An Expensive Urban Legend
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
About.com describes an “urban legend” as an apocryphal (of questionable authenticity), secondhand story, told as true and just plausible enough to be believed, about some horrific…series of events….it’s likely to be framed as a cautionary tale. Whether factual or not, an urban legend is meant to be believed. In lieu of evidence, however, the teller of an urban legend is apt to rely on skillful storytelling and reference to putatively trustworthy sources.
I contend that the belief in human-caused global warming as a dangerous event, either now or in the future, has most of the characteristics of an urban legend. Like other urban legends, it is based upon an element of truth. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose concentration in the atmosphere is increasing, and since greenhouse gases warm the lower atmosphere, more CO2 can be expected, at least theoretically, to result in some level of warming.
But skillful storytelling has elevated the danger from a theoretical one to one of near-certainty. The actual scientific basis for the plausible hypothesis that humans could be responsible for most recent warming is contained in the cautious scientific language of many scientific papers. Unfortunately, most of the uncertainties and caveats are then minimized with artfully designed prose contained in the Summary for Policymakers (SP) portion of the report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This Summary was clearly meant to instill maximum alarm from a minimum amount of direct evidence.
Next, politicians seized upon the SP, further simplifying and extrapolating its claims to the level of a “climate crisis”. Other politicians embellished the tale even more by claiming they “saw” global warming in Greenland as if it was a sighting of Sasquatch, or that they felt it when they fly in airplanes.
Just as the tales of marauding colonies of alligators living in New York City sewers are based upon some kernel of truth, so too is the science behind anthropogenic global warming. But there is a big difference between reports of people finding pet alligators that have escaped their owners, versus city workers having their limbs torn off by roving colonies of subterranean monsters.
In the case of global warming, the “putatively trustworthy sources” would be the consensus of the world’s scientists. The scientific consensus, after all, says that global warming is…is what? Is happening? Is severe? Is manmade? Is going to burn the Earth up if we do not act? It turns out that those who claim consensus either do not explicitly state what that consensus is about, or they make up something that supports their preconceived notions.
If the consensus is that the presence of humans on Earth has some influence on the climate system, then I would have to even include myself in that consensus. After all, the same thing can be said of the presence of trees on Earth, and hopefully we have at least the same rights as trees do. But too often the consensus is some vague, fill-in-the-blank, implied assumption where the definition of “climate change” includes the phrase “humans are evil”.
It is a peculiar development that scientific truth is now decided through voting. A relatively recent survey of climate scientists who do climate research found that 97.4% agreed that humans have a “significant” effect on climate. But the way the survey question was phrased borders on meaninglessness. To a scientist, “significant” often means non-zero. The survey results would have been quite different if the question was, “Do you believe that natural cycles in the climate system have been sufficiently researched to exclude them as a potential cause of most of our recent warming?”
And it is also a good bet that 100% of those scientists surveyed were funded by the government only after they submitted research proposals which implicitly or explicitly stated they believed in anthropogenic global warming to begin with. If you submit a research proposal to look for alternative explanations for global warming (say, natural climate cycles), it is virtually guaranteed you will not get funded. Is it any wonder that scientists who are required to accept the current scientific orthodoxy in order to receive continued funding, then later agree with that orthodoxy when surveyed? Well, duh.
In my experience, the public has the mistaken impression that a lot of climate research has gone into the search for alternative explanations for warming. They are astounded when I tell them that virtually no research has been performed into the possibility that warming is just part of a natural cycle generated within the climate system itself.
Too often the consensus is implied to be that global warming is so serious that we must do something now in the form of public policy to avert global catastrophe. What? You don’t believe that there are alligators in New York City sewer system? How can you be so unconcerned about the welfare of city workers that have to risk their lives by going down there every day? What are you, some kind of Holocaust-denying, Neanderthal flat-Earther?
It makes complete sense that in this modern era of scientific advances and inventions that we would so readily embrace a compelling tale of global catastrophe resulting from our own excesses. It’s not a new genre of storytelling, of course, as there were many B-movies in the 1950s whose horror themes were influenced by scientists’ development of the atomic bomb.
