Viscount Monckton gives a presentation during the 2007 Conference on Climate Change
From Mike Asher at the DailyTech:
The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming “incontrovertible.”
In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marque explains,”There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.”
The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity — the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause — has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling. A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.
Complete article here
(h/t Fred)
UPDATE: 7/18/08 9PM PST It appears there is some discord at the APS over the issue.
The higher ups at the American Physical Society, apparently do not agree with the editor that made the initial post and reaffirms the statement on human caused global warming, posting this statement on their web site www.aps.org:
The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:
“Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate.”
An article at odds with this statement recently appeared in an online newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society, one of 39 units of APS. The header of this newsletter carries the statement that “Opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the APS or of the Forum.” This newsletter is not a journal of the APS and it is not peer reviewed.
There has certainly been a lot of argument and rhetoric surrounding this issue, and I’ve taken a fair amount of criticism for even posting it, with one commenter exclaiming that I was “popping champagne corks” while another said that “I couldn’t wait to talk about it as a major hole in the case for doing something to clean up air pollution.” which is curious, since I never made any comments about “celebrating with champagne”, “air pollution” or “major hole in the case”.
What this story does is demonstrate how politically and emotionally charged the issue has become. And when politics, emotions, and science mix, the outcome is never good.
Boris speculates:
That ridiculous figure comes not from empirical data, but from a climate model, which would attribute only 87% of all other climate change to the effects of water vapor, methane, residual radioactivity in the Earth’s mantle and core, the PDO and AMO, El Nino, El Nina, albedo, Solar effects, etc.
Unless Boris was inadvertently at least two orders of magnitude too high when referring to the influence of carbon dioxide on global warming, then I refer him to the article by David Evans mentioned above. Dr. Evans stated:
So Boris continues to claim that CO2 [a small trace gas, which comprises less than .04 – of one percent – of the atmosphere], contributes an astonishing 13% of the GHE — versus David Evans, who states unequivocally that there is no evidence that CO2 contributes anything significant to the greenhouse effect.
And then we have Joel Shore (07:54:57) who joins the ilk of James Hansen and David Suzuki in demanding the silencing of someone he disagrees with. Refuting the science is the proper response, but perhaps Mr. Shore has no adequate refutation, and so prefers to demand the silencing of a different point of view.
The above examples are indicative of the climate alarmists’ hypothesis: click
It would take me a day to change by belief in AGW to become a skeptic if I know that APS as a whole has doubts about AGW. It would take me a less than a second if APS and ACS start doubting AGW. In this case, if it ever happens, consensus works to help the current critics of AGW, which is perfectly fine.
But I am highly skeptical on the importance of the current Physics & Society forum announcement. Apart from APS distancing themselves from this statement, this is only one group among the 39 or so groups in APS (http://www.aps.org/membership/units/index.cfm ), and even in this group Jeffrey Marque is only one member (and an associate editor) among the 20 or so officers (http://www.aps.org/units/fps/governance/officers/index.cfm ). The importance is not that high since it is really not an APS review on the topic, just a forum for posting unreviewed (but highly moderated) opinions probably with more scientific content. But it would be interesting to see the outcome; more discussion is always better (I personally would have preferred to see APS as a whole to open a critical evaluation of AGW, obviously they do not see the need). However, I hope politics will not cause Jeffrey Marque’s departure from the editorship.
According to Christopher Monckton, his paper published in the APS was peer-reviewed by Alvin Saperstein, a professor of physics and editor of Physics and Society.
– Jon McComb radio program, The World Today (CKNW 98), July 17, 2008. 3:38 pm PDT
Well, I see today the hysterics are rallying to fill the breach. They are resorting to word parsing; they have to protect the grail; maintain the mantra or the spondulics stop flowing.
“One of the most disfiguring parts of the deliberations of the UN’s climate panel has been the insistence of the bureaucrats that run it that a particular orthodoxy shall be reflected in the scientific documents it produces. The scientists are not, repeat, not in charge of the UN’s climate panel. It is political representatives who agree the final text and it is bureaucrats who prepare that final text for them after the scientists have all signed off the final version.
And when I got my final version of it and read through it I saw that these bureaucrats had inserted, among many other things, a table of figures in which, by ingenious manipulation of 4 decimal points, they had succeeded in exaggerating the contribution of melting ice sheets and glaciers – the sort of thing that Al Gore is always banging on about – not just a little exaggeration but a ten-fold exaggeration, a thousand percent exaggeration.
