climate change
22 May 2008
The IPCC is Not God
An anti-climate change protest
Don Aitkin responds to Clive Hamilton's slam on climate change skeptics
Others who have commented publicly on my address to the Australian Planning institute on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) have generally sent me a copy of their critique in advance. I learned about that of Clive Hamilton through a reference on another website. That circumstance explains this delayed response.Hamilton tells us that he decided that in the AGW field the important question was "not what to believe but whom to believe". Such a choice has never occurred to me. I think that every one of us has a duty as a citizen to explore major issues and come to a decision about them based on the argument and evidence that she or he can find. That is what being a citizen means. The notion that we should instead believe others or other points of view seems a cop-out to me, though I recognise it is a familiar position.
As I have said many times, the issues in the AGW debate are not difficult to understand. Is the earth warming, is the warming unprecedented, and what is the extent to which we are responsible for any warming that has occurred? These are questions that any literate, reasonably educated person can understand.
The answers are less straightforward. The earth seems to have been warming for the last 150 years, and continues to do so in an irregular way. There have been long warm (and cool) periods in the Christian era, and on the face of it the one we are in is another.
It may well be true that we are contributing to that warming - this is suggested by the fact that warming in the northern hemisphere, where most human beings live, is more pronounced than in the southern hemisphere. But the connection between that warming and the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not strong statistically.
Carbon dioxide is the fuel of plant life, which has flourished in the last 30 years. Plants provide us (and other animals) with food, and produce oxygen, which we breathe. That increased carbon dioxide has been responsible as well for all or the major part of any warming that has occurred has not been demonstrated by anyone, least of all by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It has been modelled, conjectured, argued, asserted and proclaimed, but it has not been shown to be true.
There is abundant evidence that the "consensus" and "peer review" of the IPCC is flawed, and that it needs something equivalent to the "double blind" systems in medical research. In any case, to repeat, my view is that each of us is entitled to form his or her own judgment on the issues. The IPCC is not some kind of superior court, but an assemblage of government-appointed people from around the word whose official task is to supply information and propose solutions to "human-induced climate change". It is not, that is to say, a completely disinterested body.
In response to someone else who has criticised what I have been saying, I remarked: "I am increasingly struck by the similarity of the AGW debate to the struggle between the Church of Rome and the Protestant dissenters in the 16th century and afterwards. The Church claimed the right to mediate between the believer and God, while the Protestants argued that each of us could establish a personal communication with God. Throughout [his] talk I could hear someone talking in the tones of 'received wisdom'.
"My skeptical, protestant mind begins to object as soon as I hear anyone talk like this, no matter how many years they have worked in a field, no matter how many peer-reviewed papers they have published, no matter what their title. They are claiming authority. I don't accept it." I want to see the argument and the evidence. That Hamilton does accept it is his choice, and I have no quarrel with his doing so. But each of us can make our own decision.
In my view we should be able to conduct this debate without ad hominem, guilt by association and smears. It has not been so in this case. Hamilton refers to my thanks to Ian Castle and Bob Carter at the end of the paper, not as he says, "for their guidance in preparing the paper" but (as I wrote) "for pointing me in useful directions". There is plainly a difference.
This kind of intellectual sloppiness runs through Clive's essay. He writes: "As his primary source on climate science, Aitkin directs readers to a paper published by the Heartland Institute." My primary source? I shook my head. The passage he must refer to goes like this: "The IPCC's voluminous papers are available at its website www.ipcc.ch, while a skeptical scientific response Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate, published by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, can be downloaded from http://sepp.org./publications/NIPCC-Feb%2020.pdf. The best place to start to come to terms with the debate is a New Zealand website whose organisers come from the University of Canterbury at Christchurch. Their site www.climatedebatedaily.com attempts to give a 'balanced' perspective, but it does list all the most active websites on both sides of the issue." When your critic can't even quote you accurately, you begin to wonder what he is about.
Back to Castles and Carter, whom Hamilton pictures at once as "associated with the denialists of the Lavoisier Group", which is said to have "links to Exxon-funded organisations in the United States". Wow. Somewhere along the way Hamilton forgot to mention that Ian Castles was once Australian Statistician, who writes (yes, peer-reviewed) articles about the sloppy use of statistics in the AGW domain, and that Bob Carter was the head of the Earth Sciences panel of the Australian Research Council and the Australian leader of the international Ocean Drilling Program. Perhaps they came to their skepticism all by themselves.
After this straight-out example of selective labelling and guilt by association we are given Hamilton's tour of the alleged right-wing and industry connections of those who argue against AGW. Perhaps recognising that he was getting into character assassination, Clive says, parenthetically, "I am not suggesting, and have no reason to believe, that Don Aitkin has taken any money from Exxon or any other company or group." Great! No one but Clive himself has ever implied it.
I have appreciated some of Clive Hamilton's work in the past, but this is not a good example of it. For my taste it is too much of a rant, with too little argument and too much that is simply irrelevant. If anyone wants to read what I actually said, rather than what Hamilton thinks I said, my paper is available from me at donaitkin@grapevine.com.au.
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Relevant to this correspondence is a two-day scientific conference Manning Clark House is to hold at Manning Clark Lecture Theatre No 3, Union Square, ANU, Canberra, on 11 and 12 June , "Imagining the Real - Life on a Greenhouse Earth". This will be a genuine scientific and sociological exploration of current knowledge and ideas, featuring climate scientists: Prof Barry Brook, Prof Ian Enting, Prof Janette Lindesay, Prof Graeme Pearman, Dr Barrie Pittock, Prof Will Steffen; Earth and prehistory scientists: Dr Geoff Davies, Dr David Denham, Dr Andrew Glikson (conference convenor), Dr Simon Haberle, Prof Malcolm McCulloch, Dr Bradley Opdyke; political leaders: Senator Lyn Allison, Dr Carmen Lawrence; environmental lawyer: Phillip Toyne; health and population experts: Prof Stephen Boyden, Dr Bryan Furnass (conference co-convenor), Prof Tony McMichael, Dr Sue Wareham; humanists: Phillip Adams, Dr Paul Collins, Tony Kevin, Dierk von Behrens; and poet: Mark O’Connor. Full details of speakers and themes on the Manning Clark House website,
http://www.manningclark.org.au/events/conference2008/index.html
Tony Kevin
sigh
Your article makes claims in relation to the scientific consensus in the 1970s:
Thirty years ago the climate worry in scientific circles was about the possible return of the ice age.
An article at Realclimate (dated 7 March 2008) contradicts this claim (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/03/the-global-cooling…). As evidence, the article cites a review of the published literature from 1965-79 which found 71 relevant articles: 7 (10%) predicted cooling; 44 (62%) predicted warming; and 20 (28%) were neutral. While the methodology does not appear to have been peer-reviewed, the findings clearly disagree with your views.
