Japan’s boffins: Global warming isn’t man-made
Climate science is ‘ancient astrology’, claims report
By Andrew Orlowski The Register UK (h/t) from WUWT reader Ric Werme
UPDATE: One of the panelists (Dr. Itoh) weighs in here at WUWT, see below.
Exclusive Japanese scientists have made a dramatic break with the UN and Western-backed hypothesis of climate change in a new report from its Energy Commission.
Three of the five researchers disagree with the UN’s IPCC view that recent warming is primarily the consequence of man-made industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. Remarkably, the subtle and nuanced language typical in such reports has been set aside.
One of the five contributors compares computer climate modelling to ancient astrology. Others castigate the paucity of the US ground temperature data set used to support the hypothesis, and declare that the unambiguous warming trend from the mid-part of the 20th Century has ceased.
The report by Japan Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) is astonishing rebuke to international pressure, and a vote of confidence in Japan’s native marine and astronomical research. Publicly-funded science in the West uniformly backs the hypothesis that industrial influence is primarily responsible for climate change, although fissures have appeared recently. Only one of the five top Japanese scientists commissioned here concurs with the man-made global warming hypothesis.
JSER is the academic society representing scientists from the energy and resource fields, and acts as a government advisory panel. The report appeared last month but has received curiously little attention. So The Register commissioned a translation of the document – the first to appear in the West in any form. Below you’ll find some of the key findings – but first, a summary.
Summary
Three of the five leading scientists contend that recent climate change is driven by natural cycles, not human industrial activity, as political activists argue.
Kanya Kusano is Program Director and Group Leader for the Earth Simulator at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science & Technology (JAMSTEC). He focuses on the immaturity of simulation work cited in support of the theory of anthropogenic climate change. Using undiplomatic language, Kusano compares them to ancient astrology. After listing many faults, and the IPCC’s own conclusion that natural causes of climate are poorly understood, Kusano concludes:
“[The IPCC’s] conclusion that from now on atmospheric temperatures are likely to show a continuous, monotonous increase, should be perceived as an unprovable hypothesis,” he writes.
Shunichi Akasofu, head of the International Arctic Research Center in Alaska, has expressed criticism of the theory before. Akasofu uses historical data to challenge the claim that very recent temperatures represent an anomaly:
“We should be cautious, IPCC’s theory that atmospheric temperature has risen since 2000 in correspondence with CO2 is nothing but a hypothesis. ”
Akasofu calls the post-2000 warming trend hypothetical. His harshest words are reserved for advocates who give conjecture the authority of fact.
“Before anyone noticed, this hypothesis has been substituted for truth… The opinion that great disaster will really happen must be broken.”
Next page: (at the Register) Key Passages Translated
UPDATE: From Kiminori Itoh, Prof., Yokohama National University.
Hi everybody!
I am one of the five who participated to the article in the JSER journal, which may have seemed to you as a mystery from Japan. At first, I thank you for picking up our activity in Japan. I am a regular reader of several climate blog sites, and had been making some contributions mainly to Climate Science of Prof. Pielke. Actually, the information I gave in the article largely owes the invaluable information shown at this site WUWT as well as Climate Science and Climate Audit. Thus, I felt I should explain a bit about the article of JSER because, unfortunately, it is written in Japanese although it has partly been translated into English.
Some readers of WUWT might remember my name; I had written a guest blog in Climate Science several months ago, when Roger kindly suggested me to introduce my new book “Lies and Traps in Global Warming Affairs.” Yes, I am regarded as one of the most hard-core AGW skeptics in Japan, although I myself regard me as a realist in this issue.
The article of JSER has been composed of discussions between the five contributors, made through e-mail for several months, and was organized by Prof. Yoshida of Kyoto University (an editor of the JSER journal). Our purpose was to invoke healthy discussions on the global warming issue in Japan. The JSER journal was selected as a platform for this discussion just because Prof. Yoshida has a personal interest in this issue and he is an editor of the journal.
Thus, it is not correct if one thinks that the discussion represents the opinion of the journal’s editors or of the society JSER. In fact, none of the five contributors belong to the JSER, and Prof. Yoshida kept his attitude neutral in the article.
