Google scientists rebel over company's support for 'climate-hoax' Senator In 2011 Google appointed 21 Google Science Communication Fellows (GSCF) – academics representing the cream of US climate-change science – and tasked them with exploring new ways of communicating the issue to the public. On Thursday, 17 of the GSCF did just that, and called out Google for its own failings in an open letter. …
It would seem he is ignoring it in favour of a bible quote.
The question is not so much, is our climate changing, but are we causing or affecting the change. It has changed in the past, it would be foolish to believe it will not change in the future. There is a valid question over us influencing a very complicated system, but a quote from the bible must be the purest definition of faith, and even less reliable than a purely statistical model.
We have a choice - fight the natural tide of global warming by destroying our economies or rationally spend some money figuring out how to live in a warmer world. Green house gases are an unproven source of global warming although they probably exacerbate the natural processes. Computer models are guides, not proof.
For those who think man made green house gases are the ONLY reason for global warming, please explain why the glaciers that covered Canada and the northern US 15,000 years ago have melted. Climate change is a natural process for many reasons and trying to fight nature is always a losing proposition. Charles Darwin might say Adapt or Die.
Unfortunately, the alleged Climate Scientists cannot perform controlled experiments with climate as medical scientists can perform double blind medical experiments. Without experimental proof, they have only theory. The climate long range projections are subject to insufficient and imperfect data, a mass of assumptions that may not be correct or are numerically wrong, and the biases, some financially induced, that are embedded into the computer programs. The Climategate email revelations and subsequent whitewash "investigation" did enormous damage to the credibility of any "climate scientist".
"Green house gases are an unproven source of global warming "
erm - no - we know they cause global warming with 100% certainty. The only question is the relative degree...
"please explain why the glaciers that covered Canada and the northern US 15,000 years ago have melted"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
Apparently you missed the announcement from NASA stating that CO2 in the atmosphere is REFLECTING solar radiation back into space or that their instrumentation has confirmed that every planet in our system has had an increase in temperature. "100% certainty" is held mostly by those who will profit from "carbon tax credits"; you know, the same ones who promote wars against things (war on drugs) or concepts (war on terror). Its important to be a skeptic when the people in charge are septic. Just sayin.......
In the specific case of Senator Inhofe it hardly matters whether man-made climate change is real or not. Sen Ihhofe thinks man-made climate change does not exist because it says so in the bible.
Therefore he is automatically wrong, whatever the truth about climate change is.
Well, there are different styles of doing business.
One is the brand-oriented, ivory-tower-style vertical business. Sometimes with a cult following. Like Apple. Other is more pragmatic - whatever brings the money in. Lots of different brands, lots of related companies. Big international conglomerates.
Now which way is more suitable for the energy business?
Neither.
Given the regulator environment for energy companies the only option is to be as aggressively political as your opponents. The Greens decided oil was bad long before they took the name "Greens" and have politicized and demonized the oil companies ever since. AWG is just their latest fad in that defamation. The disadvantage for the oil companies is that in addition to buying Congresscritters the way the Greens do, they also have to make a profit and pay their shareholders.
@TAT,
IF you are refering to his campaign donations then yes, he gets plenty of money from oil and gas. Check back for previous 2 year cycles and oil and gas is at the top each and every time. He is bought and sold, not that he is any different to most of them. That is the world we live in.
http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00005582
I thought the weirdest thing was the whole "Its a UN commie pinko conspiracy!" line. There seems to be a startling number of people in the US who believe that the UN is some kind of sinister world government and that its only a matter of time before they invade the land of the free and take away everyone's guns and give them social healthcare or something.
I don't really understand where this idea came from, especially the notion that the UN could be this organised and effective. Anyone care to enlighten me?
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Can someone explain the origin of Inhofe's viewpoint. is it because:
1) his religious convictions which mean that possible climate disasters do not tally with his covenant with God
2) nationalist values which see a global community threatening to limit the USA's control over its own energy policy
3) a large brown envelope stuffed with cash
4) whichever of the first three is expedient at the time.
