Dean's World

I'd been wondering about the effect on wind shear for awhile. Calculating that effect is obviously tricky, though. Fortunately, scientists are on the job:

Global warming could increase a climate phenomenon known as wind shear that inhibits Atlantic hurricanes, a potentially positive result of climate change, according to new research released on Tuesday.

The study, to be published on Wednesday in Geophysical Research Letters, found that climate model simulations show a "robust increase" in wind shear in the tropical Atlantic during the 21st century from global warming.

Wind shear, a difference in wind speed or direction at different altitudes, tends to tear apart tropical cyclones, preventing nascent ones from growing and already-formed hurricanes from becoming the monster storms that cause the most damage.

Ouch, these guys are definitely getting the cold shoulder at the next global warming conference.

As I've said before, I'm not sure we really know whether or to what extent global warming is a net positive or negative overall. There certainly seems to be too much alarmism, though — Al Gore might like to claim we'll be inundated by hurricanes and a 20-foot sea level rise, but this tends to knock down the first assertion, and the IPCC is saying the maximum sea level rise over the next century is 23 inches.

Hmm.

I'm having a hard time imagining a group of professional researchers that feels a more desperate desire to morally condemn fully qualified scientific skeptics.

*This article bumped to the top. See update below.*

I must say, I'm geeked.

For years now I've recognized that Professor Peter Duesberg of Berkeley is one of the most wrongly-maligned scientists on the planet. He may not be right about everything but he simply does not deserve the kicking-around he's gotten.

I've also said for some time that he is responsible for a theory on what causes cancer that is almost certainly correct. I've been saying so for years, and often been patronized for it. But based on what I knew was going on behind the scenes, I repeatedly told Dean's World readers to watch for it, because it would be coming in the popular press.

Slowly, it's been happening, like a snowball building. We've all been watching it happen (here, for example). Now it has reached a new level: the latest issue of Scientific American has a major article by Peter on Cancer, and it pretty firmly establishes, to anyone who reads it, that the aneuploidy theory of carcinogenesis is very serious and may just be the most important development in cancer research in decades.

He is the man responsible for bringing it to light. No one can deny it, although many would like to.

An interesting sidelight is that, because of his AIDS heresy (Peter has never believed that HIV kills t-cells), he has been permanently locked out of any funding from our often corrupt, unaccountable, cronyism-laced funding system for scientific research. As Professor Richard Strohman recently stated:

I would like to take this opportunity to publicly congratulate my long time friend and colleague, Peter Duesberg, on this quite remarkable 'breakthrough' into completely mainstream recognition.

I would also like to point out that even the "Disclaimer" is to his credit. In much the same way as with the Rene Magritte painting that declares itself not to be a pipe, one cannot help but be caught on the horns of several logical and semantic dilemmas when encountering it.

The one that first comes to mind as particularly relevant to Peter and AIDS is that it does seem impossible that a man who might just be correct concerning something as complicated as the genetic basis of malignancy could be so totally wrong about something as straightforward as whether HIV kills T-cells.

More on Strohman right here. (And by the way, if you want to learn some things about the Human Genome Project that you've probably never heard--like the fact that it was a huge disappointment to a lot of people and that it caused a fundamental re-evaluation of a lot of previous assumptions--see Strohman's piece here.)

America's system of funding scientific research has been labeled as "peer review." This is, much too often, a lie. In many cases--not all, but many--it needs to be called "Crony Review." Peter still to this day cannot get a grant application approved to save his life. This despite an exceptional record of achievement before he dared question whether HIV really kills t-cells. And despite the fact that over ten years ago he advanced what may well be the most important development in cancer research in a generation.

While millions died, our corrupt Crony Review system blew it big time. Peter's not the only one who illustrates this fundamental breakdown in scientific protocol, but he's probably the most egregious example.

A scientist who has made major contributions in important areas, but questions the consensus view, should not be punished for it should he? Yet Peter has been, repeatedly.

It is high time that the American taxpayer stops being scared of scientists, and starts asking pointed questions about how our tax dollars are spent on this funding system. As Al Gore is so fond of noting:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

It's not conspiracy. It's the bureaucracy, stupid.

Government incompetence married to corporate self-interest: it's not a good thing.

In any case, without that sideline: check out the latest Scientific American, which should be on news stands now. Hated dissident Peter Duesberg is on the cover because no one can deny that he's fundamentally changed the face of cancer research. And how cool is that?

You read it here first.

*Update*: For some reason an earlier thread linked to this one by Celia Farber disappeared. In any case, I got some emails from Professor Duesberg and put them into the comments here.

I see that the credibility-impaired global warming politician-scientists are angry that other politicians aren't toeing the line sufficiently for them.