Our modern equivalent is the 2004 movie, “Day After Tomorrow”, in which all kinds of physically impossible climatic events occur in a matter of days. In one scene, super-cold stratospheric air descends to the Earth’s surface, instantly freezing everything in its path. The meteorological truth, however, is just the opposite. If you were to bring stratospheric air down to the surface, heating by compression would make it warmer than the surrounding air, not colder.
I’m sure it is just coincidence that “Day After Tomorrow” was directed by Roland Emmerich, who also directed the 2006 movie “Independence Day,” in which an alien invasion nearly exterminates humanity. After all, what’s the difference? Aliens purposely killing off humans, or humans accidentally killing off humans? Either way, we all die.
But a global warming catastrophe is so much more believable. After all, climate change does happen, right? So why not claim that ALL climate change is now the result of human activity? And while we are at it, let’s re-write climate history so that we get rid of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice age, with a new ingenious hockey stick-shaped reconstruction of past temperatures that makes it look like climate never changed until the 20th Century? How cool would that be?
The IPCC thought it was way cool…until it was debunked, after which it was quietly downgraded in the IPCC reports from the poster child for anthropogenic global warming, to one possible interpretation of past climate.
And let’s even go further and suppose that the climate system is so precariously balanced that our injection of a little bit of that evil plant food, carbon dioxide, pushes our world over the edge, past all kinds of imaginary tipping points, with the Greenland ice sheet melting away, and swarms of earthquakes being the price of our indiscretions.
In December, hundreds of bureaucrats from around the world will once again assemble, this time in Copenhagen, in their attempts to forge a new international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. And as has been the case with every other UN meeting of its type, the participants simply assume that the urban legend is true. Indeed, these politicians and governmental representatives need it to be true. Their careers and political power now depend upon it.
And the fact that they hold their meetings in all of the best tourist destinations in the world, enjoying the finest exotic foods, suggests that they do not expect to ever have to be personally inconvenienced by whatever restrictions they try to impose on the rest of humanity.
If you present these people with evidence that the global warming crisis might well be a false alarm, you are rewarded with hostility and insults, rather than expressions of relief. The same can be said for most lay believers of the urban legend. I say “most” because I once encountered a true believer who said he hoped my research into the possibility that climate change is mostly natural will eventually be proved correct.
Unfortunately, just as we are irresistibly drawn to disasters – either real ones on the evening news, or ones we pay to watch in movie theaters – the urban legend of a climate crisis will persist, being believed by those whose politics and worldviews depend upon it. Only when they finally realize what a new treaty will cost them in loss of freedoms and standard of living will those who oppose our continuing use of carbon-based energy begin to lose their religion.
Good one … Now if more scientists would speak the truth, they would be better off for it.
The “Average” guy has no idea whether the earth is actually getting warmer, or not. When it becomes obvious that it’s not, And when some of those he trusts (the local weatherman, for instance) starts pooh-poohing the idea) he will go from apathetic to hostile (if any of his money is taken for “taxes,” that is.)
The “perfect storm,” right now, would be for this to end up being a weak-to-moderate El Nino, followed by a pretty strong La Nina that would push Dr. Spencer’s 13 month smoothed average Below 0.0 (that would be a bit cooler than the ’99, 2000 La Nina.
That would give the trusted authority figure (the local weatherman) cover to say, “Well, uh, you know, it has been *Cooling* since 1998. This *theory* might need a little bit of work.”
That will be the Death Knell.
I wonder, if The New York Times would consider Dr. Spencer’s crystal-clear synopsis of the AGW consensus as an op-ed piece?
Don’t hang by your thumbs waiting for it’s appearance.
The sun has a good size spot today.
But isn’t it a bit close to the equator? I thought at this stage in the cycle the spots ought to be located at higher latitudes.
Vincent (06:07:51) :
parody of those trolls….smallest error, no matter how trivial, then trumpet the claim that the author cannot be trusted.
Like when they make a big deal out of a misspelled word.
Or when they try make it look bad that someone who is a ‘skeptic’ believes in God. When you tell then Einstein, Galileo, Kepler, Pasteur, Newton, Lemaître, Copernicus, Faraday, Pascal, Maxwell, Kelvin, Planck, Voltaire, etc., believed in God they seem to become silent.
