The 16 scientists and engineers, some of them trained and experienced in climate sciences, who wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion letter published in late January have recently stuck to their guns in a second such missive. They wrote this to un-repudiate a contrary rebuke the journal later printed from 38 scientists - essentially all of them noted authorities in climate change - led by Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
The core of this round 3 is that because one can compare warming data (which is in itself concession that the warming is real) since 1989 with the first report the IPCC issued at about the same, one may see that the IPCC's preferred best-guess rate of warming exceeds what happened. Therefore something is falsified. They call what is falsified IPCC computer models. All of'em. And therefore one may disregard the mewlings of those with PhDs who are alarmed about global warming because their belief's core has been falsified.
Hmpfffft. A pretty good demolition of the second letter from this group, I just learned, is at the blog-by-experts site RealClimate, posted by Brigham Young University geologist Barry Bickmore.
If you want to know more about Bickmore, and you should, here is a YouTube video of a talk he gave not so long ago, called How to Avoid the Truth About Climate Change. In it, he explains how he went from an inattentive skeptic to a true-CO2 believer when he turned his mind to the topic. And if you'd like to read something at Bickmore's own blog, "Anti-Climate Change Extremism in Utah" but not by Bickmore himself but by a former Wall Street quant, here it is by Bob Fischer. He marvels at the ironic spectacle of the journal giving tacit approval of those who mock the IPCC's forecasts when the journal itself has failed utterly at forecasting what it is suppose to know about: Economic Trends. And yet it keeps on declaring what's coming up with stocks and business cycles.
*UPDATE: NY Review of Books - William D. Nordhaus : Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong ; Nordhaus, a deep believer in the power of markets to shape behavior, and thus one might erroneously think to conservative and therefore apt to doubt global warming, and although his work was cited by the Original Sixteen, he is on the side of science. He debunks the Wall Street Journal Sixteen. He does not debunk their letter to the editor in a collegial fashion either. He sledgehammers it into smithereens.
- Charlie Petit