All the contributors are well-established researchers in different fields and each has characteristic personal opinions on the AGW issue. Only one (Dr. Emori, National Institute of Environmental Sciences, Japan) represents IPCC. Other members are more or less skeptical of the conclusions of IPCC. For instance, as translated into English, Dr. Kusano made a severe critique on climate models; he himself is a cloud-modeler, so that his critique seems plausible. Prof. Akasofu is well known as an aurora physicist, Prof. Maruyama is famous for his ideas in geophysics, and I myself have sufficient academic record in environmental physical chemistry (more than 160 peer review papers).
We know that our try this time is small one, and its impact has a limitation especially due to language problem. Nevertheless, we believe that the discussion was useful and informative for everyone interested in the controversies associated with the AGW issue. In March, another article will come also in the JSER journal because the discussion received much interest from the readers of the journal.
Any comments and opinions are welcome and very helpful for us.
Thank you again.
Based on Dr. Itohs comments, I’ve amended the headline to be more reflective of his first hand account on the report. – Anthony
Reasic (12:57:15) : The international scientific community HAS provided a viable theory, and verifiable proof to support it.
No, they have not. They have a flakey theory encoded into weak computer models driven by dodgy data that’s been cooked by folks like Hansen. (Yes, I know that data are cooked ’cause I’m reading the GIStemp code right now. It cooks the books, to put it charitably.)
A computerized fantasy is proof of nothing. One fed garbage is worse.
You think you can just assume it’s “natural” unless proven otherwise, but you’re wrong. A cause for recent warming must be proven, natural or not.
No, it need not. The ‘null hypothesis’ is just fine as: The world has changed far more dramatically in the past with no humans at all, it can be doing that again.
See, it’s real simple. People don’t know everything. Sometimes they need to admit that.
That you can’t provide proof for any alternative mechanism is telling, don’t you think?
Yes, it says that we have the wisdom to admit that there is one heck of a lot more that we don’t know. Admitting your ignorance is the first step to understanding.
I might just as well say “Green Gremlins cause gravity” and because you can not PROVE to me what gravity is or how it works, then I must be right. That clearly is nutty. We can describe what gravity does, be we just don’t really know what it is.
We can describe what 30 year weather is, but we just don’t really know what drives it. (Or perhaps you would care to tell us exactly what the PDO, AMO and ENSO do and why? Oh, and when? While you are at it, exactly what is the influence of cosmic rays. On clouds, ozone, and charged particle flows. And how does the sun influence them? And what is the effect of our position in the galaxy and relative to the invariant plane?) We have guesses, but it isn’t known. Given that you don’t know, you can not dismiss.
Furthermore, you need to explain: The Little Ice Age, The Medieval Warm Period, The Younger Dryas, … and about a dozen others. What causes Bond Events? What is the impact of the Jose Cycle? Why do volcanoes seem more active when the sun goes quiet? Hmmm?
These things can not be simply dismissed by saying “My computer fantasy says CO2 did it!!!”
Chris V “rather small (about 1700 members)” —
corresponding size for an American society 5,000 —
Now, how big is the IPCC? “More than 2,000 scientists from 154 countries …”
Rather small, don’t you think, for a 154 country organization?
As for the CO2 nut, what is the forcing from CO2 alone? If there is amplification, where is it? Troposphere not heating up. Oceans neither.
Your right: What’s the big deal?
Joel Shore (12:48:02) :
I read Spencer Weart’s essay on CO2 and while interesting and well written, reaffirms that climate science is still in its infancy and AGW still in the realm of hypothesis.
E.M Smith says:
On that we can agree.
Yes…But admitting someone else’s ignorance, maybe not so much. And, in fact, I think it is quite a block to understanding if you think that you understand something (including to what extent things are actually understood) that you are not an expert on better than most of the experts on the subject.
There are always uncertainties in science. However, in scientific fields where the conclusions don’t have policy implications that some people find quite abhorrent, these don’t seem to be as paralyzing as they seem to be found for theories like AGW and evolution.
Chris V:
Getting rid of that CO2 forcing is a tough nut to crack!
Have youl tried Deprograming?
