Global Warming

Who am I to say?
If you look at my c.v. <here> you will see that I am not a climate scientist. I am an engineer, a water resources scientist, a former Naval Reserve officer, and have had family members from my grandfather, to my father, to my brother serving in the enlisted ranks in WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and Gulf War 1. I come from a long line of Republican fiscal conservatives, and am myself an independent fiscal conservative, with a balance of beliefs somewhere between libertarian and liberal (sounds oxymoronic, but its not). I am not a knee-jerk liberal opponent of industry, a tree-hugger, or ivory-tower academic. In my career have worked on offshore oil rigs, crude oil supertankers, and ship design for U.S. Navy warships. What I am not is an ideologue, and I cannot abide people who choose to close their eyes to reality. The main reason that anti-warming skeptics dismiss reputable climate scientists is that scientists get their funding from government agencies: somehow they believe this means that scientists have an “interest” in scaring the public to get more money. This sort of ad hominem attack cannot hold up. Our scientific method involves too many people for such a conspiracy to exist. As an aside, anyone who thinks that scientists get paid a lot should seriously look at the difference in pay scales between an MBA graduate and a Ph.D in science. Scientists have a variety of motivations - but if it was all about money, they wouldn’t have bothered with a Ph.D.

Our best scientists are sounding the warning. I’ve read some of the papers and it scares the *@#$*& out of me. I’m not a climate scientist, but the people who are have clearly shown that we are pushing our environment in an uncertain direction in a single massive CO2 experiment. Who are you to say they are wrong? What are your credentials? How long have you studied climate science? What are the credentials of the people who are telling you that long-term reliance on fossil fuels is OK?

I’m not asking you to listen to me.
I’m asking you to listen to the experts!

Who are the “scientists” that signed the petition and are they some kind of consensus?
The web site for the petition <here> has a huge list of names that are purported to have signed the petition and are claimed to be scientists. Some are some scientists, some aren’t. Its not clear that any of the signatories are actually climate experts or have any credibility in the field of global warming. Here’s a challenge for you - try to track down a couple of these people on Google or other resources and see their credentials. Are they climate scientists? Are they from an energy-dependent industry? At random, I grabbed the name Otto A. Homberg, Ph.D. from the petition. Here’s the sum total of peer-reviewed journal publications for Dr. Homberg over the past 32 years from the ISI Web of Knowledge (which doesn’t go back any further than 1975):
Homberg, O.A. and A.H. Singleton (1975), “Performance and problems of Claus plant operation on coke oven acid gasses.” Journal of the Air Pollution Control Association, 25(4): 375-378.
Lynn J.B., C.E. Fries and O.A. Homberg (1975), “Studies on detergent phosphate replacements. 1. Aerobic biodegradation of sodium 2-hydroxyethyliminodiacetate,” Journal of the American Oil Chemists Society 52(2) 41-43.
The impact of the above? The first article was cited twice (papers in 1976 and 1977). The second article was cited once in 1976. Thus, the scientific impact of the above work in its discipline was negligible, and it is clear that none of the work is related to climate science. I have no doubt that Dr. Homberg is credible in his own field. However, his signature on a global warming petition should have no more weight than the signature of a football or baseball player (or politician for that matter). Dr. Homberg is not a climate scientist, but was employed as an air pollution chemist by the Bethlehem Steel Corporation when his papers were written. My point is not to cast aspersions on Dr. Homberg. Indeed, I can claim no more credibility as a climate scientist than he. My argument is that the people who have climate expertise are the ones that count. Having a Ph.D. does not make your signature on a petition a valid statement either for or against global warming science. Indeed, compare he supposed scientists on the petition to the statement from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences that “The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action.” Which is more credible: the unchecked list of names on a web page or the people who know what they’re talking about? Check out the web site “Logical Science” at http://www.logicalscience.com/consensus/consensus.htm#Joint_I , which has a listing of international scientific organizations that have stated that climate change is real and we are part of the problem. Do you really think they are all in a conspiracy to wreck the world’s economy?
Some people challenge the credibility of the National Academy of Sciences as the “little boy who cried wolf” because of the global cooling paper issued in the mid-1970s. Remember two things: 1) the scientific method worked and the community quickly debunked the erroneous conclusions, and 2) at the end of the fairy tale there really was a wolf!

Where was the Robinson et al. “climate” paper published?
...the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons? The scary thing about this paper is they make the skeptic’s argument seem so reasonable. But you might just wonder why a journal for physicians and surgeons would be publishing a climate article. I certainly did. You should check out their website, www.jpands.org and some of the papers. They’ve got these great titles like: “Towards Socialized Medicine: Fighting the Leviathan” and “The Necessity of Free-Market Prices for Medical Care.” It’s clear that this is not a non-political science organization. Indeed, their publication of a bogus paper on climate science really destroys any credibility that they might have had as a medical organization. If you do some Googling around, you’ll find that this “climate” paper was originally written and discredited in the late 1990s. The present version is just an update that doesn’t meet any reasonable standards for scientific accuracy.

I recently received a copy of the “refutation” of global warming in the paper “Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” by Arthur B. Robinson, Noah E. Robinson, and Willie Soon. Enclosed with the article was a request that I sign a petition “...to reject the global warming agreement...”

I categorically reject the Robinson petition along with the obfuscation and shoddy science that is represented in the paper.

Unfortunately, there is no way for all of us who reject the petition to register our rejection!

updated November 8, 2007