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A cautionary tale…
Nature will deal with sceptics
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The roots of today’s climate scepticism, the most recent expression of which is the new book by Adelaide geosciences professor Ian Plimer, can be found in the 1992 Earth Summit. The Rio Summit was a watershed not just for international environmentalism but also for US conservatism. As jubilation over the fall of the Berlin Wall subsided, the wave of environmental activism around the world was perceived as a political threat. Rush Limbaugh, then building his conservative credentials, went on the offensive: “With the collapse of Marxism, environmentalism has become the new refuge of socialist thinking.” A counter-movement emerged, resolved to resist what seemed like a renewed attack on the idea of progress and mastery over nature that for conservatives defined modernity itself. These same sentiments help explain why a handful of US scientists with genuine climate science credentials broke from the bulk of their colleagues and joined the anti-environment movement. Myanna Lahsen has studied the life experiences and beliefs of three prominent physicists — Frederick Seitz, Robert Jastrow and William Nierenberg — who founded the George C. Marshall Institute and were prominent in the conservative backlash against climate science in the 1990s. The three rose to positions of privilege and respect in the post-war decades, an era of American supremacy built on what Lahsen calls “…a pre-reflexive modernist ethos” in which science and technology were believed to hold the answer to any problem. As the masters of scientific progress humans had the right, even the obligation, to assert control over the natural world through the application of their intelligence to practical problems. In this world the scientists, and especially the physicists, stood at the centre of the modernist project and their special knowledge gave them a unique entitlement to shape opinion. The emergence of the environment and peace movements in the 1970s challenged the benefits of nuclear technology, the power of the military-industrial complex and the claims of science to neutrality and benevolence. It is hard now to appreciate the shock caused by Rachel Carson’s 1962 classic Silent Spring documenting the effects of pesticide use on wildlife in rural America. Carson was confronting the technological hubris of American capitalism and her book is often said to have spawned the environment movement. The criticism of the hitherto unquestioned place of science and technology destabilised the power and privilege of the scientific elite. Frederick Seitz himself wrote of his depression over the new political environment and its assault on the idea of progress through technological advance. The determination of the scientific elite to defend their privileged place in society was only one manifestation of a broader conservative resistance to the social and cultural transformations brought by the 1960s. As Lahsen observed of the trio of climate denying physicists:
This reading of conservative resistance applies, mutatis mutandis , to Australian sceptics like Ian Plimer, Bob Carter and William Kininmonth — all scientists in their 60s or older, schooled in the unquestioning pre-1970s faith in the power of science and technology. And it explains why their attack on mainstream climate science has such strong appeal to conservative forces in Australia. For sceptics like these, the dispute is not really about sun spots, hockey stick graphs or the existence of a consensus. In truth it is not about global warming at all; it is about defending a set of conservative values and privileges that are threatened by environmentalism. It is a plea for a return to an older world order. This is the starting point for Ian Plimer’s campaign against mainstream climate science, now set out in his book Heaven + Earth , which has been seized upon by conservatives across Australia as a vindication of their repudiation of environmentalism. Despite its manifold scientific short-comings, including a number of school-boy howlers — soon pointed to by climate scientists like Barry Brook and Tim Lambert — Plimer’s intervention stimulated a chorus of crowing from right-wing commentators like Andrew Bolt (Plimer challenges “the global warming hysterics, hypocrites and carpet baggers”), Miranda Devine (“Plimer’s book … will help redress the power imbalance between those who claim to own the knowledge and the rest of us”), and Christopher Pearson (“2009 will be seen as the turning point and divided into the pre and post-Plimer eras”). Repudiating climate science has become the focus of their culture war. The Australian’s heavy promotion of Heaven + Earth was also predictable. Uninterested in any assessment of its scientific claims, the book bolsters the apparently ecophobic worldview of the newspaper’s editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell. Mitchell’s campaign is interesting because (as I noted in my book Scorcher) The Australian has campaigned vigorously against the influence of ‘post-modernism’ throughout Australia’s institutions, holding itself up as the defender of objective truth against the corrosive influence of moral relativism. Yet alone among the world’s newspapers it devotes acres of space on its opinion pages to sceptics like Plimer to both dismiss the science and “deconstruct” the motives of the scientists who carry it out. Nowhere is scientific truth more malleable, contingent and contestable than in the pages of The Australian where there prevails a form of anti-scientific fundamentalism that has less regard for scientific method than the most committed constructivist on any university campus. Plimer embodies the view of science and progress that defined Frederick Seitz and the other physicists, a faith in the ability of man to control his own destiny through the rigorous application of reason. It takes on a slightly different shade among older geologists who see their life’s work as contributing to human wealth and prosperity through providing the building blocks for almost everything — pharmaceuticals, transportation, heating, cooling, all of the comforts of modern life. Those who work with the mining industry tend to absorb the view that human progress depends on mining and its products more than anything else. It was a view common enough among his peers, but Plimer seems to cleave to a belief in the supremacy power of science and technology more dogmatically than most. Plimer devoted years to a personal war against creationism, on the face of it a worthwhile cause, except that he engaged with such bare-knuckled zeal that he alienated his fellow sceptics and became mixed up in ugly court cases. One of his previous allies against creationism, philosophy professor and atheist activist Jim Lippard, wrote a stinging repudiation of Plimer’s resort to “abuse and ridicule” and his misrepresentation of the views of other scientists. Defending “proper scepticism” against dogmatism, Lippard wrote:
Plimer’s hostility to environmentalism seems to predate his attacks on climate science. He deploys the usual epithets such as “tree-huggers” and dismisses environmentalism as a new religion, akin to paranormal beliefs, arguing that “greens” have an authoritarian agenda and promote policies that would take us backwards. Naturally, he is drawn to right-wing groups that share his worldview and the fear of the threats to it posed by the social movements of the 60s and 70. He is involved in the right-wing Melbourne think tank the Institute for Public Affairs, the Australian organisation that most closely mimics the conservative think tanks that have provided the intellectual ballast for neo-conservatism in the United States. The IPA has been prominent in anti-greenhouse activism and, unsurprisingly, is partly funded by Exxon-Mobil. Plimer also has links to the Lavoisier Group, since 2000 the main entrepôt for climate denialism in Australia. As documented in my book, the Group was founded by Ray Evans, the moving force behind a number of right-wing organisations, including the H.R Nicholls Society, the Bennelong Society and the Samuel Griffiths Society. And he is an ‘allied expert’ with a Canadian group called the Natural Resource Stewardship Project, which is linked to energy industry lobbyists. In turning against mainstream science Plimer has also had to turn against mainstream scientists, including colleagues he has worked with for decades. Some of them are members of the IPCC whose reports Plimer dismisses as “holy writ” and whose authors he calls “pseudoscientific pedlars of bad news”. Adam Morton recently summarised the bizarre conspiratorial conception that Plimer shares with US sceptics: “The IPCC, he says, is a dishonest political organisation hijacked by environmental activists and diplomats to boost trade, encourage protectionism and add costs to competitors”. It’s the sort incoherent bogey-man conception that is impossible to argue with. And that’s the thing about the climate sceptics; for all of their claims to be the defenders of the truth and heroes of dissent, they have made themselves immune to the evidence that the real world throws up. There appears to be only one way to deal with the sceptics: wait patiently for them to die off. It shouldn’t take long. Clive Hamilton is Visiting Professor, Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the author of Scorcher: The dirty politics of climate change (Black Inc). |
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61 Comments
Clive’s piece was obviously written before the scathing review of Plimer’s book by Michael Ashley, Professor of Astrophysics at UNSW, writing in Saturday’s Weekend Australian. it’s a devastating critique which concludes by stating that Plimer’s book Plimer’s book ‘…deserves to languish on the shelves along with similar pseudo-science such as the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Daniken.’