And so I, I wrote to the IPCC and said, look, once we’ve signed off on this document it is not for you to insert tables like this without our sanction and without having drawn our attention to it.”
– Lord Monckton on the Jon McComb radio program, The World Today (CKNW 98), July 17, 2008. 3:39 pm PDT
Just to elaborate on Joel’s post above:
The “skeptic movement” and “scientists” are not two mutually exclusive entities as Joel implies. The “skeptic movement” contains many scientists and the pro-AGW movement contains many non-scientists. The fact that much skeptic work is being done outside of the peer-review process is a symptom of the dysfunction of that process.
I concluded my post at 9:37 today by agreeing with Bill March that the APS policy statement is hardly a ringing endorsement of the IPCC position. Further confirmation of that is found in a short paper entitled “Climate Change” – published earlier this year (i.e. subsequent to the policy statement). See http://www.aps.org/policy/reports/popa-reports/energy/climate.cfm
Here are some quotations from its Conclusions:
“While the inevitability of climate change is generally accepted, the magnitude and nature of these changes are still uncertain.”
“While anthropogenic climate change has not been unambiguously detected … [the] rate of change is similar in magnitude to natural climate changes but also well within the range of the possible effects of the historical rise in greenhouse gas concentrations.”
“Unambiguously detecting climate change through the record of global mean temperature is not possible at this point …”
“The degree to which the climate will change in the future is still uncertain … and a definitive cost-benefit calculation which compares climate change damages to mitigation costs is not possible at this time.”
“Technological change and a general increase in wealth through economic growth will leave the world better able to deal with this issue in the future. However, some, perhaps small, amount of damage will accrue in the interim. A risk-averse viewpoint argues for mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible to avoid the possibility of harm. An opposite view advocates waiting until we are more certain about climate change effects (and more able to effect changes). This part of the debate will be better informed, but not solved, by improved science.”
It seems to me that the APS has a sensibly open mind on the matter and that the debate that has caused all this fuss is little more than a continuation of that. Nonetheless, I repeat my comment that a helpful (and interesting) step now would be for them to ballot their members to determine individual views on the matter.
Joel Shore (08:02:44) :
Mark W says: “Can someone point to me a place where the physical mechanism behind the substantial positive feedback of water vapor has been proven? I know of a number of papers that cast significant doubts on that assumption, but none that support it.”
Well, here are two papers that support this mechanism:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;310/5749/841
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;296/5568/727
There are others out there too. See, for example, the discussion here:
http://sciencepoliticsclimatechange.blogspot.com/2006/08/more-o
Sorry, Joel, these fail to answer the question. A computer model is not physical proof, but a conjectured proof at best. A physical proof would be something on the order of an experiment under controlled circumstances whereby an atmospheric sample with one concentration of CO2 warms more than a similar sample with a lower concentration.
The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review.
So? As I understand it, the whole purpose of posting both the articles was to generate debate and to welcome reviews from the community. This sounds like the most open peer review possible.
Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community.
This is irrelevant. Science is not about opinion, majority or otherwise. It’s about facts and the discussion about the facts in these papers hasn’t even begun.
The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.
While they have every right to disagree, this statement is meaningless without detailed rebuttal of the points raised.
The whole tenor of this notice is political rather than scientific. It sounds more like a great pressure was brought to bear to ensure conformance to accepted dogma before the requested scientific feedback was received, which would hopefully appear in the October issue. For it to be done in this fashion, targeting for special attention just the one article, demeans science and is a disgrace.
Smokey says: “And then we have Joel Shore (07:54:57) who joins the ilk of James Hansen and David Suzuki in demanding the silencing of someone he disagrees with. Refuting the science is the proper response, but perhaps Mr. Shore has no adequate refutation, and so prefers to demand the silencing of a different point of view.”
I am not trying to silence anyone and I very much resent the claim that I am. What I am trying to do is make sure that the editors of the newsletter do their best to correct the blatant misrepresentations of the paper that Monckton and cohorts are now engaged in promoting. And, the statement that they have now added to the newsletter goes most of the way toward doing this. (In addition, I think that they should politely ask Monckton and co. [i.e., the Science and Public Policy Institute] to revise their blatantly untrue press release if they have not already done so.)