Could you please indicate the basis of your claim.
Interesting stats garnolda. I wonder if it will turn out that AGW skeptics (who are less than 10% of scientists) will be incorrectly used in the future as a supposed majority for our times.
Don, you state the following:
"That increased carbon dioxide has been responsible as well for all or the major part of any warming that has occurred has not been demonstrated by anyone, least of all by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It has been modelled, conjectured, argued, asserted and proclaimed, but it has not been shown to be true." (my emphasis)
As you have asserted the resposibility of each of us to personally come to grips with the science of climate change, could you please outline the truth of the claim could be established? I don’t expect a full research program; just a general idea of the types of test that could be carried out.
Sorry, something went wrong with the html tags in the last post. The second para should read:
As you have asserted the resposibility of each of us to personally come to grips with the science of climate change, could you please outline how the truth of the claim could be established? I don’t expect a full research program; just a general idea of the types of test that could be carried out.
The issue at the bottom of the global warming discussion is even simpler than the much-discussed questions of anthropogenesis. The questions that matter are: "Is the planet warming to a degree dangerous to us and other life?"; and if so, "Is there anything we can do about it?". If we are cooking in our own juices, it will kill us just the same, whether we caused it or not.
The guilt-fest that is the debate over who or what is to blame is, ultimately, a sideshow. Don’t get me wrong: anthropogenesis is interesting intellectually, and understanding causes can help us find solutions. But it seems to me that a lot of the motivation for denial is a reluctance to feel bad about the way we live: and in return, many deniers attribute a relish for self-flagellation to those arguing that global warming is taking place.
Either way, the guilt thing is kind of unhelpful. It distorts the scientific and political debates with all sorts of unworthy inflections; and it is irrelevant to figuring out if we have a problem, and solving it if we find we do.
A better strategy might be just to get over it and get on with it. If we found a big comet on a collision-course with Earth we wouldn’t stand around arguing about whether the Voyager missions were to blame (or whether the developing countries should bear more of the cost of taking it out, since they have more people): we’d do something to avert disaster.
The anthropogenesis that matters is the potential human source of the solutions.
Don Aitken is misleading when he says that warming has been occurring for 150 years. The facts speak otherwise. First, significant warming has occurred only since the 1950s, as shown by the British Met Office data at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/myths/ and, second, the recent rises in temperature and atmospheric CO2 are unprecedented. Ice cores show that the current level of CO2 is way above any level of the past 400,000 years. The recent spike upward has no plausible natural explanation other than human activity. There is an indisputable causal link between atmospheric CO2, atmospheric warming, and climate change. If the recent increases had been within the long-run observed bands of fluctuation then we would justifiably be skeptical about the causation. But the British Met Office data does not offer that comfort.
Trouble is, Don, as with most denialists, you claim to be a sceptic, but you are simply accepting a different orthodoxy. Your original article reads not as a genuine attempt to examine the truth, but as the kind of thing you can see on any blog around the world when climate change is mentioned and the denialists swing into action, using whatever is the latest talking point from the right wing think tanks. It is clear that instead of coming into the field with an open mind you came in as one who really didn’t want to believe (a) that the planet was warming rapidly (b) that human activity was the cause, (c) the consequences, unchecked, were going to be catastrophic, and (d) urgent action was needed. I’m guessing that the mind set is to do with an unshakable faith in the market and laissez faire economics, but that’s just a wild guess. Fine, come into the field with that mindset, it’s a free country. But with a predisposition to believe that global warming wasn’t real, or significant, or human induced, you had an obligation (think null hypothesis) to read not just the stuff that agreed with that mindset, but with all of the stuff that doesn’t. You would find, if you did that, that all the points you raise have been raised before, and answered, over and over. It would then be incumbent on you to say why you didn’t think those answers were satisfactory, not simply repeat, in another venue, the same old tired arguments that have been heard a million times. And, incidentally, your IPCC characterisation of people as being "not completely disinterested" is true in a funny kind of way, but is significant in the opposite way to what you believe. The IPCC is summarising research from all kinds of other scientists working in all the disciplines which have been brought to bear on climate change and its consequences. It would have been far more blunt and savage in its prognoses and warnings if it hadn’t been for the presence of "not disinterested" US representatives determined to prevent the world becoming alarmed and taking action which corporate America dreaded.
Remain a denialist, see if I care, but you will find you are becoming as rare (http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/66848/Whacko_Texas.html) as the species already becoming extinct as their habitats change around the world. Not models, not ideology, just ecological observation of the way the real world is responding to a real, and rapid, change.
David Horton
I tend to side with Clive hamilton on this. The climate change argument is far too complex for anyone but climate scientists to understand so therefore we have to decide who to believe rather than what to believe.
I have a PhD in Engineering but, although I can follow some of the papers, I can’t verify the basis or data used. I don’t have the time. I read an article one day and a few weeks later someone refutes it.
I therefore go with the majority view which seems to be that CO2 is causing warming. Unfortunately the whole climate change debate is rapidly becoming a political one, believers (left wing) skeptic (right wing).
It’s very sad to see a once-respected academic, in his dotage, pissing his reputation against the wall of evidence. As the Barrier Reef gradually disintegrates in the increasingly acidic sea, a phenomenon clearly seen already, I hope Don fades away into the dusk of his CV without doing it too much more damage.
I don’t think that sort of comment is necessary jnightin. The guy had the guts to air his views on a website visited by people likely to be critical of them. This suggests that he is sincere and should therefore be treated respectfully.
jnightin: What makes you think the Pacific is already "acidic" as you claim? Not even the IPCC claims that, in fact its 2007 AR4 WG1 Report produced no evidence that the world’s oceans are in any way acidic or even less alkaline globally (which is what I suppose you would have meant if you were not already senile - I say that just for payback to your claim that Don Aitkin is "in his dotage"). You need to read the IPCC, and read up also on what is acidic and what is alkaline - then you might realise that if the ph of the oceans dropped substantially they would first become freshwater, ideal for irrigating Queensland’s sugar! In short, Aitkin’s science is a whole lot better than yours.
tymoshenko
"if the ph of the oceans dropped substantially they would first become freshwater". Say what?
David Horton
David Horton: if the oceans became freshwater, we would not need desalination, and the world’s deserts would bloom from piped seawater.
But as a scientist who no doubt claims a share of the 2007 Oscar and IgNobel prizes awarded to Gore and the IPCC, you are blissfully unaware of the necessary transition from alkaline to acidic, or that acidic if it happens needs less treatment than alkanine to freshen it. Viva la science of IPCC and David Horton.
tymoshenko
No Tony Kevin Don Aitkin’s article has no relevance to your two-day scientific conference at Manning Clark House. You see Don Aitkin is an AGW sceptic. Whereas the two day conference you are touting is stacked with "True Believers". All of of whom, to a man (and woman) slavishly follow the garbage in gospel out computer models. In short they all think like you. And each other. Not like Don Aitkin. In fact there is not one heretic listed. Just the usual collective of self congratulatory huggers.