Plimer book’s “success” is in telling most people what they wish to believe … After all, who wants to believe the “sky is falling”? In doing so, the book overlooks some basic principles of physics and chemistry of the atmosphere:
1. The experimentally established infrared absorption/emission greenhouse effect [GHGE]);
2. Measurements of solar radiance (ove the last 35 years one order of magnitude less than the GHGE effect);
3. The evidence from the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores;
4. The comprehensive studies of CO2-climate relationships through the last 400 million years (by Berner, Beerling, Royer, Zachos and others).
And, not least, the paleontological evidence of mass extinction of species once the rates of climate change (in the past due to volcanic events, asteroid impacts and natural greenhouse events) overcome the rate to which which organisms can adapt*.
* (Noting that, through the emision of over 300 billion tons of Carbon since 1750, CO2 levels rose by 2 orders of magnitude faster, and tempratures by one order of magnitude faster, respectively, than the mean rises during the last glacial termination (~14 - 10 thousand years ago).
Andrew Glikson
11.5.09
Tsk. Tsk. Clive, attacking the man…again.
Why not argue against the points Plimer makes?
Why? Because you can’t.
No-one is disputing the climate changes.
It has done…over millions, nay BILLIONS of years.
The dispute is whether it is precipitated and catalysed by man.
Predictably, like most grants-driven believers, Hamilton shrieks and wails from deep within the ramparts of so-called “peer-review(ed)” science.
But so far neither Clive, nor ‘biologist’ Barry Brooks, has been able to provide any conclusive evidence that AGW is indeed man-made. Moreover, their continual references to the bankrupt ‘consensus’ of the IPCC et al. only serves to underscore the paucity of their scientific and evidentiary arguments.
Not content with (again) attacking the messenger, the vainglorious Hamilton then cranks up the itinerant screaming to a cacophanous level:
“There appears to be only one way to deal with the sceptics: wait patiently for them to die off. It shouldn’t take long.”
Any reasonable ‘scientist’ who holds such a view should be thoroughly ashamed.
Although one presumes Clive’s moral vanity precludes him from REALLY speaking his mind in this instance.
Again predictably, Hamilton adopts the default position of most of the innately gullible in wishing those who seek to challenge his moral authority would die…and quickly.
Such turpitude has become the stock-in-trade of the climate proselytes.
And the last vestige of prophetic self-delusion.
Thanks Clive, a genuinely interesting read. I could never understand the link between right wing ideoology and anti-environmentalism, but now it makes a lot more sense.
Agree with the last couple of lines too. However, we might not have the time to wait.
Most Peculiar Mama, I would argue that the last refuge of self delusion was hiding behind a moniker for your ill thought out tirades…
A small correction: I am a computer scientist, not a climate scientist and am no more qualified to discuss climate science than Plimer.
Most Peculiar: The evidence for human influence on climate is summarised in chapter 9 of the IPPC AR4 WG1 report. Plimer doesn’t dispute any of it — he just, lie you, pretends it doesn’t exist.
I am not sure that I understand the reference to the age of the nominated skeptics. That all are over 60,is irrelevant.
You don’t lose your marbles just because you reach a set age. It could be argued that having retired(?) they are more able to speak their minds without worrying about their career prospects in promoting a politically unpopular cause.
The cause of science is not well defended by setting one bogey-man against another. I would like to see Clive desist from these ad hominen attacks and engage with the issues, with the very credible points made for example by Bob Carter at: http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/
Clive is approaching this from a tribalist mentality: many of the climate change sceptics are conservative, therefore they must be wrong; most progressives support the anthropogenic thesis, so this must be right.
Nature will indeed settle the matter. If the anthropogenic theory is right, the global temperature will soon resume its upward trend. If the solar forcing people are right, the opposite will happen. By 2020 one model will be validated and the other one will be falsified.
Until then, we must carefully weigh the arguments put by both camps and try and discount the ideologies.
In my academic days trying to get funding against the zeigeist was like pushing it uphill. Nothing has changed - no scientist will get money trying to disprove climate change.
What gets me is that somehow capitalism is to blame for global warming. Capitalism is about profiting from the zeitgeist and monopolies and oligarchies are part of totalitarian system it back. In our present oligarchic system, the favoured few are rewarded by the state and allowed to do what they like with impunity and a bailout. It is hardly the result of the free market in operation. The monopolists and oligarchs are the ones holding the world to ransom over energy yet somehow the public is going ot be punished.
If any govt, anywhere, had any metal at all, it would immediately cut taxes for all developers of clean energy and, after fair warning, punish dirty energy producers . But monopolists and oligarchs would not take too kindly to that solution as they havent wrung enough out of the hold- back 19th century energy technologies we are presently saddled with.
The idea that someone who wanted to rigorously disprove climate change would have a hard time finding funding is ridiculous - they would only have the world coal, oil, car, aluminium and electricity industries lining up to help them. Its as plausible as the natural medicine nuts who claim that the pharmaceutic industry doesn’t want news of the cure for cancer to get out - where as they would really just patent it. Unfortunately no amount of money can produce a scientific disproof of what is actually happening, and so climate change skeptics resort to populist sociology about grand conspiracies, zeitgeists and other brain-bunkers in the sand.
Good call Andrew. I’d always found the ‘they’re just trying to get grant funding’ argument utterly ridiculous, and this is a pretty good rebuttal. Who do you reckon has more money to splash around; the Government on science, or the coal and oil industries…
“…Australian sceptics like Ian Plimer, Bob Carter and William Kininmonth — all scientists in their 60s or older”
… which appears to be a defining characteristic. Are there actually any prominent young sceptics? (Hint: The worst AGW effects aren’t expected to set in until after about 2050. These guy will all be long dead, cursed and forgotten by then.)
G.
“The idea that someone who wanted to rigorously disprove climate change would have a hard time finding funding is ridiculous - they would only have the world coal, oil, car, aluminium and electricity industries lining up to help them.”
In the interests of rigour and balance, all scientists should be able to sup at the same treasury font.
For you to suggest ‘dissenters’ pursue “Big Oil” or similar as their patron is laughable.
If they were to do so you would be front and centre screaming louder than Clive Hamilton that it was simply ‘cash for comment’.
“Unfortunately no amount of money can produce a scientific disproof of what is actually happening”
The burden of proof lies with the proposer of the ‘theory’. Have you forgotten what science is all about?
In this instance, Galileo would argue your ‘theory’ holds as much water as a rusty colander.
