129 Scientists sign Letter to UN Security General Ban Ki-Moon

[Snow_Miser]

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/11/29/open-climate-letter-to-un-secretary-general-current-scientific-knowledge-does-not-substantiate-ban-ki-moon-assertions-on-weather-and-climate-say-125-scientists/

Quite a bit of impressive climate credentials on this list.

[wxmeddler]

Joe Bastardi signed it... as well of a lot of people with Ph.D's in Marketing and Business.

Classy.

[Snow_Miser]

Joe Bastardi signed it... as well of a lot of people with Ph.D's in Marketing and Business.

Classy.

I counted one person that signed the list to have a Ph.D in Marketing. There are many climate scientists that have signed this list.

[PhillipS]

I counted one person that signed the list to have a Ph.D in Marketing. There are many climate scientists that have signed this list.

Here's a partial list of the pseudo-skeptics who signed the letter:

Tim Ball

Joe Bastardi

Joseph D'Aleo

Don Easterbrook

Ole Humlum

Craig Idso

Jay Lehr

Oliver Manuel

Viscount Monckton

Fred Singer

Anthony Watts

David Wojick

Seriously, anybody who believes that letter to be anything other than an advocacy puff piece is a chucklehead.

[Snow_Miser]

Seriously, anybody who believes that letter to be anything other than an advocacy puff piece is a chucklehead.

Thanks for your opinion.

[Vergent]

Here's a partial list of the pseudo-skeptics who signed the letter:

Tim Ball

Joe Bastardi

Joseph D'Aleo

Don Easterbrook

Ole Humlum

Craig Idso

Jay Lehr

Oliver Manuel

Viscount Monckton

Fred Singer

Anthony Watts

David Wojick

Seriously, anybody who believes that letter to be anything other than an advocacy puff piece is a chucklehead.

Now we know who the 3% are. Impressive bunch of wh*r*s. Probably the attendees from the Heartland institute's get-together last summer. Nice of them to give us a troll list. It's even alphabetized. Anyone that signs a letter implying that global warming stopped 16 years ago has no credibility, only a paid troll or a their dupes would sign such a piece of prevarication.

In the not too distant future, this list will be a good start for a crimes against the planet trial.

[Snow_Miser]

Anyone that signs a letter implying that global warming stopped 16 years ago has no credibility, only a paid troll or a their dupes would sign such a piece of prevarication.

That's obviously incorrect, as many earth and environmental scientists with qualified degrees have signed this letter.

[A-L-E-K]

not a single person at our firm would sign that nonsense

[Alpha5]

Now we know who the 3% are. Impressive bunch of wh*r*s. Probably the attendees from the Heartland institute's get-together last summer. Nice of them to give us a troll list. It's even alphabetized. Anyone that signs a letter implying that global warming stopped 16 years ago has no credibility, only a paid troll or a their dupes would sign such a piece of prevarication.

In the not too distant future, this list will be a good start for a crimes against the planet trial.

Its extreme views like this that make people hate radical environmentalists.

Crimes against the planet, give me a freaking break

[TerryM]

When Bastardi signs on, reasonable people sign off.

If the denial side has dropped back to the "129 scientists say" arguments it's indicative that they've totally run out of new material. Heartland's funds must have sunk lower than their credibility if they're reduced to re-running old saw. They need to pool their resources & find a new script writer.

Terry

[blizzard1024]

When Bastardi signs on, reasonable people sign off.

If the denial side has dropped back to the "129 scientists say" arguments it's indicative that they've totally run out of new material. Heartland's funds must have sunk lower than their credibility if they're reduced to re-running old saw. They need to pool their resources & find a new script writer.

Terry

Why are words like denialist, denier, skeptic, or even worse "environmental criminal" used against REAL scientists.

I am sick of this.

