Emeritus Professor of Physics, American Physical Society fellow, quits APS over "global warming scam" (metamars)
Link
Another prominent physicist who is a skeptic of (human caused?) global warming is Nobel laureate Freeman Dyson. I personally don't think they are right, but I've also no doubt that the great amount of money involved is causing tremendous groupthink, and yes, fraud. It's possible to have groupthink and fraud, and still be essentially correct...
Where to begin? with that Obama-like last line? It's quite tempting given how much MM despises Obama. Professional jealousy much? That line does make me wonder. Well, first by explaining that the Quick Hit title & link do not refer to Freeman Dysaon, but to retiref physicist Harold Lewis, who, like Dyson, knows nothing in particular professionally about climate science.
Second, by explaining that citing "authorities" outside their fields of expertise is a long-recognized fallacy:
Fallacy: Appeal to Authority Also Known as: Fallacious Appeal to Authority, Misuse of Authority, Irrelevant Authority, Questionable Authority, Inappropriate Authority, Ad Verecundiam
Description of Appeal to Authority
An Appeal to Authority is a fallacy with the following form:
- Person A is (claimed to be) an authority on subject S.
- Person A makes claim C about subject S.
- Therefore, C is true.
This fallacy is committed when the person in question is not a legitimate authority on the subject. More formally, if person A is not qualified to make reliable claims in subject S, then the argument will be fallacious.
This sort of reasoning is fallacious when the person in question is not an expert. In such cases the reasoning is flawed because the fact that an unqualified person makes a claim does not provide any justification for the claim. The claim could be true, but the fact that an unqualified person made the claim does not provide any rational reason to accept the claim as true.
Third, by explaining that even if someone is an authority in a field, if they say something in public that they can't back up in the peer-reviewed literature, that's really no more valid than an Appeal to Authority.
Fourth, by explaining that (quoting from the link) Lewis is just blowing hot air. For example:
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
"[T]rillions of dollars" driving the "global warming scam"? From where? There most certainly were trillions of dollars driving the Cold War nuclear weapons scam that drove the careers of the most vociferous physicist deniers. But so far there's far more money on the fossil fuel "let's keep causing global warming" side than there is on the green jobs "let's stop global warming" side. Just check Opensecrets.org in case you have any doubt at all.
But this is where our troll has chosen to double down. In comments, I wrote:
In reality-land, ALL accusations of fraud re "climategate" have been dismissed.
And troll-boy responded:
Dismissed by whom?
Answers courtesy of Curtis Brainard at the Columbia Journalism Review on the flip:
The Observatory - July 07, 2010 04:30 PM
Wanted: Climate Front-Pager
Reviews vindicating scientists get strong blog coverage, but more high-profile stories are needed
By Curtis BrainardOver the last two days, two reports have, respectively, reaffirmed the integrity of the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the scientists involved in the so-called "Climategate" affair. Unfortunately, while the reports have received a lot of attention in the blogosphere, high-profile coverage in newspapers and magazines has been woefully lacking.
On Tuesday, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, which advises the Dutch government, released a review of the IPCC's 2007 report on the impacts of climate change. It found that report contained no errors that undermined the panel's main conclusion that manmade global warming poses serious threats to human society. On Wednesday, independent investigators in the United Kingdom released their analysis of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia who were embroiled in a series of controversial e-mails hacked and leaked from the university last year. The investigation found that, despite accusations of impropriety, the scientists had conducted their work with rigor and honesty.
To be sure, both the Dutch report and the investigation in the U.K. raised a few important, but relatively minor, concerns about the climate scientists' research and behavior. The former was a response to a handful of minor mistakes in the 2007 report uncovered last winter. One of the most glaring was a statement that 55 percent of the Netherlands is below sea level-when, in fact, that is the amount vulnerable to flooding, and only 26 percent of the land is below level-but the Dutch agency took responsibility for that blunder, admitting that it did not make the distinction clear in data that it gave to the IPCC in 2005.
In addition to that error, and one related to the melt rate of Himalayan glaciers (which has drawn significant attention), the environmental assessment agency found one more significant error in the IPCC report-related to climate change's effect on crop yields Africa-as well as a handful of lesser problems attributable to typos and citation errors. In addition, the agency found that a number of conclusions in the report's summary statements could not be adequately traced to scientific evidence in the underlying chapters, and that the summaries tended to single out the negative impacts of climate change.
