In this interview from The Today Program on the threat from global warming, he spouts such gems as; “it [climate change] didn’t happen in one of these smooth curves like these one of these modelers produce, it moved in a series of jerks and jumps” (emphasis his) and “the moment [science] became a career job… you tended to adjust your data to fit what your bosses wanted”.
There are many others, too many and too wack-a-loon for me to feel like debunking them one by one, but, just for the record:
Climate modelers don’t claim the climate will change smoothly like one of their graphs; they are predicting a trend. That means that, once you account for all the seasonal and short-term variations (that’s decades in climate science), the graph you have left will be fairly smooth and THAT is demonstrably following models with frightening accuracy.
I personally find it quite offensive that James Lovelock believes that your job being a career rather than a vocation is enough to make you dishonest. Apart from propagating by inference the myth that climate scientists lied about their data*, he has pretty much just said that no human being in the entire world is either smart enough nor moral enough to tell their boss the truth if it won’t progress their career. What a depressing opinion to hold of your entire species; I wonder what cruel things can have happened in his past to cause him to hold us all in such low esteem?
He also mentioned that we have had an extra cold winter in the whole northern hemisphere this year (we didn’t in Japan btw, which last time I checked is above the equator). James: there is a reason it is called “global” warming. While Europe and North America have been battling the snow, Western Australia has been having their warmest summer on record. Again.
James Lovelock is welcome to his views, he can even have a blog to publish them if he wants, but responsible broadcasters should not be giving him a platform. His ravings are a mixture of fatalistic “we can’t fix it so why try” and “climate scientists don’t know what they are talking about” and, while he doesn’t deny global warming himself (something I find confusing since he obviously has so little respect for those who have proven it), he provides valuable ammunition to those who do, or who have a vested interest in convincing people it can’t be fixed. Worse, because he is a scientist himself (albeit one with a checkered history), he gives respectability and credence to these ideas in the eyes of people who do not know his background.
There is only one antidote for this sort of nonsense – a generous dose of Douglas Adams talking some refreshing sense:
*which they didn’t:
http://watchingthedeniers.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/climategate-inquiry-no-proof-of-fraud-better-disclosure-called-for/
Nicely deconstructed I think, I went from ‘so what’ to ‘yeah I agree’ pretty quickly.
A problem with scientists commenting on something they are not specialist in is that they only seem to use ‘the artifact explanation’ for the data*. In practice, this lends itself to denial-ism, or at least procrastination and limits their thinking of other explanations. I think this is especially true when reductionists are asked to comment on trends in data where confounding variables cannot easily be eliminated.
*I’m aware this is a vast generalization.