It’s a soggy Monday night but the pews in one of Ottawa’s most spacious churches are overflowing with believers. “We have tried to assume the position of the gods,” the angry man at the lectern thunders, “without the knowledge to manage our ecological footprint.”

No, the speaker is not a preacher, at least not a preacher of the conventional sort. He is David Suzuki, scientist, environmentalist, icon.

The natural systems that sustain us are infinitely complex, he tells the worshipful audience. We are only beginning to understand them and we cannot possibly predict what effect the actions and technologies of almost seven billion people will have on them. We must be humble. We must be cautious and reverent. “We don’t know enough to take the place of the gods,” he proclaims.

It’s a familiar theme, which is appropriate because Suzuki, at 74, is summing up his life’s work—his “legacy,” as he puts it in the title of his new book.

Suzuki delivers another familiar theme this night. He illustrates it with a thought experiment.

Imagine a test tube filled with food. That’s the Earth, he says. Now introduce a single bacterium to that test tube and let it grow exponentially. In the first minute, one bacterium becomes two bacteria. In the second minute, two become four. Four become eight. Eight become 16. If it takes one hour for the bacteria to multiply until they fill the entire test tube and there’s no more food—and the bacteria all die—when will the test tube be exactly half full of food and half full of bacteria?

In the 59th minute. Which is strange because at that moment things look fine. But the very next minute, catastrophe strikes.

“Every scientist I talk to agrees with me,” Suzuki declares, “that we’re already past the 59th minute.” We must drastically change the way we live, immediately, or we are doomed.

Neither of these themes is unique to Suzuki. Indeed, they are standard fare among environmentalists. And therein lies a little-recognized paradox.

I recently wrote a book called Future Babble (to be released Oct. 12), which is about expert predictions, why they fail, and why we believe them anyway. The experience of sifting through heaps and heaps of failed predictions has made me quite sympathetic to Suzuki’s first theme of humility. We truly are awful at foreseeing what is to come. And there’s little reason to think we’ll get much better. Indeed, key properties of complex systems make prediction inherently impractical or even impossible. We really should be humble. And cautious.

But how can a humble and cautious man say we are “past the 59th minute”? To know that, one must fully understand all those complex natural systems—to say nothing of social systems—and be able to see how they will develop in the future. Monday night, Suzuki said this is now possible thanks to “scientists and supercomputers”—the same scientists with supercomputers who “don’t know enough to take the place of the gods.”

This stunning contradiction shows up most clearly when environmentalists talk about climate change. On the one hand, greens oppose geo-engineering schemes—deliberate attempts to alter the atmosphere to counteract the effects of climate change—on the grounds that we cannot possibly predict the consequences of our actions. But they also treat forecasts of what will happen if humanity doesn’t curtail carbon dioxide emissions as perfectly reliable glimpses of the future. That makes no sense. Either we can reliably predict the effect human actions have on climate and the natural world or we cannot. Which is it?

Environmental activism is steeped in this contradiction. A 1992 statement by leading scientists warned of “unpredictable collapses of critical biological systems” and insisted—rightly, I believe --that this uncertainty strengthens the case for action. But then the statement declared humanity had “no more than one or a few decades” to make the necessary changes. If the collapses are unpredictable, how could they possibly know how much time we have to avert them?

This isn’t humility. It’s hubris. To see how foolish it is, consider the history of similar forecasts.

The famous and revered 1972 report “Limits to Growth”—the first to dazzle the world with “scientists and supercomputers”—opened with a statement from UN secretary general U Thant that the world has “perhaps 10 years left” to stave off calamity. The report itself offered computer-generated forecasts that supported this claim: Radical changes implemented in the 1970s would avert disaster, the forecasts showed, but it would be too late if the same changes were not implemented until the year 2000. Either that report was wrong then, or Suzuki is wrong now. There’s no way around it.

