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 This political activism has now been replaced by a more sober assessment of the scientific evidence and ongoing climate debates.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).
Myrrh.
From your link you’ll find that those comments attributed to Phil Jones have been ‘summarized’ by Indur Goklany.
As the great skeptic you obviously are, why not read what Phil Jones actually said in his Febuary interview with the BBC and quote that, rather than the (rather creative), interpretation of what he said by someone else? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm
“Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming”
“Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods. ”
E – “How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?”
“I’m 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 – there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.
Does anyone know if Dr Phil Jones is back from his suspension from the CRU yet?
“Quite the opposite”? The last paragraph does not logically contradict the first. I leave it to you as a mental exercise to puzzle it out.
Verba in Nullius.
It’s the end of the beginning.
15. The continuing Great Recession, the Western world’s debt crisis, and accompanying political pressures for spending cuts and against expensive regulatory measures.
16. Revelations of extensive and very expensive fraud in carbon trading.
17. Videos of lengthy, well-applauded speeches by Chavez and his buddies at Copenhagen.
18. Revelation of the spectacularly oversold practicality of renewable energy in poster child locations like Spain, and to a lesser extent in Denmark and Germany.
19. A cold winter in the US and Europe.
20. Met Office’s embarrassing elimination of its quarterly climate forecasts.
Andrew W
On the contrary, all the data show it is not well mixed, so this claim has been falsified by available data.
There are two things at play here re the ‘well-mixed’ which create immense confusion between the supporters of the AGW claims and those who give counter arguements which show that these claims are falsified.
AGW do not have any grasp of the real science in this as it relates to the real physical world because they are taught a different science to explain ‘well-mixed’, and this makes it frustrating for those in the real physical world to explain why such claims are contrary to real science unless they appreciate where this AGWScience comes from.
‘Well-mixed’ has become the AGW mantra, and there are two aspects which need to be taken into consideration in untangling any of the claims made where this is quoted.
The data show that Carbon Dioxide is not well mixed in the atmosphere; it varies seasonally, hemisphere to hemisphere, and from place to place and satellite data show this clearly. The first confusion arises because most on both sides of the arguement do not understand that the figures used in describing how much CO2 is in the atmosphere are actually, Averages. Average rainfall does not mean that this amount falls as rain in every place on every day.
There is a good explanation of the The Fallacy of the Average on this page from an AGW supporter with links to further explanation, but his comment that the majority of detractors of the Keeling curve don’t know this applies equally to the majority of those supporting it.
http://www.science20.com/chatter_box/co2_greenhouse_gas
I only refer to this particular item on the page as real science.
The second aspect, and this is more insidious as it is actually being taught as real science explanation of how gases act in the physical world, is the confusion caused by viewing CO2 as acting according to ideal gas laws. This has become so prevalent in its use that supporters of AGW have lost all sense of reality regarding CO2 in the atmosphere and have lost touch with it as the basic food in our Carbon Life Cycle, even seeing it as a pollutant and a poison. (Which is actually a third aspect here, this same PhD argued that CO2 becomes toxic when I pointed out that in real science which understood what toxicity meant, had designated it an non-toxic gas; a pillow is non-toxic and it can also kill by suffocation, as does CO2, it doesn’t suddenly become toxic the bigger it is regardless how many strange contortions of medical effects one can come up with to explain this sudden change from being non-toxic to acting as a poison.)
The argument from AGW supporters in the second aspect re well-mixed says that Carbon Dioxide behaves as an ideal gas. That it travels as a molecule of ideal gas, colliding and bouncing off other molecules without interacting with them until it diffuses into the general atmosphere of these molecules becoming well-mixed, gravity is dismissed as having so little effect that it can be discounted. So convinced are they that this happens in the real physical world that one of them went off to a cave to prove that separated gases will mix on their own accord, concluding that there must be continous source of the gas somewhere which keeps replenishing the separation faster than the gases can diffuse..
