James Hrynyshyn is a freelance science journalist based in western North Carolina, where he tries to put degrees in marine biology and journalism to good use.
Got the Monday blues? Then find five minutes to brighten your day by playing what I call spot-the-slander on the Heartland Institute's list of "500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming." The rules are simple:
1. Open the PDF that lists the scientists who agree with the proposition outlined on the page linked above search the file for a popular research institution at which climatologists are employed. For example: "NASA."
2. When you get a hit, copy and paste the name of the researcher associated with that institution into a reliable internet search engine. In the case of NASA, the first hit I got was "Shindell, Drew T." So I plugged that into Google and got this set of results.
3. Select at random one of the hits. In my example, I chose an abstract for: Shindell, D.T., G. Faluvegi, R.L. Miller, G.A. Schmidt, J.E. Hansen, and S. Sun, 2006: Solar and anthropogenic forcing of tropical hydrology. Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L24706, doi:10.1029/2006GL027468, 2006.
4. See if the author's research supports or contradicts the anthropogenic global warming consensus. If it supports the consensus, you've discovered another case of slander. But you win nothing, so try again. If it doesn't, you owe your significant other a candlelight dinner.
Unfortunately for my wife, in the running example, we find that Shindell's abstract concludes with "Projections of 21st-century climate change yield hydrologic cycle changes via similar processes, suggesting a strong likelihood of increased subtropical drought as climate warms."
If you bother to read the actual paper, it concludes with:
Furthermore, the 1990-2050 climate forcing (3.28 W/m2) is more than 15 times our mid-range historical solar forcing estimate, implying that future changes are likely to greatly exceed those in the past despite a reduced precipitation sensitivity for GHGs relative to solar forcing (as in Figure 3). Precipitation decreases, combined with greater evaporation in a warmer climate, could lead to very severe drought conditions. The projected changes thus have a potential to cause substantial harm, especially in water-stressed regions such as the American Southwest, Mexico, parts of North Africa and the Near East, and Australia.Chances are this kind of thing will happen quite frequently as you play the game. As you might expect, this has made some of the scientists who are described by the Heartland Institute as "Co-Authors" of the list of disagreements with the AGW consensus less than pleased, as documented by the team at deSmogBlog. The objections are starting to pour in. For example:
Why can't people spend their time trying to identify and evaluate the facts concerning climate change rather than trying to obscure them?" -- Dr. James P. Berry, Senior Scientist, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research InstituteThey have taken our ice core research in Wyoming and twisted it to meet their own agenda. This is not science."
-- Dr. Paul F. Schuster, Hydrologist, US Geological SurveyPlease remove my name IMMEDIATELY from the following article and from the list which misrepresents my research."
-- Dr. Mary Alice Coffroth, Department of Geology, State University of New York at Buffalo
Comments
Liars do not care about the truth, they only care about wining something with their lies. In my opinion Heartlessland Institute obviously is intent on wining money. Money from those who would themselves make huge sums by deflecting the public's eye away from their contributions to global warming.
Posted by: Ron Hager | May 6, 2008 12:17 AM
It's a good game.
I chose Allen, Richard P., Hadley Centre, UK. A search led me to Large discrepancy between observed and simulated precipitation trends in the ascending and descending branches of the tropical circulation, published in GPL.
In this he argues that precipitation changes in the tropics are likely to be worse than currently projected:
"An emerging signal of rising precipitation trends in the ascending regions and decreasing trends in the descending regimes are detected in the observational datasets. These trends are substantially larger in magnitude than present-day model simulations and projections into the 21st century."
Quite how this supports Avery's "things can only get better" philosophy is beyond me.
Posted by: S2 | May 7, 2008 3:38 PM
Didn't the Discovery Institute-backed Creationists try this ploy in Ohio?
Posted by: Mustafa Mond, FCD | May 8, 2008 11:28 AM
"Didn't the Discovery Institute-backed Creationists try this ploy in Ohio?"
You're probably referring to The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.
That was a petition - people had to sign up to it.
This is much worse - Avery has simply nominated them based on his own personal interpretation of their works.
And he has the cheek to call them "co-authors" ....
Posted by: S2 | May 9, 2008 4:47 PM