"400 Prominent Scientists," Part III

One of the objections to changing policies cited often in the Inhofe report is the fact that, during the Nixon administration, scientists caught Nixon's ear with predictions of global cooling and a coming ice age.  It follows, in some people's opinion, that governments should not go overboard in forcing behavior change in response to scientific predictions.

It turns out that one of the scientists who made the ice age prediction in 1972 is also cited in the Inhofe report as a climate change denier.  That scientist is paleoclimatologist Dr. George Kukla.  Dr. Kukla's response to the Senate committee's request for dissenting views is that humans do influence climate change, but not enough to worry about.  From the report:

What I think is this:  Man is responsible for a PART of global warming.  MOST of it is still natural.

Dr. Kukla is still predicting an ice age, based on past ice age cycles, and believes that climate change is mainly driven by a combination of periodic changes in the Earth's tilt and periodic changes in its orbit around the sun.

Other scientists, of course, are aware of the known natural drivers of climate change, and include them in their tests.  One example is in a 2011 paper by climate scientists Reto Knutti and Marcus Huber, cited in Nature, which concludes that man's release of greenhouse gases into the air is responsible for 74% of the observed since 1950.  The authors of the paper developed methods of separating the effects of greenhouse gases from various known natural influences on climate, including the cycles mentioned by Dr. Kukla, as well as cyclic differences in solar radiation.  According to Nature, Knutti's and Huber's results agree with those from experiments done using other methods.

According to the paper's authors, the rise in average air temperature caused by human activity would actually have been higher, but have been mitigated by natural processes.

Finally,

To test whether recent warming might just be down to a random swing in Earth's unstable climate--another theory favoured by sceptics--Knutti and Huber conducted a series of control runs of different climate models without including the effects of the energy-budget parameters.  But even if climate variability were three times greater than that estimated by state-of-the-art models, it is extremely unlikely to have produced a warming trend as that observed in the real world, they found.

In other words, in spite of Earth's being in a cooling part of the natural cycle, temperatures are still rising.

And, Senator Inhofe, including a scientist criticized by other skeptics for being wrong about global cooling in the 1970s in your list of doubters is sloppy work, in my opinion.

"400 prominent scientists," Part II

The Inhofe report we've been talking about does not claim to refute climate change, but 1) to try to show that there is a significant number of "prominent scientists" who are skeptics, and 2) to refute certain claims by the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  The scientist at the top of their list (whether by prominence at random I don't know) is Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (I cite the Inhofe report for that description).

Paldor's objections to the IPCC report are as follows:

First, temperature changes, as well as rates of temperature changes (both increase and decrease) of magnitudes similar to that reported by the IPCC to have occurred since the Industrial Revolution have occurred in Earth's climatic history.  There's nothing special about the recent rise!

and

Second, our ability to make realizable (or even sensible) future forecasts are greatly exaggerated by the IPCC.

and

Third, the rise in atmospheric CO2 is much smaller (by about 50%) than that expected by the anthropogenic activity, which implies that the missing CO2 is (most probably) absorbed by the ocean.  The oceanic response to increasing CO2 in the atmosphere might be much slower than that of the atmosphere (and is presently very poorly understood).  It is quite possible that after an "adjustment time," the ocean (which contains far more CO2 than the atmosphere) will simply increase its biological activity and absorb the CO2 from the atmosphere. 

and, finally,

Fourth, the inventory of fossil fuels is fairly limited, and in one generation we will run out of oil.

In regard to the fourth claim, I have wondered about the dwindling supply of fossil fuels myself.  One way or another, the near future may not be pleasant!  Paldor is apparently no spokesman for the coal or oil industries, being more a proponent of nuclear energy.  (I'm against nukes myself, because of the waste disposal problem.)

I don't know whether Paldor's third claim is anything more than speculation, although his own scientific papers (technical and way over my head, unfortunately) are predominantly to do with the ocean.  It's interesting that Paldor's statement that "the oceanic response to increasing CO2 in the atmosphere might be much slower than that of the atmosphere," when the IPCC reports that most of the warming since 1971 has been in the ocean.  Perhaps I don't understand what Dr. Paldor means by "oceanic response."

Dr. Paldor claims that climate modelers' "abysmal 3-day forecasts" don't bode well for longer predictions, but I really think that a very short-term prediction for an exact weather forecast for an exact area is tricker than making long-term predictions in average global temperature rise or fall.

As for the first claim, that there is nothing unusual about temperature changes since the Industrial Revolution, it makes no mention of the causes of those earlier events.  I would say that, just because earlier temperature increases were not man-made, doesn't mean that the current ones can't be.