1. Given that the world’s principal climate research institutions (NASA, Hadley-Met, Tindall, Potsdam, CSIRO and other), consider the emission of over 305 billion tons of carbon since the 18th century (nearly 42% of the total atmospheric inventory of 750 GtC) resulted in a rise of CO2 levels to 387 parts per million (38% higher than the maximum of 280 ppm of the last 2.8 million years), what new insights can the so-called “skeptics” offer, except for claiming conspiracy theories, namely that the thousands of scientists on whose work these reports are based, are biased?
2. Have the so-called skeptics read these reports, for example compiled in the IPCC AR4 2007?
3. If they have read these reports, do they have any cognet science-based arguments which refute the essential validity of the peer-reviewed science literature?
4. If they have not read them, on what basis do they continue to object to the urgent mitigation measures needed to prevent further serious deterioration of the climate, manifested around the globe through extreme weather events?
5. What is the motivation of those who claim a conspiracy by the world’s scientists? Would they, for example, criticize brain surgeons, or aerodynamic engineers, or nuclear physicists etc., despite an ignorance of these discipline? If not, why the special criticism of climate scientists? What is the origin of the resistance to adaptation of clean renewable energies consistent with the preservation of life and biodiversity?
“Who do you reckon has more money to splash around; the Government on science, or the coal and oil industries”
Governments have unlimited funding. Any Year 10 economics student will tell you that.
Mama, you are wrong on many counts.
You have intentionally twisted the proposition from above, and tried to make it absurd. The initial conjecture was that ‘those against the zeitgeist’ can’t get funding. Others have rightly pointed out that Big Oil and Big Carbon in general have tonnes of cash and could easily support research. No one has suggested that they have to go there, just that they could.
Also, your understanding of science is different to mine. ‘The Proposer’ of a theory is neither here nor there. Science has always been about having theories that can be disproven. It matters nought Who proposed the theory, just that it can be disproven by someone else with better information. No one own a theory, but all scientists in the field will be setting out to disprove it. If their information supports the initial theory it stands, until better information comes along, then it’s gone. This has not happened yet with Climate Change, but if some good information, that could genuinely show there is no link between humans and climate change, it would surely be accepted by the scientific community. I bet you’re scoffing at that, but there’s nothing I can do about your pessimism.
“why the special criticism of climate scientists?
You mean the one’s that refuse to lockstep on the “peer-reviewed consensus”? There are plenty of those Andrew Glikson, why do you choose to outrightly dismiss and ignore them?
“What is the origin of the resistance to adaptation of clean renewable energies”
The two are separate arguments. Some would say mutually exclusive.
Moving to alternative energy sources is one thing…’proving’ man is heating the Earth through CO2 ‘emissions’ is another completely different matter altogether.
But I look forward to your treatise supporting the embracing of nuclear energy as the only truly carbon-efficient energy generation system with sufficient capacity to meet the demands of an ever-growing global population.
“consistent with the preservation of life and biodiversity?”
That’s what you do in a museum. Behind glass.
Here on earth we adapt and evolve.
As organic life has done for BILLIONS of years and will continue to do so.
As a scientist, why are you so scared of evolution?
“peer-reviewed consensus”
You don’t even know what these means, do you?
You’ve probably fallen for the delusionist line that peer reviewing is some kind of scientific rort. It’s in line with the rest of rubbish that you’ve written that has not only been debunked on this site but hundreds of others. Little point in engaging.
“…It matters nought Who proposed the theory, just that it can be disproven by someone else with better information…”
This is how bereft of reason your ‘reasoning’ is:
From today I propose a theory that rampart craters on Mars are the result of rapid surficial climate change bought about by the exhalation from subsurface of giant plumes of orogenic volatiles.
I expect my theory to come into immediate effect in the relevant literature worldwide.
Can you disprove my theory?
Can I prove it?
That’s how absurd your argument is.
“there’s nothing I can do about your pessimism”
Hey Evan, I’m not the one who’s running around saying we’re all going to die if we don’t switch our AC off and ride skateboards to work.
“Little point in engaging.”
That’s because in doing so you would need to shift out of stupid.
Evolution vs mass extinction:
Natural evolution can be distrubed ny abrupt natural events, including volcanism, asteroid impacts, natural methane eruptions, abrupt ice ages, which can trigger mass extinctions, for example: “Asteroid/comet impact clusters, flood basalts and mass extinctions: Significance of isotopic age overlaps. Andrew Glikson, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 2005. doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2005.05.007)
The following are examples of human activities consistent with neither natural evolution nor with the term “sapiens”:
1. Injecting CFC into the atmosphere with consequent ozone destruction.
2. Cutting more than 2/3 of the world’s forests, with consequent desertification.
3. Emitting SO2 with consequent acid rain affecting lakes (Canada) and forests (Europe)
4. Acidifying the oceans (pH reduced by 0.1 - 0.2) affecting marine food chain including coral reefs
5. Raising atmospheric energy/temprature levels by 1.6 Watt/m2 with consequent global warming about 1.2 degrees C, resulting in (1) fast melting of the cryosphere; (2) rising sea levels; (3) polar-ward migration of climate zones and associated droughts; (4) intensifying hurricanes. Those who do not accept the evidence need to (1) travel to the affected areas and see the effects; (2) read the relevant up-to-date per-reviewed science literature. Peer-review is essential in ensuring, as much as possible, evidence-based science.
“You mean the one’s that refuse to lockstep on the “peer-reviewed consensus”?”
Possibly the most moronic statement I’ve seen for a while. So having scientists carry out independent reasearch that leads to the same conclusion or adds support to the same hypothesis is being in “lock-step” is it? I suppose it’s fortunate that you never studdied science or went to school for that matter otherwise you might find yourself in lock-step as well. You know there are a lot of scientists who are in lock-step with Einstien or Watson and Crick or Darwin, you must pity the poor fools.
I agree with the comment about the age of these three prominent Australian AGW (anthropogenic global warming) sceptics, but not so much as an indicator of age per se but rather a pointer to the era in which they gained/practised their professions. Quite possibly it was the end of the golden age of geology. While there must be many problems and mysteries remaining to be solved — including off-planet — nevertheless it seems its glory days are behind it: for example in uncovering the structural history of the planet, providing evidence for Darwinian evolution, and plate tectonics etc. But starting with the discovery of the structure of DNA in the 50s followed by the molecular biological revolution of the 70s to this day, biology has become the more dominant science. (full disclosure: I am a molecular biologist). One could modify/update Hamilton’s statement that “the physicists, stood at the centre of the modernist project and their special knowledge gave them a unique entitlement to shape opinion” to include biologists at the table, if not arguably at the head of the table.
It is observable in these sceptics, many of whom are geologists and not climatologists, that there appears a strange kind of professional enmity against the biologists, and which sometimes becomes personal, for example against Tim Flannery. This is kind of ridiculous –and you won’t get them admitting to such absurdity –but we saw a naked exposition of it when Lateline’s Tony Jones elicted the response from Plimer that “Barry Brooks was only a biologist”. Ian Plimer in particular seems to deny any role for biology in climate change over the ages. But the white cliffs of Dover and the Great Barrier Reef (just to take a few of the more visible cases of a veritable iceberg of unseen calcium carbonate deposits of biological origin) which represent trillions and trillions of tons of carbon captured from the atmosphere by organisms over the eons, not to mention all the buried fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) and methane hydrates (frozen under the Tundra) surely cannot be waved away so tritely.
