"APS to Review Statement on Climate Change
February 20, 2014
A subcommittee of POPA is reviewing the APS statement on climate change in accordance with the policy to review official statements every five years.
Preparations are under way by the APS Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) to review and possibly update the society’s statement on climate change. In the coming months, the APS membership will have a chance to weigh in on any proposed revisions before the society adopts a final draft.
“We intend to keep the membership informed at every stage in this process,” said Robert Jaffe a physicist at MIT and Chair of POPA. “We’re quite eager to make sure that the revision of the climate change statement is done in the most open and orderly way.”...
One of the big problems with the climate establishment is that, like many institutions, it tends to polarize according to interest and ideology. Like the League of Women Voters or the American Association of University Women (both reliably liberal organizations, though they did not start out that way), a combination of self-selection and bias has placed the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and various scientific associations, almost wholly in the hands of True Believers. While the IPCC has included some prominent dissidents from the “consensus,” their critiques from inside the process tend to be ignored or rejected.
This is what makes so significant today’s news that the American Physical Society is appointing a balanced, six-person committee to review its stance on climate change. The APS, with 60,000 members, has hitherto fallen in line by issuing statements reflecting the usual alarmism about climate, but experienced the resignations of some of its high profile members because of their official stance.
The Quadrant lays out the membership:
The APS Panel’s review sub-committee, after ‘consulting broadly’, appointed a workshop to get science input into the questions. The appointed workshop of six expert advisers, amazingly, includes three eminent sceptic scientists: Richard Lindzen, John Christy, and Judith Curry. The other three members comprise long-time IPCC stalwart Ben Santer (who, in 1996, drafted, in suspicious circumstances, the original IPCC mantra about a “discernible” influence of manmade CO2 on climate), an IPCC lead author and modeler William Collins, and atmospheric physicist Isaac Held.
Lindzen, Christy, and Curry will be a handful for the APS. Maybe the most important part of the review will be its transparency:
The sub-committee is ensuring the entire process is publicly transparent — not just the drafts and documents, but the workshop discussions, which have been taped, transcribed and officially published, in a giant record running to 500+ pages
At the center of this inquiry will be the problem of “temperature stasis,” i.e., the current “pause” In warming that is causing so much embarrassment to the Climatistas just now. Among the questions the APS committee will review:
While the Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST) rose strongly from 1980-98, it has shown no significant rise for the past 15 years…[The APS notes that neither the 4th nor 5th IPCC report modeling suggested any stasis would occur, and then asks] …
