[ RadSafe ] FW: AW: dose RATE of ANY Medicine is the decisivevariable

[Dukelow, James S Jr]

Jim Muckerheide wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Muckerheide, Jim (CDA)
Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 2:09 PM
To: 'Rainer.Facius at dlr.de'; hflong at pacbell.net; nbcsoc at hotmail.com;
tedrock at starpower.net; radsafe at radlab.nl
Cc: rad-sci-l at WPI.EDU; Rad_Sci_Health at yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: AW: dose RATE of ANY Medicine is the decisive variable

   <snip>

There's an interesting Aug 30 Boston Globe column on this process,
"MIT's inconvenient scientist," at:
http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2006/08/30/mits_inconvenient
_scientist/ 

(It may require a free registration.  Let me know if you want me to send
it.)

Regards, Jim 

======================

Alex Beam's op-ed was posted on another mailing list and I responded.

-----Original Message-----
From: 
Sent: Saturday, September 02, 2006 1:55 PM
To: Mailing List for Risk Professionals
Subject: [riskanal] Fwd: Re: Fwd: Re: Fwd: Global warming: the other
side

inconvenient scientist

By Alex Beam, Globe Columnist  |  August 30, 2006

Speech codes are rare in the industrialized, Western democracies. In
Germany and Austria, for instance, it is forbidden to proselytize Nazi
ideology or trivialize the Holocaust. Given those countries' recent
histories, that is a restraint on free expression we can live with.

More curious are our own taboos on the subject of global warming. I sat
in a roomful of journalists 10 years ago while Stanford climatologist
Stephen Schneider lectured us on a big problem in our profession:
soliciting opposing points of view. In the debate over climate change,
Schneider said, there simply was no legitimate opposing view to the
scientific consensus that man - made carbon emissions drive global
warming. To suggest or report otherwise, he said, was irresponsible.

Indeed. I attended a week's worth of lectures on global warming at the
Chautauqua Institution last month. Al Gore delivered the kickoff
lecture, and, 10 years later, he reiterated Schneider's directive. There
is no science on the other side, Gore inveighed, more than once. Again,
the same
message: If you hear tales of doubt, ignore them. They are simply
untrue.

I ask you: Are these convincing arguments? And directed at journalists,
who are natural questioners and skeptics, of all people? What happens
when you are told not to eat the apple, not to read that book, not to
date that girl? Your interest is piqued, of course. What am I not
supposed to know?

Here's the kind of information the ``scientific consensus" types don't
want you to read. MIT's Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology Richard
Lindzen recently complained about the ``shrill alarmism" of Gore's movie
``An Inconvenient Truth." Lindzen acknowledges that global warming is
real, and he acknowledges that increased carbon emissions might be
causing the warming -- but they also might not.

``We do not understand the natural internal variability of climate
change"
is one of Lindzen's many heresies, along with such zingers as ``the
Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940," ``the evidence so far suggests
that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average," and
``Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and
were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many
of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing
again. And, frankly, we don't know why."

   <pseudo-snip>

When Lindzen published similar views in The Wall Street Journal this
spring, environmentalist Laurie David, the wife of comedian Larry David,
immediately branded him a ``shill." She resurrected a shopworn slur
first directed against Lindzen by former Globe writer Ross Gelbspan, who
called Lindzen a ``hood ornament" for the fossil fuels industry in a
1995 article in Harper's Magazine.

I decided to check out Lindzen for myself. He wasn't hard to find on the
16th floor of MIT's I.M. Pei-designed Building 54, and he answered as
many questions as I had time to ask. He's no big fan of Gore's, having
suffered through what he calls a ``Star Chamber" Congressional
inquisition by the then senator . He said he accepted $10,000 in
expenses and expert witness fees from fossil-fuel types in the 1990s,
and has taken none of their money since.

He's smart. He's an effective debater. No wonder the Steve Schneiders
and Al Gores of the world don't want you to hear from him. It's easier
to call someone a shill and accuse him of corruption than to debate him
on the merits.

While vacationing in Canada, I spotted a newspaper story that I hadn't
seen in the United States. For no apparent reason, the state of
California, Environmental Defense, and the Natural Resources Defense
Council have dragged Lindzen and about 15 other global- warming skeptics
into a lawsuit over auto-emissions standards. California et al . have
asked the auto companies to cough up any and all communications they
have had with Lindzen and his colleagues, whose research has been cited
in court documents.

``We know that General Motors has been paying for this fake science
exactly as the tobacco companies did," says ED attorney Jim Marston. If
Marston has a scintilla of evidence that Lindzen has been trafficking in
fake science, he should present it to the MIT provost's office.
Otherwise, he should shut up.

    <pseudo-snip>

``This is the criminalization of opposition to global warming," says
Lindzen, who adds he has never communicated with the auto companies
involved in the lawsuit. Of course Lindzen isn't a fake scientist, he's
an inconvenient scientist. No wonder you're not supposed to listen to
him.

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam at globe.com.

===================

Richard Lindzen has the best scientific credentials of the relatively
small collection of climate scientists skeptical of the global warming
"consensus".  His credentials are even better than Alex Beam suggests;
he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.  If you follow
scientific debate, frequently two sets of scientists with excellent
credentials will hold diametrically opposed views on a topic, implying
that one or both sets are wrong.  The corollary is that excellent
credentials do not guarantee correct science.

Lindzen is one of the only skeptical scientists I am aware of doing
actual peer-reviewed science.  The most recent and best-known example is
his paper, with Chou and Hou, Does the Earth Have an Adaptive Iris?, in
the March 2001 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological
Society.  Lindzen et al. propose a negative feedback mechanism operating
in the warm pool of the western Pacific Ocean that would have the effect
of limiting the maximum achievable sea surface temperature.  The
proposal was speculative, based on a single limited-area,
limited-time-frame satellite data set, and, appropriately enough, the
Lindzen et al. language in the paper properly reflected the speculative
nature of the adaptive iris proposal.  Interestingly, when talking to
and writing for non-scientist, right wing audiences, the speculative
tone of their paper disappears and a conspiracy to suppress their firmly
established theory appears.

Although not a specialist, I read the paper and could identify a couple
of problems.  Lindzen et al. discarded, without explanation, about 30%
of their data set prior to performing the analysis.  More seriously,
they had 17 months of data collected from a region of tropical ocean
that was about 60-65% northern Pacific and 35-40% southern Pacific.
That creates the potential for seasonal effects.  After obtaining
Lindzen et al. raw data from  a professor of atmospheric science at
University of Washington, I was able to repeat the Lindzen et al.
analysis on 12 month windows into their 17 month data set, hoping to
minimize any seasonal effect.  Depending on which 12 month window you
looked at 25% to 40% of the adaptive iris "effect" disappeared.

Rather than being ignored, Lindzen et al. provoked a substantial debate
in the peer-reviewed literature.  Interested RISKANAL readers can access
quite a bit of the debate by doing a Yahoo or Google search on "Lindzen
adaptive iris".  My take on the debate is that the Lindzen et al.
proposal that there is an important negative feedback not incorporated
in the ocean/atmosphere general circulation models does not stand up to
independent review.

Best regards.

Jim Dukelow
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Richland, WA
Jim.dukelow at pnl.gov

These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved by my
management or by the U.S. Department of Energy.