This is quite something. Sixteen scientists, including such names as Richard Lindzen, William Kininmonth, Wil Happer, and Nir Shaviv, plus engineer Burt Rutan, and Apollo 17 astronaut Dr. Harrison Schmidt, among others, write what amounts to a heretical treatise to the Wall Street Journal, expressing their view that the global warming is oversold, has stalled in the last decade, and that the search for meaningful warming has led to co-opting weather patterns in the blame game. Oh, and a history lesson on Lysenkoism as it relates to today’s warming-science-funding-complex. I can hear Joe Romm’s head exploding all the way out here in California.
Excerpts:
No Need to Panic About Global Warming
There’s no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy.
Editor’s Note: The following has been signed by the 16 scientists listed at the end of the article:
…
Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.
The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.
…
Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.
This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.
Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word “incontrovertible” from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question “cui bono?” Or the modern update, “Follow the money.”
Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.
…
Signed by:
Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.
Full letter is online here at the Wall Street Journal
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R. Gates says:
January 29, 2012 at 6:22 am
“Of course the skeptics will always have their laughable fallback position that we are still in a recovery from the Little Ice Age.”
Why laughable R. Gates? There have been times during the Holocene when temperatures were higher than those of the present and times when the Arctic ice was likely completely melted in the summer season. What evidence can you cite proving that the climate has finished recovering from the Little Ice Age? Have you considered that your hypothesis, that natural climate phenomena are hiding the AGW induced warming trend, is also a fallback position from an earlier consensus? Back in the last century when the temperature record was telling the “correct” story, AGW was touted to dominate any natural climate fluctuations.
This was published in this weekend’s Daily Mail. More refuting of the Global Warming theory.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming–Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.htm
Where’s Al Gore when we really need him???
Gates opines:
“Of course the skeptics will always have their laughable fallback position that we are still in a recovery from the Little Ice Age.” Thanx for making clear that you are not a skeptic – the only honest kind of scientist. You should try it some time, you might like it.
Question for Gates: do you believe there is no rising temperature trend from the LIA? Because there is ample scientific and historical evidence showing such a trend exists.
I am not one who thinks we are at a temperature peak. Until the trend line from the LIA is decisively broken, I think we are still on that rising trend [which must be largely, if not entirely natural, since CO2 did not start rising until after about 1800]. But all I need are a few facts, such as several year-over-year declines, to make me start to question whether the trend has reversed.
The trend from the LIA is not a “fallback position,” it is the skeptical position, because it shows the null hypothesis remains unfalsified: the rising temperature trend is natural, not man made. And just as trees don’t grow to the moon, trends don’t go on forever. At some point the planet will enter a cooling cycle, and burning all the fossil fuels available will not change that. But timing is everything, and we don’t know when the trend will reverse.
@Smokey says:
We are beginning to think that WUWT is becoming WUW…G (GATES)? 🙂
Werner Brozek says
GISS, for example, has a slope of 0.0087 per year from 1940 to date.
Hi Werner
Spencer reports an increase of 0.14 degrees C per decade when you look at the past 33 years. So, if the same trend were to continue, we are looking at ca. 0.5 degrees extra by 2050.
I have done a statistical analysis of 20 weather stations, randomly chosen, but I kept a balance as per + & – latitude and 70% of stations near – or islands in – the oceans and 30% inland.
The average slope I found for the past 37 years is 0.0137 degrees C per annum, which is the exact same result as Spencer’s.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
The interesting thing about my results, reported in the link above – if you would care to have a good look – is that I am also able to report on the increase in maxima and minima. So far, the score is follows:
MAXIMA: rising at a speed of 0.0369 degrees C per annum
MEANS : increasing at 0.0137 degrees C per annum
MINIMA: increasing at 0.0055 degrees C per annum
HUMIDITY: decreasing at a rate of -0.02% per annum
PRECIPITATION: increasing at a rate of 0.16 mm /month /year
The ratio of the rate of increase in Maxima, Means and Minima is 7:3:1
Surely anyone looking at these results, will understand that it was the maximum temperatures, that ocurred during the day, that pushed up the mean average daily temperatures and minima?