Roy Spencer says:
No. Scientific truth is decided by the scientific process, as it always has been. And, who better to evaluate the current state of the science than the scientists themselves, which is why we have the expert assessments by the IPCC…and the endorsement of their findings by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the academies of all the other G8+5 nations, AAAS, and the councils of many major scientific societies such as AMS, AGU, and APS?
We only get into talking about poll results when people complain that all of these societies’ councils have been somehow been co-opted and thus that their views don’t reflect the rank-and-file members.
Fine, how about asking the question a different way, namely whether they perceive climate change as being dangerous? Such a survey of people who are in American Men and Women of Science and list themselves as members of either the AMS and AGU found that 85% believe that climate change in the next 50-100 years will pose either a very great danger or a moderate danger (split about evenly between these two answers) whereas only 13% believe it will pose relatively little danger ( http://stats.org/stories/2008/global_warming_survey_apr23_08.html ). [Also note that the criteria for determining who was surveyed was somewhat broader than just climate scientists and probably thus included some scientists, like forecast meteorologists or geologists, who are probably more skeptical of AGW on average than scientists working in climate science itself.]
I also have a general question for Dr. Spencer: Given that your own latest research ( http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/04/spencer-on-finding-a-new-climate-sensitivity-marker/ ), as I understand it, suggests a climate sensitivity of 1.6 to 2.0 C, how high do you think that CO2 can rise before we will have problems? What if you are wrong in your estimate of the climate sensitivity and the real value is between 2.0 and 4.5 C as the IPCC sees the likely range as being?
Joel Shore,
Your post is so wrong as to make reasonable people doubt your sincerity.
The IPCC is not a scientific panel, for starters.
It is a political panel, carefully organized to sell AGW.
Its leader is not a climatologist.
The fact that the climate is not at all behaving in any sort of unusual fashion is not going to go away, no matter how many scientists allegedly believe it is not so.
I can’t believe that you don’t believe most global warming is Mann-made.
Initially, the vast majority believed Chicken Little. The critters (aka People) didn’t turn on him until what he’d been screaming about just didn’t come true: the sky didn’t fall. From then on he was the joke of the barnyard. A mob of people are far more stupid than a barnyard full of animals and will likely do far more damage to themselves until they realize it was all a lie (then they‘re likely to do a lot of damage to the fools who started the riot). When dealing with a mob it’s best to NOT be standing in the middle and yelling that everyone is being stupid. People mobs sorta get real angry with folks who do that. There’s a lot of wisdom to the belief that you’ll do far more good for yourself (and your own private cause celeb) if you take advantage of fools running around in circles and wait for them to calm down. Look at all the money Big Al Gore’s making off these fools. Look at all the stupid changes the current administration is going to effect because of all the hysteria. The poor scientist (pro or part timer) who stands in the middle trying to save everyone (or anyone) he/she can from the stupidity is only going to be trampled to death.
While there is a lot of useful info here which has certainly demonstrated to me that climate change has a huge amount of uncertainty, it slightly bugs me that supporters of the staus quo are reffered to commonly as “socialists” As a commited and life long European socialist can I assure posters that there are climate change dissedents across the political spectrum, and that ones political affiliation does not automatically correlate with climate beliefs.
turbobloke:
There have already been hundreds of studies that supposedly support the theory of manmade global warming. What I am suggesting are studies that examine alternative hypotheses for most of the warming. But, at some point, sure, some combination of the two is most likely.
BTW, for those monitoring the AMSU site, the new “sea surface” temperature is from AMSR-E on the Aqua satellite, using Frank Wentz’s (RSS) retrievals. We have not yet replaced the NOAA-15 AMSU with the Aqua AMSU on the website, however. But we’re working on it.
P Gosselin (07:16:40) :
The sun has a good size spot today.
But isn’t it a bit close to the equator?
Yes, really. It seems that solar cycle 24 is ending!. Anyway those NASA forecasts, based on that dynamo of theirs, didn´t see the future. Ask the GISS´Hansen to improve them, or better, and more beautiful hire some real fashion models.