Worse than that, he is uneducated, stupid and religious where the lethal thing is being all of that at the same time. The fact that a person like him is also a US Senator does not surprise me any more and that makes me sad. Perhaps he believes the world is now some 5000 years old too. The fact that "Google scientist rebel" Is fine.
> "In 2002, I was alone in exposing the global-warming hysteria as a hoax," he writes, saying that the climate debate stems from the United Nations' wish to establish control over what kind of energy sources the US can use, and to "redistribute wealth."
OK, so I was warming (not globally) to this guy's opinions, until we got to:
> In Genesis 8:22, God promised "as long as the earth remains there will be seed time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night," he quoted.
And then he lost me.
A while back I was looking at the emissions of Washington state, and Mt. St. Helens was spewing just as much as the state's combined industrial emissions. 1 volcano = all of the state's industrial output. The Seattle Times ran a diagram of glacier melt on Mt. Ranier. Did you know that glacier has been receding since the late 1800s? There was a recent report about earthquakes causing methane to be released from the ocean floor. Plus the methane from ant farts.
And we're supposed to believe that switching to CFL/LED lighting is going to keep the oceans rising ten feet?
We live in an industrialized society. If you want to see us go without industry, then the solar flare from two weeks ago would have done it. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2382527/A-near-miss-Earth-Devastating-electromagnetic-pulses-knocked-power-cars-phones-occured-weeks-ago.html) And from what I've read, even a total shutdown of industry wouldn't have stopped "climate change."
Not that I'm going to get into it with you but the following sentence is idiotic:
'The Seattle Times ran a diagram of glacier melt on Mt. Ranier. Did you know that glacier has been receding since the late 1800s?'
Care to tell me when the Industrial Revolution started?
murph, the IPCC says that human-caused greenhouse emissions only really started measurably affecting the global temp in the 2nd half of the 20th century, so for IPCC purposes, the Industrial Revolution started in 1950. Unless I miss my guess, that's well after the 1890s.
However, don't give up yet! The IPCC can't explain why global temps are essentially unchanged over the past 15 years, so they might also be wrong about the "no effect until 1950s" bit.
Let's see; during the same time as the eruption of Krakatoa? You know, the one that effected weather for the ENTIRE PLANET! [Ice cores are used to obtain a high resolution record of recent glaciation. It confirms the chronology of the marine isotopic stages. Ice core data shows that the last 400,000 years have consisted of short interglacials (10,000 to 30,000 years) about as warm as the present alternated with much longer (70,000 to 90,000 years) glacials substantially colder than present. The new EPICA Antarctic ice core has revealed that between 400,000 and 780,000 years ago, interglacials occupied a considerably larger proportion of each glacial/interglacial cycle, but were not as warm as subsequent interglacial s.] I guess its a good thing mankind dates back almost a million years [sarcasm] or we might never have thawed out, since only HUMANKIND is responsible for global warming. Or is every other interglacial warming period an anomaly to be disregarded?
Although it's not what I think he really believes that God bothering nonsense is fucking madness, isn't it? The fact that dangerous fundamentalist nonsense not only exists but thrives in the US government in the 21st Century is insane.
The US has some nerve preaching to Pakistan and India about 'fundamentalists in control of Nukes' when they have these kind of 'God told me to do it' nutjobs in their Senate.
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There are STILL supposedly intelligent people who accept the distractions put out by oil/coal companies (e.g. UN lunacy, pet psychologists expressing doubt about the overwhelming consensus amongst those who study the topic, East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, invalid models, research grants, cost of windmills, volcanos, etc etc etc)?
There's still not one published peer-reviewed paper that casts doubt on anthropomorphic climate change.
BTW, who would get a better pay-off, a research scientist supporting the currently accepted knowledge or a research climatologist handing a piece of research that goes against that knowledge to (e.g.) the Koch brothers?
Of course there's no paper, peer-reviewed or not, that "...casts doubt on *anthropomorphic* climate change.".
That's to be expected, because "anthropomorphic" means "resembling or made to resemble a human form."
Perhaps some additional years of schooling might put you into form to be able to intelligently comment on the climate debate?
> There's still not one published peer-reviewed paper that casts doubt on anthropomorphic climate change.
