WUWT Flashback:
Royal Society to review climate consensus position
“I don’t think they were very pleased. I don’t think this sort of thing has been done before in the history of the society.”
Society to review climate message
Today: (Via email press release from the GWPF) Royal Society Bows To Climate Change Sceptics
Britain’s leading scientific institution has been forced to rewrite its guide to climate change and admit that there is greater uncertainty about future temperature increases than it had previously suggested.
The Royal Society is publishing a new document today after a rebellion by more than 40 of its fellows who questioned mankind’s contribution to rising temperatures.
…
The new guide says: “The size of future temperature increases and other aspects of climate change, especially at the regional scale, are still subject to uncertainty.”
The Royal Society even appears to criticise scientists who have made predictions about heatwaves and rising sea levels. It now says: “There is little confidence in specific projections of future regional climate change, except at continental scales.”
It adds: “It is not possible to determine exactly how much the Earth will warm or exactly how the climate will change in the future.
“There remains the possibility that hitherto unknown aspects of the climate and climate change could emerge and lead to significant modifications in our understanding.”
The working group that produced the new guide took advice from two Royal Society fellows who have links to the climate-sceptic think-tank founded by Lord Lawson of Blaby.
Professor Anthony Kelly and Sir Alan Rudge are members of the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. They were among 43 fellows who signed a petition sent to Lord Rees, the society’s president, asking for its statement on climate change to be rewritten to take more account of questions raised by sceptics.
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Full article at The Times, 30 September 2010
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Professor John Pethica, who wrote the report, was interviewed by the BBC this morning. He enphasised that there is strong evidence that human activity is causing global warming… the science remains the same…
The interviewer tried repeatedly to get him to admit that the earlier report did not give sufficient weight to the uncertainties. Each time, Pethica denied this. The interviewer asked, in desperation what was the different between the earlier report and this one. He didn’t answer that, either.
I was quite disappointed that the interview came over as complete waffle apart from the science being settled, move along, nothing has changed. I have not yet seen the report, but comments here are much more optimistic than I would have expected.
I’m left a bit bemused and wonder if others who heard the interview could comment.
It might not be as bad as they thought.
The first I heard of this was the BBC TV morning news summary this morning which gave a mention of the Royal Society’s new climate change guide. My casual impression was “no change there, then” – the brief item emphasised the statement that the recent warming was very likely man made, and didn’t at all give me the impression of a major change of opinion. Either the BBC has put their own spin on this (very likely), or celebrations here are premature about the Royal Society’s headlong retreat on the subject (also very likely).
Here’s the BBC’s late evening take on the Royal Society announcement:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11438570
I note however that the BBC Toady programme presented it as just a small concession to sceptics but the overall conclusions unchanged – just a bit less so!
Ah, the BBC. Don’t you just love (to hate) it!
Denial – Check.
Anger – Check.
Bargaining – In process.
Depression – On its way.
Acceptance – We never said that…
The Stoat and his [/snip] sidekick, Kim Dabelstein Petersen, are probably already working overtime to keep this out of their pet global warming propaganda pages on Wikipedia. In particular, I suspect they will resist every attempt to insert the updated RS statement into this article. At the very least, we can expect them to downplay the significance of it and/or spin it into a strong pro-AGW statement. Such is life in the killing fields of Wikipuchea.
No Mike (Mike Haseler says: September 30, 2010 at 12:32 am) it doesn’t.
That means that we’ve seen a drift upwards in temperatures, same as we saw between c1910 & 1940.
The question as to what part of this is due to our activities and which of these activities contributes to what part of this warming hasn’t been answered in a satisfactory manner.
Remember, correlation does not necesarily equal causation.
Daniel H says: “The Stoat and his [/snip] sidekick, Kim Dabelstein Petersen,”
[REPLY: Crass descriptors tend to lower the intellectual level of discussion and make the threads less friendly…. bl57~mod]
In the case of Silly Billy, I think Daniel is being very modest. Let’s put it this way: anyone with an ounce of sense who has ever come into contact with silly billy’s antics on wikipedia has come away with a profound sense that something is very wrong with the argument for manmade global warming when such zealots are behind it.
He certainly was directly responsible for turning me from a card waving warmer into a sceptic.
Very brave of the Royal Society to make such a sea change on the CAGW dogma it has been pushing for the last 30y of so. Like the MSM, they are drifting into damage limitation mode as our cooling world scuppers this cargo cult science scam.
Be interesting to see if this U turn causes the fuming Prince Charles to get the queen to revoke their ‘Royal’ charter???