What I mean by REAL scientists is that a real scientist knows that complex branches of science are never settled

especially climate science. It not as simple as the discovery of the round earth or gravity. The climate is very very

complex and to think that a bunch of computer modelers have it totally figured is clearly indicative of ignorance and

gullibility of many many people. Just because the earth is going through a warming period now is meaningless in the grand

scheme of things. Our current rate of climate change is around 1.5C/century which is well within the range of climate

change in the Holocene. The Pleistocene with the great ice sheets showed much more rapid climate change both ways...

and CO2, water vapor and the climate system did not spiral out of control.

Real scientists are skeptical, period. And when you are dealing with climate, a very chaotic, non-linear

multivariate problem you have to be skeptical to learn more. This is getting ridiculous. As an atmospheric

scientist myself, I am sick of all these folks who don't understand the atmosphere or the complexities who

think the world is coming to end because a trace gas that may cause at most 1C warming....probably less due

to negative feedbacks, because if positive feedbacks dominated, the climate would have spiraled out of control

long ago. There is a breaking mechanism...there has to be.

[skierinvermont]

Well I haven't looked at all 129, but the ones already listed in this thread are hacks that can't get real peer-review worked published because they are frauds.

[skierinvermont]

Why are words like denialist, denier, skeptic, or even worse "environmental criminal" used against REAL scientists.

I am sick of this.

What I mean by REAL scientists is that a real scientist knows that complex branches of science are never settled

especially climate science. It not as simple as the discovery of the round earth or gravity. The climate is very very

complex and to think that a bunch of computer modelers have it totally figured is clearly indicative of ignorance and

gullibility of many many people. Just because the earth is going through a warming period now is meaningless in the grand

scheme of things. Our current rate of climate change is around 1.5C/century which is well within the range of climate

change in the Holocene. The Pleistocene with the great ice sheets showed much more rapid climate change both ways...

and CO2, water vapor and the climate system did not spiral out of control.

Real scientists are skeptical, period. And when you are dealing with climate, a very chaotic, non-linear

multivariate problem you have to be skeptical to learn more. This is getting ridiculous. As an atmospheric

scientist myself, I am sick of all these folks who don't understand the atmosphere or the complexities who

think the world is coming to end because a trace gas that may cause at most 1C warming....probably less due

to negative feedbacks, because if positive feedbacks dominated, the climate would have spiraled out of control

long ago. There is a breaking mechanism...there has to be.

First of all positive feedback does NOT equal "spiral out of control." Perhaps you should get a refresher on the definition of a positive feedback. A positive feedback only means that warming causes more warming. For example 1C of warming causes .5C more warming which causes .25C more which causes .125C more which causes .0625C more etc. etc. (totally 2C). A runaway feedback occurs only if the feedback is greater than the initial warming. For example 1C causes 2C which causes 4C more etc. etc.

There is a large body of work on historic climate change, which not only is consistent with but supports modern AGW theory and the idea of positive feedbacks (NOT runaway positive feedbacks - there IS a difference).

Also, 1.5C/century is not consistent with historic climate change.

[valkhorn]

That's obviously incorrect, as many earth and environmental scientists with qualified degrees have signed this letter.

What a pity science isn't based on petitions. It's based on consensus and data. Why aren't these people publishing research to change the consensus instead of signing petitions which do absolutely nothing?

I think I'm going to start a petition that says water is wet. Maybe then we can change those alarmists with just a few thousand signatures. Then water will FINALLY be wet.

[Mallow]

Why are words like denialist, denier, skeptic, or even worse "environmental criminal" used against REAL scientists.

I am sick of this.

What I mean by REAL scientists is that a real scientist knows that complex branches of science are never settled

especially climate science. It not as simple as the discovery of the round earth or gravity. The climate is very very

complex and to think that a bunch of computer modelers have it totally figured is clearly indicative of ignorance and

gullibility of many many people. Just because the earth is going through a warming period now is meaningless in the grand

scheme of things. Our current rate of climate change is around 1.5C/century which is well within the range of climate

change in the Holocene. The Pleistocene with the great ice sheets showed much more rapid climate change both ways...

and CO2, water vapor and the climate system did not spiral out of control.

