The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 30 September 2010
LONDON, 30 September – The Global Warming Policy Foundation has welcomed the Royal Society’s decision to revise and tone down its position on climate change. Its new climate guide is an improvement on their more alarmist 2007 pamphlet which caused an internal rebellion by more than 40 fellows of the Society and triggered a review and subsequent revisions.
The former publication gave the misleading impression that the ‘science is settled’ – the new guide accepts that important questions remain open and uncertainties unresolved. “The Royal Society now also agrees with the GWPF that the warming trend of the 1980s and 90s has come to a halt in the last 10 years,” said Dr Benny Peiser, the Director of the GWPF.
Dr David Whitehouse, the science editor of the GWPF said: “The biggest failing of the new guide is that it dismisses temperature data prior to 1850 as limited and leaves it at that. It would cast a whole new light on today’s warming if the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period and the Bronze Age Warm Period were as warm as today, possiblity even warmer than today. A thorough discussion of the growing empirical evidence for the global existence of the Medieval Warm Period and its implications would have been a valuable addition to the new report.”
In their old guide, the Royal Society demanded that governments should take “urgent steps” to cut CO2 emissions “as much and as fast as possible.” This political activism has now been replaced by a more sober assessment of the scientific evidence and ongoing climate debates.
“If this voice of moderation had been the Royal Society’s position all along, its message to Government would have been more restrained and Britain’s unilateral climate policy would not be out of sync with the rest of the world,” Dr Peiser said.
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The statement and document from the Royal Society follows:
Climate change: A Summary of the Science
The Royal Society, 30 September 2010
Climate change continues to be a subject of intense public and political debate. Because of the level of interest in the topic the Royal Society has produced a new guide to the science of climate change. The guide summarises the current scientific evidence on climate change and its drivers, highlighting the areas where the science is well established, where there is still some debate, and where substantial uncertainties remain.
The document was prepared by a working group chaired by Professor John Pethica, Vice President of the Royal Society and was approved by the Royal Society Council.
Download the guide here (PDF).
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Common sense and cold reasoning will hopefully prevail. Passion has no place in rational discourse. Always “pathos” leads to pathology.
The Royal Society disappoints.
An overdue “CRACK in the DIKE”!
My first thought was: “Why is there a picture of a thresher on the cover?”
Then I downloaded the report and discovered that the image is actually an illustration of Europe’s CryoSat research satellite. Interesting!
Every major organization that has parroted the settled science dogma is disappointing. Those that extrapolated unsettled science into catastrophism are even worse.
Perhaps they’ve concluded that cats and dogs don’t cause bubonic plague after all.
So the Royal Society comes to its senses, while at the same time, President Obama’s Science and Technology Adviser, John Holdren directs the US off the cliff (see yesterday’s post).
Let’s be thankful that someone amongst this erstwhile authority on science has had the integrity to question their “misleading impression that the ‘science is settled’”.
All is not lost.
They are scientists. We must show them the way.
Contrary to what is reported above, guide says that global warming has continued every decade since the 1970’s, including 2000 to 2009. While the report acknowledges the inability to model cloud cover, it still leaves the impression that models/modelling are somehow useful. Fear is generated that there is no turning back from current levels of warmness even while including a doubt laced acknowledgement that similar to the present warm periods have been experienced in the recent past. This guide is an improvement, but it is still laden with inuendo and fear mongering that betrays its real purpose, i.e. to maintain support for the AGW industry.
Seems odd, and is a bit sad, that we are thanking the Royal Socitey for slowly returning to what is was chartered to do in the first place – uphold the science.
I quite like this new report. However, nothing I can see supports Dr. Peiser’s claim that the “warming trend of the 1980s and 90s has come to a halt in the last 10 years”. Quite the opposite, in fact:
“When these surface temperatures are averaged over periods of a decade, to remove some of the year-to-year variability, each decade since the 1970s has been clearly warmer (given known uncertainties) than the one immediately preceding it. The decade 2000-2009 was, globally, around 0.15oC warmer than the decade 1990-1999.”
#19 from the pdf:
“From such simulations, one can derive the characteristics of climate likely to occur in future decades, including mean temperature and temperature extremes.”
Nonsense – the input data is flawed!!!
Well, there’s some interesting stuff, some harmless stuff, some stuff we can all agree with, but other stuff that will cause further squawking. For example:
I’m sure Axel Moerner would have something to say about the 20 cm and the future rate. Also, if the paper described in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/29/pielke-on-ground-water-extraction-causing-sea-level-rise/ is right, then an important chunk of sea level rise ascribed to melting ice is wrong. Some “fossil aquifers” that are currently being drained are running low and cannot keep up the use rate of the past decades.
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Also, while the word “cooling” is used twice, there is no mention of medium scale climate change related to the PDO or AMO. The tenor seems to be steady warming over the previous and next century with minor deviations due to volcanoes.
Many of the statements are pretty much lifted from (or paraphrased versions of) the IPCC AR4; so the crowing of the media (like the Daily Mail) looks ridiculous in this context: by supporting this report they are supporting the IPCC AR4 they have attacked so often in the past!