I am a climate moderate. I believe that CO2 indeed causes some warming, but I’ve yet to see hard evidence of dangerous climate change.
Were I only to judge this strictly on the basis of temperature trends, I’d say the body all currently available scientific literature - especially that published in the last decade points to a CO2 sensitivity of around 1.0 - 1.2 C increase in temperature as CO2 levels double from 380 - 760 ppm.
That is not an apocalypse.
Trend lines, however aren’t enough. The end of last millenium warming has also now been ascribed largely to heating by industrial soot deposition (Zender, et al.) with tropospheric soot contributing easily 35 percent to all global temperature anomalies (Ramanathan, et al). Ramanathan himself clearly stated that his findings surprised not only him, but flew in the face of conventional thinking about aerosols. It seems reasonable then to subtract the warming caused by aerosols from the CO2 column. If it isn’t reasonable to do so, then why not?
The ARGO autonomous submersibles have yet to locate the bulk of (currently ‘deferred’ ;-) errant ocean heat content predicted by warming-only scenarios. The AQUA data is finding less-than-anticipated water vapor in the atmosphere. In my reading the GCMs available to IPCC(2007) have now been shown to not be conservative in that they do not correctly attribute cause and effect in the role of high altitude tropical clouds (Spencer et al.)
A moderate warming scenario is more credible in explaining this temperature plateau 1998 - 2008.
The sun is being reasonably forecast to be in the full throes of a solar grand minimum by 2020, with half-amplitude solar cycles for the rest of the century. Shindell, et al, of NASA/GISS modeled the results of solar grand minima in 2001 and found that SGM would indeed induce a moderate global cooling trend, with falling inland temperatures characteristic of the Little Ice Age.
The above statements are perfectly reasonable and moderate qualifiers on the current state of the art of climatology.
Do I hear mention of this or other field data-based reversals from mainstream climatologists? No. Yet these apparent negative findings knocking the side of the warming-only hypothesis, are tremendously salient to the AGW issue.
IQ over 150 at the age of 12 (less now ;-). Three hard science degrees, co-authored 60-odd peer reviewed papers and book chapters in earth science, 30 plus years work experience. Still working. Read every paper on climate science and paleoclimatology I can get my hands on.
Why then am I just a ‘denier’, a ‘denialist’ or a ‘flat earther’?
Don. Your allusion fascinates me:
"I am increasingly struck by the similarity of the AGW debate to the struggle between the Church of Rome and the Protestant dissenters in the 16th century and afterwards. The Church claimed the right to mediate between the believer and God, while the Protestants argued that each of us could establish a personal communication with God. Throughout [his] talk I could hear someone talking in the tones of ‘received wisdom."
From a lapsed Catholic point of view, I think your Protestant individualist approach serves you well. But it also leads you into an intellectual elephant trap. In modern society there will always be matters we cannot grasp- there are so many pursuits one can dedicate a lifetime to and so many bodies of knowledge that take years to grasp. Unless you regard yourself as Descartes incarnate, eventually you have to just take someone’s word without question. The truth is that intellectual freedom is based on our ability to filter out the chaff. Without working information we are useless. I trust the majority of the scientific community. I have no reason to believe in conspiracies. Clive’s comment that we ask "not what to believe but whom to believe" is quite reasonable in the circumstances. Which leads me to think about religion. Luther himself was disappointed with the degree of relativism he saw emerging around him, joking that ‘once there was one pope sitting on the seven hills of Rome, and now there is a little pope on every dunghill in Saxony.’ My point is that if too many amateurs attempt to claim authority, the whole of society suffers.
‘This is the second doomsday scenario of recent decades, the first being the Club of Rome’s prediction in 1972 that the world would soon run out of natural resources. Both are “scientific,” but their structure is the same as that of the biblical story of the Flood: Human wickedness (or, in today’s case, unbridled materialism) triggers the disastrous sequence, which it may already be too late to avert. Like Biblical prophecy, scientific doomsday stories seem impervious to refutation and are constantly repackaged to feed the hunger for catastrophe.
Scientists argue that the media and politicians are responsible for exaggerating their findings as promises of salvation or warnings of retribution. But scientists themselves are partly responsible, because they have hardened uncertainties into probabilities, treated disputable propositions as matters of fact and attacked dissent as heresy.
Scientists are notoriously loath to jettison conclusions reached by approved scientific methods, however faulty. But their intolerance of dissent is hugely magnified when they see themselves as captains in a salvationist army dedicated to purging the world of evil habits.
Today it is the West that foists an apocalyptic imagination on the rest of the world. Perhaps we should be looking to China and India for answers about how to address environmental damage, instead of using climate change as a pretext to deprive them of what we already have. How do the Chinese feel about their newfound materialism? Do they have an intellectual structure with which to make sense of it?
The best antidote to the doom merchants is skepticism. We must be willing to take uncertainty seriously. Climate change is a fact. But apocalyptic thinking distorts the scientific debate and makes it harder to explain the causes and consequences of this fact, which in turn makes it harder to know how to deal with it.’
Robert Skidelsky, member of the British House of Lords, professor emeritus of political economy at Warwick University and board member of the Moscow School of Political Studies.
22 May 2008
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2008/05/22/200341256…
Following a technical post to CCNet I had cause recently be on the receiving end of an unsolicited, lecturing email from Dr Andrew Glikson of ANU, convener of the forthcoming two-day scientific conference Manning Clark House at Manning Clark Lecture Theatre No 3, Union Square, ANU, Canberra, on 11 and 12 June, the list of attendees of which I note reads like a roll call of the Australian AGW apocalyptics. To my unexpected surprise that email revealed a level of knowledge of oceanic biogeochemistry by Glikson that had not got any ‘warmer’ than 1st year undergraduate level.
I guess my point is also that if too many amateurs attempt to claim authority, the whole of society suffers.
And your magic pudding scenario for the never-ending availability of natural resources (fish, oil, agriculture, forests, water) is?
David Horton
What fascinates me is the underlying assertion in Don’s article that if we all carried out our own scientific investigations from scratch we would do so in a fully-rounded and informed way (as he obviously believes he has) and come to some perfect conclusion devoid of investigative weakness.
Yet the IPCC, an independent body assessing the work of hundreds of highly qualified scientists, and following a complex approach to review, still remains - even by their own admission - imperfect.
I, for one, am more comfortable with the wisdom of a well-qualified crowd than with any scientific assessment I could manage on my own. And I have a science background.