But Suzuki seems not to care for historical references like this. He even lionizes the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, the author of 1968 smash The Population Bomb, who made a long list of predictions that failed, using essentially the same analysis as Suzuki. In 1974, for example, Ehrlich argued that growing resource shortages would make Americans and others drastically poorer in the years ahead, putting an end to consumerism and the conventional economics of growth. “We are facing, within the next three decades, the disintegration of nation-states infected with growthmania,” Ehrlich wrote. Thus, it was a little odd to listen on Monday as David Suzuki railed against the consumerism and economic growth which Ehrlich said would be swept away long ago.

And then there were the two books which introduced a young Paul Ehrlich to ecology. Both William Vogt’s Road to Survival and Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet were published in 1948. Both were influential best-sellers. Both made arguments similar to Ehrlich’s and Suzuki’s. And both were stuffed with predictions that flopped: “The most critical danger is that we shall not realize how short we are of that one unrenewable resource—time,” wrote Vogt. “If we wait until next year, or the next decade, to push our search for a solution, then our fate may well be sealed.”

We never learn. Earlier this year, scientists delivered the startling news that despite increases in sea level caused by climate change, only four out of 27 small Pacific islands surveyed were smaller than they had been in the 1950s. The remaining 23 had either stayed the same size or grown, thanks to offsetting accumulations of coral debris.

Water rises; islands get smaller. It seems like the simplest thing in the world to predict.

Nature constantly surprises us, Suzuki said Monday night. “I hope we can learn some humility.” Indeed.

Read post and comments here. H/T Matt Vooro

Reality denier: After polar bear numbers have greatly increased since the cooling scare of the 1970s, he now suggests that CO2 may kill them all by the time his daughter grows up

Climate [Fraudster Michael Mann] Speaks Out - Science News

Late the morning of November 7, Mann stepped in front of a crowd of reporters just off the campus of Yale University, as part of a plenary panel at the annual Council for the Advancement of Science Writing meeting. It was a friendly crowd, most of whom had spent years covering the overwhelming scientific evidence that greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere by human activities are causing global temperatures to heat up.
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Mann concluded that “there’s not just a hockey stick - there’s a hockey league.” Some scientific uncertainties do remain about climate change, such as the precise effects of clouds in a changing climate. “There are legitimate uncertainties,” Mann said, “but unfortunately the public discourse right now is so far from scientific discourse.”
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I’ve seen Mann in this frame of mind before; several years ago he testified in front of some of his staunchest critics at a National Academy of Sciences panel set up to review the hockey stick work. The jaw I saw clenched back then seemed not to have loosened, even when the audience was a group of friendly journalists rather than aggressive panel questioners. (The final NAS report reaffirmed the basic science underlying the hockey stick reconstruction.)

Yet Mann remains keenly aware of the political import of every word. He ended his talk with an impassioned plea to action, complete with a picture of his daughter marveling at swimming polar bears at the local zoo. “I can’t imagine having to tell her when she’s grown up that the polar bears became extinct,” he said, “because we didn’t act soon enough to combat a problem that we knew was real but that we couldn’t convince the public of.”

See post here. See Steve McIntyre on Mann’s where he comments “...one sees someone who purports to be a “scientist” making unsupportable statements” here.
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Inaccurate news reports misrepresent a climate-science initiative of the American Geophysical Union

WASHINGTON-An article appearing in the Los Angeles Times, and then picked up by media outlets far and wide, misrepresents the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and a climate science project the AGU is about to relaunch. The project, called Climate Q&A Service, aims simply to provide accurate scientific answers to questions from journalists about climate science.

“In contrast to what has been reported in the LA Times and elsewhere, there is no campaign by AGU against climate skeptics or congressional conservatives,” says Christine McEntee, Executive Director and CEO of the American Geophysical Union. “AGU will continue to provide accurate scientific information on Earth and space topics to inform the general public and to support sound public policy development.”

AGU is the world’s largest, not-for-profit, professional society of Earth and space scientists, with more than 58,000 members in over 135 countries.

“AGU is a scientific society, not an advocacy organization,” says climate scientist and AGU President Michael J. McPhaden. “The organization is committed to promoting scientific discovery and to disseminating to the scientific community, policy makers, the media, and the public, peer-reviewed scientific findings across a broad range of Earth and space sciences.”

