Knocking down the extremists who set up straw men
From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
The Daily Telegraph, on 8 December 2009, produced what it called the “Climate Skeptic’s Q&A”, a piece written by Fred Pearce, a long-standing environmental extremist campaigner on the climate question. There was no attempt in the piece to produce balanced or scientifically-accurate answers. A reader has sent the “Q&A” to us and has asked us to put matters to rights. Mr. Pearce’s “straw-man” questions are in bold face; his answers are in italics, and my comments are in Roman face.
How can scientists claim to predict climate change over 50 or more years when they can’t even get next week’s weather forecast right?
They can’t tell us in detail. But forecasting climate change is more like forecasting the seasons than the weather. We know winters are cold and summers are warm. Always. And it’s like that with greenhouse gases. Physicists have known for 200 years that gases like carbon dioxide trap heat. These gases are accumulating in the atmosphere, thanks to our pollution. They will heat up the atmosphere just as certainly as the summer sun heats us.
This is a classic “straw-man” set up and then knocked down by Pearce. It is not and has never been the contention of skeptical scientists that there is no such thing as the greenhouse effect. The question that is hotly debated among climate scientists is not whether the doubling of CO2 concentration that is expected this century can in theory cause warming: the question is how much warming we can cause, and the increasingly frequent answer in the peer-reviewed journals is “very little indeed”.
Pearce also tries to suggest that forecasting climate change is “like forecasting the seasons” – i.e., easy. Unfortunately, Edward Lorenz proved that claim to be false very nearly half a century ago, in the landmark paper in a climatological journal that founded chaos theory. Lorenz demonstrated that unless we knew the values of the millions of parameters that define the climate to a precision that is not and can never be in practice attainable the long-range prediction of climatic behavior would be impossible “by any method”. Yet the UN’s case for climate alarm is based almost exclusively on the output of models that have been demonstrated, time and again, to fail. Not one of the models on which the UN relies, for instance, had predicted that there would be 15 years without any statistically-significant “global warming” – the years 1995-2009 inclusive.
But surely it’s the job of scientists to deal in irrefutable evidence rather than predictions?
Nothing is absolutely certain or irrefutable. We could be hit tomorrow by an asteroid or a mega-volcano that wipes out warming for centuries. But I’d say climate science is a good deal more reliable than most economic predictions, because it is based on natural laws rather than how markets behave.
And what qualifications does Pearce to say, “Climate science is a good deal more reliable than most economic predictions,” when he is neither a climate scientist nor an economist? Precisely because there are so many unknowns in the equations that govern climatology, the uncertainties in almost every result in the field are greater than in any other science. The UN’s climate panel itself admits that our scientific understanding of most of the radiative forcings for which we are thought to be responsible is “Low” to “Very Low”, and its understanding of the temperature feedbacks that provide two-thirds of the estimated warming is so low that it does not even dare to assign a Level of Scientific Understanding to them. By contrast, the rules of the market are well understood: for instance, if the supply of a good decreases, or the demand increases, the price will tend to rise.
Anyway, how can they be sure that the earth has warmed in the last few centuries?
It hasn’t. Evidence from tree rings, the pollen in the bottom of lakes, gas bubbles in ice cores and a lot else, all suggests strongly that it was warm 800 or 900 years ago; then cooler during the little ice age; then warmer again in the 19th century. All this was due to explainable natural cycles. But during the second half of the 20th century there was fast global warming for which there are no known natural explanations. Only the known physics of our soaring emissions of greenhouses gases can explain events.
Here, Pearce uses a technique to which climate extremists often resort when all else fails: he simply lies. Here are the falsehoods.
First, the weather was warmer in the Middle Ages than today, implying that today’s temperatures are not unprecedented in the recent history of the climate, but Pearce misleads the reader by carefully failing to mention this.
Secondly, he fails to mention that there has been a continuous recovery both of solar activity and of temperatures for three centuries since the Little Ice Age began to come to an end in 1695.
