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At Least Half Of Nobel Prize Winners Skeptical Of AGW Orthodoxy
4 July 2008
Much like every year since 1951, there has been another meeting
(6/29-7/3) of Nobel prize winners in Lindau, Bavaria, Germany.
[...]
So let us look at the climate & energy panel instead.
Seven Nobel prize winners participated in a climate debate. How did it
look like? Well, there may be a climate consensus among the high-school
dropouts but there is none among the Nobel prize winners. There was one
more difference. Many of the Nobel prize winners said, unlike the
high-school dropouts, the following sentence: "I am no expert."
Ivar Giaever (Norway), the 1973 Nobel prize winner for superconductivity
(he was essential to master electron tunneling in superconductors and
shared the physics award with Esaki and Josephson), was asked how the
world should tackle climate change. The following quote accurately
matches the content but it was shortened and edited:
"First of all, I didn't volunteer to be on this panel. Second of all, I
am a skeptic, as I told you yesterday. Third of all, if I am Norwegian,
should I really worry about a little bit of warming? I am unfortunately
becoming an old man. We have heard many similar warnings about the acid
rain 30 years ago and the ozone hole 10 years ago or deforestation but
the humanity is still around. The ozone hole width has peaked in 1993.
Moreover, global warming has become a new religion. We frequently hear
about the number of scientists who support it. But the number is not
important: only those who are correct are important. We don't really
know what the actual effect on the global temperature is. There are
better ways to spend the money [question period]," he referred to a
lecture about poverty by Hans Rosling (Sweden) that heavily relied on my
favorite Gapminder: well, he is the director of the Gapminder
Foundation.
Ivar Giaever had done some "Google research" before the panel so he
could also speak about 1998, 1934, 1921 as the warmest U.S. (where they
have the best record) years in the 20th century, the hockey stick graph,
the crucial role of the huge heat capacity of the oceans, the little ice
age whose cause is unknown, and about the increase of "bulk" Greenland
ice in the last century (by 2 meters at the center). Another panelist
conjectured that this increase of ice was due to precipitation.
Giaever mentioned that it takes years to regain the energy that was
needed to produce a solar panel; the precise number became a topic of a
controversy. There is 500 years worth of coal in the U.S. He also warned
that ice ages do happen and we might be just waiting for one (54:30).
The temperature decrease could be 8 °C so maybe they should pollute more
than they do! (The moderator argued that we can calculate there won't
be an ice age for 40,000 years, a statement I can't confirm.)
And by the way, if people really cared about this problem, why don't
they talk about one solution that we already have, namely nuclear
energy?
And finally, we don't know what is the correct temperature. It could be
2 °C warmer or colder. I don't know but what I do know is that this is
not the correct temperature. In the question period, he said that the
chance the the warming is anthropogenic is not very large: it might be
but it doesn't have to. In the question period, he was also asked
whether it was a good idea to establish more efficient schemes of
transportation of energy. Despite attempts to humiliate him, he sensibly
insisted that it was only up to 10% of the energy which was a very
small, unimportant number.
Entertainingly enough, his moral record was clear because, as he said,
Norway only produces clean energy! Well, Norway is not quite perfect. In
his very final contribution, he hated to say something bad about Norway
but he sharply disagrees with his country that has allowed Al Gore to
pick a peace Nobel prize (applause!).
"The number of scientists is not important. Only those who are correct
are important..." Just count the number of faces who wanted someone to
say these words! But don't forget: their number is not important. Only
those who wanted to hear these words are important!
The audience was chuckling throughout his contributions as if they were
looking at the most entertaining heretic in their life. In the middle
of the meeting, Giaever continued that he was not supporting pollution
but even if climate change were man-made, we can't stop the usage of
fossil fuels because the Chinese want to live in the same way as we do.
And he doesn't see any results of the climate regulation efforts during
the first decade when it was already supposed to materialize in Europe.
You may also read a new report about a happy meeting of some young
Lindau participants with Ivar Giaever.
Other participants
As the video and Seed's websites reveal, many other statements at the
meeting would be inconvenient for the high-school dropouts, too.
Hartmut Michel (Germany), a biochemist and the 1988 chemistry Nobel
prize winner for crystallization of membrane proteins, urged the world
to stop the biofuels immediately: the audience applauded to him. Biomass
only captures 0.7-0.8% of the solar radiation, for biofuels it is 0.2%,
and it would be much better to wait for good enough solar panels with
15% efficiency. Also, the biofuel technology leads to food shortages and
the logging of rain forests. You shouldn't be suprised that Hartmut
Michel was irritated when Ivar Giaever called the solar panels
"unproductive" but as you can see, none of them would agree with the
environmentalist "consensus".
Some speakers, namely Douglas Osheroff (superfluidity of Helium 3, Nobel
for physics in 1996, a Bush hater), wanted to blame politicians for the
bad idea of biofuels. I find it hypocritical. The biofuels were pushed
because some scientists close to Osheroff have been repeating nonsense
about bad "non-renewable" sources of energy. So biofuels are naturally
better than crude oil because they are renewable. People like Osheroff
never promoted a fully rational, scientific debate about these things
and results such as inefficient biofuels are exactly what you should
expect from such a mixture of inaccurate science and ideological
slogans. It is simply bad that Osheroff et al. try to get rid of the
responsibility.
