Exxon Offered $10k to Scientists to Debunk U.N. Global Warming Report

its funny, this article came out before katrina and rita.

 

This does fits the topic nicely...

Billionaire Offers $25M Prize to Fight 'Warming'

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, February 9, 2007; 9:52 AM

LONDON, Feb. 9 -- British billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson, with former vice president Al Gore at his side, on Friday offered a $25 million prize for anyone who can come up with a way to blunt global climate change by removing at least a billion tons of carbon dioxide a year from the Earth's atmosphere.

Branson, saying that the "survival of our species" is imperiled by current environmental trends, said the prize was similar to cash inducements that led to some of history's most notable achievements in navigation, exploration and industry.

"I believe in our resourcefulness and in our capacity to invent solutions to the problems we have ourselves created," said Branson, who has already pledged to invest $3 billion in profits from his transportation companies, including Virgin Atlantic Airlines and Virgin Trains, to fighting global warming.

"We are now facing a planetary emergency," said Gore, who has become one of the world's leading voices on climate change issues, most lately with his documentary film, "An Inconvenient Truth." Gore, who will serve as a judge in the Virgin Earth Challenge, said he hoped the contest would spur scientific innovation without distracting from more practical steps people can take to battle global warming, such as using energy-efficient light bulbs or pressuring politicians to confront "the crisis of our time."

"It's a challenge to the moral imagination of humankind," Gore said at a packed news conference, where several noted climate scientists and authors attended, provided videotaped endorsements or appeared by live video-link.

Gore and Branson said that although scientists are working on technologies to capture carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases at power plants and other industrial sources, no one has developed a strategy to remove gases already released into the atmosphere. Those gases are contributing to a dramatic increase in global temperatures that could have catastrophic results in the coming decades, they said.

The winner of the award must devise a plan to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere without creating adverse effects. The first $5 million would be paid up front, and the remainder of the money would be paid only after the program had worked successfully for 10 years.

"We're nowhere" on technologies to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, Gore said. But he said he hoped innovators might be spurred not simply by the cash prize offered by Branson, but by passion for working on what he called "a moral issue."

Gore cited the example of telegraph pioneer Samuel Morse, whose work was motivated by the death of his wife.

"The telegraph came from his efforts to spare others the sense of loss," Gore said. "There are many other examples of new technologies and innovations we have discovered that did not come in the first instance from the head but came from the heart."

Other judges in the competition are James E. Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies; British environmentalists and authors James Lovelock and Crispin Tickell and Australian conservationist and author Tim Flannery.

Gore, Branson and the other panelists referred repeatedly to a study released last week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made up of hundreds of scientists from 113 countries, that concluded human activity is warming the planet at a potentially disastrous and irreversible rate.

Gore dismissed critics who claim the potential effects of climate change have been exaggerated. He said the overwhelming scientific evidence is that "the planet has a fever." He likened the situation to parents told by a doctor that their child needs medical care, saying those parents shouldn't listen to "some science fiction expert who tells you it isn't real -- you listen to the doctor."

Gore said he believed public interest in climate change was growing in the United States. But asked if he thought Americans were ready for a presidential campaign in which global warming was the central issue, he said, "We're not there yet."

Branson and Gore said they hoped to ask the governments of the United States, Britain and other countries to contribute to the prize money, or match the $25 million pledged by Branson. "I don't have much influence with this administration," Gore joked.

Gore, who barely lost the 2000 presidential election to President Bush, has had a resurgence in popularity among many Democrats and is still viewed as a potential dark horse candidate in the 2008 election. Gore said he would not categorically rule out another run for public office, but he said he "can't foresee" any circumstances that would lead him to enter the race.

"I'm involved in a different kind of campaign," Gore said.

 

Right. I keep forgetting that those were the first bad hurricanes.

SCIENCE NEWS
February 07, 2007
Debate storms on possible warming-hurricane link

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By Jim Loney

MIAMI (Reuters) - While a U.N. report last week left little doubt that scientists think humans are heating the planet, it did nothing to settle the question of whether they are partly responsible for more intense hurricanes.

Nonetheless, weather experts said the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could help convince politicians, regulators and insurers that climate change is here to stay.

The report warned that human activities are contributing to global warming and the result could be more heat waves, droughts and rising seas. But its conclusion on hurricanes was more vague.

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The panel said it was "more likely than not" that humans contribute to a trend of increasingly intense hurricanes.

Debate on that issue among scientists has raged since the record-setting 2005 Atlantic season, which saw some of the most powerful hurricanes on record. Katrina killed 1,500 people on the U.S. Gulf Coast and caused $80 billion in damages.

Some researchers say global warming appears to have contributed to more intense hurricanes, while others argue there is no evidence of that.

