There has been much hoo-hah over Rep. Jeff Lewis convening a panel on global warming titled "Climate Change: Fact Or Fiction". For his panel Rep. Lewis, recruited three climate scientists who supposedly fall in the category of global warming dissenters. Let's take a look at these gentlemen shall we?
First, the credentials and they are impressive.
Patrick Michaels - Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
John Christy - Director of the Earth Science System at the University of Alabama. He also won an award from NASA for Exceptional Scientific Achievement.
Joel Schwartz - Scientist and fellow at the American Enterprise Insititute.
Well now. Surely, if such honored men doubt this whole global warming bunk, we should as well. Or do they? And should we?
Let's look at each gentleman's actual position on global warming.
Patrick Michaels - Believes in man made climate change. His "disagreement" with the evidence is that he believes the change will be on the low end of projections by the IPCC.
John Christy - Believes in man made climate change. In fact he has been quoted as saying "It is scientifically inconceivable that after changing forests into cities, turning millions of acres into irrigated farmland, putting massive quantities of soot and dust into the air, and putting extra greenhouse gases into the air, that the natural course of climate has not changed in some way". Also falls into the camp of impact will be on the lower end of the scale.
Joel Schwartz - Believes in man made climate change. But believes the cure would be worse than the disease.
Well my goodness gracious me! It seems there's a dirty secret hiding at Rep. Lewis' hearing. All the scientists actually believe man is causing global warming! How about that? The only disagreement they have with their scientific brothers and sisters is the scale, impact and ultimate result of global warming.
Disagreement among scientists is not uncommon. A significant portion of good science hinges on disagreement and discussion. However, as anyone who witnessed the evolution/creation wars understands, when consensus begins to reach larger conclusions, the ideologues afraid of losing their last tenuous grasp on reality latch onto any dissent in order to paint the whole as suspect. Even when the dissenters actually agree with the whole.
6 comments:
Excellent work.
And welcome back.
Arctic ice is disappearing faster than predicted by models.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
(Notice my restraint. I am not adding a bad joke regarding 'albedo'.)
"Selective" science, eh? Trust a Georgia Rep. to love that.
I took a physical geography class from tim ball and he has some real weird ideas but you have to listen to all sides after all science is supposed to be a hypothesis is presented, an experiment is performed to see if the hypothesis holds than you wait to see if it holds water. Any pharmacologist will tell you a drug is only specific to one receptor till its tested. Maybe we're using this big lump of earth as a test ground and the scientists are playing
To use another of your posts and steal a phrase..."I may not be a smart man" but I know something is going on when I literraly see mountains of ice crumbling into the ocean.
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