You’d expect a gathering of over 700 reputable scientists, economists, and policy makers tackling an issue as topical and media-hyped as global warming to be big news.
And you know it would be, had the goal of their discussions and presentations been to parrot and propagate the conclusions of the alarmist mainstream. But instead, attendees of the International Conference on Climate Change arrived on Sunday prepared to put anthropogenic warming claims to the test, and for their sins the publicity they received ranged from none to insulting. [snip]
Although this year’s New York Times attack dutifully mentioned the tired but requisite erstwhile Exxon Mobil funding, IPCC heresy and dwindling numbers blather, its very title, Skeptics Dispute Climate Worries and Each Other, implied a new strategy. This time out, Revkin played the old divide et impera card – characterizing scientific points of debate as “internal rifts” within realist’s ranks, sprinkling words like “division” and “dissent” to imply disruptive disunity throughout.
While the piece is fraught with intellectual dishonesty, the manner in which he highlighted Dr. Richard Lindzen’s Sunday keynote address to make his point was a conscious misrepresentation of Lindzen’s position and demands rebuke. Here’s what was actually said on Sunday night:
The global warming issue has done much to set back climate science. In particular, the notion that climate is one-dimensional -- which is to say, that it is totally described by some fictitious global mean temperature and some single gross forcing a la increased CO2 -- is grotesque in its oversimplification. I must reluctantly add that this error is perpetuated by those attempting to ‘explain’ climate with solar variability. Unlike greenhouse forcing, solar forcing is so vague that one can’t reject it.
However, acting as though this is the alternative to greenhouse forcing is asking for trouble.
Okay, for starters, the expression “asking for trouble” hardly implies “erroneous.” Telling your wife she’s gaining weight is certainly asking for trouble, but it doesn’t make you a liar.
Of course, had Revkin included these words Lindzen spoke next, he would have made the climate guru’s actual meaning quite clear:
Remember, we are dealing with a small amount of warming (concentrated in two relatively brief episodes) in an inadequately observed system. The proper null hypothesis is that there was no need whatsoever for external forcing in order to produce such behavior. The unsteady and even turbulent motions of the ocean and atmosphere are forever moving heat from one place to another on time scales from days to centuries and, in doing so, they leave the system out of equilibrium with the sun, leading to fluctuations in temperature.
Just moments prior, Lindzen had explained that nature is “dominated by stabilizing negative feedbacks rather than destabilizing positive feedbacks,” and that once such is made clear, “the silliness of the whole issue becomes evident.”
[Highly Recommended for examples of how messy real science is and the lengths to which the scamsters will go to discredit it.]
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