NYT Climate Change Article, Reporter Blasted by ‘Dissenters’ — Here‘s Why They’re Upset
Let’s start this story here: there are “warmists” and “alarmists” or there are “dissenters” and “skeptics.” Warmists/alarmists are terms used by those who don’t believe global warming is man-made — and they use the terms to describe groups who do and advocate for action to curb it. Dissenters/skeptics are terms used by those who believe there is enough scientific evidence to support man-made climate change — and they use the terms to describe others who are in “denial.”
Now that we have those definitions out of the way, here’s the latest in the warmist vs. dissenter battle. A story published on Monday in the New York Times has some — who would most likely be labeled as dissenters by warmists — lambasting its publication and the author as being “profoundly dishonest.”
The topic of Justin Gillis’ article in the Times is about a group of “scientific dissenters” who believe the effect of clouds on the environment is relatively uncertain in that they could “shift in such a way as to counter much of the expected temperature rise.” Gillis includes information by MIT meteorology professor Richard Lindzen who is described as leading the charge on this theory. He also reports the flip side: that the clouds won’t change enough to reverse the effects of global warming.
Here‘s the crux of Lindzen’s theory as reported by Gillis:
Dr. Lindzen says the earth is not especially sensitive to greenhouse gases because clouds will react to counter them, and he believes he has identified a specific mechanism. On a warming planet, he says, less coverage by high clouds in the tropics will allow more heat to escape to space, countering the temperature increase.
With that hopeful prognosis, Gillis points out that some politicians and some organizations like the free-market think-tank The Heartland Institute have welcomed this theory. There is opposition though, including scientific evidence and opinions by climate experts, that clouds will not in fact have a mitigating effect on global warming and that computer analysis in climate change research needs to be improved to understand just how clouds will influence the climate.
Much of Gillis’ rhetoric throughout the article though is what has some dissenter websites riled. For example, NewsBusters, a product of the conservative Media Research Center, writes “New York Times’s confessed climate activist (and journalist) Justin Gillis made Tuesday’s front page with a 2,500-word story on what he called the last line of defense for climate change skeptics.” The organization culls through Gillis’ article emphasizing some of the language it took issue with. Here are a few examples (emphasis added by NewsBusters):
- For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong.
- However, politicians looking for reasons not to tackle climate change have embraced Dr. Lindzen and other skeptics, elevating their role in the public debate.
- Among the many climate skeptics who plaster the Internet with their writings, hardly any have serious credentials in the physics of the atmosphere. But a handful of contrarian scientists do. The most influential is Dr. Lindzen.
- Today, most mainstream researchers consider Dr. Lindzen’s theory discredited. He does not agree, but he has had difficulty establishing his case in the scientific literature. Dr. Lindzen published a paper in 2009 offering more support for his case that the earth’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases is low, but once again scientists identified errors, including a failure to account for known inaccuracies in satellite measurements.
NewsBusters writes that Gillis in his article is “nodding” in agreement with “scare-mongering scientists.”
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sensitive to greenhouse gases
because no one has ever
demonstrated that there even
is such a thing as a
greenhouse gas
it is nothing but an
irresponsible conjecture
at best
yes
after more than 40 years
they have to prove that any gas
traps and/or consrves heat
all gases are virtually identical
in their insulative rffect
just look at the
thermal infrared spectrography graphs
by the way
the alarmist jerks will never
display these graphs
for they conclusively disprove
their claims ( lies )
Everybody who has ever spent time swiming knows that when clouds come between your wet skin and the sun there is a noticable and instant cooling. It's called an empirical observation that is repeatable by anyone, which the alarmist might claim is not very usefull.
The last line of defence? Hardly. How about the first line of defence being the decades of failed predictions from these alarmist loons, then the lies they tell, then data they manipulate and hide.
Could you please give me a link to the graphs that you refer to?
I will do my own research, but can you help me out- have you seen any mainstream responses to those graphs, and if so, what do you see as the problem with those responses?
Now if I enter a search string such as "disproving the greenhouse gas theory" then there are numerous results in the first page of google, as though that is any criteria by which to determine anything.
The key point being Robert Wood performed experiments in 1909 that proved the theory to be incorrect.
Those experiments were most recently reproduced by Nasif Nahle. The conclusions supported Robert Wood's conclusions. It was not the gas in the experiment that cause the warming, it was the lack of convection in the test chamber.