Seriously, why hasn’t water vapor alone already produced runaway warming, at least up to its maximal absorption given a stable source of long wave radiation? Or has it already maxed out? If it hasn’t, then why would CO2, which is effectively a very weak greenhouse gas, make water vapor, which is effectively a much stronger greenhouse gas, do much more than what it apparently could only achieve before – in the face Climate mechanisms such as clouds, convection, etc., which have limited its effect and will still be acting strongly to do the same?
And exactly why is a doubling of CO2 concentration going to increase temperatures ~3 degrees C.? [Please post the answer also on CA.] And what happens with the next doubling? What happened with the previous doublings of CO2 in the process of the Earth’s atmospheric temperature getting to where it is now? Why have CO2 levels always followed temperature changes?
Without simply postulating ex post facto factors, why haven’t temperatures tracked CO2 concentrations more closely, now to the point that “natural influences” have to be invoked? Can the GCM’s explain the MWP warming, along with the other warmings of the Holocene? If they can’t, then they can’t really explain the current [apparently minor] warming over the past 130 years, because they haven’t accounted for non-CO2 factors.
Anthony, shouldn’t there be a link to the original Register story someplace obvious? The link at the bottom is labeled as not going to the first page of the Register story. Give them a link to their story, please.
REPLY: The link at the bottom of the page does in fact go to the second part of the story at the Register, which I thought would give them the maximum linkage to the entire piece, sinc emost people would want to read the entire story. But I’ve also added another. – Anthony
DaveM (10:08:11) :
Thanks, Dave, for that excellent illustration of how ‘feel good’ ideology trumps rationality, common sense, and responsibility amongst the extreme ‘environmentalists’ and their politically-correct camp followers (fortuitous pun).
Writ large, it says something about demagogues like Algore, who use a combination of fear-mongering and ersatz sentimentality about ‘the environment’ to further their quest for power and control. That some of their followers are as callous and selfish as they are is no surprise. It’s all about self-aggrandizement, except perhaps for those genuinely naive and deluded souls, who will not pick up their trash to keep the place clean, but to ‘save the planet’.
/Mr Lynn
Obama is the “front man”, the salesman for the Ideology of Change (aka Global Socialism). The man behind the curtain is George Soros.
Soros wants to change the world and has enough money to do it. He has funded the effort that in less than a year brought a little known “community activist/junior senator” from Chicago into the White House. There is no doubt that he has a brilliant mind.
Soros has funneled large sums of money into the Democratic Party. In reciprocation, the Democrats have allowed him to install a small army of true believers to execute his bidding. He funds MoveOn.org and a number of environmental front groups.
The Soros vision is of a one-world Socialist government ruled by a select elite that control the global financial system. He has euphemistically christened his Utopian vision as The Open Society.
What follows are the closing paragraphs of a speech he recently made at Davos (printed in The Financial Times). Here in are the marching orders for his surrogate-creation, Barack Hussein Obama. Note the paragraph regarding energy:
“To prevent the US economy from sliding into a depression, Mr Obama must implement a radical and comprehensive set of policies. Alongside the well-advanced fiscal stimulus package, these should include a system-wide and compulsory recapitalization of the banking system and a thorough overhaul of the mortgage system – reducing the cost of mortgages and foreclosures.
Energy policy could also play an important role in counteracting both depression and deflation. The American consumer can no longer act as the motor of the global economy. Alternative energy and developments that produce energy savings could serve as a new motor, but only if the price of conventional fuels is kept high enough to justify investing in those activities. That would involve putting a floor under the price of fossil fuels by imposing a price on carbon emissions and import duties on oil to keep the domestic price above, say, $70 per barrel.
Finally, the international financial system must be reformed. Far from providing a level playing field, the current system favours the countries in control of the international financial institutions, notably the US, to the detriment of nations at the periphery. The periphery countries have been subject to the market discipline dictated by the Washington consensus but the US was exempt from it.
How unfair the system is has been revealed by a crisis that originated in the US yet is doing more damage to the periphery. Assistance is needed to protect the financial systems of periphery countries, including trade finance, something that will require large contingency funds available at little notice for brief periods of time. Periphery governments will also need long-term financing to enable them to engage in counter-cyclical fiscal policies.