Perhaps too it is not totally irrelevant that the biggest employer of geologists is the mining industry.
I won’t be reading Ian Plimer’s book but note that, whatever may be said of the geologists, Kininmonth can hardly be dismissed with ad hominem theorising. His points about the logarithmic character of the increase in radiative absorption with concentration of CO2 combined with inadequate modelling of evaporation, precipitation and clouds, added to those of David Evans and the undoubted record of Richad Lindzen as a climate scientist make your points about Plimer and Carter rather peripheral.
If there is one good reason for those who still regard not just reason but careful rational thinking that the IPCC team’s promoters and its activist supporters are quasi-religious it is surely that, in Australia more than anywhere, rushing into an ETS is sensible only to Holy Rollers whose hair shirts inadequately reflect their deep sense of their individual and species unworthiness of the blessings of Nature. In short, apart from giving some sort of certainty for some (major) future investments, almost every proposal for major expenditure or policy change by Australia to reduce the emission of CO2 here or by those burning our coal in other countries will have no positive result for our or any one else’s climate - and may have a negative effect if we export certain kinds of industry to countries with inferior technology - and will make us less able to afford to adjust to climate change or to help others to do so or even to do research into remedial measures.
Ah, but if we preach, and if we “set an example” the rulers of the other 6 billion (mostly much poorer) people in the world may listen. And the hot air could make pigs levitate.
Now Clive for something really interesting. How does cod-Freudianism explain your attitudes and actions as an enthusiastic amateur? You are not required to include supercilious sneers or patronising reference to age in your answer if it is possible to do so without that.
Interesting that we have yet another of these magisterially elegant trolls in “Most Peculiar..”. Not a typo. as a normal person bangs out, not a fact or cogent argument, not a single rational point, merely captious niggling, always trying to derail a thread, refusing because unable to engage & debate a reasonable point. Rabble soothing at its most banal.
The simple reason that RWDBs must oppose environmentalism is that it threatens their entire raison d’etre, “he who dies with the most toys wins!”
If I cede you the laurels will you go away?
Who in the future will continue to fund these mutants who bleed human endeavor for their own soulless green satisfaction ? Dr Frank N Furter I presume!
Quite agree Clive - and by the way science will deal with sceptics as well
Clive is obviously not a scientist whom would have provided scientific evidence to support his arguements. Sounds like a typical American god-bothering tree hugger. Climate reality, not the world of models will be his undoing.
Clive Hamilton’s book: “Scorcher: The dirty politics of climate change” is appropriately named considering his poisonous political writing of which this meandering paean to venomous shrill climate alarmism is but one more example.
Plimer’s core challenge is that IPCC ‘science’ has failed to demonstrate proof that atmospheric increase in levels of carbon dioxide are firstly entirely man made and secondly that this is the dominant cause of the increase in global atmospheric temperatures over the past 30 years (despite the failure of warming in the last decade) and explains why.
Plimer also disputes the scenarios of the future projected by the IPCC and explains why.
Lastly he casts doubts on the value of directing massive resources to limiting CO2 concentration in the atmosphere to less than 550ppm (presently just below 400ppm now) rather than adaptation and explains why.
None of his arguments are addressed in any meaningful critique here.
What can be said is that this is a completely partisan and prejudiced piece of ‘opinion’ and typical of Hamilton who blames AGW as the direct cause of the some 200 deaths in the recent Victorian bushfires.
Unlike Plimer there is nothing remotely mature nor scientic about Hamilton and his spitefulness.
I’ts only his opinion
As the belated winner of the Crikey ‘Climate Change Cage Fight’ (the AGW theorists vacated the cage), I can think of nothing better than following Andrew Glikson and co. into this particular cat fight. He still owes me an analysis of the NGS Interglacial SL and T chart, and an explanation of why climte change models run so poorly backwards in accurately duplicating the Holocene and the last 400,000 years.
AGW theory is largely based on the last 40-50 years of temperature rise (roughly 0.4 deg C of recent proxies) being correlated with CO2 levels rising from about 310ppm in 1950 to 380ppm today. It is a plausible theory. Only in the last 10 years is it suffering from serious divergence from observations. Flattening or falling temperatures, and stable or growing ice in Antarctica (home of 90% of the Earth’s ice) are proving difficult topics for the AGW theorists. (West Antarctica, 20% of the land mass is warming; and East Antarctica, 80% of the land mass is cooling).
Even if we accept that sensible conclusions can be drawn from the last 30-40 years, the last 10 years has seen more CO2 released into the atmosphere than the previous 10 years and the 10 years before that - all the way back to the start of the industrial revolution in about 1800. All IPCC climate models predict steeper warming over the whole planet, at both poles and greater climate variability. When it does not warm for 10 years, critically in Antarctica, the biggest knob on the Earth’s thermostat - well, it must be ‘weather’ - not climate change - just a touch of variability in this relentless lockstep of CO2 and global warming.
Computer modelling with a number of variables, compounded over 20-40 years forward have all the mathematical error of compounding. Tiny errors in the accuracy of a single variable can produce huge errors in results when cycled many many times. Would anyone place bets on a forecast of literally anything which might exist in 2050?
Ken Lambert wants the climate change models to run backwards and match the last 400,000 years. That’s a big ask. I would be satisfied if the models could match the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warming — but they can’t even do that.
It seems the LaRouche-ites are out in force once again.
Much skeptics venom is expended on the faultiness of computer models. Models have their faults as predictive tools, by the proof of climate change itself rests on immediately verifiable observations. The average temperature has been measured to increase over 100 years, the ice sheets and glaciers have retreated (everywhere except in Plimers book, apparantly) etc. Models are used to try an see how bad this might be because most people find the skeptics position of “?” to the potential end of global civilisation to be a little bit of an under-reaction if not actually the most morally negligent position possible. So one has to ask, if all the models are wrong, what is it that the climate skeptics position thinkis will happen over the next 20 years. Nothing? Something? Anything? All possibilities from those carping about the limitations of state-of-the-art science are less satisfactory than our limited knowledge.
Sir, the roots of today’s climate scepticism are not in the 1992 Earth Summit.
The roots of todays climate scepticism are founded in sensible doubt. Doubt is a function of intelligence. In such a legitimately contestable area of science as climate change, an attack on sceptics really is an insult to intelligence.
How refreshing to see the believers default to type when anyone challenges their religion. I particularly enjoy the liberal use of the word “troll’ when opposing arguments to “the science” are posed, such is their inability to rationalise and discuss such a topic like adults.
Let’s try this again:
The IPCC and none of the “peer-reviewed” data can conclusively prove an evidentiary link between changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations and temperature. Why not?
The IPCC and none of the “peer-reviewed” data can conclusively prove an evidentiary link between (increased) human activity and observed increases in CO2 emissions. Again, why not?
References to historically inaccurate forward modelling is not evidence.
If these questions could be answered there would be no debate.
That they can’t is a significant challenge for the scientific community.
However, what is simultaneously disappointing and embarrassing is the attitude of those in our scientific community who accept “consensus” on anything.
Stefan Landherr says: Ken Lambert wants the climate change models to run backwards and match the last 400,000 years. That’s a big ask. I would be satisfied if the models could match the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warming — but they can’t even do that.
