>Would anybody care to debunk this article? > http://www.techcentralstation.com/022404D.html > >Lillie
Hello Lillie Not it, them: Willie Soon, Lucy Hancock and Sallie Baliunas. The first and third are easily tracked, no need to bother with the second, and what's uncovered leaves no need to debunk the article itself. Hakan makes some good points, but that certasinly wasn't these authors' intention. So never mind this article, let's look at what happened to a previous one first. ----- Three Journal Editors Resign Over Paper by Skeptics By Jeff Nesmith Cox News Service, July 29, 2003 WASHINGTON -- A science journal editor who recently published an article questioning whether industrial emissions are driving up the earth's temperature has resigned, saying he was not allowed to publish an editorial repudiating the article. The article was written by two Harvard University scientists with support from the petroleum industry. ``They submitted a flawed paper,'' said Hans von Storch, editor-in-chief of the journal, Climate Research. He said that the journal's peer review procedure failed to identify methodological flaws in the study. However, owners of the magazine, which is published in Germany, refused to allow him to write an editorial saying the paper was flawed, Von Storch said in an e-mail to Sen. James Jeffords, I-Vt. Cox Newspapers reported in May that the paper was underwritten by the American Petroleum Institute and promoted by nonprofit organizations that receive support from energy interests, primarily ExxonMobil Corp. Jeffords announced Von Storch's resignation, as well as that of another Climate Research editor, Clare Goodess, in the middle of a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing called in part to air the views of one of the Harvard authors, astrophysicist Willie Soon. The paper by Soon and fellow astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas argues that the current global warming trend is not unique and that an even more dramatic episode occurred centuries ago, before widespread combustion of oil and coal. The paper, as well as an earlier, almost identical article by Soon, Baliunas and three other scientists, stated that ``across the world, many records reveal that the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.'' That statement may be true, Von Storch said, but it is not supported by evidence cited in the paper. Most scientists believe global warming is mainly caused by carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere through the combustion of fossil fuels. Opponents of climate change legislation have used the Soon-Baliunas paper to challenge the need for legislation restricting emissions of the greenhouse gases. A bill introduced by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., to impose the first limits on greenhouse gas emissions in the United States is scheduled to come before the Senate this week. Story Filed By Cox Newspapers See "Climate experts reject industry-linked report" ---- Global Warming Skeptics Are Facing Storm Clouds By Antonio Regalado, The Wall Street Journal, July 31, 2003 A big flap at a little scientific journal is raising questions about a study that has been embraced by conservative politicians for its rejection of widely held global-warming theories. The study, by two astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says the 20th century wasn't unusually warm compared with earlier periods and contradicts evidence indicating man-made "greenhouse" gases are causing temperatures to rise. Since being published last January in Climate Research, the paper has been widely promoted by Washington think tanks and cited by the White House in revisions made to a recent Environmental Protection Agency report. At the same time, it has drawn stinging rebukes from other climate scientists. This week, three editors of Climate Research resigned in protest over the journal's handling of the review process that approved the study; among them is Hans von Storch, the journal's recently appointed editor in chief. "It was flawed and it shouldn't have been published," he said. Dr. von Storch's resignation was publicly disclosed Tuesday by Sen. James Jeffords (I., Vt.), a critic of the administration's environmental policies, during a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee called by its chairman, Sen. James Inhofe (R., Okla.). The debate over global warming centers on the extent to which gases released from the burning of fossil fuels -- mainly carbon dioxide -- are trapping the sun's heat in the Earth's atmosphere, creating a greenhouse effect. The political fight has intensified as the Senate votes on a major energy bill. Sens. John McCain (R., Ariz.) and Joseph Lieberman (D., Conn.) planned to introduce an amendment this week that would cap carbon-dioxide emissions at 2000 levels starting in 2010 for select industries. The Bush administration is opposed to imposing caps, and the measure isn't expected to become law. The Harvard study has become part of skeptics' arguments. Mr. Inhofe, who is leading the opposition to the emissions measures, cited the research in a speech on the Senate floor Monday in which he said, "the claim that global warming is caused by man-made emissions is simply untrue and not based on sound science." The paper was authored by astronomers Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, and looked at studies of tree rings and other indicators of past climate. Their basic conclusion: The 20th century wasn't the warmest century of the past 1,000 years. They concluded temperatures may have been higher during the "Medieval Warm Period," the time during which the Norse settled Greenland. Dr. Soon couldn't be reached and Dr. Baliunas declined comment. In his testimony before Mr. Inhofe's committee, Dr. Soon reiterated the findings of his study, which was partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute. Dr. Soon's findings contradict widely cited research by another scientist, Michael E. Mann of the University of Virginia. Dr. Mann's reconstruction of global temperatures shows a distinct pattern shaped like a hockey stick: Temperatures stayed level for centuries, with a sudden upturn during recent decades. A reference to Dr. Soon's paper previously found its way into revisions suggested by the White House to an EPA report on environmental quality. According