Their logic is not simply faulty because of this education, it has taken them out of the reality of the physical world working to physical science, completely. They no longer have any ‘feel’ for this physical existence. Explanations that CO2 is heavier than air and so falls through the atmosphere because it displaces oxygen are met with shock and horror that anyone can say such a thing because it is against the science they have actually been taught as relating to the physical world, because they have been taught that the world works according to ideal gas law principles. They say, for example, that if that were true there should be a layer of CO2 on the ground and anyone going to the Dead Sea area would die in this layer, but clearly as this doesn’t happen this proves that CO2 doesn’t sink through the atmosphere displacing oxygen. (From this also oblivious to the carbon life cycle, instead seeing plants only as ‘sinks’ to capture this nasty substance, rather than the source of our food and oxygen through them.) They are shown experiments where CO2 as dry ice disappears as it changes to a gaseous state and this proves they say that CO2 has diffused into the atmosphere and become well-mixed. Pointing out that CO2 is invisible and this experiment does not actually prove what they conclude, because CO2 being heavier than air sinks, is an uphill struggle.
Only those who haven’t lost touch with the physical laws of molecules as they exist in the real physical world will actually see how absurd their reasoning.
They are shocked to be told that gas molecules move at different speeds through different media, slower in liquids and even slower in solids than when in a gaseous state, because in their world all molecules move at the speed of ideal gases.
This page on the ideal gas laws also explains that real gases don’t work to these laws.
http://www.scienceclarified.com/Ga-He/GAses-Properties-of.html
From the paragraph “Ideal and real gases”: “All four of the gas laws previously discussed apply only to ideal gases. …There is, however, one problem with this concept: there is no such thing as an ideal gas in the real world.”
This is extremely worrying in general, that the education system is creating a generation, has already created a generation, who don’t understand the basic physical laws as they relate to the actual physical world we live in; this is utterly the fault of AGW supporters and their pernicious influence. It really must be stopped.
The Royal Society knows better, that it supports this re-education of the children of the country to think in this absurd logic is a political decision, not scientific.
Tim Williams – the quotes from Phil Jones were extracted from the emails. It was certainly something I picked up on when reading them, that he was also confused by the machinations of the IPCC as he found them playing out, but in the end it makes for an easier life to accept being a pawn. He was said to be close to a nervous breakdown before the enquiry, it wouldn’t have taken much pressure to get him to conform to the party line.
The claims for AGW from and supported by government funding come out of political machinations, it has resulted in the creation of AGW as a new religion; faith in its doctrines argued in ever more absurd ways, as using ideal gas laws to explain the physical world, and detractors are those who won’t join their religion. It has united Atheists and those with otherwise disparate and incompatible beliefs about God, to the use of violent denigration of non-believers. When Atheists who believe in science and not God and claim they are open thinkers because of this view, got together and invited an old tv presenter of science to speak at one of their gatherings, they hadn’t taken into account that he would refer to real physical science and debunk AGW ideas. He was aggressively booed and driven from their company. So much for their open scientific thinking, and they didn’t see the irony.
Tim Williams – the quotes from Phil Jones were extracted from the emails.
Eh? They are not quotes from Phil Jones.
You originally linked to ‘MasterResource :A free-market energy blog’ quoting Phil Jones as having said something he didn’t say. Instead it emerges that we have a summary of what Phil Jones is supposed to have said in a BBC interview that was linked to in the article and I linked to on here. Nowhere in that interview has he actually said what is alleged.
Now you’re saying he said these things in his emails?
Myrrh, thank you for your lengthy reply, you state that “there is no such thing as an ideal gas in the real world.”
You are correct, everyone knows this, it is not news.
“Well mixed” does not mean “perfectly mixed”, in any volume of mixed gases to which some components are continuously removed and added there will always be variations in the constituents concentrations at different locations, everyone, and I do mean everyone, apart from you knows and accepts this.
Please provide links to the individual emails that you claim the quotes from Phil Jones are from, the Masterresource article you take the quotes from appears to give the BBC article as the source, it does not claim the emails are the source. It still looks to me like (as Tim Williams puts it) the comments attributed to Phil Jones have been ‘summarized’ by Indur Goklany.
