[ExI] Phil Jones acknowledging that climate science isn'tsettled

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 12:33 PM, Christopher Luebcke
<cluebcke at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Let me just add: I am not a climatologist, and therefore even if I had read a wide variety of peer-reviewed papers on the subject, I would not be qualified to determine whether I had made an accurate sampling, much less judge the papers on their merits.
>
> My claim comes in fact from paying attention to those organizations who are responsible for gathering and summarizing professional research and judgement on the subject: Not just IPCC, but NAS, AMS, AGU and AAAS are all organizations, far as I can tell, that are both qualified to comment on the matter, and who have supported the general position that AGW is real.
>
> If you are going to dismiss well-respected scientific bodies that hold positions contrary to your own as necessarily having been "infiltrated by environmental activists", then it is incumbent upon you to provide some evidence that such infiltration by such people has actually taken place.

### Actually it's the other way around - once I started having doubts
(a long time ago) about the catastrophic AGW scare, I decided to check
some crucial publications myself, including their reviews by minority
scientists. Luckily, climate science is not rocket science or string
theory, so a mentally agile layperson can get a good idea of
plausibility of claims presented there, and can follow lines of
argumentation laid out by opposing sides sufficiently well to spot
gross aberrations, and very importantly, separate the actual claims
advanced in primary publications from the distortions introduced by
secondary publications (i.e. reviews in peer-reviewed literature), and
complete garbage spouted by tertiary publications (which is
unfortunately the only source of climate information for 99.9%
participants in the debate). Now, once I became in this way convinced
that peer-reviewed literature emphatically does not support AGW, I had
to explain why the tertiary literature and non-peer-reviewed
communications of some climate seem to be telling a dramatically
different story. So far my best explanation is that there is a clique
of environmental activists (James Hansen, Thomas Karl, Michael Mann)
who were appointed to a few key positions in the science
establishment, including review groups, and have since then
manufactured the AGW scare. Of course, scientific organizations, such
as NAS or APS don't have an opinion about science - they always rely
on the input of a small number of active researchers on any particular
issue, and if their input (produced by Mann et al.) is corrupt, their
output in the form of policy statements will be corrupt as well. GIGO.

But, the question of exactly what mechanisms ("infiltration" or
others) caused the science establishment to fail so badly here is just
a side issue - the key question is whether AGW is real, and for that I
can only urge you to delve into the primary literature and form an
opinion directly.
---------------------------------
>
> I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to disagree with their positions, though, without also presuming that the people you disagree with are wicked? That's the larger point of what I was trying to get at.

### The core group of about 50 climate activists (The Team, as they
refer to themselves), are wicked. They intentionally forged and
misrepresented data to advance a preconceived position. The remaining
"thousands of scientists" who lent their support to the AGW scare just
failed to read and critically analyze the literature, which makes them
incompetent but not wicked.

Rafal