Should the Scientific Challenges of Dissident Nobel Laureates be answered?

Discussion in 'Science & Society' started by Eugene Shubert, Sep 19, 2015.

  1. Eugene Shubert Valued Senior Member

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    Go for it.
     
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  3. Daecon Kiwi fruit Valued Senior Member

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    What about the video did you want to discuss?
     
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  5. Eugene Shubert Valued Senior Member

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    I'd like to hear the answers to the scientific challenges put forth by the Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever.
     
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  7. Daecon Kiwi fruit Valued Senior Member

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    You mean this guy?

    http://www.skepticalscience.com/ivar-giaever-nobel-physicist-climate-pseudoscientist.html
     
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  8. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    Giaever's contrarian climate opinions come from a position of extreme ignorance on the subject, as he admits. [0:58] “I spent maybe half a day — a day or so — on Google” While he is certainly a highly accomplished physicist, that does not automatically make him a climate expert as well. As he himself has admitted, he has spent very little time researching the subject, and it shows. He personifies the classic stereotype of the physicist who thinks he understands all scientific fields of study.

    This is why we don't rely on indvidual scientists or individual papers to draw conclusions about climate change. The only way to get an accurate picture is through the work of many scientists, peer reviewed and scrutinized over decades and tested against multiple lines of evidence. He's the one trying to make empty claims backed only by his personal authority in a field where he has earned zero authority.

    Giaever is currently associated with the Heartland Institute. So not on the side of the science.

    Here, in red, are some areas of basic science where Giaever has pushed his career down the stairwell:

    See next post for related content.
     
    Last edited: Sep 19, 2015
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  9. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    Concrete examples of Giaever's ignorance and sources of learning that he ignored:
    • “How can you measure the average temperature of the Earth? I don't think that's possible”
      • The accuracy of the global surface temperature record has been repeatedly confirmed.
      • There are also learning resources which explain how we know these facts.
      • Since this is ground zero to approaching a problem, finding out what the empirical facts are and not known to Giaever, it appears you can stop listening here and gain no less information.
    • [04:27] “From ~1880 to 2013 temperature has increased from ~288K to 288.8K (0.3%). If this is true, to me it means that the temperature has been amazingly stable.”
      • What type of physicist can't do a conservation of energy calculation in their head? If the surface temperature changes that much in 133 years, then you are talking about an energy imbalance currently averaging over 200 TW.
      • We're not talking about the melting of the non-ice parts of the Earth, we are talking about effects on biology on a global scale. So pooh-poohing the change as small percentage change in thermodynamic temperature is based on no empirical point of view. It's a bad argument.
    • “Water vapor is a much much stronger green[house] gas than the CO₂. If you look out of the window you see the sky, you see the clouds, and you don't see the CO₂.”
      • What a moronic bit of reasoning. Even weathermen know that H₂O is a dependent variable, not an input signal. That's because H₂O precipitates out of the sky all the time. Thus the total amount of H₂O in the air is causally related to the mean global temperature.
      • A second moronic part is that he seems to be ignorant that CO₂ is an invisible gas. This was a meeting of young scientists, not ignorant blind people with no exposure to the concept of what CO₂ is before.
    • “Is it possible that all the paved roads and cut down forests are the cause of "global warming", not CO2? But nobody talks about that.”
      • Everyone talks about that. But the data shows it's not the cause of the measured effect.
      • Then Giaever contradicts himself by claiming that Steven Chu is one of these people who talks about the subject nobody talks about. Giaever is speaking with a more literally forked tongue than I would credit to a non-politician.
    • “[Fellow Nobel Laureate Steven Chu has] been bought by the global warming people, and he's now helping Obama trying to make green energy in the United States.”
    • “Is climate change pseudoscience? If I’m going to answer the question, the answer is: absolutely.”
      • A sound bite and not a rational, fact-based judgment supported by the lecture.
    Videos that Eugene Shubert's post should be replaced with:

    http://www.mediatheque.lindau-nobel...hemistry-and-climate-in-the-anthropocene-2012
    http://www.mediatheque.lindau-nobel.org/videos/31331/the-science-and-policy-of-climate-change-2012

    This post (and the prior one) copies heavily to to point of being plagiarized from that of Dana Nuccitelli because Eugene Shubert never shows any sign of clicking through to good science links, even though Daecon really tried.
     
