[Stoves] interesting link

Crispin Pemberton-Pigott crispinpigott at gmail.com
Sat Jun 23 17:18:13 CDT 2012


Dear Ron and Ron

 

>From Ronal L

>These topics, which seem important to you,  should be on the table at Rio + 20  - and I can't see that they are.  Because, in part, of the three sites listed below in your "P.S."

This is reminiscent of the several times Ron, that you have called me a ‘denier’ concerning  CAGW wherein you have sought to avoid a discussion of the physics of the contribution of stoves, coal, PM, fuels in general, to the warming, if any, of the planet, and bearing on the reasons for your decision to promote char-making stoves.

It so happens that the whole issue of ad hominem arguments in place of real and rational argument was taken to the pages of the Journal Nature when Dr Paul Bain used the name ‘denier’ in a published comment. Today there is an excellent discussion of the unreasonableness of this sort of tactic taking place at the link at the bottom of this message. 

You and many other are calling for the development and rolling out of specific stove types based on the argument that it is a necessary and effect way to prevent the planet from heating up as a result of ‘our greenhouse gas emissions’. This claim ultimately is rooted in defective and unrepresentative models of the earth’s climate that are so defective, a recent paper by McKitrick found that a ‘random walk’ (a statistical random number generating  technique) outperforms virtually all climate models. This he did checking 530 million combinations of human CO2 and land use changes to see if any weighted combination could match the empirical data.

A discussion of this an the abstract are here at one of the websites you quite incorrectly say is holding up an agreement at Rio+20:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/14/climate-models-outperformed-by-random-walks/

With reference to the use of epithets on this list for those supporting an open investigation of the atmospheric science, here is hoping that this puts an end to it on this list. See below. The rest of Dr Brown’s reply to Dr Bain is at the link at the end.

Sincerely,

Crispin

 

Dr. Robert G. Brown writes:

The tragic thing about the thoughtless use of a stereotype (denier) is that it reveals that you really think of people in terms of its projected meaning. In particular, even in your response you seem to equate the term “skeptic” with “denier of AGW”.

This is silly. On WUWT most of the skeptics do not “deny” AGW, certainly not the scientists or professional weather people (I myself am a physicist) and honestly, most of the non-scientist skeptics have learned better than that. What they challenge is the catastrophic label and the alleged magnitude of the projected warming on a doubling of CO_2. They challenge this on rather solid empirical grounds and with physical arguments and data analysis that is every bit as scientifically valid as that used to support larger estimates, often obtaining numbers that are in better agreement with observation. For this honest doubt and skepticism that the highly complex global climate models are correct you have the temerity to socially stigmatize them in a scientific journal with a catch-all term that implies that they are as morally reprehensible as those that “deny” that the Nazi Holocaust of genocide against the Jews?

For shame.

Seriously, for shame. You should openly apologize for the use of the term, in Nature, and explain why it was wrong. But you won’t, will you… although I will try to explain why you should.

 

[continues at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/22/a-response-to-dr-paul-bains-use-of-denier-in-scientific-literature/#more-66096 ]

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