Do you think anyone would publish it in the current "climate"?
Do you think anyone would be able to get any kind of funding to produce such a paper?
I think not.
The "evidence" (I mean real evidence) is tenuous at best and anyway the onus is on the sky's falling down brigade to prove significant anthropogenic warming anyway.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and I 'aint seen anything coming close yet.,
Do you think anyone would be able to get any kind of funding to produce such a paper?
Sure. Any "scientist" willing to shill for the deniers can start their search for sympathetic funders here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial#Private_sector
<Any "scientist" willing to shill for the deniers can start their search for sympathetic funders here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial#Private_sector>
Here we go again. Any scientist trying to disprove the current scientific concensus is not a real scientist but only a sellout to the Big Bad Industry.
Still less ludicrous than quoting the Bible to deny climate change however.
I'm wondering if climate change is triggered by all the hot air around those silly debates.
@Yag
I put "scientist" in quotes because skelband was talking about getting funding to produce a paper with a predetermined conclusion. That is not science. In science, you don't know the answer before your do the work, and you get your funding to do the work, not after the work is done.
This Inhofe guy only needs one more conspiracy theory and/or shadowy figure to hit the Conspiracy Trifecta. We've got the UN and the Democrats already, who will he pick to round out his axis of evil?
-Satan
-The Illuminati
-Mexicans
-Sol (our Sun)
-Planned Parenthood
Windows close at midnight. Wager now!
"We've got the UN and the Democrats already, who will he pick to round out his axis of evil?
-Satan
-The Illuminati
-Mexicans
-Sol (our Sun)
-Planned Parenthood
Windows close at midnight. Wager now!"
Thumbs up for a nice selection. You really know your SEL's
It's a tough call but I'll go with Satan by a nose. I've got him pegged as a pro-lifer but I suspect he sees PP as merely a front organisation for "The Beast"
The winner is "Hollywood". Hollywood is conspiring to scare the americans into becoming willing slaves to the control of multi-national organizations, like the U.N.
He's also accused the Obama administration of buying all the ammo so gun owners wont get any.
Stark barking mad. I'm surprised he hasn't been appointed head of the Science committee yet, that's where the craziest bible-thumpers tend to wind up.
A big premise of this story is that the Google Science Communication Fellows are "...academics representing the cream of US climate-change science..."
However, if you actually follow the linky and read the story about the Fellows, you find that they are in fact early- to mid- career people interested in getting into the *communication* of climate-change science. These are not the A-team of climate scientists, folks.
I am enjoying the debate here and wonder if it will re-enact some of the historical wars somewhat. 2 religions going head to head for the amusement of the atheists/agnostics. Lets see which god wins (remembering a joke about the Israelites and Pharaoh and that the christian god drowns the egyptians because the egyptian god is a cat).
I wonder if a top trumps game has been made out of the competing religions yet?
I'll even go even further by stating that several scientific advances happened when a few scientists were sceptical of something that was supposed to be proven.
An ideal scientist, in the modern sense, is sceptical1 of everything - or more precisely, acts as a Bayesian reasoner in regard to every hypothesis. Per Descartes' "evil genius" and the like, an ideal scientist knows that his or her own sensory impressions and/or process of reasoning might be corrupted and lead to incorrect conclusions, and thus no purported fact should ever be treated as having probability 1.
In practice, of course, it's impossible to operate without a great many axiomatic assumptions, and ubiquitous vigilance isn't feasible either. So actual scientists have to relax their sceptism many times a day. But scientific epistemology works best when its practitioners start with the explicit assumption that everything is open to question, then decide which hypotheses to provisionally accept based on their high Bayesian probability. So, for example, a scientist will typically decide to trust sensory impressions at some level (for example when reading the output of scientific instruments); to assume mathematics is consistent; to assume reasoning that seems to be logical in fact is so; and so on.
But "proven"? That's faith, and is fundamentally non-scientific. So is "disproven".2 What an ideal scientist refers to as "proof" is really only one of two things: the description of a tautological result (eg in mathematics3), or a gloss for "looks like a really high probability of being true, so we'll treat it as true and move on to other things".