On the BBC television news, about 2 hours ago, all that was reported was the extract:
“……there was “strong evidence” that the warming of the Earth over the past half-century had been caused largely by human activity.” Followed by some wooley statement about there being still some uncertainties.
The BBC still has a long way to go in objective reporting, and it does not look to me as if the RS is backing away from CAGW.
The solid PR-wall sought by the IPCC and provided by the Royal Society and many others in order to prevent politicians being stalled by any talk of uncertainties has been well and truly broken by this new position statement. It may be modest. It may be highly-spun. But it gives a little more political credibility to those who have not been convinced by any evidence yet brought forward to justify alarm about CO2 in the atmosphere.
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Hmmm. Did they attend the Bilderberger conference, perchance??
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Comments from Piers Corbyn
http://www.weatheraction.com/displayarticle.asp?a=244&c=5
>>Russ:
>>Well England is starting to come around,
Possibly. The Times did a big article on the giant new windfarm, just opened in the Thames estuary somewhere.
Two days later, the letters page had several replies – and they were all critical, asking what happens when the wind does not blow, like it failed to do when we had our recent cold winter. That is unusual for The Times.
The Times used to be a solid right-wing paper, but under the Blair era it towed the New Labour line and went distinctly liberal. Perhaps the wind of change are blowing, with the new government, and The Times is veering off to the right again.
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I doubt the royal society has changed, but it indicates a shift in the case that they think they can defend. It may also indicate that they are starting to realise that the credibility of a scientific institution rests on its objectivity and support of the scientific method. It can only continue to cover up and sell the cagw hypothesis when not too many people are looking at its position in detail. Maybe they want to back out of leading the charge. That will surely be the turning point, when institutions like the royal society no longer feel comfortable putting their reputations on the line for this stuff. Do they elect their leaders?
Jack Enright 12:48:
Thanks, Jack, for the link to the RS. I’ve downloaded the report and I’ve just read it. It doesn’t seem like too much of a climbdown to me, but if the door has been opened an inch I suppose it’s a start.
Perhaps someone very gifted in data management could collate all the signatories to the Manhattan Declaration, the Petition Project, the 60 German scientists who wrote to Angela Merkel, the 43 RS bods and other Climate Realists [ to borrow from Dr Corbyn ] and begin circulating the list to all politicians and policy makers who are not “settled” over the AGC/CCC/GCD ‘science’.
An additional feature could be to annotate the list with qualifications, years of experience and numbers of peer reviewed papers published.
This might also encourage others who are living and working in fear of persecution and marginalisation such that they are able to endorse the scientifically robust assessments rather than the fables.
This statement in the RS document is misleading
“38. When only natural climate forcings are put into climate models, the models are incapable of reproducing the size of the observed increase in global-average surface temperatures over the past 50 years. However, when the models include estimates of forcings resulting from human activity, they can reproduce the increase.”
Firstly, it means nothing that “when the models include estimates of forcings resulting from human activity, they can reproduce the increase”.
Atributing recent climate change to “estimates of forcings resulting from human activity” on that basis would be the logical fallacy of ‘argument from ignorance’.
This isn’t new. In the Middle Ages experts said,
“We don’t know what causes crops to fail: it must be witches.”
Now, experts say, “We don’t know what causes global climate change: it must be emissions from human activity.”
Of course, they phrase it differently saying they can’t match historical climate change with known climate mechanisms unless “estimates of forcings resulting from human activity” are included. But evidence for these “forcings resulting from human activity” is no more than the evidence for witches.
Importantly, all global climate models and energy balance models are known to provide indications which are based on the assumed degree of “forcings resulting from human activity” resulting from anthropogenic aerosol cooling input to each model as a ‘fiddle factor’ to obtain agreement between past average global temperature and the model’s indications of average global temperature.
A decade ago I published a peer-reviewed paper that showed the UK’s Hadley Centre general circulation model (GCM) could not model climate and only obtained agreement between past average global temperature and the model’s indications of average global temperature by forcing the agreement with an input of assumed anthropogenic aerosol cooling.
And my paper demonstrated that the assumption of aerosol effects being responsible for the model’s failure was incorrect.
(ref. Courtney RS An assessment of validation experiments conducted on computer models of global climate using the general circulation model of the UK’s Hadley Centre Energy & Environment, Volume 10, Number 5, pp. 491-502, September 1999).
More recently, in 2007, Kiehle published a paper that assessed 9 GCMs and two energy balance models.