Another excellent essay Dr. Spencer!
There is also another aspect to this urban legend. It is underlain with a social meme; “Mankind is all powerful! Mankind is wicked! We must repent!”. There are a considerable number of people who, because of the way they were raised, are predisposed to accepting this meme. Even among climate scientists (who should know better) there are those who cannot help but think there is some small kernel of truth to the CO2-driven AGW claim (no offense Dr. Spencer).
The truth is that it cannot be true. It is widely recognized that the atmosphere is opaque to IR. Except for those wavelengths within the atmospheric window that escape directly to space, all of the upwelling IR is fully absorbed to extinction in the troposphere today.
This is the reason why adding more GHG’s to the atmosphere cannot make the atmosphere warmer; because it is not possible to absorb more than 100% of the available energy. If more GHG’s are added to the atmosphere, the absorption-extinction altitude simply declines a little to a lower altitude, that’s all. No additional warming.
Geoff Sherrington:
“Anyone into psychology enough to coment professionally on motivation? Is it more than the girl school mass panic attack effect that is documented?”
It is an unresolved wish to return to a utopia. I say ‘return’ because each of us has an experience in very early life of utopia – the baby experiences the world (and especially the mother) as a part of itself and ‘needing’ does not exist because everything (food, warmth, love etc) ‘magically’ appears as it is wished for.
As infancy progresses, the child learns – by increments – that the world is in fact a separate entity and frustration has to be tolerated when wishes and demands are no longer instantly met – that is, when the child’s felt urgency of a need has to be survived through a waiting period.
If this separation all goes well (if the child accepts the new reality if finds itself in), it can begin to make use of the resources in the outside world and it learns the value of ‘language’ as a tool of negotiation for its needs to be met (and for it to meet the needs of others). If the child rejects separation – that is, if it insists on remaining in ‘utopia’ and demands all external ‘otherness’ continues responding in such a way that confirms the utopian fantasy to itself – the child will grow into adulthood with this failure of development unresolved (although largely unconscious) and this will influence and determine pretty much all of its uses and abuses of a surrounding environment and its objects – including other people.
The adult will be left preoccupied with a hankering after some indeterminate ‘past’ which it feels was somehow ‘perfect’ for its existence. The adult will identify all ‘other’ – except those who collude in its demands – as being the obstacle to it achieving a return to this ‘past’.
Of course, as time passes, the objects the adult chooses to use for its project will change – it would be a bit of a give-away for a grown adult to demand the return of its mother to a lost pre-infant relationship to it, hence the need to disguise the motive (from itself as well as from others) in an elaborate ‘cover-story’ using contemporary objects – such as, as we can see, the ‘climate’ (other recent objects have included population, an angry god, swine flu, millennium bug etc).
The cover-story, and its corresponding demand, remains the same throughout: the real environment – the world the adult has to become a part of, negotiate with, exchange resources in, and survive through – cannot possibly be sustained… it is unwanted and should be abandoned and returned towards the adult’s vague fantasy of a pre-infant ‘pure’ version. It’s worth noting here that from a psychological point of view, ‘being sustained’ and ‘being held’ are interchangeable demands with the same meaning – but only a baby (if it had the words) would insist, rightly, upon this uninterrupted need – or feel it really to be the end of the world if this holding environment failed.
For this adult, negotiation with the ‘obstacle’ to its demand has no value because the pre-infant world contains no negotiation… only a (very familiar) rage as a response to an unmet demand.
The adult who is magnetised by the Global Warming story (who can’t let go) is a person with his obstacles muddled up. It becomes the other person who is the obstacle to the self’s demand – rather than the self’s demand being the obstacle to his growing up.
If psychology is indeed a science, it may be a far more interesting and resourceful one than climatology to use in discovering more about ourselves and our relationship (or refusal of relationship) to the outside world and the objects we find in it. It’s nature, just human nature.
