Icecap and SPPI and I am certain all the other friendly bloggers wish you all a safe, happy and properous New Year. Thank you for your support and encouragement in 2009. Paraphrasing NOAA Susan Solomon, a lead author of the 2007 IPCC Summary for Policymakers in one of the leaked emails. “2009 was a very good year for the science and the ‘true’ scientists” I suspect as more of the hoax becomes unravelled and hoaxsters exposed, 2010 will be even better. Energized by Climategate which has proven we were not conspiracy theorists and shills for big oil, many of us are working even harder to analyze and present the real story.
By Lord Christopher Monckton
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.
Unscientific American pompously continued: “Not everyone who questions climate change science fits that description, of course - some people are genuinely unaware of the facts or honestly disagree about their interpretation. What distinguishes the true naysayers is an unwavering dedication to denying the need for action on the problem, often with weak and long-disproved arguments about supposed weaknesses in the science behind global warming.”
Politicized 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!
In this introduction, we have made some rude remarks about Scientific American. Did those remarks grate as you read them? If so, you will know what it feels like when, day after day, those scientists whose diligent research has shown the “global warming” scare to be nonsense have to put up with invective and vilification of the sort that Scientific American doles out in its poisonous article.
From here on, therefore, we shall confine ourselves solely to scientific argument, with no name-calling. Scientific American would do well to learn from this approach.
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 (ONLY THE STRAW MAN AND SIMPLIFIED REPLIES ARE REPRODUCED HERE - SEE ARTICLE FOR THE FULL ARGUMENTS AND TRUTHS.
Straw Man 1: “Anthropogenic CO2 can’t be changing climate, because CO2 is only a trace gas in the atmosphere and the amount produced by humans is dwarfed by the amount from volcanoes and other natural sources. Water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas, so changes in CO2 are irrelevant.”
True skeptical argument: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, second only to water vapor. It is settled science that the direct effect of adding it to the atmosphere will be some warming - but not very much.
Straw Man 2: “The alleged ‘hockey stick’ graph of temperatures over the past 1600 years has been disproved. It doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of a ‘medieval warm period’ around 1000 A.D. that was hotter than today is. Therefore, global warming is a myth.
True skeptical argument: As papers by more than 770 scientists from more than 450 institutions in more than 40 countries over the past 25 years demonstrate by proxy temperature reconstructions from measured data, the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was warmer than the present, in some places by almost 4 C (6.3 F). measurable influence at all over temperature.
Straw Man 3: “Global warming stopped a decade ago; Earth has been cooling since then.”
True skeptical argument: Though 2000-2009 is allegedly the warmest decade in the 150-year instrumental record, there has been no statistically-significant “global warming” for 15 years, and there has been rapid and statistically-significant global cooling for nine years, ever since the turn of the millennium on 1 January 2001. The UN’s models had all predicted a continuation and acceleration of “global warming”. Though natural variability explains the recent cooling, by the same token it also explains the preceding period of warming, which was not exceptional even in the recent record. During the 40 years 1695-1735, for instance, surface temperature in Central England rose by 2.2 C (4 F), whereas during the 100 years 1906-2006 global temperature rose by just 0.6 C (11 F).
Straw Man 4: “The Sun or cosmic rays are much more likely to be the real causes of global warming. After all, Mars is warming up, too.”
True skeptical argument: It was warmer than the present, by 7 C (12.5 F), for most of the past 600 million years; warmer by up to 6 C (11 F) in each of the past four interglacial warm periods; warmer throughout 7500 of the past 11,400 years in the current or Holocene interglacial warm period; and warmer in the Holocene, Minoan, Roman, and medieval climate optima. Therefore, today’s temperatures, and the observed rates of warming, are well within the natural variability of the climate, and no other explanation is necessary. However, changes in solar activity may exert a larger influence on terrestrial climate than the direct changes in total solar irradiance suggest.
One possible mechanism for this amplification of changes in solar irradiance is the Svensmark effect - the displacement of cosmic rays by the solar wind at times of high solar activity, reducing the rate at which cloud nucleation takes place. However, this theory is not yet established. It has been noticed - though the uncertainty in the measurements is high and not too much weight should be put on them - that warming has occurred on the surface of Mars, on Jupiter, on Neptune’s largest moon, and even on distant Pluto.
Straw Man 5: “Climatologists conspire to hide the truth about global warming by locking away their data. Their so-called ‘consensus’ on global warming is scientifically irrelevant because science isn’t settled by popularity.”