In addition, banking regulations need to be internationally co-ordinated. Market regulations should be global as well. National governments also need to co-ordinate their macroeconomic policies in order to avoid wide currency swings and other disruption.”
The writer is chairman of Soros Fund Management and founder of the Open Society Institute. These are extracts from an e-book update to The New Paradigm for Financial Markets – The credit crisis of 2008 and what it means (Public¬Affairs Books, New York)
J. Peden (20:29:40) :
Chris V:
“Getting rid of that CO2 forcing is a tough nut to crack!
Have youl tried Deprograming?”
I was hoping more for something that involved physics and stuff.
I hope your not going to respond with a link to that stuff by Dr. Hug.
I’m happy to admit that many greenies think they’re more noble and caring.
Roger Sowell (14:56:24) : Japan will have serious problems converting to a “green” energy economy, as their solar opportunities are limited (northern latitude, small land area), area for wind energy is small, and geothermal exists but is less than 1 percent of total energy supplies.
But they do know how to extract Uranium from sea water at prices that are near market, and they do have the Japan current for bottom anchored ‘water mills’ and they do have lots of waves for wave power… (They could do wind, but the land is just too beautiful to put up wind turbines, IMHO…)
So if you count Uranium as ‘green’, no problem. Oh, and they can also buy organic feedstocks for ‘petrochemical’ processing from places like Brazil, if they wanted to do so. (It would be silly, since oil is so available, but we’re being silly about carbon, so why not…) And they have a major issue with garbage disposal, so the ‘trash to fuel’ processes would be a great match.
I’ve got to think that the costs of nuclear facilities in Japan are lower than here.
As a worker in the UK IT industry I regularly read The Register for its industry news and gossip – and in this area it is generally informative and entertaining, if a little ‘laddish’. However on the climate change issue it is simply not a reliable source, having decided to adopt a remorselessly contrarian stance, its news pieces are relentlessly spun and unbalanced and the ‘science’ articles contain factual errors and blatent cherry-picks which remain uncorrected even when pointed out.
Some recent examples: in this piece on the GISTEMP October data foulup, Evan Jones says GISS reported the warmest October on record and that GISTEMP does not use satellite data, both untrue. Here the same author confuses CO2 with CO2 equivalent (amongst other howlers). In this piece Steve Goddard compares a global trend with a hemispherical one, compares annual figures with a YTD, and uses different start dates when comparing the trends in Hadley and NASA data, introducing a >0.2C bias. And, here, in a rare retraction, the Editor publishes a response to another of Goddard’s articles from Dr Walt Meier which concludes Besides this significant error, the rest of the article consists almost entirely of misleading, irrelevant, or erroneous information about Arctic sea ice that add nothing to the understanding of the significant long-term decline that is being observed
So, having established that El Reg is not quite the goto site for accuracy, what are we to make of this piece claiming an opinion shift amongst the Japanese scientific community? First a nitpick
JSER is the academic society representing scientists from the energy and resource fields
No, it is one such thinktank, there are others e.g. the JIE .
The facts behind the Register’s rather excited piece appear to be that 5 members of the JSER have published a report, parts of which, by three of the five, selectively translated by El Reg, are at odds with the conclusions of the IPCC. Is the report representative of the position of the JSER as a whole? No evidence that it is, and that would in fact represent something of a shift, as just last month the Society was supporting an international symposium on this topic…
Global warming is recognized as a serious problem which the human race is facing now, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for its research and proposal of measures concerning this issue.
In this symposium, the 4th assessment report was highlighted, and the future concept of measures to mitigate global warming was discussed. Also, leading researchers presented their advanced works, particularly biofuel production and carbon dioxide capture & storage that attract attention as future promising technologies …
Very curious. Can anyone enlighten us as to what the actual position of the JSER is?
Re ‘continuous and monotonous’. Obviously weather doesn’t stop in the event of greenhouse gas forcings rising, so temperatures will continue to go up some years, down other years. The long term trend will be constantly upward, though, if greenhouse gas concentrations continue to be the largest forcing operating.
As for monotonous, in the AR4 summary that Paul S linked to, the possibility of abrupt changes was specifically discussed. I really don’t rate the credibility of anyone who can’t accurately report what they are commenting on.