Real scientists are skeptical, period. And when you are dealing with climate, a very chaotic, non-linear

multivariate problem you have to be skeptical to learn more. This is getting ridiculous. As an atmospheric

scientist myself, I am sick of all these folks who don't understand the atmosphere or the complexities who

think the world is coming to end because a trace gas that may cause at most 1C warming....probably less due

to negative feedbacks, because if positive feedbacks dominated, the climate would have spiraled out of control

long ago. There is a breaking mechanism...there has to be.

And I am sick of "meteorologists" who don't understand the difference between weather and climate and resort to the disingenuous "we don't know if we're causing warming" argument. "At most 1C warming"? Really? Do you ignore science in other facets of life as well? The fact that CO2 is a "trace gas" is irrelevant since it's the total amount (mass) of CO2 in the atmosphere, and not the percent of the atmosphere that CO2 comprises, that is important. To use that kind of terminology is to intentionally mislead by adding doubt where there should be none.

Real scientists are skeptical. Which is why I am 100% against attributing the label "skeptic" to only the part of the community who believe the IPCC vastly overstates our impact. I am a skeptic. I am also willing to look at evidence and determine to the best of my ability which scenario most closely matches "reality". The notion that our CO2 impact "may cause at most 1C warming" goes against almost all serious studies out there. A true skeptic would thus be highly skeptical of such a claim. You, my friend, are therefore not a "skeptic".

I'm assuming when you say "spiraling out of control", you're referring to an unbounded runaway greenhouse effect. No serious climate scientist believes that we will see a scenario where we fill our atmosphere with such a quantity of greenhouse gases that we see an unbounded, runaway greenhouse effect. Or even a bounded one, like what must have happened on Venus. We simply won't pump THAT much CO2, CH4, etc into the atmosphere. Nowhere near enough. In other words, you've built a strawman. It's easy to destroy a silly argument when nobody actually made it.

On top of all that, you seem to misunderstand the effect of positive and negative feedbacks. Positive feedbacks do not, of necessity, lead to a runaway greenhouse effect. They serve to amplify an impact, nothing more. Moreover, there are often diminishing returns on positive feedbacks, which would further prevent the possibility of approaching a "runaway greenhouse effect", even with the existence of positive feedbacks. The key being that a net negative feedback is not required to slow the warming... all that's required is a decrease in the causal forcing. In other words, if your greenhouse gases are not increasing exponentially (since temperature goes as an exponential of CO2, CH4, etc concentrations), your warming will slow down.

Why they didn't teach you this stuff in college is beyond me.

[valkhorn]

Why are words like denialist, denier, skeptic, or even worse "environmental criminal" used against REAL scientists.

I am sick of this.

What I mean by REAL scientists is that a real scientist knows that complex branches of science are never settled

especially climate science. It not as simple as the discovery of the round earth or gravity. The climate is very very

complex and to think that a bunch of computer modelers have it totally figured is clearly indicative of ignorance and

gullibility of many many people. Just because the earth is going through a warming period now is meaningless in the grand

scheme of things. Our current rate of climate change is around 1.5C/century which is well within the range of climate

change in the Holocene. The Pleistocene with the great ice sheets showed much more rapid climate change both ways...

and CO2, water vapor and the climate system did not spiral out of control.

Real scientists are skeptical, period. And when you are dealing with climate, a very chaotic, non-linear

multivariate problem you have to be skeptical to learn more. This is getting ridiculous. As an atmospheric

scientist myself, I am sick of all these folks who don't understand the atmosphere or the complexities who

think the world is coming to end because a trace gas that may cause at most 1C warming....probably less due

to negative feedbacks, because if positive feedbacks dominated, the climate would have spiraled out of control

long ago. There is a breaking mechanism...there has to be.

