Comedy gold: APS president attacks “inaccurate characterization” of APS position, doesn’t realize he’s attacking an APS quote

[og w ash@hogwash AGWHooey]

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/08/comedy-gold-aps-president-attacks-inaccurate-characterization-of-aps-position-doesnt-realize-hes-attacking-an-aps-quote/#more-56251

Comedy gold: APS president attacks “inaccurate characterization” of
APS position, doesn’t realize he’s attacking an APS quote
February 8, 2012



When German ex-climate-alarmist Fritz Vahrenholt came out last week as
a climate skeptic, he related his moment of epiphany, when he was
firsthand witness of the alarmists’ sheer disregard for error:

Vahrenholt’s skepticism started when he was asked to review an
IPCC report on renewable energy. He found hundreds of errors. When he
pointed them out, IPCC officials simply brushed them aside. Stunned,
he asked himself, “Is this the way they approached the climate
assessment reports?”

For a comedy of errors, witness American Physical Society president
Robert Byer’s response to the 16 climate skeptics who recently
criticized his organization’s statement on climate change in the Wall
Street Journal. It should serve as a Vahrenholtian moment for APS
members. Here is Byer’s complaint:

The APS statement is unequivocal. It notes that “global warming is
occurring.” … The statement does not declare, as the authors of the op-
ed suggest, that the human contribution to climate change is
incontrovertible.

See how up-to-speed the APS is? Byers is aware that climate skeptics
don’t deny global warming—that they only question whether this warming
is attributable to human action—and so he assumes that the critics
must have accused the APS of claiming that human attribution is
incontrovertible. But if he had actually read the skeptic article that
he presumes to correct, he would know otherwise. They explicitly
questioned the statement that “global warming is occurring.” How did
Byers miss this sentence:

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming
for well over 10 years now.

It may be incontrovertible that the planet WAS warming, past tense.
But the claim that the planet is incontrovertibly STILL warming is
nothing short of bizarre.

It’s not just little news items like: “Met Office releases new figures
which show no warming in 15 years.” It’s the very idea of making an
unequivocal statement about the content of incoming data, about the
direction that our ever-changing climate is currently heading. Byers
really doesn’t see the problem?

Byers attacks the APS statement itself

Of course the sixteen critics also took the APS to task for its
presumption that warming is primarily caused by humans, but they did
this entirely with quotes. When Byers attacks the claim that APS
attributes warming to human activity, he is blissfully unaware that he
is attacking the APS statement itself.

Here is the full skeptic paragraph on the APS:

In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a
supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned
from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: “I
did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS
policy] statement: ‘The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming
is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant
disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social
systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce
emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.’ In the APS it is OK to
discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a
multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is
incontrovertible?”

Giaever is directly quoting the APS statement. The quote is not out of
context. There are no omitted ellipses. It is APS itself that jumps
directly from the claim of incontrovertible warming to the claim that
greenhouse gases must be reduced, implicitly attributing the
proclaimed warming to human GHG production. Nobody can blame Byers for
taking this quote to imply that APS also considers human attribution
to be incontrovertible, but it is quite amazing that he somehow fails
to realize that it is in fact a quote.

Byers is all het-up about this scurrilous aspersion. How dare the
skeptics accuse the APS of such perfidy! It is a ludicrous
concatenation of error, all in a mere 200 word response to a 1200 word
op-ed.

Who can write 200 words for a national newspaper without bothering to
check the few facts addressed? Does Byers even know what the APS
statement says? He can’t have bothered to read the WSJ op-ed. And he
is clearly unaware that there is some leeetle bit of doubt about
whether the planet is in fact still warming.

Witness your naked president, APS members. He actually thinks he is
wearing clothes. Maybe you could just shuffle him out the door, and
that egregious APS statement with him.