But perhaps there’s the malignant point: our isolation (ie, most of us arein North America). One skeptic Michael did not mention is Bjorn Lomborg. His thick and serious book – “The Skeptical Envrionmentalist” – was produced without any yucky corporate or rightwing support. Yet that fact did not prevent him from getting pilloried by the US Scientific American, yet praised by the Italian Sci Am! In fact, if you visit http://www.lomborg.com, you can also read details of a Danish debate conducted by authorities and its outcome: “The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation has December 17 2003 repudiated findings by the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DSCD) that BjàƒÆ’à‚ⷲn Lomborg’s book ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist’ was ‘objectively dishonest’ or ‘clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice.’”

Only on March 12, 2004, did the DSCD’s rejection of its own complaints become official. These turn out to have been based on the US Scientific American’s own sponsored critique by many AGW heavy-hitters. Their authority sufficed to persecute a junior academic dissenter. And yet having said so, is it now safe to go on and ignore the politics of science in climatology? I think not.

Lomborg – a statistics professor at the time teaching in a Danish university political science department – began his study by trying to repudiate the claims of the late US economist Julian Simon. Simon is often dismised because of his “right wing” connections. But in large part, Lomborg found Simon substantially correct: the environement is getting better, with certain exceptions (eg, oceans). As for climate change, the best evidence (satellite observation) indicates very slight recent warming.

If so, why throw trillions of dollars at an issue with limited certainty and often hyped benifits when definite benefits can be had for hundreds of millions of people with so much less money?

I bring up Lomborg’s persecution and its conclusion here because the participants above in the back-and-forth with Michael on ACW lead us to the political problem of marginalizing serious dissent in science and its enormous human and inhumane consequences. Because of such marginalization, some $42 billion dollars has been spent on ACW by the US federal government in the past 15 years – 90% of all research dollars on the matter worldwide. (Numbers approximate, from memory.) And yet most educated and informed people are like Michael, ready and willing to ceed authority to spend trillions of more dollars guided by experts. Scientific conclusions can have enormous ethical consequences in public policy.

Now, surely all will admit that this is a political matter with great practical importance. For example, Michael mentions one certain dire problem with AGW: more climate instability – he says (#63): “Just today, the most intense hurricane ever recorded formed in the tropical ocean.” But look at the evidence of those closest to bearing the real costs: private US insurers – those who place real bets indemnifying against property loss – unlike the supposedly more serious scientists – are unmoved by ACW: “The American Insurance Association, which represents 400 property and casualty insurers, says the debate about global warming has not been resolved.

“‘The science isn’t that definite,’ said David F. Snyder, the group’s vice president and assistant general counsel. ‘There’s no consensus in the insurance industry on the issue.’” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/04/AR2005100401700.html

(Others, like Munich Re – a large reinsurance firm in Europe – are either politically pressured to join “the consensus” or are enjoying the cost-subsidizing compliance with the EU brings (or both). At any rate, the political-legal-economic environment isn’t as few there as here, and so words like “consensue” are more rountinely respected there.
http://gnn.tv/headlines/3607/Disaster_Losses_Lead_Insurers_to_Global_Warming_Debate)

Having lived in Boulder, Colorado for many years, I’ve had a front row seat on environmental politics because several federally funded labs like NCAR, UCAR and NOAA are local fixtures. These institution’s research has largely supported AGW instead of skepticism. But up the road at Colorado State University, the famed hurricane season forecaster William Gray in 1998-9 descried the impact of the ACW research funding-fetish as crowding out his arguably more important – and socially and economically more valuable – research. Billions a year are not enough to go around in climate work!

Despite facts like these, Michael’s skepticism – like many others – goes the other way: “The skeptics…have little more than a political manifesto camouflaged as science (witness Crichton, Inhofe, Michaels, Tech Central Station, The Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Global Climate Coalition, etc.).” But as Gray avered, a climatologist like Pat Michaels is not going to sell-out his professional integrity for merely the 200-grand in support from Western Fuels Association. It’s a question of degree of fiscal dependence; some dependence is far from near-total. If it is fair to raise the question of bias and conflict of interest here, why don’t any AGW supporters equally raise the issue – much less answer it – when mega-billions in federal monies support thousands of “climate scientists”? Isn’t what’s good for the goose also good for the gander?

So why don’t AGW suporters answer these conflicts instead of blithely ignoring them? The findings of Public Choice economcs over the decades, as well as simple common sense, tells us that they don’t because to do so would expose their deep conflict of interests to public scutiny and skepticism; it’s in their self-interest to change the subject and hype their works importance for their own benefit. It is rightly pointed out that Fred Singer and many other skeptics by contrast are retired or else elder scientists, and therefore lack both the same slavish dependence and arrogant ambition the mega-billion dollar conflicts of interest that younger government scientists thrive on – yet it still remains fashionable to condemn the little funding that private interests do for the skeptics while giving a uncritical pass to ACW proponents. Isn’t this revealing?

