Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Clueless: Gerald North, who chaired the AGU climate hoax panel panel, says the statement steered clear of value judgments "except for the headline and the first sentence"; he also wonders if skepticism is "tapering off" but he admits he doesn't actually read blogs or other postings

AGU’s New Climate Change Statement Emphasizes Human Role | The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media
Thirteen approve, with one official and very vocal dissenter: Roger Pielke Sr dissents as AGU adopts new statement saying ‘urgent action’ needed on climate.
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But that one, Roger A. Pielke Sr, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, in his dissent threw some pretty sharp elbows at the panel and its chairman.
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AGU logo “In hindsight, I wonder if it’s too strong,” committee chair Gerald North of Texas A&M University later allowed, insisting the overall statement had steered clear of value judgments “except for the headline and the first sentence.”
...North said “I believe he [Pielke Sr] has an agenda.”
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Calling his own approach “more balanced,” Pielke’s alternative statement is one that Curry said she would “vastly prefer.” In commenting on the matter on her site, Curry wrote that she thinks the revised AGU statement “is one of the worst I’ve seen from a professional society on this topic,” and she singled-out the headline, quoted above, for particular scorn, calling it “an explicit statement of advocacy.” But she mistakenly objected that the subject of uncertainty was not used in the statement, which in fact pointed to “important scientific uncertainties” as noted above.
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North told The Yale Forum he had had no role in naming panel members but had been asked to review and approve them when AGU asked him to chair the panel.
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No major scientific society having expressed a policy statement on climate science has moved to temper its statement in the face of withering objections from climate “contrarians” and others within or beyond their own membership. The skeptical blogosphere will no doubt erupt should that ever happen.

North said the panel had received only about two-dozen member comments on the draft when it was published for comment last November. He said also that “it was amazing to me” that in the initial weeks since adoption of the new AGU statement he had received so few “hate mails” compared to his prior experiences with such statements. He said he wonders if there is “a tapering off” among climate skeptics, particularly with the passing of some prominent and skeptical engineers. But he also said he personally does not read blogs or other postings where such rants and criticisms continue to run rampant.

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