Excellent article on a Global Warming skeptic

[badrose]

What Catastrophe?

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/what-catastrophe_773268.html#

Lindzen also says that the “consensus”—the oft-heard contention that “virtually all” climate scientists believe in catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming—is overblown, primarily for structural reasons. “When you have an issue that is somewhat bogus, the opposition is always scattered and without resources,” he explains. “But the environmental movement is highly organized. There are hundreds of NGOs. To coordinate these hundreds, they quickly organized the Climate Action Network, the central body on climate. There would be, I think, actual meetings to tell them what the party line is for the year, and so on.” Skeptics, on the other hand, are more scattered across disciplines and continents. As such, they have a much harder time getting their message across.

Because CO2 is invisible and the climate is so complex (your local weatherman doesn’t know for sure whether it will rain tomorrow, let alone conditions in 2100), expertise is particularly important. Lindzen sees a danger here. “I think the example, the paradigm of this, was medical practice.” He says that in the past, “one went to a physician because something hurt or bothered you, and you tended to judge him or her according to whether you felt better. That may not always have been accurate, but at least it had some operational content. .  .  . [Now, you] go to an annual checkup, get a blood test. And the physician tells you if you’re better or not and it’s out of your hands.” Because climate change is invisible, only the experts can tell us whether the planet is sick or not. And because of the way funds are granted, they have an incentive to say that the Earth belongs in intensive care.

[CitizenBBN]

In a 2007 debate with Lindzen in New York City, climate scientist Richard C. J. Somerville, who is firmly in the “alarmist” camp, likened climate skeptics to “some eminent earth scientists [who] couldn’t be persuaded that plate tectonics were real .  .  . when the revolution of continental drift was sweeping through geology and geophysics.”

“Most people who think they’re a Galileo are just wrong,” he said, much to the delight of a friendly audience of Manhattanites.
But Somerville botched the analogy. The story of plate tectonics is the story of how one man, Alfred Wegener, came up with the theory of continental drift, only to be widely opposed and mocked. Wegener challenged the earth science “consensus” of his day. And in the end, his view prevailed.

This is a nice conclusion. I remember when I was a kid the theory that the dinosaur extinction was caused by a meteor impact was viciously derided by "the consensus" of the scientific community. Those who proposed it were mocked and outcast. Now it is preached as a fact, as if we were standing there with a video camera.

We know the Earth warms and cools, and it's reasonable to think that us putting more of certain gasses in the atmosphere has some impact, but what is NOT clear is what is in the doomsayer camp Manual of Doctrine: that our impact is significant and will cause the end of days if we don't stop using energy tomorrow. It's just not supported. As the article points out, the models on which it is based have been WRONG for the last 15 years yet we're to accept they are accurate 20 or 50 or 100 years in the future. That's just bad math. If you were sold a system for winning in blackjack and you played it for 15 years and lost money would you still accept it as a mathematically valid system? It may have elements of truth in it, but you'd reject it as a predictive model of what cards are coming next.

The whole thing is driven by politics and specifically the politics of control. If you are old enough you've seen these doomsayers do this more than once with different issues, and they never finish that first sentence about imminent man-made destruction that the 2nd sentence isn't about how we need sweeping government controls on business and economic growth and energy production and use. Deforestation was a biggie for them, as was the ozone layer, but nothing has been a political winner like global warming. Nearly anything can be "linked" to it so it justifies being involved in nearly every kind of behavior and consumptive use and can span every kind of regulatory body. It's a Statist's wet dream of justification, you better believe they quash anyone or anything that would indicate it isn't so dire as to justify extreme action.

[dan_bgblue]

He has said over and over again that the models in use today are faulty. The reason they are faulty is that there is so much about spaceship earth that we do not know.

Example (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140108102453.htm)

[KeithKSR]

He has said over and over again that the models in use today are faulty. The reason they are faulty is that there is so much about spaceship earth that we do not know.

Example (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140108102453.htm)

Like the cause of the polar vortex, which previously was most oft heard of in movies like Day After Tomorrow, which visited record cold temperatures upon us.

I am surprised that the ships being frozen in the ice in Antarctica have not received more attention. It is early summer in Antarctica, and as such the sea ice should be reaching its annual minimum.