[arctic shelf] delving behind the statement

First the news:

Arctic ice shelf specialist Derek Mueller of the Trent University in Ontario, Canada said the 19-square-mile shelf is now drifting in the Arctic Ocean after breaking loose in early August. The chunk of ice sheet was part of the 4,500-year-old Markham Ice Shelf.

He adds the event underscores how rapid changes are taking place in the Arctic due to global warming.

So he supports the contention of global warming which bloggers assure us is not happening. First step is to play devil's advocate and find the dirt on him which would support the climate sceptic bloggers.

His CV says he completed two years of postdoctoral work at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (supervised by Martin Jeffries). He's the Roberta Bondar Fellow in Northern and Polar Studies at Trent University and is working with Luke Copland. He has an association with Wayne Pollard, of McGill.

The four of them have really only one strike against them - they are primarily geographers, then glaciologists and Trent University is a general Liberal Arts university, within which the department operates.

Each of the four appears to have had an outstanding career path and has been published many times in journals. A minor blip is that McGill rang a bell in the mind in another context and that raises another question - while geography is not psychiatry, still, how far is university research biased, given the issue of who funds it?

Returning to McGill, it is funded by SURF and government and other institutional funding is paramount. One such institution is the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, research of which leads to this site and a statement by Steven Harper, in another area:

... that allowing foundations to operate without scrutiny showed that the Federal Government “has learned nothing from the Sponsorship Scandal.” Harper further said “that scandal happened because the liberals stashed millions away from the watch of parliament. Even after repeated warnings, billions of dollars continue to be hidden away in these unaccountable research funding foundations. When will the government learn and put the foundations under the scrutiny of Parliament and the Auditor-General?”

No doubt the CFI itself is squeaky clean but the question does remain how far the universities, and by a logical process its research departments, are caught in the research dilemma, firstly in this way:

"Our concern is that, by primarily rewarding academic research that's divorced from its practical application, we risk having entrants to the profession taught by people who have never practised it themselves."

... and also in the pressure to produce certain findings, e.g. in the pharmaceutical trade:

Most clinical trials, however, are funded by pharmaceutical companies with enormous financial stakes in the products being evaluated. Furthermore, the scientists who design, conduct, analyze, and report clinical trials often receive monetary compensation from drug companies, in the form of either salaries or consulting fees.

... and:

The effect of competing interests is debated in medical research. It has been found that industry funding has been associated with higher quality than trials without external funding. On the other hand, financial interests may bias the interpretation of trial results.

The above looms as a convoluted strawman, in that by raising the spectre of bias at Trent in geophysics by scrutinizing McGill in medicine which, of course, is a non sequitur, it thereby plays into the climate proponents' hands. That is possible and yet, the nagging doubts about the sceptics persist:

Of all the accusations made by the vociferous community of climate sceptics, surely the most damaging is that science itself is biased against them ... "Most global warming sceptics have no productive alternatives; they say it is a hoax, or that it will cause severe social problems, or that we should allocate resources elsewhere." Andres Millan wrote. "Scientifically, they have not put forward a compelling, rich, and variegated theory."

So we are left with the people on the ground, such as Derek Mueller and colleagues, accepting climate change due to global warming.

The blogosphere, on the whole, begs to differ due to possibly sound, innate distrust of the Gore and IPCC agenda and point to the statements by such groups as the NIPCC, e.g. Professor Frederick Seitz, the past president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, who told WND:

... he believes the issue has nothing to do with energy itself, but everything to do with power, control and money, which the United Nations is seeking. He accused the U.N. of violating human rights in its campaign to ban much energy research, exploration and development.

Diametrically opposed to that are the scientists, like Jay Lawrimore, a climatologist at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., who said:

... there was no way to account for the trends, be they the melting of Arctic sea ice or the warming of winters, without including an influence from heat-trapping gases.

The Federation of American Scientists states:

“There is no serious doubt that human activity is altering the earth's climate in potentially catastrophic ways. Even skeptics are forced to admit that the risk is real and that prudence demands action if only as an insurance policy, the only serious debate is about how best to respond."

... and here is a list of organizations supporting human agency in climate change.

Whom to believe?