(ref. Kiehl JT,Twentieth century climate model response and climate sensitivity. GRL vol.. 34, L22710, doi:10.1029/2007GL031383, 2007).
Kiehl found the same as my paper except that each model he assessed used a different aerosol ‘fix’ from every other model.
He says in his paper:
”One curious aspect of this result is that it is also well known [Houghton et al., 2001] that the same models that agree in simulating the anomaly in surface air temperature differ significantly in their predicted climate sensitivity. The cited range in climate sensitivity from a wide collection of models is usually 1.5 to 4.5 deg C for a doubling of CO2, where most global climate models used for climate change studies vary by at least a factor of two in equilibrium sensitivity.
The question is: if climate models differ by a factor of 2 to 3 in their climate sensitivity, how can they all simulate the global temperature record with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Kerr [2007] and S. E. Schwartz et al. (Quantifying climate change–too rosy a picture?, available at http://www.nature.com/reports/climatechange, 2007) recently pointed out the importance of understanding the answer to this question. Indeed, Kerr [2007] referred to the present work and the current paper provides the ‘‘widely circulated analysis’’ referred to by Kerr [2007]. This report investigates the most probable explanation for such an agreement. It uses published results from a wide variety of model simulations to understand this apparent paradox between model climate responses for the 20th century, but diverse climate model sensitivity.”
And Kiehl’s paper says:
”These results explain to a large degree why models with such diverse climate sensitivities can all simulate the global anomaly in surface temperature. The magnitude of applied anthropogenic total forcing compensates for the model sensitivity.”
And the “magnitude of applied anthropogenic total forcing” is fixed in each model by the input value of aerosol forcing.
I cannot post Kiehl’s Figure 2 here. Please note that it is for 9 GCMs and 2 energy balance models, and its title is:
”Figure 2. Total anthropogenic forcing (Wm2) versus aerosol forcing (Wm2) from nine fully coupled climate models and two energy balance models used to simulate the 20th century.”
The dots on the graph are all over the place.
The underlying problem is that the modellers assume that additional energy content in the atmosphere will result in an increase of temperature, but that assumption is very, very unlikely to be true.
Radiation physics tells us that additional greenhouse gases will increase the energy content of the atmosphere. But energy content is not necessarily sensible heat.
An adequate climate physics (n.b. not radiation physics) would tell us how that increased energy content will be distributed among all the climate modes of the Earth. Additional atmospheric greenhouse gases may heat the atmosphere, they may have an undetectable effect on heat content, or they may cause the atmosphere to cool.
The latter could happen, for example, if the extra energy went into a more vigorous hydrological cycle with resulting increase to low cloudiness. Low clouds reflect incoming solar energy (as every sunbather has noticed when a cloud passed in front of the Sun) and have a negative feedback on surface temperature.
Alternatively, there could be an oscillation in cloudiness (in a feedback cycle) between atmospheric energy and hydrology: as the energy content cycles up and down with cloudiness, then the cloudiness cycles up and down with energy with their cycles not quite 180 degrees out of phase (this is analogous to the observed phase relationship of insolation and atmospheric temperature). The net result of such an oscillation process could be no detectable change in sensible heat, but a marginally observable change in cloud dynamics.
However, nobody understands cloud dynamics so the reality of climate response to increased GHGs cannot be known.
So, the models are known to be wrong, and it is known why they are wrong: i.e.
1. they each emulate a different climate system and are each differently adjusted by use of ‘fiddle factors’ to get them to match past climate change,
2. and the ‘fiddle factors’ are assumed (n.b. not “estimated”) of forcings resulting from human activity ,
3. but there is only one climate system of the Earth so at most only one of the models can be right, and
4. there is no reason to suppose any one of them is right,
5. but there is good reason to suppose that they are all wrong because they cannot emulate cloud processes which are not understood.
Hence,the statement in the RS document (which I quote above) is misleading.
Richard
Tenuc says: “Like the MSM, they are drifting into damage limitation mode as our cooling world …”
Yes, it does look as if the stark facts of the temperature record are forcing them to adopt a defensible position if or when we see further cooling – and the timing is pretty apt, because it now seems very unlikely that we could get a temperature rise sufficient to overturn the current cooling trend for the first decade of the 21st century. On the face of it, this may just sound like empty propaganda, because it is warming if you count your decade from 2000 rather than 2001 (but centuries officially start with 01).
However, 2001 was the beginning of a period of years when there wasn’t much variation in the temperature, so basically it makes a lot of scientific sense because if you take any of the year immediately after 2001, you get the same basic answer: it hasn’t been warming recently.
