Naomi Oreskes has an op-ed in the Post this morning on this subject, in anticipation of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report release tomorrow. I went over a lot of this ground in researching the new book, and there's one detail I can never get over. John Tyndall discovered what we now think of as the greenhouse effect at pretty much the same time that Darwin published On the Origin of Species. In other words, the theoretical understanding of the behavior of greenhouse gases goes back just as far as the theory of evolution by natural selection.
That's really something, when you think about it.
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And in other news, dog bites man. Would the NY Times have printed an op-ed allowing a flat-earther to explain why he believes the earth is flat? Because that's what they did when they ran Brownback's defense of intelligent design creationism. And there's nothing original in Brownback's op-ed…
From the archives comes this post about the ridiculous attraction to 'breaking paradigms':
Every so often, intelligent design flares up like a really bad pimple. If you're a biologist, you're always torn between ignoring it or responding to the same old statements of belief that you or someone else…
George Bernard Shaw, according to a comment left on a previous post, thought that many people gave up on reading the Origin because, convinced of Darwin's argument, they wearied of him making his points over and over again.
But I disagree. It's not seeing Darwin restate his case that's tiring. It's…
Did you hear the one about how Charles Darwin wasn't the creator of natural selection? Did you know that other people had had the idea before him?
Oh, you did know that? Because anyone who has ever spent five minutes learning about the history of evolutionary thought knows that? Well, tell that…
Yes, it does go back a long way and also like evolution, the earth's climate is one of the most extensively studied subjects in science...
which NAS President Ralph Cicerone conveyed when he said
"I think we understand the mechanisms of CO2 and climate better than we do of what causes lung cancer. ... In fact, it is fair to say that global warming may be the most carefully and fully studied scientific topic in human history."
...a statement which Roger Pielke called "absurd on its face".
If you want to read something truly absurd, read Pielke's post and his related comments on Prometheus.
Pielke claims (based on his own omniscience?) that Cicerone was referring to "mechanisms of global warming" on one hand and "causes [rather than mechanisms] of lung cancer" on the other hand.
Talk about an absurd claim.
For those who don't know, Cicerone is one the nation's pre-eminent atmospheric scientists and Scott Saleska's comments on Prometheus throw some light on Cicerone's statement:
"The ambiguity of the newspaper quote aside, I believe Ralph Cicerone was comparing mechanisms to mechanims, at least that's how I recall him characterizing it to me when I saw him last November in DC, and asked him specifically about this testimony."
The word in Cicerone's statement that clues you in that he was indeed talking about mechanisms in the case of lung cancer as well as global warming is the word "of" after "better than we do".
In other words, his statement should be read
"I think we understand the mechanisms of CO2 and climate better than we do [the mechanisms] of what causes lung cancer."
That is almost certainly a true statement, since the actual mechanism(s) by which substances in cigarette smoke cause cancer are still poorly understood.
If Cicerone had meant what Pielke claims, he would have left the word "of" out and simply said
" I think we understand the mechanisms of CO2 and climate better than we do what causes lung cancer."
But as a careful reading of Cicerone statement and Scott Saleska's comment show, that is certainly not what he meant.
Finally, if Pielke had cared to know what Cicerone really meant by his statement, he should have simply asked Cicerone (as Scott Saleska did) before he ever labeled Cicerone's statement absurd.
That would have been the wise (and polite) thing to do.
Great article, thanks for the reference!
Arrhenius's 1896 paper may be found here. It amazes me that the organisations paid to spread disinformation about global warming can get away with phrases like "the theory that carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation" as if it was just something scientists are guessing. Like they were looking up at the sky one day and said "Hey, I wonder if CO2 traps solar heat?" "Gee, I don't know, if only we could figure a way to find out?"
It wouldn't be so bad if the shills cast doubt on the complex interactions of the Earth's climatological system that may either compensate for or exaggerate the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide, but for goodness sake, the actual absorption spectrum of CO2 gas itself is basic physics, it's a simple measurement!
How little progress science education has made since the Scopes monkey trial...