Fred Pearce makes up a Gavin Schmidt quote out of thin air and otherwise writes total bullcrap about the real scientists and the climate change denier faux scientists -- when is New Scientist going to wake up!?!

Readers, sorry to republish this, but you need to see what the Climate Denial Machine is putting out there in what used to be respectable science magazines like New Scientist (and now they have even subverted Scientific American, and seem to have a hand in at Nature (which owns SciAm), not to mention the BBC -- read all of these sites with a critical eye, as they can no longer be trusted, unfortunately -- this is what millions of dollars over the years from fossil fuel companies can do to our sources of information -- hijack them!).


Please use multiple headvises before reading -- Pearce's writing really is quite disgusting  Oh, and the meeting was supported by oil money.

Climate sceptics and scientists attempt peace deal

12:04 2 February 2011

Environment

Fred Pearce, consultant

Climate sceptics offer a peace deal. Well, no it wasn't quite like that. But in Lisbon, Portugal, last week, I joined a group of 28 climate scientists, bloggers and professional contrarians who spent three days discussing how to encourage reconciliation in the increasing fractious debate about the science of climate change.

The meeting was the brainchild of University of Oxford science philosopher Jerry Ravetz, an 81-year-old Greenpeace member who fears Al Gore may have done as much damage to environmentalism as Joseph Stalin did to socialism. Post-Climategate, he found climate science characterised by "a poisoned atmosphere" in which "each side accuses the other of being corrupt". Mainstream researchers were labelled "ideologues on the gravy train," while sceptics were denigrated as "prostitutes and cranks."

His dream of an instant rapprochement in Lisbon didn't come off. The eventual make-up of the workshop, paid for by the European Commission, was too lopsided in favour of the sceptical camp.

Those making the trip included heroes of the sceptics such as statistician Steve McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick, plus writers and bloggers such as Steve Mosher, the man who broke the Climategate story [Mosher falsely smeared all -- the only scandal was the trumped up scandal itself], and "heretical" scientists such as Georgia Tech's Judy Curry and Peter Webster.

Avowed non-sceptics included Hans von Storch, a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and James Risbey of CSIRO. But the leaders of mainstream climate science turned down the gig, including NASA's Gavin Schmidt, who said the science was settled so there was nothing to discuss. [You've just read a complete fabrication of a quote, never said by Dr. Schmidt.]

Across the spectrum, participants were mostly united in disagreeing with Schmidt. Climate science, they said, is much less certain than the IPCC mainstreamers say, and peace can be found only if all accept what they dubbed "the uncertainty monster." 

Leaving out the cranks, what's to be resolved? Few at the meeting doubted that climate change was a real issue that the world had to address, but they said the science had been corrupted. They agreed with von Storch, who told a public meeting after the workshop that "too much climate science is done not out of curiosity but to support a preconceived agenda."

The biggest, most totemic, issue remains the IPCC's adoption of the "hockey stick" narrative, which holds that 20th-century warming is unique over the past millennium. Most in Lisbon saw this as a scandalous example of IPCC editors taking sides in an unresolved debate, and of how "scientific findings were judged according to their political utility."

Equally contentious is the charge - the pet subject of several in Lisbon - that the IPCC is "in denial" about whether ocean oscillations, which can absorb and release heat from the atmosphere but are not well represented in climate models, could explain the global warming of the past 40 years.

Third, most agreed that there was no scientific basis for the world adopting a target to prevent global warming going above 2 °C. It was "arbitrary," they said, and cooked up by climate scientists with a political agenda.  [Apparently, they think that 2 °C doesn't mean disaster -- we haven't even had one degree yet and the climate is going haywire -- guess they did not notice.  Note the smear that the real scientists are cooking things up.]

Much time at the meeting was taken up bitching rather than conciliating. Several complained about how hard it was to get papers published if they ran counter to climate-change orthodoxy. They agreed with von Storch that peer review was riven with conflicts of interest.

And they felt this was most pronounced in the IPCC itself, where reports assessing climate science were routinely written by people sitting in judgement on their own research and that of their critics.

Public trust in climate science had collapsed and had to be rebuilt through reconciliation, they said. Of course, mainstreamers would claim it is hypocrisy for "sceptics" to lash out at mainstream climate science and then invoke the resulting public confusion to demand a seat at the table. But have they a better idea?