I would like models to be tested for the ability to retro-predict the major climatic changes of the past that produced 1. The wiping out of the Egyptian Old Kingdom and drying up of the Sahara; 2. Wiping out of the early Indus civilisation; 3. Drying up of the Great Lakes in North America. All of these occurred well after the end of the last major Ice Age.
I raise these and the silence is always profound. David Karoly did in a very general way say Nos. 1 and 3 were all within the explanatory envelope of the IPCC models but, with no chance to cross-examine, I remain questioning.
Will someone proffer a serious response out of the AGW corner? Without it all being ultimately disappointing or flawed links for preference.
Cardinal Pell is an anthropogenic climate change sceptic. Condoms don’t prevent AIDS. Smoking is good for you. Every sperm is sacred. A little wine for thy stomach’s sake. These to me are the “religious” points of view - it wasn’t so long ago that scientists advocating anthropogenic climate change were regarded as the wingnuts, much like the String theorists.
I should be honest here, I actually don’t bother trying to convince sceptics any more, there’s no point, the war is over.
The Australian Coal industry, those with most to lose, have admitted that CO2 emissions from coal is driving climate change.
http://www.newgencoal.com.au/
Go on, harp on about it just being a sales pitch or what ever, like anyone has a choice about buying coal anyway. It’s over. The only debate left to have is how to respond. I disagree that doubt is sensible and intelligent in this case. To put it another way, from the comfort of home, and by reading second/third hand reports, you think you know better than the combined knowledge of the UN and NASA. That despite the summits, conferences and regulations, you’re pretty sure that you know better. Do you not see a flaw in that?
This nonsense about collusion, grants, blah blah blah, it’s all obfuscation and nonsense. This has become a politically awkward issue; surely any/every Government in the world would make it go away if it wasn’t true. So go on, continue bickering, but remember that for most of us, we’ve stopped listening, it’s all over.
Re Most Peculiar Mama
“If these questions could be answered there would be no debate.”
This rather pious assertion is incorrect given the role of sociological and political debate about scientific issues in the modern world. When vested interests are threatenied, and by this I mean the undeniable commercial interests of the corporate sector and politicians they support (sorry, lobby) rather than an imagined intellectual club of scientists, then they respond with a synthesised debate.
This is because their PR men have learned a simple cycle of denial. First you keep it from public recognition (the 1950s to 1980s), then you ridicule it (the 1990s) and when all else fails you call for a frank and open debate. This debate is not about the evidence, its about managing the social environment to avoid a response. This works precisely because, to the deliberately obtuse, a debate can go on forever. The record of the evidence linking smoking to cancer is instructive. Debate started when conclusive evidence became available not when no-one had a clue, because when no-one had a clue there was no need to debate.
Extract from ÍanHuntley’s YOUR MONEY WEEKLY … can’t help himself …
Just on that subject, I strongly recommend subscribers read Professor Ian Plimer’s heaven+earth for it is by far the best text I have read demolishing the arguments of zealots who push the global warming cart. Plimer’s text includes an excellent chart of the changes in global warming/cooling over the last 1000 years, a chart I had seen quite some years ago. Today’s fluctuations are far from abnormal! Greenland was actually green farmland in the late single digit centuries, the world didn’t come to an end, and the world wasn’t industrialised. He also plots several well regarded measures of global temperatures, showing them falling since 1998. He discusses the early formation of the United Nations IPCC and the political forces behind it. Great election winner! Arnie Schwarzenegger showed that in California, and Rudd kicked off his first debate with John Howard - “Are you a climate change skeptic,” as if to answer in the affirmative was to acknowledge worship of the devil incarnate as against simply being a rational man, evaluating a critical issue that could be costly to the nation indeed.
Thank you James Guest. Your appreciation of the backwards modelling point is critical.
When you look at the whole AGW case. it nearly all rests on the last 40-50 years of ‘recent proxy’ temperature readings (often quoted in the NH only), and the human release of CO2 over the ‘industrial revolution’.
Well, the industrial revolution really only got going from about 1800 onward, and CO2 levels had only risen to about 310ppm by 1950.
Temperatures started continuously rising from a trough in about 1650, which is roughly 200 years *before* CO2 levels started a more rapid rise around 1850. Warming was happening anyway, and its (non-CO2) contribution (noise) to the observed rise is never discussed in the AGW story.
The Holocene has been remarkably stable (compared with previous interglacials) with a 0.5 degree C cooling trend over the last 8000 years, and the Wikipedia averaged chart shows approx nine (9) peak-trough temperature swings in the amplitude range of about 0.4 degC. All of which is background ‘noise’.
Hence a logical proposition is to run your climate change models backwards with reasonably well known input data (the historical record) and see how accurate they duplicate the known temperature proxies. If the backwards correlations were accurate, then we could have much higher confidence that the background ‘noise’ of natural climate forcings was being accurately modelled, and crucially that the CO2 and other GHG effects could be separated out.
Consider the logical absurdity that climate models run very poor correlations backwards with known historical data, yet are trumpeted by AGW theorists as reliable predictors of the future where the input factors going forward are increasingly unknown or just plain unknown !
Never has the rate of CO2 released from fossil fuel burning and land use been higher than in the last 10 years, yet global temperatures are flat or slightly falling.
What AGW theorists rarely discuss is the role CO2 plays in cooling mechanisms which have peaked and reversed the last 3 interglacials. Icemelt/ocean albedo and re-freezing feedbacks are stated to be the most important mechanisms. Andrew Glikson has stated that the Earth’s atmosphere/ocean system is sensitive to even minor forcings and temperature changes of 0.2 to 0.4 deg C have ended civilizations. All of which happened without human release of ‘industrial’ scale CO2 at all!
The exact role CO2 plays when the system is cooling is still vague. In the case of Prof Karoly’s ‘Swindle’ debate, his CO2 played an incoherent game of ocean absorption/release /feedback/warming - always warming, with icemelt/ocean albedo thrown in to boot!
Without reasonable confidence in the climate models (gained by accurate backward correlations), who could reasonably argue that CO2 is a major forcing, when Glikson’s ‘minor’ forcings (all natural factors) have caused major climate change in the historical record?
A vast climate change edifice is therefore based on 30-40 years of data, with the last 10 years being discounted as a ‘weather anomaly’ by AGW theorists.
Much of the edifice has been based on James Hansen’s Nasa/GISS construction of the data. A reasonable person would conclude that a lot more than 30-40 years of data is needed to verify the CO2 driven warming theory.
Tha Antarctica story is critical. AGW theorists have recently found ‘continental’ warming, when others find a 30 year cooling trend, and increased East Antarctic ice out-weighing lost West Antractic ice. At 90% of the Earth’s ice, Antarctica is the big game in town vastly outweighing all the other global glaciers, ice sheets and the Arctic.
A whole lot more is going on here.
To summarise Ken’s comment: the models are imprecise and possibly wrong, and therefore there is nothing to worry about.
I therefore invite all those on the ‘nay’ side of the climate change debate to answer one simple question. Using whatever means you feel appropriate, what is the ‘safe’ level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
I ask this because it is irrefutable tha CO2 is increasing year on year and, without the sort of measures most people feel are justified by climate change, it will keep on increasing. So where do the ‘skeptics’ feel we should draw the line. Is any amount of CO2 OK? 500ppm, 800pp, 2000ppm?
