In response to a letter in the Telegraph on 19th April from the President of the Royal Society, Lord Rees of Ludlow, asserting that the evidence for human-caused global warming “is now compelling”, 41 scientists have written to the same newspaper contradicting Lord Rees. Published in the the Telegraph today, the letter claims:
1. Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural ‘noise’, and
2. Observational evidence does not support today’s computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future.
This is the third ‘climate change consensus’ letter in as many weeks, click here for links to previous letters.
Edward Celiz from Bodham Halt, Norfolk, has written to the newspaper complaining that:
“If I read another word about climate change, I shall go mad. Of course the climate is changing. That is what climate does, and has done so for billions of years. Do these scare-mongering pseudo-scientists really believe that puny man can control the unimaginable forces of nature by sticking a windmill on his roof, throwing away his fridge and planting a few trees?
Global warming? Perhaps, but what’s the betting that in a few years they will be telling us that they have got it wrong? That, in fact, the earth is getting colder?
My advice? Leave it to God.”
And I’m an atheist.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
What I find amazing about this whole AGW business is how politicised the scientists have become.
We now have math professors joining this letter writing stuff and ecpecting us to trust their judement when they nothing about climate science. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t serious.
Yes, several letters, different numbers of signatories. Does 41 trump 1? 60 trump 90? Such shallow questions. I glanced through the signatories to this latest letter and without thinking or rechecking carefully I saw at least 10 names that were also on the letter to Canada’s PM.
So a more meaningful question might be: Does 1 person signing 2 letters count as 2 GW denialists? I also note again that these are people scraped together from aroung the globe, not citizens of the country to which they petition.
Jennifer, you have been sufficiently impressed by Edward Celiz’s comment to quote it in your post. He says:
“Of course the climate is changing. That is what climate does, and has done so for billions of years.”
Yes, climate has varied in the past and it has varied for many different reasons, some better understood than others. The present day climate change is very well understood and is different. Simply noting that something happened before without humans does not in any logical way show that humans are not causing it today, nor does ignoring the consequences of past changes help as judge what consequences we now face.
For example, we see in ice core records from Antarctica and Greenland that the world cycled in and out of glacial periods over 120Kyr cycles. The cause for that climate cycle’s timing is fairly well understood to be the results of changes in the orbit of the Earth, though the mechanism behind the resulting response has not been conclusively established. These orbital cycles are regular and predictable and they are definitely not the cause of today’s warming. The other important difference between the glacial-interglacial cycles and today is the rapidity of the current change. The rate of warming is on the order of 10 times faster today than seen in the ice cores.
Such rapid warming on a global scale is very rare in the geological record, and while it may not be unprecedented, there is very strong evidence that whenever such a change has happened, whatever the cause, it was a catastrophic event for the biosphere.
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/01/climate-is-always-changing.html
Bob Carter has emphasized the point made in the Canadian version of this letter, a point I complained about here:
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/04/oh-canada.html
That the models are not matching the observations. I recently listened to a BBC Radio4 interview with him and I believe I now know what he is thinking of. He stated in the interview that the models predict an increasing temperature since 1998 and yet the temperature has not risen. I can understand when uninformed or unintelligent people confuse weather with climate, or are unable to understand the difference between very short term variability and a general trend. Bob Carter is neither so I am left with the conclusion that he is a manipulator intentionally trying to mislead. No scientifically literate person will discern a trend by drawing a straight line between one anomalous high point and today. He is scientifically leterate, so this is just a lie.
“Global Warming stopped 8 years ago because it was warmer in 1998 than now.” This argument is clearly lacking in substance. 1998 was a record high year, and according to NASA GISS, it was elevated .2oC above the existing trend line by the strongest El Nino of the century. Choosing that year as a starting point is a classic cherry pick and demonstrates why it is necessary to remove the very chaotic inter-annual variability that exists in the annual mean. Looking at the NASA graph above you can see the smoothed line in red, which represents a 5 year mean (thus it stops in 2003 as we won’t know the mean for 2005 for two more years).
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2005/
Interestingly, Bob Carter seems to know what he is doing in his recent op-ed and tries to preempt objections by basically insinuating that any choice of starting point, (such as 1978), will just be a cherry pick with the opposite motive! But cherry picking is about choosing data for the sole purpose of supporting a pre-conceived conclusion, it is not the simple act of choosing at all, one must choose something. In the case of the year 1978, this is often chosen simply because it is the first year that satellite records of tropospheric temperatures were available.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_temperature_record
So what choices are there, what reasons for those choices and what are the conclusions?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Satellite_Temperatures.png
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2_lrg.gif
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/pollack.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/paleolast.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
All of the various records above put the lie to Bob Carter’s specious claim that global warming has stopped.
And I have not even presented the other indicators like sea ice extent, glacier mass balance, sea level rise, ocean temperatures and changes in the onset of spring around the globe.
Some more detail here:
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/04/warming-stopped-in-1998.html
The climate may be changing but public perception is not; from an IHT article “Global warming’s PR problem” http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/23/news/warm.php
“..While scientists say they lack firm evidence connecting recent weather to the human influence on climate, campaigners still push the notion.
A Gallup survey last month shows that people are still not worried about climate change. When participants were asked to rank 10 environmental problems, global warming was near the bottom.
Without a connection to current disasters, global warming is the kind of problem people have proved singularly terrible at solving: a long-term threat that can only be limited by acting promptly, before the harm is clear.
“I wish I were more optimistic of our ability to get a broad slice of the public to understand this and be motivated to act,” said David Hawkins, who directs the climate program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private group.
In an e-mail message, he wrote: “Perhaps pictures of drowning polar bears (which we are trying to find) will move people but even there, people will need to believe that those drownings are due to our failure to build cleaner power plants and cars.”
Upping the ante is climate scientist Jerry Mahlman who is perhaps best known for the “hockey stick”
Mahlman: There’s a colossal misperception that if you bike to work once a week and recycle your garbage, then global warming will be fixed up. The problem is that, even if everyone did that, the attempt to stop global warming would fail by a factor of, oh, roughly of 100, from what we really need to be doing.
For example, I was in Al Gore’s office when he was vice-president. And he asked me the question, “If we could hold the emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere constant, would global warming go away?”
And I said, “If you were to hold the emissions constant, you would get up to eight times the carbon dioxide, or CO2, that there was before the Industrial Revolution. You would still be in a heck of a mess.”
..I‘ll tell you one of the horrifying facts of global warming, and why it is so inexorable. Suppose that you and I wanted – along with all the rest of the people in the world – to cut down on CO2 emissions so that they would be small enough to let us guarantee that the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere next year, and the decade after, and the decade after, would not go up any more.
What would be your guess as to how much we would have to reduce our per capita consumption of fossil fuels to meet that goal? This is an intuitive question for you.
Well, it turns out that every person in the world would have to do that, only twice as good as that. You’d have to cut it by 75 percent.
That’s a horrific number if you think about everything that you do: whether it’s talking on the telephone, or driving our cars, or heating or cooling our homes. Think of everything that’s manufactured, energy used to extract metals, for example. So the answer is 75 percent, if the entire world were going to participate.
http://www.earthsky.org/shows/observingearth_interviews.php?id=49567
rog – “Mahlman: There’s a colossal misperception that if you bike to work once a week and recycle your garbage, then global warming will be fixed up. The problem is that, even if everyone did that, the attempt to stop global warming would fail by a factor of, oh, roughly of 100, from what we really need to be doing.”
Funny how you post this comment as a call to do nothing. The point he is trying to make is that we have left actions far to late. In 1990 quite small reductions compounded for 16 years to present would have made a difference.
Instead we have done nothing. The only agreement in town was watered down to ineffectivness by the greed of Western Nations that wanted to pollute as much a as possible and also let the sweat shops of the world, China and India, to pollute as much as they can just so the economy wouldn’t be hurt.
So now the final ironry is that well we can’t do anything now anyway so lets keep doing nothing. Good plan!!!!!
rog,
“You’d have to cut it by 75 percent”
I will ignore the missing context of this number and instead focus on your mistake of equating 75% less fossil fuel burning with 75% less activity. I am not going to claim it will be easy or it won’t require simply driving less rather than driving better vehicles, but the point is to *replace* that much fossil fuel energy usage with *other energy sources*.
