A Cool Look At Global Warming

For those who are naive about the consensus on global warming it should come as a big surprise that three of the top hitters for the climate change orthodoxy could be taken on – and beaten – in a public debate. Yet this happened just recently in a ticket-only event hosted by the Rosenkranz Foundation (March 14 2007)

The Motion: “Global warming is not a crisis”

Prior to the debate the motion had only 30% support from the audience.

After the debate – 46% of the audience had been convinced that global warming was indeed not a crisis, while just 42 percent continued to believe it was a crisis.

For the orthodoxy there were some big hitters:

• Gavin Schmidt ~ a climate modeller at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space. Gavin is chief guru-in-residence at realclimate.org (the prime resource for those seeking to stock up on anti-contrarian weaponry)
• Brenda Ekwurzel ~ works on the national climate program at the Union of Concerned Scientists
• Richard Somerville ~ University of California, San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Who could the so-called ‘contrarians’ field to match this fearsome firepower?

• Richard Lindzen ~ Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Philip Stott ~ Professor Emeritus of Biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
• Michael Crichton ~ MD Harvard Medical School & Postdoctoral Fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. (Also a writer and filmmaker…)

If you favour an epistemology that respects argument & reason, then the result of this debate is interesting and thought-provoking. But of course not ultimately especially conclusive.

On the other hand if you hold to an epistemology that offers no better than ‘knowledge by authority‘ you will see the debate as quite insignificant and indeed ill-advised: only the “priesthood” should make up the audience, and presumably only certain “approved priests” should be permitted to conduct the argument in any case. Attitudes such as this can be found on show at the inquest that followed the debate held at realclimate.org here as in this kind of comment:

“Our experience and that of all the scientists we know is that public debates with sceptics or denialists are not useful at all“

By “useful” one supposes this contributor means: “convenient to our authority“.

Or take this counsel against public debate:

“You’re guaranteed a hostile audience and a rhetorical ambush of some sort, your mere presence legitimates the proceedings, and they can always count it as a win with some justification afterward“

I would have thought that advocates of sound scientific theories (Boyle’s law, Archimedes’ Principle, Relativity) have no fear of public debate. On the contrary how could a public airing be other than entirely welcome and quite “un-threatening“?

So why plead a “special case” for AGW (anthropogenic global warming)?

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I have a transcript of the debate in PDF (255KB) here.

They say our atmosphere is getting laden with CO2 – in fact I imagine it’s so thick you could cut it with a knife when Czech President Václav Klaus gets together with European and World leaders at their regular jamborees. According to Klaus:

“Global warming is a myth”

“Other top-tier politicians do not express their global warming doubts because a whip of political correctness strangles their voice”

“Environmentalism as a meta-physical ideology and as a world view has absolutely nothing to do with natural sciences or the climate itself”

“…as a scientifically inclined man, I know how to read science articles about these questions, e.g. about ice in Antarctica. I don’t have to be a climate scientist myself to read them. The papers I have read simply don’t lead to the conclusions we may see in the media”

“…environmentalism is a new incarnation of contemporary leftism”

(These quotes are from from Luboš Motl’s blog)

It seems that Václav Klaus is planning a book soon and one chapter will be reserved for expressing his scepticism over climate change.

Go for it Václav!

I live in the UK where the climate is notoriously fickle. This characteristic of our climate is of great assistance to the powers that be as they programmatically seek to replace the concept of “global warming” with that of “climate change” in the vernacular. Any moderately significant weather event can now be harnessed to the Great Cause and taken to add to “the weight of mounting evidence” that confirms the truth of climate change. It matters not whether it be a drought in the south, a flood in the West Country, a tornado, a spell of hot weather in London, severe gales in autumn, water spouts in the Channel – the media will tend to hype them all up as harbingers of the coming apocalypse.

However as 2006 came to an end there was an excellent piece by Philip Eden in his Weather Watch series for the Daily Telegraph (Dec 30) that added a much needed sense of perspective:

A year for the record books

It was a year when unusual weather events frequently occupied the headlines, several records were broken, and many people were convinced that the climate really was changing.

January ’06 was the wettest for almost 30 years in southern England , then on Feb 8 a severe thunderstorm accompanied by hail and violent squalls caused much damage across the Midlands and the South-east.

Spring was wet in the north and west of Britain, but very dry in the south and east; June was mostly fine, apart from a 12-hour-long, steady downpour on the 29th which deposited between 2 and 3in of rain in a broad zone across southern, central and eastern England. That apart, it was a memorably long and sunny summer which culminated in record-breaking temperatures in early September with 35°C widely approached or exceeded.

October and November were both remarkably mild though often cloudy and damp, but the year ended with a dramatic burst of wintry weather with widespread snowfalls of 6in or more, and level depths approached 2ft in eastern Scotland.

You might not remember all those events. In fact you should not remember any of them as the year was 1906, not 2006. The purpose of this exercise has been to illustrate that, weather-wise, there is nothing new under the sun. Any year will deliver a handful of records and a host of unusual events, and we should not be surprised when they turn up.

(This article was reproduced by kind permission of Philip Eden. However I should say that this does not imply that he would endorse any of the views expressed here!)

Philip Eden is an independent meteorologist. As well as lots of other excellent articles and features (e.g Spin Between the Raindrops) He has published a number of books:

• Change in the Weather: Weather Extremes and the British Climate (2006)
• “Daily Telegraph” Book of Weather (2003)
• Great British Weather Disasters(due 2008)

Philip also runs the websites climate-uk.com and weather-uk.com

Following on the post about Russian scepticism over Anthropogenic Global Warming, I see scientific doubts from China too…

“Even though the CO2 greenhouse effect on global climate change is unsuspicious, it could have been excessively exaggerated. It is high time to re-consider the trend of global climate changes”

Multi-scale analysis of global temperature changes and trend of a drop in temperature in the next 20 years, Lin Zhen-Shan and Sun Xian, The School of Geographic Sciences, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, P. R. China, Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics, July 2006

In the context of global warming (“climate change”) we so often hear the mantras “the debate is now over” and the “overwhelming scientific consensus is blah blah“.

But there are plenty of scientists who don’t follow the supposed party line. One such is Habibullo Abdusamatov, the head of the space research laboratory at the St. Petersburg-based Pulkovo Observatory.

In an interview with the Russian News & Information Agency Dr Abdusamatov stated:

“Global warming results not from the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but from an unusually high level of solar radiation and a lengthy – almost throughout the last century – growth in its intensity. It is no secret that when they go up, temperatures in the world’s oceans trigger the emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So the common view that man’s industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect relations” [Jan 15 2007]

The point is not so much that he is right (though of course he may be). Rather it gives the lie to the idea that the men in white coats are of one mind on this (apart from a few big-oil-financed lackeys!)

Of course fanatical warmers are prone to respond to this kind of counter-example by saying “ah, when we say consensus we don’t mean by that that you can’t find academics with top qualifications in mathematics, physics, or whatever who disagree with us. Rather we mean that if you look at a select list of peer-reviewed journals, then you will find consensus. Oh, and by the way, we’ll tell you which are the ‘good’ journals in which to look for the consensus“

I think this is a key battle line in the debate. The concept of “peer-reviewed consensus” is being put forward as lying at the heart of the methodology of science. It is essential for the warmers’ case that that are able to hold the line on this.

But can “peer-reviewed consensus” carry the weight that the warmers want to put on it?