Thirdly, he implies that all warming before “the second half of the 20th century” was natural, but fails to point out that in the global instrumental temperature record that began in 1850 there have been three periods of rapid warming, all at identical rates – 1860-1880, 1910-1940, and 1975-1998. The third of these periods is the only one we could have influenced, even in theory, and yet the warming rate during that period is identical to the warming rates in the two earlier periods, which we could not have influenced. There is, therefore no anthropogenic signal in the global temperature record at all.
Fourthly, he says, “Only the known physics of our soaring emissions of greenhouse gases can explain events,” yet in fact more than five-sixths of the warming during the period 1983-2001 was caused by a naturally-occurring reduction in cloud cover entirely unconnected with any human activity.
Fifthly, he mentions “our soaring emissions”, but fails to mention that it is not emissions but concentrations of CO2 that cause warming, and that CO2 concentration is rising not exponentially, as the UN predicts, but purely in a straight line. This inconvenient truth, on its own, requires the UN’s forecast of temperature change this century to be halved.
Sixthly, he fails to mention that the effect of all those extra emissions (or at least of that minority of them that end up remaining in the atmosphere) is logarithmic, not linear: each new molecule of CO2 has less influence on the climate than its predecessors. The greatest effect of CO2 on warming the planet occurs with the first 50 parts per million. After that, diminishing returns set in.
Seventhly, he fails to mention that there is a raging scientific debate about how much warming is to be expected from a given increase in CO2 concentration, with a growing consensus to the effect that the UN has exaggerated the warming effect of CO2 approximately sixfold.
Note that most of these falsehoods are by omission: Pearce is carefully giving the readers only one part of the story, and is not giving them the full picture.
But increases in CO2 follow periods of warming don’t they, not the other way round?
Both are true. The evidence here comes from gas bubbles in ice, which give us a timeline of atmospheric temperatures and CO2 levels. The two go in tandem in and out of the ice ages over hundreds of thousands of years. But temperatures change a few years earlier than CO2. That’s not surprising. The ice ages come and go because wobbles in the Earth’s orbit change solar radiation, heating the earth. So temperature changes first. But a lot of the subsequent warming (or cooling) is due to CO2 switching between the ocean and the atmosphere as a result of the initial temperature change. The world starts to warm because of a wobble; and as it warms, CO2 bubbles out of the oceans, adding to the warming.
Here again, mendacity creeps in, though not quite as obviously as in the previous answer. Pearce says that in the paleoclimate “temperatures change a few years earlier than CO2”. Actually, temperatures change 800-2800 years earlier than CO2, and that is rather more than “a few years”. Though Pearce is right to mention that, in accordance with Henry’s Law, warming of the oceans causes them to outgas CO2 to the atmosphere, he once again fails to mention the uncertainties. For a doubling of CO2 concentration, the UN’s climate panel says that somewhere between 25 and 225 ppmv of CO2 will be outgassed to the atmosphere. The maximum value is nine times the minimum value, indicating a more than usually large uncertainty. None of this uncertainty, however, is revealed to Pearce’s readers.
Isn’t it a complete myth that the Arctic ice cap is melting?
Haven’t you seen the satellite pictures? It melts every summer, of course. But in recent years the melt has been greater. In 2008, probably for the first time in thousands of years, both the northwest and northeast shipping passages through the Arctic, north of Canada and Siberia, were ice-free.
