Phil, you could try Ken's piece here:

"Stepping outside my comfort zone"

https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2019/10/14/stepping-outside-my-comfort-zone/

It's about this petition/letter which he, among many others, signed:

"Scientists’ Declaration of Support for Non-Violent Direct Action Against Government Inaction Over the Climate and Ecological Emergency"

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FuZYG-gT5EPTLDyvgNnlYIS5dAy43TM1MnvOls48qIc/preview?pru=AAABbe5a2XM*ZvFb_TlRgIxpLq5t49DNXQ#

He seems to have doubts and reservations (“I’m somewhat uncomfortable with the claim that human-caused changes to the Earth’s land, sea and air are severely threatening the habitability of our planet…I don’t think what we’re doing is going to make it un-inhabitable”) about aspects of the letter (but signed it anyway).

I don’t understand how a scientist can be uncomfortable with a scientific claim, but put his name to it anyway, because he “wanted to show some support”.

If he’d signed but added a caveat, I’d accept that as a reasonable position to adopt, but he didn’t. He signed, without expressing the reservations he claims to feel. I wonder how many of his co-signatories also had reservations, but signed anyway?

When do scientists cease to be scientists and become propagandists? Is Ken a scientist for Extinction Rebellion?

However, I am trying to step out of my comfort zone, and I do think we need to take immediate and decisive action, I do think that the warnings from the scientific community have – to date – been largely ignored, and I do support those who are campaigning to get governments to act (although, it’s key that this remains peaceful and non-violent). Hence, I wanted to show some support.

That's one of the things about science, there are always uncertainties, there are always confidence intervals. Wait for 100% and you wait forever.

"That's one of the things about science, there are always uncertainties, there are always confidence intervals. Wait for 100% and you wait forever.
Oct 16, 2019 at 10:30 PM | Phil Clarke"

Excellent. Trump should scrap all funding of Climate Science and we can all wait to see if any Hockey Teamster predictions for Global Warming correct.

Will Ken and his fellow academics want "to show some support" for Susan Crockford?

This thread is appropriately headed "The Moral and Intellectual Poverty of Climate Alarm".

Will Ken and his fellow academics want "to show some support" for Susan Crockford?

I doubt it

Sadly, Phil, I doubt it too.

Showing support for quasi-religious nutters (despite, apparently, having doubts) is probably more important than supporting freedom of expression in academia these days. How low we have stooped.

Nobody is preventing Ms Crockford from continuing to spread her nonsense. She has merely lost the right to affiliate herself with the University. Perhaps she should have considered that possibility when she breached University regulations on conflicts of interest when she decided not to declare the $750 a month she was receiving from the Heartland Institute?

Phil, back to the ad homs then. Are you claiming that's why she was sacked?

Even Wikipedia manages a modicum of balance on that question:

"Between at least 2011 and 2013, she received payment from The Heartland Institute, in the form of $750 per month, which Crockford states was to provide summaries of published papers that might not have been covered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report.[3] This payment has been construed as an undisclosed conflict of interest, by blogs such as Desmog Blog.[2] Her response to such claims was a disclosure of the job description, how much she was paid, and the duration of the contract"

She disclosed it in 2015, after criticism was made by your lot before then:

https://polarbearscience.com/2015/03/12/on-being-a-polar-bear-expert-among-other-things/

What's the relevance to her treatment this year? Would an alarmist behaving the same way be treated like that?

She has not been sacked. The unpaid post of Adjunct Professor is a rolling contract renewed every three years at the discretion of the department. They have decided not to renew on this occasion. It happens. They committee has not given its reasons and so I am not going to speculate. She disclosed her outside income only after it was leaked, and we do know that certain members of staff were unimpressed...

“It is regrettable that anyone affiliated with the University of Victoria participated in the activities of an organization like the Heartland Institute,” says Dr. Thomas F. Pederson, Executive Director of the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS) at UVic. “The University prides itself on being an institution of higher learning that deals with facts and that is nowhere more true than in the field of science. Those who deny that the planet is warming as a direct result of human activity are denying facts.
…
“The Heartland Institute is one of a collection of so-called think tanks that have been extensively supported by elements within the American fossil fuel industry,” says Pederson. “Their mission is quite clearly not to think, but instead to sow confusion with respect to the global warming issue.”

July 2019 was the warmest month on record, nearly 1C above the 20th century average, the last five years were the five hottest and 2019 will also be in the top 5. Not much cooling in evidence.

