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OT IEEE Spectrum on Anthropogenic Global Warming

Being pedantic, the IPCC produces summaries and digests. It does not represent nature and isn't a proper study of scientific research. The ephemeral folks (at least here in the US they serve only temporarily and should be active researchers in their own right) in the meeting room considering research grant proposals would probably find some research proposal that was nothing other than a directed attack at the IPCC as entirely political and certainly not scientific. I'm having a hard time thinking of how such a proposal could be framed as science.

More, it's hard to suggest some kind of research proposal where the outcome is "already known," as Rich's inane suggestion would have it. Research is, almost by definition, an "examining and finding out." Somehow it boggles my mind to imagine a conclusion as a proposal for research. Why should it be funded?

On the other hand, a research grant proposal that specified some independent approach to address an older question in a new way might find funding support by the investigator when it was re-presented to the teams later on. Or one that picks up upon some of the assumptions applied in tentative conclusions formed from earlier research and attempts to test them through an approach that appears workable. Novel ideas do get attention, particularly if the approach seems well reasoned.

Everything is done in bits and pieces, with "an aim to establish general rules determining reciprocal connections of objects and events in time and space." It's frankly not about the IPCC, which is not nature but more about summarizing what present knowledge says about global climate. As you've repeatedly pointed out, they just summarize. I can't see the IPCC itself as a valid target of research.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Kirwan
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Rich's proposal was 'to get a research grant to question the IPCC's "inconvenient truth" ', by which I assumed he meant anthropogenic global warming. Such grants are being made every day, so Rich had to be imagining a research grant investigating an alternative explanation for the temperature rise we've seen so, such as the potty proposals that its all caused by charged particles from the sun and cosmic radiation influencing cloud cover.

Any plausible and original proposal in that area presumably would be funded. It's obviously difficult to imagine where such a proposal might come from, but someone who did manage to find one more new way of looking at the problem would obvously earn many bonus points for surprising the reviewers.

Because it was original.

Exactly.

Rich might have meant the IPCC, rather than the "inconvenient truth" which it is their business to summarise and digest, but that doesn't strike me as a useful interpretation of his proposition.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Reply to
bill.sloman

It admittedly wasn't a useful interpretation. But when Rich says, "It'd be interesting to try to get a research grant to question the IPCC's 'inconvenient truth,'" I tend to take that literally, in very simple terms and without nuanced understandings.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Kirwan

Jon, The IPCC is just the frontman, the easily seen part of what has become a generalized attittude in research and academia. They are just the ones that gave legitimacy to a much larger problem. They don't award the grants, or control research. That is all done at a much lower level.

And I am not proposing the 'conspiracy' theory, where a bunch of nebuolous back room types have decried that all research shall support AGW. No, it is much more dangerous than that.

Instead, fifty years ago, as the environmental movement was taking hold, many folks got the impression that people were evil, were destroying the Earth wtih polution and over-use of resources, and that 'something' should be done about it. Only the most radical proposed ending the human stain on the globe, but many felt that people were the problem. This attitude became especially entrenched in academia, where anti-society ideas have often been cherished as indicating 'freedom of thought' and novelty.

So, as some of these anti-human academics worked their way up the ladder of the heirarchy, they of course attracted others of their ilk. And, their ideas percolated throughout the system, so that today you will see that elementary school children are taught this attitude.

So, now we apply this to AGW. As climate models started becoming viable, some of them indicated the disaster of thermal runaway. This was seized upon by they radical anti-human element as a justification for their opinions, especially after publicizing these early results got such great press, and was so useful for persuading politicos to accept their manifesto. As more refined models started coming on line, the meme of disaster ruled - if your results indicated disaster, you got support and grant money. If your results indicated the status quo, then you were boring and got to get a job flipping burgers.

Now, you will probably state that this did not, and could not happen. I have to disagree, having seen it happen to several researchers in the late '90s. While not flipping burgers, they did get out of the Earth System Science game and went into other fields. Their lack of support for AGW was a kiss of death to their early careers.

Charlie

Reply to
Charlie E.

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