Note: if the name below is familiar to you it is because of this article from Monday. This will be a sticky post for a day or two, new stories will appear below this one– Anthony
Guest essay by Jonathan Abbott
Please allow me to recount the details of my personal path to CAGW scepticism. I have never previously found myself at odds with the scientific mainstream and at times it feels quite odd. Perhaps others here have similar experiences? I am curious to know how fellow-readers came to their current views. If some have gone from genuine scepticism to accepting CAGW, I would find that especially fascinating.
My own story begins at school in England in the early 80s. Between playing with Bunsen burners and iron filings, I remember being told that some scientists predicted that we would soon enter a new ice age. This sounded quite exciting but I never really thought it would happen; I was too young then to have seen any significant change in the world around me and it all seemed rather far-fetched. A nuclear war seemed far more likely. Soon enough the whole scare melted away.
I grew up into a graduate engineer with an interest in most branches of science but especially physics. I read the usual books by Sagan, Feynman and later Dawkins (whose The Ancestor’s Tale I simply can’t recommend highly enough). I also dipped into philosophy via Bertrand Russell. I like to think this reading helped build upon the basic capabilities for critical thinking my education had provided.
I suppose it was in the early 90s that I first noticed predictions of global warming and the associated dire warnings of calamities to come. Some of these emanated from the Met Office and so I knew should be treated with a pinch of salt but other sources included NASA, which I then personally still very much respected; despite the space shuttle evidently being the wrong concept poorly executed, their basic scientific expertise seemed unquestionable. In general I was looking forward to the warmer climate predicted for the UK, and assumed that the overall effects for the globe wouldn’t necessarily all be bad.
Now, being English I knew all about the vagaries of the weather, but the warnings about CAGW always seemed to be made in the most certain terms. Was it really possible to predict the climate so assuredly? The global climate must be an extremely complex system, and very chaotic. I had recently heard about financial institutions that were spending vast sums of money and picking the very best maths and programming graduates, but still were unable to predict the movements of financial markets with any confidence. Predicting changes to the climate must be at least as difficult, surely? I bet myself climate scientists weren’t being recruited with the sort of signing-on bonuses dangled by Wall Street. I also thought back to the ice age scare, which was not presented as an absolute certainty. Why the unequivocal certainty now that we would only see warming, and to dangerous levels? It all started to sound implausible.
The whole thing also seemed uncertain on the simple grounds of common sense. Could mankind really force such a fundamental change in our environment, and so quickly? I understood that ice ages could come and go with extreme rapidity, and that following the scare of my childhood, no one seriously claimed to be able to predict them. So in terms of previous natural variability, CAGW was demonstrably minor in scale. It seemed obvious that if natural variability suddenly switched to a period of cooling, there would be no CAGW no matter what the effect of mankind on the atmosphere. Even more fundamentally, how could anyone really be certain that the warming then taking place wasn’t just natural variability anyway? The reports I read assured me it wasn’t, but rarely in enough detail to allow me to decide whether I agreed with the data or not.
The other thing that really got me thinking was seeing the sort of people that would appear on television, proselyting about the coming tragedy that it would imminently become too late to prevent. Whether from charities, pressure groups or the UN, I knew I had heard their strident and political use of language, and their determination to be part of the Great Crusade to Save the World before. These were the CND campaigners, class war agitators and useful fools for communism in a new guise. I suddenly realised that after the end of the Cold War, rather than slinking off in embarrassed fashion to do something useful, they had latched onto a new cause. The suggested remedies I heard them espouse were always socialist in approach, requiring the installation of supra-national bodies, always taking a top-down approach and furiously spending other peoples’ money. They were clearly eager participants in an endless bureaucratic jamboree.