As I’ve said many times, a scientific consensus is as nothing compared to the cold reality of scientific data.
Sir Isaac, a true skeptic if ever there was one, no longer spins in his grave.
Pointman
Congratulations to Professor Anthony Kelly and Sir Alan Rudge for standing out and insisting that the RS lives up to its past scientific reputation. As an intermittent observer of RS affairs over the past two decades I can attest to the view that they have moved from an open enquiring society to a more politicised stance on a number of topics. Also, those RS members who have not accepted the RS establishment polemic have been put at some disadvantage in getting their voice heard. But, perhaps now the RS43 will be in a position to restore the scientific balance.
Peter Stroud:
If the RS, the most respected scientific and technological body in the UK, casts just a tiny piece of doubt upon the AGW alarmism, and the consensus dogma, then the UK government should take notice and modify its stance.
Well, the RS shift is a welcome start, but I feel that our UK politicians will need a bigger push. For example, Tim Yeo, the Climate Change Minister, recently called for the resignation of Rajendra Pachauri, but he still is giving 100% backing to carbon tax, proposing wind farms in preference to nuclear, has a belief in CO2 as a pollutant, and going along with predictions of dire weather patterns due to increasing CO2.
Hi Anthony,
For any readers trying to chase the ‘times’ link through the paywall, the easiest way is to find a phrase (the title works well) and do a ‘Google News’ search. The google link will usually get through the paywall for places like the times and wsj.com.
Feel free to pass this on to your readers if you think it useful.
Keep up the good work.
You can download the report from here: http://royalsociety.org/climate-change-summary-of-science/
IMO it summarises the mainstream science view of AGW very well. Uncertainties and all.
Now it appears that many people here embrace the bit of the Royal Society report that mentions uncertainties: what’s your view of the “certainties” that they mention such as:
“The size of future temperature
increases and other aspects of climate change, especially at the regional scale, are still
subject to uncertainty. Nevertheless, the risks associated with some of these changes
are substantial.”
And how about where they explain the scientific certainties behind the Greenhouse effect?
Edward Bancroft says:“Well, the RS shift is a welcome start, but I feel that our UK politicians will need a bigger push. For example, Tim Yeo, the Climate Change Minister, recently called for the resignation of Rajendra Pachauri, but he still is giving 100% backing to carbon tax, proposing wind farms in preference to nuclear, has a belief in CO2 as a pollutant, and going along with predictions of dire weather patterns due to increasing CO2.”
Edward, perhaps I can put this in perspective. In the late 1990s I got involved in wind energy and there was a constant frustration at the lack of action from government. At the time the temperature record showed a dramatic and accelerating increase and the only explanation available was manmade warming from CO2 emissions, yet still, in the face of an obvious and overwhelming need to start acting … they did bugger all.
It took time. Policy needs to be developed, civil servants (few of whom know anything of science) need to educated. Options explored, committees formed, but slowly, slowly, very very very slowly, the wheel of government grind and eventually what seems obvious looking from outside becomes ingrained in government action.
Now that the bubble has burst … people like me can look back and see how we over-reacted (in retrospect). We didn’t have the full picture, the coincidental accelerating rise in CO2 and temperature was just that: coincidental. Now that we know more about the “consensus” (aka group-think) of the experts, the huge hidden uncertainties in the temperature record and the vastly over-exaggerated effects … we know the potential problem is much smaller than we were told, the liklihood of that problem is much smaller and indeed the whole thing may just disappear in the face of other problems like fossil fuel shortage.
Quite clearly the bubble has burst. The mainstream media have lost their enthusiasm for the global warming scare story, the world economy has forced people to look at the stark reality of economic facts and not the luxury of beating their breasts about fluffy polar bears.
The world has moved on, even the RS have changed their position … but as I said before, government is like a brontosaurus: you kick it between the legs, but that nerve impulse takes an awful long time to make its way up through the body politic to the head. My estimates are that UK government action lags the real world by around 5 to 10 years.
In 2000 what that meant was that the UK government hadn’t a hope in hell of seriously reducing CO2 emissions within a reasonable time period (and about the only reduction in the UK has been from a transfer of manufacturing of goods bought here to places like China). In 2010, that means that the government are currently accelerating their action on CO2 at a time when the political reality is that the public have lost their appetite for such notions.
That is the nature of the UK civil service/government. They are always 5-10 years behind the rest of us!
And there can be no doubt, that if we entered a period of cooling winters (we had more early snow in Scotland!!!), we will just about be coming out the decade of cooling as the politicians order the first new snowploughs!