Tymoshenko I am not sure if you are confusing acidity with salinity, never quite know which playing field is operating on these kinds of threads. Needless to say you don’t get freshwater from increasing acidity. The effect of rising CO2 on ocean pH is interesting (or it would be merely interesting if we were watching safely from another planet while the denialists and energy companies conducted an experiment on this one to see how much carbon you could burn before the planet became unliveable). Like much else the situation is complex, partly because of the huge buffering effect of Ca in the oceans, partly because of the effects of sea currents and water turnover generally, and partly because of the interacting effects of temperature rise. Originally the change in pH was fairly slow, but a recent study (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/23/climatechange.water) shows it is speeding up. Even a small change is going to have drastic effects on the marine life that uses calcium to make exoskeletons, and some of these effects are being seen already.
David Horton
That the IPCC is not God is truly a remarkable insight. Here’s another: self proclaimed "skeptics" are mostly just naughty little boys diddling around, showing off while Rome burns.
Who thinks homo sapiens would have reached the moon, developed nuclear power or created something like the internet if the necessary scientific work had been left to our historians, geologists or blogwarring blowhards? You do, I suppose, ecoeng and Don Aitkin? Hmmm, consider me underimpressed by your insights into the physics of climate change, and have you long suffered from delusions of the adequacy of your understanding of the hard sciences?
Not only have the delusionals done nothing historically to disprove the premise that they are out of their depth beyond rockhopping or cribbing from one another’s muppet websites, it may by now be incumbent upon them to prove that they have much of anything to offer us by way of the creation of things like clean new energy technologies that, global climate chaos or not, we have been in desperate need of for decades already.
Yeah, man let’s forget all about the 17 - 19 glacial/interglacial cycles of the last million and a bit years!
Yeah, man let’s forget all about the massive outpourings of CO2 from volcanic action that can be identified even in just the geologically recent past.
Yeah, man let’s forget all about the variable periods of ± 2- 4 deg. C natural variation in global temperatures that have occurred even just since the Pharaohs starting building the pyramids.
Shit, who gives a stuff that it might have been cooling a bit for the last 10 years - that’s just another effing aberration. We’re not having anything to do with effing aberrations, deniers, delusionals, denialists and all that scum, man.
Us deep green Gen-X&Y environmental bovver boys know the score - its warming all the way with Big Al right! Who gives a toss about his dodgy investments and his tobacco-built inheritance.
Human’s done it, right…right….right (muffled pounding noises off stage) and (some) effing humans just gotta pay, right? Yeah!
Not us though, man, gotta keep the Pajero going, mate.
Just those little brown bastards ‘over there ‘. Wankers got the effing nerve to cook their pathetic little bowls of weeds over some burning tyres or bits of plastic. Little brown global warming bastards, we’ll get the boot into them up right smart….
Starvation, malnutrition, disease, …..hypocrisy?
Eff orf you delusional old bastard.
David Horton:
Thanks for that - BUT as Banks et al have shown: (i) degassing of CO2 …[as happens all the time from the oceans] leads to a RISE in pH); (ii) progressive evapoconcentration of waters [as occurs increasingly according to IPCC] leads to (parallel accumulation of Cl−, Na+, SO42−, and INCREASE in pH due to common ion effect); and (iii) precipitation of calcite (depletion of Ca from waters, reduced rate of accumulation of alkalinity)." (My caps) Only the latter meets your link’s usual nonsense (The Grauniad is not a reliable source on any issue these days, to my regret having subscribed to it continuously since 1961)
tymoshenko
Jim 101 says “In modern society there will always be matters we cannot grasp” and along with the precautionary principle this forms the basis for many to advocate wholesale acceptance of the theory that increases in greenhouse gas concentration are very likely responsible for most of late 20th century warming. Fortunately many who can not follow the science do remember that other consensus, like that on stomach ulcers, proved wrong and more importantly that poor processes rarely produce good results. Few expected Robert Mugabe to accept he had lost the Zimbabwe election, and only an optimistic sceptic expected the IPCC to accept that any of its core beliefs are wrong.
The comparison is fair. The election rules for Zimbabwe should have ensured free and fair elections, and the internationally agreed Principles Governing IPCC Work should have ensured the science was assessed on a “comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis”. The same problem afflicted both processes. Those controlling the process were not able to bring themselves to believe they had lost the argument.
Sixteen IPCC authors – not the thousands we are so often told – decided against the weight of evidence powerfully presented by expert reviewers that they really could talk to the trees (and other so called proxies) and that the trees were telling them that the late 20th century warming is 66 to 90% likely to be exceptional in over 1300 years. This conclusion was vital for the modellers to justify their alarming projections of future warming and is the only thing that passes for evidence of dangerous human causation.
While the sixteen IPCC authors were writing up their WGI Chapter 6 conclusions in 2006, two groups of highly respected experts published conclusions from their studies and presented them under oath to the US House of Representatives. These groups looked at exactly the same evidence as had the IPCC authors, but reported in much greater detail and unambiguously contradicted the IPCC. One study by statisticians confirmed that the infamous “hockey stick” was statistically invalid as anyone with a reasonable amount of common sense would have figured out by then. More importantly a Panel of the US national Research Council concluded that we can not say with any statistically justifiable certainty that it is warmer now than any time before about 1600 AD.
The NRC Panel were to a man ardent supporters of the IPCC view and couched their report in polite terms that were heavily spun by some but when asked directly the Chairman Gerald North wrote for the House of Representatives record:
“I may have mistakenly mentioned the "two to one odds" figure in the oral press release of the report, and it may also have appeared in some press accounts, but it does not appear in the report, and I avoided using it in my sworn testimony.
In our view it is not possible to quantify all of the inherent uncertainties associated with reconstructing surface temperatures from proxy data, which in turn precludes assigning numerical probabilities to statements regarding the unique nature of recent warmth.”
A presentation, which everyone here will be able to grasp, of the scam that is the IPCC position on trees rings and other proxies is to be found at http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/ohio.pdf
Dear ecoeng of IQ >150,3 degrees etc etc.Whatever the validity of your views please remember that self praise is no recommendation.
Now I see from a later post that you are getting upset.It just goes to show (yet again) that wisdom does not necessarily flow on from cleverness.
Time for a few glasses of a respectable red followed by a good lie-down,old chap.
RE: tymoshenko vs david horton
For an ocean fully equilibrated with the atmosphere, it would require an increase in the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere to a level of 2455 ppmv (presently 380 ppmv) to drive the Saturation Index (SI) of aragonite (the form of calcium carbonate secreted by corals) down from its present +0.61 to zero. pH of the seawater would then be 7.52.
For an ocean fully equilibrated with the atmosphere, it would require an increase in the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere to a level of 3388 ppmv ppm (presently 380 ppmv) to drive the SI of calcite (the form of calcium carbonate secreted by calcareous forams - phtytoplankton) down from its present +0.73 to zero. pH of the seawater would then be 7.39.