This means that, on my pool table, the global warming that is observed on earth is largely natural and is not caused by an increase in greenhouse gases. If it had been the other way around, i.e. minimum temperatures pushing up the average temperature, (i.e heat being trapped), minima rising faster than maxima and means, then we should agree that the increase in greenhouse gases on earth was the cause.
Note that the so-called ”global warming” is not global at all.
In the Southern Hemisphere (SH) there is almost no warming. Clearly, you can see a big difference in the results for means between NH and SH? Check out these two weatherstations’ results from the antarctic.
http://www.nerc-bas.ac.uk/icd/gjma/amundsen-scott.ann.trend.pdf
http://www.nerc-bas.ac.uk/public/icd/gjma/vostok.ann.trend.pdf
They are remarkably flat.
(I got these graphs from someone here, does anyone perhaps know where the original data are of these two graphs?)
We know from real science and experiments that the CO2 is distributed everywhere exactly the same. So, if increased CO2 or increased GHG’s were to be blamed directly due to it causing an increased greenhouse effect, should not the warming be the same everywhere in the world? So, we conclude (again) it never was the increase in GHG’s that caused any warming.
Looking at the differences between the results from the northern hemisphere(NH) and the southern hemisphere (SH), what we see is happening from my dataset is that more (solar) heat went into the SH oceans and is taken away by water currents and/or weather systems to the NH. That is why the NH is warming and that is why the SH does not warm.
Now, if we could only get R.Gates and A.Physicist to do their own testing, they might get the same results and come to the same conclusions.
But I suspect they are on a payroll by someone to keep sowing doubts.
HenryP
Even your 37 year period is not long enough. You need about 100 to 120 years of data to be able to make a realistic compensarion for the 60 year cycle in order to get down to the underlying ~1000 year cyclic trend.
The best plots I have seen (in several thousand hours of research on all this) is that plot at the foot of my Home page http://climate-change-theory.com on which I have added the yellow line using an “axis trend” for the obvious, 60 year cycle after visually completing the incomplete part. I justify this having some knowledge that temperatures were declining slightly between 1880 and 1900.
Note that the plot is not of temperatures but of gradients of 30 year trends calculated each month: ie Jan 1900 to Dec 1930 then Feb 1900 to Jan 1931 etc. For each period a linear trend was calculated and its gradient plotted at the end of the period. (I would rather have seen it in the middle of each 30 year period, so you should visualise a 15 year shift.)
What we see is a rate of increase of 0.06C per decade in 1900-1930 reducing to 0.05C/ decade in recent years, based on my yellow line. This will keep decreasing as the top of the cyclic trend is approached with the next 150 to 250 years I would guess, before a 500 year decline.
Richard M: “Not surprised you confused an accurate description of your actions as a personal attack.”
The reality is that I offered several specific points to the effect that the signers of this attempt to influence the political process (not that there’s anything wrong with that) were fudging their lack of knowledge.
You have been unable to offer any evidence to challenge my arguments, hence your resort to personal abuse.
The defects in this letter are further exemplified by the poor thinking skills where the authors attempt to liken the current climate science scene with Lysenkoism, under whom, “Many [scientists] were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death”.
I’m not aware of any western scientists who have been sent to the gulag for their views on climate, much less condemned to death. The analogy is therefore disproportionate and gives one little confidence in their views on climate.
“Brendon H. said: I’m not aware of any western scientists who have been sent to the gulag for their views on climate, much less condemned to death. The analogy is therefore disproportionate and gives one little confidence in [the WSJ signatories] views on climate.”
