The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and affiliated professional societies ignored the science when they sent a letter to U.S. policy makers. Perhaps being politically correct, rather than scientifically accurate, draws in more government research money. Dr. Judith Curry explains on her blog why the letter is both foolish and unscientific. (Dr. Curry is Professor and former Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.)
AAAS says: In a consensus letter to U.S. policymakers, a partnership of 31 leading nonpartisan scientific societies today reaffirmed the reality of human-caused climate change, noting that greenhouse gas emissions “must be substantially reduced” to minimize negative impacts on the global economy, natural resources, and human health.
Curry counters: This statement is a blatant misuse of scientific authority to advocate for specific socioeconomic policies. National security and economics (specifically called out in the letter) is well outside the wheelhouse of all of these organizations. Note the American Economics Association is not among the signatories; according to an email from Ross McKitrick, the constitution of the AEA forbids issuing such statements. In fact, climate science is well outside the wheelhouse of most of these organizations (what the heck is with the statisticians and mathematicians in signing this?)
The link between adverse impacts such as more wildfires, ecosystem changes, extreme weather events etc. and their mitigation by reducing greenhouse gas emissions hinges on detecting unusual events for at least the past century and then actually attributing them to human caused warming. This is highly uncertain territory – even within the overconfident world of the IPCC. And the majority of the signatories to this letter have no expertise in the detection and attribution of human caused climate change.
The signatories whose membership has some expertise on the detection and attribution of climate change are only a few: American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological Society, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Geological Society of America. The rest are professional societies who are not involved with the physics of climate but explicitly profit from the alarm.
Dr. Curry also notes: Many of these society leaders (who were responsible for signing on behalf of their organization) are not scientists themselves, e.g. Chris McEntee, Executive Director of the AGU, has a background is in nursing…” What does this say of AAAS et al.? “They have become just another group of lobbyists, having ceded the privilege traditionally afforded to dispassionate scientific reasoning to political activists in the scientific professional societies. With a major side effect of damaging the process and institutions of science, along with the public trust in science.”
I am sad to say that the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum has joined the alleged consensus with a recent position paper, see my article: Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum issues position statement on climate change. In that article I present physical evidence which shows the consensus is wrong.
Interestingly, since January 2014, 770 peer-reviewed scientific papers have been published in scholarly journals that show how unsettled the “consensus” science is regarding claims that anthropogenic or CO2 forcing dominates weather and climate changes, or that non-anthropogenic factors play only a relatively minor and inconsequential role.
According to an article on the blog NoTrickszone, instead of supporting the “consensus,” these 770 papers support the position that there are significant limitations and uncertainties apparent in climate modeling and the predictions of future climate catastrophes. Furthermore, these scientific papers strongly suggest that natural factors (the Sun, multi-decadal ocean oscillations, cloud and aerosol albedo variations, etc.) have both in the past and present exerted a significant influence on weather and climate, which means an anthropogenic signal may be much more difficult to detect or distinguish as an “extremely likely” cause relative to natural variation. Papers questioning the “common-knowledge” viewpoints on ocean acidification, glacier melt and advance, sea level rise, extreme weather events, past climate forcing mechanisms, the “danger” of high CO2 concentrations, etc., have also been included in this volume of 770 papers.
The links below provide a short summary of each paper and links to original papers:
“Today, scientists’ success often isn’t measured by the quality of their questions or the rigor of their methods. It’s instead measured by how much grant money they win, the number of studies they publish, and how they spin their findings to appeal to the public.” – The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists by Julia Belluz, Brad Plumer, and Brian Resnick (source)
Note to readers:
Index with links to all my ADI articles: http://wp.me/P3SUNp-1pi
My comprehensive 28-page essay on climate change: http://wp.me/P3SUNp-1bq