I am interested in the positive assertions of those who do not believe in APW, beacuse I generally just here what they think is NOT happening. What is it that you people think IS happening.
Andrew, all that can be said ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ is that we are in uncharted waters regarding the effect of the current levels of CO2 (around 385ppm) on the Earth’s temperatures, sea levels and the environment.
Some say that higher CO2 levels will enhance plant growth, increase water vapour in the atmosphere and produce higher crop yields. Others say the opposite. Has climate change affected human civilizations dramatically in the past - you bet it has. And it was all done by natural forcings - not industrial release of CO2.
The reason I have taken a sceptical view, was initially prompted by the ‘shoe shine boy’ effect.
You know the story - when your Yankee shoe shine boy is offering you stock tips - it is time to get out of the market! Well, when pimply youths and fervent schoolchildren start lecturing their elders about the calamities to come from ‘climate change’ - then its time to take a hard look at the evidence and the observations.
What I found was an uncritical acceptance and alarmism by public commentators, academics and the media, that climate change was novel and inherently bad.
I am indebted to Dr Chris Schoneveld (WE Australian Feb 2008) for this elegant proof of the falsity of this premise: Quote;
“One only has to take about 50 things humans like (butterflies, cave paintings, wine, peace, health) and 50 things we don’t like (sharks, feral cats, jellyfish, allergies, crime, drought, floods) and perform a Google search for each in combination with the term ‘global warming or climate change’ and the following will emerge: anything we like will be negatively affected and anything we don’t like will benefit. For example, you will never find butterflies thriving and cockroaches suffering.
Since the forces of nature are insensitive to the preferences of humans, one would expect a balanced outcome of thriving or declining likes and dislikes. Since this is not the case, the statistical significance of this exercise allows us to draw the conclusion that the science of climate change is alarmist and subject to severe bias.” End Quote
Try this yourself, and reach the same conclusion.
Just to be clear Ken, you have personally overturned the UN and NASA on the basis of a Google internet search?
See my post above. When the coal industry admits that their emissions are changing the climate, the battle is over. Everything else is so much obfuscation.
@ Evan Beaver:
The point to be doubtful of is this:
Even IF human activity is the overarching driver of the changes in climate trends we are being told are occuring, can human intervention serve to ‘reverse’ those changes?
The >>scale<>complexity<< of climate dynamics would strongly suggest not, in which case mitigation efforts should focus on coping, e.g. investing limited and valuable capital in efficiency and effect amelioration rather than unproven, untested, speculative global “solutions to causes” based on shonky Hollywoodesque premises.
No Evan, I have presented what I consider is an elegant proof that “the science of climate change is alarmist and subject to severe bias” based on the uncritical acceptance of the *premise* that climate change was “novel and inherently bad”, by public commentators, academics and the media.
Nearly two years ago, I attended a ‘climate change’ seminar presented by a senior ‘scientist’ employed by Rio Tinto. The audience was a university assembly of over 100 professional engineers and academics. The Rio man Powerpointed the ‘hockey stick’, said the ‘debate was over’ and proceeded to show that all of the resources of clean coal, all renewables, nuclear etc would be required to stabilize CO2 levels by 2050. A huge task.
At the end of the seminar, two emeritus Professors of Engineering stood up and vigorously disputed that the ‘debate’ was over, and directly challenged the ‘science’ behind the hockey stick and CO2 driven warming theory. A subdued and shocked Rio man paid his respects to the eminences and the meeting ended in an overflow of repressed doubt expressed by many participants.
My point is that industy (particularly the coal industry) will make a dollar out of any situation, and will go along with the prevailing orthodoxy, particularly when ‘rent seeking’ opportunities are available, and a march can be stolen on the opposition in being ahead of the wave on the ‘next big thing’.
How is it that the State and more recently its corporate arm, always blames the people for the problems? We the people consume too much meat, eat too much food generally, use too much energy, drive too many miles, use too much water, fly to far away places for holidays or breathe too much air and therefore; we need to be taxed. If the State is unable to solve the problems and we the people are to blame, then we the people do not need the State, or their designated monopolists, involved in the solution. Their solution, which never works, invariably results in more taxes on us and more power to the State. We should tell them to drop dead and that we will handle it ourselves.
You see I resent being punished for something outside of my control. The debate has gone scalar and is now about the size of my carbon footprint (SOMCF) as though it would be better if I curled up and died quietly somewhere. If other energy forms have been known since Tesler or even Archimedes; e.g. geothermal, zero-point, hydrogen, and more recently cold fusion; not to mention the powers of nature, then why has there been no significant development in any of these clean energy solutions over the 20th century? Why are all the scientists fighting each other over a dubious Al Gorethm when there is so much of the debate which is in no way contentious? The reason I believe that we have stagnated for 100 years (a massive travesty of science) is not a lack of scientific interest, but something to do with the dollars tied up in a continuation of BIG OIL & GAS and BIG COAL.
Whether carbon dioxide is heating the atmosphere or not, we are killing the planet with pollution and the ongoing destruction of our rainforests and oceans.
About this, there is surely no debate. Instead of arguing about instituting a new tax on us, the long suffering patsy public, we should be arguing about the criminal assault on the world’s ecosystems by conscienceless corporate no-accounts and their dictator lackeys. They, in my view, should be held to account and appropriately sanctioned.
@Ken
Well at least the evidence is on your side regarding stock tips.
But although it is interesting to hear why you doubt climate change, why you are skeptical etc the question was what you think we need to do about CO2 if anything. What is the counter proposal?
Its like intelligent design. Its not a positively sustainable position because it doesn’t tell you anything predictive about how biology works, its just an anti-position which is created to debate evolution.
So if climate change is wrong, what is the counter theory which informs a skeptics opinion about how much Co2 should be in the air? Because your apparant comfort with “uncharted waters” isn’t really very comforting to the rest of us.
Some points about Andrew Pengilley’s puzzling challenge to Ken Lambert to say how much CO2 is OK. One is that is generically a rather odd approach. Why isn’t life an endless task of justifying how much of everything might safely be added to everything else? Maybe the proposition at base is that whenever a lot of conscientious seeming people raise a scary prospect that one doesn’t wholly accept then one should have an alternative theory, and not just an alternative theory but a comprehensive explanation, with supporting facts and argument to justify one’s scepticism. Thus it would not have been good enough for a sceptic to resist the consensus that really bad people would go to Hell. He must have a comprehensive althernative answer to what happens to you after death. Nor would a certain scepticism about the age of the earth being just a few thousand years based on scraps of evidence from fossils and geology have been good enough for those of Andrew Pengilley’s disposition. It would have to be fully worked out Darwinism or the bush.