Now don’t get me wrong: a scientific theory is correct or not regardless of who supports it. But recognising the most vocal proponents of CAGW for what they were set alarm bells ringing, and made me want to investigate further. I had always been somewhat sympathetic towards Friends of the Earth but much less so towards Greenpeace, by that time obviously a front for luddite socialism and basically shamanistic in outlook. I had deep personal concerns about the environment, having seen reports of terrible industrial pollution in developing countries and the former Eastern Bloc. I had also sailed across the Atlantic twice in a small yacht, and seen for myself floating plastic debris hundreds of miles from land. (I also saw an ‘eco warrior’ yacht in Antigua, lived on by a crusading hippy and daubed with environmental slogans. It was poorly maintained and leaked far more oil into the water than any other boat present.)
So I was quite passionate about the environment, but my focus was on keeping it clean and safe for all life to live in. I wanted people to stop overfishing and manage fish stocks sensibly, I wanted agricultural land to produce the best long-term yields possible, to provide enough food without encroaching on wilderness and wild spaces. I wanted people everywhere to have clean air to breathe and water to drink. I had hoped that the CAGW crusade would somehow also lead to more urgent progress in fighting pollution, and the other environmental issues I cared about. If anything it did the reverse. Why the absolute fixation on reducing CO2 emissions, why was it taken for granted that this was the only way to proceed? Where was the public debate about the balance between prevention and mitigation? The CAGW protagonists always came up with solutions that were anti-industrial, anti-development and always, always required more public money. Where was the encouragement for inventors and entrepreneurs to discover and develop new technologies? And most of all, why oh why not spend some of the huge sums of money thrown at CO2 instead on getting effective pollution controls enacted in developing countries?
It had become quite clear to me that the BBC and similar media organisations would never even discuss whether the science underpinning CAGW was really robust. It had simply become a truism. An occasional doubting voice would be offered a sliver of airtime in the interests of supposed impartiality, but a proponent of CAGW would always be allowed the (much longer) last word. But, if NASA kept having to adjust their course calculations as the Voyager probes entered the outer reaches of the solar system (an utterly trivial problem compared to the complexities of the global climate), how could the science possibly be settled as claimed? Surely the great joy of science is in admitting ignorance, in taking a finely honed theory and sharpening it still further, or even better in realising a fundamental mistake and stepping aside onto a new path? The claimed certainty itself seemed unscientific.
Then in 2007 I saw a trailer on television for the forthcoming documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. I watched it excitedly, for here finally were people publicly addressing the science and the data, but drawing alternative conclusions to the mainstream. There was none of the usual hand-waving and appeals to trust the experts, who magically seemed to be the only doubt-free scientists in recorded history. The backlash against the program told its own story too, being mainly outraged appeals to authority and conscience.
Having recently become a regular user of the internet, I started digging around looking for more information and so, soon after he started it, I found Warren Meyer’s excellent web site climate-skeptic.com. Oh, the joy! Here were links to data I could see and evaluate myself; here was critical dissection of reports and papers accepted elsewhere without demur. From there, I moved onto WUWT, Bishop Hill, Climate Audit and all the other sites that have become part of my daily round of the internet whenever I have access. However late to the party compared with many regulars at WUWT, I could now see fully both sides of the argument.
When the Climategate emails were released, some further scales fell from my eyes. I had hitherto assumed that most of the most prominent scientists supporting CAGW were well intentioned but wrong, akin to those opposing the theory of continental drift. I have taken part in many lengthy email exchanges concerning technically complex projects, and instantly recognised familiar methods used by those playing the political and bureaucratic game, for whom the data is infinitely malleable in order to reach a pre-determined goal. I had fought against this kind of factual distortion myself.
Now at this point, I am sure some (perhaps many?) readers are thinking, ‘Great, an inside view of how someone becomes a believer in a conspiracy theory, perhaps I’ll base a research paper on this idiot’. My response is that like most people I have at times stumbled upon the real conspiracy theory nuts lurking on the internet. But on WUWT and other CAGW-sceptic sites criticism of the position of the website founder isn’t just tolerated but often encouraged. ‘Prove us wrong! Please! It would be fascinating!’ There are many articles and views published on WUWT that I treat with suspicion, or even downright disagree with, but it is all stimulating and usually well argued. Plus, I am an experienced professional engineer and know what real science looks like, and when people are misusing it as a smokescreen. Neil Armstrong was a great man, and most certainly did land on the moon. Right or wrong, WUWT is a site that considers real scientific issues.