Why are words like 'liberal' and 'alarmist' used for those who accept anthropological global warming?

By your logic, we cannot teach gravity in schools because we don't understand a small part of it. We also shouldn't teach evolution either because there are things we haven't figured out yet. We should also not teach meteorological degrees since the forecasts aren't 100% accurate, and we should also scrap the NHC because they're not 100% accurate 100% of the time either.

Yes, real scientists are skeptical, but where is the peer-reviewed science showing something else that's natural and that can explain the current warming? Or peer reviewed science that explains the warming, or corrects it, or shows that the earth isn't warming? Where's the peer reviewed science unlinking CO2 to warming?

Petitions don't cut it. If you are a real scientist, you don't start blogs. You don't write op-eds. You don't sign petitions. You do the research and you get it published in order to change or overturn a consensus.

All the petitions in the world aren't going to change the fact of evolution. All the op eds and opinion pieces and politicians alike aren't going to change the fact of evolution. But, if one scientist finds a genuine rabbit fossil in pre-cambrian strata - they'll become famous overnight.

Science is in the work, not in hot air and empty 'skepticism' for the sake of skepticism.

Now you are right about one thing. Eventually the warming will stop and balance out based on the amount of CO2 - since it'll never become 100% of the atmosphere. However, Venus is at 98%, and the surface temps are hot enough to melt lead. I don't think that would be a good goal. I don't think 1C of warming is a good goal either, and we're almost already there.

[skierinvermont]

Positive feedbacks do not, of necessity, lead to a runaway greenhouse effect. They serve to amplify an impact, nothing more. Moreover, there are often diminishing returns on positive feedbacks, which would further prevent the possibility of approaching a "runaway greenhouse effect", even with the existence of positive feedbacks.

Beat you to it Mallow

[Mallow]

Beat you to it Mallow

Heh, I noticed, but I figured maybe if he saw it twice it would sink in better. Not sure where he got the notion that positive feedback = runaway warming.

[skierinvermont]

Heh, I noticed, but I figured maybe if he saw it twice it would sink in better. Not sure where he got the notion that positive feedback = runaway warming.

Oh I figured we were typing at the same time. I hope it sinks in too. He's brought this up several times already.

[Jonger]

Oh I figured we were typing at the same time. I hope it sinks in too. He's brought this up several times already.

Did you move to Utah?

[skierinvermont]

Did you move to Utah?

Yep, a week ago, it's great so far.

[FPizz]

Why are words like denialist, denier, skeptic, or even worse "environmental criminal" used against REAL scientists.

I am sick of this.

What I mean by REAL scientists is that a real scientist knows that complex branches of science are never settled

especially climate science. It not as simple as the discovery of the round earth or gravity. The climate is very very

complex and to think that a bunch of computer modelers have it totally figured is clearly indicative of ignorance and

gullibility of many many people. Just because the earth is going through a warming period now is meaningless in the grand

scheme of things. Our current rate of climate change is around 1.5C/century which is well within the range of climate

change in the Holocene. The Pleistocene with the great ice sheets showed much more rapid climate change both ways...

and CO2, water vapor and the climate system did not spiral out of control.

Real scientists are skeptical, period. And when you are dealing with climate, a very chaotic, non-linear

multivariate problem you have to be skeptical to learn more. This is getting ridiculous. As an atmospheric

scientist myself, I am sick of all these folks who don't understand the atmosphere or the complexities who

think the world is coming to end because a trace gas that may cause at most 1C warming....probably less due

to negative feedbacks, because if positive feedbacks dominated, the climate would have spiraled out of control

long ago. There is a breaking mechanism...there has to be.

Exactly

[skierinvermont]

Exactly

As much as you "like" what he has to say, as explained above the post contains numerous basic factual errors. All you're doing is showing how biased you are by arbitrarily agreeing with posts you like the sound of despite its many basic factual errors.

