Nu ook de nederlandse representanten bij de VN's IPCC klimaat panel uit
de kast zijn gekomen als skepticus begint het er een ommezwaai zichtbaar
te worden.
Het Nederlandse IPCC lid Hajo Smit wordt in dit rapport ook genoemd.
Ook hij is inmiddels uit de kast.
Zie hier een rapport van de US senate (het republikeinse deel uiteraard)
waarin niet minder dan 650 wetenschappers hun zegje doen. Een flink
aantal daarvan is EX-IPCC!!.
Als je, zoals ik, meer om de controverse geeft dan om de inhoud is dit
werkelijk hilarisch rapport om te lezen voor het slapen gaan!.
Hieronder een stukje uit een bezoek -rapport van een argeloze
wetenschapper die de 33ste "International Geological Congress" in
Noorwegen bijwoonde. Met 6000 wetenschappers is dit Congress de
"olympische spelen" genoemd op dit gebied:
9) The plenaries, especially the climate session and somewhat the energy
sessions, were designed for a more general scientific audience. They
tended to be moderately interesting, optimistic about resources and
technology and often extremely contentious.
About two thirds of the
presenters and question-askers were hostile to, even dismissive of, the
IPCC (International panel on climate change) and the idea that the
Earth's climate was responding to human influences.
This was rather
shocking to me who knows of several other such scientists but had no
idea there were so many. They talked about Milankovich Cycles of course,
but also sunspot cycles and other possible climate forcings.
These were
linked to some pretty bizarre (to me) ways of influencing the climate:
e.g. making cloud condensation nuclei through ionizing radiation from
sun spots or slowing or speeding the Earth's rate of spin in response to
cosmic rays.
These were apparently very serious scientists but presented
far more correlation than clear and convincing mechanism, at least I
thought. An atmospheric physicist sitting next to me said that there was
no correlation between cosmic rays and clouds as he had made all the
measurements.
The IPCC folks were adamant that there model was built on
first principles, could reproduce past changes in climate and was making
proper predictions.
The plenary had at the end a "debate" but it was
really two ships passing in the might---each side presented its
arguments -usually using different types of logic, often arrogantly, and
said the other side could not possible be right. The moderators could
have done us all a service by guiding the debate to specific issues
"what do each of you think about sun spot correlations even when their
effect appears trivial" but that did not happen.
10) I could not at first figure out why there was so much hostility
between the two climate groups. At first I thought it empiricists vs
modelers, although each group was somewhat mixed. Then I concluded that
it is the geologists, used to studying constant climate change over very
long time periods of Earth's history, who think that basically the
climate of the earth is always changing due to various forcings, and
what's the big deal now? The IPCCers respond that the Earth has never
seen CO2 levels such as we are headed for and that the CO2 changes
produce a strong enough signal to change the climate. And on and on.
John Holdren has recently prepared a point by point response to the anti
IPCCers which I will try to send out. Then we can expect a rebuttal to
that and so on.