On the question of how much atmospheric CO2 might be acceptable, or, more relevantly, how much CO2 by fossil fuel burning can be safely produced and added to the atmosphere it is perhaps scientifically permissible (if not correct) to say that it is an amount that we haven’t got anywhere near yet unless there is a model with convincing and frightening calculations of feedback effects including much better modeling of clouds, evaporation and precipitation than has yet been generally accorded acceptance. Why is that? Because, to quote Dr William Kininmonth “The IPCC have come to the conclusion that 3.7 W/m2 is the ‘forcing’ from a doubling of CO2. The 2.8 W/m2 comes from using the MODTRANS radiation transfer model for clear sky and the US Standard Atmosphere temperature and humidity profile” and the consequence of the 2.8 figure is that, after an absorption of 19.2 W/m^2 of incremental radiation by the first 50 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere, doubling of the CO2 in the atmosphere thereafter up to 800 ppm and beyond only adds 2.8 W/m^2 radiative forcing for each doubling. It would follow from this that, unless by some unhappy chance we have already reached a tipping point for runaway global warming because of feedback (which never seems to have occurred in the past when temperatures have been high), we are already at a level of atmospheric CO2 concentration beyond which the addtional radiative forcing will be negligible. But that must be too simple mustn’t it? So, would someone please say, in detail, what is wrong with it.
I have never denied that climate change is happening - it has ever been so; since the Earth first had an atmosphere, oceans and ‘climate’.
My scepticism is mainly about the contribution of human released CO2 to global air and ocean temperature observations and its ‘badness’ for the biosphere. If you were to follow the arguments of Crikey regular contributor Andrew Glikson, then you would expect to turn the CO2 knob to 450ppm and get 1 degree warmer, 550ppm and get 2 degrees warmer, etc. I would suggest that the way the Earth handles human released CO2 is much more complex, probably highly non-linear, and very inadequately dealt with by current climate models.
If you look at Charts of the last 3 interglacials, and the roughly 100000 year intervals between, you might even conclude that the next ice age is closer than the start of the Holocene, and that any warming contributed by human released CO2 might be delaying the start of the next glaciation.
@James
Well yes, I do think that if you want to resist the consensus that bad people go to hell you do need an alternative theory which, presumably would be, “no they don’t”. And no, you don’t have to have a completely generated alternative scientific theory to disagree with a current one, so I wouldn’t hold people to Darwin or the bush. But you can’t dress up “I don’t know” as a contrary scientific explaination. All the arguments about whether the models are wrong, and whether this of that sports-good resembling graph is misleading basically comes down to “I don’t know”. What would be convincing would be a scientific basis for asserting that higher levels are in fact fine.
While “Search me” is a perfectly acceptable academic position, as I have said the idea that climate change is an academic pursuit is a social strategy of groups who do not want to accept that practical decisions are being made. Whatever side of the argument you are on, it is absolutely certain that what we decide now will determine CO2 levels for a century or more (based purely on the half-life of the gas). A skeptical position academically is fine, therefore, but opposition to action on climate change is a postive committment to higher CO2 levels.
I believe there is a prima facie case that dumping a couple of billion tonnes of a gas into the atmosphere is likely to do something. Its not a little action, doubling the concetration of something in ambient air, and I find the cavalier attitude of people to doing so disturbing. Leaving that aside, however, the answer as to “Why isn’t life an endless task of justifying how much of everything might safely be added to everything else?” is that there is no other industrial pollutant you could get away with doubling the concentration of in the ambient air without any evidence it is not harmful. S0 even if you take the, in my opinion plainly obtuse view that climate change science is so wrong that there is actually nothing at all to worry about, then you are against what would be a usual standard of care for any other chemical.
As for the radiative forcing. In the words of Dr McCoy, “I’m a doctor not a physicist”, but I suspect it is too simple. The fact that the radiative forcing from Co2 is logarithmic is not debated, but you still end up with a positive energy balance and the effects of that are debated. Decreasing marginal effect does not equal no net effect over time.
The caveat that 800 ppm this is safe “unless by some unhappy chance we have already reached a tipping point for runaway global warming because of feedback” is a bit glib, since it amounts to “its safe unless it insn’t”. The feedback mechanisms are a big reason why why people think this level is unsustainable.
But, as I say, this is about practical issues and the reason I ask skeptics what level of CO2 they are happy with is that a ‘business as usual’ approach still gives you 800ppm inside a century. So even if you believe a level that high is safe, and that requires current scientific consensus to be completely and utterly wrong not just a few tweaks on the models, then you still require action in the very near future. Pick virtually any Co2 level ever seen in you will still have to be investing in massive changes to the economy this century and, given the scale of the tast, that would require rapid action. That is what the debate is about - what do we do either by action or inaction. Its not an academic exercise, since no-one is skeptical in their actions.
What a pleasant and novel experience to meet a civil and lucid contributor to a blog (who even seems to clean up those literals that must occur). Of course anyone who can find time to blog must be a bit sus but I don’t think I shall becoming back, when anonymous posting is again allowed, to severely with Andrew Pengilley as Vlad the Impaler. Maybe Torquemada on a merciful saint’s day.
I do have to reprove your equation of my “unless …. we have already reached a tipping point…” with glibly saying “it’s safe unless it isn’t”. What I was saying was that, unless we had already reached a tipping point (a suggestion made I think by the ancient mammal expert Tim Flannery), in which case there was ex hypothesi nothing we could do about the runaway disaster that was already under way, there was nothing to suggest that the increases, even the doublings, of CO2 in the atmosphere would have more than marginal effects on the radiative forcing.
Interesting that you call CO2 an “industrial pollutant” (better than Senator Wong’s “Carbon Pollution” solecism I acknowledge). Is that like calling Bougainvillea a weed when it grows up a fence where you don’t want it? However, I accept your point that dumping large quantities of anything into the atmosphere which has a known capacity to react or interact with other ingredients should entail watchfulness at least. Doubling the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere would presumably have disturbing effects in a biosphere evolved for the accustomed levels of oxygen. Certainly bushfires would be fiercer. So, indeed, let’s pay close attention to what might follow from such large scale emissions.
The problem for a rational Australian is that there doesn’t seem to be much that we can do even if Dr William Kininmonth is wrong in predicting only a 0.5 to 1 degree rise in global temperature’s over the next 50 years or so. (I assume that no one is going to get too fussed about that prospect if it doesn’t go much further because Singpore’s and Helsinki’s annual average temperatures are over 20 degrees apart and both are highly prosperous and livable cities).
Preaching and example perhaps? The sounds of pig wings in take off mode (but never levitating) are to be heard whenever Australians talk in fantasy mode about the rulers of billions of poor people being influenced by anything we do or say (apart from adding to the stock of useful technology). There are, however, things we can do to keep on making ourselves richer and more able to fund research, adaptation of Australia to climate change, and help for those elsewhere who suffer from climate change. Making as much money as we can out of coal and iron ore are indispensable parts of that unless one is a fatuously innumerate and economically illiterate new lefty (posing as a Green which is a bit insulting to those of us who have been planting thousands of trees for decades) who hypes Green jobs and investments in renewables as if they aren’t part of becoming poorer that some of our governments have already started to subsidise with our taxes. It will be great if science and technology crack the big renewable and near-renewable problems. Wind will only be an expensive source of electricity compared with hydrocarbons for the foreseeable future. Solar is a marvellous prospect for Australia but still has a long way to go in conversion of solar energy to electricity and then we need very much better batteries. Nuclear needs the left to see sense and may one day be fusion power……. But, in the meantime, money has a time value and putting on a hair shirt today isn’t going to help anyone much.