You are thinking like a partying teemager. Tell him you can’t drive home drunk and he wants to argue: so what, I just stay home all the time? No, you twit. Find other ways to do what you want.
This can be solved, a huge part of the challenge can be met with simple, no-brainer efficiency improvements, existing technology and yes, *gasp* some SMALL sacrifices, that who knows may turn out to make life better anyway (how fun is it to sit in bumper to bumper traffic jams anyway?)
The very same voices who constantly said “its not happening” can not be trusted to tell us if it is possible to stop it.
I am reminded of a favorite saying, no idea where I got it: wether you believe you can, or you believe you can’t, you’re probably right.
Catastrophism WORKS. Sir David King, UK Chief Scientific Adviser, said (18/5/01): “Antarctica is likely to be the world’s only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked”. Unamazingly, he became the only incumbent to get a second (5-yr) term.
When he was plain Sir Martin, and Astronomer Royal, the Lord Rees wrote a book “Our Final Century” saying we humans have only a 50/50 chance of making it through the 21st century: “Some natural threats, such as earthquakes and meteorite impacts, remain the same throughout time, while others are aggravated by our modern inter-connected world. But now we also need to consider threats that are human-induced.” Is it any wonder that he won the vote for the (rewarding in several respects) appointment as 59th President of the Royal Society. (Actually, it is no surprise that he won the vote, really; because by tradition, the Society only offers its fellows one candidate in the ballot.)
Is it possible that Jennifer could expand the readership of her blog by taking the catastrophist side on everything?
The bigger question is what happened to the 19 that signed the 60 letter that didn’t sign the 41 letter. Could they have changed their mind? or were like Swaters who were ‘duped’ into signing the 60 letter (who, by the way, has rejected the 60 letter and signed the 90 letter)?
This ‘is the third ‘climate change consensus’ letter in as many weeks’ with the two of the letters signed by the exact same 41 people. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say ‘This is the second letter by the same group of skeptics’ The fact that in three weeks this group of skeptics has fallen from 60 to 41 is probably an indication of momentum of the ‘skeptic’ movement.
Coby, if you had followed the link you would have read that it is Mahlman’s assessment not mine, in 2007 he will be a senior editor of assessment for the IPCC
Mahlman is now a senior researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, you can email him and tell him he is “thinking like a partying teenager”
“The rate of warming is on the order of 10 times faster today than seen in the ice cores.”
Tim Flannery (definitely not in the sceptic category re GW) in “The Future Eaters” (page 303), in chronicling the end of the last ice age, writes:
“About 15,000 years ago, perhaps over just three to five years, the climate warmed and the grip of the ice began to loosen.”
At least in the ‘sceptics’ letters we don’t have the unedifying spectacle of Canadian public servants signing a public document saying to their Prime Minister that ‘we.. call on you to provide national leadership’.
Now that scientists in Environment Canada and Fisheries and Oceans Canada have set the ball rolling, perhaps their counterparts in Health Canada could dispense with tiresome internal advisory processes and use the correspondence columns of the national dailies to give Mr. Harper the benefit of their views on GM foods and toxic wastes?
And Finance Department experts could get into the act too – they could link up with business leaders and make a public offer to get the Prime Minister up to speed on the urgent need for reform in Canada’s tax system.
I don’t find anything in the least surprising about this unprofessional behaviour by scientists on Canada’s public payroll. In fact I’m surprised that you found all the names unfamiliar, Coby. Quite a few of them, both of government people and academics, were familiar to me as prominent members of the IPCC milieu.
John M R Stone, former Executive Director (Climate Change), Meteorological Service of Canada, Environment Canada attended IPCC meetings in Geneva, Paris, Marrakech, Potsdam and New Delhi in the twelve months to November 2003.
I’ve read summaries of what Dr. Stone had to say about the Castles & Henderson critique at some of these meetings, thanks to the unofficial but non-confidential reports that were circulated by Australia’s principal delegate to the IPCC at that time, Dr. John Zillman. Dr. Stone’s comments were most illuminating.
There were 5 Canadians at the IPCC Plenary in Paris in February 2003, and 6 at the Plenary in New Delhi in November of the same year. On my reading of the participants’ lists, all of the Canadian representatives at both meetings were from Canadian government departments. In between the Plenary meetings there were the IPCC scoping meetings at Marrakech and Potsdam, each of which was attended by three experts from Canadian government departments.
In June 2003, after Marrakech but before Potsdam, David Henderson and I were the subject of an Environment Canada ‘hatchet job’, in the form of a review of the first Castles & Henderson critique in the Department’s weekly ‘summary’ of recent literature. Among the observations made by the anonymous reviewer were that Castles and Henderson ‘attempt to make a case as to why the 40 SRESs are “technically unsound”; that the IPCC team ‘step through the arguments advanced by Castles and Henderson’; that the IPCC ‘make a strong case to support the soundness of the science and procedure used in developing the IPCC SRES’; that ‘Castles and Henderson are just creating controversy where none exists’; and that Castles and Henderson had not responded to the IPCC’s comments ‘but continue to question the SRES in public fora.’ Public fora are anathema to Environment Canada!
(On our failure to respond, the facts were that E&E had held up its release date because of Dr. Pachauri’s insistence that the response that David Henderson and I had suggested should be sought from the IPCC must appear in the same issue of E&E as our criticism. The IPCC authors then complained about the ‘extremely short journal timetable’!).
Thanks for your advice that ‘a huge part of the challenge can be met with simple, no-brainer efficiency improvements’, Coby. Interesting that the fastest growth in GHG emissions of the 40 Annex I countries between 1990 and 2003 was in Canada. But if emissions from land use changes are excluded there were five countries whose GHG growth was even faster than Canada’s: Spain, Monaco, Portugal, Greece and Ireland.
So Canada must be doing something right: the result of some of the no-brainers emanating from Environment Canada perhaps?
To Rog:
Cutting CO2 emissions by 75% is not enough. Roughly 13% of CO2 emissions stay in the atmosphere forever. Stabilizing CO2 concentrations therefore requires zero emissions.
Simon C,
But Emeritus Professor Ian Lowe wrote just last year that there were only 5 climate change skeptics in the whole world: http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/000853.html !
So I do laugh everytime I read one of these letters signed by lots of scientists – especially when they are climate change skeptics. And I have had fun with the titles of these blog pieces – at least they amuse me.
But ‘skeptics’, in particular, should not be into ‘consensus’ and impressing with the ‘authority’ of lots of names. But it seems they are using the propaganda technique effectively – and I guess they get bored of people like Ian Lowe suggesting they are so few they don’t count?
In fact science should have nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary,
requires only one investigator who happens to be right. But how can one determine who is ‘right’ in the tangled web that is the politics of climate change science?
Richard Tol;
a. the 75% figure was quoted by Mahlman
b. Mahlam said 75% was not enough as there would still be warming
c. zero emission just will not happen.
Mahlman intimates that ordinary people are powerless to effect change and that life is controlled by a few “irregular” button pushers. He then rhetorically asks “What are the proactive actions that you take?”
There seems to be an extreme element to this ‘climate science’ debate, any kid with a PhD is revered as an irreproachable source. Even John Quiggin has found it easy to condemn Lindzen as an “irresponsible contrarian” based on one paragraph in a Newsweek article, with commenters referencing endless RealClimate links as evidence.
http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2006/04/23/credibility-up-in-smoke/
Jennifer,
I have just come across the following anecdote (which I now remember hearing before) on Climate Audit.
“In 1932, one hundred German scientists came out against relativity theory. When Einstein was told about it, he said something like, ‘Why 100? If I am wrong, all it would take is one.’ This comment reveals a deep truth about science.”
Congratulations on rediscovering a deep truth!
My guess is that the 41 signatories of the Telegraph letter understand this truth as well as you do. But they also understand that good tactics and deep strategy are necessary in order to win a war.
Cathy
Cathy – “But they also understand that good tactics and deep strategy are necessary in order to win a war.”
What war?
BTW is McIntyre putting himself in Einstein’s category now?
Cathy
but then relativity theory is now problematical, so which period of suitable history do you wish to identify yourself with?
Post Relativity or Pre Relativity?
And deep strategy? What post-modernist term does that mean?
And as it is war, as you conclude, manners are unecessary. Not another socialist are you?
Ender has succinctly demonstrated Cathy’s, (and mine) last point.
