Monday
Nov302009
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Another climatologist speaks out
Nov 30, 2009 Climate I've been getting some traffic from a French site called Rue89 and I've picked up this quote by a French climatologist, Serge Galam, from there.
The debate is not over, even among the "warmists" ... but it should have been public like any scientific debate. These emails show a discrepancy between the assertion that a spectacular scientific truth is established, the debate declared closed, and the fact that the proponents of those views recognize among themselves that uncertainties remain..."
The translation is mine via Google. French article here.
Reader Comments (10)
It's just like a statement on the IEET (Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies) website says as regards global warming: "There is no debate".
'Debate' is totally the wrong word - especially when we are dealing with arts grads and the great unwashed.
It suggests that
(1) someone in the room has the right answer
(2) the right answer needs convincing rhetoric
(3) taking a vote is the way to decide
In real science we accept there are some subjects where we just do'nt have a clue, and that nature works independently of human attempts to understand.
The danger for English graduates like the BBC's Roger Harrabin is that his whole mental process is not trained for this kind of question. He thinks that if some say a play is too long and others say its too short then its probably the righgt length - and that we can take a vote and move on.
Funny thing they were attacking skeptics(I wanna say non-believers) about the existence of scientific consensus, the time they were worried about the travesty weather.
There was no consensus even to the "warmest" of the "warmest" scientists.
warm regards! :)
The article says that Galam is a physicist (Serge Galam, physicien que nous avions interrogé) not a climatologist. That does not disqualify him, it's just that I want to, as the French say, 'mettre les points sur les i'. He has indeed written a book about global warming but it seems more polemical that scientific.
Instead of upgrading non-climatologists it may be more profitable to downgrade climatologists. Is there such a thing as 'climatologist'? And is a climatologist who specializes in one subsubdiscipline better qualified to judge about global warming than for example a physicist? I have browsed through the first volume of the AR4 report and it seems to me that a reasonable background in statistics and general scientific maturity are all that is needed to understand this report and evaluate the plausibility of AGW. Maybe we should tell the public that statisticians are the most qualified to evaluate the plausability of global warming. How many of these climatologists have a basic knowledge of statistics?
@ Bishop Hill
I've replied to your question on camirror but I realise maybe I can post here also :
The French article on ClimateGate you talk about is atrociously biaised like all other mainstream media whose coverage merely consisted of the translation from an apologist article from the AP (and of course, NO television coverage).
Interestingly, it's on a minor web newspaper, with very leftist editorial team but the reader comments to the ClimateGate article is widely skeptical.
Note also that Serge Galam is not "climatologist" but just mathematician. French media's tactics has been to ask some unknown skeptics next to IPCC scientists to give a semblance of balance, and conclude to make the alarmist case. And how they treat the ClimateGate has been no different.
A increasingly prominent French skeptics is now Courtillot and ironically, he had the intuition of Jones' fraud already in 2007 : http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/11/26/skewed-science.aspx
That's one of the reasons he has been the target of RealClimate as demonstrated in emails (1200426564) and (1200493432), a case Steve McIntyre has also dealt with on CA.
MH
I started with Galam as a climatologist, having misread the article. Finding my mistake I changed him to physicist, then found he'd written a book about climatology so I put him back again.
Jean
Thanks for that. Can you clarify the bias for me? Is it just that they put a physicist up against a climatologist?
@BH,
It's biased because the article's main thrust is based on the question : "why the Climategate coverage in France has been a flop" (translation of the title) and the response is
1) because Climate change is too difficult a scientific question for the general public to understand (gasp !)
2) because you cannot conclude much of anything from the revelation.
In short, they are saying "circulez, il n'y a rien à voir" (move on, nothing to be seen here)
And I can tell you that readers here in France are mad as hell and journalists are experiencing an unprecedented warming of both hemispheres (L&R, not N&South), all the more because we have been rammed through the throat a carbon tax (voted without opposition in the parliament then the senate) due to begin next January (2010) which is rejected by 2/3 of the French according to polls.
The Pravda (!) has made a much more decent article today on the ClimateGate, that's rich ! http://www.rue89.com/2009/11/29/pourquoi-le-climategate-a-fait-un-flop-en-france-127890
Err, the Pravda article is here : http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/30-11-2009/110832-climategate-0
@BH @Jean
The situation in Belgium is no better and certainly not in Flanders. Having had a mathematical education I'm not inclined to believe in global conspiracies but the week that has passed has been extremely trying. As far as I have been able to ascertain using Google and Google News, the press in Flanders has mentioned climategate only three times. On 22/11/2009, Het Laatste Nieuws, the newspaper in Flanders with the largest readership, published (at least on the internet) a neutral article with the heading 'Scientists tamper with info about climate change'. One day later on 23/11/2009 it published (on the internet) a follow up with the heading 'Hackers themselves tampered with climate mails'. The article said that the mails had been falsified. I have roamed the internet for more than a week and have never seen even the slightest suggestion in that direction. There must have been an intervention from higher up to undo the previous publication and to do so they had to resort to extreme measures viz. the accusation of falsification, for which of course they gave no evidence at all. Today (30/11/2009), the newspaper for the intellectuals in Flanders, De Morgen, published (on the internet) an article about global warming where climategate was casually mentioned, minimalizing its significance. I was very much relieved (irrational exuberance you may call it). It looked to me as the beginning of the breaking of the dam. There are seven major newspapers in Flanders. There are also two TV news stations, one public and one private. None of them mentioned climategate on their internet sites. I have no TV but I conjecture that they did not mention it on television either. I don't know whether readers in Flanders are mad as hell. The flemish are a pretty inert lot (German, not Latin :)). Bloggers in toto seem rather uninterested or they just don't know. Curiously enough, I ended my search this morning reading the same Pravda article that Jean mentioned. The times they are a changin'.
On physicist vs "climatologist":
Well physics is a pretty "hard" science - it has well established laws that can be proved from first principles or existing theory, and can often be verified by experiment.
Of course there are sometimes grey or controversial areas - Einstein's work was not accepted at first, and Einstein himself had problems with quantum physics. There is stuff like string theory that does not command universal acceptance.
"Climatology" by contrast seems to consist of a lot more hand-waving and opinion, mixed in with some pretty basic science.
I'd put up a good physicist against a climatologist any day. (Some of the latter are just social climatologists :-) )
Geologists also seem to have their feet on the ground :-)