http://www.desmogblog.com/press-the-...are-in-retreat



With Democrats controlling the environmental agenda in Congress, a panel of international scientists saying there's a greater-than-90 percent chance that humans contribute to global warming, and former vice president Al Gore calling climate change a moral issue, many besieged global warming skeptics are starting to tone down their rhetoric.
http://www.desmogblog.com/press-the-...are-in-retreat

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Ross Gelbspan
Michael Crichton: Big Oil's Favorite 'Journalist'
9 Feb 06
The American Association of Petroleum Geologists is presenting its annual journalism award this year to Michael Crichton, the science fiction writer whose latest book, "State of Fear," dismisses global warming as a largely imaginary threat embraced by malignant scientists for their own ends.
"It is fiction," conceded Larry Nation, communications director for the association. "But it has the absolute ring of truth" he told the New York Times.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which reviews the work of more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries, we humans are overheating the planet with our burning of oil...

Good moviemaker, but I would hardly call him an expert on climatology or even meteorology. Um, besides that, I thought the book was about how the media and our politicians have been taken hostage by highly motivated interest groups, and the dangers of group think and fiction on top of that. Hardly a scientific report.
Dr. James McCarthy, a co-chair of the 2001 IPCC, summed up the findings not only of that panel but also of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, when he said, "There is no debate among any statured scientists working on this issue about the larger trends of what is happening to the climate."
Dr. Christopher Landsea, a leading expert in the field of hurricanes and tropical storms resigned as an author of the IPCC 2007 report, stating the IPCC was "motivated by pre-conceived agendas" and was "scientifically unsound."
"I am withdrawing because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized. In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns," wrote Landsea, of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory.
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Sounds a lot like what happened at Enron, doesn't it?
Landsea said a lead author for the IPCC report asked him to provide the writeup on Atlantic hurricanes in what he thought would be "a politically-neutral determination of what is happening with our climate."
Landsea, a contributor and reviewer for the IPCC report in 1995 and 2001, says this author, having been told research showed "no global warming signal found in the hurricane record," attended a Harvard lecture stating the polar opposite.
"I found it a bit perplexing that the participants in the Harvard press conference had come to the conclusion that global warming was impacting hurricane activity today. To my knowledge, none of the participants in that press conference had performed any research on hurricane variability... All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin."

One guy? There were over 2000 scientists from a 130 countries involved in the IPCC report. After lengthy calculations, I determined that there would be at least 1999 scientists left. Keep trying.