War? What nonesense. I think most climate experts would give their left leg to be wrong about global warming and climate change. This isn’t an issue of pride, arrogance or similar. It is a simple result of 100 years of science which is unchallenged, and a globe which continues to get warmer, with clearly and easily identifiable impacts on the cryosphere, sea levels, biosphere, and increasingly human sphere.
We have no alternative to the enhanced greenhouse effect, we have no alternative theory of atmospheric radiation, we have no explanation of the warming based on physically credible models, and we have no basis to believe the greenhouse effect stopped functioning beyond 280ppm of CO2. The sceptics have had 100 years to put a credible altenative forwards – do they need another 100?
David
Dear Jennifer,
You look young and despite what qualifications you may have on your subject, the experience of a lifetime has an advantage, in making comparisons of what went before and the present. At 67 years of age i have this advantage, i have observed the changes in weather, pollution and the occurence of the greedy consumer, creating so much non biodegradable waste.
It would be better for you to produce evidence of your claims, instead of verbally attacking those who who have a differing opinion or belief to your own.
Yes climate does change, nature has been undergoing destructive change since the beginning of the Industrial Age, and this has had a direct influence and cause of climate change. I have seen this for profit destruction, with my own eyes, not through someone else’s eyes.
David,
Are you descended from Lord Kelvin? Because you share his arrogance, and apparently also Lord Rutherford’s simplistic belief that science is either “physics or stamp collecting”. A good place for you to start broadening your knowledge and deepening your understanding would be for you to read some of Richard Lindzen’s recent writings, accompanied by an elementary study of the geological record.
And Jave, though the advice you give Jennifer is doubtless rooted in experience and made with every good intention, such anecdotal, personal reflections do not take us very far towards understanding the science. Yes, of course your memory is to a degree accurate that climate and other environmental things have changed in your particular district. It was ever thus, for change is what climate does.
The key question is not whether climate is changing, but the degree to which human influence is causing the change. If you look carefully at both the wording and the signatories to the Letter-of-60 to the Canadian P.M., you will see that there are any number of exceedingly well qualified scientists, some of high distinction, who assert that no human signal can yet be differentiated from the background noise of the climate signal.
This does not mean that no human signal exists, but it does mean that it is most unlikely that human activity at the moment poses a serious climate threat.
Cathy
fosbob,
“Antarctica is likely to be the world’s only habitable continent by the end of this century”
This is a completely unsupportable statement IMHO. So much so that I did not want to believe that Sir David King said it. I have tried to google it to find an original source for it. The phrase as quoted above returned around 500 hits which is not alot for a presumably newsworthy sound bite. I looked through them and based on what I was seeing googled again, this time with -“Geoffrey Lean” and -“Bob Carter” as they seemed to be very common sources of the quote. That left around 150 and the first page was full of blogs and SEPP, Fred Singer’s propaganda website.
Do you have an original source for this? Was it ever reported in the BBC or Independent or any mainstream press? I’m asking because often outrageous quotes are either really paraphrases or taken way out of context and was wondering if that is the case here.
rog,
I’m not unfamiliar with Mahlman’s name and I understood that figure came from him.
That does not speak to my point at all, though rereading I may have attributed an implication to you you were not making. In short, my point is that you can not equate reductions in emissions with reductions in activity, be it human or economic.
Coby, James Lovelock has made the claim that only the Arctic will be habitatable and the mainstream media repeated it: http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/001116.html
And Jaye, Are you suggesting that 67 year old men are by definition more knowledgable than 42 year old women? Have you any evidence to support the proposition? 🙂
It was first published in the Independent, there are plenty of press articles and op-eds repeating the claim ;
Global warming could soon make Antarctica the only place to live, says chief British scientist
02.05.2004
By GEOFFREY LEAN
Antarctica is likely to be the world’s only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked, the British government’s chief scientist, Professor Sir David King, said last week.
He said that the Earth was entering the “first hot period” since 60 million years ago, when there was no ice on the planet and “the rest of the globe could not sustain human life”.
The shock warning — one of the starkest yet delivered by a top scientist or senior government figure — comes as British ministers are deciding whether to weaken measures next week to cut the pollution that causes climate change.
That is despite Tony Blair last week describing the situation as “very, very critical indeed”.
The Prime Minister – who was launching a new alliance of governments, businesses and pressure groups to tackle global warming – added that he could not think of “any bigger long-term question facing the world community”. Yet the Government is considering relaxing limits on emissions by industry under an EU scheme on Tuesday.
Sir David says that there is “plenty of evidence” to back up his warning. Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — the main “green-house gas” causing climate change — were already 50 per cent higher than at any time in the last 420,000 years. The last time they were at this level — 379 parts per million and rising — was 60 million years ago during a rapid period of global warming in the Palaeocene epoch, he said. Levels soared to 1,000 parts per million, causing a massive reduction of life on earth.
“No ice was left on earth. Antarctica was the best place for mammals to live, and the rest of the world would not sustain human life,” he said.
Sir David warned that if the world did not curb its burning of fossil fuels “we will reach that level by the end of the century”.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=26&objectid=3563950
Ian,
Canada’s emissions have grown fastest you throw at me, you may be interested to know I am a dual citizen of the US also, so you can lay their transgressions at my feet as well. But I don’t want to just argue…
It is anything but clear to me what is wrong with “Canadian public servants signing a public document saying to their Prime Minister that ‘we.. call on you to provide national leadership’.” Especially when these are not people taking one stance in their job and another in their private life ie no hypocrisy or circumventing procedures or anything like that. That is to say that these government institutions are unanimous in their endorsement of the IPCC WG1 report, what’s wrong with an open leter making the same point? Your anecdote suggests their may be some personal background involved that I am unaware of, but I am still not clear on the principle.
“Roughly 13% of CO2 emissions stay in the atmosphere forever”
I don’t think this is correct. It is a matter of centuries however.
“In fact science should have nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary,
requires only one investigator who happens to be right. But how can one determine who is ‘right’ in the tangled web that is the politics of climate change science?”
You are correct to a point that science is not a matter of consensus and one fresh view can turn things around. However, policy has no choice but to be guided by scientific consensus. The ony tangle in climate change science has been manufactured by political interests.
The climate is warming rapidly. This warming is unprecedented in rate and height over at least the last one thousand years. The primary cause is anthropogenic emissions of GHG’s. If these emissions continue to build in the atmosphere the warming will continue.
That is the scientific reality. No credible scientific source disagrees with this, not even Richard Lindzen or Patrick Michaels will deny that human CO2 has been the primary cause of the observed warming. To aid an abet people who try to obfuscate this reality is truly a crime against humanity, and it is morally repugnant. Ignorance is a very weak excuse and it is only an excuse for people who are not familiar with this issue.
Frankly, I have a lot of trouble believing you are sincere in asking “what are we to make of it all?!” When the skeptics are using arguments like Bob Carter’s “warming stopped in 1998” you surely have the intelligence to realize your self that this is a manipulative lie.
Why would you respect an open letter he authors and signs?
“But how can one determine who is ‘right’ in the tangled web that is the politics of climate change science?”
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm
It is not that complicated.
Hi Jennifer,
Yes I was aware of Lovelock’s comments and I think they are pessimistic to the extreme. I would be *very* surprised if David Kay has said anything that far outside of what is scientifically supported.
Cathy,
Some of the 60 names on that letter also denied the tobacco smoke/cancer connection for decades. Some of them denied the Ozone Hole right up until the Montreal Protocol was a done deal.
And at least one of them has come forward as saying he was mislead as to what that letter was saying.
So, 60 signatures about which there are legitimate questions signed to a letter with no clear scientific basis on one hand, and on the other:
NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS)
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/edu/gwdebate/
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm
National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
http://books.nap.edu/collections/global_warming/index.html
State of the Canadian Cryosphere (SOCC)
http://www.socc.ca/permafrost/permafrost_future_e.cfm
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
http://yosemite.epa.gov/OAR/globalwarming.nsf/content/index.html
The Royal Society of the UK (RS)
http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=3135
American Geophysical Union (AGU)
http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/climatechangeresearch_2003.html
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
http://eo.ucar.edu/basics/cc_1.html
American Meteorological Society (AMS)
http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/jointacademies.html
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS)
http://www.cmos.ca/climatechangepole.html
Every major scientific institute dealing with climate, ocean, and/or atmosphere agrees that the climate is warming rapidly and the primary cause is human CO2 emissions.