    Last edited: Sep 19, 2015
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  10. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Mod Hat ― Drive-by reminder

    While we greatly appreciate those who are willing to give their efforts to such threads, it is also necessary that we remind members that lazy, drive-by topic posts are generally inappropriate.

    Seriously, if one wishes to post a thirty minute video and put no effort into their own role in the discussion, there is a place for that.

    It's called "Facebook".
     
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  11. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    It's intellectually dishonest to promise "scientific challenges" in the thread title when you present an anti-scientific Gish gallop with nothing that passes for scholarly research.
    It's also intellectually dishonest to promise Nobel Laureates (plural) in the thread title when you present only one.
     
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  12. Eugene Shubert Valued Senior Member

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    1st challenge (1:46-2:55): Global warming is a religion because you can’t discuss it.

    2nd challenge (4:25-4:42): From 1880-2015 the average temperature has been amazingly stable. It has increased from ~ 288K to 288.8K, i.e., only 0.3%.

    3rd challenge (5:10-5:59) Only 8 thermometers to measure the average temperature of a continent. Where do you put them?

    Also, you missed Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever saying that most of his challenges are based on commonsense.

    Here is another Nobel Laureate that calls global warming a scientific fraud (21:00-29:08):

     
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  13. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    Ivar's first issue with inclusion of the ocean temps in the data may or may not be a valid complaint. It's probably too early to tell.

    34 other Nobel laureates have signed a document voicing their concerns about global warming. Many of those are no doubt not climatologists either.

    About the global sea level rise:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise
    1. For example, geological observations indicate that during the last 2,000 years, sea level change was small, with an average rate of only 0.0–0.2 mm per year. This compares to an average rate of 1.7 ± 0.5 mm per yearfor the 20th century.

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    Last edited: Sep 19, 2015
  14. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    Eugene, this is definitely a spurious argument. What PERCENTAGE change does it take to cause a cascade phase transition on some part of this planet? It depends.

    On a satellite would be an excellent choice, wouldn't it?

    Under that argument, a lot of science, like relativity, to name only one example, fails miserably. Observation beats common sense, a lot of the time.
     
  15. Eugene Shubert Valued Senior Member

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    What? No one is capable of proceeding in a chronological order? Has the global warming religion got everyone stumped?
     
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  16. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    It's not a religion to me, Eugene. I have nothing to gain or lose by discussing it, but I'll be the first to admit, I'm no expert on the subject. I'm a former telecom engineer, so when someone asks me "where do you put the thermometers?", the answer to that one is kind of obvious, to someone with my background, at least.

    I provided a detailed graph of the sea level changes he was discussing. I thought I saw the same one flash on his slides. It is very interesting to me, somehow he just seemed to totally ignore the part of the graph that resulted from measurement of sea level changes done by satellite. Does he even know what a satellite is?

    Just because climatologists decided recently to include average ocean temperatures in their estimates of global warming is not something that necessarily negates or skews their views of the problems of global warming or carbon emissions.

    The argument that a large number of scientists and climatologists in particular have a different view regarding global warming actually is an indictment of someone who instead relies on "common sense", particularly when that "common sense" does not inform him, satellite telemetry has come a very long way since the time he won his Nobel, and none of us are the least bit interested in where he thinks the eight thermometers should have been placed.
     
  17. river

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    Climate is changing but it has nothing to do with CO2 levels.
     
  18. Eugene Shubert Valued Senior Member

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    Not only is climate changing but hurricane severity is actually decreasing according to observational data presented by Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever. Measured CO2 levels has no appreciable effect.
     
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  19. Daecon Kiwi fruit Valued Senior Member

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    And what about any observational data presented by an actual, qualified, climate scientist?
     
  20. river

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    Tim Ball

    http://drtimball.com
     
  21. Daecon Kiwi fruit Valued Senior Member

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  22. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    Well, he has us dead to rights there, Eugene. With the exception of 1995, the trend in the Atlantic has been a decrease in hurricane activity over the last two decades. Authority: NOAA. I'm not certain this statistic would be an accurate predictor of global warming trends, and evidently neither does NOAA.

    My oldest stepson is a hurricane physicist contractor with NOAA.

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    Last edited: Sep 20, 2015
  23. Eugene Shubert Valued Senior Member

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