James: You can change your display name in your profile — click the link in the masthead — if you’d like to comment semi-anonymously (“semi” because nothing on the Internet is truly anonymous, and I wouldn’t want anyone to expect so).
Thanks Jeff. It’s hard living as a real life realist. Why not Napoleon lV or a bit of transexual experimentation as Catherine the Great? I’ve just changed Nickname and Public Display name in the profile to Vlad so I can try this experimentally to see if it picks up the new profile for use on this page.
Now I am conducting the further experiment of changing the Public Display name but leaving the Nickname as Vlad
Very odd, I seem to have lost the old James Guest login in favour of some ancient jamesguest login name which remained, unchangeable. So, the Nickname seems to be important only to make sure you can have it as an option for Public Display: it apparently does not appear on a blog unless you choose it as the Public Display name.
The reason I feel the above debates are futile is that the so-called “skeptics”, instead of attempting to test their beliefs by reading the essential up-to-date climate literature and, in so far as they have reservations advance cogent scientific evidence-based arguments, will instead pontificate open-endedly, including a liberal spray of conspiracy theories. Basically it would appear some of these people either do not understand, or do not like, the scientific method itself. Instead of having a journal peer-review system (which some of them claim is a “conspiracy”) they would reduce science to a combination of hear-say and prejudice, promoting what they wish is true. But while everyone is entitled to his view, not to his facts (Senator Daniel Moynihan).
I understand. After all who wants to “believe” in bad news, even if they are manifest in nature as well as in physics and chemistry. But while individual denial may have its place, collective denial of facts and evidence by societies is dangerous.
Rember the Easter Islanders?
@Andrew,
What you are failing to acknowledge is that the scepticism you’re on about is about the cogency of the so-called scientific evidence-based arguments.
Whether or not the climate science is on the ball, which , frankly I doubt, the general public perception of science and scientists is that of distrust.
Perhaps its because economics, which has tried (really hard) to make itself out as some kind of scientific discipline instead of the social ‘science’ that it actually is, has failed so utterly and dismally at delivering the goods that it promised that it has lowered the tone for the whole scientific neighbourhood. And lets face it, science has promised a lot too..
And if this climate-change mess we’re in is actually human-induced, that means that some boffins somewhere missed something and messed up big time. And now they’re going to fix it? I doubt it, somehow. Climate patterns exist amidst so many variables. Mainstream science can’t even properly explain how the sun works. Add it up mate -
Far from a collective denial of the ‘facts’, the better informed sceptics are debating the ‘facts’. The CO2 theorists are shouting that their theory fits the last 40-50 years of temperature measurements, and are arrogant enough to declare the debate over.
Sceptics such as Ian Plimer produce a raft of arguments to show that the Earth has a history of ‘climate change’ - sometimes rapid and disruptive and subject to a range of natural forcings - some of which we know well and other factors which are poorly known and others which we probably have not yet discovered. None have anything to do with industrial release of CO2.
Instead of remembering the ‘Easter Islanders’ we should remember Dr Paul Ehrlich of 70’s fame, who was a hero of youth worldwide in predicting a “Club of Rome’ food disaster by the end of the 1980’s. Young, sideburned, charismatically bright, Ehrlich held the world in thrall to his prophesies of doom. Opponents such as Dr Colin Clark were pilloried as silly old farts, hopelessly out of touch.
Dr Erhlich was proved wrong, wrong and wrong, and had the good grace to admit it. James Hansen beware.
Andrew Glikson has escaped the cage - and his needle is caught in the groove…
When you look at the whole AGW case, it nearly all rests on the last 40-50 years of ‘recent proxy’ temperature readings, and the human release of CO2 over the ‘industrial revolution’.
Well, the industrial revolution really only got going from about 1800 onward, and CO2 levels had only risen to about 310ppm by 1950.
Temperatures started continuously rising from a trough in about 1650, which is roughly 200 years *before* CO2 levels started a more rapid rise around 1850. Warming was happening anyway, and its (non-CO2) contribution (noise) to the observed rise is never discussed in the AGW story.
The Holocene has been remarkably stable (compared with previous interglacials) with a 0.5 degree C cooling trend over the last 8000 years, and the Wikipedia averaged chart shows approx nine (9) peak-trough temperature swings in the amplitude range of about 0.4 degC. All of which is natural background ‘noise’. Some of these swings ended human civilizations - something on which Ian Plimer and Andrew Glikson agree.
Hence a logical proposition is to run your climate change models backwards with reasonably well known input data (the historical record) and see how accurately they duplicate the known temperature proxies. If the backwards correlations were accurate, then we could have much higher confidence that the background ‘noise’ of natural climate forcings was being correctly modelled, and crucially; that any industrially released CO2 and other GHG effects could be separated out.
Consider the logical absurdity that climate models run very poor correlations backwards with known historical data, yet are trumpeted by AGW theorists as reliable predictors of the future where the input factors going forward are increasingly unknown or just plainly unknowable 40-50 years hence.
Never has the rate of CO2 released from fossil fuel burning and land use been higher than in the last 10 years, yet global temperatures are flat or slightly falling.
What AGW theorists rarely discuss is the role CO2 plays in cooling mechanisms which have peaked and reversed the last 3 interglacials. Icemelt/ocean albedo and re-freezing feedbacks are stated to be the most important mechanisms. Andrew Glikson has stated that the Earth’s atmosphere/ocean system is sensitive to even minor forcings and temperature changes of 0.2 to 0.4 deg C have ended civilizations. All of which happened without human release of ‘industrial’ scale CO2 at all!
The exact role CO2 plays when the system is cooling is still vague. In the case of Prof Karoly’s ‘Swindle’ debate, his CO2 played an incoherent game of ocean absorption/release /feedback/warming - always warming, with icemelt/ocean albedo thrown in to boot! The exact scale of absorption of CO2 by the world’s oceans is largely unknown.
Last week ‘The Economist’ Science & Technology section (23May09) reported that jelly fish like thaliaceans (a type of gelatinous chordate) are one third carbon by weight and in their billions could sink *twice* as much carbon to the ocean bottom as dead planktonic algae; hitherto assumed to be the main way sinking carbon to the ocean bottom. “The carbon cycle has thus acquired another epicycle - something that will have to be added to computer models of how the climate works”.
Without reasonable confidence in the current climate models (gained by accurate backward correlations), who could reasonably argue that CO2 is a major forcing, when Dr Glikson’s ‘minor’ forcings (all natural factors) have caused major climate change in the historical record?
The Antarctica story is critical. AGW theorists have recently found ‘continental’ warming, when respected scientists on the spot find a 30 year cooling trend, and increased East Antarctic ice outweighing lost West Antractic ice. East Antarctica is 4 times bigger than West Antarctica. At 90% of the Earth’s ice, Antarctica is the big knob on the Earth’s thermostat - vastly bigger than all the other global glaciers, ice sheets and the Arctic combined.
A vast climate change edifice is therefore based on 30-40 years of data, with the last 10 years being discounted as a ‘weather anomaly’ by AGW theorists.
Much of the edifice has been based on James Hansen’s NASA/GISS construction of the data. Given the Earth’s vast history of natural climate change, sometimes abrupt and disruptive; a logical thinker would conclude that a lot more than 30-40 years of data is needed to verify the CO2 driven warming theory.