I must report one study for which Dr. Paldor is famous outside academic circles.  Along with Doron Nof, PhD, Paldor wrote a paper explaining a possible way that a high wind could have parted the Red Sea for Moses and the Israelites' escape from Egypt.  I believe that the paper was intended as a mental exercise more than as a claim that the Bible's story of the Exodus is true.  But it gives me pause.  If I'm making fun of the man and not his stature as a scientist, so be it.

 

 

"400 prominent scientists can't be wrong!" Part I.

I'm just getting caught up with the news from 2007.

No, actually, a friend of mine on Facebook was mocking climate change deniers for not believing despite a purported 97% of climate scientists' agreeing that man's activities on earth are having a significant effect on the climate.  Climate change is any easy thing to be unsure about, and a friend of my friend's disagreed vociferously.  I did some sparring with this friend of a friend, and he was quite adamant that my beliefs on the subject were clouded by my politics, and that it was impossible to reach me with facts.

Well, I have made the same charges against conservatives here, so it's only fair for me to look into friend-of-friend's facts.  I will definitely agree with this fellow that it's a vexing human trait to keep believing what you believe, contrary to facts.  I have friends on the left who are much too ready to be against things that they really don't know much about, so I know this affliction affects people in all parts of the political spectrum.

So, is climate change real, or is it a case of mass hysteria that has overcome even scientists who should know better?  Well, I'm sure I won't come up with the definitive answer here, but I'm going to look into this guy's claims.

But the question itself is a knotty one.  Is the argument that man is not having a significant effect on climate that a change in policies can do something about?  Or maybe the controversy is simply over the 97% claim?  Or that the media have overhyped climate change in their never-ending need for a scary story?  Or that Al Gore's take on the subject is bullshit?  I bring up the vagueness of the question because I'm not sure what we're talking about.

In any case, if you Google "400 prominent scientists," you will find the basis of friend-of-friend's argument, a U.S. Senate Report titled Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007 - Scientists Debunk "Consensus".  This is a U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Minority Staff Report under the aegis of Senator James Inhofe.

Now here's where friend-of-friend got very upset with me:  Did I really disbelieve a U.S. Senate report?  I have to admit that I am predisposed to doubt any report put together by James Inhofe.  But I'm going to try to look this report over and see if there's anything in it.  I will no doubt be trying to debunk it, because I'm only human, after all.

The report consists of statements from more than 400 people who are basically testifying about how they became climate change skeptics.  I have not yet read most of those statements, but I'm going to try to see what these folks are claiming, and if they're all claiming the same thing.  (Now, I am already suspicious that some of these statements are taken out of context, but I won't make that claim until I know it's true.)

Before I start, I want to make note about this report that surprised me, and which gives me pause.  Here is what  the report says about the scientists giving the testimony:

The distinguished scientists featured in this new report are experts in diverse fields, including:  climatology; geology; biology; glaciology; biogeography; meteorology; oceanography; economics; chemistry; mathematics; environmental sciences; engineering; physics and paleoclimatology.

I have to say that I would be more impressed if the report had found 400 climatologists who are skeptics.  Throwing the climatologists, meteorologists, atmospheric scientists, and paleoclimatologists together, I come up with 152 scientists who are actually toilers in the field in question.  (I cannot at present say just how "prominent" any of them are.)  I will also grant that physicists and astronomers might have something to teach climatologists about solar cycles, but I doubt that many of the experts in other fields have done the experiments or read the literature enough to back up their views on climatology.

And I'm not sure at all about the inclusion of 22 economists, 47 engineers, 2 social scientists, and one philosopher.  Can they be of any help here?

But this is to be a learning experience.  Next, I'll be examining the statements of some of the climatologists and their associates.

Authority

It occurred to me only recently (I can be quite dim) the reason that conservatives worship the free market.  Conservatives love authority--authority of all types.  The ultimate authority is God, of course.  The thing that the free market has in common with God is its unpredictability.  Yes, there is a near-science of economics, but try as it may to make predictions, it's far from perfect (particularly imperfect when ideology gets in the way of honest research, but that's a topic for another time).

Conservatives resist the idea that humans can have any significant effect on the world.  Part of the denial of climate change (apart from the greed that helps drive it) comes from conservatives' denial that climate change could be either caused or mitigated by human efforts.  God wouldn't let that happen.  The twin authorities of the free market right wing church know better than science.

Of course, part of belief in the free market comes from the sense of justice of the rich, who believe that it must be God's will that the both rich and poor are where they belong.

As they've done since the beginning, do now, and ever shall do, the benighted lovers of imposed authority fight against the erosion of that authority.  I used to separate the right from the left by describing the right as "the punitives."  They love doling out punishment, but now I think they love receiving it, too.