Biased survey

von Storch attack on the hockey stick is at least science. What troubled me is this article he wrote: (this version has all the quotable parts already highlighted)
http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/von_Storch/staged_angst/a_climate_of_…

"Despite a good deal of factually untrue - and thus all the more striking - compression, Crichton has quite correctly observed the dynamic of the paths of communication among scientists, environmentalist organizations, the state and the civilian population."

This is what von Storch says just after having written "The idealists are so obsessed with their mission that ultimately, in order to rouse the public, they themselves bring about the foretold catastrophes." Does he *really* think this is a good description of how scientists and environmentalists work????

Many of the other names on the list are pure jokes.

I would probably be inclined to include Nils-Axel Mörner with your list. I am not sure of his position on anthropogenic global warming, but he claims that there will be no associated rise in sea levels.

Mörner is a global warming sceptic, and he also believes in dowsing and some other excentric ideas. That list really is something with its mix of some famous people and others totally out of place in a list of reknown scientists.

Thanks Thomas, I knew his stand on sea level rises but had never heard him say anything about AGW.

Now, how about James J. O'Brien? From this interview he would seem to fall into the skeptic side of things. While his answers seem corrrect, he took great pains to never talk about greenhouse gases when it would have made sense to do so.<br.>

http://www.globalwarming.org/article.php?uid=659

James J. O'Brien appears on the list of sceptics at Envirotruth, and has criticised claims that climate change will increase the severity of hurricanes (his area of expertise), but I haven't been able to find anything from him that's overtly sceptical about anthropogenic global warming.

Some other spiked articles from the same page:

No clear policies on nuclear energy
From global warming to 'war for oil', the political debate about energy has become a morally loaded rather than a technical one.

Blackballing sections of the science community
The new US protocol that says scientists with corporate connections are unfit to judge drug safety smacks of modern-day McCarthyism.

Cool heads required
As long as the climate change debate is fuelled by politics, the science will remain up in the air.

Falling down
Jared Diamond's new book, Collapse, offers fantasies about 'ecocide' instead of an understanding of history.

Space cadets
If environmentalists had their way, probes would never have touched down on Titan, Saturn's moon.

My favourite is written by the editor of Spike. The independent editor of Spike:

Global warming: how 'sceptic' became a dirty word
spiked editor Mick Hume's Notebook in The Times (London)

What shits me about this, from a personal point of view, is that they support some things that I support like stem cells and the possibilities of GM.

Bet the scientists and sponsors are pleased.

Are you aware of the provenance of Spiked? It's made by the people who previously ran the Revolutionary Communist Party and published Living Marxism. The position of the RCP seemed to be that environmentalism was no more than capitalism making excuses for its failure to provide owing to its inevitable decline. They had some interesting ideas about chaos theory and Godel's Theorem as well. Wikipedia traces the links between these organisations, though the description of the RCP's politics is very much what their critics argued they believed rather than what they actually stood for.

Thud. My jaw hitting the floor. What was NESTA thinking?

I imagine that the pitch to NESTA had the names of a large number of reknowned scientists and that he contra science crew were added later.

Tim,

as a mere computer programmer, trained in the Jesuit tradition, you seem over confident in your posts here.

I agree that there is an over-representation of "sceptics". However, which of the survey responses other than Ball's would you actually take exception to?

In the survey summary "What we found" the only mention of climate is:

Five respondents - Lynne Frostick, Jack Harris, Jeffrey Harvey, Tony Juniper and Charles Kohlhase - offer aspects of ecology and the environment as their answer to the survey, principally discussing the dangers of anthropogenic climate change.

Anyway, it looks like reader responses are open for contributions.

JK, it's about building up the credibility of the skeptics. I think the idea is that some of the prestige of the other people on the list will rub off onto the skeptics.

I suspect it is just somone who isn't very familiar with science collecting a bunch of names he had come across before. It probably just shows his bias and isn't part of any nefarious plan. Had there been a plan, more mainstream climate scientists should have been included.

Some of you may have noticed that I am on the survey, even though I told Sandy Starr that I expected Spiked to stack the deck with contrarians. Hans Erren is a climate change sceptic over here in Holland who has hardly published anything in his scientific career, so it shows you exactly what kind of position Spiked has, which is libertarian.

BTW, it should be "renowned".

And Jeff Harvey thinks he is able to comment on climate change physics although he is a biologist.

Have you actualy read my contribution Jeff? What's so contrarian about it?

1a, you mean they are the US equivalent of neo-cons?