AGU initiated a climate science Q&A service for the first time in 2009 to provide accurate scientific information for journalists covering the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. AGU has been working over the past year on how to provide this service once again in association with the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico.

AGU’s Climate Q&A service addresses scientific questions only. It does not involve any commentary on policy. Journalists are able to submit questions via email, and AGU member-volunteers with Ph.D.s in climate science-related fields provide answers via email.

The relaunch of the Climate Q&A service is pending. When AGU is ready to announce the service, we will notify journalists on our distribution list via a media advisory that the service is once again available for their use.

For additional information about the Q&A service please see a 2 March 2010 article about the 2009 Q&A service that was published in AGU’s weekly newspaper Eos, and a blog post about the service on AGU’s science communication blog The Plainspoken Scientist.

The American Geophysical Union was established in 1919, and is headquartered in Washington, D.C. AGU advances the Earth and space sciences through its scholarly publications, meetings and conferences, and outreach programs. For more information, please visit the AGU web site.

"The American Geophysical Union plans to announce that 700 researchers have agreed to speak out on the issue. Other scientists plan a pushback against congressional conservatives who have vowed to kill regulations on greenhouse gas emissions.”

A new article in the LA Times says that the American Geophysical Union (AGU) is enlisting the help of 700 scientists to fight back against a new congress that is viewed as a bunch of backwoods global warming deniers who are standing in the way of greenhouse gas regulations and laws required to same humanity from itself.

Scientific truth, after all, must prevail. And these scientists apparently believe they have been endowed with the truth of what has caused recent warming.

The message just hasn’t gotten across.

We skeptics are not smart enough to understand the science. We and the citizens of America, and the representatives we have just elected to go to Washington, just need to listen to them and let them tell us how we should be allowed to live.

OK, so, let me see if I understand this.

After 20 years, billions of dollars in scientific research and advertising campaigns, cooperation from the public schools, TV specials and concerts by a gaggle of entertainers, end-of-the-world movies, our ‘best’ politicians, heads of state, presidents, the United Nations, and complicity by most of the news media, it has been decided that the American public is not getting the message on global warming!?

Are they serious!?

Americans - hell, most of humanity - have already heard the 20 different ways we will all die miserable deaths from our emissions of that life giving - er, I mean poisonous - gas, carbon dioxide, that we are adding to the atmosphere every day.

So, NOW it no more mister nice guy? Give me a break.

Finally Time for a REAL Debate?

Actually, this announcement is a good thing. There has been a persistent refusal on the part of the elitist, group-think, left-leaning class of climate scientists to even debate the global warming issue in public. Maybe they have considered it beneath themselves to debate those of us who are clearly wrong on the global warming issue.

A complaint many of us skeptics have had for years is that those who constitute the “scientific consensus” (whatever that means) will not engage in public debates on global warming. Al Gore won’t even answer questions from the press.

This is why you will mostly hear only politicians and U.N. bureaucrats give pronouncements on the science. They are already adept at weaving a good story with carefully selected facts and figures.

Why has the global warming message been presented mostly by politicians and bureaucrats up until now? Probably because it is too dangerous to put their scientists out there.

Scientists might admit to something counterproductive - like uncertainty - which would jeopardize what the politicians have been trying to accomplish for decades - control over energy, which is necessary for everything that humans do.

Scientists Ready to Enter the Lion’s Den

The LA Times articles goes on to explain how there will be “scientists prepared to go before what they consider potentially hostile audiences on conservative talk radio and television shows.”

Gee, how brave of them.

Kind of like when I went up against Henry Waxman? Or Barbara Boxer?

I can sympathize with Republican’s desire to have hearings to investigate how your tax dollars have been spent on this issue. But I will guarantee that if such hearings are held, the news media will make it sound like Galileo is being tried all over again.

As if climate scientists are objective seekers of the truth. I hate to break it to you, but scientists are human. Well...most of us are, anyway.

Most have strong personal, quasi-religious views of the role of humans in the natural world, and this inevitably guides how they interpret measurements of the climate system. Especially the young ones who have been indoctrinated on the subject.