These values are easily obtained using a standard geochemical code such as Phreeqc (took me <15 min).
The literature shows that observations of the occurrences of corals and calcareous phytoplankton in the geological record of the last hundreds million years are fully consistent with the above thermodynamic facts.
Thus the modern level of CO2 in the atmosphere of 380 ppmv would have to double almost 3 times before corals and calcareous plankton would begin to disappear.
Nothing like a glass of good red.
Thank you, ecoeng. Three things worth noting before you down that glass of red. First, the pH scale is logarithmic, so an apparently small change in numbers represents a big change in the chemistry. Second, it is absoluutely true that the ocean has a big buffering capacity. Over scales of thousands, millions of years acidity probably stays much the same, even with large changes in absolute CO2 levels. Unfortunately, as with so many other aspects of global warming, the devil is in the speed. The kind of unprecedented rapid change we are seeing now can in the short term at least, overwhelm the buffering effect and lead to a lower pH, as scientists are now finding as in that link I gave. It would eventually balance again in the longer term, but that will probably be too late. Finally, whatever your theory about the effects on animal life, changes are already being observed in the foraminfera skeletons (probably the most sensitive indicators), and I don’t think effects on corals and shellfish can be far off. Such species are adapted within fine limits, and although, again in the long term, adaptation might well be able to adjust their requirements, in the short term it can’t. And extinctions will therefore happen well before adaptation can occur.
David Horton
No offence intended David but your views are scientifically naive.
There is an enormous literature base to show that species of foraminifera come and go, first affected and then even perhaps rendered extinct by all sorts of physical and chemical stressors - many of which we can still only speculate about and some of which occurs on only relatively short timescales.
At any one time, even in absolutely pristine aquatic systems one can easily find species, especially the smaller ones, undergoing growth and decay in abundance. Usually decays in abundance can be related to actual detectable physical changes to the organisms themselves which reflect environmental or competitive stresses.
It is also a fact that coral species come and go over timescales of less than a few million years.
Interestingly there is even good evidence for the existence of some coral species when past atmospheric partial pressures of CO2 were as high as 5000±2000 ppmv i.e. above the point at which aragonite becomes unsaturated in seawater (according to equilibrium thermodynamics).
I don’t want to go into this in too much detail but the way in which coralline algae etc (and other carbonate secreting organisms) lay down carbonate is/are very interesting mechanism(s) which essentially actually manipulates the surface Gibbs free energy of tiny crystals inside a space bounded by a membrane. So, in effect, the organism competes against the overall equilibrium thermodynamics of the bulk system and can even surpass the overall constraints of equilibrium thermodynamics to a minor extent. This relates to Ostwald ripening etc etc.
In a nutshell, you must come to understand that, in the real global biosphere ‘it has always been a jungle out there’!
It is simply not enough to show that some species within taxa are showing signs of structural stress - this is normal. Its real meaning is more often than not very subtle and often impossible to unravel.
Rates at which overall numbers of certain classes e.g. taxa of aquatic species increased or decreased has in the (geological) past been aligned both with and against increases or decreases in atmospheric CO2.
The only real measures of significant impact on species making up individual taxa etc are the overall numbers of species.
Clive Hamilton never let pragmatism get in the way of a good story.
His article (not this one) didn’t actually present any solvable problem. Unless he was advocating scientific censure?!
No folks, it was a "star wars" inspired rant about the battle between "good science" and "evil science." Clive’s simplistic and childish narrative meant that the reader only had to join two dots. Who should I sympathize with? Hmmm… good or evil?
Cudos to forum dwellers like ecoeng who have tried to elaborate, time and again (amidst the Pentecostal-like screams of people to whom AGW is about "belief"), that the issue isn’t that simple.
What are we to make of Clive’s position? If we all do the right/good thing then right/good thing will get done? That’s kind of like saying that if we just had world peace there would be no war. If we just had less people there would be more space, more “carbon rights” to go around. What we need is a little living room, a little lebensraum… (Haven’t we been here before?)
Where are the solvable problems Clive? Why isn’t Clive burning the midnight oil in order write lucid articles about how to transition to cheap renewable energy sources?
I’ll tell you why. That’s somebody else’s job. Clive’s (like big Al) is looking after the big picture. Clive’s job (like that of the clergyman) is to make us all feel better about doing what common sense tells us is the wrong thing. To make us feel better about driving the Pajero, about not actively protesting against stupid proposals like yet another traffic tunnel in Sydney, about not demanding that public transport be heavily subsidised and about not questioning the Iemma governments’ attempt to move electricity generation away from public oversight mechanisms (where presumably "we" can have a say about it becoming more sustainable).
BOTTOM LINE: Clive’s article didn’t contribute one iota to solving his apparent problem. It’s quite ironic that he thought it important to fiddle like this (slinging mud at non-believers) whilst the whole premise of his position is that Rome is burning.
“Why isn’t Clive burning the midnight oil in order write [sic] lucid articles about how to transition to cheap renewable energy sources?”
For a start I’m not sure how he’d feel about using ‘transition’ as a verb. Also, as your question implies, this issue is on the cusp of being translated into policy. His aim, from my reading, is not to dismiss bona fide scientific arguments. He makes the point that the IPCC actually considered a number of contentions from bona fide sceptics, a good thing. It’s reasonable to take issue with people like Don, who enter the fray without qualification or expertise. The issue is important enough for the public to demand that the dust settles and that we start making policy. Thus, by keeping the focus on science we will come to a conclusion, not endless debate. I, personally, would sooner welcome the comments of someone like ecoeng (provided he has some wine)- he will succeed or fail on his own argument’s merits, not bastardise someone else’s.
At the risk of being a bit too geeky - apologies in advance - but food for thought….
A striking correspondence exists between measures of Phanerozoic macroevolution and environmental dynamics, exemplified by the rate of origination of new forms of marine animals and the level of CO2. We show that the rates of diversification of the marine fauna and the levels of atmospheric CO2 have been closely correlated for the past 545 million years.
Such convergence between biological and geochemical history over so long a period [545 million years (my)] suggests interesting macroevolutionary hypotheses.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/99/12/7832
Ah ecoeng, I probably am "scientifically naive" about foraminfera, and indeed much else, having only two doctorates, and being only a vertebrate palaeoecologist for much of my academic life, not an invertebrate one. I have seen reports that Antarctic foraminfera (ie across all species) are beginning to show structural effects of increased acidity. If this is indeed the case, then the fact that it is happening with so little change in acidity is a worrying thing. Call me chemically naive (my chemistry and biochemistry only extends to second year university) but it seems to me that foraminfera have little room, if any, to adapt to increased acidity, the link between CO2 and water and Calcium being so fundamental. And if they are in trouble, across all species, then this doesn’t bode well for the oceans as a whole since they are at or near the botom of ocean food chains. To repeat, the problem seems to me the speed of change, and therefore the history of biodiversity changes in other periods doesn’t help us much.