I would expect you and others in the skeptic movement to have the courage to speak up when someone like Monckton makes such blatant misrepresentations of facts. But, I suppose I am expecting too much given that the whole movement seems to be based on blatant misrepresentations of the facts.
Rob Guenier says: “I concluded my post at 9:37 today by agreeing with Bill March that the APS policy statement is hardly a ringing endorsement of the IPCC position. Further confirmation of that is found in a short paper entitled ‘Climate Change’ – published earlier this year (i.e. subsequent to the policy statement). See http://www.aps.org/policy/reports/popa-reports/energy/climate.cfm ”
Rob, that was not published earlier this year. That link goes to part of a report called “The Current Energy Situation & Background Papers”, listed here http://www.aps.org/policy/reports/popa-reports/ , which was published in September 1996 (which explains why the latest cite in it is to the Second IPCC report issued in 1995). In other words, that expresses the views of that APS committee 12 years ago. I think that the APS’s current statement on climate change reflects the greater certainty that the APS now feels is warranted in light of the scientific evidence.
And how exactly does one differentiate where specific warming is coming from? As far as I know you can’t. The so-called feedbacks will react to any temperature changes, not just CO2.
Smokey,
David Evans is wrong. He misreads the same figure as Monckton (he likely got the idea from Monckton). In addition, CO2’s contribution to the GHE is known to be between 9 and 26 percent. The exact number is almost impossible to determine, but 13% is a reasonable estimate. (see Ramanathan and Coakley 1978) These numbers are undisputed in the literature–I could find no publications by David Evans on this subject.
Robert Wood (12:40:22) :
Paul Shanahan, the editor is correct but you can bet there is a lot of internal wrangling going on, with the paymasters threatening to withold grants, etc.
There’s definately going to be some kind of fallout from this and I suspect it will provide debate for long time to come.
The statement that was shown in the index to the July 2008 issue of Physics & Society next to Lord Monckton’s article has now been removed. However, it is still shown within the actual body of Lord Monckton’s article.
I feel for that poor editor. He must be catching all sorts of hell from all quarters.
“this is only one group among the 39 or so groups in APS (http://www.aps.org/membership/units/index.cfm ), and even in this group Jeffrey Marque is only one member (and an associate editor) among the 20 or so officers ”
A journey of 1000 miles starts with the first step.
You don’t have to have a climatology degree, or even a degree in Physics to realize that CO2-caused warming theory has more holes in it than a piece of swiss cheese. All it takes is enough time to study the published articles and criticisms readily available on the internet. Then you have to decide if you are going to rely on what your common sense tells you, or starting baaaa-ing with the rest of the consensus sheep. It’s time for all of us to start contacting our congresspeople and insist that they dry up the funding for these bloodsuckers and get them off the government (our) payroll. If we don’t, they won’t stop until they bring our standard of living down to the level of a third-world country.
I found the paper by Messrs Hafemeister & Schwartz very interesting. Many of the formulae they cite are quite beyond my comprehension, but I do understand words so I’ll stick to words.
Their paper is in two parts, a fact reflected in their introduction. First they use a number of formulae to conclude that increased CO2 in the atmosphere causes a rise in surface temperature. Then they use another formula to conclude that increased solar activity alone cannot explain increases in surface temperature. The approach they adopt in each part is different.
In the first part they examine the effect on CO2 in the atmosphere of “burning carbon and deforestation” (2 activities which they treat together as a single phenomenon). For all I know their sums are correct, I would not be so rude as to say otherwise. The conclusion they draw is that half the CO2 from these 2 activities remains in the atmosphere and half is absorbed by sinks on land and in the oceans.
That conclusion is, if I might respectfully say so, patently incorrect because they are not comparing like with like. They look at one source only of CO2, attribute all the increase in atmospheric CO2 to that one source and calculate the fraction of that source that remains in the atmosphere. Yet there are two other very obvious sources of increased CO2, both also linked to people.
World population roughly trebled from 1800-1959 and a further rough trebling has occurred since 1959. This, of itself, has produced a mighty chunk of the old Chicken Licken Gas because we breath it out 24/7. On the best information I have been able to find, I produce more CO2 each year by breathing than I do by driving my car (it’s not that I make sordid panting phone calls, but I only drive a thousand or so miles a year).
