The Scottish Climate & Energy Forum is pleased to announce a seminar by
world famous Australian climate expert
Prof. Murry Salby
Atmospheric & Oceanic studies Faculty of Science,
Macquarie University, 2008-2013
Climate Change: What We Know and What We Don’t
as part of his
UK TOUR
Thursday 7th November
The Links Hotel, Edinburgh
7 – 9pm
Entry is free, but please book early as places will be limited
Contact: Mike Haseler 0845 10 88 500
Email: chairman@scef.org.uk
–oo000oo–
http://wottsupwiththatblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/why-it-must-be-frustrating/
For Those who do not know this link on WattsUpWithThat http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/08/professor-critical-of-agw-theory-being-disenfranchised-exiled-from-academia-in-australia/ explains. Professor Salby, one of the few sceptical climate scientists with a post in academe found his contract with McQuarrie (state funded) university breached by denial of the promised resources and was charged with misconduct for failing to produce results made impossible by lack of said resources. The “trial” was arranged for a time when the University knew he was in Europe.
Such behaviour may explain why there is a “scientific consensus” among state funded climatologists about CAGW – while it is impossible to find a single scientist anywhere in the world who supports this “scientific consensus” among the 60% of scientists not funded by government (or Greenpeace).
With Australia having elected a climate sceptical government we may hope the wrong done to him will be addressed. Firmly.
A touch economical with the truth there.
For a bit more truth, try http://www.desmogblog.com/2013/07/12/murry-salby-galileo-bozo-or-p-t-barnum There are plenty of quotes from US court records there.
Strangely, neither NC nor AW find space to mention that Salby “was forced to resign 01/31/08 and by 2009 had been debarred by the National Science Foundation (NSF) from Federal funding until 08/13/12”.
Odd that.
Still making use of the fact that Mike does not share your (directly or on Wikipedia) enthusiasm for censorship.
I invite anybody to read both blogs and decide which proclaims facts and which is depends on evidence free innuendo.
If any significant part of the warmist community had any respect for the principles of either science or academic freedom they (including you Wm) would be united with us in saying that what was done stinks. I note that even you cannot deny that what I said was factually true & even if there was a counter argument there would be no excuse for accepting it without rigorous examination.
ACADEMIC
“fundamentally everyone is interested in the same thing: understanding the science associated with climate change.”
versus
SCEPTIC
“fundamentally everyone is interested in the same thing: because climate changes naturally there will always be some massive natural event about to hit us. We cannot prevent natural climate change, so the question is this: is CO2 going to change the climate more than it would naturally? If so will the effect be beneficial or harmful? And even if it is harmful, will the harm to society of trying to reduce CO2 be greater than the harm from CO2?”
In other words,
the warmist approach is to assume “scientific”** knowledge in itself is “good” … and that those with “scientific” knowledge are therefore “good” and will therefore be the right people to make “good” decisions.
**there is an implicit assumption that “scientific” is the same as the consensus view of people who call themselves “scientists” in academia.
The sceptic approach is to target investigation to where it is most likely to produce knowledge that will help make a decision. Scientific knowledge++, like all other forms of knowledge is only “good” in the sense it helps make a decision. And, although scientific knowledge is preferred because it tends to be better quality, all knowledge and experience is critically assessed to determine how its quality will affect the quality of the decision.
++ Scientific means “hard facts” gathered using quality measurements taken as part of a rigorous methodology ideally under the scientific method of unbiased hypothesis testing.
> Scientific knowledge++, like all other forms of knowledge is only “good” in the sense it helps make a decision
Wrong. Knowledge is good for its own sake as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_R._Wilson
> because climate changes naturally there will always be some massive natural event about to hit us.
Wrong, as the stability of the holocene shows.
> ACADEMIC “fundamentally everyone is interested in the same thing: understanding the science associated with climate change.”
Does anyone believe that? I certainly don’t.
> the warmist approach… and that those with “scientific” knowledge are therefore “good”
Wrong. Or at least, wrong as far as I’m concerned. Since I reject your labels, I can’t tell if you’re talking about me, or some other group. But fundamentally I don’t think you know or understand the group, insofar as it is a group, that you’re trying to talk about; so I don’t think your text is going to be productive.
Since this appears to refer to something I’ve said, I’ll make a comment. My statement “everyone is interested in the same thing: understanding the science associated with climate change” was not meant to be a statement about the good of science – as you seem to have interpreted it – it was simply a general statement about an ideal in which everyone is fundamentally interested in improving their understanding of something (as opposed to having some alterior motive – for example). It would include most of what you’ve included under sceptic.
The point of the post that William Connolley links to is that the promotion of the views of Murry Salby is one of the aspect of this debate that is frustrating. Murry Salby is almost certainly wrong. I would say he’s definitely wrong, but – as with anything – there’s an infinitesimally small chance that he could be right (but it’s in the same category as things like ESP and other pseudo sciences). An example of him being definitely wrong is explained here. The comparison he makes using the two graphs is completely incorrect. Anyone with a basic understanding of numbers and graphs should recognise this.
I would happily go into more detail, if you wish to do so. I’ve even been playing around with a little computer code I’ve written to use Henry’s Law to see if there is a chance that he could be right (no he can’t). The point that I’m trying to make, constructively I hope, is that there are some things that are simply wrong and not recognising this makes it very hard to see how we (general we, not you and I specifically) can have constructive discussions about this topic. We should all recognise the aspects that are definitely wrong, so that we can at least focus on those aspects for which there is a reasonable uncertainty.
Ha, I hadn’t realised I was responding to Wotts’ words. But our host has taken a sentence fragment from a hesitant, assume-good-faith suggestion, and turned it into a hard position, which it isn’t. Its the position that a scientist – or anyone – might take, if they had only listened to people’s self-descriptions, and before actually reading any of the debate.
You are also wrong in saying that the Holocene was totally stable unlike today since the Holocene is the entire period from the end of the last ice age to today and thus cannot have failed to include recent variation.
You may be meaning the early Holocene, called the Climate Optimum, which was much warmer then our current “catastrophic warming”. That does not mean that there were no variations within that – perhaps between slightly warmer than “catastrophic” up to a lot more.– it is a ling time ago and there are no written records. We do know that during that Edenlike period the Sahara was sufficiently lush to support hippopotami, because we have painted records.
Perhaps not quite the promised catastrophe after all.
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