Nobel Laureate Ivar Giaever Quits APS over Stand on Global Warming

[Doc Savage Fan]

Because now that this is now a political issue, it's no longer politically correct to research anything that might controvert the "accepted science". If you want to get money, you have to do research that concludes only what the true believers agree with.

Case in point. Jasper Kirkby (CERN) is one of the most preeminent particle physicists in the world. His CLOUD project was essentially "delayed" 10 years due to a comment he made in 1998 stating that the sun and cosmic rays "will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth's temperature that we have seen in the last century." He expressed that global warming may be part of a natural cycle in the Earth's temperature. Heresy!

After this statement, funding for the CLOUD Project immediately dried up.
Details here: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=975f250d-ca5d-4f40-b687-a1672ed1f684

The only reason he eventually got funding was when other studies (Svensmark, Eigil Friis-Christensen, Shaviv, Scafetta, West) started showing evidence of the GCR link.

Kirkby has now recently confirmed the mechanism by which GCRs induce cloud nucleation. His work continues on how this potentially impacts our climate and relates to historical climate changes.

This is a perfect example of how good science can be subverted by groupthink and heavy handed politics in the scientific community.

 

[ElFenix]

Physicists are not Climatologists.

climatology is a job description. a lot of climatologists are economists because climate science and economics share 1 very important thing: you can't run experiments at a macro level. so economists developed econometrics to try to isolate variables in a huge sea. turns out that is applicable to climate science. physicists have overlap as well.

 

[Hacp]

Indeed, and 98% of specialists who have done so came to the same conclusion, despite the monetary and visibility-based incentives to take the minority position.

There is more monetary incentive to take the majority position. You can get NSF funding.

 

[woolfe9999]

After this statement, funding for the CLOUD Project immediately dried up.
Details here: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=975f250d-ca5d-4f40-b687-a1672ed1f684

Your author asserts that Kirkby made remarks about the sun's contribution to warming that were criticized by climate scientists, and that funding for his project dried up. He then asserts a causal link between the two, while offering no proof whatsoever of any such link.

In fact, this article is rife with unsupported assertions about what scientists of various stripes are saying or doing, without quotations or links. I wonder if any those those scientists might disagree with how he's characterizing their research. For example, he says the IPCC is discounting the effect of the sun "by half." He never says why. Ya think the scientists who are doing so might have a coherent reason for doing do? We wouldn't know by reading your article. But gee, it certainly *sounds* bad the way he puts it.

Edit: I checked around, googling Kirby, CLOUD, and funding. The assertion that the IPCC killed or delayed the funding all seems to loop back to your article.

Then there's this nagging problem:

http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/...-experiment-studies-cosmic-climate-connection

Here is Kirkby himself giving a very different reason for the trouble with funding.

He goes on to explain some of the difficulties he faced winning the funding. "Although interdisciplinary experiments are very politically correct these days, in a world where there are limited resources – which is definitely the world we live in – the funding agencies are not at all used to funding across boundaries. Atmospheric funding agencies are not accustomed to paying for CERN experiments. By the same token CERN is not used to funding atmospheric experiments. When there are limited resources, and first class proposals are being turned down in your own subject it is very easy to put a line through the strange-looking proposal that doesn't fit in anywhere. That to some extent was a problem but finally the experiment is up and running." It is a notable personal achievement for Kirkby, then, that CLOUD has got so far. But how long will it go on?

 

[Harvey]

There is more monetary incentive to take the majority position. You can get NSF funding.

At least, you can use that as YOUR lame excuse why you don't get funding.

 

[monovillage]

There's quite a few articles that have been written about NSF funding, it's not as if it's an unknown subject. Here's a few examples from just a single climate scientist.
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.c...erit-review-criteria-revision-and-principles/

 

[Doc Savage Fan]

Your author asserts that Kirkby made remarks about the sun's contribution to warming that were criticized by climate scientists, and that funding for his project dried up. He then asserts a causal link between the two, while offering no proof whatsoever of any such link.