True skeptical argument: The emails released by the Climategate whistleblower contain clear evidence, now being investigated by the prosecuting authorities in the United Kingdom, that climate scientists prominent in the UN’s climate panel and in leading meteorological institutions round the world conspired to block, withhold, or destroy scientific data that had been validly requested under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act. The emails also show how The Team, as these bad scientists called themselves, tampered with the peer-review process, leaned upon editors to delay publication of papers by those with whom they disagreed and to provide them with advance copies of such papers, and - in essence - made up the global temperature record for the past 150 years.
Straw Man 6: “Climatologists have a vested interest in raising the alarm because it brings them money and prestige.”
Scientific American disingenuously cites a single study by the Government Accountability Office suggesting that between 1993 and 2004 US federal spending on climate change rose from $3.3 billion to $5.1 billion. This is bad enough - an increase of more than half in little more than a decade. However, in the recent stimulus package tens of billions more were thrown at climate research. NASA and NOAA, two institutions where several of The Team writing the Climategate emails came from, both received very substantial increases in their budgets. As Professor Richard Lindzen has pointed out, there is now so much money available for climate research that scientists everywhere are reclassifying themselves as climatologists to take advantage of it.
Straw Man 7: “Technological fixes, such as inventing energy sources that don’t produce CO2 or geo-engineering the climate, would be more affordable, prudent ways to address climate change than reducing our carbon footprint.”
True skeptical argument: Adaptation to climate change when and if it occurs, and in whichever direction it occurs, is orders of magnitude cheaper and more cost-effective than attempting to prevent it from occurring by controlling emissions of greenhouse gases. Technological fixes cannot be counted upon, because it is impossible to foresee which will work in future and which will not, and governments are notoriously bad at picking winners.
Read much more here. See SPPI’s Monthly CO2 Report here.
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” Albert Einstein
By Patrick McIlheran, Milwaukee Sentinel OnLine
We face, then-Sen. Al Gore wrote in 1991, “a kind of global civil war” between those who properly see the Earth as on the brink of catastrophe and those who do not. We must, he wrote, “make this struggle the central organizing principle of world civilization.”
Gore liked the phrase so much that he repeated it in his Nobel Prize speech in 2007: Rescuing the environment must be “the central organizing principle of the world community,” he said.
It sounds appealingly bold, even if it didn’t prompt Gore to give up his carbon-snorting mansion. Perhaps he meant to mean it.
Others, however, took it to heart, and because of the ensuing scandal this past year, we can start seeing the cost of such pretty phrases.
The scandal is Climategate. The 3,000 or so leaked e-mails between eminent climate researchers in Britain and America reveal that these men, whose work is the foundation of the claim that catastrophe is mere years away, took Gore’s prescription to heart. They made moving world leaders to action their central organizing principle, elevating it above science itself.
So, in one e-mail after another, we can read that they manipulated data, coerced scientific journals into excluding contrary findings and exaggerated their findings to produce the desired political result.
The task of predicting whether and how much world temperatures would rise, always difficult - models don’t predict the current decade-long cooling, for instance - is now much more tangled because the honesty of key research has been thrown into doubt. People whose central organizing principle should have been truth instead behaved like advocates, keeping or discarding data on the basis of how effectively it stampeded the world into uprooting the industrial revolution.
They join the list of stranger activists who, saying the climate cause trumps all else, would impose on us the end of childbearing, of air travel, of carnivorous diets. These fringe causes seem to be the central aim of such campaigns; the climate is merely the opportunity to demand we all at last fall into line.
All of this suggests that we look at what Gore’s new principle would replace. It sounds nice if you say you’re enthroning cleanliness. It’s pleasant to presume that when Wisconsin, for instance, adopts greenhouse-gas rules that cost one state’s people alone $7.9 billion in lost income per annum, we’re just replacing our civilization’s core of greed.
But Western civilization already has a central organizing principle. It isn’t greed or growth. It is, rather, that the most important things are individual humans, in whom rights inhere. Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it, it’s self-evident that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Working out that principle has taken centuries. Forgive me, but it seems foolish panic to replace it overnight based chiefly on apocalyptic visions promoted by a failed politician.
In fact, if it proves true that the Earth not only has warmed but will go on warming and is doing so because of humans and will warm dangerously and that this isn’t easily adapted to - if this whole chain of ifs holds up and everyone must change radically, then our only hope of making those changes humanely is to hold fast to the principle that we do not sacrifice individuals’ life and liberty for the sake of the collective or, Gaia help us, Mother Earth.
Fortunately, 2009 might have been the year that Gore’s appealing toxin went impotent. Only panic could sell most people on the wholesale reordering of society. That narrative of panic has been undermined by the very mendacity of Climategate researchers who fell into panic themselves. If this is so, 2010 will be a much happier year. See post here.
