Review by Bill DiPuccio
Could the global warming hypothesis meet the rigorous evidentiary standards of a legal trial? The answer, according to Jason Scott Johnston, is clearly negative.
Johnston is the Robert G. Fuller, Jr. Professor of Law, and Director of the Program on Law, Environment and Economy of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. His 79 page essay, Global Warming Advocacy Science: A Cross Examination, published by the Institute of Law and Economics, examines a broad range of evidence both for and against the conclusions drawn by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
After a comprehensive examination of the peer-reviewed literature, the author concludes that there is a tendentious use of evidence by the IPCC, revealing “a systematic tendency of the climate establishment to engage in a variety of stylized rhetorical techniques that seem to oversell what is actually known about climate change while concealing fundamental uncertainties and open questions regarding many of the key processes involved in climate change” (1).
Johnston is not attempting to arrive at a scientific conclusion regarding the global warming hypothesis. Rather, he is cross examining the “established climate story” by asking “very tough questions, questions that force the expert to clarify the basis for his or her opinion, to explain her interpretation of the literature, and to account for any apparently conflicting literature that is not discussed in the expert report” (6).
This approach raises some fundamental questions about the role of non-specialists in critiquing science. Scientists would like to believe that their disagreements can be settled by evidence alone. However, the reality is that science possesses an underlying grammar which includes the rigorous use of opposing evidence, critical thinking, mathematics, logic, and internal consistency. Most of these elements are shared by other fields, including - and especially- the legal profession.
Anyone who is competent in these areas may weigh-in on their proper, or improper, use without a full understanding of the scientific facts. When I first read the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment (2007) I had very little background in climate science, though I had worked in operational meteorology. Yet, it became fast apparent to me that the supporting evidence for the IPCC’s projections did not warrant the high level (90%-95%) of confidence expressed by its authors. Indeed, it was the authors themselves who raised fundamental doubts about our scientific understanding of radiative forcing agents and climate change, both past and present. As Johnston concludes, these projections are not reliable enough to make public policy decisions.
After pouring over years of mainstream literature, Johnston discovered numerous scientific uncertainties “which are rarely if ever even mentioned in the climate change law and policy literature” (8-9):
* “There seem to be significant problems with the measurement of global surface temperatures over both the relatively short run - late 20th century - and longer run - past millennium - problems that systematically tend to cause an overestimation of late 20th century temperature increases relative to the past;
* Continuing scientific dispute exists over whether observations are confirming or disconfirming key short-run predictions of climate models - such as an increase in tropospheric water vapor and an increase in tropical tropospheric surface temperatures relative to tropical surface temperatures;
* Climate model projections of increases of global average surface temperature (due to a doubling of atmospheric CO2) above about 1 degree centigrade arise only because of positive feedback effects presumed by climate models;
* Yet there is evidence that both particular feedbacks—such as that from clouds - and feedbacks in total may be negative, not positive;
* Confidence in climate models based on their ability to causally relate 20th century temperature trends to trends in CO2 may well be misplaced, because such models do not agree on the sensitivity of global climate to increases in CO2 and are able to explain 20th century temperature trends only by making arbitrary and widely varying assumptions about the net cooling impact of atmospheric aerosols;
* Similar reason for questioning climate models is provided by continuing scientific dispute over whether late 20th century warming may have been simply a natural climate cycle, or have been caused by solar variation, versus being caused by anthropogenic increases in atmospheric CO2;
* The scientific ability to predict what are perhaps the most widely publicized adverse impacts of global warming - sea level rise and species loss - is much less than generally perceived, and in the case of species loss, predictions are based on a methodology that a large number of biologists have severely criticized as invalid and as almost certain to lead to an overestimate of species loss due to global warming;
* Finally, many of the ongoing disputes in climate science boil down to disputes over the relative validity and reliability of different observational datasets, suggesting that the very new field of climate science does not yet have standardized observational datasets that would allow for definitive testing of theories and models against observations.”
Johnston cross examines and juxtaposes conclusions from numerous scientists to reveal “a rhetoric of persuasion, of advocacy that prevails throughout establishment climate science"(9). Complexities and uncertainties that might shake the confidence of policymakers are often concealed. For example, there is no mention of water vapor feedbacks in the IPCC AR4 “Climate Science” documents intended to influence the public and the media - the Policymaker Summary and Technical Summary (24).