In fact, this article is rife with unsupported assertions about what scientists of various stripes are saying or doing, without quotations or links. I wonder if any those those scientists might disagree with how he's characterizing their research. For example, he says the IPCC is discounting the effect of the sun "by half." He never says why. Ya think the scientists who are doing so might have a coherent reason for doing do? We wouldn't know by reading your article. But gee, it certainly *sounds* bad the way he puts it.

Edit: I checked around, googling Kirby, CLOUD, and funding. The assertion that the IPCC killed or delayed the funding all seems to loop back to your article.

Then there's this nagging problem:

http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/...-experiment-studies-cosmic-climate-connection

Here is Kirkby himself giving a very different reason for the trouble with funding.

Here's an article in PhysicsWorld from 1998 when the "controversial" project was a "go". After this article and Kirkby's statement appeared in print, the project was suspended. Coincidence? Here you have one of the world's leading particle physicists announcing a new project sponsored by CERN and suddenly it's stopped cold. How odd is that?

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/3124
CERN plans global-warming experiment
Nov 26, 1998

A controversial theory proposing that cosmic rays are responsible for global warming is to be put to the test at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics. Put forward two years ago by two Danish scientists, Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen, the theory suggests that it is changes in the Sun's magnetic field, and not the emission of greenhouse gases, that has led to recent rises in global temperatures.

Experimentalists at CERN will use a cloud chamber to mimic the Earth's atmosphere in order to try and determine whether cloud formation is influenced by solar activity. According to the Danish theory, charged particles from the Sun deflect galactic cosmic rays (streams of high-energy particles from outer space) that would otherwise have ionized the Earth's lower atmosphere and formed clouds.

The theory is supported by findings presented by Svensmark, of the Danish Space Research Institute, in a paper published in the 23 November edition of Physical Review Letters. Svensmark found long-term correlations between cosmic rays and the Earth's temperature, concluding that cosmic radiation fluctuations were related to cloud cover. "Clouds are important to the Earth's energy balance, " says Svensmark, "but there are still many aspects of the relationships that need clarification. If the sun does influence our climate as we believe, it means that processes originating in the formation of the Milky Way affect the climate."

Jasper Kirkby, who will lead the CERN project, believes Svensmark is right. He points out that there was a mini ice age in northern Europe at the end of the 17th century that was not caused by humans but that perfectly matched changes in the Sun's activity. "The theory will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth's temperature that we have seen in the last century, " says Kirkby. "But we have yet to prove the relationship between the Sun's cosmic radiation and the formation of clouds." He points out that global warming may be part of a natural cycle in the Earth's temperature.

Bent Sørensen, an environmental physicist at Roskilde University Centre in Denmark, believes Svensmark's paper lacks real evidence. "It's an interesting proposal for research, which is why CERN will try to acquire the knowledge that is lacking, " says Sørensen, "but I feel there's a large gap between finding statistical correlations with some assumptions and having a causal correlation or even a physical correlation."

Sørensen says that Svensmark and Friis-Christensen have done themselves no favours by denouncing the greenhouse theory: "I think it's very unfortunate that the authors said right from the beginning that they didn't believe in the greenhouse theory, which is a proper physical theory with a concrete mechanism. Instead their theory is still speculative. I'm not saying there isn't anything in it, it just has a different status to the theories behind the greenhouse effect."

It's interesting to note how Kirkby's rhetoric has dramatically changed since 1998...wonder why? It's also interesting that the director of CERN mandated a "gag order" to all scientists involved in CLOUD to not give opinions or interpret the recent results.

"I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them. That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters." - Rolf-Dieter Heuer (Director General of CERN)

Show me where a similar type of "gag order" has ever been mandated regarding any study that supports the man-made global warming hypothesis. I won't hold my breath.

The reality here is that politics play a huge role in climate science, especially when you live on the 'wrong side of the tracks' so to speak.

 

[Munky]

climatology is a job description. a lot of climatologists are economists because climate science and economics share 1 very important thing: you can't run experiments at a macro level. so economists developed econometrics to try to isolate variables in a huge sea. turns out that is applicable to climate science. physicists have overlap as well.

And there's the correlation between economists and climatologists - unlike "real" science, when your models and predictions don't work, you keep talking as if you knew WTF was going on.