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/02/global-warming-is-just-hoax.html
Why would you as an interested and sincere outsider chose to believe differently? I think you should require extraordinary evidence to reject the emphatic and united advice of the scientific community.
Thanks rog. I hope that was a misquote, it is an unsupportable statement.
rog, rereading that I think it is not an accurate paraphrase and it is clearly not a direct quote.
I think this is similar to the recent Overpeck et al study that said the earth could be “committed to” 6 metres of sea level rise by the end of this century and the press misrepresented it as just 6 metres by the end of this century. Sir David King knows that there is no chance that the antarctic will not be under hundreds of metres of ice in 2100 even if with had 10oC warming.
Coby, I think you are hogging this thread a bit. What about trying to run some of your thoughts together into one post a bit more and providing some arguement with substance rather than telling us who said what and whether or not you consider them a reputable source of information. And providing a link to an IPCC working group document in support of a position suggests to me you are just ‘sold on the concept’ rather than able to provide a logical argument in support of the proposition.
Given the generous laws of libel in the UK I would say that Sir David King has had no problem having his named linked to the text – but then I am in no position to “know” what he “knows”.
The whole GW argument is based on the validity of indicators including indications made by people such as Sir David King. You cant say he did not say it as you have no evidence.
Without evidence to the contrary I accept that Sir David King made the statement and thats that. He also said that sea levels would rise by more than 20 feet and put London under water.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1395288,00.html
“Coby, I think you are hogging this thread a bit. What about trying to run some of your thoughts together into one post a bit more and providing some arguement with substance rather than telling us who said what and whether or not you consider them a reputable source of information.”
Jennifer,
I was specifically queried or refered to in several unrelated comments, so I thought it appropriate to make seperate and concise responses. It is a rather bizarre segue from that complaint to saying I am lacking in substance. Can you please be more specific? What point did I attempt but did not provide substance? I am trying to recall if you have yet done me the courtesy of answering any of the referenced and reasoned comments that I have explicitly directed at you in the past, including straightforward and simple questions and I can’t. Perhaps a few notable omissions has blocked my recollections of other times. This is your perogative of course, but it makes your comment really stick in my teeth.
Providing a link to the IPCC report is because I am sold on the concept of reading the science for one’s self. It was not “in support of a position”.
Someone made a comment about how confusing it all is and this is the single best resource out there. No one who discusses this issue and whether it is real or not or whether it is bad or not or whether it is our fault or not should do so without being relatively familiar with that document. Believe it or not, some things are simple matters of fact and not political opinion.
As for your other unfounded and insulting insinuation, I provide logical arguments to support all of my positions, I have already said above what response I feel that I get.
HTH.
PS. 14 out of 40 comments may be more than my share but it hardly seems to warrant a complaint. But don’t worry, it is late in Canada and this is my last for the night.
Coby, What do you mean when you say that ‘These government institutions are unanimous in their endorsement of the IPCC WG1 report’? If this follows from the fact that the Canadian Government has endorsed the report, why restrict the comment to the WGI Report, and why restrict it to these Departments? The Government has endorsed a number of IPCC Reports, and there are many other Government Departments. Is every Canadian official obliged to accept all IPCC findings? If so, there’s no need for them to write to the Prime Minister about it: are the names of public servants not publicly available?
If it is your point that every scientist in Environment Canada endorses every statement in the letter from the 90 (including, for example, that ‘the world is now warmer than at any time in at least the last 1,000 years’), you have given a rather telling illustration of the unhealthy culture of conformity that prevails in that department – which was my point.
For example, if a scientist holding qualifications comparable to those of Dr. Khandekar were to apply for a position in the Department, would they be considered ineligible for appointment if they held the same views as he does about the reliability of climate models?
There is no way of knowing whether any particular lead author of an IPCC chapter agrees with the contents of the chapter concerned, let alone whether they supported what was said (or even felt qualified to form a view on what is said) in every other chapter. You offer us a long list of institutions that have issued statements supporting the IPCC, but it doesn’t follow that all members of the institution support the view.
The Australian Academy of Science signed a statement of support for the IPCC that was drafted by the Royal Society, but I know that there are Fellows of the Academy (including highly-qualified climate scientists) who don’t support IPCC positions.
The Royal Society is on your list. In early-January 2005 I wrote to Dr. Francois Bourguignon, Chief Economist at the World Bank about the PPP vs MER issue, and copied my letter widely including to the prominent and outspoken scientist Stephen Schneider of Stanford University. Professor Schneider forwarded my message to several colleagues under cover of the note: “Hi all, in case you haven’t seen Castles latest ride on the PPP horse. Any reactions? All the best for 2005, Steve”.
One of the recipients of this invitation to comment was Sir Partha Dasgupta, Professor of Economics at the University of Cambridge who is a Fellow of the Royal Society. Professor Dasgupta immediately responded as follows:
‘Castles is, of course, quite right. Correcting for differences in the “true” value of the dollar in terms of domestic currency and the official value of the dollar isn’t mere cosmetics, it is essential if we are to give meaning to standard of living comparisons… Bad practice is counterproductive, even tactically, let alone morally. Inflated statistics founded on known errors only give strength to detractors.’
So there is one Fellow of the Royal Society who does not support the IPCC’s practice of using market exchange rate-based converters when making international comparisons of GDP.
I cited Canada as having the greatest increase in GHG emissions of all Annex I countries because we are discussing letters to Canada’s Prime Minister, and you had put the view that ‘a huge part of the challenge [of containing GHG emissions] can be met with simple, no-brainer efficiency improvements’ – which also seems to be an article of faith at Environment Canada.
Yes I am interested to know that you are a dual citizen of the US also. Have you wondered why GHG emissions from the US (exc. land use changes) increased by only 13% between 1990 and 2003, compared with a 24% increase in Canada? Perhaps Canada’s stress on the ‘no-brainers’ is one of the reasons? And ratifying an agreement providing for mandatory reductions, which led Canadians to think that something serious was being done when in reality it wasn’t?
>Richard Lindzen’s recent writings, accompanied by an elementary study of the geological record.
Richard had one theory – the Iris effect – and it has been shown not to work. His more recent attempts to paint climate sensitivity as low due to the current rate of global warming are physical nonesense as the oceans heat capacity mean it takes decades for the globe to warm given a radiative forcing.
David
David, You say that ‘the sceptics’ have had 100 years to put forward a ‘credible alternative’ to the ‘simple result of 100 years of science.’ But is it really such a simple result, and is it really 100 years of science?
In 1978, which is less than 30 years ago, the US National Defense University published ‘Climate Change to the Year 2000: A Study of Expert Opinion’ (Washington, NDU, 1978). As explained in ‘The Global 2000 Report to the President of the U.S.’ (Pergamon, 1980):
‘The five climate scenarios of the NDU study were developed by a panel of experts in climatology. All had the same basic information, each had his own ideas and opinions was to the nature, dimensions and consequences of the climate changes that could be expected over the next 25 years.. All members of the panel had available detailed evidence of climate variation, both during human history and during the geologic history of the planet, indicating that significant natural variations could occur between the present and the year 2000.. Consideration of current trends in temperatures and of the history of climate over the past 10,000 years led the NDU to five alternative climate scenarios for the next 25 years: (1) Large Warming, (2) Moderate Warming, (3) No Change, (4) Moderate Cooling, and (5) Large Cooling’ (Vol. 1, p. 79).
The detailed analysis of the results of the survey was tabulated in the Technical Report of the Global 2000 study (vol. 2, pps. 54-63). The probability of the five scenarios was assessed at 10% for large warming, 25% for moderate warming, 30% for no change, 25% for moderate cooling and 10% for large cooling. According to the explanation of the analytic methodology, these ‘probabilities’ needed to be carefully interpreted:
‘This probability [of scenario] is a derived value based on the panelists’ probabilistic temperature forecasts and a weighting scheme to take into account each respondent’s expertise as rated by himself and his peers. Therefore, it reflects the range of judgments expressed by the climate panel and the strengths of their beliefs, as well as their level of expertise’ (Vol. 2, p. 577).
