Scientists to Talk about Physics, not Politics, of Climate

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://today.duke.edu/2013/01/apsclimate

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Scientists to Talk about Physics, not Politics, of Climate[/font]

[font size=4]Duke scientists have helped to build a new community of physicists to analyze climate science, not policy.[/font]

January 23, 2013 | Ashley Yeager

[font size=3]Durham, NC - Duke physicists Robert Behringer and Warren Warren are not climate scientists. Their research is not directly linked to climate or to its physics. But over the past few years, the two researchers have become key players in an experiment that will soon test scientists' ability to be objective when talking about climate and humans' possible effects on it.

…

The APS began to design the topical group on the physics of climate in response to the society's controversial 2007 statement on climate change. In the report, the society stated, "The evidence is incontrovertible. Global warming is occurring." That claim of incontrovertibility launched a storm of criticism among physicists because scientists rarely use the word incontrovertible, and the nature of science is to question mainstream ideas, Behringer said.

"Global warming is clearly established, but the APS took too much of a political or 'Al Gore' stance, which made scientists question the statement and made one Nobel prize winner and several other prominent scientists drop their membership to the society," he added. "And, there is a continuing debate on the contributions to global warming caused by humans versus those that would occur without human influence."

The APS, having about 50,000 members at the time, lost several hundred physicists and faced criticism in editorials in the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets in response to the statement. The society wrote a clarifying statement explaining the original stance, noting that the word incontrovertible was not one typically used in science. The new explanation, however, did little to assuage some scientists' fears that the society was becoming more politicized than its charter allowed.

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[Speck Tater]

1. And when the human race goes extinct, the wishy-washy scientists

will share the blame for being too cowardly to take a stand.

[caraher]

2. That new APS "topical group" has a weird history

I remember thinking about joining it before concluding it didn't really seem to have a purpose. As I recall, the people who were up in arms against the APS statement on climate change suggested it, and the APS officers took the idea, formed the group and took a vote of APS members to approve it. But the "skeptics" didn't like the fact that they didn't get to control the process, while the people who never had a problem with the climate change statement mostly felt like there isn't a lot of "real physics" to do in climate physics that isn't already being done by, well, professional climate scientists. So it's this group that didn't really have much of a constituency, as far as I could tell.