Nobel Laureate Resigns Over Global Warming Endorsement.

The News is reporting today that Physicist and Nobel Laureate, Dr. Ivar Giaever, has resigned from the prestigious American Physical Society (APS) over their ringing endorsement of Man-Made Global Warming:


http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/09/14/nobel-prize-winning-physicist-resigns-from-top-physics-group-over-global/?test=latestnews


It seems that Dr Glaever so strongly objects to the use of the word incontrovertible in describing Man-made Global warming "science," that he preferred to leave the APS and remain and lend his prestige to what he considered a misleading statement.  I don't blame him.  In my own field, Criminal Justice, we were taught that words like incontrovertible were so strong that they should only be used when one was so sure of the position taken that it was unimpeachable.  In fact, we were taught that only one finding in Criminal Justice Science was considered incontrovertible, that a perpetrator faced with a potential victim he or she suspected was either armed or capable of defending themselves and willing to do so would move on to another.


The article on fox News links to another at Climate Depot which reprints the entire letter.


DR. Glaever is hardly the only prominent physicist to do the same thing.  A year ago Harold Lewis, professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, resigned was well over the APS white-washing of Climategate.(most people aren't aware that Dr. Mann's credentials are in Physics, not dendocrinology, the field he so famously published on).  Mr. Lewis wrote:

"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."

Although I would echo this opinion, this is a prominent physicist writing the above, not this humble bachelorate in Criminal Justice Science. The whole article in The Telegraph is a good read:

The Telegraph: Global Warming Greatest Pseudoscientifc Fraud according to US Scientist.

Enjoy!

The Al Gore and Thomas Friedman Show.

Today is Al Gore's "24 hr" broadcast meant to shame us sceptics into realizing we're wrong about Global warming.

Of course along with that is a world-wide effort on the part of Gore sycophants to bash us at the same time.  One of the most prominent is the piece over at the New York Times by ever reliable Thomas Friedman entitled Is It Weird Enough Yet?  After seeing this little missive I could ask the same question myself.

Friedman’s big example for manmade global warming is the drought in Texas.  He informs us that it is a consequence of man made global warming because:

“The weather gets weird: the hots get hotter; the wets wetter; and the dries get drier. This is not a hoax. This is high school physics, as Katharine Hayhoe, a climatologist in Texas, explained on Joe Romm’s invaluable Climateprogress.org blog: ‘As our atmosphere becomes warmer, it can hold more water vapor. Atmospheric circulation patterns shift, bringing more rain to some places and less to others. For example, when a storm comes, in many cases there is more water available in the atmosphere and rainfall is heavier. When a drought comes, often temperatures are already higher than they would have been 50 years ago, and so the effects of the drought are magnified by higher evaporation rates.’”

Really?  When I followed the link he provided it led to the home page for the blog not the article which was supposed to enlighten us.  I don’t know about my readers, but I wasn’t about to wade through the mass of AGW propaganda to get to the article in question.  Let me enlighten my readers just a little.  Rather than Global warming, that drought, along with our current Atlantic Hurricane season is caused by, cooling of the pacific waters, what is known bas the La Niña.  As Dummies.com explains:

“In places like the northeastern United States that are accustomed to cold and snowy winters, La Niña often makes for especially hard winters. In the rainy Pacific Northwest, La Niña winters seem to bring even more rain and snow than usual...

Across the desert Southwest, often the season is even drier than normal. Tornadoes seem especially numerous during springs and summers of La Niña, and the Atlantic hurricane season can be especially long and dangerous. In 1999, for example, while La Niña conditions prevailed in the tropical Pacific Ocean, 12 tropical storms grew big enough to earn names, eight of them became hurricanes, and five became intense hurricanes.”

Sound familiar?  There was a hard winter in the Northeast this year, and conditions were dryer here in the Southeast, including Texas which is suffering from a drought just like the rest of us here in the South.  We also had a record tornado year, all the result of a La Niña not global warming.

Mr. Friedman’s explanation, which he calls “high school physics” also misses the mark in another important way.  Let’s let Mr. Harris over at Pajamas Media explain:

“Consider extreme weather, the main topic of 24 Hours of Reality. Gore promotes the concept that greenhouse gas-induced global warming is leading to increasingly severe weather. But this defies logic. If the world warms due to increasing greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures at high latitudes are forecast to rise most, reducing the difference between arctic and tropical temperatures. Since this differential drives weather, we should see weaker midlatitude cyclones in a warmer world, and so less extremes in weather, not more.”

Check history and we find that to be anecdotally true.  Just about every period of known global warming in history was marked by a forward pace for humanity.  Arable land increased as Northern lands warmed up.  So mankind’s food supply increased; and along with it so did our human population.  The bounty in food made possible the advancement in crafts and the sciences.  That is true of the Roman period, the medieval warming period, several Amerindian civilizations and civilizations in the far East.  Surely that wouldn’t have been possible had the dire consequences Friedman and Gore warn us about had accompanied those warming periods, as they should’ve.  But, excuse me, Al Gore and Friedman deny such periods ever took place.  Dr. Mann and Dr. Briffa proved as much as far as they’re concerned.

But then you already know my opinion of Dr. Mann.

Tea Partyers Racists?

I can only shake my head as I read something like this:

Academics Dub Tea Partyers Racist.

Stuff like this is the reason the Social Sciences have struggled for recognition among their scientific peers for generations.  That they would proudly present such research at a conference totally boggles the mind.  Check out, for instance, the following:

But like Mr. Jacobson, Mr. Abramowitz also said they were more likely to harbor racial resentment, which he judged based on their answers to questions such as whether blacks could succeed as well as whites if they “would only try harder,” and whether they agreed with the statement that Irish, Italians and Jews overcame prejudice and “blacks should do the same without any special favors.”

Really?  Notice the second question.  How does that objectively measure one's racism?  The truth is it doesn't.  It compares blacks with other minorities who have faced and overcome prejudice and asks a person if blacks should be held to a different, arguably racist, standard which demands special treatment for them.  I would argue that the question is design to elicit the opposite of what it purports to measure if I weren't aware of the sophist thinking which motivated it.  It is based on the specious assumption that the black experience is somehow so much worse than that of any other minority in U.S., so much worse, that they must be accorded special status and favors.  To think otherwise is considered in modern academia to be automatically racist.  As a part American Indian myself, who was tossed out of Restaurants in the South in my youth under Jim Crow laws, I beg to differ.

So why do we end up with stuff like this passed off as "science?"  Follow the money.  These studies are financed, just like Climate studies.  By far the biggest provider of money is we, the taxpayers.  Something I learned in college is that basically applicants for research money have to promise an outcome.  The government doesn't hand that money for pure research for research's sake.  Generally bureaus are staffed by folks with left-wing leanings in their permanent positions, much like universities.  These folks determine who gets the research grants and they don't tend to give that money out to those who don't expect to get the approved result.

Clearly a lot of money went into this blatant effort to smear the current administration's political opponents.  Look for this stuff to surface in the coming months as it makes its way in the appropriate academic journals where it will be used by media pundits to smear both the Tea Party and, by extension, Republicans.  That is what happens when science becomes the servant of politics.