Not surprisingly, Carlo Rubbia (Italy), the 1984 winner of the physics
Nobel prize for the experimental discovery of the W and Z bosons at
CERN, promoted (although not enthusiastically) nuclear energy (and also
solar energy). See his proposal to replace uranium by thorium - a text
that uses some of the CO2-concerned language. He also said that the
Earth is going through an extraordinary process today: every decade, the
number of people gets multiplied [sic] by 1 billion! :-)
Well, I am afraid that if Rubbia's obvious mistake is fixed, the current
era becomes pretty ordinary. Nevertheless, Rubbia says that it should
"become impossible to say that we should continue with the business as
usual" because the population is increasing [just like it has done for
millenia]. Among the participants, Rubbia clearly turned out to be the
ultimate hardcore, nearly Hansen-level alarmist. Rubbia (*1934) also
thinks that he is not old! :-)
Nuclear waste was not discussed at all but nuclear weapons were
mentioned as a dangerous by-product of the nuclear power plants: thorium
doesn't allow for bombs. Moreover, 1 ton of thorium gives the same
energy as 200 tons of uranium. There's so much of it that it makes no
sense to call it "nonrenewable".
Concerning climate change, Klaus von Klitzing (Germany), the only 1985
physics Nobel prize winner for his discovery of the quantized Hall
effect, argued that more research was needed. People have already
changed the world in many ways and we simply do not know whether
tripling of CO2 leads to any kind of instability. Moreover, he
emphasized that the increasing population inevitably leads to increasing
consumption of energy - the "energy problem" that is primary - and
climate change is just a result and we clearly have to live with that.
Thermonuclear fusion in a near future is unlikely and time constraints
are essential. Sometimes, the government (EU) funding of energy research
(solar etc.) is higher than necessary.
Once again, von Klitzing and Giaever were certainly not the only ones
whose skeptical inclinations couldn't be hidden. Even among the
signatories of the pro-rational, anti-environmentalist 1992 Heidelberg
Appeal, you find three members of the Lindau climate panel. Johann
Deisenhofer, who won the 1988 chemistry prize with Michel and Huber as
well, has signed it, too. As far as I can say, he tried not to say
anything controversial at all. As a result, he didn't say anything I
would find worth reporting.
Jack Steinberger, the 1988 physics Nobel prize winner for the discovery
of muon neutrinos, argued that it was pointless to wait for
thermonuclear fusion because Edward Teller already promised him the new
source 53 years ago. It won't be ready in a foreseeable future. At the
very end, someone asked what the scientists can do for politicians to
follow their recommendations. Steinberger honestly said that the panel
revealed disagreement between the scientists so what the politicians
should "hear" is not obvious.
If you summarize the comments, 3/7 of the panelists could be classified
either as downright skeptics (Giaever) or cryptoskeptics, the fourth one
(Michel) radically hates biofuels, and the fifth one (Steinberger)
thinks that there is a significant disagreement in the science
community. The remaining two, Osheroff and Rubbia, could be honestly
counted as supporters of the "consensus".
The percentage of supporters of the "consensus" among the scientific
Nobel prize winners is low and it would be even lower if the organizers
were not afraid to ask more skeptics to participate and if these
skeptics were not afraid that it will be an annoying experience for
them.
The moderator and organizer, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber who is a local
director and a member of the Inquisition Promoting Climate Change (IPCC)
who boasted that he met James Hansen a week ago (this guy try to "look
important" all the time even though he is only a puppet in an inferior
scientific discipline: I am somewhat allergic to similar individuals),
obtained a similar number. So when a student asked whether the Nobel
prize winners thought that men were behind climate change, he said that
"there is a 60% probability that man is seriously behind climate change"
and it is a problem that should be wrestled with.
However, Schellnhuber also used Pascal's Wager. If you think that there
is a 60% probability that there won't be a crash, you won't enter the
aircraft. Well, that's a good joke but not what I would call a rational
conclusion of a complex panel debate.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/07/lindau-half-of-nob
el-prize-winners-are.html
--
Warmest Regards
Bonzo
"America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a
25-year Rise" New York Times, March 27, 1933
Ice dam to break prematurely on Argentine glacier - July 7,2008
BUENOS AIRES (AFP) - A huge ice dam on Argentina's Perito Moreno glacier
will
break apart for the first time in the southern hemisphere winter, likely as
a
result of global warming, scientists and environmentalists said Monday.
The 60-meter (yard) high wall of ice holding back a portion of Lake
Argentina
breaks apart spectacularly in cycles of one year to several years, but
always in
summer, and is one of Patagonia's top tourist attractions.
"This is the first time the glacier breaks up in winter. It could be related
to
global warming as rising temperatures affects ice friction," said Los
Glaciares
National Park director Carlos Corvalan.
The Perito Moreno glacier, one of the world's largest, measuring 275 square
kilometers (106 square miles) and five kilometers (three miles) wide at its
mouth, is located 2,800 kilometers (1,740 miles) southeast of Buenos Aires.
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