This community of researchers, laced as it is with croneyism and an opaque, non-accountable "peer review" funding system where they get to spend tax money on each other to protect their incomes, has no scientific credibility anymore. The Wegman Report pretty much said all that needs to be said about these people. If they won't clean up their act, and instead keep issuing ever more dire warnings (which coincidentally result in more money and more prestigious careers for themselves), and keep giving condescending, head-patting, "look at me I'm a saint" answers to pointed questions, there's no reason the rest of us should look at their sky-is-falling predictions with any less skepticism than we look at research put forward by tobacco company scientists.

These people are political bureaucrats, and they need to be treated like political bureaucrats.

*Update*: Argh, had the first link wrong. Sorry about that. This is what I meant to link.

The truth of the matter is that some people have metabolisms that are a lot more efficient--i.e. more prone to get fat--than others. In earlier generations, when people were poorer and food was not so abundant, this was a pro-survival genetic inheritance: your metabolism was slower, and more efficient, so you could survive better when food was short. We now live in a time of abundance, when being hungry is not a normal, everyday occurrence.

Search as long and as hard as you want through the peer-reviewed scientific literature, and you will find that there is no evidence that fat people can become normalweight simply by eating less and exercising more and being "more disciplined." Barely 1% of the chronically obese can become--and stay--normalweight this way. Watching what you eat and exercising helps prevent the problem from becoming worse, or can ameliorate it a little, but it can't fix the problem.

No program of eating less and exercising more has ever been shown to be a cure for chronic obesity, and none has ever shown that overweight people are by nature less disciplined or more self-indulgent than the non-obese. Indeed, the average fat person tends to be more self-conscious and more disciplined than the non-obese.

It's a metabolic issue, not a character issue.

By the way, the majority of Americans are overweight, and a third are medically obese. I guess we're just all slobs with character flaws, eh?

We're taking over. Give us your pizza or we'll destroy you.

(Via Joy.)

There seem to be three relevant assertions regarding the issue:

1) The global temperature is rising, especially in the last ten years.

This is accepted by almost everyone.

2) Global warming is anthropogenic, driven primarily by man-released greenhouse gasses, especially CO2.

This is now widely accepted, but not uncontroversial, with a vocal minority of scientists pointing to other factors like the solar cycle as potentially having a major influence as well.

3) Global warming's effects are overwhelmingly a net negative for humans and other life on Earth.

This, for me, is the problematic assertion, as it’s the least examined and hardest to prove. Estimates of sea level rise over the next century range from 100 meters (disastrous) to less than a foot (not even mildly inconvenient), but with the IPCC finding a maximum level of rise of less than one meter, which doesn’t seem to pose any great risk (no, Al Gore, half of Florida is not going to be underwater), I think the doom-mongering on this issue is a bit overblown. Other putative negative effects are similarly inconclusive, such the predicted “worst hurricane season ever” that failed to materialize last year. Another obfuscating factor is the “clinician’s bias” in news coverage of global warming’s effects: if Gaia bleeds, it leads, and sometimes the connection to climate makes little sense.

And very little attention is paid to possible benefits of global warming. Such benefits might include: longer growing seasons, greater arable areas, expanded natural habitats and greater biodiversity (most life needs warmth; there are no rain forests in the Arctic), and reduced devastation from possible incidents of sudden global cooling (such as a nuclear/volcanic winter event). It's worth noting that historically even mild global cooling has been devastating, while warming has generally been highly beneficial. While the possibility of cooling may be lower than that of warming, there is a concept in risk management which says the worse the potential outcome, the lower probability we should accept for it (This is easy to understand: we accept a high probability of being mildly inconvenienced by security at the airport rather than accept the very small chance that we will be killed on our flight by armed terrorists because there is no security).

At the same time, it would be irresponsible to assert there is no possible danger from global warming, and as Glenn points out, we should be limiting pollution anyway on general principle. But with cost estimates for Kyoto in the trillions, it’s important to be sure the cure isn’t worse than the disease — or just silly (are those solar helicopters?).

So, under the deluge of rhetoric on this issue, what's a rational empiricist to do?

Well, I think it's useful to draw a distinction between two kinds of activities intended to curb global warming: things we should probably be doing anyway because they have other benefits, and things that we would not do except for the putatively anthropogenic, putatively harmful warming of Earth. Falling into the first category would be efforts to increase our use of nuclear power and fund more research into less-polluting alternative fuels. In the latter category we have CO2 emissions controls such as the Kyoto Protocol and similar efforts “encouraging” people to use less energy (which notably even Al Gore refuses to consider doing voluntarily) through coercive means like taxation; we would not normally do these things as they are otherwise wasteful and injurious to personal freedom and economic prosperity. (I will ignore carbon offsets entirely until someone proves to me they function as more than modern indulgences)

I think our best bet, for the time being at least, is to restrict our efforts to the first category while we gather more data. If the temperatures start to decrease as we approach the solar minmum, we can breathe a sigh of relief – and who knows, maybe we’ll even have reason to be thankful for those elevated CO2 levels.