to an internal EPA memorandum disclosed in June, agency scientists were concerned the version containing the White House edits"no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change." Dr. Mann's data showing the hockey-stick temperature curve was deleted. In its place, administration officials added a reference to Dr. Soon's paper, which the EP A memo called "a limited analysis that supports the administration's favored message." The EPA says the memo appears to be an internal e-mail between staffers but isn't an "official" document. A spokesman at the White House's Council on Environmental Quality says the addition of the citation to Dr. Soon's paper to the draft report was suggested during an interagency review process overseen by the White House. Dr. Mann and 13 colleagues published a critique of Dr. Soon's paper in Eos, a publication of the American Geophysical Union, this month. They said the Harvard team's methods were flawed and their results "inconsistent with the preponderance of scientific evidence." Then, last week Dr. von Storch was contacted by Sen. Jeffords's staff, which was looking into the paper in preparation for Tuesday's hearing, where Dr. Soon and Dr. Mann were scheduled to appear. After hearing from Sen. Jeffords, Dr. von Storch says he decided to speed an editorial into print criticizing publication of the paper. But publisher Otto Kinne blocked the move, saying that while he favored publication of the editorial, Dr. von Storch's proposals were still opposed by some of the other editors. "I asked Hans not to rush the editorial," Mr. Kinne said in an e-mail. That is when Dr. von Storch resigned, followed by two other editors. ----- White House Favors Dubious Climate Change Study In its recent attempt to revise an EPA report on climate change and the environment, the White House cites a study by Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics that has drawn harsh criticism from climatologists. "Greenhouse skeptics, pro-industry groups and political conservatives have seized on the results," David Appell writes in Scientific American. "But mainstream climatologists, as represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are perturbed that the report has received so much attention; they say the study's conclusions are scientifically dubious and colored by politics. ... 'The fact that it has received any attention at all is a result, again in my view, of its utility to those groups who want the global warming issue to just go away,' comments Tim Barnett, a marine physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, whose work Soon and Baliunas refer to.'" Source: Scientific American, June 24, 2003 http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa004&articleID=000829C7-70D9- 1EF7-A6B8809EC588EEDF&pageNumber=1&catID=4 Science & Technology at Scientific American.com June 24, 2003 Hot Words A claim of nonhuman-induced global warming sparks debate By David Appell SIDEBAR: Politics in Peer Review? In a contretemps indicative of the political struggle over global climate change, a recent study suggested that humans may not be warming the earth. Greenhouse skeptics, pro-industry groups and political conservatives have seized on the results, proclaiming that the science of climate change is inconclusive and that agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol, which set limits on the output of industrial heat-trapping gases, are unnecessary. But mainstream climatologists, as represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are perturbed that the report has received so much attention; they say the study's conclusions are scientifically dubious and colored by politics. Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics reviewed more than 200 studies that examined climate "proxy" records--data from such phenomena as the growth of tree rings or coral, which are sensitive to climatic conditions. They concluded in the January Climate Research that "across the world, many records reveal that the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climate period of the last millennium." They said that two extreme climate periods--the Medieval Warming Period between 800 and 1300 and the Little Ice Age of 1300 to 1900--occurred worldwide, at a time before industrial emissions of greenhouse gases became abundant. (A longer version subsequently appeared in the May Energy and Environment.) In contrast, the consensus view among paleoclimatologists is that the Medieval Warming Period was a regional phenomenon, that the worldwide nature of the Little Ice Age is open to question and that the late 20th century saw the most extreme global average temperatures. Scientists skeptical of human-induced warming applaud the analysis by Soon and Baliunas. "It has been painstaking and meticulous," says William Kininmonth, a meteorological consultant in Kew, Australia, and former head of the Australian National Climate Center. But he acknowledges that "from a purely statistical viewpoint, the work can be criticized." And that criticism, from many scientists who feel that Soon and Baliunas produced deeply flawed work, has been unusually strident. "The fact that it has received any attention at all is a result, again in my view, of its utility to those groups who want the global warming issue to just go away," comments Tim Barnett, a marine physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, whose work Soon and Baliunas refer to. Similar sentiments came from Malcolm Hughes of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, whose work is also discussed: "The Soon et al. paper is so fundamentally misconceived and contains so many egregious errors that it would take weeks to list and explain them all." Rather than seeing global anomalies, many paleoclimatologists subscribe to the conclusions of Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, Michael Mann of the University of Virginia and their colleagues, who began in 1998 to quantitatively splice together the proxy records. They have concluded that the global average temperature over the past 1,000 years has been relatively stable until the 20th century. "Nothing in the paper undermines in any way the conclusion of earlier studies that the average temperature of the late twentieth century in the Northern Hemisphere was anomalous against the background of the past millennium," wrote