Maintaining a Monopoly on Climate Science
Posted by jennifer, January 14th, 2009 - under News, Opinion.
Tags: Climate & Climate Change
LEVELS of atmospheric carbon dioxide have been steadily rising, but since about 1998 global warming has stalled. Some climate scientists claim the reason has everything to do with the sun.
A little over a month ago a planning meeting was called to discuss whether more research should be undertaken by the US National Academy of Sciences/US National Research Council in particular to consider the role of solar forcing on climate.
Well known meteorologist and blogger Roger Pielke (Sr) was at the meeting and claims that compelling evidence was present showing that current climate models do not adequately represent the solar influence on climate.
Dr Pielke and a few others supported the need for a National Research Council study on this issues, but those at the meeting who also participate in the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were against the idea. Dr Pielke writes at his blog:
“The intensity of the dismissive and negative comments by a number of the committee members, and from even several of the agency representatives, with respect to any view that differed from the IPCC orthodoxy, made abundantly clear, that there was no interest in vesting an assessment of climate to anyone but the IPCC.
“The IPCC is actually a relatively small group of individuals who are using the IPCC process to control what policymakers and the public learn about climate on multi-decadal time scales. This NRC planning process further demonstrates the intent of the IPCC members to manipulate the science, so that their viewpoints are the only ones that reach the policymakers.
“If the NSF, NASA and the NRC are going to appoint and accept recommendations by groups with a clear conflict of interest to protect their turf [in this case the IPCC], they will be complicit in denying all of us a balanced presentation of the physical science basis of climate change, including the role that humans have.
“The obvious bias in the 2007 IPCC WG1 report is illustrated in the weblogs
Documentation Of IPCC WG1 Bias by Roger A. Pielke Sr. and Dallas Staley – Part I
Documentation Of IPCC WG1 Bias by Roger A. Pielke Sr. and Dallas Staley – Part II
“As it stands now, there are no independent climate assessments of the IPCC WG1 report funded and sanctioned by the NSF, NASA or the NRC.
“The agency representatives at the NRC planning meeting on December 8 2008, either are inadvertantly neglecting the need for independent oversight, or they are deliberately ignoring this lack of an independent assessment because the IPCC findings fit their agenda on the climate issue. In either case, the policymakers and the public are being misled on the degree of understanding of the climate system, including the human role within in it.”
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Roger A. Pielke (Sr.) has a B.A. in mathematics and a M.S. and Ph.D. in meteorology. Dr Pielke has served as Chairman of the American Meteorological Society Committee on Weather Forecasting and Analysis, Chief Editor of Monthly Weather Review, Editor-in-Chief of the US National Science Report to the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, Co-Chief Editor of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, and Editor of Scientific Online Letters on the Atmosphere. He was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 1982 and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2004.
NT: ”
Brad, there’s no point discussing mantle geology with Louis. He doesn’t believe in plate tectonics…”
And what the heck has that got to do with mantle geology – belief in plate tectonics – means an absence of science.
How freaking stupid can one become.
Brad – perhaps you should listen to Plimer’s address and specifically the bit about the many variables ignored in explaining sea level changes.
As for me conflating slow mantle movements with rapid sea level rises – oh where did I do that?
You obviously have not listened to Plimer’s address, so I maybe do that before instructing 62 year old practising geologists how to bang rocks.
Hi Louis,
When you and Plimer compare the most rapid sea level changes at the end of the last ice age (he says 10mm/yr) to the slow changes in mantle convection rates, oceanic subduction rates, etc – that is confusing climate caused sea level changes with geologically caused changes. Geology did not change at the end of the last Ice Age, climate did.
A simple way to resolve this is consider the rapid increase in the rate of sea level change occuring over the last few decades (from 0.5mm/yr to 3mm/yr). Is this caused by a sudden change in mantle convection, MOR basalt heat, or some other subsurface phenomena?
Or is it caused by a change in the heat content of the ocean and cryosphere?
If you aren’t even willing to directly answer this question, then you are avoiding the facts in front of you.
I do appreciate your willingness to discuss this, but I am worried that you will continue to avoid the subject of heat content in the climate system.