Lies again. The north-east passage was not ice-free in 2008. It was only possible to get through with a fleet of icebreakers, and only then for a couple of weeks during the sea-ice minimum. The north-west passage has been ice-free on numerous occasions before. Amundsen went through in a sailing-boat without power in 1903, and it was open in 1945, when the Arctic was 1-2 C (2-3.5 F) warmer than today. Pearce also fails to point out that in mid-September 2007, when the extent of Arctic sea ice reached a 30-year minimum (before that, there were no satellites and we could not measure the extent of sea ice), only three weeks later the Antarctic sea-ice extent attained a 30-year maximum. From this, it follows that the melting of the Arctic sea-ice (which would not, in any event, cause a single millimeter of sea-level rise, for it is already floating) was not caused by “global warming” but by regional climate variability caused, in 2007, by unusually strong currents and winds from the Tropics, as a paper by NASA the following year revealed. This phenomenon, therefore, had very little to do with anthropogenic “global warming”. Next, Pearce fails to tell his readers that the extent of summer sea ice in the Arctic has rebuilt itself almost completely. In 2009 it was almost as great as it had been on average during the previous decade. Finally, he is careful not to explain to his readers that the mere fact of warming tells us nothing of its cause. To say, “Warming is happening, therefore humankind is to blame” is to perpetrate the worn Aristotelian logical fallacy of the argumentum ad ignorantiam – the fallacy of the appeal to ignorance.
And hasn’t the world stopped warming since 1998?
Yes. For now. Global temperatures have been more or less stable since the super-warm El Nino year of 1998. Even so, 2009 is expected to be the fourth or fifth warmest year on record. Some researchers predict stable temperatures, or even modest cooling, for another five years or so. This is due to natural cycles in the oceans that affect air temperature. Nobody ever said that man-made global warming would abolish natural cycles. Or if they did, they were dumb. But greenhouse gases are still accumulating in the atmosphere. Once natural cycles move back to a warming phase, global warming will go into overdrive.
Let us straighten out the mangled facts. First, there has been no statistically-significant “global warming” since 1995 – 15 full years. Secondly, temperatures have fallen rapidly compared with the year of the Great El Nino in 1998 – an ocean circulation that occurs once in 150 years and releases large quantities of stored ocean heat to the atmosphere. Thirdly, even if one removes the artificial high point for temperatures in 1998 and starts the trend measurement from 1 January 2001, there has been a global cooling trend for nine full years. Fourthly, CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere at exactly the same rate it was accumulating a decade ago – at just 2 parts per million per year. This is far too small to be significant. Methane concentration largely stopped rising in the year 2000. Other greenhouse gases (other than water vapor) are, on any view, present in concentrations so small as to be irrelevant.
If there is warming, isn’t solar radiation really to blame?
Obviously we would be frozen without the sun. But changes in solar radiation cannot explain what has happened in the past half century. If anything, they would have cooled us since about 1980, during the period of most rapid warming.
Once again, the facts are artfully distorted, so as to convey an incomplete and hence inaccurate picture. First, the only warming that has occurred since 1940 was in the two decades 1980-2000. As we have seen, that warming was at a rate no greater than the warming periods 1860-1880 and 1910-1940. From 1645-1715, the 70-year Maunder Minimum, there were almost no sunspots on the Sun, and intense global cooling resulted. Thereafter, the Sun began to pick up again and, from 1695-1745, in just 40 years, temperatures in central England rose by 2.2 C (4 F). Compare that with just 0.6 C (1.1 F) in the whole of the 20th century. Solar activity and temperatures continued to rise. Solar activity reached its peak in the Grand Maximum of 1925-1995. One cannot, therefore, dismiss the Sun as having had no significant effect. Solar activity has been declining since the peak of the Grand Maximum in 1960: however, temperature variability is also caused, in the shorter term, by changes in cloud cover and in ocean circulations. It is these changes that have been demonstrated, in the peer-reviewed literature, to cause nearly all of the warming from 1980-2000.
And what about water vapor?
Water vapor is a major natural greenhouse gas. Always has been. It didn’t start recent warming, but it roughly doubles the warming caused directly by CO2. That is because if you add CO2 to the air and warm it, then evaporation increases, putting more water vapor into the air, causing further warming.