1Or skeptical, if you prefer. Either spelling is etymologically justifiable.
2Fans of Karl Popper think disproof, or falsification, has special status in scientific epistemology, but that's an inferior model. Under a Bayesian interpretation of scientific epistemology there's no need to give falsification special status. A falsifying result shifts the probability of a hypothesis substantially downward, and that follows from the math, so there's no need to treat it differently from a confirmational result. Any amount of falsification only approaches a probability of 0 for the hypothesis asymptotically, but that's also appropriate, because it's always remotely possible that every single experiment was flawed, for example, so no hypothesis can be rejected absolutely. (See again the evil genius problem.)
3And that's still subject to interpretive error, distortion of consciousness, etc.
Recent reports indicate major back-pedalling on AGW by its supporters, and the predicted "ENDOFTHEWORLD" has been delayed a few centuries. Sea levels will rise inches not feet, and the computer models appear to be a little less than accurate, with nearly 20 years of predicted temperature rises missing from the world-wide actual record.
Perhaps it was those apocalyptic predictions that triggered Sen Inhofe's bible-waving rant.
Personally, I'd rather stick with facts, and even IPCC's error prone predictions beat out 4000 year old mythology any time!
Let's just say that global warming is a fact, and that people have something to do with it. After all, it seems quite likely true just from gross arguments along the line of greenhouse gases are increasing -> radiative heat loss is declining, while (solar + other) input is staying about the same, so the temperature should adjust upward until the radiative loss balances the (solar + other) input. Everything else, including the dubious accuracy of the various ever more complex models, is detail, although possibly of some use in telling us how long we have before things get quite uncomfortable or, for those on the seacoasts, wet.
It then becomes reasonable to ask whether the science is good enough to tell us how effective each of a large number of suggested solutions will be. I am skeptical, and that is not the entire question anyhow, as the technical part is the easiest. The hard questions are about what it may be necessary to sacrifice in exchange for mitigation of global warming; and these questions are not technical, but political, and clearly involve agreement among all highly industrialized nations. How likely are China, India, and other rapidly industrializing countries to forego the benefits of high energy use, and how likely is it that North Americans and Europeans will give them up? And given the relative populations, would it make much difference if North America and Europe agreed to return to stone age technology and population?
The 800 pound gorilla in the room is one or another form of nuclear power, yet that seems, except in France, to be politically unacceptable as long as almost everyone is unwilling to do reasonable risk analysis. So the upshot appears to be that we will continue to burn fossil fuel and muddle through with marginal adjustments as we can.
And savaging Google for hosting an Imhofe do does not address any real issue. Politics makes for strange alliances, especially where there are only two parties, and global warming is not Google's primary business concern. It is possible that Sen. Imhofe's inclinations on other issues seems to Google more important than his flakiness on the subject of global warming.
@ tom dial
Upvoted your post but the 300 pound gorilla is not nuclear power, it's population and the ideal of never-ending 3% annual economic growth. If this planet were expanding 3% annually, this might not be an issue. But it's finite, it's no longer 1880 with a pre industrial revolution size population. Wars, famine and disease used to keep this in check. Pity.
" it's population and the ideal of never-ending 3% annual economic growth. If this planet were expanding 3% annually, this might not be an issue. "
Which implies that Earth is the only body that humans can, will or ever exist on.
That we already harvest most of the power output of biggest fusion reactor within 100 million miles of Earth.
Neither of those statement is true. When the human race has exhausted those options then I'll start to worry.
Which implies that Earth is the only body that humans can, will or ever exist on.
That most certainly was not implied. Humans have existed (briefly) on the moon, and that didn't help with population pressure on the Earth in the slightest.
It is hugely unlikely that it will ever be practical to move any substantial number of people off the Earth. Even under some fantasy "free energy" regime, the logistics and industrial effort are absurd, and there's precious little justification for it. So that ain't gonna help control the planet's population. It's a pulp-SF pipe dream.
"That most certainly was not implied. Humans have existed (briefly) on the moon, and that didn't help with population pressure on the Earth in the slightest."
That's exactly what is implied.
