leaderpost.com|By Margaret Munro

 

Eight Pseudoscientific Climate Claims Debunked by Real Scientists

Most people who deny that human activity is warming the planet just dismiss a massive body of scientific evidence as a big hoax.
But there’s a more sophisticated set of climate “skeptics” who make arguments that, at least to the lay ear, sound like they’re grounded in scientific evidence. And because most of us lack the background to evaluate their claims, they can muddy the waters around an issue that’s been settled in the scientific community.
So, as a public service, we gathered eight of the most common of these pseudoscientific arguments and asked some serious climate scientists — all working climatologists who have been widely published — to help us understand what makes these claims so misleading.

Innumerate Claim of the Day: NASA Scientists Dispute Climate Change

The letter simply chastised NASA for crossing the line between science and advocacy. They stated that:
“We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.”
There was no reference to a scam, only that they did not believe the science was settled and that NASA’s strident claims to the contrary were not consistent with an organization based upon scientific principles.
In order for the science to be settled, you need an actual hypothesis to be tested. Then you need an actual system which when applied can prove the hypothesis true or false. The problem here is the hypothesis is morphing. Is that human activities are making the planet warmer? Changing the weather? Which one?
Beyond there is no experimental system which can be used to test any of these hypotheses. Left with no system to prove predictions of climate catastrophe driven by human endeavors, it is perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of those who appear to be driven by advocacy, not science and apear to be oblivious to the unintended consequences such an effort might spawn.
This is not about simple math. Science is not settled by political or democratic means. Consensus is not truth.
Sorry to disturb the group think operating here.
BTW – no money from the Koch Brothers.
http://georgiacontrarian.blogspot.com/

My Uncle signed this. And, of course they’re a lot more than 49 that agree with them and didn’t sign. NASA has politics just like any organization. I’ve told him to forget about this many times, but its hard to convince someone that was on a team that went to the Moon that he can’t make a difference. I don’t know about AGW (not a climate scientist) , but it is fun to ask all kinds of questions and find out how they did things. He was on the teams that investigated accidents from the Apollo fire to the shuttle failures. Why the US used pure oxygen and the Russians didn’t? He was on the team that drew up the procedure for Apollo 13 CO2 scrubbers. When he heard about the accident and that they were going to use the Lunar module as a life raft, the first thing he thought was they were going to have trouble with the canisters. Also how the suits were constructed and how they protected against possible micro meteor impacts, and how heating and cooling were done with the massive temperature contrasts. The surprising thing is the different projects he worked on, how they solved the endless problems, and the often time simple solutions and every day materials they used. Many NASA engineers were first generation college graduates: a bunch bright farm boys that went to the Moon.

A7L-B
AGW models are imperfect, sometimes significantly flawed. This is a key reason why many reputable scientists, even climatologists, have concerns. Science is not about popularity, or feelings, rather, about facts.
One need not be a climatologist to recognize flawed methodology. Like it or not, virtually every tenet of AGW can be reasonably challenged, and should be. If the AGW computer models withstand continued scrutiny, they will become accepted as mainstream.
That’s what good science is about. Making your data available, and subjecting it to scrutiny, often from a wide range of scientific disciplines, including the astronomers and comparative planetologists, who have indeed found significant shortcomings in the models developed by earth-centric climatologists.
You may want to believe in the popular theory du jour, but science is not a popularity contest, as Galileo sadly discovered, it about facts which withstand continued multidisciplinary scrutiny. Many early assumptions of the AGW crowd have been disproven. More will follow. As a reality check, which climate scientist can accurately predict climate conditions for even next week?
Can even one of them? No. Food for thought… More and better research is needed, including an accurate accounting of the observed temperature variations seen on other planets and their moons.
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BR: As George Box pointed out: “All modes are wrong, some are useful.”
My suspicions run against those “Skeptics” who are paid to be skeptical, funded by the Oil & Coal indusrty

GMO's stranglehold on Hawaii

Staff on 19 June 2011 for the Molokai Dispatch- (http://themolokaidispatch.com/hawaii-s-one-sided-love-affair-gmos)Image above: Cartoon by Matt Collins of scientists being over-ruled by GMO corn companies.From (http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/do-seed-companies-control-gm-crop-research_1.jpg).

 Clearly the GMO corn seed companies have cultivated a love affair with Hawaii’s legislators and governing agencies with a crop of alluring promises of tax and employment benefits. Instead, this love affair has birthed unrestricted and unregulated access to our scarce agriculture resources of water and land for Monsanto, Pioneer, Syngenta, Dow and BASF, with no oversight, no inspections and no protections against unintended – but sure to happen - consequences. The GMO seed companies are the ultimate self-licking ice cream cone; with no consumer demand for the non- food product, the companies created an artificial demand called “crop improvement”, then manipulated genes to create new patented life-forms, then controlled all research, production, sales, distribution and ultimately replanting. The global protest against GMOs challenges its science and seeks to abolish GMOs worldwide. Meanwhile, our `aina has become the laboratory test bed for both GMO seed production and also high risk, open-field, bio-pharmaceutical research with the unfortunate result that GMO corn seed – a non-food commodity - is now Hawaii’s highest valued agriculture crop. Shame on us!!