In addition, humans breed animals in vast numbers for consumption and companionship (in some instances both, but I don’t want to upset dog lovers of Korean origin). Animals also breath out CO2 and, unlike we polite English chaps, they also have a tendency to (ahem, I’ll say it quietly) flatus.
Assuming these are the only two additional increases in CO2 they mean that far less than half the additional CO2 produced by humans remains in the atmosphere and, consequently, that far more than half is absorbed by sinks. Any additional sources reduce that proportion further.
That is not the end of the story, of course, because the mere fact that half (or one-third, or one-quarter, or whatever proportion you wish) of CO2 output remains in the atmosphere over a given period and at a given level of CO2 production does not mean that the same fraction will remain for the same period at all levels of production.
They then look at the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere in 1800 and in 1959 and insert assumed figures into a formula in order to demonstrate how that increase might have occurred. This part of their exercise seems pretty futile because it merely involves finding the numbers that need to be fitted into the formula to explain the measured difference in CO2 levels between those dates. The formula is a sausage machine, they wanted to make pork sausages so they fed pork into the sausage machine.
Next they seek to predict the increase in concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere from 1990 to 2050. At this stage there is no mention of deforestation but their reference to “fossil fuels” rather than “burning carbon and deforestation” might be a distinction without a difference. The formula they adopt makes the same assumptions which undermined their conclusion that about half the CO2 produced by industrial activity remains in the atmosphere. By doing so they come up with a “worst case scenario” of the possible concentration of CO2 in 2050.
Their biggest problem thus far is that they take 1800 as the “Year Dot”. It is their benchmark of “pre-industrialisation”. If one assumes that industrialisation is the bogey-man it makes eminent sense to take a starting date around 1800 (a case could be made for it being a bit earlier but we are among friends so let’s not quibble). On that assumption it does not matter what happened prior to 1800 because it cannot have been a problem, industrialisation is the problem therefore we measure only from a random pre-industrial Year Dot. Am I the only one who sees the horse and cart arranged in a less than conventional order?
Because (i) their analysis to this point is predicated on the assumption that industrialisation is the only explanation for increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1800, (ii) any effects of CO2 in the atmosphere prior to 1800 which do not fit their conclusions are ignored and (iii) no other variable is taken into account, it is hardly surprising that the final stages of part 1 of the paper reach the same conclusion as the IPCC.
We are back to the sausage machine. They have fed the same meat into the same machine as the IPCC and have produced identical sausages. In other words, as the second paragraph of the paper suggests would be the case, they have concluded that, on the assumption that the IPCC’s data and methodology are correct, their formulae prove that the IPCC’s conclusions are correct. Golly gosh! Who’d have thought it!
The second stage of the paper is even more fun.
In the first stage, their assumptions about CO2 and industrialisation led to conclusions which were carried-over into their calculations of the effect of atmospheric CO2 on surface temperature. In the second stage, their conclusion that atmospheric CO2 causes surface temperature change is taken as a given. They then ask whether solar variations can account for changes in surface temperatures on Earth given that those changes are caused by CO2 levels. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As always, we can learn from cricket. Let us assume we have not the IPCC but the IPCG – the International Panel on Cricketing Greatness. A group of Englishmen get together to review the evidence and decide who is the greatest cricketer in history. They conclude it is Sir Ian Botham, an Englishman. New Zealand’s cricket fraternity hears of this and wishes to put the case for Sir Richard Hadlee, India suggests Mr Kapil Dev, Pakistan says Mr Imran Khan, Australia argues for Sir Donald Bradman and the West Indies put the case for Sir Garfield Sobers. All challengers encounter the same problem – the panel has met, reached a decision and its whole existence depends on its conclusion being correct. The panel says it is for the challengers to prove that Sir Ian Botham was not the best and in deciding the strength of the new candidates the Panel will presume itself to have been correct. No one would treat that as a sensible or fair way to reach a conclusion on something so important.
And I bet you a potato crisp to a pork pie that Messrs Hafemeister and Schwartz cannot explain why a cricket ball swings more in humid conditions.
http://thefatbigot.blogspot.com/2008/07/what-is-point-of-emissions-targets.html
Joel Shore, you are doing what I asked someone earlier not to do, which is throw out links claiming they support your position, when in fact they don’t.
