MIT Professor Richard Lindzen (Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences) wrote a little article called “The Climate Science Isn't Settled” in the Wall Street Journal on 30-Nov-09 in which he said “IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn't reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability — that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc. Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false. … What does all this have to do with climate catastrophe? The answer brings us to a scandal … namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of "bait and switch" scams.… The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number … CO2 … represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming.” Professor’s Lindzen’s complete article is at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574567423917025400.html.
No research is perfect, and no researcher is either. Still it's important to not let the minor flaws detract us from seeing the larger truths that may also be in evidence. Nevertheless, we must also be aware of those flaws and imperfections, as well as the biases we have and the biases and assumptions inherent in our views of the world -- and in our models of it. Stephen Hawking, the astrophysicist, summed it up nicely when he said "All we ever know is our models, but never the reality that may or may not exist behind the models …. Our models may get closer and closer, but we will never reach direct perception of reality" (Nature, Dec 2000, 775).
Everyone is biased in one way or another by things like language, culture, training, experience, religion, and position, as well as by less honorable sources like selfishness and greed. No one has a monopoly on truth … the important question is how much absolute truth is in their biased truth or as Einstein put it “I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts.” (The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press, 2000 p. 202). Whether you call it "God" or something else, that is (at the least metaphorically) really what science is after -- knowing the truth as God sees it. That's really what we should all be after -- the truth. Even when it is inconvenient.
This whole climate and CO2 discussion (if we can call it a "discussion") is very revealing in that it highlights how poorly understood basic facts about science, systems, and models are among the so-called educated population of the world, including our leaders in industry, government, science, education, media, and the environmental movement. We have terrible pollution problems and they continue to get worse and we squander billions of dollars and precious time on the bad and perhaps even maliciously biased science of anthropogenic global warming (see "Climategate: Follow the Money" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574566124250205490.html). It is long past time for some real change to begin, and perhaps that may just be happening.