I like how it splits up findings into different levels of ‘consensus’, but I think it is missing some more discussion on observational/palaeo methods to calculate climate sensitivity. There are plenty of them about!
And what Zeke said.
Thanks Zeke, when I saw that “warming trend of the 1980s and 90s has come to a halt in the last 10 years” I thought the Royal Society may have gone nuts. Looks like Dr Benny Peiser was just making that bit up.
Zeke Hausfather says: I quite like this new report. However, nothing I can see supports Dr. Peiser’s claim that the “warming trend of the 1980s and 90s has come to a halt in the last 10 years”
I think this refers to this:
“This warming has not been gradual, but has been largely concentrated in two periods, from around 1910 to around 1940 and from around 1975 to around 2000.
The warming has largely occurred in these periods clearly indicates that warming has not been significant outwith these periods, which given the end date of 2000 clearly confirms the assertion that there has been no significant warming recently! (it has cooled this century!!!!!!!)
O/T: “EATING MEAT IS GOOD FOR THE PLANET”. The following article from the UK’s Daily Mail is interesting and has a bearing on the sad plight of the Thompsons family in Australia:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-1316382/Carnivores-rejoice-Eating-meat-good-planet.html#comments
Zeke,
I think it is misleading to say that warming is continuing because the decade 1990-1999 was not as warm as the decade 2000-2009. Theoretically, if the shape of those decades was an upside down V with the peak of the V occuring in the last year of 1990-99 and first year of 2000-09, it would be inaccurate to say that the trend continued as the trend reversed at the peak of the upside down V. This is still true even if the averages of the two decades show the latter one to warmer.
In our case, global temperatures hit a peak in 1998 and have since leveled out (no noticeable increases or decreases). Since this decade started out at a higher level than the early 1990s, of course the average is higher, but that does not mean the temperature is still increasing.
This, in itself, does not prove or disprove AGW, but we’d be a lot better off if both sides could agree that global temperatures have not shown significant increases or decreases since 1997-1998.
Hmm, maybe they checked the latest Arctic ice graphs and thought they might want to tone it down a tad??
Ok so it’s a bit better than before, but still full of scaremongering and side stepping of key factors. Eg, it mentions the 1910/1940 warming, but in a way that implies it was a warming on the way to the 1970/1990 warming, ie a step up to it. Does this by not mentioning the cooling after 1940. Then side steps the possibility of current cooling by comparing decades – we know that 2000 – 2009 was warm, but trends are ignored.
Also, ignores the pre 1850 temp issues. Also, assumes the CO2 concentrations from ice cores – essentially proxy measurements – are undisputed: no mention of the chemical analyses. And assumes the surface temp sets are reasonably accurate. No discussion of water vapour/evaaporation/precipitation as a cooling/heat distribution mechanism, and etc etc etc across many aspect.
4/10 in my book; and quite unhelpful really. Still, a step back from “the science is settled and were all going to die”, but not much. Maybe next time the step back will be bigger…. but what a waste of resources and wrong policy impacts meantime!
Who knows – perhaps the Royal Society will soon decide that cholera is not spread by “bad smells”, and that maybe smallpox is not best cured by bleeding.
BC Bill writes:
“This guide is an improvement, but it is still laden with inuendo and fear mongering that betrays its real purpose, i.e. to maintain support for the AGW industry.”
Absolutely, sir. Our duty is to take them point-by-point and teach them what they still do not know. Now, we know that there are open minds within the Royal Society who are open to what we have to say. Lawson’s group deserves praise. By the way, the inuendo and fear mongering amounts to soft pitches that folks should hit out of the park. I would offer my own point-by-point analysis right away, but this darn day job nags the heck out of me.
Very disappointing! Marginally better than the previous report but both the introduction and concluding remarks shows they are still wedded to the AGW hypothesis.
No thermometer records before 1850, no proxy and historical evidence of various temp. fluctuations in the last 2000 years,no mention of CO2 levels in geological time scales, limited exploration of alternative explanations for 0.8C temp. rise etc.
Still fixated with ‘sophisticated’ climate models with their ‘approximations’ and ‘parameterisations’ aka guesses.
Nothing here, sadly, to prevent or dissuade our politicians on both sides of the pond from building windmills and other ways of destroying our economies and redistributing wealth (hard work) to the developing countries.
Ironic that the UK govt. is about to slash ‘Defence’ with an ongoing war and other potential but likely threats while simultaneously wasting untold millions on mitigating a non-existent threat.
On a brighter note, the Ryder Cup starts tomorrow in ‘sunny’ Wales at the Celtic Manor G.C. Don’t miss it.
BTW there is a reason we are a green little country and we supply most of the water for Birmingham, Warwickshire not Alabama.
Meanwhile from Dr J. Curry’s blog – curryja says “Some relative sanity on the climate policy front, see” http://www2.ucar.edu/news/united-states-must-take-steps-adapt-climate-change-report-says – Gee, it still presents as the “science is settled” – we’re going ahead – with all the backing and sanction from on high. Is Judith saying she supports the report?