Brad,
The end of the last ice remains one of the most controversial and disputatious areas of science.
One factor which most seem to ignore is the massive depletion of ground water reserves by humanity. Lance Endersbee has described this in detail elsewhere on this blog, and in his book.
I side with Endersbee that ground water is not recycled rainwater, (some of it is) but generally humanity has extracted an enormous amount of water, caused signficant land subsidence, and this water has not returned back into the lower crust – for one simple reason, it can’t from a density contrast. So it goes into the oceans and this water source is ignored in climate science because of the entenched belief that all ground water is recycled rainwater, and hence not a factor.
Humanity has recently had the technology to pump enormous quantities of water from bore holes and most of these are now dry – oddly this has happened over the last 50 years or so since WWII.
You also need to keep things in perspective – elsewhere on Jen’s blog is a diagram prepared by Lance Endersbee that shows graphically to scale the thickness of the oceans in comparison to the Earth itself. It is a whisper thin layer of water, so the thermal behaviour of this film of liquid will be dominated by the Earth itself.
Other subsurface phenomena need to include the large electrical currents passing through the atmosphere via the flux tube events, into the earth. The Earth is very hot down below and that heat cannot be supplied by radiogenic sources, since these deplete over time. The only energy source left is electricty and it is only recently that NASA has identified them. So here is an entirely newly discovered source of heat that no one suspected.
Thirdly I see the Earth’s surface as its interface between itself as a quasi metallic ball immersed in the electric plasma of the solar system. The physical activity on that interface would be dominated by electrical forces, but these are not well understood, though electrical engineers are well aware of them when they affect the various systems we have built. Again Science Daily reported on this recently. The association of lightning with tropical hurricanes etc suggests that rather being effects of atmospheric motion in hurricanes that the observed lighting might instead indicate the presence of electrical forces generating those hurricanes, most of that electrical activity occurring in dark current mode, so we don’t see it. We do know that hurricanes are associated with electric fields in excess of 10,000 volts per metre.
I suggest you Google Bruce Leybourne and read his published papers on surge tectonics and EM effects – geology does have a reasonable explanation for the PDO but it’s ignored.
If the only thermal inputs to the climate system are solar radiation and heat retention by greenhouse gases, then we should have worked it out by now. That it remains a highly disputed area of science sgtrongly suggests we heed Fred Hoyle’s observation – that after allocating enormous resources to a problem, for a long period of time with many, many scientists, and we still have not solved the physics, then maybe that is because we are thinking with the wrong ideas.
I am suggesting that we should include electricity as a significant input into the climate system.
“Is there no end to the claims that “since about 1998 global warming has stalled”? Do you not realise that over ten years, noise dominates?”
Well thats an own goal by a confirmed idiot if ever we did see one.
Hi Louis,
As I feared, you studiously avoided answering the question of climate system heat content. Instead, you tried two diversions.
1st, the depletion of groundwater. You put up a ridiculous strawman – that climate science is ignoring this contribution to sea level rise. And then you implied that it is responsible for the observed accelerating sea level rise.
20 seconds of googling is enough to disprove both obfuscations.
Measurement and modeling of the very thing you claim is ignored:
http://discover-decouvrir.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/dcvr/jsp/showresult.jsp?article=0
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2006WR004941.shtml
ftp://ftp.csr.utexas.edu/pub/ggfc/papers/2000GL011595.pdf
Estimates of terrestial water used in sea level change budgets:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/page5.php
And if you can bring yourself to lay eyes in the dreaded IPCC reports, they have a section called “5.5.5.4 Anthropogenic Change in Land Water Storage” where they estimate the total net contribution to sea level change to be “on the order of 0.05mm/yr, with an uncertainty several times as large”.
All the estimates and measurement that I could find agree that this is a very minor contributor to sea level change.
Diversion #2: Electricity as an input to the heat content of the climate system.
I’ll consider it when you can show some data. Can you point to any published study that estimates the magnitude of this effect, in watts/square meter, or joules/yr for the Earth?
Thanks in advance for your data,
Brad
P.S.
Will you be able to answer the question about the total change in the heat content of the climate system since 1998?