By Anthony Watts
Yesterday, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) published a letter yesterday to U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, admonishing him for having the temerity to doubt that carbon dioxide is the “primary driver” of global warming.
Here is the letter.
Here are a few of my thoughts.
The AMS, in their letter, say skepticism is welcome:
In the interview you also mentioned that it should be quite acceptable to be a skeptic about aspects of the science. We agree, and would add that skepticism and debate are always welcome and are critically important to the advancement of science.
Yet, the very letter they sent contradicts this, suggesting that there is no debate nor room for skepticism about carbon dioxide being the primary driver of temperature change.
The fundamental problem of our knowledge boils down to the sample size. We only have about 100 or so years of temperature records that are worth anything and even the most recent records on all that good because they’re terribly polluted by the infrastructure of human existence itself. And further our understanding of atmospheric and oceanic cycles is even more limited in time than the case of global temperature data.
If you were to line up our period of first-hand scientific knowledge of Earth’s processes, against the period of humanity’s intelligence, it would just be a small speck on the timeline. To assume we have certainty in knowledge about Earth’s processes, when new processes are still be discovered, is pure folly.
Even today, we are discovering more about our atmosphere than we knew 30 years ago in June 1988 when Dr. James Hansen first declared it a problem, and there are studies that show that recent record breaking warmth, such as a paper just published in Nature, Yao et al. Distinct global warming rates tied to multiple ocean surface temperature changes. covered here on WUWT.
For the AMS to admonish Perry that there’s no room for debate on Carbon Dioxide as being the primary driver, is essentially to deny the process of science itself. Science is often right, and also often wrong, but just as often, it is self-correcting. If global warming hadn’t become such an entangled and messy social and political issue, it’s likely that science would have done some levels of self-correction on the issue already.
For example, it was once believed that the Earth’s plates did not move, until plate tectonics came along. Alfred Wegener proposed continental drift in 1912, but it took until the 1960’s for it to become generally accepted, when a drastic expansion of geophysical research, driven by the cold war, produced evidence that reopened and eventually settled the debate.1 Science self-corrected, but it took decades because scientists are often reluctant to embrace change which threatens the validity of their own work. It was also generally believed that stress caused stomach ulcers, until a clinician, exasperated by lack of attention to his pointing out that the real cause was the bacterium Heliobacter Pylorii infecting the stomach lining 2, had to prove it against the consensus, and drank a bacterial cocktail and developed an ulcer himself. He won the Nobel prize for defying that consensus 3.
Science that fails to account for the possibility of being wrong is of no virtue.
The AMS should lead in science by setting an example, by showing that even in the face of overwhelming consensus on an issue, there must be room for doubt, and thus room for self-correcting science. It only takes one finding in science to refute consensus, no matter whether it’s 97%, 99%, or 100%. Science is not infallible.
Anthony Watts
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Nicely done, Anthony.
Shortly after the post, Ryan Maue, a fellow WeatherBELLian wrote:
Rick Perry said the following:
Asked whether CO2 emissions are primarily responsible for climate change, Perry told CNBC’s “Squawk Box”: “No, most likely the primary control knob is the ocean waters and this environment that we live in.”
“The fact is this shouldn’t be a debate about, ‘is the climate changing, is man having an effect on it?’ Yeah, we are. The question should be just how much, and what are the policy changes that we need to make to effect that?” he said.
The AMS statement says this is indisputable: “It is clear from extensive scientific evidence that the dominant cause of the rapid change in climate of the past half century is human-induced increases in the amount of atmospheric greenhouse gases ...”
Now, an eagle eyed reader with some nuanced knowledge of climate science could interpret Secretary Perry’s statement as rather profound. He posits that the oceans are acting as the “primary control knob” responsible for (recent) climate change. With the now voluminous literature on the hiatus and consensus view that the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) phase changes result in “pauses”, one could look back to the 1976-77 Great Pacific Climate Shift as the beginning of recent global warming as we know it. It’s not exactly clear to me how CO2 concentration changes causes these rather dramatic, decadal scale Pacific Ocean heat distribution changes.
See also Ryan Maue and Michael Bastasch story on the Daily Caller on The New Consensus On Global Warming here.
Nicely done, Ryan. My compadre at WeatherBELL, Joe Bastardi agrees:
Spot on right Ryan. I have argued and do so in the patriot posts in 2 main blogs, the Grand Slam of Climate and a short summation of my climate position, the same thing, There is nothing irrational or radical about simple observational data of the past, which by the way has support from Greenland Ice cores and tree ring study. I have the sun, the oceans, stochastic events and the VERY DESIGN OF THE ENTIRE SYSTEM (land and ocean configuration, wobbles on its axis in an elliptical orbit around a somewhat inconsistent start dwarfs the affect of CO2 given the entire planetary history of CO2/temp.
I have coauthored a series of reports covered here that the natural factors are the real drivers that has the deep state climate world throwing the big guys to try to discredit, but they simply use a call to authority. I have done a series of 5 videos called the Winds of Change : CO2- the Demon gas?, Taking the Earth’s Temperatures, Weather Extremes, The Man-made and Natural Factors (not including CO2) that really drive the climate changes and Renewable Energy and the Paris Accord. I will post links to them all here after they air on local cable. Here is the relevant part IV.
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ICECAP COMMENT:
For a lifelong member of the AMS, a Fellow of the AMS, a CCM, former Chair of the Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting and the only private meteorologist to be elected by my peer to be a councilor, it is a sad day to see a former Texas Governor to know more about the scientific method and the science of climate than the AMS Director. I dearly miss Ken Spengler more every day.
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Yes, Prime Minister Gets it Right: Global Warming is a Sham Front for Political and Financial Ambitions
The BBC’s news side is utterly dedicated to spreading global warming alarmism and has even had a policy of refusing to interview fully qualified scientists who question it.
But its entertainment side isn’t quite on board with that. Two years ago the program Yes, Prime Minister aired a devastating critique of climate hysteria in one of its episodes.