‘In June 1977, the project Advisory Group recommended that an ad hoc panel review early drafts of the five scenarios for internal and external consistency. Accordingly, project staff met in July with six climatologists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research at Boulder, Colorado. The reviewers paid particular attention to the large and moderate warming and cooling scenarios, i.e., those constructed from the smaller databases. The details and the conditional probabilities of these end scenarios, therefore, reflect the judgments of more people than the limited number of panelists who responded to the questionnaires along the lines of these scenarios.’
For each of the five scenarios, the ‘Probability of temperature change by latitude’ was tabulated for eight regions (Polar, higher mid-latitude, lower mid-latitude and subtropical, separately for the Northern and Southern hemispheres), with a frequency distribution of responses shown for each region.
The results for the Northern hemisphere ‘polar latitudes’ (65° to 90°) are of particular interest in relation to the recent statement by 90 Canadian scientists that ‘We endorse the conclusion of the 2005 Arctic assessment that “Arctic temperatures have risen at almost twice the rate of those in the rest of the world over the past few decades.” In the ‘large cooling’ and ‘moderate cooling’ scenarios produced 30 years ago, the modal responses were for a cooling in the Arctic of, respectively, 1.5°–2.0° and 1.0° -1.5° by the end of the century. In the ‘no change’ scenario, the modal response was for a warming of between 0° and 0.5°, but this was true FOR ALL EIGHT REGIONS – i.e. there was no expectation that Arctic temperatures would rise much faster than in the rest of the world.
In short, the consensus of expert opinion in the late-1970s was that the Arctic regions would either become cooler (35%) or would not show any significant change and would not differ significantly in trend from the rest of the world (30%) by the year 2000. The assessed probability that Arctic temperatures would increase faster than the rest of the world (as has in fact happened) was only 35%.
I know that there have been great advances in climate science in the past 30 years. I know that much more and better information is now available about observed trends over the same period. I know that the great majority of climate scientists do not agree with the views expressed in the letters to the Daily Telegraph and the Canadian Prime Minister (the first letter). But that does not mean, as some posters on this blog seem to suppose, that these letters can be dismissed as the product of liars or fools.
I’ll conclude by mentioning three scientists who signed both letters, and who were formerly employed at national meteorological agencies.
BILL KININMONTH agrees with you, David, that ‘we have no basis to believe the greenhouse effect stopped functioning beyond 280ppm of CO2’, as John Zillman noted in listing his points of agreement with Bill’s book (which John launched in November 2004):
+ ‘There is a natural greenhouse effect in the atmosphere and, other things being equal, more greenhouse gases means a stronger greenhouse effect. I agree and so does the IPCC.
+ ‘The concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been increasing over the past century. I agree and so does the IPCC.
MADHAV KHANDEKAR submitted a paper to the Lords Committee entitled ‘Are climate model projections reliable enough for climate policy?’ I infer from the sentences quoted in the Committee’s Report (para. 36) that he believes that the answer is in the negative. My only other knowledge of Dr. Khandekar comes from a posting by Rog on another thread, which said that he ‘has a PhD in meteorology, a masters degree in statistics and won several post-doctoral fellowships, including one with the National Research Council, was a top climate scientist with Environment Canada for 25 years as well as with the UN.’ Rog also said that Khandekar had ‘worked at the highest levels on climate research for 48 years and has published more than 100 highly regarded scientific papers.’ Perhaps Coby knows whether or not this is true and, if it is, how this record compares with the output of the scientists still working at Environment Canada who signed the letter to the Prime Minister?
HENDRIK TENNEKES, formerly Director of Research at the Netherlands Met Bureau, said in a recent paper that “those that advocate the idea that the response of the real climate to radiative forcing is adequately represented in climate models have an obligation to prove that they have not overlooked a single nonlinear, possibly chaotic feedback mechanism that Nature itself employs.. The blind adherence to the harebrained idea that climate models can generate “realistic” simulations of climate is the principal reason why I remain a climate skeptic. From my background in turbulence I look forward with grim anticipation to the day that climate models will run with a horizontal resolution of less than a kilometer. The horrible predictability problems of turbulent flows then will descend on climate science with a vengeance.’
I don’t understand this and perhaps it is all wrong, but I would like to see a discussion of the point by a mainstream climate scientist. I may not understand the explanation, but I will try to do so. It does not seem to me to be likely that a person whose views are palpably ridiculous gets to be appointed as Director of Research at the Netherlands Met Bureau. Has any mainstream climate scientist commented on Dr. Tennekes’ views?
David,
“As the oceans heat capacity mean it takes decades for the globe to warm given a radiative forcing.”
This statement alone shows you have no understanding of climate – since, according to your statement, “it takes decades for the globe (what the globe or the atmosphere) to warm.
I can assure that with a mass of 6E24 Kg it will take a little more than a few decades to warm the globe according to your understanding of physics.
Re Ian Castles comment; Tenneke
Ian,
Tenneke was sacked for questioning AGW. This fact I got from Hans Labohm directly. However his sacking was politically correct, in other words he was not sacked.
> David, You say that ‘the sceptics’ have had 100 years to put forward a ‘credible alternative’ to the ‘simple result of 100 years of science.’ But is it really such a simple result, and is it really 100 years of science?
Unfortunately it is that simple.
The theory started over 100 years ago (Arrhenius 1896), and no one since has come up with an credible alternative to explain the global warming we have since observed. Arrhenius suggested a doubling of CO2 would raise global temperatures by 5 to 6degC. He was awarded a nobel prize in chemistry in 1903.
A copy of Arrhenius paper is available from http://web.lemoyne.edu/~giunta/Arrhenius.html.
Unfortunately, AGW, it is NOT that simple. Please refer to the submission by the Lavoisier Group to the (UK) Stern Review Discussion Papers on the the Economics of Climate Change, which refers to Arrhenius’ paper and subsequent developments as follows:
‘Arrhenius’ calculations in 1896 of a 5 or 6 degree warming from CO2 doubling were not “remarkably close to the mark” and do not “[stand] up very well to the much more sophisticated modelling that has taken place subsequently”. Arrhenius’ calculations were in fact wild overestimates based on highly inaccurate radiation data [see footnote below].
‘The only reason Arrhenius’ figures are roughly the same as the top end of today’s model predictions is that the models assume large water vapour feedback, which makes up for some of Arrhenius’ large overestimate of the effect based on his incorrect data on the infra-red emission spectrum of CO2.. [T]he minority of scientists who believed that increases in carbon dioxide would have a noticeable warming effect – starting with Arrhenius himself – thought that this would be a good thing, since it would slow the onset of the next ice age and open frozen land masses to agriculture.
The footnote states:
‘Succinctly explained, with supporting extracts from Arrhenius’ original publications, at http://members.lycos.nl/ErrenWijlens/CO2/arrhrev.htm. The incorrect radiation data had been computed by Langley in 1890. Langley corrected his error in 1900, four years after Arrhenius’ paper (http://members.lycos.nl/ErrenWijlens/CO2/langley.htm), and in the same year Ångström directly refuted Arrhenius’ calculations (Annalen der Physik, Bd. 3, pp. 720-732). Arrhenius at first resisted Ångström’s demonstration, but backed down in 1903, without ever adjusting his warming estimates. These were 4 degrees C for doubled alone, plus water vapour feedback of 30 per cent. Current high-end climate models imply feedbacks of ~300 per cent.’
Of course the climatologists of the 1970s were well aware of Arrhenius’s calculations. They were mentioned in the MIT Study of Critical Environmental Problems (SCEP) in 1970. If Arrhenius’ calculations made in 1896 were the ‘only credible alternative to explain the warming that has since occurred’, why do you suppose that the expert view in the late-1970s was that for the succeeding 25 years cooling was just as likely as warming?
Louis – “I can assure that with a mass of 6E24 Kg it will take a little more than a few decades to warm the globe according to your understanding of physics.”
Is this the best your fine scientific brain can come up with? A childish quip about what David means when you know full well he means the earths’s ocean/atmosphere.
Grow up!!!!
My apologies, ABW – calling you AGW was a Freudian slip.
Jennifer,
Your comment about Coby’s “hogging” of the thread, etc was a while back now, but I found it a bit harsh and unnecessary. It also seemed a little like you were having a go at someone who may not have the same opinions as you re climate change. Similar treatment was given to Phil, and I notice he has been absent from contributing lately.
