Reader Responds to Mr. Lindzen's opinion of Al Gore's Movie

Some comments from unknown authors to the above:

Huh. It's interesting, but it doesn't sound like
the atmospheric scientist had a clue about what
the social scientists actually said or did.

Lindzen's opinion says:

"Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI
Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to
2003 under the key words "global climate change"
produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts
supported what she referred to as the consensus
view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser,
checked her procedure and found that only 913
of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and
that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly
endorsed the so-called consensus view.
Several actually opposed it."

Benny Peiser talks about Oreskes's paper here:

http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/NationalPost.htm

and you can get to it from Peiser's home page (as I did)

0.) It's not Nancy Oreskes, it's Naomi Oreskes.

1.) Peiser's paper claims that Oreskes claims
that 75% of the papers supported the
"consensus" ... a far cry from the "all"
claimed by Lindzen.

2.) Oreskes lumped implicit and explicit support
for the consensus, whereas Peiser only looked
for explicit support ... a dramatic difference
in approach.

[[I have no clue how social scientists discern
implicit acceptance, which kind of seems
relevant ... but I'll leave it alone since
Peiser's clearly comparing apples and oranges]]

So clearly Lindzen either didn't understand Peiser's
paper, misquoted it, or perhaps something got munged in
the process of publishing Lindzen's paper, and Lindzen
didn't know or care enough to go back and correct it.

Lindzen seems to argue that you can't prove that any
observed changes are due to human influences, and that
therefore there is no evidence of human influence.

To use a bold example, the environmental alarmists
seem to claim that if I fart in the room and the
room is stinky, the fact that I farted proves why
the room is stinky.

Lindzen seems to claim that if I fart in the room,
and he can show there is some other stinky substance
in the room, then the fact that I farted is irrelevant.

Either way the room stinks, and I think we should look
into air cleaners.

===========================================================

There are several irritating things about both the Lindzen article
and the Peiser study beyond the points previously raised.

First, not only does Lindzen not bother to provide any links, he
doesn't even bother to provide ordinary references, instead using the
kind of vague statements that are suspiciously difficult to check.
Example: "When Newsweek featured global warming in a 1988 issue, it
was claimed that all scientists agreed." You only need to sort
through 52 issues, perhaps several thousand pages, in order to
fact-check this remarkably vague and probably false assertion (am I
expected to believe that Newsweek asserted that ALL scientists -
including particle physicists and petroleum geologists - agreed?).
Similarly, Lindzen refers to "an interview with George Stephanopolous
on ABC" - no dates or program names. And he makes a lot of factual
assertions with no sources whatever. Why do I get the feeling he
doesn't want people to question him too closely?

Second, as Lindzen himself admits, he doesn't seem to understand what
the debate is about. "Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted Mr. Gore with
the fact that the best estimates of rising sea levels are far less
dire than he suggests in his movie..." When discussing the
possibility of 100 million refugees, I don't think the "best"
estimates are as important as the worst plausible case. It's like
buying insurance. And the worst plausible case wasn't even what Gore
illustrated: that would be the loss of both Greenland and the western
Antarctic ice sheet, resulting in a sea-level rise rise of 40 feet
IIRC, and Gore only illustrated what a rise of 20 feet would mean.
So what is the likelihood of a rise of 20 feet? Lindzen doesn't say.

Third, Lindzen just makes things up. "A general characteristic of
Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth
and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without
any external forcing." No, actually, Gore's charts made it clear
that there is plenty of variation in climate and has been for
hundreds of thousands of years. He trusts his audience to see the
trends.

Next, Peiser. We note again the complete absence of supporting links
and footnotes, and vague citations such as "Six eminent researchers
from the Russian Academy of Science and the Israel Space Agency have
just published a startling paper in one of the world's leading space
science journals." Got a date, or a journal title, or a researcher
name, Peiser? Only the Oreskes article and the Bray/Storch survey
(see below) are cited in any meaningful way.

Also note that according to Peiser, if a paper is rejected by Science
it indicates corruption. There couldn't be any other reason Science
might reject a paper.

But most importantly, Peiser says the "recent survey among some 500
international climate researchers ... conducted by Professors Dennis
Bray and Hans von Storch of the German Institute for Coastal
Research" asserts that "a quarter of respondents still question
whether human activity is responsible for the most recent climatic
changes." I think he's referring to the 2003 survey listed at
http://w3g.gkss.de/G/Mitarbeiter/bray.html/BrayGKSSsite/BrayGKSS/surveyframe
.html
But I can't find those exact words anywhere. I do find that for item
8, "We can say for certain that, without change in human behavior,
global warming will definitely occur some time in the future" only
15% of respondents actually disagreed (answered 5-7 on a 1-7 scale).
Another item Peiser may have been looking at was "40. Climate change
is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes" but this item is too
vague; obviously the climate changes of the last 650,000 years
(Gore's longest timeline) were not mostly the result of anthropogenic
causes. Even I would have disagreed, so it's not terribly surprising
that only 55% of respondents agreed. I can't find a more definite
question about human effects on *recent* climate change, so where did
Peiser's statement come from?

The Bray/Storch survey is the most interesting thing I've uncovered
on this "consensus" question. I don't know what % you ought to have
for a consensus, but it's pretty clear from this survey that the vast
majority of climate scientists are convinced that global warming is
happening and the IPCC reports are valuable and reflect the
scientific consensus. Also note the sampling controversy link; I'm
not at all sure that skeptics were not overrepresented in 2003, even
if Bray and Storch are satisfied.

======================= And some more follow up ==============

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/04/open-thread-on-lindzen-op-ed-in-wsj/

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/04/lindzen-point-by-point