Leading researchers and scientists say the report would do nothing to sway either side.

Chris Landsea, a prominent U.S. government hurricane researcher who has differed with IPCC methods in the past, wrote in an e-mail that the report was "okay, but a bit incomplete."

Specifically he said the human contribution to the intensity trend was not quantified and could be "grossly misinterpreted."

HOT DEBATE

The conclusions of the U.N. climate panel, made up of 2,500 researchers from more than 130 nations, are being hotly debated and already have come under counter-attack by partisan groups.

William Gray, a prominent Colorado State University researcher who pioneered hurricane frequency forecasts, said the panel had bought the argument that humans are having an impact on hurricanes.

"I don't think that's right," he said, adding that "there's no solid evidence that global or Atlantic hurricane frequency or intensity has been altered due to this global warming in the last century."


While the panel's report broke no actual new ground on the hurricane-warming link, some experts said it could have wide influence on politicians, policymakers and regulators.

Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor whose research has linked warming to hurricane intensity, said rising property damage from hurricanes is partly due to government policies that influence coastal construction, including regulation of insurance markets, federal flood insurance programs that undercharge property owners and disaster relief after storms.

"In the United States it may provide additional incentive for governments ... to take more seriously the threat of hurricanes, even if the climate isn't changing," he said. "We have a serious hurricane problem made worse by government policies."

Hugh Willoughby, a tropical meteorologist at Florida International University, said he was concerned the IPCC report could be used as a weapon by the insurance industry, which paid out about $40 billion in Katrina, to seek higher premiums from customers or to abandoned needy markets like Florida.

"I'm worried that this is going to tend to make windstorm insurers less eager to enter the market and come to think they may experience this kind of loss on a regular basis," he said.

Willoughby said a hurricane's greatest impact on humans is due less to global warming than to runaway coastal development and to bad luck -- whether a storm hits a heavily populated area or not.

"The message is that it's a game of chance. What global warming does is make it a higher-stakes game of chance," he said. "It's making all hurricanes a little bit stronger, and that means when we have bad luck it's going to be worse and when we have good luck it's not going to be as good."

Jeff Masters, the founder of weather Web site Weather Underground, said the report did not break any new ground.

"But we do expect there to be an increase in the future in intense hurricanes," he said, "so that was the right thing to say."


http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=882137F311C5728F8E257E56820AF92C

 

Hayes, 2 things you need to be a man and admit: 1.PG busted you and that you posted a 2005 article and tried to pass it off as a 2007 one, hopefully by accident, and further admit that using a one-hurricane season snapshot to prove or disprove global warming is
idiotic.
If you admit these two things your life will improve immediately.

 

I agree but also as I said while I am a layperson I do consider myself fairly well read and enjoy intellectual exercises like this. Also I posted some information from another expert source regarding the nature of storm formation that clearly contradicts Lindzen's assertion regarding humidity and storm formation. He says relative low humidity where as everyone else says high humidity.

Dr. Lindzen didn't offer much explanation on his response and his response seemed to be directed towards someone with more expertise. I'm not sure he will give more explanation. Not that he doesn't have answers but probably he is too busy to deal with every email coming in that challenges him.

As far as lay speculation not being able to be answered its issues like this though that provoke my own intellectual curiosity and I can tell you in the past few days I've learned a lot about climate, global warming and storm formation. So why not take the opportunity to learn some more. We're not experts but that shouldn't prevent us from applying our minds, doing some research of our own (even if it is just on the internet) and discussing the issue rather than deferring to experts.

 

Yeah Global Warming!

It's too cold here...

 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece

An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change
Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challenged
When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months’ time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.

The small print explains “very likely” as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain’s top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latterday Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.

Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers. And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.

Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heatwaves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winter’s billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages. The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adélie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean.

So one awkward question you can ask, when you’re forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is “Why is east Antarctica getting colder?” It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. While you’re at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it’s confirmed that global warming has stopped. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.

That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago.

Climate history and related archeology give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval Warming.

The Chinese population doubled then, while in Europe the Vikings and cathedral-builders prospered. Fascinating relics of earlier episodes come from the Swiss Alps, with the rediscovery in 2003 of a long-forgotten pass used intermittently whenever the world was warm.

What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on long before human industry was a possible factor? Less than nothing. The 2007 Summary for Policymakers boasts of cutting in half a very small contribution by the sun to climate change conceded in a 2001 report.

Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate. The sun’s brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism.

He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun’s magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier.

The only trouble with Svensmark’s idea — apart from its being politically incorrect — was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.

In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.

Thanks to having written The Manic Sun, a book about Svensmark’s initial discovery published in 1997, I have been privileged to be on the inside track for reporting his struggles and successes since then. The outcome is a second book, The Chilling Stars, co-authored by the two of us and published next week by Icon books. We are not exaggerating, we believe, when we subtitle it “A new theory of climate change”.

