Sutera and Speranza?

Posted by William M. Connolley on December 17, 2007
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Lindzen sez Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.

This sounds like tripe – they continue to publish; and if they ever said anything about GW, I missed it.

Anyone know what Lindzen is on (about)? RC touched on this.

[Update: SB points out that L says in this, "The Italian situation was more benign. Some of Italy's leading younger atmospheric scientists like Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza publicly questioned alarm and organized a meeting in early autumn of 1991 in Chianciano under the auspices of the Demetra Foundation. Shortly thereafter they too disappeared from the debate. Apparently their funding for climate research was cut off, but funding for other projects was provided, and they, quite reasonably, moved to other areas of research." Notice how they have shifted from respected profs to young sci. So the point appears to be that they organised a meeting on an unknown topic that no-one has ever heard of (have you?) and didn't organise another one. Thin gruel indeed -W]

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  1. #1 Aaron Lemur Mintz
    2007/12/17

    Mr. Terrier has a good point, in that Iqaluit would be a good spot for a GW talk. First-hand, it’d give a view of what needs to be protected, what the stakes are. I’m sure that some of the elders have stories about how it’s harder to hunt now with the melting icepack, I’m pretty sure Sheila Watts Cloutier lives there as well.

    Granted, right now might not be the best time to visit – it’s the dead of winter, it’s above the northern circle…daylight’s always nice.

    (And I’ve never been there, but I have a strong hunch that the airport is not that nice, nor could the accomodations support enough people.)

  2. #2 Steve Bloom
    2007/12/18

    See the top of page 19 of this Lindzen draft rant. It seems to be rather thin gruel.

  3. #3 JamesG
    2007/12/18

    Pedantic maybe but 16 years can change you from being young into respected. Do you have any other points to make about the rest of the Lindzen “rant” or would you say it was fair comment?

    [I took "Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared" to assert that they were respected profs *then*. The rest contains far too many errors to pick them all out. Is there any part of it you think is true? -W]

  4. #4 mugwump
    2007/12/19

    You should walk in the shoes of a an honest sceptic for a day, William.

    Point out the fudges in the models. The over-reliance on aerosols to engineer fits to the temperature record. The lack of statistical rigour. The continuing attempts by the IPCC and cohorts to wipe out the MWP.

    See want kind of reaction you get. It’s all perfectly true, but goes against received orthodoxy. In a world where the middle-class has largely adopted the Green/AGW religion to fill the hole left by widespread abandonment of true religion, you’re treated as something below a satanist.

    Against that backdrop, your beating of this trivial (and old) Lindzen drum looks like no more than another attempt by the high priests of Climate Science to silence all dissent.

  5. #5 JamesG
    2007/12/19

    “Is there any part of it you think is true”
    Touching on two points only:

    The cartoon about the scientist issuing a bland, ambiguous statement which is then hyped up by the media, which encourages funding into the supposed “problem”. Except that as we both know, you can’t really blame the journalists if they are given a press release which bears little relationship to the actual paper behind it. It happened with the ice age scare and it’s happening much more now.

    The other bit is the Hadley modeling scenario. Of course Lindzen must be describing Hadley’s curve-fitting technique exactly: With all these variables and huge error bars there is no possible way to match up to the temperature record by happenstance – the temperature record was obviously the target to aim for. Hence, their conclusions that only Anthropogenic influences could explain 20th C warming because of this curve-fitting exercise is blatant misinformation as every computer modeler should immediately recognise. If they had even managed to reproduce the temperature in several discrete parts of the world (Arctic, Antarctic, Bangladesh etc) then it would have had a lot more credence – but of course their models are rather inaccurate at local level, which means that their final graphs of global average are meaningless.

    [You need to provide something more substantive than a cartoon. And there is no curve fitting. Another go? -W]

  6. #6 Michael Tobis
    2007/12/19

    Congrats, William, you are breaking new ground, an apostate and a high priest simultaneously!

  7. #7 JamesG
    2007/12/21

    Very enlightening. I’m reminded of Monty Python’s 5 minute argument sketch:
    “Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.
    It is not!”

  8. #8 Marco Ferrari
    2007/12/21

    Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza are still publishing on climate science. They belong to the very powerful group of atmospheric scientists lead by Franco Prodi (brother of Italis PM, by the way). Toghether with Prodi and others, they sent a letter to the Ministry of University and Research to protest the manifesto of the last National (italian) Conference on Climatic Changes, which stated that we need to face “irreversible changes”. They said the changes are not “discernible and certain”, and they didn’t agree with the irreversible part, so they can be classified as doubter, not really contrarians.
    So, who disappeared?
    Marco Ferrari

    [Interesting, thanks. Doesn't sound like they are poor oppressed folk after all -W]

  9. #9 Marco Ferrari
    2007/12/22

    They are not. And, apart from that, in Italy it’s almost impossible to block funds for this or that science project, since the decision are made mostly on political, non plain scientific, ground. The power that be can’t tell the first law of thermodynamics from a pigeon…