U.S. Skeptic Has a European Outing

Submitted by Bob Burton on

Fred Singer is one of the veteran climate change skeptics appearing at the Have Humans Changed the Climate? conference in Brussels hosted by Roger Helmer, a British Conservative Party representative in the European Parliament. Billed as speaking on the topic of "Why can’t we trust IPCC?" [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], Singer staked out a position that even other sceptics disagree with. "We are certainly putting more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. However there is no evidence that this high CO2 is making a detectable difference," he claimed. Singer, who has been a consultant to oil companies and the now defunct Global Climate Coalition, has also been a critic of regulatory restrictions on secondhand tobacco smoke. Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said that "conferences like this are designed to create confusion and play into the very understandable psychology of denial that most humans have ... This is what these people are relying on. Some are funded by fossil fuel companies so it is a very simple motivation, others have more complex reasons, but it does not change the fact they are wrong."

Main Source: 
Telegraph.co.uk, November 18, 2009
Topics: 
Climate Change
Environment
Science

Comments

Hal Taylor replied on

So - I believe I see your position clearly now -

Don't confuse me with the facts, I already have my mind made up!

One should take a stand in life, I guess that is as good as any.

Here are a few links for you to check out:

http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-ourenvironmentalfuture.html
http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=ba5c8f1e-60a1-42f3-8e72-e95e19a8163e
http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm

However, please do not let any facts deter you from your moral stand!

Hal

S. Booth replied on

Perhaps a better choice of website might be made. Crichton makes the mistake of taking a large error from the range of temperature change offered. The range is chosen as having a 90% (for example) probability of the actual change falling in between the values. Large errors only matter if they mean that zero change is is reasonable. That is, if -0.3 to 0.7 was considered as the possible value of the warming.

Secondly, i would advise that the scales need to be made equivalent to perform a comparison. The variation of the mean is the only relevant part, and these variations are always small. Such graphing is little more that a fool playing with excel. Just because hbar is on the order of 10^-34 does not imply that quantum effects don't exist. Yet if physicists used the same method as Crichton they would think that it was.

Thirdly, when translating academic use into common use great care must be taken to TRANSFORM all phrases. Similar mistakes have been made in the other direction as well, notably with David Hume, when individuals ignore the statement 'to conform to normal use of language'. Clearly better analysis could have been done.

Crichton clearly has not studied statistics, and confuses error bars with ranges.

Finally, the problem of a 1.5 degree warming is not in the average of a city, but rather what it implies for the climate. 1.5 degrees means more heatwave, elsewhere droughts, flooding rains ect. If all climate change meant was a simple taking on of 1.5 degrees, I 'd just move from Los Angeles to San Fran. However, is is the changes to weather patterns that is the real problem.

If one is going to be skeptical, at least make a worthy case. Crichton's can be torn apart easily.

Anonymously replied on

who knows what to believe. There have been more record lows set this decade than any decade in ?, and you want me to believe the globe is getting warmer? I believe it is all a farce, but I don't know who benefits. Historically these farces have been an avenue to raise taxes and make some small entity rich.

S. Booth replied on

The release of these emails should not change anything. Either the methods that verify global warming are valid or not valid. If they are not valid then explain why. These leaked emails did not change anything. They provide no insight into methodological weakness.

To put it another way. If you found out, through leaked emails that Stephen Hawking was a neo-nazi who planned to dance of Einteins grave you have no reason to doubt the validity of the BHIP as a problem. Even if described the method he employed as a "trick". It is either valid or invalid for some specific reason.

Furthermore, Global Warming does not say that record lows won't be set. That is related to weather and not Climate. Even if climate gets 7 degrees warming, there is nothing to say that record lows won't be set somewhere. It is like taken a classical approach to a quantum problem. Completely invalid and leads you to a flawed conclusion.

There are no definite winners if action is taken on global warming, because there are not any really well established industries. Solar, Wind and other renewables are growing, but they are tiny when compared to the groups that stand to lose if action is taken on global warming. So perhaps a better way to approach the problem is to consider that G.W. is fact, and to see who benefits by deny this. This makes the benefits question easy, and obvious.