torsdag 15 oktober 2009

No Consensus on Scientific Consensus on Climate Change

One of the bloggers on Blog Action Day 2009 on Climate Change is Erik Svensson, professor of Zoological Ecology at Lund University, claiming that there is scientific consensus on AGW based on 80-90% majority vote according to some poll.

But scientific truth is not determined by polls and majority consensus, only by scientific arguments and debate by living scientists, as carefully motivated in
Among the 20-10% of sceptics to climate alarmism, according to the poll, there are many prominent, serious and honest scientists, and the arguments and facts put forward by these sceptics are not annihilated in one stroke by referring to a majority consensus. Or like Erik Svensson does, by hinting at the existence of sceptics to e.g. Darwin.

In science disagreement can only be settled in scientific discussion between scientists using 
scientific arguments. If such discussions and direct confrontations are blocked by a majority claiming to determine truth by majority consensus, then science is in danger.

The Copenhagen Climate Conference could have been an arena for such discussions, but will
now be a one-sided AGW UN event with a preset political agenda:
  • The Climate Conference in Copenhagen is essential for the worlds climate and the Danish government and UNFCCC is putting hard effort in making the meeting in Copenhagen a success ending up with a Copenhagen Protocol to prevent global warming and climate changes. 
In these hard efforts, sceptics to climate alarmism cannot be part.

To mix politics into science may be tempting to both politicians and scientists, but in the long run it is a disaster for science. The anticipated political failure of the Copenhagen meeting will put a blow to science as well...The true reason for the failure is that there is no scientific consensus on AGW! 

Or the other way around: The Copenhagen meeting will not be a failure for the sceptics to climate alarmism, but science as a whole will suffer. 

On non-consensus on sea level rise, read interview with Axel Mörner. Read Mörner's letter to the President of the Maldives.

  • Just two years ago, Mike Hulme would have been about the last person you'd expect to hear criticising conventional climate change wisdom. Back then, he was the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, an organisation so revered by environmentalists that it could be mistaken for the academic wing of the green movement. Since leaving Tyndall - and as we found out in a telephone interview - he has come out of the climate change closet as an outspoken critic of such sacred cows as the UN's IPCC, the "consensus", the over-emphasis on scientific evidence in political debates about climate change, and to defend the rights of so-called "deniers" to contribute to those debates.

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