Perhaps you could be a little more consistent with your control over the posts. For example, no offence to Ian Castles, who obviously spends a lot of time writing and researching his comments, but they are incredibly long, and perhaps could also be viewed as “hogging”. I wonder if you simply want to weed out those whose views you don’t share and have a blog that undergoes a selection committee and appropriate dress codes before entering.
BBC have broadcast a program called “A load of hot air?” addressing the issue of global warming alarmism.
The say “Hardly a day goes by without a new dire warning about climate change. But some claims are more extreme than others, giving rise to fears that the problem is being oversold and damaging the issue.”
Says Dr Hans Von Storch “The alarmists think that climate change is something extremely dangerous, extremely bad and that overselling a little bit, if it serves a good purpose, is not that bad.”
Commenters are now blaming the press saying “If journalists decide to embroider on a press release without referring to the paper which the press release is about, then that’s really the journalists’ problem. We can’t as scientists guard against that.”
However the evidence runs to the contrary, when the UK “Environment Agency publicised research on global warming over the next 1,000 years, it predicted cataclysmic change; temperature rises of 15C and sea levels increasing by 11m. The agency said action was needed now.”
Despite his signing of the press release the study’s lead author did not see it that way – “His research shows if you did nothing for a century you would still only get a fraction of the worst case scenario.”
Confused?? Read it all on..
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4923504.stm
James Hansen also tells ‘activists’ to cool it..is this another case of media distortion?
“..NASA scientist James Hansen warned that environmental activists and the media better be more cautious with their rhetoric regarding “global warming.” In addition, a CBS News “60 Minutes” reporter recently compared skeptics of “global warming” to Holocaust deniers. Hansen, who was responding to a question about the increased media coverage of “global warming” in recent months, issued the warning during a teleconference with a top Democratic congressional staff member, liberal environmental groups and journalists. “I am a little concerned about this, in the sense that we are still at a point where the natural fluctuations of climate are still large — at least, the natural fluctuations of weather compared to long-term climate change,” Hansen, director of the agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told the participants in the April 13 teleconference. “So we don’t want the public to hang their hat on a recent storm, recent hurricanes for example, because those will fluctuate from year to year,” he said….”
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200604/CUL20060424a.html
Travis,
I enjoy reading paragraphs of information that provide evidence and argument – from which ever side.
But I get tired of the endless provision of links to IPCC and other very long documents as though citing a thick document or providing links to numerous journal articles proves you are right. …It would be good it get a bit more of an explaination, or summary of the text being quoted, from Coby and others sometimes.
There is also this mindless appeal to the status quo and the authority of the IPCC which would be more tolerable if the same commentators where not so intolerant of those institutions and individuals with a different view.
Also, as you would have noted, comments from some ‘AGW believers’ can be very agressive, particularly towards me, often suggesting that I have some hidden motivation and am not to be trusted. And I am a little tired of the endless personal criticism that adds nothing to our understanding of the issues.
> If Arrhenius’ calculations made in 1896 were the ‘only credible alternative to explain the warming that has since occurred’, why do you suppose that the expert view in the late-1970s was that for the succeeding 25 years cooling was just as likely as warming?
The “scientists thought it was cooling in the 70’s” myth is well covered by Realclimate:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=94
Science is an iterative process. No credible alternative (to greenhouse gas increase) has been put forward to explain the currently observed climate changes.
Jennifer – “But I get tired of the endless provision of links to IPCC and other very long documents as though citing a thick document or providing links to numerous journal articles proves you are right”
I am a bit puzzled because what do you expect? I am not a scientist so I do not have any of my own work to cite. I can only link to work done by professionals. I does not prove I am right however it does say that professional scientist also have the same conclusion.
“There is also this mindless appeal to the status quo and the authority of the IPCC which would be more tolerable if the same commentators where not so intolerant of those institutions and individuals with a different view.”
I would not be intolerant of different views if all of them were genuine. A lot of the alternate views were and still are wedge tactics to prevent action on climate change rather than genuine scietific discussion. The time to object to AGW was 20 or 30 years ago when scientists fought the establishment for acceptence of AGW. That argument was won with peer reviewed science. Also the contrary view is almost without exception negative debunking of research rather than positive information gathering contributing to science.
Ender,
I was not thinking of anything you had posted when I made the comment.
I was thinking of the links that come with no explaination or summary and refer to a document of several hundred pages. For example,
“”But how can one determine who is ‘right’ in the tangled web that is the politics of climate change science?”
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm
It is not that complicated.”
Given all the detailed discussion about these issues and the content of such documents, would you consider that comment arrogant?
Now I have often refrained in the past from passing such judgement, but I am going to make more comment into the future.
It seems people like Phil have in the past become frustrated, because people like me, don’t end up agreeing after being sent lots and lots of links and given endless amounts of informaton about how important certain people are and how they have published in Nature.
I am just trying to explain that such information doesn’t necessarily impress me. I am interested in ideas, evidence and argument.
Jennifer,
“It would be good it get a bit more of an explaination, or summary of the text being quoted, from Coby and others sometimes”
Please look at comment 3 and comment 4 in this thread. Particularly comment 3. Very clear, very specific, what I mean when I claim I try to provide substance. Above you say this is what you want, but it was met with dead silence.
Actions speak louder than words.
Do you understand why the “but climate is always changing” objection is an not appropriate reassurance? Do you understand what is wrong with Bob Carter’s “warming stopped in 1998” tripe? A layperson could be forgiven for that one, but Bob Carter has the kind of background that means he *knows* he is being disingenuous.
I put efforts into these discussions and I offer links to science because I do not ask anyone to take my word for matters of fact. What I see coming back from you was first silence, then a request to shut up, and now an accusation that I don’t explain things. This is demonstrably false.
So how about either a defense of Bob Carter’s “warming stopped” argument, refuting the lengthy rebuttal I gave or an acknowledgment that it is not a reasonable point?
How about an explanation from you about why you highlighted Edward Celiz’s “climate always changes” comment in light of the problems in it I pointed out?
Ian,
Sorry, you have asked me a number of questions but they have drifted high up the thread now and some of them seem very leading so I am not sure where to begin.
Perhaps if there was something particular you wish I had responded to you can bring it back up, thanks.
Coby,
1. I think that ‘climate is always changing’ is an important point. And I repubished Celiz’s letter because it made me laugh.
2. I disagree with Bob on the issue of warming. I see a general and continual increase in temperature in the global and Australian data – and I have also noted that James Hansen’s predictions are more-or-less on track.
3. Nevertheless I consider Bob a clever geologist and experienced in the collection and interpretation of sediment core data which has much relevance to understanding climate over long time periods. So I am interested in his opinion and evidence on climate change issues.
4. I recognise David (who sometimes comments at this blog) knows a lot about climate from the meterological perspective and I am also always interested in his opinion and evidence.
5. I appreciate that Bob and David don’t often agree – but they both contribute to my understanding of the issue.
Jennifer,
Did you not read what I wrote in comment #3? That is not meant as “case settled” but it is meant to say that I already brought up some points and you have continued to ignore them.
Climate is always changing is true depending on the timescale you wish to think about. It is notable that climate has been very stable during the entire length of the Holocene, basically since the dawn of agriculture.
Someone says to you, we are changing the climate and if we don’t stop it could be very bad. You respond: “the climate is always changing”. There are two possible reasons for this response. One is to say that it is probably not our fault and two is to say it is normal and therefore not bad.
It is very clear that the climate change we are currently experiencing is anthropogenic. I don’t think there are many sceptics with relevant scientific backgrounds left who deny this. Regardless, the case is very strong so the fact that this is not natural should be stressed.
What about the reassurance that change is normal? Well it turns out that the rapidity of the change that is underway is anything BUT normal. Even when compared to the very dramatic looking fluctuations of the glacial interglacial cycles, this change is roughly 10 times faster. If the temperature does indeed rise 4.5oC more this century (the high end of IPCC’s projected range) that will represent an equivalent difference to between pre-industrial climate and deep glaciation. 10oC is the difference between the coldest glaciations in the last 650K yrs and the warmest interglacial, completely different climates.