I’ll grant that talking about the Soviet Gulag and death penalties seems a bit hyperbolic on the surface. But I’m not sure you’ve correctly represented the meaning in their use of those statements. Those statements were meant to show how politics can dictate to scientists and corrupt the process. I hope you would not deny this simple notion, even if you think there might be a better way to state that concept. To me, the fact that a totalitarian nation state from the recent past used it’s political power to dictate what is and is not “acceptable” truth, makes for a pretty clear and unambiguous example of the point they were trying to make. So, I’d not criticize the letter’s use of this rhetorical device. The authors could also have used the example of the Roman Catholic church’s punishment of Gallileo’s heresy (which might have been more appropriate, now that I think about it), or many other cases from history. But the meaning in their example was clear: in cases where honest disagreements with “orthodoxy” occur, those who think themselves in charge of the orthodoxy must defeat and punish challengers to their power, and that punishment has nothing to due with the merits of the heretical statement, only with maintaining their monopoly on power to decide “truth.” I can see some similarities between previous attacks on scientific “heresy” and some behaviors of the climate alarmists in protecting their rice bowl.
But let’s focuson your very sensible point that hyperbole can damage the credibility of scientists (or anyone trying to make a logical argument). That’s correct, and I agree with you 100%. Thank you for helping make the case for climate skepticism. I think when climate modelers say their models can accurately predict future climate, they are engaging in hyperbole. In fact, much hyperbole has been published (and peer reviewed) under the guise of AGW, now climate change. James Hanson’s professional life has been one huge hyperbole, first predicting catastrophic cooling (it warmed), then catastrophic warming (now no longer warming), 5 meter sea level rise (not happening), etc. And then there’s the IPCC, the CRU, the hockey stick, Al Gore. There were not 3 or 50 million climate refugees in 2010. And here’s a brand new howler, some idiot says GCC is even responsible for exacerbating human sex slavery in Cambodia. He says women in rural areas with no running water might have to walk further to get water, making it more likely they’be be kidnapped by slavers. That’s part of his argument. I kid you not.
Hyperbole kills credibility. Bow Howdy, does it ever.
Mickey Reno: “Those statements were meant to show how politics can dictate to scientists and corrupt the process.”
The letter suggests that we are seeing today what occurred under Lysenko. But for the sake of argument I accept your hypothetical case.
The issue is: how likely is it that in the foreseeable future dissenting scientists living in Western democracies will be hauled off to the gulag and executed in their hundreds? I would say it’s on the very low side.
And the Galileo gambit is no more convincing. In the present day, how many dissenting climate scientists have been hauled before investigating committees, been subject to official enquries, or been pursued by zealous prosecutors?
And remember that it was Galileo who had the big new idea, not his opponents, who were defending the traditional view.
In effect, you are defending your preferred alarmism. But if “hyperbole kills credibility”, then you’ve pronounced your judgement on this letter.
HenryP says:
January 29, 2012 at 10:20 pm
Spencer reports an increase of 0.14 degrees C per decade when you look at the past 33 years.
True, but he only has 33 years of satellite data to work with. I believe that things go in 60 year cycles, so we would have to go elsewhere for that. And GISS gives 0.11/decade for the last 60 years. And since we have presumably gone up 0.8 C so far, at the rate of 0.11/decade, we would not even reach an increase of 2 C by 2100. I do not believe this would be bad, but that is another topic.
As for your difference between maxima and minima, since I live in a cold country, I would have thought the minima would be higher with the furnaces going all night. But in light of what you say, I wonder if the air conditioners in hot places partly drive up the maxima.
Even lower rates of increase (at least in sea surface temperatures) are apparent if you look at a plot of rates of increase since 1900 as at the foot of my Home page http://climate-change-theory.com
There you will see a rate of 0.06 deg.C / decade which (by the green line) reduces to 0.05 deg.C / decade at present. These rates effectively take out the influence of the 60 year cycle and just show the longer-term (~1,000 year cycle) which looks like it’s heading for a maximum around 2200 before declining to a LIA around 2700.
So, at around 0.05 deg.C/decade or more likely 0.04 deg.C / decade, 2100 should only see about 0.4 deg.C extra in the trend. The 60 year cycle will of course take it higher for the maximum around 2058 to 2060 but possibly cooler in 2100 due to a minimum in the previous decade.