Where does all that leave the impact of greenhouse gases? Their effects are likely to be a good deal less than advertised, but nobody can really say until the implications of the new theory of climate change are more fully worked out.

The reappraisal starts with Antarctica, where those contradictory temperature trends are directly predicted by Svensmark’s scenario, because the snow there is whiter than the cloud-tops. Meanwhile humility in face of Nature’s marvels seems more appropriate than arrogant assertions that we can forecast and even control a climate ruled by the sun and the stars.

 

madmax how come you seem to post every single GW-denier piece you come across?

Here is a rebuttal btw of the WSJ editorial you posted last week:

 

I don't. I have posted articles on both sides of this. I've also said, whether the sky is falling or not, I think it's imperative we clean up our environment. I think these articles provide good fodder for discussion, though. There's nothing wrong with testing.

 

I don't think they provide good fodder for discussion, rather I think many things propounded by the GW denier crowd, like the WSJ piece or the Gore "spoof" that Exxon paid for) are done so just to obstruct and obscure.

 

It's interesting to me to hear the other side of the argument. And since I'm not a scientist...and have never measured ice levels in Antarctica, I'm pretty much open to whatever anyone has to say on the matter. I think it's fairly dangerous to assume one side is always correct.

 

The GW-deniers tend to exploit this type of openmindedness, however.

Look at sishir Chang and Hayestreet, arguing for pages and pages about GW and increasted tropical storms, both of them having not realized taht they were arguing about a red herrring of extratropical storms instead (I don't believe Lindzen disputes the idea that tropical storms will increase in intensity in a GW environment).

Look at the WSJ editorial piece you posted. They aren't scientists either and their agenda is pretty transparent (though the rebuttal from realclimate.org was written by scentists). I just don't see the value in something like that at all. And I don't think that's a matter of opinon - the facts on which that editorial is based are pretty much just objectively wrong.

I just don't see the point until waiting until GW is unanimously believed, which apparently the capitulation point of the GW deniers. That's just straight up obstructionism, it's not just presenting opposing views.

 

There are certain types of things for which openmindedness is better suited - for example a debate on political philosophy or something like that.

For factual things, it doesn't work that well. I can be "openminded" to the possiblity that 2+2= 5 but that opens me up to a lot of criticism, deservedly so. I think with respect to climate change it is ultimately a factual question.

Exploitation of openmindedness with respect to factual things is how silly things like 9-11 conspiracy theorists and Holocaust deniers get traction.

 

Wow - I didn't realize my manliness was at stake. That's some pretty shallow rhetoric.

Your response "admit that using a one-hurricane season snapshot to prove or disprove global warming is idiotic" would apply equally to someone saying 'look at Rita and Katrina to decide whether or not GW is increasing the intensity of hurricanes."

Brilliant!

I haven't tried to 'pass off' anything. I have pasted the articles as they came up, with links (which makes such a charge silly). If there is a discrepancy it is of course unintentional. Feel free to point it out. Regardless, unless the dates are something I've emphasized then you'll have to show how they change the point.

Not for some people, Max. You might think since they 'know the truth' then getting alternate opinions wouldn't be a threat. But they can't be having any dissention. Just as in the hurricane debate, where you have scientific dissention against positions like Sam's, we really shouldn't have discussion. It's just obstruction to the 'truth.' Take Sam's 'rebuttal article' - this whole thread people like Sam and Rhad have been talking about how they just want there to be acknowledgement on the proportionality of opinions. 'Most' people believe that... Yet then he posts an article that says only the WSJ editorial board is still challenging the IPCC. We know 'objectively' that this is not true.

As for the WSJ vs realclimate debate, the policy summary is a document that is point by point negotiated between governments, so it is not 'objectively false' to say it was written by politicians.

"Unfortunately, little attention has been paid to past IPCC reports. Most readers instead focus on the short Summary for Policymakers, which starts from a draft prepared by scientists, but then is heavily rewritten by government appointees in a multilateral negotiating process. Past summaries have been criticized for not reflecting the complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty in the underlying reports. They may also distort the underlying report by placing major emphasis on topics that are relatively minor, or by highlighting new and untested research."

http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/shared/readmore1.asp?sNav=ed&id=455

Since there isn't a link or names of the unnamed 'scientists' who wrote the rebuttal, it's also a little hard to qualify their other statements.

 

ok, great. so let's post them here and tear them apart then. use the Daubert test if you'd like...but as the judge, i'd like to at least hear the argument over the evidence.

i am concerned that you see dissent on this issue as akin to 2+2=5, though. i think the "experts" have sold us all sorts of things about the sky falling that haven't materialized.