REPLY: Rachel what’s your credibility? What do you do, other than hang out on blogs. Are you a scientist, or artist?- Anthony
The planet is more than one subject. Include the sun and there’s even more subjects (astrophysicists anyone?) Show me the group that is expert in all of these things.
Now, as for groups. “Groups” and “Consensus” are also a subject. Who is expert on groups? Who is expert on belief systems? Who is expert on groupthink?
We have to at least turn to sociologists at the very minimum. Plus if you are so inclined, I also have it on good authority from the world’s foremost recognised expert on delusion, the Buddha, that we are all suffering from one form of delusion or another. But let’s stay with sociology for now.
Most knowledge we receive second hand. Most stuff we don’t double check ourselves. And most people are part of one subculture or another, with their own particular views on life, their own beliefs, their own sense of moral outlook, their own philosophy, and all that stuff we call a “lifestyle”. We are social creatures, and we know that groupthink, conformity, obedience of authority and so on–the world’s religions have been using these for thousands of years of course–are all very real and very powerful mechanisms in culture. This we know from the experts. So if “experts” is the main concern, we should also be listening to sociologists who can explain something about cultural groupthink. It doesn’t matter whether you think groupthink is or isn’t happening, that’s for the experts to declare.
The most damming thing about the AGW supporters is that they are so picky about whom they admit as an “expert”. When they see an expert they don’t like, they attack them. It goes like this:
– is the expert part of a church? say he’s not a rational person
– if he is not part of a church, then say he’s paid by the oil industry
– if he’s not paid, say he’s a crazy person
– if he’s not crazy, and actually is a scientist, say he’s not in the field
– if he is in the field, say he’s just one voice
– if there are more than one of them, and they are in the field, and they are experts, and they are not crazy, and they are not part of a church, then say:
“they may have a point but it is IRRESPONSIBLE of them to express it”
And because they are irresponsible, we can dismiss their view.
See, these discussion play out like this. The fact which I observe time and time again is the AGW believers trumpet “the experts” whilst in reality not caring one whit about experts.
I was poking through my bookshelf the other day and came across a copy of Karl Popper’s Logic of scientific Discovery, 50 years since the first english translation was published.
It seems to me his thesis cuts to the core of the climate debate ,
a hypothesis has to be written in a way that it can be falsified.
This to me is the core of the problem for the AGW proponents and the IPCC’s handling of the science.
Time they reread Popper.
All hypotheses should be tested and if found wanting back to the drawing board.
In almost every case the claims of the IPPC in relation to the science have been found wanting. The responce from their scientists has been to take a fortress mentality and refuse to accept data which challanges or falsifies their claims.
Hansen & gore have stooped to the equivalent of saying lets burn the heretic’s, a classic denialist defence, an admission their scientific arguments are weak, lets turn to politics to preserve our position.
Burning heretics comes with a price, so be warned
[snip- junk]
Rachel (01:56:31) :
As for monotonous, in the AR4 summary that Paul S linked to, the possibility of abrupt changes was specifically discussed. I really don’t rate the credibility of anyone who can’t accurately report what they are commenting on.
The AP4 report specifically discusses a great many things. What you asked for is where the IPCC’s conclusion that from now on atmospheric temperatures are likely to show a continuous, monotonous increase. I think I’ve proven this. What your rebuttal attempted to do was redirect the argument from the original point. This does bode well on your creditability stakes.
I believe you can contribute a lot to the debates on WUWT if you open up a little. I for one enjoy the debates put forwards by Joel Shore, foinavon and John Phillip, for example. They put forwards arguments that challenge and that are backed up with evidence. Don’t let us down.
Soros also backs realclimate.org. When you point out that inconvenient fact, we’re told the source of funding is irrelevant, of course.
Barry Foster (12:25:07) :
I don’t know how they come up with these numbers. The first number is actual and the second is provisional Anomaly.
February 4.0 0.3 provisional, to the 25th
Further down the page we read:-
Provisional CET anomaly, (up to 25th February): -0.29
So what is it? 0.3 or -0.29.
I can tell you that if February comes in at 4.0 it will be 1.4 lower than last Feb and below 1900-2008 trend. By eyeballing the graph I have, it will be about -0.3 below the trend. The best fit trend is up from 1900 4.0 to 2008 4.4.
