http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate ... 1429832149

In its 2012 Special Report on Extreme Events, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there is “high agreement” among leading experts that long-term trends in weather disasters are not attributable to human-caused climate change. Why do the president and others in his administration keep repeating this untrue claim?

Climate alarmists have failed to explain the lack of global warming over the past 15 years. They simply keep adjusting their malfunctioning climate models to push the supposedly looming disaster further into the future. Following the U.N.’s 2008 report, its claims about the melting of Himalayan glaciers, the decline of crop yields and the effects of sea-level rise were found to be invalid. The InterAcademy Council, a multinational scientific organization, reviewed the report in 2010 and identified “significant shortcomings in each major step of [the U.N.] assessment process.”

http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/

Freeman Dyson is a scientist of enormous stature. For more than four decades, he taught theoretical physics at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study - described by the New York Times as "the most rarefied community of scholars" in the US.

In a recent 8,000-word profile, the Times says Dyson is "a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists." One colleague describes him as "infinitely smart." Another says: "You point Freeman at a problem and he’ll solve it. He’s extraordinarily powerful.”

Dyson is also a longstanding member of JASON - "a small government-financed group of the country’s finest scientists" that evaluates matters of an often classified nature. At JASON meetings, in which everyone present is considered brilliant, reports the Times, someone will idly pose a math question and Dyson will quickly provide an answer, pointing out that "the smallest such number is 18 digits long."

In the words of one of Dyson's colleagues, "When this happened one day at lunch, the table fell silent; nobody had the slightest idea how Freeman could have known such a fact or...could have derived it in his head in about two seconds.”

For the past four years, he has also challenged prevailing ideas about climate change. In a nutshell, he thinks the computer-generated models being used to predict long-term climate consequences are flawed because scientists have too little information about many of the variables that must be taken into account.

In 2007, Dyson reminded a Salon writer: "I was in the business of studying climate change at least 30 years ago before it became fashionable." Having seen many faddish notions come and go, Dyson is distressed that many environmentalists now believe "global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet."

Although the  public thinks that "anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment," he feels the opposite is true.

"Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists," he insists. But they believe old-fashioned pollution and nuclear weapons are bigger concerns.

http://noconsensus.org/scientists/freeman_dyson.php

To be fair, he also said this:

Freeman Dyson wrote:One of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas.

The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global.

Freeman Dyson

http://edge.org/documents/archive/edge219.html

This is mostly about politics. In “A Many-Colored Glass” I came out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned. I believe global warming is grossly exaggerated as a problem. It’s a real problem, but it’s nothing like as serious as people are led to believe. The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm

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Plus some interesting comments about Richard Dawkins as an added bonus:

http://www.salon.com/2007/09/29/freeman_dyson/

i think Dyson holds 18 honorary degrees - eighteen.

I first heard of Dyson while listening to On Being, a few years back.

I think we do need to cut emissions.
I do not believe alarmists or that the consensus is not to be questioned, is correct in their assumptions, or that the science is not badly tainted by politics, money, and ego.

When considering the "consensus" what exactly is up for debate? From the various available published articles and reports I personally have read the consensus isn't more than an agreement that data gathering techniques have been as methodical as can reasonably be expected, for instance as Dyson explains we cannot measure every square foot of the earths oceans, nor can we cut down every tree on the planet for chemical analysis, same goes for the study of lake and river sediments, glacial ice cores, air sampling, what comes from the rectums of living breathing things, geologic movements, the list can go on and on.

Representative samplings are what forms climate model baselines, its an inherent weakness, and its that aspect deniers exploit.

I have yet to read an article that manages to not admit a level, any level, of effect by humans on the ecology of the earth. Even Dyson admits a human component to climate change

Its an undeniable fact we have affected aspects of the planet profoundly, we have dammed rivers which contributes to unwanted fluctuations in the salmon run, we over fish tuna and grouper, we over breed pets. What's the last three got to do with climate change? Its just examples of how humans alter their environment.

I'm not an alarmist, but I am also not a reductionist, I'm a remover. It is to me abject self-centeredness when as a collective there can be no agreement merely to do no more harm, there is simply not a will to care about an environment we as individuals have little to no control over, it is yet another sham for our species, that we clamor so weakly and bemoan our station, that we intellectualize trivialities of method while falling further behind in our gift of humanity, The side bar of the religiosity of climate science and science in general is a welcome dose of skepticism indeed but a minutiae of a point.

Proposals of living standard devaluation are not a part of the climate correcting advocates agenda, the agenda is little more than the creation of a new standard of respect for the planet and that which sustains all of us, (things that inhabit the earth).

Just as gun control has a perfidious connotation surrounding it, climate change has been calibrated as a tool of fear as well, both sides of the debate fling exaggeration like some farmers fling manure about the pasture.

The credulity of people underlies the entire debate, If more people opened their minds and researched on their own they would see for them selves what an appropriate response should be to much of what is going wrong on this planet, there's to much of a refusal to act on the individual level toward self awareness.

WSJ wrote:Climate alarmists have failed to explain the lack of global warming over the past 15 years.

NOAA and CNN wrote:New climate change records have come along to remind us that Earth's thermostat is steadily pushing upward. More exactly, there are two global high temperature records and a smattering of climate change low points. March 2015 was the warmest March since record-keeping began in 1880, says the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association. And the first quarter of 2015 was the warmest first quarter on record in those same 136 years. That gives 2015 a stab at trumping the hottest year on record -- which was 2014. The uninterrupted continuation of the warming trend is no surprise. The 10 warmest years on record have occurred in the past 17 years.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/09/world/glo ... index.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201503

Have changes in the earth's magnetic field, jet stream currents, and possible cyclical interaction with our Sun's binary star sister been discounted as a factor in the supposed global warming? (rhetorical question).

In other words, since temperature shift is and has been cyclical over the history of the Earth, could the supposed temperature rise be related to factors beyond Man's control?

Dinosaur fossils have been unearthed near The South Pole. Since dinosaurs were cold blooded reptiles, it is quite obvious the Earth's temp has shifted dramatically before people even existed, unless you believe in Fred Flintstone like Sarah Palin does.

Please do not be offended, but as a trained scientist, I do take issue with Marxist redistribution of wealth disguised as climate hysteria. The Earth's temp may very well be rising, but the source of the data is suspect in my view. Trust me, I am in the biz. You have to be careful when looking at statistics. A statistician could be just like a crooked used car salesman, someone with some specialized knowledge and a desire for aggrandizement (although that would also put my testimony in doubt, I suppose).

Well, not to be drive by poster, but I stopped by to promote my vampire romance book, free today on Kindle. The last thing I am going to do is debate this topic with anyone, I am just shooting some holes in the basic premise (That's my day job). Just know that while my pocket is getting picked by a bunch of politicians who couldn't make it as lawyers, my relative silence is based on the hopes of a Jacobian uprising eventually, not on my agreement.

PJ Kelly, we debate these issues as well as discuss books. It may seem to you to be mixing work at play, but your perspective would be great for the rest of us.

There are many things that could cause the temperatures to fluctuate, absolutely. And we can't merely go off the coincidence that mankind's worldwide industrialization is occurring at the same time as the climate is changing. Just as we can't say that where there's smoke there's definitely fire. Even if the mechanism that supposedly fosters the change is well enough understood.

There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global.

Yeah, right. So two rooms in my house are getting warmer every year and I can't stop it but there's no reason to believe this will affect the rest of my house.

It's difficult to notice what's happening to the world around you when your head is jammed up your ass.