It is unfortunate that this statement does not address the real physics. The best statement I have ever read on all this is Dr Latour’s which points out that the atmosphere is actually cooling the Sun’s incident radiation – compare the temperatures in the Thermosphere which are much hotter than the surface, in fact over 100 deg.C …
,i.”Here is the science for what is happening. Thermal T is a point property
of matter, a scalar measure of its kinetic energy of atomic and molecular
motion. It is measured by thermometers. It decreases with altitude. The
rate of thermal energy transfer by conduction or convection between hot
Th and cold Tc is proportional to (Th – Tc).
Radiation t is a point property of massless radiation, EMR, a directional
vector measure of its energy transmission rate per area or intensity, w/
m2
, according to the Stefan-Boltzmann law. It is measured by pyrometers
and spectrometers. Solar radiation t increases with altitude. Black bodies
are defined to be those that absorb and radiate with the same intensity
and corresponding t. Real, colorful bodies reflect, scatter, absorb, convert
4and emit radiant energy according to the nature of the incident radiation
direction, spectrum and body matter reflectivity, absorptivity, emissivity
and view factors. The rate of EMR energy transfer from a hot body, th, is
Q, w = 5.67Ae(th + 273)
4
, where A is radiating area and e is emissivity
fraction. But it may not be absorbed by all bodies that intercept it, as
GHG theory assumes. In particular, hotter radiating bodies do not absorb
colder incident radiation and reemit it more intensely, as GHG backradiation theory assumes.”
R. Gates says:
January 28, 2012 at 2:46 pm
Allan MacRae said: “There has been no global warming in more than a decade.”
_____
How long is this meme going to be repeated? The last decade was the warmest decade on instrument record. 9 out of the 10 warmest years on record were in the past decade, and 2010 was the warmest year on record. Hardly sounds like “no global warming in more than a decade”
___________________________________________
Nonsense Gates – you must just make this stuff up.
2010 was certainly not the warmest year on record, unless you are cherry-picking from bogus surface temperature data that are contaminated by UHI and other artificial warming biases.
In the modern era, only the UAH or RSS satellite temperature data has credibility. The surface temperature data are relatively worthless, evidence only of Mann-made global warming.
Furthermore, when there is a sinusoidal pattern of warming and cooling, it must include a flat peaking crest. Global temperatures are peaking and will soon decline, if they are not already doing so. That is what you are describing – it is a plateau, and no cause for alarm – for rational people.
The problem with you global warming alarmists is your religious fervor blocks out all logic and facts that contradict your “be-very-frightened, trust me” mantra.
The fact is that the IPCC and all other acolytes of the global warming “Cause” have NO PREDICTIVE TRACK RECORD. None of their scary global warming scenarios have materialized.
In fact, their predictive track record is 100% false – a truly remarkable achievement!
Here are predictions I/we made in 2002 and 2003.
1. There is no global warming crisis.
2. Earth will soon enter a natural cooling cycle.
Global cooling will be much more dangerous to humanity and the environment than the recent, natural warming cycle.
Repeating, “there has been no global warming in more than a decade.”
Our predictive track record is infinitely better than yours. Suggest you bundle up.
Werner Brozek says
I would have thought the minima would be higher with the furnaces going all night. But in light of what you say, I wonder if the air conditioners in hot places partly drive up the maxima.
I am afraid that the reports of any such influence by AC’s or heaters are greatly exaggerated.
I have not studied the effect of the removal of snow by man, but I suspect that that alone is larger than any energy consumption by anyone, whether for heating or cooling. (Man “interferes” with the natural state of earth by removing snow, causing more absorption of heat than would normally be the case)
I did pick up a few interesting results: if you cut forests, like they did in the south of Argentina, you will get cooling.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/de-forestation-causes-cooling
I have also been able to establish that the opposite, i.e. planting of trees and/or more natural vegetation, does cause warming, like I found in Grootfontein (Namibia), in the “Kgalagadi Basin”.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/24/the-earths-biosphere-is-booming-data-suggests-that-co2-is-the-cause-part-2/
I might even be able to find a correlation coefficient between the leaf area index (LAI ) and warming if I could get hold of those three Liu’s who wrote the paper quoted above. ( I need actual figures for the LAI)
Hi Doug
Your work is impressive.