By oversimplifying the climate story, it appears that the IPCC’s projections are just straightforward physics: The 2 C to 6 C projected rise in global average temperature is the direct, linear result of increasing CO2. But in reality, the IPCC claims that CO2, acting alone, will result in only a 1.2 C rise in temperature. The rest depends on whether the climate amplifies (positive feedback) or diminishes (negative feedback) CO2 forcing.
As Johnston demonstrates from the scientific literature, the complex and chaotic processes underlying these mechanisms, especially as they relate to cloud formation and precipitation, constitute anything but straightforward physics. The issue of feedbacks and climate sensitivity is probably the greatest question facing climate science. But policymakers are left blissfully ignorant of these controversies.
Johnston concludes by calling for a change in climate science practices and funding. Since one of the major sources of disagreement between scientists lies in the use of different datasets, he recommends that “public funding for climate science should be concentrated on the development of better, standardized observational datasets that achieve close to universal acceptance as valid and reliable.” On the other hand, the continued development of “fine-grained climate models,” in the absence reliable data, only perpetuates “faith-based climate policy” (77-79).
Johnston’s essay echoes the experience of many reputable scientists whose work has been marginalized or rejected by IPCC gatekeepers. As we learned from the ‘Climategate’ emails, there was indeed a concerted effort behind the scenes to insure that only one side of the story was heard. If the climate science community is serious about transparency, then they need to abandon their “tidy story” and provide a bone fide forum for opposing views. These views should be incorporated as an alternative report in both IPCC and governmental publications, including the summaries for policymakers. With so much hanging in the balance, decision makers need to hear both sides of the debate.
Special thanks to Roger Pielke Sr. for finding Johnston’s article. See PDF.
Bill DiPuccio served as a weather forecaster and lab instructor for the U.S. Navy, and a Meteorological/Radiosonde Technician for the National Weather Service. More recently, he was the head of the science department for Orthodox Christian Schools of Northeast Ohio.
By Christopher C. Horner Times-Dispatch Guest Columnist
The University of Virginia indicates it will challenge Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s request for records produced, using taxpayer resources, by former Assistant Professor of Environmental Sciences Michael Mann. This is regrettable. Cuccinelli is following smoke to see if there is fire, prompted by troubling revelations in leaked documents that raise serious questions about Mann’s activities while at the university.
UVa’s Faculty Senate has condemned Cuccinelli’s request, calling it a serious infringement upon academic freedom and assault on the freedom of scientific inquiry. It joins a chorus of voices enjoying massive financial support from the taxpayer but who, it seems, believe that this should come without conditions, established by law, which follow the money.
On its face, their problem is with a 2002 statute that passed both state legislative chambers unanimously, the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act. It bears no hint of exempting academics, scientists, or others from its prohibitions or inquiries that attach to the use of appropriated funds. It empowers the attorney general to compel documents, and testimony about them.
No one claims the law doesn’t apply here. With a straight face, scientists and academics instead merely argue against applying it to them. Academic freedom apparently means taking taxpayer money free from accountability under standards applying to the rest of us. Since when?
This inquiry derives from the late 2009 leak of e-mails, computer code, and code annotations produced by Mann and colleagues throughout the “climate” establishment. This is known colloquially as “Climategate.”
Despite intense efforts to wave the revelations away, the admissions and code annotations establish, among other things, efforts to “hide the decline” in temperatures, and patch thermometer data on the end of tree ring reconstructions despite admonition by colleagues not to do so for it was improper.
Without implausibly recasting the evidence as a series of misinterpretations, how does the attorney general justify ignoring this mountain of evidence in the public domain?
Upon intimidation, it seems. Ritual “McCarthyism!” rhetoric and straw-man arguments abound, including keening about non-existent criminal fraud allegations. Cuccinelli has made none, and is not challenging scientific conclusions. He simply is following the letter of a statute authorizing investigation of possible fraud.
The wailing and gnashing of teeth from scientific, academic, and other establishment salons is of course designed to pressure him to back off. Let’s hope they fail, for the signal such a move would send would be a costly one, in several respects.