But there are actually examples of changes quite similar to the one we are now causing, but this is not reassuring when we examine the consequences that came about in the past. Google for Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum or read here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene-Eocene_thermal_maximum . It seems that roughly 55 million years ago, there was a sudden and large pulse of carbon into the oceans and atmosphere, the exact mechanism is not know. Perhaps a smaller warming or some kind of eruption or earthquake triggered a catastrophic release of methane clathrates from the ocean floor (an event we are dangerousy tempting today as well). Where ever it came from the result was an extinction event and a 5-10oC global warming. It took the climate more than 100K yrs to recover from this perturbation, both temperatures and oceanic acidification. That is not the only analogous geological event and it is crystal clear that such large and rapid changes wreak havoc on the biosphere.
It is worth considering that we have already weakened the biosphere with other kinds of pollution and over exploitation, effectively stacking the dack further against its ability to adapt and survive.
History is also not without examples of complex and develope human societies that have collapsed and died out due to climate changes regional to where they developed. We are unwise to pretend that we do not depend on a healthy and diverse environment.
Climate has always changed…yes, I guess that is a nice philosophical outlook. But change of the magnitude we are causing today is rare and deadly.
…and?
Be assured the worlds need for cheap and reliable energy will not diminish and that need will not be constrained by philosophy or ideology.
So the question is, if you see the problem what is your solution? (forget windfarms or riding a pushbike with a solar panel hat)
The world we live in today has been made by problem solvers not problem makers.
Coby,
I’m not here to defend Bob Carter (but I will likely quote him again in the future), and I’m not an expert on climate change, but I think you have made a worthwhile point at #3, and I apologize for being a bit harsh in one of the following comments.
Coby,
You have a great capacity for making declamatory statements which are entirely wrong.
1. “It is very clear that the climate change we are currently experiencing is anthropogenic”.
If it were clear, then there would not be an ongoing debate, with many pedigree scientists on each side. And why would you suppose that the western world would continue to spend about $4 billion a year on researching something which is, apparently, “very clear”?
2. “Well it turns out that the rapidity of the change that is underway is anything BUT normal.”
Completely wrong again. The MAGNITUDE of the modern warming period probably less than that of the Mediaeval Warm Period, and is certainly up to several degrees less than that of recent interglacials. And the RATE of the warming lies at the 20 per centile of the rates of both warmings and coolings that have occurred over 140-yr-averaged intervals through the last 10,000 years. i.e. 20% of such periods of time show greater rates of warming.
See:
Watanabe, O., Jouzel, J., Johnsen, S., Parrenin, F., Shoji, H. & Yoshida, N. 2003 Homogeneous climate variability across East Antarctica over the past three glacial cycles. Nature 422, 509-512.
and
Davis, J.C. & Bohling, G.C. 2001 The search for patterns in ice-core temperature curves. In: Gerhard, L.C. et al. (eds.), Geological Perspectives of Global Climate Change, American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Studies in Geology 47, 213-229.
3. “Do you understand what is wrong with Bob Carter’s “warming stopped in 1998″ tripe?”.
Unless I misread his article, Carter didn’t say that – the subeditor who chose the headline did.
Carter merely pointed out the incontrovertible fact that 1998 was the year in which a roughly 20 year-long warming trend turned into temperature stasis, which stasis has now lasted 7 years.
That 1998 also happened to be an El Nino year has nothing to do with it. How much longer does the stasis, or the cooling which will probably set in next, have to last before you reassess your self-evidently passionate beliefs?
Cathy
Jennifer, thanks very much for the apology and acknowledgement, it’s big of you.
rog, “…and?”
… and I refuse to discuss solutions to a problem with someone who will not acknowledge that there is a problem. It is inevitably just a way to confuse the issues, waste time running in circles and you will eventually fall back on a denial of any need or urgency any way. My very consistent experience is that people who don’t want to believe a problem is serious will not be serious in discussion or effort at solving it.
My personal focus is trying to get us past the pure denialism that is preventing us from seriously addressing this problem. Frankly, I think that the human race is resourceful and innovative and once the effort begins we will find ways. What we can not invent ourselves out of is the need for food and water. The economy is a human construction it can be reconstructed. The biosphere is huge and delicate and intricately complex, by far the more difficult thing to reengineer.
Well Coby looks like you have thrown in the towel, your refusal to speak with those who dont agree with you is not an answer it is a denial to deal with the problem in its entirety.
Like it or not the world holds many opinions and they are all valid and you will have to learn to accept that before you can “get us past the pure denialism”
Hi Cathy,
Re point #1, “there is ongoing debate” does not follow from the fact that alot of money is still being spent on research. There are always areas in need of better understanding of course. Scientists are still researching the fundamentals of gravity after all, put this does not stop us from erecting guardrails in front of high falls. Understanding future consequences is very difficult and very important and I’m sure is money well spent. (BTW, Americans spent 4 billion dollars on candy last Easter). If you really want to do a head count on the whole global warming issue please see this page:
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/02/there-is-no-consensus.html
Re point #2, There is actually no good evidence that the MWP was indeed a globally warm period comparable to today. Regionally, there may have been places that did exhibit notable warmth but all of the various global proxy reconstructions agree that it is warmer now and the temperature is rising faster than at any time in the last one or even two thousand years. Anecdotal evidence like that above can never tell you a global story.
NOAA presents a whole selection of proxy studies together with the data they are based on and these can be found here: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/paleo.html
Specifically, they have this to say about the MWP:
“The idea of a global or hemispheric “Medieval Warm Period” that was warmer than today however, has turned out to be incorrect.”
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/medieval.html
The paper from Nature about Antarctica does not seem to have any relevance whatsoever to what you are claiming here, though I have only read the abstract. It is about findings that refute previous indications of regional variability in the Antarctic, so what? The paper from the American Petroleum Institute is an analysis of the Greenland ice core. The temperature variations indicated by this record do show some rapid jumps in short times, notably several degrees in a few decades at the end of the younger Dryas, however the other proxy records from that time period indicate that this was a regional phenomenon, not a global one. What’s more this paper’s claims, from 2001, about the lack of model replication are out dated as just this years model runs at NASA GISS were able to reproduce the major features of that time. It has long been thought, and these model findings further indicate, that those regional variations were the result of ice sheet dynamics as the Laurentide sheet retreated, specifically large pulses of melt water that disrupted the THC current. I also note that this abstract talks about natural flucuations but offers no plausible physical mechanism. I don’t understand how the authors cam make comparisons between regional paleo climate and global climate today.
(BTW, the only numbers from your comment that showed up in the paper’s abstract was the 10000 year length of the Holocene)
Re #3, I fail to see a significant difference between “warming stopped” and “a 20 year-long warming trend turned into temperature stasis”, but no matter both versions are equally wrong. A trend is not established by a single data point. 1998 is a single data point. If you look at the NAS GISS analysis here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2_lrg.gif
you can see the red line, which is a five year smoothing. There is no cessation in the warming trend. Also note that if you were to take Carter’s shallow approach even using the smoothed line you would have to conclude that global warming:
– stopped in 1979
– started in 1980
– stopper in 1981
– started in 1984
– stopped in 1989
– started in 1993
– stopped in 1997
– started in 1998
If you want to cherry pick years then we have had 17 different periods of warming and cooling in the last thirty years. Please, is it really necessary to do this?
As for “cooling will probably set in next”, James Annan has made it a little hobby of his to try to get any of these sceptics to put money where their mouths are, and surprise surprise, none of them are willing.
http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2005/06/betting-summary.html
Hi rog,
You don’t make any sense. I am not interested in discussing what to do about a problem that you don’t think exists. Why should I waste my time? First things first.
I am quite willing to discuss with you wether or not the problem does exist despite any differing opinions.
Cheers.
Coby, I assume that your earlier offer to me and the response you have now made to rog means that you are quite willing to discuss with me whether the problem exists despite differences we may have.
You claimed in your first post on this thread that ‘The rate of warming is on the order of 10 times faster today than seen in the ice cores.’ Cathy has contested this, citing two papers in peer-reviewed journals (one of them entitled ‘The search for patterns in ice-core temperature curves’).
On the face of it, the issue of whether or not today’s warming is 10 times faster than seen in ice cores is a question of fact. If you are not prepared to discuss this issue with Cathy because she doesn’t think a problem exists, would you please explain the basis of your claim to the rest of us?
Hi Ian,
I wrote and posted a lengthy response to Cathy a couple of hours ago, even before my reply to rog. I received a “comment received, pending approval” notice.
Basically, the very rapid temperature changes seen in the Greenland Ice cores (and not in the antarctic, though there are issues of differing temporal resolution) represent regional changes driven by ocean current changes from freshwater run-off. This has been a long standing hypothesis, I am not very intimate with the data aside from the ice cores, and just this last year NASA had some success reproducing this climate history in atmosphere ocean coupled model runs.
The key point can be seen in this graph:
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/fig2-22.htm
The very steep rises as glaciation ends represent ~10oC over 5-10Kyrs which is an average of .02oC/decade versus the .2oC/decade we are experiencing.
(I broke this in two on the theory that long post full of links get flagged for moderation)
I see my reply to Cathy has appeared a few comments up.
Thanks Coby for your reply to my question and also for your reply to Cathy.
I accept your first point in response to Cathy, in relation to funding. However, I find the ‘head count’ on ‘the whole global warming issue’ on your website to be quite unconvincing.
This is an institution count, not a head count. You list the Royal Society of Canada as having agreed to a statement that says that ‘The ratification of this [Kyoto] Protocol represents a small but essential first step towards stabilising atmlospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.’
Is this part of the ‘whole global warming issue’? My reading of recent statements, including comments made only yesterday by Canada’s Environment Minister, suggests that the present Canadian Government does not share this view. And I don’t believe that it could be held by every member of the Royal Society of Canada (I note that, unlike many other national academies, the RSC includes economists).
You attribute to all of these institutions the position that ‘the earth is undergoing a RAPID warming trend that is outside the likely bounds of natural variations and this climate change IS primarily driven by anthropogenic emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel burning’ (EMPHASES added).
Did the IPCC say ‘rapid’? Contrast your statement with the following statement by Dr John Zillman, Principal Delegate of Australia to the IPCC from 1993 to 2003, President of the World Meteorological Organization from 1995 to 2003 and Australia’s Director of Meteorology from 1978 to 2003. John was Review Editor of several key chapters of the IPCC Third Assessment Report. He is the President of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and was recently elected to the Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science. In launching a book by Bill Kininmonth (one of the signatories of the recent sceptics’ letters) in November 2004, John Zillman said:
‘I now believe, as does the IPCC, that there is no more than a ONE IN THREE chance that the observed global warming over the past century is ENTIRELY natural in origin’ (EMPHASES added).
It is a big step from such carefully expressed statements to the position you present as one that commands near-universal support.
I don’t agree that ‘the idea of a global or hemispheric “Medieval Warm Period” that was warmer than today’ has been shown to be incorrect. This and related issues are currently being examined by a Panel of the US National Research Council. On the basis of the reports that I have seen, including the presentations of several participants, the proceedings at the Panel’s hearing early in March did not reflect well upon the IPCC or upon the leading scientists in the proxy climate milieu.
I agree with your statements that ‘A trend is not established by a single data point’ and that ‘1998 is a single data point’. It is regrettable that the IPCC had no scruples about giving such prominence to this single data point in some versions of its famous diagram: see http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/figts-5.htm
Ian,
Regarding “head counts”, I wish to emphasis that this page of mine is very specifically targeted at the common misconception that there is a raging debate in the scientific community about the general conclusions regarding AGW. Contrast these institutional positions with the question about a global warming signal in hurricane trends, you will not find conclusive statements about this because there is (for now) a legitimate debate on this question. Until a few months ago, NOAA was unique in having a definitive “natural cycles” attribution on their site. This has been removed in the wake of the recent revelations of political pressure emanating from the Whitehouse as it seems it did not represent an agreement within that institution.
But I concede your point, you are quite correct in noting the distinction between “head count” and “institution count”. I have tried to address that in this article:
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/04/position-statements-hide-debate.html
If you are familiar with Benny Peiser’s counter to that, but not his serious problems, see here:
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/03/what-about-peiser.html
I don’t think it is very useful to judge a scientific issue from statements by the Minister of Environment. If the current Canadian gov’t is ignoring its own scientific institutions, this is to their shame and is a comment on politics not science. Policy decisions are necessarily a mix of politics and science but that does not mean that particular questions within this broad and complex issue can not and should not be addressed as strictly scientific.
Regarding the issue you take with how I phrased the position, I think I am justified in the use of the word “rapid” and offer this TAR quote in my defense:
“the rate and magnitude of global or hemispheric surface 20th century warming is likely to have been the largest of the millennium”
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/071.htm#235
I have ammended the IS you highighted and the phrase now reads “this climate change IS LIKELY TO HAVE BEEN DUE TO anthropogenic emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel burning” to reflect the text near the bottom of this page:
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/007.htm
I think the last five years of research will add more strength to these statements in AR4, but I will wait.
Regarding that John Zillman quote, the context of it is also relevant to the whole should we worry question:
“I believe the models are now remarkably good at simulating most of the essential climate forming processes in the atmosphere and the ocean and even the behaviour of the total climate system at the global scale. And, though I would not have said so a decade ago, I now believe, as does the IPCC, that there is no more than a one in three chance that the observed global warming over the past century is entirely natural in origin.”
Scientists are properly very cautious in what they say, and it is often inappropriate to interpret the kinds of qualifiers they use in formal venues as if it were everyday vernacular. Surprise, I have an opinion on that too!
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/04/scientists-arent-even-sure.html
Regarding 1/3 chance, 95% probability etc etc I think people need to take a step back and consider that we are talking about risk management and as such insistence on complete certainty is highly inappropriate. If you were sitting on an airplane preparing for take off and heard a sudden wrenching metal sound and felt the plane shake and then the captain came on the intercom and informed you “there is at most a one in three chance that was nothing to worry about folks”, would you want to take off?
Regarding the MWP, all I can say is the studies keep coming in. I think it is important to remember, however, that study of the past can be very informative, but it is not explanatory of the present nor predictive of the future.
I don’t think your issue with the IPCC graph http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/figts-5.htm is fair. Any given graph can be:
a. intentionally misleading
b. misleading
c. potentially misleading
d. perfect
This graph is a (c) because a naive reader might compare the dotted 1998 line with the black smoothed trend. However, it is not (b) or an (a) because that graph contains the interannual variability over its entirety, as well as error bounds on each year. The 1998 line serves to make the legitimate point that by this analysis it is very unlikely that any single year in the past 1000 NH years matched 1998 and thus 1998 is likely the highest annually averaged NH year since 1000AD.
Ian,
An answer is in the moderation pipe,
Best wishes.
Thanks Coby for your detailed answers to the issues that I’d raised.
Of course I agree with you that it’s not useful to judge a scientific issue from statements by the Minister for the Environment. But the statement that the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol ‘represents a small but essential first step towards stabilising atmlospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases’ is a politico-economic statement, not a scientific one.
Here’s the concluding paragraph of the report of the unanimous all-party Committee of the House of Lords into The Economics of Climate Change:
‘The important issue is to wean the international negotiators away from excessive reliance on the ‘targets and penalties’ approach embodied in Kyoto. Hence there should be urgent progress towards thinking about wholly different, and more promising, approaches based on a careful analysis of the incentives that countries have to agree to any measures adopted.’
It seems that the 17 scientific academies agreed to the statement drafted by the Royal Society in 2001 in a matter of days, without conducting any analysis or seeking the advice of persons with relevant expertise, such as political scientists, economists or – dare I say it – politicians or former politicians.
You say that ‘If the current Canadian gov’t is ignoring its own scientific institutions, this is to their shame and is a comment on politics not science.’ No, in my view it is to the shame of the scientific institutions that they have pronounced on issues that are beyond their competence. They should now be reviewing how their decision that Kyoto was ‘an essential first step’ was made, and whether they still think it is true.
I accept your point that the IPCC statement on recent temperatures can reasonably be paraphrased using the word ‘rapid’.
I don’t think that we are in disagreement on the risk management question. Of course it would be illogical to insist on complete certainty BEFORE ACTING. But when (for example) Robert Watson, former IPCC Chair, told the UNFCCC that it was ‘indisputable’ that the last decades of the 20th century were the warmest of the millennium, he was not making a scientific statement (at least in my view).
On the MWP, I’ll defer further judgment until the US National Research Council Panel has reported. At the least I’d expect that it will be found that interannual variability was significantly greater than shown in the iconic graph.
Coby, Thanks for your detailed comments. My answer to some of them is in the moderation pipe, I hope.
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