In a similar vein, the "Climategate" investigation in the U.K., which was called for by the University of East Anglia but run independently by former civil servant Sir Muir Russell, criticized climate scientists for "a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness" with regard to dealing with public requests for information and complying with freedom of information laws. Both the Dutch review and the Russell report are, however, just the latest in a series of reviews dispelling the notion pushed by many global-warming skeptics this winter that climate science is a corrupt field coming apart at the seams.
A report from British parliament's House of Commons Science and Technology Committee at the end of March and an independent investigation by Lord Ronald Oxburgh in April also cleared the climate scientists at the University of East Anglia of any misconduct on malpractice. Likewise, in two separate reports released in February and July, investigative panels at Pennsylvania State University absolved scientist Michael Mann, who was also caught up in the "Climategate" affair, of wrongdoing. Another more comprehensive review of the IPCC's research assessment process is expected from the InterAcademy Council, an association of science academies from around the world, toward the end of the summer.
[You'll note that there were some minor errors pointed out, but no fraud whatsoever.]
Really, if you don't live in Versailles, the only excuse for not knowing that "Climategate" has been debunked six ways from Sunday is that you spend all your time hangind out with Teabaggers and pretending they're 100% racist-free.
A Side-Note On Red Herrings
As is often the case when people have no case, metamars also resorted to the kitchen sink defense:
Two books that I highly recommend, about similar problems in string theory, are The Trouble with Physics and Not Even Wrong. Anybody who thinks that even highly intellectual scientists are above acting tribally, doesn't know what they're talking about.My favorite group of dissident scientists are cosmologists, who, I believe, turn out the largest number of peer reviewed papers challenging the dominant paradigm in their field. See here and here.
There's also a noteworthy AIDS dissident community which is growing in size. See here, here, and here. [links intentionally NOT included, because I don't like being an accessory to murder.]
Spoken like a true ignoramus in the history of science. There's nothing particularly nobel about a fundamental disagreement in a field of science or fundamental heinous in the lack of one. These sorts of things arise from time to time as a result of problems that emerge in various fields.
There were no such fundamental problems in the field of physics for a few centuries after Newton, for example. But the enormous amount of progress made in the field during the late 19th Century--as well as progress in related fields--lead to a totally unforeseen crisis emerging at the turn of the 20th Century. This in turn lead to not one but two fundamental revolutions--relativity and quantum mechanics.
Those revolutions were not suppressed in the 1800s by an evil cabal of scientists. The internal reasons for them had not yet emerged as problems confronting the field. It was just that simple.
There is a similar situation in the field of cosmology today--as Valatan wrote in a comment to that quick hit:
OF COURSE cosmologists publish the most papers challenging their dominant paradigm. The dominant paradigm in cosmology doesn't even make sense to cosmologists, and they'll TELL YOU THAT. It's way easier (as in orders of magnitude) to rewrite the big picture of cosmology than it is to do the same in fluid mechanics, particle physics, or almost any other branch of physics.The first true precision cosmology data came to us in the late '80s and early '90s. It's still a growth field.
Nothing remotely like this is happening in the fields of climate science or AIDs research.
This is not to say there aren't ordinary human motivations involved in how scientific debates play out. Of course there are. But the sort of simplistic conspiratorial worldview that metamars is pushing is just as unrealistic, schematic, and out-of-touch with the historical realities as the cartoonish "scientists as gods" fairy tale that it foolishly pretends is the only alternative.
By adopting either of these simplistic mythologies, one makes oneself incapable of recognizing a genuine fundamental crisis in the basic models of a given field when it does arise, or of distinguishing it from a tempest in a teapot--or worse--an externally manufactured controversy that has no scientific foundation at all worth speaking of.
Welcome to the 3rd-grade world of metmars.
Conclusion: The Big Picture
All the above may seem like pretty small potatoes. And in the grand scheme of things, it certainly is. But it's entirely indicative of how conservatives have developed and waged an increasingly sophisticated war on science over the past several decades, and how all sorts of people who ought to know better have fallen for it.
Fortunately, there's a really excellent antidote to all that, the recently-published book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. They gave a dynamite presentation at Netroots Nation, and I've been meaning to do a review of their book ever since, but I've just been too swamped by my expanded duties here at OL to concentrate properly and finish reading the book, much less put together a cogent commentary on it.
Suffice it to say, not only is metamars falling for very old tricks in the conservative attack on global warming, but these tricks have their origins in the tobacco company's war on American lives. He simply has no idea what unspeakable evil he is aligning himself with. But hundred of thousands of deaths per year for more than half a century does tend to add up.
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