Tuesday 24 February 2009

Hendrik Tennekes

Atmospheric scientist Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, a scientific pioneer in the development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at The Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute, and an internationally recognized expert in atmospheric boundary layer processes

List cites a few blog posts

Arguments Condensed:

  • Models might be wrong
  • Climate modellers are incompetant
  • Scientific conspiracy
  • Accepts human co2 induced warming
Quotes

  • "I am of the opinion that most scientists engaged in the design, development, and tuning of climate models are in fact software engineers. They are unlicensed, hence unqualified to sell their products to society."
  • "I agree with IPCC that there is a likely link between fossil fuel consumption and increased temperatures"

1 comment:

  1. Tennekes is quite highly cited for one work, his textbook on turbulence. He was featured in the National Post (Canada) series "The Deniers" by Lawrence Solomon, and he signed "inactivist" appeals to Ban Ki-Moon in 2007 and to Canadian PM Harper in 2006.
    As for his statement 1 above - yeesh, what a leap of logic! He asserts that modeling is software engineering (like airplane fly-by-wire software or nuclear plant control systems?) - a tendentious claim. Then he rushes forward with the red herring of licensing software engineers (much debated but little applied in the massive field of application development apart from system control software). He smuggles in the premise that only licensed engineers should write complex software (puts Microsoft and Google out of business pretty quickly!). If you accept that, then sure, everyone writing complex software is "unqualified" to sell to the public. Never mind that climate scientists don't sell their software, though sometimes they give it away as for CCSM 3.0:
    http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/models/ccsm3.0/

    Rhetorical bluster. I'll grant that Tennekes is a (partial) skeptic, but he has nothing much to offer beyond the argument from ignorance.

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