Mann and Princeton University's Michael Oppenheimer in a privately circulated statement. The most significant criticism is that Soon and Baliunas do not present their data quantitatively--instead they merely categorize the work of others primarily into one of two sets: either supporting or not supporting their particular definitions of a Medieval Warming Period or Little Ice Age. "I was stating outright that I'm not able to give too many quantitative details, especially in terms of aggregating all the results," Soon says. Specifically, they define a "climatic anomaly" as a period of 50 or more years of wetness or dryness or sustained warmth (or, for the Little Ice Age, coolness). The problem is that under this broad definition a wet or dry spell would indicate a climatic anomaly even if the temperature remained perfectly constant. Soon and Baliunas are "mindful" that the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age should be defined by temperature, but "we emphasize that great bias would result if those thermal anomalies were to be dissociated" from other climatic conditions. (Asked to define "wetness" and "dryness," Soon and Baliunas say only that they "referred to the standard usage in English.") Moreover, their results were nonsynchronous: "Their analysis doesn't consider whether the warm/cold periods occurred at the same time," says Peter Stott, a climate scientist at the U.K.'s Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research in Bracknell. For example, if a proxy record indicated that a drier condition existed in one part of the world from 800 to 850, it would be counted as equal evidence for a Medieval Warming Period as a different proxy record that showed wetter conditions in another part of the world from 1250 to 1300. Regional conditions do not necessarily mirror the global average, Stott notes: "Iceland and Greenland had their warmest periods in the 1930s, whereas the warmest for the globe was the 1990s." Soon and Baliunas also take issue with the IPCC by contending that the 20th century saw no unique patterns: they found few climatic anomalies in the proxy records. But they looked for 50-year-long anomalies; the last century's warming, the IPCC concludes, occurred in two periods of about 30 years each (with cooling in between). The warmest period occurred in the late 20th century--too short to meet Soon and Baliunas's selected requirement. The two researchers also discount thermometer readings and "give great weight to the paleo data for which the uncertainties are much greater," Stott says. The conclusion of Soon and Baliunas that the warming during the 20th century is not unusual has engendered sharp debate and intense reactions on both sides--Soon and Baliunas responded primarily via e-mail and refused follow-up questions. The charges illustrate the polarized nature of the climate change debate in the U.S. "You'd be challenged, I'd bet, to find someone who supports the Kyoto Protocol and also thinks that this paper is good science, or someone who thinks that the paper is bad science and is opposed to Kyoto," predicts Roger Pielke, Jr., of the University of Colorado. Expect more of such flares as the stakes--and the world's temperatures--continue to rise. David Appell is based in Lee, N.H. ---- So who are these people? First, Tech Central Station is a free-market e-zine which might be summed up by an October 3, 2001 headline suggesting environmentalists in favor of the Kyoto treaty and other environmental policies/laws/treaties are "eco-terrorists". So most of the world's governments and scientists are "eco-terrorists". Ho-hum. As "scholars", Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon are familiar names to anyone who has monitored the far-right anti-environmental movement, along with Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute, Ronald Bailey and Michael Fumento of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Robert Balling of Arizona State University, Joseph Bast of the Heartland Institute, Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, Steven Safe of Texas A&M, and the late Julian Simon of the Cato Institute. Both Baliunas and Soon work with Frederick Seitz at the ultra-conservative George C. Marshall Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank where Seitz served as executive director. Funded by a number of right-wing foundations, including Scaife and Bradley, the George C. Marshall Institute does not conduct any original research. It is a conservative think tank that was initially founded during the years of the Reagan administration to advocate funding for Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative - the "Star Wars" weapons program. Today, the Marshall Institute is still a big fan of high-tech weapons. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the Marshall Institute has adapted to the times by devoting much of its firepower to the war against environmentalism, and in particular against the "scaremongers" who raise warnings about global warming. A case study: Baliunas and Soon were coauthors of a paper titled "Environmental Effects of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide", which has a strange history - worth knowing about because it provides another view of how this kind of spin works, and how people like the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, John M. Olin Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the William H. Donner Foundation have managed to buy acceptance of lies in the US on behalf of industry's anti-environmental conservative movement. In 1998 the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, headed by Arthur Robinson, an eccentric scientist who has a long history of controversial entanglements with figures on the fringe of accepted research, circulated a deceptive "scientists' petition" on global warming in collaboration with Frederick Seitz of the George C. Marshall Institute. The Oregon Petition was circulated in a bulk mailing to tens of thousands of U.S. scientists. In addition to the petition, the mailing included what appeared to be a reprint of a scientific paper. Authored by Robinson and three other people (including Baliunas and Soon), the paper was titled "Environmental Effects of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide" and was printed in the same typeface and format as the official Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A cover note from Seitz, who had served as president of the NAS in the 1960s, added to the impression that Robinson's paper was an official publication of the academy's peer-reviewed journal. Robinson's paper claimed to show that pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is actually a good thing - "a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution." But neither Robinson's paper nor OISM's petition drive had anything to do with the National Academy of Sciences, which first heard about the petition when its members began calling to ask if the NAS had taken a stand against the Kyoto treaty. Robinson was not even a climate scientist. He was a biochemist with no published research in the field of climatology, and his paper had never been subjected to peer review by anyone with training in the field. In fact, the paper had never been accepted for publication anywhere, let alone in the NAS Proceedings. It was self-published by Robinson, who did the typesetting himself on his own computer. The NAS issued an unusually blunt formal response to the petition drive. "The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal," it stated in a news release. "The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy." In fact, it pointed out, its own prior published study had shown that "even given the considerable uncertainties in our knowledge of the relevant phenomena, greenhouse warming poses a potential threat sufficient to merit prompt responses. Investment in mitigation measures acts as insurance protection against the great uncertainties and the possibility of dramatic surprises." Notwithstanding this rebuke, the Oregon Petition managed to garner 15,000 signatures within a month. Fred Singer called the petition "the latest and largest effort by rank-and-file scientists to express their opposition to schemes that subvert science for the sake of a political agenda." Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel called it an "extraordinary response" and cited it as his basis for continuing to oppose a global warming treaty. "Nearly all of these 15,000 scientists have technical training suitable for evaluating climate research data," Hagel said. Columns citing the Seitz petition and the Robinson paper as credible sources of scientific expertise on the global warming issue have appeared in publications ranging from Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post to the Austin-American Statesman, Denver Post, and Wyoming Tribune-Eagle That's how it works. The George C. Marshall Institute's cadre of "experts" overlaps with Western Fuels Association "experts" Sallie Baliunas, Patrick Michaels, Willie Soon, and Thomas Gale Moore. Other Marshall institute experts include Fred Seitz, who also on the board of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, another organization highly critical of the predominant body of global warming science. Baliunas was also the primary scientific spokesperson for the Global Climate Coalition. Western Fuels Association (Big Coal) and member companies fund the World Climate Report through the Greening Earth Society, a WFA Astroturf front group. World Climate Report primarily functions to promote the idea that global warming is not happening, and knocks down whatever new evidence emerges which supports the global warming thesis. Patrick Michaels is the Chief editor, while Sallie Baliunas and Robert Balling are contributors. World Climate Report also employs the expertise of Robert Davis (colleague of Michaels' at the University of Virginia), Thomas Gale Moore, resident climate change skeptic of the George C. Marshall and Cato Institutes, Mark Mills from Mills McCarthy and Associates Inc.(which produced two books for WFA in 1997 according to 1997 annual report, including "Coal: Cornerstone of America's Competitive Advantage in World Markets"), and Willie Soon, also a visiting scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute. The Global Climate Coalition started in 1989 as a corporate lobbying and public relations front for business interests engaged in a no-holds-barred campaign to convince America that global warming doesn't exist. GCC hired a handful of scientists who are of the opinion global warming is not a threat, and amplified their voices across the op-ed pages of the U.S. After losing most prominent corporate members in recent years as well as its multi-million dollar P.R. campaign to wish away global warming, GCC has softened its message. The coalition now focuses its efforts on opposition to the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty, "sound science", and on promoting the idea of (unspecified) "pragmatic and viable solutions" to global warming. The links on the GCC web page are almost entirely to other industry-funded anti-Kyoto sites such as Western Fuels' Association's Greening Earth Society, The Science and Environmental Policy Project, George C. Marshall Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, junkscience.com, etc.. ---- So you can't really say that people like Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon are actually "scientists", if you think of scientists as people devoted to the furtherance of human knowledge, but they fit in well with this kind of "science", recently raised here: http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040218.wscie0218/BNS tory/Front/ Bush administration fudging data top scientists warn http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030901&s=block Science Gets Sacked http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040308&s=kennedy The Junk Science of George W. Bush http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040308&s=green The New Scopes Trials ... and, sorry to say, there are a great many more such references that have nothing to do with the Bush administration, but much to do with corporate influence. Anyway, that gives you a trail uncovered direct from the spin merchants to the US mainstream media, funded by big-time polluters who fear the truth might hurt their bottom-line, and sod the rest of us, and the planet. The best place to start this sort of check is here: http://www.prwatch.org/search.html PR Watch: Search Website Regards Keith Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/biofuel/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
