What really broke my heart though is that when I decided to google this to see if the stuff they wrote had been debunked I found blogs which did not just provide clear technical arguments demostrating where dubner and levitt errored, they were also angry rants and contained some misrepresentations of the dubner and levitt’s position too along with rather paranoid assumptions about their motives (one can speculate a luttle hear but it should be in a careful reasoned manner) and jumping on scraps of info to support this paranoia with weak arguments. It’s especially upsetting because it removes one of the ways lay people can differentiate between the experts and the quacks. I guess scientists bloggers don’t use the same care when wrioting blogs as they do when writing papers, but i really wish they would.

Anyway thanks for being different.

The letter is posted at http://www.realclimate.org

The chapters on climate change in the new book are a complete and unmitigated embarrassment

Just because the specific numerical predictions of the 2001 IPCC report are imperfect does not mean that the main point — anthropogenic warming — is incorrect. As any scientist should know, almost every model describing a complex system has shortcomings, but as long as the essential behaviors of the model are correct then the model is useful. So scientists (even physicists) keep the model anyway — no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

I have not read the 2001 report, but I think figures TS.2 and TS.5 of the 2007 report (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-ts.pdf) are pretty convincing, even in the absence of a predictive model as clean as Newtonian physics.

The Prius smear: “But every time a Prius owner drives to the grocery store, she may be canceling out its emission-reducing benefit, at least if she shops in the meat section… The world’s ruminants are responsible for about 50 percent more greenhouse gas than the entire transportation sector”

The 2 percent line: “human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay.”

Someone needs to ask Levitt what he believes the effect on price would be when demand is completely inelastic and you have a 2% decrease in supply.

“… trends over the past 10 years show only a 0.07 °C increase in global average temperature. Although this is only a small increase, it indicates that there has been no global cooling over this period. In fact, over the past decade, most years have remained much closer to the record global average temperature reached in 1998 than to temperatures before the 1970s. All the years from 2000 to 2008 have been in the top 14 warmest years on record.”

I think you should state your credentials on your claims (not links to fringe web sites), including your academic affiliation. If you are legitimate, no need to stay anonymous, you’re a PhD physicist after all. There was once a petition showing 10,000 scientists named Steven (or Stephanie) to agree that global warming is a problem, so petitions don’t really do it for most of us.

What is always interesting to me is the stridency of the denial of global warming by some, which I obviously find unconvincing. Let’s just say we do the steps that global warming worriers suggest: reduce use of fossil fuels, emphasize the use of renewable and non-CO2-creating energy sources, above all use energy efficiency wherever practical. Where’s the harm? We certainly are going to run out of oil at some point, so why not switch earlier rather than later — the costs are the same either way? And, why take the chance that the global warming models that show significant harm might be right? It leaves me completely baffled that some are so passionately opposed. I can only conclude that it is political and ideological, not scientific.

With regard to the state of scientific opinion on Global Cooling in the ’70s, the following link, which contains a transcript of a Letter sent to President Nixon from the Chair of a conference upon the subject may be illuminating, http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/letter/

I’m old enough to recall that the cooling effect was reported upon widely, and was supported by a significant scientific minority – nothing like the present consensus upon AGW, of course – but it wasn’t just a few articles in the press as set out above.