I don’t think that ocean acidity in itself is necessarily the greatest threat that increased atmospheric CO2 brings. Of the environmental things I worry about, it is probably down around number ten. But I also think that it may be an additional stress, on top of all the others threatening the oceans, that breaks the foraminfera’s back. And I am always stunned by the blissful way in which some observers are happy to watch a global experiment conducted on the life support systems that have maintained human beings and the species that share the planet with us. Maybe you are right to think that all will be well, good old mother nature will adapt yet again, in the course of less than a century, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it, as deniers seem willing to do.
David Horton
Well then David, this is getting interesting. Let us at least agree then that we both aspire to be straight talkers.
If you are saying there is good evidence that the classof all Antarctic forams is showing evidence of structural change I would be very interested to see those references please.
As I’ve stated clearly before I hold a moderate position on AGW and am not a complete ‘denialist’. As a geochemist I am actually very concerned about any major stressor, including oceanic acidity, anthropogenic pollution (e.g. PAHs from ship exhausts), terrestrial runoff contaminants etc which might imperil the ‘lungs’ of the planet (cyanobacteria) and hence the critical biogeochemical efficiency of the all important oceanic CO2 conveyor. Think GEOCARB III etc.
Thus I believe we should be particularly mindful of the health and biomass of the world’s ‘standing crop’ of the 2 overwhelmingly dominant cyanobacteria i.e the pico-cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus. If there was any evidence of sustained regional declines in the morphology or productivity of these species I would have significant concern.
But as a geochemist for 30+ years who has in the past done some paleoclimatic research and who now works as a consultant chemothermdynamic modeller in a number of countries, I tend to see anthropogenic impacts both from an overall ecosystem perspective, and am ever mindful of the reality of the ‘it’s a jungle out there’ principle and the incontestably long history of global biogeospheric variation, diversity and chemical adaptation.
After all it was less than 20 years ago that we had absolutely no idea that iron dissimilatory bacteria even existed! Now we now that Geobacter spp. are everywhere from the surface to the base of the Greenland icecap to the bottom of the ocean to deep in hot rocks.
It took among many other things the observation that the tars and heavy oily gunk from the Exxon Valdez which sunk to the sea floor was consumed over only a few decades (bleaching the marine sediments of every atom of Fe(III)) to help identify them.
I admit to being someone who is obsessed with biogeochemical mechanism (on all timescales). Thus I see a long history of approach-to, and then perturbations and returns to homeostasis of the global biogeospheric CO2/O2 inventory over the last 800 My or so i.e. ever since the subsequent ubiquity of hopane biomarkers shows the emergence of the dominance of cyanobacteria. It absolutely stuns me that the ‘Gliksons’ of this world cannot see this ‘truth’ at all.
Therefore maybe it is just boils down to the fact you and I have different kinds (degrees?) of respect for the immensity, power and flexibility of Gaia?
The report I saw (on tv I’m afraid) was by Dr Will Howard head of the Antarctic CRC in Tasmaina. They held a conference in February, but I can’t see whether the proceedings are available yet.
And Gaia recovery? Well, I don’t doubt that ecosystems have built in "buffering mechanisms", and that, for example, oil spills can be cleaned up (although I have a feeling the Alaskan one from Exxon Valdez is still showing effects many years afterwards). Outbreaks of pests lead to outbreaks of predators and all that. Fine, when dealing with, say, the effects of a cyclone or a fire, or even a chemical spill. Trouble is threefold - first the damage just keeps on coming, oil spill succeeds oil spill; second the ecosystems have been so damaged (think mangrove removal in Burma) that they are losing their capacity to react; and three, the effects of global warming are going to be multifaceted, so that you are trying to deal with, say, warmer water, increasing acidity, less freshwater entry, more silt all at the same time. It is as if you were relying on your immune system to throw off a nasty flu while at the same time smoking, drinking to excess, over-eating, using drugs, and getting no exercise, and had diabetes and lung cancer. Possible but unlikely.
David Horton
What about Krakatoa, the Dalton and Maunder Minima, the Medieval Warm Period, the effects of (human) deforestation of much of Europe and East Asia in the name of agriculture, the Younger Dryas, the Last Glaciation, Oxygen Isotope Substage 5e, numerous mega-volcanic events throughout the Holocene and Pleistocene all of which were survived by homo sapiens at a time when we were far fewer and much more vulnerable to the stresses of environment?
All through this a powerful global CO2/O2 homeostasis has always continued, pushing the atmospheric partial pressure of CO2 back down in timescales either so short that they either cannot be resolved in ice cores more than about 1000 years old (and/or CO2 is mobile in ice under pressure). Now there’s a good one - if you were to believe the ice core CO2 record alone you would have to believe there were no mega-eruptions like Krakatoa and Yellowstone between about 1000 and 700,000 y BP. The same cores contain numerous volcanic dust layers.
Why ignore the actual estimated scale of global biogeospheric perturbations and oscillations of both the recent and distant past, and thus fail to correctly put the inputs of a short-lived modern human civilization into that scale? It seems to take a monumental arrogance to view the present (and man’s relatively puny effects) in that unique light.
Hey, I can scuba dive off my home town on the South Coast of NSW and see bommies of 2500 year old tropical corals still in growth position (when the sea level along the east coast was 1 - 1.5 m higher than now) !
From where I stand, I see historically weakened academic educations leading to a widespread group-think failure to calmly reason by rigorous analogy, by impartial comparisons and rigorous statistics, to thereby correctly apportion degree, confusing visceral but essentially irrational fears with common sense. It is no accident that many prominent ‘deniers’ are outstanding statisticians of long experience such as Ian Castles, Steve McIntyre etc. or highly experienced outstanding mainstream scientists such as Lindzen and Spencer.
The net result of the resulting neo-religious apocalypticism can only be to plunge the world into even more dissension and turmoil and worse - to selfishly and unjustly deny billions of poorer fellow humans a birthright our forefathers and we have already grasped and taken as Bjorn Lomborg eloquently reminds us again and again.
Further, consider that the use of fossil fuels is only likely to last technologically another 100 or so years on supply and demand grounds alone. In my view, it is likely that a combination of ground-based solar and geothermal power together with orbital solar power arrays beaming power to ground stations by focussed microwave will eventually surplant coal etc. It may even be that thorium-based nuclear power takes on a large role.
Good luck with your planet, Earthman.
Oh, and thanks for all the fish.
David Horton
Don’s paper as well as some of the comments here suggest that there has been no increase in global temperature since 1998.
When an opponent of the IPCC consensus uses 1998 as a base year, it is usually an indication that the person making the claim is trying to mislead you, or that they are not thinking critically about the evidence they are using. It is well known that 1998 was a record year for global temperatures, due to a prolonged el nino effects.