If one really wants to look into it further one finds that Fourier's work was applied incorrectly by later researchers whose work is the basis for this entire mess.
The information is out there, it is being ignored, but the work the theory is based upon was flawed, and many of the conclusions were incorrect when they were made and no one has yet bothered to correct them.
Because anyone who does try to correct them gets lambasted for attacking the sacred cow of the GHG theory.
More of that consensus "science" you see.
I hope Liz will forgive my double-posting here.
“[R]esults in the first page of google”, are my criteria to determine that I’ve done enough looking for myself and it’s not unreasonable to ask others.
I used the search string you suggested. I read each article it linked to. I also searched for “robert wood 1909 experiments” and read detailed descriptions of both sets of experiments. Sadly, I encountered an error with Adobe Acrobat when I tried to read the original complete write-up. But despite all of this, I didn’t find the “thermal infrared spectrography graphs”. A link from anybody would be appreciated, as would an answer to my supplementary questions to prestigio.
I was interested to read the articles. I acknowledge the accuracy of the experiments of Wood and of Nahle. But those experiments don’t prove what many of the commentators think they prove.
Despite the similarity of names, Domestic pigs and Guinea Pigs are different things. Similarly, the method by which Greenhouses (and car interiors) are warmed, and ‘The Greenhouse effect’ of the Global Warming debate are different phenomena, despite the similarity of their names. And it’s a dammed good thing too, because if I thought Global Warming was going to make the world as hot as the inside of my car sometimes gets, I too would be an alarmist.
The mechanism is named after the effect of solar radiation passing through glass and warming a greenhouse, but the way it retains heat is fundamentally different as a greenhouse works by reducing airflow, isolating the warm air inside the structure so that heat is not lost by convection.[2][3][4] (Emphasis mine)
What the experiments have proven is that the process that warms a greenhouse is preventing heat loss by convection. They don’t address the similarly named but physically distinct process that you are familiar with, the ‘greenhouse effect’ that causes air down in valleys to be warmer than air on the frigid mountaintops, by carbon dioxide and water vapour retaining I.R. radiation from the Earth’s surface.
I have major problems with the confusion of science with Green political activism, and the many errors that has created. But insisting ”Pigs is Pigs” i.e. there’s only one kind of ‘Greenhouse effect’, is not one of their mistakes
Consider also that there will be less convection in a valley than on a mountain top.
In the valley air flow will be funneled by the valley walls where as on a mountain top there is airflow around the peak. Two different convection models in your example ignores atmospheric pressure along with other factors.
The following might interest you:
greenhouse.geologist-1011.net/
You assume it is a "greenhouse effect" that causes the temperature difference in a valley as compared to a mountain top. An assumption that ignores numerous other factors that can account for those differences without the need to bring in CO2 at all.
I've always been under the impression that this phenomenon was called 'temperature inversion' caused by a lyer of cold air sitting over the top and trapping the pocket of warm air in the valley.
Wow, like you, I also thought a temperature inversion was "caused by a lyer of cold air sitting over the top and trapping the pocket of warm air in the valley."
Checking Wikipedia and Answers.com I find we're both wrong, they describe an inversion as warmer air over colder.
However, you can satisfy yourself that that isn't the cause. The normal situation is warm air near the surface, cooler above, (even after hot air rises...). An inversion is 'an inversion of the normal situation', so it can't be an explanation of the normal situation. Standard High school science is that the normal situation is caused by I.R. absorbtion.
Thanks to your point, I'm now better informed.
There is a reason schools do not accept it as a source for papers.
Yes, there is a reason- but that reason is not that it is wrong in every respect.
I've read one person's claim that for 15 minutes Wikipedia read that Brad Pitt, Robert Pattinson and Toby McGuire, were dating her. Nevertheless, even an unreliable source can be accurate on occasion. Even my brother-in-law isn't wrong every time.
In this case, Wikipedia is right.
I know exactly why instructors don't accept Wikipedia, and it is not because "they're jealous it wasn't around when they were schoolkids". It is because it encourages sloppy research, does not reliably screen the content, and anything it references can be found in its original form elsewhere.
Wikipedia in the eyes of every professor and educator I have spoken with is for the lazy. With regards to matters relating to AGW or Climate Change it is decidedly biased and unreliable.
johnosullivan.wordpress.com/2012/04/
Despite all the evidence there are no less than fifty bogus statements by leading authorities exposing the shocking ignorance that such figures still believe Earth’s atmosphere truly acts as if it were a greenhouse trapping heat
johnosullivan.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/our-atmosphere-like-a-greenhouse-50-crass-authority-statements/
Not that I intend to defend alarmists!