In the face of Climategate’s revelations, it seems critical to remind all of those living off of taxpayer monies, but pondering inappropriate activism, of these conditions. There is no other external incentive to be honest. Climate science, living high on public money, has proven it cannot or will not self-police. But it is our money they are playing with.
The “climate” industry writ large is now spectacularly funded by the taxpayer, to the tune of about $9 billion just at the U.S. federal level in 2009. It now far outpaces even our public expenditures on, for example, AIDS (should AIDS researchers be exempted from responsibility?). It appears burdened by those problems associated with other boom industries springing up almost overnight. Granting passes because certain quarters blanche at the prospect of scrutiny is the inappropriate response.
Adherence to conditions that come with public funding is subject to civil enforcement. This request for documents, indeed the statute authorizing it, put academics on notice that they must do their work openly, honestly, and using the traditional approach of the observer who is indifferent to the outcome of the experiment. That is in grave doubt in the instant case. It is troubling how saying so is considered unacceptable, amid escalating name-calling against an attorney general who is operating under a unanimously enacted law, which plainly applies, about which no one previously complained.
There is one other disturbing aspect of the university’s telegraphed challenge. That is the double-standard and seemingly malicious treatment to which it subjects academics less politically correct than Dr. Mann.
Consider former Mann colleague Dr. Pat Michaels, who as a research professor of environmental sciences drew great political and academic wrath by challenging the same political and policy agenda that Mann champions.
In stark contrast to Mann’s case, UVa has told Michaels it is preparing to provide his records and e-mails to Greenpeace under the Freedom of Information Act. The establishment reaction? Silence.
Oddly, UVa informed Del. Bob Marshall that he could not similarly have Mann’s records, claiming they were destroyed by virtue of Mann having departed the university.
Of course, so had Michaels. Both were in the same department. Yet Michaels’ records remain, and are on their way to Greenpeace. A university FOIA official explained to Michaels that some peoples’ records are treated differently.
Indeed. The university needs to self-correct, and faithfully and evenly follow all laws. See post here.
ICECAP NOTE: Time for phone calls and letters. The University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson conceived by 1800 and established in 1819. It is currently rated by U.S. News & World Report as the #2 best public university in the United States. They need to know by this duplicitous action, they will lose the respect that they earned over the last two centuries. University of Virginia President John T. Casteen III, who became president in 1990, will step down at the conclusion of his 20th year on Aug. 1, 2010. He will become President Emeritus at that time. The address is P.O. Box 400224, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4224 and phone 434-924-3337.
The Foundry, Energy and Environment
Another one of the standout presentations at the Heartland Institute’s fourth International Conference on Climate Change was the one by Nils-Axel Morner, former emeritus head of the paleogeophysics and geodynamics department at Stockholm University. His talk focused on sea level increases and the difference between observed data and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) model’s predictions.
Morner was a former reviewer on the IPCC report and when he was first made a reviewer he said he was “astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one.” Morner discussed the realities of a number of countries and islands claimed to be doomed from climate change. He started with the Maldives, which some reports claim will be submerged in the next fifty years. Morner pointed out that the sea level around the Maldives has been much higher before and actually fell 20 centimeters (7.8 inches) during the 1970s. He also asserted that sea levels have been stable for the past three decades.
The same could be said for Bangladesh, another country threatened by sea level rises. Last year US News reported that “brackish water from the Bay of Bengal is encroaching, surging up Bangladesh’s fresh-water rivers, percolating deep into the soil, fouling ponds and the underground water supply that millions depend on to drink and cultivate their farms.” Morner’s analysis of the data, however, shows that the sea level has been stable for the past 40 to 50 years and may have even decreased. Coastal erosion is unquestionably a problem but it’s not from sea level rise, Morner says. He also reports that there has not been an increase recorded in Tuvalu, Qatar, Vanuatu, Venice and northwest Europe.
Of course, rising sea levels could present problems in the future but so far the hysteria has been unsupported by fact. Furthermore, the policies aimed at reducing sea levels (cap and trade, international carbon dioxide reduction treaties) will have little if any impact. Despite the futility of CO2 cuts, there are many cost-effective, adaptive solutions that efficiently target specific problems and do not require globally adopted treaties. Many of these adaptations are driven by markets. Seed companies develop drought and heat resistant strains that have increased agricultural productivity in the face of global warming. Low tech, but efficient, dams create reservoirs in the Himalayas to provide water supplies and irrigation during dry months. Capping CO2 only hinders the overall economic development of poorer countries and thus puts them in a worse position to adapt to climate change and rising sea levels, if it ever becomes necessary. See more here.
