[environment] The Great Global Warming Swindle [politics] (445)

218 Name: Anonymous Scientist : 2007-09-26 17:42 ID:Heaven

Mmmm'kay. Be good and try to read the whole thing before denouncing it, alright?

AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW
9 September, 2007. Supplement page 8.
Global warming sceptics fuel hot debate

Mark Lawson

The ranks of the doubters are legion and speaking up as the climatic change debate rages, writes Mark Lawson.
Despite being scorned, derided and accused of links with oil companies, the climate change sceptics are still out there and, although the greenhouse lobby will never admit it, occasionally scoring major points. They may also be more numerous than the greenhouse lobby or politicians believe.
One example of this scepticism breaking to the surface is a dissenting minority report issued by a group of federal government backbenchers as part of a parliamentary committee investigation into viability of geosequestration (burying carbon produced deep underground).
The report by four MPs - three Liberal and one National - declared that the evidence that humans were altering climate was “not compelling”, but it was largely derided by the media.
A much more serious, if not devastating, attack on greenhouse claims concerning likely future temperature increases was the recent release of a paper entitled Global Warming: Forecasts by Scientists versus Scientific Forecasts.
Written by J. Scott Armstrong, a professor of marketing at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and Kesten Green, a visiting fellow at the business and economics forecasting unit at Monash University in Melbourne, the paper assessed, as forecasts, the temperature projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change earlier this year. It found little to approve.
In the paper prepared for the International Symposium on Forecasting 2007, Armstrong and Green conclude, “the forecasts in the report were not the outcome of scientific procedures. In effect, they present the opinions of scientists transformed by mathematics and obscured by complex writing.”
The paper also points to one of the recognised rules of forecasting, namely that “unaided judgement forecasts by experts have no value. This applies whether the opinions are expressed by words, spreadsheets or mathematical models. It also applies regardless of how much scientific evidence is possessed by the experts.” A group of experts is little better.
Kesten Green told The Australian Financial Review that there were plenty of examples of experts being wrong, both individually and collectively, about their own area of expertise. Albert Einstein, for example, famously declared that atomic power was not possible. Other examples are in the treatment of stomach ulcers and head injuries, where the medical establishment held to treatments which harmed rather than helped for many years.

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