Here, we must deal with mere scientific ignorance. Evaporation is merely the vehicle for the accumulation of more water vapor in the atmosphere. The principal reason why water vapor increases with warming is that, by the Clausius-Clapeyron relation, the space occupied by the atmosphere can carry near-exponentially more water vapor as it warms. However, there are numerous problems with the UN’s exaggerated estimate of the warming caused by this water-vapor feedback. First, the models relied upon by the UN tend to treat water vapor as though it were a well-mixed greenhouse gas, occurring at uniform concentration throughout the atmosphere. However, numerous measurements have demonstrated that this is not so, and that, although the UN predicts that most of the warming caused by anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcing would occur in the upper atmosphere, at that altitude any additional water vapor tends to subside to lower altitudes where the principal absorption bands of water vapor are already saturated, so that very little extra warming occurs. Secondly, the UN treats cloud feedback as positive when it is in fact very strongly negative, exercising a countervailing cooling effect. For these reasons, a growing body of papers in the scientific literature finds that the water-vapor feedback is considerably smaller than the UN would like us to imagine.
Didn’t those email leaks from the University of East Anglia prove that global warming scientists suppress opinions they don’t agree with?
Yes. Sometimes. To be fair, how many of us would come up smelling of roses if a selection of our most ill-advised emails were published on the internet? But even so, the emails showed a bunker mentality among some climate researchers, who have a hard time dealing with critics who work outside the “priesthood” of peer-reviewed research. But trying to shut out the critics, however disruptive they may be, is bad for science, which is (and should be) an adversarial process of open debate. Did the researchers succeed in suppressing opinions they disagreed with? No. Did the emails reveal a conspiracy to lie to us about the climate science? I have read most of them. I am a journalist. I love conspiracies. But the answer is no.
This answer is characteristically disingenuous. The truth is that the Climategate emailers were scientists whose distortions and fabrications of data I had been following for some years. I was intrigued to find that they were working so closely together. That, together with the sheer nastiness of the tone of many of the emails, was what struck me most forcibly. See the SPPI paper on Climategate for detailed exposure of the numerous frauds and scams perpetrated by those named in the emails.
Isn’t the whole climate change scare a plan hatched by governments as a justification to hike up taxes?
Hardly. Governments have been dragged kicking and screaming to get serious about climate change. They’d just love it to go away.
The largest majority for any recent Bill in the House of Commons was that which the Climate Change Bill – an economic suicide note of more than usual stupidity – was passed with only three dissenters on the very night in 2008 when the first October snow in 74 years was falling in Parliament Square. Politicians, particularly but not exclusively on the Left, have seized on the “global warming” issue as an excuse to inflict upon their electors the heaviest tax increases in human history, together with tens of millions of words of pointless regulations – and all for nothing except their own enrichment and empowerment.
Isn’t the suggestion of Lord Stern and others that we divert 1 per cent of the world’s GDP to prevent climate change a colossal misuse of money that could be better spent on improving human life – eradicating killer diseases such as malaria, for instance?
Stern says it will cost us a great deal more in the long run if we don’t tackle climate change. The trouble is that if climate change isn’t halted, it will carry on getting ever worse. Carbon dioxide hangs around in the atmosphere for centuries. So even if current emissions stayed as they are, we won’t stop at 1 or 2 degrees of warming, we will go on up to 4 and 6 and even 8 degrees. How hot can you handle? Ultimately, the only question is whether we stop it, or it stops us.
Except among true-believers in the new superstition that is “global warming”, no one takes the Stern Review of climate economics seriously. He used a near-zero discount rate, and prodigiously exaggerated the imagined warming that was to come, more than doubling the UN’s already wildly excessive upper estimate. As for the rate of warming, it was just 0.6 C over the past 100 years, and – even during the past 30 years, 20 of which were warming years – the warming rate was just 1.4 C/century. There is no basis in observational reality or in theory for the absurdly high warming estimates cited by Pearce.
Overall, this article was typical of its kind, exploiting the scientific ignorance of the Daily Telegraph’s editors and attempting to increase the scientific ignorance of its readers. However, the readers are a more-than-usually literate lot, and they have been writing thousands of letters to the paper telling it to rein in its increasingly dotty climate coverage, and to provide more of the fact-based balance that you will find in the present posting.
Tags: Climate Change Bill, climategate, Daily Telegraph, Fred Pearce, House of Commons