Articles by Andrew Dessler

The Heartland conference recycles the usual climate change skeptics in its speakers list

The New York Times carried this interesting write-up of the Heartland Institute's 2008 International Conference on Climate Change. For those not familiar with this conference, it's like a scientific meeting on climate change -- without the science.

The NYT article concluded with this statement, which pretty much sums it up:

The meeting was largely framed around science, but after the luncheon, when an organizer made an announcement asking all of the scientists in the large hall to move to the front for a group picture, 19 men did so.

I wonder where the other 95 percent of the Inhofe 400 was. Perhaps they were at their unicorn farm. Or relaxing with the snuffalufagous.

This pretty much confirms what I've been saying for a while: While advocates against action on climate change claim that there are lots of legitimate climate scientist skeptics out there, it's simply not true. To further convince yourself of that, take a look at the speakers listed on the program. You'll see the same old tired skeptics have been recycled yet again: Michaels, Spencer, Singer, McKitrick, Balling, Carter, Gray, yada, yada, yada ...

I guess I shouldn't complain. Here at Grist, we firmly encourage recycling. And no one recycles more effectively than the climate denial machine. The problem is that this is one type of recycling that's not good for the environment.

Climate change myth debunked: scientists did not predict new ice age

Over on his blog, John Fleck dispatches one of the most ridiculous urban legends of climate change: that scientists in the 1970s were predicting that an ice age was impending.

John and his colleagues, Thomas Peterson and William Connolly, point out that, even in the 1970s, most scientists thought that global warming was the dominant problem.

It should also be pointed out that those worried about global cooling did not necessarily dispute the fact that carbon dioxide causes warming. Rather, the global cooling theory was based on the idea the dust and other stuff people were putting into the atmosphere would reduce sunlight by more than enough to overwhelm the heating from carbon dioxide. The net result would be cooling.

There is in fact no credible dissent to the argument that carbon dioxide warms the climate. Even the Dean of Skeptics, Dick Lindzen, admits that (although he predicts less warming than the IPCC).

So, two things to remember:

1. The consensus that an ice age was coming in the 1970s didn't actually exist.
2. The theory that an ice age was coming does not contradict the theory that carbon dioxide warms the climate.

What happens when a group’s position statement does not reflect its members accurately?

A while back, I blogged on the huge number of scientific organizations that had put out position statements supporting the mainstream theory of human-induced global warming.

Many commenters on my post and around the internet have suggested that one can't trust a statement put out by a professional organization. They argue that these statements are not voted on by the membership, but generally drafted by an ad hoc committee and adopted by the organization's leadership.

If this small clique of members turned out to be advocates, the hypothesis goes, then the resulting statement will not reflect the overall views of the organization.

It occurred to me, however, that this is a testable hypothesis. How do we test it, you ask? We have a professional organization try to put out a statement that its members don't agree with. What would happen?

The fourth IPCC report is still going strong a year later

I was at a meeting earlier this week and was talking to one of the coordinating lead authors of the recent IPCC working group 1 report on the physical science of climate change. He remarked that he was quite surprised that how little substantive criticism the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report had received since its release just about one year ago.

The reason, he thought, was that the skeptics were "in the room" with the writing team. What he meant was that the scientists writing the report knew that the denial machine would go over the report with a fine tooth comb looking for any "gotcha" mistakes to use to discredit the IPCC. Because of that, the IPCC report was extremely carefully worded so as to make virtually every statement in the report bulletproof.

In fact, it is quite amazing to me that essentially none of the IPCC documents produced over the last 18 years has been found to contain any substantive errors. The trolls, of course, will come out with their litany of "errors" that the IPCC contains (I suspect a few will appear in the comments to this post), but when you look closely, the trolls are almost always misrepresenting the IPCC's statements.

In fact, that's the most common attack on the IPCC: make the claim that the IPCC said something ridiculous (which it didn't actually say), then disprove that ridiculous statement, and then use that as evidence that the IPCC's reports cannot be trusted. "The IPCC says that 2 + 2 = 5, but that's just hogwash. We know that 2 + 2 = 4. Thus, climate change is a hoax." Yeah, right.