However, of the first three quotes, its only the EPA article you quote that gets it wrong. The Bigelow quote distinguishes between the two types, and the NASA one defines which use of the term 'Greenhouse Effect' they mean.
The EPA one is profoundly wrong, and I'd like to point at it and laugh- but the link you give does not go directly to that quote. It's a 244 page document. It's not in the first 5 pages, and I haven't worked out how to progress through their 'search this document' system. I get nothing when I search the whole EPA site. Can you tell me what page it's on? Of course, they might have changed it. I've got my fingers crossed and hope you can tell me that you preserved the original with WebCite or in some other fashion!
All empirical observations have shown these assumptions to be false. 35 million or so Radiosonode flights and the Satilite record confirm there has been no warming troposphere. sciencespeak.com/MissingSignature.pdf
joannenova.com.au/2010/08/the-models-are-wrong-but-only-by-400/
So whatever the "Nature of Greenhouse Gasses" are it is clearly not doing what alarmists have been claiming.
Not "trying" to shoot holes!! Shooting holes in junk science and fabricated data is easy. We have been very successful, except for the fact that the politicians refuse to alter their agenda, which means they cannot alter their lies.
In fact, the biggest hole in the whole CO2-warms-the-planet meme is that no gas can warm the surface of the planet. It is impossible. The surface in the warmest model is always warmer than the atmosphere and thus the atmosphere cannot warm the surface, which would violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
The greenhouse gas "theory" is not a theory as it has never been proven. In fact, it has been disproven long ago but was revived to serve a political agenda.
Very simply, IR from CO2 or any gas in the atmosphere cannot be reabsorbed by the surface as the surface is warmer than the IR. The energy levels equivalent to the IR are full already. The IR will be either exchanged evenly or resonated and reflected, thus not warming the surface and thus not warming the atmosphere. By the way, IR energy is not heat energy that is sensible as temperature and neither is humidity.
Your own experience should show you that your argument about colder not warming warmer is mistaken. That argument implies that a hot bath (35 degrees )can't warm your body (37 degrrees).
By all means lets argue the science where the alarmists have it wrong. But arguing it where they have it right discredits all of us sceptics.
This scenario appears to me another case in which we are actually discussing convection. In this case the water, which is warm but still cooler than the body in it, slows the rate at which the warmer body can shed heat, but does not in fact heat the warmer body.
Thanks for pointing out my lack of clarity; I'll try to be clearer in future.
I was actually arguing against the claim that a hot bath can't warm your body.
It's a perfectly ordinary use of English to say "Pop into a hot bath and that'll warm you up." My mum used the expression.
You and I are in agreement about the physical processes. It is indeed a matter of slowing the rate of cooling of the body. For the sake of this discussion, let me pretend to accept that we cannot call this 'warming'. (I don't really accept it, my mum used the expression:))
When you take this agreed-upon physical process of slowing a cooling rate, and then add to the atmosphere a day's worth of solar energy every day, the atmosphere won't get hotter than the surface of the sun. But it will get hotter than it otherwise would be- and that's the physical process that the alarmists are talking about.
If you agree with me that they haven't made the case that this process is anything to be alarmed about, then that's where you should direct your argument. But pretending 'there's no such physical process' or 'you can't say call that warming' is inappropriate. The first because it's factually mistaken, the second because a linguistic quibble doesn't change the underlying reality.
Are you in reality a lukewarmer whi is trying to sound like a skeptic? I am curious because that is exactly the impression your comments and interpretation of science indicates.
What I assert is that it does actually increase its temperature [above that which it would otherwise cool down to].
I and most people I know refer to that as 'warming'. If you don't use the language that way, then so be it, but recognise that others do, and that the physical reality you have referred to as "slow[ing] the rate at which the warmer body can shed heat" is what they are talking about, and that physical reality does exist.
As to how to categorise myself, are you reaching for some sort of Monty Python joke? "People's Front of Judea- splitters!" Shall we adopt sectarian divisions on the purity of our scepticism? Argue over what sceptical purity means? Let’s not.
Warming would not be when something that is warmer loses its heat at a reduced rate due to some influence. It is not being warmed as it is still warmer than the influence.
That would be my definition.
That is physical reality, the one you present is simply word games.