I am familiar with the first paper and it shows the only significant measureable effect from a GHG is from methane. The effect from CO2 is so small, it’s less than the error in the measurement, and therefore in all likelyhood just that, measurement error.
The second paper is about a model and therefore not scientific evidence.
I didn’t bother to read the third link.
from Boris (11:16:08 ) : he said “You still haven’t got it yet. Yes, they are model runs, but they show the contribution of warming of the different forcings FOR THE 20TH CENTURY. The solar forcing is smaller than GHG forcing, so the response is weaker. When you run models for equal forcing, you get the same tropospheric pattern, only the stratosphere is different.
Any warming would show a hot spot. A tropical tropospheric hot spot is NOT a fingerprint of GHG warming.”
Joel Shore (09:00:01) : says
Boris says: “You are making the same mistake Monckton made. The figure in question is figure 9.1 from the AR4 report. The caption states ‘Zonal mean atmospheric temperature change from 1890 to 1999.’ Solar forcing was not equal to CO2 forcing during the 20th century, so the solar response is smaller. But it still shows a tropical tropospheric hot spot.”
Indeed. In fact, because of the smaller response and the way the contour intervals have been chosen in that plot, it is simply impossible to determine with any accuracy from that figure the amplification factor between the surface and hot spot in the tropical atmosphere. A better figure is given in this RealClimate post: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/tropical-troposphere-trends/ It clearly shows how solar forcing and CO2 forcing give basically the same amplification in the tropical atmosphere, which is not surprising since it is the result of the basic physics of a moist adiabatic lapse rate.”
But this is contradicting the IPCC in the most fundamental way. The claims are that there is this unprecented increase in temperature that cannot be caused by anything other than CO@ur momisugly. Yet Boris and Joel do not see the disconnect that an unprecendented hot spot must be shown by the same argument. “A tropical tropospheric hot spot” is not an unprecendented hot spot. Boris and Joel are confirming that the IPCC is invalidated, not CO2 increasing temperature to some small amount. The 2.5Cis being invalidated for a doubling, and Joel and Boris are inadvertantly supporting the skeptics’ position.
Go to the web site, they do not agree. They still believe in climate change.
How can this be put up without verification?
Rob G,
What makes you think that paper was published this year? The latest reference is from 1995, and it references IPCC v2, during a time when there was somewhat greater uncertainty over global warming and the IPCC conclusions were more soft.
It looks like it was part of a broader paper on energy published in 1996.
http://www.aps.org/policy/reports/popa-reports/energy/situation.cfm
This is the APS position:
“(Adopted by Council on November 18, 2007)
Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.
The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.
Because the complexity of the climate makes accurate prediction difficult, the APS urges an enhanced effort to understand the effects of human activity on the Earth’s climate, and to provide the technological options for meeting the climate challenge in the near and longer terms. The APS also urges governments, universities, national laboratories and its membership to support policies and actions that will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.”
http://www.aps.org/policy/statements/07_1.cfm
I’m thinking the author of this blog post citing the appalling DailyTech article should make a firm correction at this point.
Data is always the best.
http://climatesci.org/2008/07/17/spencer-rw-and-wd-braswell-2008-feedback-vs-chaotic-radiative-forcing-%e2%80%9csmoking-gun%e2%80%9d-evidence-for-an-insensitive-climate-system/
http://climatesci.org/2008/07/15/recent-ignored-scientific-findings-an-illustration-of-a-broken-scientific-method/
[…] driver site announced this morning that APS has abandoned its long-time position on climate change. Anthony Watts couldn’t wait to talk about it as a major hole in the case for doing something to clean up air pollution. “Myth of Consensus […]
I can’t understand what is happening at the APS!
They have called for a debate on the topic of AGW – JJM said “…we thought it appropriate to present a debate within the pages of P&S..”. Now we see that papers from one side of the argument have to have a red heading warning that they are “in disagreement with the world’s scientists and the council..”
Is this an open and fair debate? How can a body call for debate one moment and then officially denigrate one side’s input before it has even been read?
“However, I hope politics will not cause Jeffrey Marque’s departure from the editorship.”John McLondon (12:49:43)
Given the evidence above, I predict that JJM will indeed shortly be departing. This seems to be the way science is done nowadays….