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Ocean Acidification and Biodiversity - Replacing Climate Change as Environmental Issues
By Bob Ferguson
Could it be that the “case for catastrophic climate change” is proving to be as weak as long suspected? As the UN and the environmental NOGs have failed to convince the public about a climate crisis, the shift appears on to species endangerment, in part derived from “ocean acidification”. Here is my PPT on this issue from the Heartland ICCC IV. See here. As always, the culprit is humanity itself [which needs transnational regulation, reduced living standards and population reduction] and its hydrocarbon-based industrial society [which requires dismantling].
Bob
UN says case for saving species ‘more powerful than climate change’
Goods and services from the natural world should be factored into the global economic system, says UN biodiversity report
• Economic report into biodiversity crisis reveals price of consuming the planet
The Brasilian Nut Tree “Castanheira” is protected in Brasil, but plenty had been logged. Photograph: Daniel Beltra/Greenpeace
The economic case for global action to stop the destruction of the natural world is even more powerful than the argument for tackling climate change, a major report for the United Nations will declare this summer.
The Stern report on climate change, which was prepared for the UK Treasury and published in 2007, famously claimed that the cost of limiting climate change would be around 1%-2% of annual global wealth, but the longer-term economic benefits would be 5-20 times that figure.
The UN’s biodiversity report - dubbed the Stern for Nature - is expected to say that the value of saving “natural goods and services”, such as pollination, medicines, fertile soils, clean air and water, will be even higher - between 10 and 100 times the cost of saving the habitats and species which provide them.
To mark the UN’s International Day for Biological Diversity tomorrow, hundreds of British companies, charities and other organisations have backed an open letter from the Natural History Museum’s director Michael Dixon warning that “the diversity of life, so crucial to our security, health, wealth and wellbeing is being eroded”.
The UN report’s authors go further with their warning on biodiversity, by saying if the goods and services provided by the natural world are not valued and factored into the global economic system, the environment will become more fragile and less resilient to shocks, risking human lives, livelihoods and the global economy.
“We need a sea-change in human thinking and attitudes towards nature: not as something to be vanquished, conquered, but rather something to be cherished and lived within,” said the report’s author, the economist Pavan Sukhdev.
The changes will involve a wholesale revolution in the way humans do business, consume, and think about their lives, Sukhdev, told The Guardian. He referred to the damage currently being inflicted on the natural world as “a landscape of market failures”.
The report will advocate massive changes to the way the global economy is run so that it factors in the value of the natural world. In future, it says, communities should be paid for conserving nature rather than using it; companies given stricter limits on what they can take from the environment and fined or taxed more to limit over-exploitation; subsidies worth more than US$1tn (696.5bn pounds) a year for industries like agriculture, fisheries, energy and transport reformed; and businesses and national governments asked to publish accounts for their use of natural and human capital alongside their financial results.
And the potential economic benefits are huge. Setting up and running a comprehensive network of protected areas would cost $45bn a year globally, according to one estimate, but the benefits of preserving the species richness within these zones would be worth $4-5tn a year.
The report follows a series of recent studies showing that the world is in the grip of a mass extinction event as pollution, climate change, development and hunting destroys habitats of all types, from rainforests and wetlands to coastal mangroves and open heathland. However, only two of the world’s 100 biggest companies believe reducing biodiversity is a strategic threat to their business, according to another report released tomorrow by PricewaterhouseCoopers, which is advising the team compiling the UN report.
“Sometimes people describe Earth’s economy as a spaceship economy because we are basically isolated, we do have limits to how much we can extract, and why and where,” said Sukhdev, who visited the UK WHEN as a guest of science research and education charity, the Earthwatch Institute..
The TEEB report shows that on average one third of Earth’s habitats have been damaged by humans - but the problem ranges from zero percent of ice, rock and polar lands to 85% of seas and oceans and more than 70% of Mediterranean shrubland. It also warns that in spite of growing awareness of the dangers, destruction of nature will “still continue on a large scale”. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has previously estimated that species are becoming extinct at a rate 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than it would naturally be without humans.