Those few of us who are publishing climate researchers and who are willing to take the risk of speaking out on the biased science on this issue are now late in our careers, and we have seen the climate research field be transformed from one where “climate change” used to necessarily imply natural climate change, to one where nature does not have the power to cause its own change - only mankind does.

I have repeatedly pointed out how virtually all global warming research funds either (1) build the case for humanity as the primary cause of recent warming, or (2) simply assume humans are the cause.

Virtually NO funding has supported research into the possibility that warming might be mostly part of a natural climate cycle. And if you give scientists enough money to find something, they will do their best to find it.

Politicians have orchestrated and guided this effort from the outset, and scientists like to believe they are helping to Save the Earth when they participate in global warming research.

Anthropogenic Global Warming is a Hypothesis, Nothing More

What the big-government funded climate science community has come up with is a plausible hypothesis which is being passed off as a proven explanation.

Science advances primarily by searching for new and better explanations (hypotheses) for how nature works. Unfortunately, this basic task of science has been abandoned when it comes to explaining climate change.

About the only alternative explanation they have mostly ruled out is an increase in the total output of the sun.

The possibility that small changes in ocean circulation have caused clouds to let in more sunlight is just one of many alternative explanations which are being ignored.

Not only have natural, internal climate cycles been ignored as a potential explanation, some researchers have done their best to revise climate history to do away with events such as the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age. This is how the ‘hockey stick’ controversy got started.

If you can get rid of all evidence for natural climate change in Earth’s history, you can make it look like no climate changes happened until humans (and cows) came on the scene.

Bring It On

I look forward to the opportunity to debate a scientist from the other side who actually knows what they are talking about. I’ve gone one-on-one with some speakers who so mangled the consensus explanation of global warming that I had to use up half my speaking time cleaning up the mess they made.

Those few I have debated in a public forum who know what they are talking about are actually much more reserved in their judgment on the subject than those who the pop culture presents to us.

But for those newbie’s who want to enter the fray, I have a couple of pieces of advice on preparation.

First, we skeptics already know your arguments...it would do you well to study up a little on ours.

And second, those of us who have been at this a long time actually knew Galileo. Galileo was a good friend of ours. And you are no Galileo.

Is there any aspect of the Democrats’ actions that didn’t take them down on Tuesday? Obamacare took down the Democrats, spending took down the Democrats, the economy took down the Democrats...and now Politico adds the climate agenda:

Democrats who voted for the controversial House climate bill were slaughtered at the ballot box, including Rep. Rick Boucher, the 14-term Virginian who helped broker some of the key deals instrumental to its June 2009 passage. In the Senate, several reliable green advocates also went down to opponents who derided tough new environmental policies.

Come January, Obama will be working with a Congress that will have little appetite for the types of sweeping energy reform he sought over the last two years. With the House in Republican hands, some of the climate issue’s most vocal advocates have been dislodged from their powerful perches, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman.

There’s no hiding the House Democrats’ bloodbath, with more than two dozen members who voted for the Pelosi-led climate bill losing their seats, and more likely to fall as the final tallies come in. The outcome sends a strong signal to moderate lawmakers as they consider any risky votes in future Congress’ on energy and environmental issues.

Turns out the scientific consensus on global warming produced a forensic consensus that it caused a political mass murder of Democrats. Read more here.
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What the Green Movement Got Wrong

A group of environmentalists across the world believe that, in order to save the planet, humanity must embrace the very science and technology they once so stridently opposed.

In this film, these life-long diehard greens advocate radical solutions to climate change, which include GM crops and nuclear energy. They argue that by clinging to an ideology formed more than 40 years ago, the traditional green lobby has failed in its aims and is ultimately harming its own environmental cause.

As author and environmentalist Mark Lynas says, ‘Being an environmentalist was part of my identity and most of my friends were environmentalists. We were involved in the whole movement together. It took me years to actually begin to question those core, cherished beliefs. It was so challenging it was almost like going over to the dark side. It was a like a horrible dark secret you couldn’t share with anyone.’

Directly following this programme, there will be a live studio debate chaired by Krishnan Guru-Murthy to discuss the issues raised.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy chairs a studio debate to discuss the issues raised in the documentary, What the Green Movement Got Wrong.