[Mallow]

Oh I figured we were typing at the same time. I hope it sinks in too. He's brought this up several times already.

We were. I'm talking about after the fact.

[Vergent]

Why are words like denialist, denier, skeptic, or even worse "environmental criminal" used against REAL scientists.

I am sick of this.

What I mean by REAL scientists is that a real scientist knows that complex branches of science are never settled

especially climate science. It not as simple as the discovery of the round earth or gravity. The climate is very very

complex and to think that a bunch of computer modelers have it totally figured is clearly indicative of ignorance and

gullibility of many many people. Just because the earth is going through a warming period now is meaningless in the grand

scheme of things. Our current rate of climate change is around 1.5C/century which is well within the range of climate

change in the Holocene. The Pleistocene with the great ice sheets showed much more rapid climate change both ways...

and CO2, water vapor and the climate system did not spiral out of control.

Real scientists are skeptical, period. And when you are dealing with climate, a very chaotic, non-linear

multivariate problem you have to be skeptical to learn more. This is getting ridiculous. As an atmospheric

scientist myself, I am sick of all these folks who don't understand the atmosphere or the complexities who

think the world is coming to end because a trace gas that may cause at most 1C warming....probably less due

to negative feedbacks, because if positive feedbacks dominated, the climate would have spiraled out of control

long ago. There is a breaking mechanism...there has to be.

When 98% of the energy imbalance is in the warming of the oceans and the melting of ice real scientists do not divert the discussion to statistically complex global air temperatures. Real scientists know the ice is melting and the oceans are warming. Real scientists knew this would happen 100 years ago. The absorption spectrum of CO2 has not changed.

Real scientists know that the global ice mass balance has been marching downward with a boring regularity.

Real scientists look to the data. Here is the data. this was the arctic ocean a year ago;

Here is the arctic ocean today;

Only the insane or the evil could deny the change that is happening. To real scientists the deniers are foaming at the mouth.

BTW +7C destabilizes methane hydrate down to 500m. There is an estimated 1,200 GT on the slopes of the arctic continental shelves.

[LocoAko]

[Snow_Miser]

What a pity science isn't based on petitions. It's based on consensus and data. Why aren't these people publishing research to change the consensus instead of signing petitions which do absolutely nothing?

I think I'm going to start a petition that says water is wet. Maybe then we can change those alarmists with just a few thousand signatures. Then water will FINALLY be wet.

Yikes. Science is never done by consensus. That's totally wrong. Many of the scientists have published in the scientific literature on this topic.

You're insulting people on that list like Katya Georgieva, Bas Van Geel, George T. Wolff, Oleg Raspopov, and Valentin Dergachev who have published NUMEROUS articles about climate change science.

Shame on you.

[Snow_Miser]

Why is Vergent focusing on the albedo feedback again, one of the weakest feedbacks in the climate system, to determine how sensitive the climate is to an increase in Carbon Dioxide?

[TerryM]

Yikes. Science is never done by consensus. That's totally wrong. Many of the scientists have published in the scientific literature on this topic.

You're insulting people on that list like Katya Georgieva, Bas Van Geel, George T. Wolff, Oleg Raspopov, and Valentin Dergachev who have published NUMEROUS articles about climate change science.

Shame on you.

Are you actually taking this to be anything other than a very poorly done propaganda piece? Do you smoke the "Cigarettes Smoked by most Doctors"? Do you believe that Saddam had Nuclear Weapons. Do you think that by 2000 all cars will have faux exhaust pipes sticking out of the front fenders?

People that affix their signature to a letter signed by Bastardi, Watts and Singer deserve the same amount of respect that these charlatans have earned. We didn't demean them - they did it to themselves.

Terry

[blizzard1024]

When 98% of the energy imbalance is in the warming of the oceans and the melting of ice real scientists do not divert the discussion to statistically complex global air temperatures. Real scientists know the ice is melting and the oceans are warming. Real scientists knew this would happen 100 years ago. The absorption spectrum of CO2 has not changed.