A recent review by Fawcet and Jones of the National Climate Centre of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (http://www.aussmc.org/documents/waiting-for-global-cooling.pdf) shows the flaws in the approach used by climate change opponents, and demonstrates that there is a continuing trend for increasing temperatures since 1998.
So you want to work me all up into a religious lather over a few hundreds of ppmv of CO2 added gently to the atmosphere over the next century?
On a tough little planet with a biosphere which can cope with this stuff?
http://www.livescience.com/environment/050308_super_volcano.html
I’d say you were trying to Girk me Dently.
‘A recent review by Fawcet and Jones of the National Climate Centre of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (http://www.aussmc.org/documents/waiting-for-global-cooling.pdf) shows the flaws in the approach used by climate change opponents, and demonstrates that there is a continuing trend for increasing temperatures since 1998’?
Things are moving so fast this report was redundant well before it was trotted out. I’m sorry to say this is disingenuous claptrap, principally an abuse of rolling average statistics designed to fool none but the foolish and statistically unschooled.
Then there is the even here quite obvious level of disagreement between the NCDC and HadCRUT3 databases on the one hand, both of which within error bars show essentially no significant warming over the last decade 1998 - 2007 and the NASA GISS northern hemisphere-biased surface station-based database which shows a statistically significant difference from the other two databases i.e. significant warming.
This is just as you would expect given that the latter database has been retrospectively massaged and re-massaged repeatedly and yet is still weighted-up with stations affected by the urban heat island effect. Unless they are far out at sea surface based temperature records are often highly suspect anyway due to urban heat island effects and other regional topographic/prevailing wind-based anomalies.
This stuff has been comprehensively critiqued by a large number of statisticians including Steve McIntyre (and probably our own Ian Castles) but anyone with a passably good statistical training can see through it anyway.
The bottom line is of course that two satellite-based IR thermometry databases agree with each other for the last decade (and more) with both showing no warming for the last decade.
Lets just do a little thought experiment, Ecoeng.
Say I am interested, as a matter of public policy, in the question of whether gun-related deaths in Tasmania are increasing over time. Lets pretend that I find that all the evidence shows a significant trend for increase in the number of deaths. The gun lobby starts to pull out graphs which all commence in the year of the Port Arthur massacre and note that there is no problem. This is what you are putting forward as good statistics.
And what is the basis of your claim that the satellite data show "no warming over the last decade"?
Two international authorities provide us with analysis of long-term, largely surface station based temperature trends. Both agree fairly well on the global temperature trend until 1998, after which time a sharp divergence occurred.
The UK Meteorological Office’s Hadley Center for Climate Studies HadCRUT3 data shows worldwide temperatures slightly declining since 1998. According to Hadley’s data, the earth is not much warmer now than it was than it was in 1941. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) National Climate Data Centre (NCDC) database, albeit based on a much smaller geographic range than the Hadley dataset also shows a near flat 1998 - 2007 trend which, within error, agrees broadly with HadCRUT3 .
By contrast, the NASA GISS database shows worldwide temperatures increasing at a record pace - and nearly a full degree warmer than 1880. Something appears to be inconsistent with the NASA data - but what?
One clue we can see is that NASA has been reworking more recent temperatures upwards and older temperatures downwards - which creates a greater slope and the appearance of warming.
Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre has been tracking the changes closely on his Climate Audit site. Steve shows NASA database pre-1970 temperatures have been nearly uniformly adjusted downwards - and the post 1970 temperatures have been adjusted upwards. Some of the yearly temperatures have been adjusted by as much as 0.5 degrees! That is a huge change for a country the size of the US with thousands of separate temperature records. How could it be that so many thermometers were wrong by an average of 0.5 degrees in one particular year several decades ago, and an accurate retrofit be made? Why is the adjustment 0.5 degrees one year, and 0.1 degrees the next?
NASA staff have clearly done some recent ‘bookkeeping’ and ‘re-refined’ the data from 1930-1999. The issues has been discussed extensively at Steve’s blog Climate Audit.
What is the probability of this effort consistently increasing recent temperatures and decreasing older temperatures? From a statistical viewpoint, data recalculation should cause each year to have a 50/50 probability of going either up or down - thus the odds of all 70 adjusted years working in concert to increase the slope of the graph (as seen in the new version) are 2 raised to the power of 70. That is one-thousand-billion-billion to one. This isn’t an exact representation of the odds because for some of the years (<15) revisions went against the trend - but even a 55/15 split would be equivalent to flipping a coin 70 times and having it come up heads 55 times. It will never happen - one trillion to one odds (2 to the power 40.)
Particularly troubling in the NASA database are the years from 1986-1998. In the latest 2007 version of the NASA graph, the 1986 data had been adjusted upwards by 0.4 degrees relative to the original 1999 database! In fact, every year except one from 1986-1998 was adjusted upwards, by an average of 0.2 degrees.
If someone wanted to present a case for a lot of recent warming, ‘adjusting’ data in this way would be an excellent way to do it!
NASA and HadCRUT data are largely based on surface measurements, using thermometers. They both face lots of difficulties of contaminated data caused by urban heating effects, disproportionate concentration of thermometers in urban areas, changes in thermometer types over time, changes in station locations, loss of stations, changes in the time of day when thermometers are read, and yet more factors such as those I mentioned previously. NASA has a very small number of long-term stations in the Arctic, and even fewer in Africa and South America.
The other widely used global temperature data sources are from two small earth-orbiting remote sensing (IR) satellites UAH (University of Alabama at Huntsville) and RSS (Remote Sensing Systems). Satellite temperature data are more reliable because they cover the entire earth - with the exception of small regions near the north and south poles. They use the same methodology from year to year, and the two sources tend to agree fairly closely. The downside of the satellite data is that it only goes back to around 1978.
Both the UAH and RSS databases show decreasing temperatures over the last decade, with present temperatures barely above the 30 year average.
Data from each of these sources is easily obtained using Google etc.
And yet the planet warms old son. Play whatever statistical-semantic-cherry-picked games you like. The trend of temperature is clearly upwards with variation around the mean trend and some larger variations associated with the SOI. The associated CO2 levels are clearly upward. The chemistry of the link between the two is known - this is not just some chance association of trend lines.
But hey, you know the maths, perhaps you could explain to the vanishing glaciers, the disappearing Arctic ice, the birds with altered breeding seasons, the fish with altered distribution patterns, the farmer in SE Australia, or the farmer in Kansas, that it is all just imaginary, all just the conspiracy of those wicked scientists with their agenda to … ? Well, some kind of agenda anyway, probably they just don’t like oil companies.
And this "tough little planet with a biosphere which can cope with this stuff"? Well, didn’t cope too well during the earleir mass extinctions did it? Couple of near run things there, close to leaving the planet as denuded of life as Mars. And that was with a biosphere without the massive damage caused by 6 billion humans.
