Dr. Tim Ball, A Different Perspective

Traditionally, the older scientists held to the prevailing wisdom and were challenged by the new, skeptical graduates looking for wider answers. In climatology, the opposite has happened. The so-called skeptics challenging the prevailing wisdom are the professors who have researched and taught the subject for 30 years or longer. Their knowledge is much wider than that of the new young scientists because climate science has stagnated for thirty years. All the funding was directed to only one side of climate science, and that was the side promoted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and accepted as the ‘official science’ by governments.

It’s now frightening how little climate science is known by both sides of the debate on human causation of global warming. I wrote this sentence before I saw a paper from Michigan State University that found,

Most college students in the United States do not grasp the scientific basis of the carbon cycle - an essential skill in understanding the causes and consequences of climate change.

The professor says students need to know because they must deal with the buildup of CO2 causing climate change. This discloses his ignorance about the science of the carbon cycle and the role of CO2 in climate. It’s not surprising, and caused by three major factors:

(1) a function of the emotional, irrational, religious approach to environmentalism;

(2) the takeover of climate science for a political agenda; and funding directed to prove the political, rather than the scientific, agenda.

(3) The dogmatism of politics and religion combined to suppress openness of ideas and the advance of knowledge critical to science.

We now have a generation (30 years) of people teaching, researching, or running government that has little knowledge because of lack of fundamental education. Because of them, the public is ill-informed, doesn’t understand the problem, and doesn’t even know the questions to ask. Correcting the education process will take time, because there are insufficient people with the knowledge or expertise. Correcting and widening the research functions will take longer because of removing or re-educating current personnel and the lack of qualified replacements. Even if achieved, success is unlikely because there is the massive problem of inadequate data.

Reduction in the number of weather stations, elimination of raw data by national governments, unexplained manipulations of existing data, and deliberate loss of data were all done to predetermine and justify results. This couples with failure to fund research to recover and reconstruct historical data. In his autobiography, Hubert Lamb said he founded the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in 1972 because

...it was clear that the first and greatest need was to establish the facts of the past record of the natural climate in times before any side effects of human activities could well be important.

The situation is worse now, sadly, due to the people at the CRU and government weather agencies.

The blame begins with the political manipulations of Maurice Strong, but he only succeeded because of the so-called climate scientists. Among them, computer modelers caused the biggest problem. They needed to know the most, but knew the least. If they knew anything, they would know there is inadequate data and understanding of the major components and mechanisms on which to build the models.

A former editor of an enlightened environmental journal said we need a committee of scientists from the many disciplines involved in climate science. Such a committee existed 25 years ago, and produced groundbreaking work. It was a joint project funded by The National Museum of Canada and Environment Canada under the title Climatic Change in Canada During the Past 20,000 Years. Each year a specific topic was considered, and scientists presented material that was published in Syllogeus. For example, Syllogeus 55 examined Critical Periods in the Quaternary of Climatic History of Northern North America. All the problems that plague climate science, such as tree rings, ice cores, circulation patterns, and proxy data, among many others, were identified and researched. In the last meeting, I was elected Chair, and in my acceptance speech I said we needed to consider, carefully and scientifically, the claims of global warming. Environment Canada cut the funding, apparently, because it challenged the political position the agency had already taken; the project died. Canada should reconstitute it, because it was producing useful and non-political science.

People who totally accepted the corrupted, limited and narrowly focused science of the IPCC have taught climate science for the last 30 years. They should all read H.H. Lamb’s monumental two-volume set Climate: Present, Past and Future. Vol. 1: Fundamentals and Climate Now (1972) and Climate: Present, Past and Future. Vol. 2: Climatic History and the Future (1977).

They’d learn that all issues now put forward as ‘new’ are not new at all. They only appear new because of the black hole that politicians, aided by a few climatically uneducated political scientists, have dragged climate science into over the last 30 years.