A few facts about those 30,000 scientists (The Oregon Petition)

- Anyone in the US with a degree is eligible to sign, the signatories include nurses, vetinarians, chiropracters etc. Just 39 are climatologists. Bob Grumbine noted that the largest single discipline amongst the signatories is actually engineering, and the number of actual signatories is a miniscule fraction of those eligible to sign.

- In 2001, Scientific American tried to contact a random sample of 30 signatories

Of the 26 we were able to identify in various databases, 11 said they still agreed with the petition — one was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages. 

- The petition was published with a fake academic paper tricked out to resemble an article published by the National Academy of Science. The NAS took the highly unusual step of issuing a press release distancing themselves from the project:

The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal.

The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy.

The US Skeptics Society reviewed the petition and concluded

… through his Global Warming Petition Project, Arthur Robinson has solicited the opinions of the wrong group of people in the wrong way and drawn the wrong conclusions about any possible consensus among relevant and qualified scientists regarding the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. His petition is unqualified to deliver answers about a consensus in which the public is interested. He has a right to conduct any kind of petition drive he wishes, but he is not ethically entitled to misrepresent his petition as a fair reflection of relevant scientific opinion. He has confused his political with his scientific aims and misled the public in the process.

"He has confused his political with his scientific aims and misled the public in the process."
Pot, kettle and overwhelming blackness come to mind.

"Bob Grumbine noted that the largest single discipline amongst the signatories is actually engineering,..."
Oct 18, 2019 at 1:51 PM | Unregistered CommenterPhil Clarke

Phucking hell. Just the sort of people with professionally enforced mathematical rigor that one might wish to have as scientific auditors.

Once again, you fail so early in your assertions that it is not worth bothering with the rest.

Roughly 99.9% of eligible engineers declined to sign the petition.

Lindzen is retired and hasn't published on climate in over a decade, his contributions on the 'infra-red iris' and low climate sensitivity have been shown to be flawed.

Late in his career, he was also in the habit of giving talks full of inaccuracies.

Bob Carter was a geologist. See here for a discussion/demolition of his arguments.

Tsonis, I believe, is not a sceptic of AGW, but the degree to which it can be attributed. Best known for his 2009 paper with Kyle Swanson, discussed here

Lennart Bengtsson, a meteorologist, (born 1935), had a paper rejected by
Environmental Research Letters in 2014 and seems just a little bitter.

Physics is my speciality and Freeman Dyson (born 1923) is a personal hero of mine, His work on quantum electrodynamics was just genius. But nobody is infallible, and his thoughts on climate are misguided.

A handful of deceased and/or retired scientists versus the 20,000 members of the US AGU (to quote just one of the professional bodies endorsing AGW).
>

Hmmm, tough one.

And of those 20,000 how many are trained in climate science would you think? How many are elderly/retired? Several professional bodies I used to belong to (to their shame) have endorsed AGW but not CAGW. That doesn't mean that even the majority of members agree.
Eggs and counting them.

We emailed 8547 authors an invitation to rate their own
papers and received 1200 responses (a 14% response rate).
After excluding papers that were not peer-reviewed, not
climate-related or had no abstract, 2142 papers received
self-ratings from 1189 authors. The self-rated levels of
endorsement are shown in table 4. Among self-rated
papers that stated a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed
the consensus.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024

On the other side..... Christopher Monckton!

I suspect that any discussion will be about the author, not the article.

The paper should not be relied upon.
Their claims are based on a chain of reasoning with multiple flaws:
(1) They claim that climate models cannot be relied upon but do not demonstrate this.
(2) They instead make a new climate model (despite this being in contradiction of (1)).
(3) Their new climate model is unvalidated. It is based upon datasets of cloud and humidity without any sources given and which are not up-to-date. They provide no assessment of the accuracy of the data used—these variables are very difficult to measure on a global basis over the time period used. No physical basis is given for their new climate model (e.g. no process is given for how higher relative humidity can make the globe cool).
(4) They fail to consider cause and effect. For example, they assume without any support that a decrease in relative humidity is natural. They give no reasons why it would have decreased. They fail to consider whether climate change could have caused relative humidity to change.
(5) They state without any support that most of the atmospheric CO2 increase is due to emissions from the oceans. They ignore anthropogenic CO2 emissions which are more than large enough to explain the full increase. They ignore observational evidence that shows that the oceans are net sinks of CO2 at present, not net sources.
(6) They dismiss the entire body of climate science—especially that there is a significant greenhouse effect—and instead cite their own work (unpublished or published in journals outside the field).

Much more here

Richard Lindzen’s HoL testimony

Misrepresentation from Lindzen (and Lindzen's apology)

Return of the Iris Effect

Lindzen: point by point

Response to Lindzen and Choi