By Dr. Hans Von Storch, Wall Street Journal
“Frankly, he’s an odd individual,” a well-known climatologist wrote about me in a private e-mail to a friend in the U.K. On this, we agree - I am an odd individual, if by that we mean a climatologist whose e-mails would not document a contempt for such basic scientific virtues such as openness, falsifiability, replicability and independent review.
The colleague is a member of the CRU cartel - the influential network of researchers at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and their colleagues in the U.S. - whose sanctum was exposed last month when a whistleblower or hacker published e-mails and documents from the CRU server on the Internet. What we can now see is a concerted effort to emphasize scientific results that are useful to a political agenda by blocking papers in the purportedly independent review process and skewing the assessments of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The effort has not been so successful, but trying was bad enough.
We - society and climate researchers - need to discuss now what constitutes “good science.” Some think good science is a societal institution that produces results that serve an ideology. Take, for instance, the counsel that then-Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen gave to scientists at a climate change conference in March, as transcribed by Environmental Research Letters: “I would give you the piece of advice, not to provide us with too many moving targets, because it is already a very, very complicated process. And I need your assistance to push this process in the right direction, and in that respect, I need fixed targets and certain figures, and not too many considerations on uncertainty and risk and things like that.”
I do not share that view. For me, good science means generating knowledge through a superior method, the scientific method. The merits of a scientifically constructed result do not depend on its utility for any politician’s agenda. Indeed, the utility of my results is not my business, and the contextualization of my results should not depend on my personal preferences. It is up to democratic societies to decide how to use or not use my insights and explanations.
But it seems I am an odd individual for taking this position. As a scientist, I strive for independence from vested interests. I am in the pocket of neither Exxon nor Greenpeace, and for this I come under fire from both sides - the skeptics and the alarmists - who have fiercely opposing views but are otherwise siblings in their methods and contempt.
I am told that I should keep my mouth shut, that criticizing colleagues is not “tactful,” and will damage the reputation of science - even when the CRU e-mails have already sunk that ship. I hear that the now-notorious “trick” is normal, that to “hide the decline” is just an unfortunate colloquialism. But we know by now that the activity described by these words was by no means innocent.
And what of the alarmists’ kin, the skeptics? They say these words show that everything was a hoax - not just the historical temperature results in question, but also the warming documented by different groups using thermometer data. They conclude I must have been forced out of my position as chief editor of the journal Climate Research back in 2003 for my allegiance to science over politics. In fact, I left this post on my own, with no outside pressure, because of insufficient quality control on a bad paper - a skeptic’s paper, at that. But in 2006 I urged a CRU scientist to make his data public for critics and, yes, skeptics -as documented in one of the stolen e-mails.
We need to repair the damage, and heal the public’s new mistrust of the workings of climate science. True, we are in a difficult situation: Climate science is in an abnormal situation, hounded by manifest political and economic interests of different sorts, and the uncertainties in our work are large and unavoidable. Then this abnormal brew forms, with scientists acting as politicians and politicians posturing as scientists.
But the core of the knowledge about man-made climate change is simple and hard to contest. Elevated greenhouse gas concentrations have led, and will continue to lead, to changing weather conditions (climate), in particular to warmer temperatures and changing precipitation. Such a change causes stress for societies and ecosystems. More emissions mean more stress, fewer emissions less. Thus, when society wants to limit this stress, it has to make sure that fewer greenhouse gases enter and remain in the atmosphere. Societies have decided they want to limit the stress so that temperatures rise no further than the politically produced number of two degrees Centigrade, relative to pre-industrial conditions. Fine. For this goal, it does not matter whether the sea level will rise 50 cm or 150 cm by the end of this century, or if hurricanes do or do not become significantly more severe. These are relevant scientific issues, with great importance for the design of adaptive strategies - but not particularly relevant to the political task of coming to an effective agreement on reducing emissions.
What we need to do is open the process. Data must be accessible to adversaries; joint efforts are needed to agree on test procedures to validate, once again, already broadly accepted insights. The authors of the damaging e-mails would be wise to stand back from positions as reviewers and participants in the IPCC process. The journals Nature and Science must review their quality-control measures and selection criteria for papers.
So please, you media, you NGOs, and you Mr. Rasmussen: You have the knowledge you need for the political decisions. Let us sit in our studies and discuss the remaining issues, the sea level, the ice sheets, the hurricanes, and other issues. Give us time to consider, to test alternative hypotheses, to falsify theories - to do our work without worrying if the results support your causes. Science is a valuable and unique societal institution, but not if it is consumed by short-sighted political goals.
But, admittedly, I am an odd individual, one who loves København - when it is not the “Hopenhagen” for thousands of COP-15 activists, lobbyists, business leaders, and politicians.
Mr. von Storch is director of the Institute for Coastal Research at the GKSS Research Center in Geesthacht, Germany, and a professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg.