Other voices on climate change

The most difficult thing for a scientist in the era of Climategate is trying to explain to family and friends why it is so distressing to scientists. Most people don’t know how science really works: there are no popular television shows, movies, or books that really depict the everyday lives of real scientists; it just isn’t exciting enough. I’m not talking here about the major discoveries of science—which are well-described in documentaries, popular science series, and magazines—but rather how the process of science (often called the “scientific method”) actually works.

The best analogy that I have been able to come up with, in recent weeks, is the criminal justice system—which is (rightly or wrongly) abundantly depicted in the popular media. Everyone knows what happens if police obtain evidence by illegal means: the evidence is ruled inadmissible; and, if a case rests on that tainted evidence, it is thrown out of court. The justice system is not saying that the accused is necessarily innocent; rather, that determining the truth is impossible if evidence is not protected from tampering or fabrication.

The same is true in science: scientists assume that the rules of the scientific method have been followed, at least in any discipline that publishes its results for public consumption. It is that trust in the process that allows me, for example, to believe that the human genome has been mapped—despite my knowing nothing about that field of science at all. That same trust has allowed scientists at large to similarly believe in the results of climate science.

Until now.

To read the rest of this online analysis of Climategate by physicist John P. Castella, click here.

Analysis of the Central England temperatures, the longest continuous record of temperatures in existence, shows that the late 20th century warming was low, not high, when compared with the past 300 years. These figures essentially give the lie to the myth of “unprecedented” 20th century warming.

For details, click here and here and here.

Defenders of the IPCC position on climate science have adopted different strategies in dealing with the scandal of the CRU emails and computer code.  Some authoritative voices, notably Judy Curry, have engaged in dialog with skeptics and have reassured PhD students that the “tribalism” revealed in the CRU emails has no place in science.

On the other hand, another very common reaction has been to mock the “deniers” for taking certain phrases out of context. This circle-the-wagons strategy tries to convince the public that the CRU episode has absolutely no bearing on the actual science, and that at worst it reveals petty personality flaws. This spin is epitomized in sarcastic pieces which take on the voice of the “deniers” and claim that the laws of physics are all a socialist hoax too.

These defenses are self-evidently absurd to anyone who has read the actual CRU emails in question. The public’s faith in the sacrosanct “peer-review process” will be understandably shaken when they read just how this “consensus” was enforced. Furthermore, the real debate was not between ultra-skeptics who say “global warming is a hoax” versus professional climate scientists who say “anthropogenic climate change is real.”

For the rest of this article, click here.

A major argument advanced for drastic GHG emission reductions is that, otherwise, we are told, global warming will exacerbate the problems that developing countries already face (e.g., low agricultural productivity, hunger, malaria, water shortage, coastal flooding). Consequently, global warming would/could/might/may swamp their meager adaptive capacity. Not only would this be a tragedy for the developing countries, it could trigger social, political and economic instability, and mass migrations which would create large negative spillover effects for the US and other industrialized countries (see, e.g., here).

It’s true, many developing countries’ adaptive capacity is relatively low today.  But will it be equally low in the future when global warming, presumably, kicks in?

For the rest of this article by economist Indur Goklany, click here.

By the end of this month, according to the Copenhagen Accord, all parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change are due to report what cuts in emissions they will make by 2020. Broadly speaking, the Annex 1 parties, who will account for about half of global emissions over the period, will commit to reducing current emissions by 30% by 2020, or 15% on average in the decade between now and 2020.

Thus, if and only if every Annex 1 party to the Copenhagen Accord complies with its obligations to the full, today’s emissions will be reduced by around half of that 15%, namely 7.5%, compared with business as usual. If the trend of the past decade continues, with business as usual we shall add 2 ppmv/year, or 20 ppmv over the decade, to atmospheric CO2 concentration. Now, 7.5% of 20 ppmv is 1.5 ppmv.

We determine the warming forestalled over the coming decade by comparing the business-as-usual warming that would occur between now and 2020 if we made no cuts in CO2 emissions with the lesser warming that would follow full compliance with the Copenhagen Accord. Where today’s CO2 concentration is 388 ppmv –

Business as usual:                              ΔT = 5.7 ln(408.0/388) = 0.29  C°

–          Copenhagen Accord:           ΔT = 5.7 ln(406.5/388) =  0.27  C°

=          “Global warming” forestalled, 2010-2020: 0.02 C°

One-fiftieth of a Celsius degree of warming forestalled is all that complete, global compliance with the Copenhagen Accord for an entire decade would achieve. Yet the cost of achieving this result – an outcome so small that our instruments would not be able to measure it – would run into trillions of dollars.

For the rest of this article by Christopher Monckton, click here.

The Associated Press has published an independent investigation into the scientific implications of the recent emails hacked from East Anglia University in England.  In, “AP IMPACT: Science not faked, but not pretty”, AP writers Seth Borenstein, Raphael Satter, and Malcolm Ritter concluded that “the messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked.” But the article misses two very important points and stumbles in its logic.  First, regarding the scientific consensus, the reporters conclude:  “However, the [email] exchanges don’t undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.”

The emails, as the article admits, reveal that “skeptical” scientists were stonewalled, blacklisted, and repeatedly denied access to data under the FOI.  If the views of these scientists had been welcomed as a check and balance on the work of others, if they had been made partners at the table, if they had been given full access to the same data, if their research was published, and if those who opposed their findings had been forced to respond to their conclusions in peer reviewed literature, then the consensus would probably look much different than it does now. 

At the very least, the pretense of utter certainty which proponents of the IPCC hypothesis maintain, would have been substantially diminished and they would have been forced to acknowledge that their position was not fully supported by the peer reviewed literature. It is circular reasoning to appeal to a consensus that was shaped by scientists conspiring to eliminate all opposition.  These scientists, though relatively few in number, wielded a disproportionate influence on the scientific community.  Moreover, from the private emails it is evident that they were less confident about their own conclusions than they appeared to be in public discourse.

For the rest of this article, click here.

Responses to “Climategate”–the leaked e-mails from Britain’s University of East Anglia and its Climatic Research Unit — remind me of the line “Are your feet wet? Can you see the pyramids? That’s because you’re in denial.”

Climate catastrophists like Al Gore and the UN’s Rajendra Pachauri are downplaying Climategate: it’s only a few intemperate scientists; there’s no real evidence of wrongdoing; now let’s persecute the whistleblower. In Calgary, the latest fellow trying to use the Monty Python “nothing to see here, move along” routine is Prof. David Mayne Reid, who penned a column last week denying the importance of Climategate.

Unfortunately for Reid, old saws won’t work in the Internet age: Climategate has blazed across the Internet, blogosphere, and social networking sites. Even environmentalist and writer George Monbiot has recognized that the public’s perception of climate science will be damaged extensively, calling for one of the Climategate ringleaders to resign.

What’s catastrophic about Climategate is that it reveals a science as broken as Michael Mann’s hockey stick, which despite Reid’s protestations, has been shown to be a misleading chart that erases a 400-year stretch of warm temperatures (called the Medieval Warm Period), and a more recent little ice-age that ended in the mid-1800s. No amount of hand-waving will restore the credibility of climate science while holding onto rubbish like that.

For the rest of this article from The Calgary Herald, click here.

This website has a very thorough description and analysis of the “Climategate” emails affair. It’s well worth reading. Click here.

In December 2009, Scientific American, once a respected popular-science journal and now a pulp science-fiction picture comic, viciously attacked US Senator James Inhofe because he had proclaimed 2009 to be the Year of the Skeptic. By skepticism, he meant “standing up and exposing the science, the costs and the hysteria behind global warming alarmism”. Venomously, Science Fiction American’s editorial comment continued: “Within the community of scientists and others concerned about anthropogenic climate change, those whom Inhofe calls skeptics are more commonly termed contrarians, naysayers and denialists.” Yah-Boo! This name-calling marks the depth of unscientific desperation to which the proponents of the “global warming” nonsense have now sunk.

Politicized Scientific American, following a host of similarly left-leaning bodies such as the Royal Society and the unspeakable BBC, proceeded to parody and then condemn the now-overwhelming scientific case against the notion that CO2 is the principal driver of the past half-century’s “global warming” by setting up and then knocking down seven feeble straw men – childish, dishonest simulacra of the true scientific arguments against “global warming” hysteria. It described its straw men as “only a partial list of the contrarians’ bad arguments”. Yah-Boo!

We shall reproduce each of Scientific American’s seven straw men in bold face, state the true skeptical argument in italic face, and discuss the scientific truth in Roman face.

For the rest of this article, click here. For the Scientific American article, click here.

Ben Santer, a climate researcher and lead IPCC author of Chapter 8 of the 1995 IPCC Working Group I Report, admits that he deleted sections of the IPCC chapter which stated that humans were not responsible for climate change.

Accusing Santer of altering opinions in the IPCC report that disagreed with the man-made thesis behind climate change, Lord Monckton told the program, “In comes Santer and re-writes it for them, after the scientists have sent in their finalized draft, and that finalized draft said at five different places, there is no discernable human effect on global temperature – I’ve seen a copy of this – Santer went through, crossed out all of those and substituted a new conclusion, and this has been the official conclusion ever since.”

“Lord Monckton points to deletions from the chapter, and there were deletions from the chapter, to be consistent with the other chapters we dropped the summary at the end,” Santer admits to the program.

Commenting on The Alex Jones Show today, Lord Monckton said that this was the first time Santer had publicly admitted to deleting the information.

For the rest of this article, click here.