The possibility of snow in Oslo on 10 December is better than for Copenhagen at the same time 🙂
A picture from the main street Karl Johansgate with parliament in the background last January. The Grand Hotel where Obama will be showing up on the balcony is just off the frame on the right side.
http://pub.tv2.no/multimedia/na/archive/00688/sn__ake_aking_ka_68807516x9.jpg
Gareth Phillips (08:14:27) :
..it slightly bugs me that supporters of the staus quo are reffered to commonly as “socialists” .
Gareth, the problem is that -as a group- Socialists tend to take advantage of mob hysteria better than any other group and the loudest group that seems to be taking advantage of all the Global Warming hysteria and pushing a “better” world vision for all to swallow are socialist politicians, and PhD’s, and College Profs, etc.
Gareth Phillips – I agree that it’s more complex than a simple left/right issue. Many people on the Left and Right have largely followed their kneejerk reaction into the AGW or Anti-AGW camps. It just so happens that those on the Right were lucky enough to be, in my opinion, correct in this instance. If I was forced to put a label on myself it would be Liberal/left (upper case Liberal, lower case left!). I have no truck with authoritarians of Left or Right. I got to my position on AGW by researching the facts and following where they led me.
It seriously pains me to be, on this issue, in the same camp as a fair number of people who are using the issue as a means of furthering a hard Right agenda rather than a simple pursuit of the truth. I also think that, as I’ve said before, it’s hugely counter-productive to polarise the political aspect unnecessarily.
Many of the people who need to be pursuaded that AGW is nonsense are in the spectrum between the Left and the moderate-Right, especially outside of the USA. The more the anti-AGW cause is associated with the, by non-US standards, far Right, then the harder the battle to win hearts and minds will be.
artwest (20:18:39) :
Thanks for the link to the Clive James piece – I will repeat the link and encourage anyone to listen:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p002wv05
Clive makes a wonderful observation that scepticism gave rise to modern medicine, moving it on from belief in magic as a cure. I wonder how many sceptical “heretics” died as a consequence of not agreeing with their witch doctors and the accepted orthodoxy of the day.
Watch the modern witch doctors incanting spells using mystical numbers, such as 350, and threatening the naysayers with storms and pestilence unless they sacrifice their way of life for an austere future.
Thank you for having the courage to write this Dr. Spencer.
The BBC has finally acknowledged the importance of skepticism… Too bad they don’t practice what they preach.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8322513.stm
I’ve been retired from research at EPA for 18 years. I consider myself a pretty good scientist and have published over 60 peer reviewed papers. I have reviewed papers for several journals and was once on the editorial board of one journal. I have spent the last few years of my retirement studying as much climate data I could download trying to get to the truth. I produced a presentation that shows strong evidence that global warming (and cooling) is a natural process that is not caused or significantly contributed to by anthropogenic emissions of CO2. Read http://www.kidswincom.net/climate.pdf and come to your own conclusions. If I have made mistakes in my analysis, let me know. You can find my e-mail address at the above website.
REPLY: Thanks Fred, we’ll have a look. – Anthony
“..it slightly bugs me that supporters of the staus quo are reffered to commonly as “socialists” .”
A word on socialists – For those of you in the USA who see Europe as being more socialist and as a result more accepting of the man made climate change theory may like to see this.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8321967.stm
“A group of rich Germans has launched a petition calling for the government to make wealthy people pay higher taxes.”
A whole different mindset
G. Karst (09:12:08) :
The BBC has finally acknowledged the importance of skepticism… Too bad they don’t practice what they preach.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8322513.stm
Comment posted:
Nice to hear the dry wit and humour of Clive James turned towards the elephant in the room. It’s increasingly obvious the climate change alarmists have over-egged their pudding for some years now.
The BBC’s reliance hitherto on members of the SEJ for commentary on all things climatological can now be seen to have been too much of an all eggs in one basket policy.
Erudite thinkers such as Clive James and meteorologists such as Paul the Weatherman can now bring some much needed balance to the BBC’s output on this issue.
OK – we all agree. We are right. Opinion research shows that public scepticism is increasing. But how the hell do we stop the juggernaut.
Joel, can I ask, what emphasis do you put on the Precautionary Principle? What I mean is, if you heard a scientist say that the Precautionary Principle is not important, or it is ethically unsound, how would that affect your opinion of that scientist?