[Vision2020] Realclimate.org 4-13-15: Ruddiman's Early Anthropogenic Climate Impact Theory

Fri Apr 17 21:04:28 PDT 2015

Seriously Debi?  The motley crew that I out hang with just clings tightly to their own blind biases on this issue.  They just reject any report and / or attack the source that doesn't align with their own unalterable belief.  The sad reality is that throughout history science has been routinely trumped by politics and religion until it can be proven beyond all doubt.  And personally, I'm OK with that to some extent because the effect is that it forces very comprehensive and far reaching studies to unearth all the facts and impeach all of the fiction.

This short video is a good parallel of what happens whenever the topic of climate change comes up with either my 'global warming is a myth' friends or with my 'we are going to die because of global warming' friends:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvSjiq1pLVY

From: debismith at moscow.com
To: starbliss at gmail.com; vision2020 at moscow.com
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2015 19:32:23 -0700
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Realclimate.org 4-13-15: Ruddiman's Early	Anthropogenic Climate Impact Theory

Thanks, Ted. this is good info, and assists me when 
i talk to folks with little science background and a denier agenda---you are 
always on top of it!  I have watched climate denier folks melt-down when 
confronted with facts that refute their disbelief---even they can only suspend 
disbelief until their arms hurt a bunch....and most of them don't have the 
muscle mass....
debi R-S

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: 
  Ted Moffett 

  To: Moscow Vision 2020 
  Sent: Friday, April 17, 2015 6:44 
PM
  Subject: [Vision2020] Realclimate.org 
  4-13-15: Ruddiman's Early Anthropogenic Climate Impact Theory

  I was surprised to just today read on Realclimate.org a piece dated 13 
  April 2015, by climate scientist William Ruddiman, discussing how the 
  scientific community has received his controversial theory regarding early 
  (before major fossil fuel powered industrial civilization) human climate 
  impacts. 

  His Realclimate.org piece argues, and I quote, against the 
  alleged "censure from a nearly monolithic community intent on imposing a 
  mainstream view" that is sometimes claimed to exist by those critical of the 
  science demonstrating major human impacts on climate change. 

  I was particularly interested in this Realclimate.org piece because I 
  referenced his theory in a 2007 op-ed in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News, which 
  now has a Google News webpage of an actual scan of the actual op-ed page in 
  the Moscow-Pullman DN.  How or why this scan happened I do not know, but 
  it can be read at the webpage below:

  https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2026&dat=20070223&id=x14zAAAAIBAJ&sjid=MvAFAAAAIBAJ&pg=3113,2791746&hl=en

  ---------------------------------
  Ruddiman's Realclimate.org article mentioned above is pasted in below, 
  and comments generated by his article are also available at the website 
  below:

  http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/04/a-scientific-debate/

  A Scientific Debate Filed under: Climate Science — mike @ 13 April 
  2015  

  Bill Ruddiman, University of Virginia

  Recently I’ve read claims that some scientists are opposed to AGW but 
  won’t speak out because they fear censure from a nearly monolithic community 
  intent on imposing a mainstream view. Yet my last 10 years of personal 
  experience refute this claim. This story began late in 2003 when I introduced 
  a new idea (the ‘early anthropogenic hypothesis’) that went completely against 
  a prevailing climatic paradigm of the time. I claimed that detectable human 
  influences on Earth’s surface and its climate began thousands of years ago 
  because of agriculture. Here I describe how this radically different idea was 
  received by the mainstream scientific community. 

  Was my initial attempt to present this new idea suppressed? No. I 
  submitted a paper to Climatic Change, then edited by Steve Schneider, a 
  well-known climate scientist and AGW spokesman. From what I could tell, Steve 
  was agnostic about my idea but published it because he found it an interesting 
  challenge to the conventional wisdom. I also gave the Emiliani lecture at the 
  2003 December American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference to some 800 people. 
  I feel certain that very few of those scientists came to my talk believing 
  what my abstract claimed. They attended because they were interested in a 
  really new idea from someone with a decent career reputation. The talk was 
  covered by many prominent media sources, including the New York Times and The 
  Economist. This experience told me that provocative new ideas draw interest 
  because they are provocative and new, provided that they pass the key ‘sniff 
  test’ by presenting evidence in support of their claims. 

  Did this radical new idea have difficulty receiving research funding? No. 
  Proposals submitted to the highly competitive National Science Foundation 
  (NSF) with John Kutzbach and Steve Vavrus have been fully funded since 2004 by 
  3-year grants. Even though the hypothesis of early anthropogenic effects on 
  climate has been controversial (and still is for some), we crafted proposals 
  that were carefully written, tightly reasoned, and focused on testing the new 
  idea. As a result, we succeeded against negative funding odds of 4-1 or 5-1. 
  One program manager told me he planned to put our grant on a short list of 
  ‘transformational’ proposals/grants that NSF had requested. That didn’t mean 
  he accepted our hypothesis. It meant that he felt that our hypothesis had the 
  potential to transform that particular field of paleoclimatic research, if 
  proven correct. 

  Were we able to get papers published? Yes. As any scientist will tell 
  you, this process is rarely easy. Even reviewers who basically support what 
  you have to say will rarely hand out ‘easy-pass’ reviews. They add their own 
  perspective, and they often point out useful improvements. A few reviews of 
  the 30-some papers we have published during the last 11 years have come back 
  with extremely negative reviews, seemingly from scientists who seem deeply 
  opposed to anything that even hints at large early anthropogenic effects. 
  While these uber-critical reviews are discouraging, I have learned to put them 
  aside for a few days, give my spirits time to rebound, and then address the 
  criticisms that are fair (that is, evidence-based), explain to the journal 
  editor why other criticisms are unfair, and submit a revised (and inevitably 
  improved) paper. Eventually, our views have always gotten published, although 
  sometimes only after considerable effort. 

  The decade-long argument over large early anthropogenic effects 
  continues, although recent syntheses of archeological and paleoecological data 
  have been increasingly supportive. In any case, I continue to trust the 
  scientific process to sort this debate out. I suggest that my experience is a 
  good index of the way the system actually operates when new and controversial 
  ideas emerge. I see no evidence that the system is muffling good new ideas. 

  ---------------------------------------
  Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett

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