Re-evaluating the manufacture of the climate consensus

by Judith Curry, August 21, 2019 in ClimateEtc.


A new book by Oppenheimer, Oreskes et al. entitled ‘Discerning Experts: The Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy‘ makes a case against consensus seeking in climate science assessments.

I have long railed against the consensus-seeking process used by the IPCC (see my previous blog posts on this topic).  And particularly, my paper:

Oppenheimer has long voiced concerns about consensus (e.g. his 2007 paper).  However, Oreskes has been consensus enforcer in chief, originating the 97% thingy.

I haven’t read their new book, but authors Oreskes, Oppenheimer and Jamison have written an essay on their book in Scientific American, entitled Scientists have been underestimating the rate of climate change.

You can see where this is going from the title of this article; most of this is an attempt to justify alarmism. But they make some interesting points.  Excerpts:

Lets stop manufacturing consensus about climate change.  Lets open up the scientific debate on climate change and celebrate disagreement and use it to push the knowledge frontier of climate science.  The whole consensus thing has done little to reduce global CO2 emissions, which was the point of the whole exercise.  It’s time for new approaches to both science and policy.

Listen to the Trees!

by Jim Steele, August 22, 2019 in WUWT


What’s Natural?

Published in Pacifica. Tribune August 20,2019

This summer I taught a class on the Natural History of the Sierra Nevada for San Francisco State University’s Sierra Nevada Field Campus. The first day we taught students how to identify the trees. Once students know their trees, they can easily see how tree species vary with elevation, temperature, moisture, and snow pack. They can see which species colonize open sunny areas and which trees need shade before they can invade. Old time naturalists used trees to identify “life-zones” where different species of mammals, birds, insects and other plants can be found. Furthermore, when you listen to the trees, you can see change.

 

Tree rings indicate the warmest decades of the 20th century were the 1930s and 40s, and temperatures have yet to surpass those decades. This divergence between thermometers and trees is best explained by the fact that instrumental temperatures are biased upwards when taken at hot airports or in areas recently suffering from growing urban heat island effects. In contrast, trees measure temperatures in natural habitat.