That the Earth is the only place that support any reasonable size of population and the only energy sources are those that can be found on planet Earth.
The energy cost to LEO is about the same as the round trip energy cost of London to Sydney (a fact known by Philip Bono since the late 1960s). An LH2/LO2 system would deposit most of its exhaust back into the atmosphere for recycling. So yes mass migration even using rather pedestrian means (no space elevators or tethers) is possible.
As for the Earths energy consumption the Earth covers a disk of roughly 127 million square kilometres. That is roughly 1/2.19x 10^9 of the sphere around the Sun at 1 AU.
Assuming the current Earths energy consumption is about 150 peta watt hours That a sphere at the Earths radius at 10% efficiency would collect 50x more energy than the entire worlds energy consumption.
The issue is not wheather those resources exist, because they do. The question is can be find a way to exploit them economically?
Yeah, a good war, we really need one soon.
You get an F for critical thinking. He didn't say war was desirable; he said they used to help keep populations in check. Clearly the various wars we have going on now are not doing that, so in fact the logical conclusion is that war is not what we need. (A war of sufficient scale to significantly reduce Earth's human population isn't something anyone with sense would wish for.)
Disease might yet do it - another serious influenza pandemic, for example. Doesn't mean that's desirable either. Ditto various major natural disasters.
And not only that. Rough times also affect mentality.
For some, it is an excuse for violence, for others, a necessity to support each other, in order to increase a likelyhood of survival.
In any case - during wars, people do not bitch about animal rights or CO2 or whatever it is hot this week. They have bigger issues. But in the prosperous times, they are perfectly capable to gnaw each other's throats for just such things.
We don't really need another war to set our priorities right, do we?
Let's say it's not.
Climate change, on the other hand, is.
Whether it is warming or cooling is something that we simply do not have either the experience or the knowledge to determine at this point in time.
It is the refusal of that last fact that gives room for lunatics on either side of the fence to rock the boat, so to speak.
"The evidence of the Bible showed that the idea of dangerous man-made climate change was wrong"
If you can bring yourself to get beyond the "Random book written by evangelical zealots with their own agendas" used as evidence part of the story. He is still talk bollocks. I don't see how he can interpret that parable as showing any such thing.
Or is this just a case of the same old, l"ets say its in the holy book as no one will ever read it anyway"?
It pains me that I am still supposed to take people seriously who claim to believe in a supernatural being, do we not have education to counter this crap?
************************************************************************************************************
"...
Spooner
Tell me then about your wife.
Hirst
What wife?
Spooner
How beautiful she was, how tender and how true. Tell me with what speed she swung in the air, with what velocity she came off the wicket, whether she was responsive to finger spin, whether you could bowl a shooter with her, or an offbreak with a legbreak action. In other words, did she google?
..."
Harold Pinter, No Man's Land, a Play by Harold Pinter, New York, Grove Press, Inc. 1975 p.32 [copyright 1975 by H. Pinter Limited]
I have no problem with religion, each to their own but I'll just quote from from Rev 11:18 "God will bring to ruin those ruining the earth". If you're going to get God involved, at least read the book fully. Clearly the Biblical God is well aware mankind can indeed ruin the earth. Inhofe is a tit, that's the problem, not that he believes in God.
In the late 90's, early noughties, Google got a reputation in the USA as being liberal, for instance it had as its slogan "don't be evil". No joke.
Being perceived as liberal in the USA automatically means that about 30% of the population will boycot you, will organize write-in campaigns to get companies to disown you, and that 50% of Congress will do their best to legislate you out of existence.*
Google has in recent years tried to compensate. For instance, if you go to the USA edition of Google News, you will find that more than half of the top stories are relayed from Fox News, Wall Street Journal, and Washinton Times - all extremely conservative - while supposedly liberal sources such as New York Times only get "human interest" stories.
I don't know if Google really is conservative, but in the present climate in USA, all corporations better be, or face the consequences.
* No, there is no similar movement from the left. Democrat senators do not try to put Fox News out of business, and there aren't hundreds of democrat astroturf organizations organizing write-in campaigns against conservative-leaning companies.
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