DaveF says:
October 1, 2010 at 3:48 am
Does anyone know if Dr Phil Jones is back from his suspension from the CRU yet?
It wasn’t a suspension. He’s currently director of research. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/
Re the Phil Jones, sorry, my bad. I had misread that (note to self, must not respond when in a hurry to do something else, and, I began to feel sorry for him…). It did seem to ring a bell with some things he’d said in the emails, but the Beeb interview has him covering his rear with the official party line. Re the emails. The enquiry was a cover up, like another rather dramatic incident we have where a coroner closed his inquest before his legal obligation to complete it and handed it over to an unofficial enquiry, this scientific fraud too was smothered by a enquiry designed to cover it up and all continues as if nothing untoward had ever happened. A reminder of just how important this was considered at the time: http://www.climategate.com/climategate-professor-phil-jones-could-face-ten-years-on-fraud-charges
Back to the Royal Society and those objecting to its support of this AGWScience, wasn’t there a similar incident in the meteorolical society in America? I recall a page they had up on their website which was part of their beginners course to understanding weather, said that CO2 had nothing to do with warming, it was taken down a couple of days after this got around the grapevine.
Andrew W – no, not “everyone knows this, this is not news”. I was arguing with a PhD physicist teaching this in the British education system, and as a supporter of AGW and the IPCC reports quite adamant that these ideal gas laws explained the movement of CO2 in real life, that CO2 obeyed ideal gas laws and diffused into the atmosphere according to them, bouncing off other molecules and mixing thoroughly, regardless of any other conditions. Oblivious to gravity and atmospheric pressure and now slimmed down to be able to float through the air with the greatest of ease.
Claiming, for example, that CO2 stayed up in the atmosphere for 200 years he simply couldn’t grasp my objections to this. That CO2 is 1.5 times heavier than air and physically incapable of this, unless we live in a continuous washing machine cycle, which I hadn’t noticed.. He claimed real gas molecules in the real world diffused into the atmosphere according to ideal gas laws and said he would fail students who disagreed with his understanding of molecules and thermodynamics. So how could he have been so ignorant of the physical properties of molecules? So ignorant of our real world? I don’t know how old he is, he himself could have been a product of the ‘new science’ teaching.
He and his coterie of on-line students continually berated me for not ‘not understanding this’ and referred me again and again to these laws as if real world science, urged me to find text books on it.., all the while I was trying to point out that these explanations made nonsense of the physical, real world we actually live in and against well understood, once upon a time, real science.
To them it was perfectly reasonable to imagine CO2 without weight accumulating in the atmosphere for any amount of yonks the AGWs claim it does, as being ‘well known’ and therefore real science. They really, and I do mean really, could not get their heads around the concept that CO2 was heavier than air and thus always sank through air, displacing it. That this is what was happening all the time to the CO2 in the atmosphere. This is not an isolated argument, these are the laws AGW’s use to claim CO2 is well-mixed in the atmosphere and stays up there well mixed, accumulating for thousands of years even forming a blanket and so a disaster in the making and the other nonsense espoused by AGW.
They really, truly, do not know that this isn’t real world science. That even this teacher argued that CO2 although heavier than air it would rise up and diffuse by itself into the atmosphere, claiming it would not remain pooled on the ground even if not disturbed, by wind or other, shows that this absurd argument for CO2 is so widespread, so entrenched, that it has created a generation or more of adults who have no concept of the laws relating to the physical reality of molecules in our atmosphere.
Who is teaching them that putting colouring into a glass of water shows diffusion which cannot become unmixed and so CO2 likewise diffuses through the atmosphere and stays mixed? They actually think this constitutes a proof..
There was a programme on the Beeb a while back which was going to settle this by experiment to invited sceptics in the audience and one experiment shown was heating a jar of air and heating a jar of carbon dioxide. The jar of carbon dioxide got hotter than the jar of air much more quickly. This proved conclusively that CO2 was dangerous in the atmosphere and would act as a blanket, etc.