I gather you did see my post here
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/27/sixteen-prominent-scientists-publish-a-letter-in-wsj-saying-theres-no-need-to-panic-about-global-warming/#comment-879203
I would love to go back further in time, but my finding was that before 1974 there are not many weather stations that have complete daily records. So I don’t trust your data/graph (yet)
For example, how did you get that result of 0.125 degrees C/decade for 1916-1946 and how do you know that your sample of weatherstations was more or less representative of the whole world?
I merely wanted to establish the linear trend, I did not really wanted to predict the future. I agree that it might not be right to make big predictions from my data set.
Generally speaking I believe the future (natural warming) could be found here in this graph:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/orssengo3.png
If you want to know where that graph came from, look here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/25/predictions-of-global-mean-temperatures-ipcc-projections/
On top of that, it seems likely to me that the increase in greenery, caused by more warmth and more CO2 and human activities, could trap some heat, causing some contributory warming, on top of the natural warming, as reported here,
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/27/sixteen-prominent-scientists-publish-a-letter-in-wsj-saying-theres-no-need-to-panic-about-global-warming/#comment-880341
Thanks HenryP – I’ll look into what you say and read the links tonight. My sources are linked on http://climate-change-theory.com
Regarding greenery etc, bear in mind the “thermal inertia” of the whole Earth as discussed on my “Explanation” page and some earlier posts here. To increase the ocean and surface temperatures requires a lot more energy because underground temperatures would also have to be raised all the way back to the core in the long run – like many thousands of years.
I must write in Serbian but I don’t know English enaught.This is very important
Zao mi je sto dosadasnja nauka nije odgonetnula prave uzroke ovih pojava cije su brojne posledice za nas na Zemlji, a u koje spada i problem klimatskih promjena.Nista ovo sto se navodi kao uzrok ovih promjena nije glavni uzrok.Postoji nesto sasvim drugo fundamentalnije koje je vezano za ukupnu konstelaciju cijelog Suncevog sistema.Sigurno je da su magnetna polja osnovni pokretac promjena svih energetskih stanja, ali treba znati zbog cega se magnetna polja tako za nas nepredvidjeno ponasaju.Sa poznavanjem tih izazivaca moguce je odrediti cikluse gotovo svih tih fenomena u svim vremenskim periodima, te bi se tako moglo i predvidjeti sve u buducnosti, a time i usporedjivati sa prosloscu.
Ja opet, po ko zna koji put , moram reci da sam na puti da mi je to dovoljno jasno , samo ja nemam tehicke mogucnosti a niti dovoljno podataka da mogu vrsiti predvidjanja.
Kada bi kojim cudom i slucajem npr. NASA pristala da pod ugovorom ovo pokusamo rijesiti, nauka bi zaista dobila mnogo na ustedi vremena na istrazivanjima koji ne donose nikakve sigurne rezultate.Ovo sto se sada nudi je samo neka nesigurna prognoza zasnovana na nesigurnim podacima i pretpostavkama.
Imam vise problema da ovo sto imam iznesem, a najvazniji je taj sto ne zelim kao penzioner pokloniti nesto sto vrijedi triliona dolara sa nauku i svijet, pod uslovom da je ovo dobro kako sam ja u to ubijedjen.. Mislim,gospodo, da vecina od vas ovo nece ni primijetiti kao sto nauka nije primijetila ovaj prost put da krene njime i dodje do pravih rezultata.
PLEASE , TRANSLATE THIS MY COMMENT, IT WILL BE VERY USEFUL!
Well we could all do with an education in statistics. Reading comprehension and logic would also be good.
The 16 eminent climate skeptics claim this:
The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause
Briggs interprets this as a claim that there is is no evidence of global warming. Wrong interpretation. It very definitely claims lack of global warning as a proven fact.
Briggs claims there is no statistical justification for claiming the time series shown in his Plait graph is evidence for global warming. My eyeball says otherwise and my eyeball is skilled at this kind of thing.
Briggs presents no statistical calculations to show that the straight line fit is wrong. He just tries to speculate it into doubt.