Real scientists know that the global ice mass balance has been marching downward with a boring regularity.

Real scientists look to the data. Here is the data. this was the arctic ocean a year ago;

Here is the arctic ocean today;

Only the insane or the evil could deny the change that is happening. To real scientists the deniers are foaming at the mouth.

BTW +7C destabilizes methane hydrate down to 500m. There is an estimated 1,200 GT on the slopes of the arctic continental shelves.

What you and many of the other global warming "alarmists" fail to look at is the big picture. In the grand scheme of things, the recent warming

is nothing unusual if you actually LOOK at the paleoclimate records. We happen to be warming at a rate of 1.5C per century which is not

that big a deal. There were times in the not too distant past that the Earth's Climate warmed 13F or about 7C in 50 years as per the GRIP ice core data

just before the Holocene with the retreating glaciers. That was a LOT of warming and the Earth survived. It was all natural back then. To think

humans and a TRACE gas can cause damage to the climate is silly. Yes the Earth has warmed and I NEVER said that it

hasn't. We also are coming out of a Little Ice Age and had high solar activity in the late 20th century. Without GCMs, you can't claim

that this warm period unusual. It warmed between 1910 and 1940 before the main burning of fossil fuels. It has warmed and cooled

in the past often. The Northern Hemisphere is always much more sensitive to any climate change because of the Arctic Ocean and the

large land masses.

It is well known that GCMs either leak too much energy or accumulate too much energy and need to be tweaked. In the past it was fluxes

that they tweaked to stabilize the climate system before increasing CO2. Now they have better models so they don't have to tweak the fluxes anymore...

BUT they still either lose or accumulate some energy so what do they do know? Tweak cloud cover to stabilize the climate system before introducing

extra CO2. Clouds ARE the main factor in regulating our climate system and they are tweaked. Nice. I have a lot of faith in this...NOT.

By pure radiative transfer alone, doubling CO2 concentrations leads to 1.2 C of warming or so. If feedbacks are negative, then this is less...if it is

positive it would be more. And NO...it won't spiral out of control. But the IRIS effect and the radiosonde data indicate drying in the upper troposphere

in the tropics with some warming. Of course, the alarmists discount this data because it does not fit their models. Satellite data in my opinion

is unreliable in this because the radiances of water vapor are tied to temperature and there is a lot of algorithms etc that need to be done to tease out upper level water vapor data. The radiosondes measure it. So you can believe what you want. I prefer direct measurements. In any event, CO2 warming of

1-2C per century is not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. There is no evidence that the loss of sea ice in the Arctic is unusual. Why is

the antarctic had record sea ice levels? The paleoclimate records show an antiphase relationship between the Arctic and Antarctic due to ocean currents.

When the thermohaline circulation is faster, more heat is pumped into the north atlantic away from the antarctic leading to cooler conditions down

there. When the circulation slows, it warms in the SH and cools in the NH. It just so happens that the AMO is in the warm phase now...so

it makes perfect sense that arctic sea ice is low. When the satellite record began, the AMO was cold...so therefore arctic sea ice was at a maximum.

You are seeing a cycle. The deepest waters in Arctic basin never lose their ice. I bet we are close to the minimums we will ever see up

there because the ice over the deepest water isn't going anywhere. We are at the minimum or close to a minimum in this cycle. It will come back

when the AMO flips.

AND...The EVIL in all this is the millions and potential even 1 billion+ people deprived of development, energy and clean water in the third world. In Africa

the powers that be won't allow them to use their coal and other natural resources for energy because of the potential CO2 emissions. Millions

are suffering and dying from lung disease because they burn wood in their huts which means they chop down trees and deforest the environment.

Also carbon taxes would ruin the world's economy leading to much more suffering and loss of prosperity in the USA and other 1st world nations.

This is EVIL in my opinion.