Did they compare the constituents of the glass of air re capacity to retain heat against the jar of CO2? No they did not. Did they time how long each jar took to cool down? Nope. It was enough to show that CO2 got hotter more quickly and so was a danger and all explanations then from AGW were therefore real. I won’t be filling my radiators with it..
When you have read as many responses as I have that CO2 can do these impossible things before breakfast then you will know that the majority arguing this do not know reality, physical real science about real gases is not at all well known.
This isn’t science, but systematic brainwashing.
Re Phil Jones, sorry, misread it, note to self, musn’t post in a hurry. I thought it was from the emails because it rang a bell to some things he’d said in them.
Andrew W – I disagree that this is well known.
I have had considerable amount of discussions about the claims for CO2 from AGWScience, and have been astonished at the lack of understanding of basic physical science. It was only on determination to find the cause that I came to see how their arguments are based on ideal gas laws re molecules and not normal physical laws in real science, in the real world. This is why they cannot grasp that CO2 has weight and so can’t ‘diffuse back into the atmosphere’ as if it was acting like an ideal gas, why they think CO2 can stay up in the atmosphere well-mixed for hundreds and even thousands of years.
There is something strange in the land of science education for children, across continents.
Myrrh
Thanks for that clear exposition of the rapid degradation of recent Science teaching, mainly due to AGW’s demonization of CO2. Please publish for educators, even a pamphlet. Should be worthy of an article in Nature or New Scientist or BBC, and the [likely] omission thereof should also go into said pamphlet if that happens.
Please could you provide full refs for your Jones quotes, it would be helpful, do they all come from Goklany or where else?
Myrrh,
Your post above reminded me of Prof Freeman Dyson’s example of growing corn. Dyson explains: “A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes. If the air were not constantly stirred by convection currents and winds, the corn would stop growing.”
But corn does not stop growing on windless days [I was raised in Ohio, with cornfields as far as the eye could see. You can hear corn creaking and groaning as it grows even better when there is no wind]. So your comment makes sense: “CO2 is constantly moving down, sinking through the atmosphere unless it is acted on by another force, such as wind, or is at rest, [and] has reached its ground.”
Corn doesn’t stop growing even on windless days. CO2 is ≈50% heavier than air, so it sinks unless there is an outside force acting on it. When it reaches a leaf of corn, it is absorbed and the corn keeps growing, with new CO2 replenished by gravitation.
Unless I’m missing something, that makes sense to me.
Myrrh, you’ve read far more into my agreement than I intended, the first couple of paragraphs here cover what’s relevant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_gas
“unless we live in a continuous washing machine cycle, which I hadn’t noticed.. ”
The washing machine analogy is actually a pretty good description of how rapidly air is moving about in the atmosphere, if air was a dense as water you’d notice it more.
Lucy Skywalker – you probably didn’t see my correction before posting, I messed up, thought these were actual quotes as also reminded me of things I’d read in the emails, but they were extrapolated. I’ve just given up attempting a trawl through these … But one worth mentioning here is Phil Jones writing from Switzerland and the walks he’s taking in the deep snow, and how quickly the temperature drops when the sun goes down..
..perhaps someone could design an umbrella lined with CO2 to radiate back the body’s IR.
Any royalties will be gratefully received.
The American Thinker also has an analysis, looks like Phil Jones wasn’t really aware of how different his words were from previous statements made about this.
http://www.americathinker.com/2010/02/climategates_phil-jones_confes.html
Thank you re the Science teaching, I have certainly thought that someone should write something. I dismissed myself as a candidate as I don’t have much of a record now of these discussions and I tend to get bogged down without the a.n.other to reply to. But pamphlet, keeping it short might just be the constraint I need. I’ll think about it.
