Ik had nog op mijn lijstje staan om een blog te wijden aan het onderzoek van de TU Delft naar de manipulatie van en selectieve omgang met studies aangaande de geluidsoverlast van Schiphol. De Volkskrant brak dit verhaal maandag (link) en velen volgden waaronder Trouw (link). Op BNR Radio sprak SP Kamerlid Jasper van Dijk schande van de situatie. Beluister het zelf:

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In de Verenigde Staten is net een rapport verschenen dat onderstreept dat de gepolitiseerde klimaatwetenschap op precies dezelfde wijze gecorrumpeerd is. De 79 pagina’s dikke studie is uitgevoerd door Jason Scott Johnston, Professor and Director of the Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Trouwens: chief alarmist Michael Mann is verbonden aan een andere universiteit in deze staat.

Lawrence Solomon wijdde op 6 juni een artikel aan het onderzoek in The Financial Post (link), waarin Johnston alle claims uit IPCC publicaties en vergelijkbaar werk heeft nageplozen en vergeleken met de peer-reviewed literatuur. Hij stelde vast dat het establishment in de klimaatwetenschap simpelweg de wetenschappelijke methode niet toepast. Hij quote Johnston als volgt:

Op vrijwel ieder belangrijke kwestie van de klimaatwetenschap, hebben de toonaangevende wetenschappers uit de gemeenschap van het klimaatonderzoek in hun IPCC-rapporten en andere synopsissen verscheidene retorische strategieën toegepast die ogenschijnlijk ten doel hebben om alles systematisch te verbergen of minimaliseren wat wijst op fundamentele wetenschappelijke onzekerheden en meningsverschillen. […]  “alles bij elkaar genomen heeft het er alle schijn van dat we hier van doen hebben met een bewuste inspanning om bewijsmateriaal aan te leveren voor een vooraf vastgestelde politieke voorkeur.”

Hieronder het volledige abstract van de studie:

Abstract

Legal scholarship has come to accept as true the various pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientists who have been active in the movement for greenhouse gas (ghg) emission reductions to combat global warming. The only criticism that legal scholars have had of the story told by this group of activist scientists – what may be called the climate establishment – is that it is too conservative in not paying enough attention to possible catastrophic harm from potentially very high temperature increases.

This paper departs from such faith in the climate establishment by comparing the picture of climate science presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other global warming scientist advocates with the peer-edited scientific literature on climate change. A review of the peer-edited literature reveals a systematic tendency of the climate establishment to engage in a variety of stylized rhetorical techniques that seem to oversell what is actually known about climate change while concealing fundamental uncertainties and open questions regarding many of the key processes involved in climate change. Fundamental open questions include not only the size but the direction of feedback effects that are responsible for the bulk of the temperature increase predicted to result from atmospheric greenhouse gas increases: while climate models all presume that such feedback effects are on balance strongly positive, more and more peer-edited scientific papers seem to suggest that feedback effects may be small or even negative. The cross-examination conducted in this paper reveals many additional areas where the peer-edited literature seems to conflict with the picture painted by establishment climate science, ranging from the magnitude of 20th century surface temperature increases and their relation to past temperatures; the possibility that inherent variability in the earth’s non-linear climate system, and not increases in CO2, may explain observed late 20th century warming; the ability of climate models to actually explain past temperatures; and, finally, substantial doubt about the methodological validity of models used to make highly publicized predictions of global warming impacts such as species loss.

Insofar as establishment climate science has glossed over and minimized such fundamental questions and uncertainties in climate science, it has created widespread misimpressions that have serious consequences for optimal policy design. Such misimpressions uniformly tend to support the case for rapid and costly decarbonization of the American economy, yet they characterize the work of even the most rigorous legal scholars. A more balanced and nuanced view of the existing state of climate science supports much more gradual and easily reversible policies regarding greenhouse gas emission reduction, and also urges a redirection in public funding of climate science away from the continued subsidization of refinements of computer models and toward increased spending on the development of standardized observational datasets against which existing climate models can be tested.

Download de hele studie hier.

Hieronder graag mooie on-topic reacties (en thx voor het uitzoeken van die universiteit)…