One who famously tried to expose this to our benefit was President Eisenhower. He made the phrase “military-industrial complex” famous for identifying one kind of conflict of interest. ( CIA WMD CYA, anyone?) He did not, however, neglect the other one: publicly funded science. In fact, they are a triad of self-dealing interests. Here’s how he put it in his Farewell Address:

“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of electronic computers.

“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present–and is gravely to be regarded.

“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
http://www.ku.edu/carrie/docs/texts/ddefarew.html

Scientific elites can become the captives of public causes – and not just during war, but during the contests of peace-time, too. Eisenhower inveighed against the very conflict of interest that climate scientists succumb: groveling before their financial masters, telling them what they want to hear instead of being ethical masters of the truth – a phenomemon that gives rise to this very web site. Yet Michael completely ignores (and others do worse: morally exempts) publicly funded ACW research conflicts of interest.

Which is why Michael Crichton advocates reforms that would prevent such fateful mistakes as the Hockey Stick from guiding policy-making. He writes: “I believe we have ample evidence that our governmental procedures fail to separate reliable information from mere opinion, speculation and untested belief.

“That’s why I argue that policy decisions should be grounded in independently verified studies”¢’‚¬?because that is the only way to get the politics out of science.” (See more here http://michaelcrichton.com/speeches/index.html)

An instance of this baleful neglect and the educated ignorance it inculcates came to me personally. Last year, I dated a 30-something physician. She earned her Masters in environmental science and policy from The University of Minnesota in the mid-90s. She asked me about the field now, (which I also study, but abroad); about ACW, “…we knew [man-made temperature increases] would happen.” Her best remembered professors were former Cold War physicists, recruited to serve a new cause.

Like Michael, she was very much impressed with the physicist’s certainty that added CO2 and temperature increases are directly related. Yet this ignores that this definite correlation holds only for closed systems – not open ones like the earth. Even advanced education in this subject would deny her certain wisdom in our captivity to policy made by and for our scientific elites.

The epistemological status of climatology is rather far from eco-toxicology, our best developed environmental field, and yet that field has many controversies (eg, Superfund sites). Education in the facts of ecological uncertainty is what we all could benefit more from instead of seductive mythologizing. But will we ever hear about this from a organization already (yes – ALREADY: read the successors to the Montreal Protocol) committed to positive anti-AGW action like the UN?

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Treaty are modelled on this success, intending to verify support for ACW. The mega-billion dollar environmental lobby saw in the treaty work eliminating CFCs a model for a virtuous new world-wide project. The UN – again post-Cold War, with dimminishing world wide conflicts – needing another reason to justify its existence, obliged. And so did Vice President Al Gore.

The seemingly neutral work of a thousand scientists in the IPCC is nonetheless beholden to the “Excecutive Summary” writers who work for politically appointed “diplomats,” most of whom are the priviledged sinecures of poor states. The result, therefore, is more of a self-justifying (because it abrogates power to the UNs well-paid bureacracy) scam than a neutral, truth-seeking, science focused project. we should be surprised if it ever finds null-results. Should we therefore ignore the implications of the mega-billion dollar “oil-for-food” corruption just because the IPCCs work is sacred “science?” Or just trust “well-intended” authorities? Or should we find creative ways around these endemic conflicts instead of meekly submitting to be “guided.”

We are dumb not to resist because suspicious conflicts of interest abound; they are ignored at humanity’s peril, good sense, as well as our pocketbook. All the while, we can feel better about ourselves for exercising self-denial. It is the virtue of the ascetic follower. Given this near-religious institutional power, let us now pray before the vulgar SUV.

I agree with your post. There would be limits on distribution of data when such data was produced for a privately funded study. However, I feel that even privately funded studies should have their data distributed when the study is used to influence public policy.

Yes HCO3- is a very weak acid. That’s why it’s ideal as a buffering agent. But H2CO3 is a pretty strong acid; except that it tends to spontaneously break up into CO2 gas and water. Anyway the formulas for the pH of a solution are straightforward and there’s no doubt that if the concentration of HCO3- relative to H2CO3 goes down because more CO2 is absorbed by the ocean the pH will also go down. But as I said, this will eventually be ofset by increased weathering on land and by dissolution of CaCo3 from shells. The question is how fast and how much the new equilibrium differs from the present one. The ecoalarmists are almost certainly wrong, but it might well be that a different balance of sea creatures will develop.

And there’s nothing particularly strange, let alone funny with the atmosphere interacting with the ocean and producing change. Every square meter of ocean has a square meter of atmosphere above it and we can expect that they will be in some sort of dynamic equilibrium. If CO2 concentrations have inceased 30% then the upper parts of the ocean will reflect that.