So good luck with the sophistry. I hope it pays well.
David Horton
Ah, the long, slow dribbling slide into instinct - a little anecdotal observation, a little nail biting fear, a little thundering. Hardly reflects the expensive training of those two doctorates, eh?
Enjoy that Long Dark Teatime of the Sole.
Give Odin my regards.
"A LITTLE anecdotal information"? Look, I must say you have me convinced. I guess like Galileo was when he was told that he couldn’t be seeing through his telescope what he was seeing, must be an optical illusion. And here was silly old me, reading reports, putting them together, thinking about context, looking out my window, debating, and I needn’t have worried at all. Nothing happening, all just an illusion, spots in front of our eyes. And to think that I was concerned. Don and ecoeng (that isn’t just a pseudonym for Don is it?) have set me straight. Any future changes to the biosphere, no matter how severe, won’t keep me awake at night. Nosiree, turn over and go back to sleep, muttering "IPCC isn’t god, ecoeng is god". And rest easy, assured that this tough little planet can cope without ice caps, can cope with a dry Australia, can cope without any other species, can cope with far fewer humans. Just like in the Rapture I guess, only the denialists will be whisked away to heaven, leaving the rest of us foolish worriers to rot in hell.
David Horton
Meanwhile…….the world, the only one we have, is going to Hell in a basket, being rushed down the river of extermination, and the sceptics give power to Governments and Big Business to ignore reality, and make plans for more instant profits! Please! Do you want the human race to continue or die out? I think I actually prefer the latter, considering the damage we have done in such a short time, as parasites, but some may want their grandchildren to have a world to live in. How about thinking of them. They may well be yours!!!
And do not think that we are going to find a new home world to destroy before this one becomes unlivable, despite Mars probes, it is not going to happen. Humans, at least as they are now, CAN NOT live on other worlds.
Dazza.
Get out of the way, Dazza, and let other people try to work out what we have to do about the problems that capitalism has caused. If you want to sip your Koolaid, go ahead, but most of us want to nut out what can be done for the benefit of our grandchildren and their grandchildren too.
Global warming is occurring - crops are ripening earlier (remember when cherries ripened just in time for Christmas ? Now it a couple of weeks earlier) but getting planted later, mountain habitats are shrinking, glaciers are disappearing, the North Pole ice shelf is shrinking, yes that’s all happening. Whether it’s all because of sun-spot activity, or human activity, may not be the main issue - what we do about it all, soon will be. Will our grandchildren curse us for doing nothing but bitching and whingeing like Dazza, or denying that there are any problems (who on Earth is suggesting this ?) ?
What do we do about it ? Switch to renewables ? Eat less, especially meat ? Walk more, travel less ? Live and work more locally and get used to a simpler life ? Fund Aboriginal communities and Third World communities to plant vast forests of trees for the next hundred years ? Fish farms ? Increase taxes on petrol and divert more funds to renewable energy research and infrastructure ?
Joe
I am staying out of the technical debate, even though this is as much my planet as Horton’s or the other academics/scientists. But I won’t be misrepresented and ridiculed by pretentious and insular twits like Hamilton and Horton, who refuse to engage on specifics.
As an average Aussie, let me set the picture straight.
I, along with pretty much everyone else not part of the scientific club, initially accepted the quite convincing evidence of AGW. Moreover, I have no consumer lifestyle to preserve, nor wealth to protect; and I certainly feel no guilt about any miniscule contribution I might have made to the degeneration of this planet of ours.
What changed my view was my own research, which revealed that the international banking community would be the ultimate beneficiaries of the $3 point something trillion in carbon taxes; and that people like David Rockefeller, Rupert Murdoch, George Soros, Silvio Berlusconi, John Howard and Malcolm Turnbull all became sudden converts, apparently on the same day.
‘No way’, I thought.
I then noted that supporters of democratic consensus process, such as Lyndon LaRouche and Gore Vidal, were condemning the Al Gore corporate machine and the IPCC as vested interests in what amounted to a global scam.
Eventually, the majority of Aussies will draw similar conclusions; that:
We have been royally sucked in;
That the poorest people on Earth will pay the bulk of the price of carbon taxes;
That the taxes will create an unsustainable rise in food and other prices of essentials.
So Hamilton and Horton can vilify us as sanctimoniously as they wish, but this is now becoming a class war, with we at the bottom of the heap, utterly disfranchised by our proclaimed ‘ignorance’. Understand this, if it is war you want, it is war that you’ll get. This is the lesson of history.
"refuse to engage on specifics" Tony?
"international banking community" Tony?
"supporters of democratic consensus process, such as Lyndon LaRouche" Tony?
"becoming a class war" Tony?
David Horton
proudly "pretentious and insular twit"
Don Aitkin I have been away for a week, and unable to contribute. My position on posts is that I will endeavour to respond to questions and comments that are what I see as contributions to debate.
to garnolda: the reference to cooling was an article in Newsweek in April 1975, referred to in my original paper, which suggests you haven’t read it. My source for cooling since 1998 is HadCRUT3v, also mentioned by someone else. The IPCC once argued that there was a straightforward relationship between CO2 and temperature. On the evidence, there isn’t.
to gracog: I am simply arguing that the argument and evidence does not support the IPCC position very strongly. It is well known that the contribution of CO2 to temperature is logarithmic and diminishing. How you would provide an experimental test would be up to experimentalists. One of them will do it, one day.
to clloyd1: These UK Met Office summaries are like those from the Royal Society. If you don’t feel patronised by their tone, I certainly do. Back to my paper.
to Jim101; A good point. One of my sons has pointed out to my that my own position eventually has to based on some kind of faith (I believe that I can understand, even though I am not a scientist). Like all analogies, one shouldn’t push them too far. I guess that my argument here is that (1) We can find out if we make an effort, (2) in any case, scientists disagree, and (3) to accept the IPCC view is to accept one set of scientists over another — if one is going to do that, why not find out why (back to (1))?
Thanks for your response Don.
I didn’t realise that your evidence for this claim:
Thirty years ago the climate worry in scientific circles was about the possible return of the ice age.
was based on this quotation in Newsweek:
There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production… The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hardpressed to keep up with it… Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded….
I did read your article, but even though your statement was in close proximity to the quotation from Newsweek, I never imagined that this would be the quality of evidence you would accept as a basis for making such a claim.
As I noted earlier, a study reported in Realclimate (7 March 2008; http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/03/the-global-cooling…) reviewed the published literature from 1965-79 and found 71 relevant articles: 7 (10%) predicted cooling; 44 (62%) predicted warming; and 20 (28%) were neutral.
While the methodology does not appear to have been published/peer-reviewed as yet, the methodology appears to be more relevant (than an article in Newsweek) to determining the questi