Thursday, November 29, 2007

Who The Heck Is Roger Pielke Sr.?

Roger Pielke Sr. does not like to call himself a global warming denier, believing rather that CO2 is merely one of the forcings (even merely one of the human forcings) that are having an effect on recent increases in the global mean temperature, which beliefs put him within but at the conservative edge of the international consensus on the issue.

Until recently, however, Pielke Sr. ran a weblog heavily frequented by climate change deniers called "Climate Science", in which he offered his comments on recently released papers, his own and those of other researchers, pertaining to the various aspects of, well, climate science.

This site was discontinued in early September but, and here is the point of the post, it has now returned as an "information service" (comments section closed). Whatever your position on these issues, I would heartily recommend frequent visits. Pielke's personal obsessions aside, there is probably no better or more inclusive on-line source of links to/information about new papers, which are often extremely difficult to track down otherwise.

In his latest post, Pielke discusses some of the projects he and his research team have been working on lately, including:

...a preliminary poll of climate scientists, we have found that a significant minority disagree with the 2007 IPCC conclusions, either concluding that is it too conservative with respect to the risk of human-CO2 caused climate change, or overstates the relative role of this specific climate forcing.

I wrote about this survey here, where I took issue with the way Pielke and his co-authors claimed their findings demonstrated that the "science was not settled". If I were to give my own interpretation of the significance of their findings, I would say they show that:

1) within the community of climate scientists, there are no pure deniers.
2) while a small minority of climate scientists believe that the IPCC conclusions "overstate the risk" of AGW, about 75 per cent believe that the effects are going to be at least as bad as the IPCC position.

...which is the sound of settled science to me.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

So if the science is settled, why are we still spending $billions on more research to "prove" what is known?

Let's spend the money on something useful, like building arks.

Anonymous said...

Good God, you're either deluded or illiterate if you haven't read one of the IPCC reports yourself. The Summary for Policy Makers (political document) has NEVER been supported by their own scientific findings! They piss off their OWN scientists.

Anonymous said...

where's the hockey stick gone ?

You know, the peer reviewed, fully supported by concensus, proof of settled science ??

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

What's with all the censorship?

Ti-Guy said...

What's with all the censorship?

I like it! Cut off the anonymii, while you're at it. They're all just the same two or three sock-puppets, anyway.

bigcitylib said...

With the sciency posts I'm going to try a slightly different policy. One anony troll raised old discredited bullshit against Mann and the IPCC, so we don't need a dozen more doing the same.

Anonymous said...

Actually you guys haven't censored even one of my anonytard posts yet so give yourselves a pat on the back.

Of course half the time I get a response from ti-guy containing one of more of the following words

retard, redneck, nazi, anonytard

but that's okay. It's part of this blog's charm.

Ti-Guy said...

Of course half the time I get a response...

Are you the 'tard who does all those long cut 'n pastes from WingNutDaily, or the one who calls Stéphane Dion a fag all the time?

Tell me which 'tard you are, what you wrote, and if it was unwarranted, I'll try really hard to feel some degree of remorse.

Anonymous said...

Exactly what was this discredited bullshit you're referring to? Scientific results that don't agree with your belief system?

Anonymous said...

Oh, that's rich. Let me guess how it was 'discredited'.

The guy doing the research was old.

Or bald.

Or a Christian.

Or conservative.

Or secretly in the pocket of Big Oil, as opposed to Family Oil, or Little Oil.

Or wore dorky clothes.

Ti-Guy said...

You forgot liar.

freshlegacy said...

Thank you so much for pointing out the resurrection of the Pielke, Sr website. I enjoyed reading it immensely when it was active, and I browsed the archives occasionally since.

Pielke always has some interesting contributions on climate science issues. Because of him, I am a more nuanced AGW skeptic than before.

By the way, I'm curious how you reach the conclusion that 75% agreement with IPCC concerns about AGW constitutes "settled science." 75% is three out of four. If three out of four doctors said that eating chocolate would kill you in five years, I'd certainly be curious what the remaining one in four thought and why.

Anonymous said...

Oh, I forgot to mention. I'm mentally retarded and fuck gerbils in my spare time.