The film’s leading protagonists, former anti-GM activist and author Mark Lynas and Stewart Brand, a pioneer of the original green lobby, face critics from today’s green movement in front of an informed studio audience.

Leading policy makers, commentators, scientists, entrepreneurs and economists debate the impact the green movement has had on global climate change and whether embracing the very science and technology the greens once so stridently opposed, such as GM crops and nuclear energy, would be more successful in reducing the risks to the planet from global warming.

See more here.

In court documents filed last night, the Competitive Enterprise Institute argues that NASA has gone out of its way to avoid turning over records that show the agency reverse-engineered temperature data to better make the case that the planet is becoming warmer.

CEI, which is being represented by Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s Andrew Tulumello, argues in a pleading filed in Washington federal court that NASA’s request for summary judgment in the Freedom of Information Act suit against the agency should be denied because e-mails and other evidence turned over by NASA suggest that there are additional records that are being withheld.

“Rather than deal forthrightly with a FOIA request on these issues, NASA has engaged in obstruction and delay,” Tulumello writes in the court filing, which was filed late last night in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

CEI argues in the Nov. 3 motion that NASA has additional e-mails and documents on separate servers that relate to changes made to temperature data, but has failed to turn them over. CEI also argues that Dr. James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, and Dr. Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and climate modeler at Goddard, used third-party Web sites and e-mail addresses to avoid having those records appear on NASA’s servers.

“The e-mails among the NASA scientists working on this project reflect a conscious choice to keep the final explanation off of NASA’s servers,” Tulumello writes.

NASA, which is being represented by Julie Straus, a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Division, requested summary judgment in the case on Sept. 20, arguing that CEI already has access to the data it is trying to obtain and that CEI’s FOIA requests don’t seek computer programs and data files. NASA contends that CEI’s FOIA requests only sought “records, documents, and international communications” related to the alleged changes to temperature data.

“[T]he Agency had no obligation under the FOIA to search Dr. Schmidt’s email correspondence, nor to release to Plaintiff any of Dr. Schmidt’s emails. Even so, on December 29, 2009, and July 9, 2010, the Agency, in its discretion, did release to Plaintiff copies of those emails of Dr. Schmidt’s that pertain to the subject matter sought by Plaintiff’s request,” Straus wrote in the motion for summary judgment.

CEI filed suit against NASA in May, alleging that in 2007 and 2008, it submitted, but has not yet received adequate responses to, FOIA requests seeking NASA documents related to changes made to NASA’s temperature data in response to questions raised by statistician Steven McIntyre. McIntyre runs Climate Audit, a blog devoted to the analysis and discussion of climate data.

CEI argues that McIntyre discovered errors in NASA’s data that resulted in an overstatement of the amount that temperatures have risen in the United States since 2000. Those allegedly erroneous data, CEI says, have been used by Goddard to make claims in the media that temperatures in the United States have risen dramatically during the past 10 years. Among those claims was that 1998 was the “hottest” year on record.

CEI alleges that, once the errors were pointed out in August 2007, NASA made a series of changes to the data and then “sought to reverse-engineer the temperature data so that 1998 could again be deemed the warmest year on record.”

NASA’s delays in responding to the FOIA requests prompted Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) and Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) to call for an investigation by the agency’s inspector general on Dec. 3, 2009. The inspector general’s investigation determined that the delays were caused by “inadequate direction given...as to what documents were requested and a due date for a response,” “inadequate communication,” and “inadequate staffing at the Goddard FOIA office.”

As pointed out in CEI’s court filings, Hansen is also known as an environmental activist. In September, Hansen was one of 100 people arrested in front of the White House while engaging in a protest against mountaintop removal mining.

Tulumello said in an interview, “There is very powerful evidence that NASA disregarded the FOIA requests because what the record reflects raises very significant questions about the changes made to the data.”

NASA has two weeks to respond to CEI’s opposition to the motion for summary judgment. If summary judgment is denied by Judge Richard Roberts, the case would proceed to discovery.

Straus declined to comment.