Joel Shore (12:36:59) :
Your continued pasting of this argument in threads shows a lack of your ability to think for yourself. You and I discussed this at length in another thread. I will if you want explain it all to you again. However it would be a good place to start if you could just get it into your head that the earth is not a green house.
Great post again Anthony. I hope Real Climate is paying attention, there’s a reason why you won science blog of the year.
One thing I’m certain of about AGW is we cannot claim to be certain.
Heck, I hope the rest of the world is paying attention too.
A mainstream publication got the story wrong? That never happens, right? Oh they got many stories wrong? Seriously, does the media ever get things right?
As for your characterization of JSER as a think tank, I don’t see anything on their site that backs up that contention, nor do I find anything that supports your implication that The Register got this story wrong.
BTW: As a fellow IT worker (albeit in the USA), I have yet to find any of the mainstream press that gets the climate change story right. The AP keeps running stories about climate change accelerating, while also running stories about how cold it is. It’s pure ‘doublespeak’ to claim the recent downturn in global temperatures is a sign of global warming.
2+2 = 5, heh?
John G. Bell (11:19:36) :
I should hope that fact that “… the JSER certainly doesn’t represent the Japanese government’s position.” is not a interpreted by you to reflect badly on the scientists involved in this report.
Huh? I was simply pointing out that it was incorrect to jump to the assumption, as some had done, that this has any bearing on Japan’s commtiment to GHG reduction. Far from saying anything bad about any of the authors, I made a point of stating that Akasofu is an eminent scientist.
kim (11:45:25) :
Simon, surely you jest. The ‘ancient astrology’ bit itself ought to be the horselaugh heard round the world. Here we are, the truth is finally getting out of bed, and looking for its boots, which Simon would prefer to hide in another room.
I agree that the ‘ancient astrology’ gaffe is a horselaugh, but the laugh is on The Register, as Nick has pointed out above ( Nick Stokes (13:37:38) ). Far from wanting to hide any truth, a motivation you falsely attribute to me for no reason, I would like the opposite – let’s see the whole of this report without The Register’s misinterpretations. Don’t you agree? Isn’t that what any true sceptic would want?
Adolfo Giurfa (11:38:30) :
Sorry about the dead link. Here’s an even bigger version of Akasofu’s full paper – it’s 60Mb and slow, so I’d advise downloading rather than trying to open it directly –
http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu/pdf/recovery_little_ice_age.pdf
I would guess that Akasofu’s contribution to the JSER report is based on his arguments therein.
Rachel (01:56:31)
The long term trend will be constantly upward, though, if greenhouse gas concentrations continue to be the largest forcing operating.
Funny how the AGW mantra now concerns ALL greenhouse gasses instead of just C02, which of course is just a bit player compared to water vapor. Oh yes, the claim is that the small amount of C02 forcing causes water vapor to rise so there’s supposedly a positive feedback there. If only. Firstly, C02’s warming effect is miniscule, and secondly, as far as feedbacks, they are just as likely to be negative as positive, due to the complexity of the climate system.
Greenhouse gasses are not, nor have they ever been much of a climate forcing, being far outweighed by what the sun does, as well as the oceans, and other long-term factors such as the orbital eccentricity every 100k years, possibly the “Milky Way” effect described by Nir Shaviv, varying the amount of cosmic rays the earth is exposed to, etc.
The minor warming of the past century was a boon to mankind, as was the rise in C02 levels. But, we can no more stop warming from happening than we can cooling, which is what is happening now, and cooling is far, far more detrimental to mankind.
Al Gore is monotonous . AGW ideology claims temperature increases, over time will be continual and monotonic , even if we halted all industrial production of C02 today, just one of their many absurd claims.
FatBigot (16:03:16) :
OT. What you say is of course true in that whatever the identity of the person is, it doesn’t diminish or give more weight to the point the poster is making.
However there is such a thing as disclosure of interest. It’s used where a person in a discussion has something gain or something to loss from the outcome of the discussion. By declaring an interest usually the person is not exempt from putting a point forward but may be excluded from any vote.
There are no votes here so disclosure is not mandatory. However it is polite to declare any special interest you may have as a recognised representative of any organisation.