Smokey – re Dyson, I had read him say this but a piece on the web not from his book. I don’t recall where he got it from, but have just found this page which shows it could have come from U.S. Department of Agriculture: http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=5600
Plants do grow better when more CO2 is available for them, it’s a common practice to pump this into greenhouse production for healthier growth, and wind does stir it around as plants take CO2 in from the underside of their leaves through stomata. It doesn’t say on this page how long it is before it affects plants, but I have noticed in spells of hot still days that my lawn doesn’t need cutting as often as warm and wet, rain brings down CO2 and stirs things up, but maybe that’s just less water, or wishful thinking! Although they say that higher CO2 levels make plants more drought resistant. There’s a direct relationship to the stomata and CO2 levels, and there’s some work on tracking past CO2 levels from such analysis, showing more variation through time than ice data.
Andrew W – I refer you back to my original link of good science on ideal gases, which is very much at odds with the wiki piece.
.
The wiki entry appears to be yet another AGW inspired botch of real science to include CO2 at all, and with some indeterminate ‘”reasonable tolerances'”to boot. No wonder there are so many young adults out there unable to grasp that CO2 has actual physical weight.
A good description you say “of how rapidly air is moving around in the atmosphere, if air was as dense as water you’d notice it more.”
What is this “atmosphere” and what this “air” moving around in it?
“I refer you back to my original link of good science on ideal gases”
You mean this one?
http://www.scienceclarified.com/Ga-He/Gases-Properties-of.html
If so, there’s nothing there that disputes the theoretical and observational evidence that CO2 is well mixed in the troposphere.
“What is this “atmosphere” and what this “air” moving around in it?”
Assuming you’re educated passed 2nd grade level, I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.
Alan Millar writes,
“What the alarmists never mention, even though it is significant when comparing decade upon decade warming, is that Mount Pinatubo erupted in the 1990s….
… Can’t understand why the Pinatubo volcano is, “the eruption that cannot speak its name”, amongst alarmists!!!!!!!!!!”
Who told you that it never gets mentioned?
Mt Pinatubo has been studied closely and mentioned many, many times by climate researchers. For example, read the section on “explosive volcanic activity” in the IPCC AR4:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch2s2-7-2.html
Mike Haseler writes,
“(it has cooled this century!!!!!!!)”
It has? As far as I can see, the global temperature indexes all show significant warming 2000 to present.
You can make the trend nonsignificant for some indexes if you cherry-pick start and end years (starting in 1998 is popular for this purpose). But it takes statistical tricks like that to hide the incline.
Andrew W – yes that page. It makes the crucial point that ideal gases and their laws are purely Hypothetical, they do not actually exist in the Real world, which is full of real gases and subject to real gas laws and conditions on earth. For example, ideal gases do not have attraction or volume or interaction, real gases do.
I asked what you meant by atmosphere and air because I don’t know what you mean by them, and if we’re going to discuss this any further I’d like that clarified. You’ve already noted you mean something other when you said that “The washing machine analogy is actually a pretty good description of how rapidly air is moving about in the atmosphere,”, which is what I said it wasn’t. So we’re obviously talking about different things here.
What I mean by atmosphere is the gases surrounding the earth, having weight and subject to gravity, producing greater pressure the closer to the ground, and so on. This is not the same picture at all as if the air was in a continuous washing machine cycle, all thoroughly mixing up together ‘because the molecules travel at high speed around the atmosphere’, which is an ideal gas concept. Air exerts pressure and molecules of real gas are subject to attraction, the individual molecules might well be moving at great speeds, but ‘on the spot’ as it were, vibrating, not actually able to travel in air at these high ideal gas speeds.
For example, how sound travels is a good description of what I mean by air. The air isn’t actually moving but vibrating and so passing the vibration on, and once the pressure of sound has gone the volume of air will stop vibrating . In other words air is an entity in its own right, in which things happen, and not a mixture of molecules without weight or mass rushing around in all directions in empty space.
http://www.mediacollege.com/audio/01/sound-waves.html
Also a page with some differences between real and ideal gases, for example attraction from the molecules around a moving molecule will slow it down, an ideal gas has no such constraint.
http://www.mpcfaculty.net/mark_bishop/real_gases.htm