So I now find myself wondering where we go from here. The global climate will continue to change, as it has always done, and although I tend to expect some cooling I am pretty agnostic about it. Nature will assuredly do its own thing. The CAGW scare is in the process of burning out, but I do not expect an outright or imminent collapse. I hope to see the deliberate manipulators of data punished, but doubt very much it will ever come to that. Whatever happens next, it will undoubtedly be interesting, and stimulate much discussion and widely varying viewpoints. This is good news, because it means that we are back to doing science.
Michael Palmer says at July 28, 2013 at 10:47 am…
You were interested in my summary of why people are sceptical which I split into 5 categories.
There is a 6th category that I don’t mention before as it has only one member – me. I ignored it is I assumed everyone thinks they are special and I’m no different. Yet on reflection it may become a larger group in a decade or so. Therefore I add it here:
6) Second generation sceptics who have had the science of cAGW as part of their basic academic make-up. They have had no period of doubt and discovery. They don’t instinctively doubt everything until they have checked it out like category 4.
I say “they” but in this blog it is just “me”. My father was a sceptic in 1984 (the year not the metaphor) so it would be expected that I am ahead of other second generation sceptics. This category, if it is real, may grow in number.
Al Gore’s book made me become suspicious of the CAGW idea straightaway. Then I began to poke around, and found out that nothing could be taken at face value, even proclamations from apparently expert organisations or bodies. Here are a few examples.
The manner in which data is presented can immediately colour a reader or listener’s perception. It’s often said that CO2 levels have increased by 40% since 1958 – but to give a meaningful picture, a concentration is far more useful. CO2 currently is increasing somewhere between one and two molecules in a million of other atmospheric gases (assayed dry) annually. That’s arguably a trivial increase. As I endlessly ask, where is the laboratory bench experiment which shows the effect of such a tiny increase in an artificial atmosphere, and at various concentrations of water vapour? Granted this is not the real atmosphere, but at least there would be a solid real-world reference point to work from, not endless model projections and calculations of the possible effects of a doubling. What other science bases so much on model ‘projections’?
CO2 has been measured at Mauna Loa in Hawaii since the late 1950s using a technique called infra-red spectroscopy. Measurements prior to that date were by the so-called ‘wet’ chemical methods. When I first found out about these and wanted to know more, I contacted the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre (CDIAC) in the USA. Their website proclaims that the CDIAC is “the primary climate-change and information centre of the US Department of Energy”. Yet their spokesman knew nothing of any methods of analysing CO2 levels prior to Mauna Loa!
Yet it turns out that this been done literally thousands of times. Ernst-Georg Beck has reviewed the data extensively, and his findings make for interesting reading. It would appear that our present day CO2 levels are not necessarily unprecedented. Interestingly, as pointed out by Ian Plimer (Heaven and Earth), the two methods have not been compared (i.e. validated) against one another (p416). He points out that previous peaks of CO2 levels occurred in 1825, 1857, and 1942 – the CO2 level in the latter year reaching 400ppm.
Then there’s the matter of the ice cores. The 280ppm ‘pre-industrial’ value is etched on the minds of all those who take an interest in CO2 levels. But can this be relied upon?
Having been 3000 feet down a mine, I have seen how even huge steel girders buckle under pressure. This set me thinking as to how air bubbles could possibly survive intact in ice cores. Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski’s ‘Climate Change: Incorrect Information on Pre-industrial CO2’ considers these pressure effects in detail. Essentially, his conclusion is that the ‘pre-industrial’ figure is too low.
The increase in CO2 post-Mauna is usually portrayed as an inexorable rise. However, as pointed out by meteorologist William James Burroughs in his book ‘Climate Change’, the rate has fluctuated dramatically (see p227). There were rapid growth rates in the late 1980s, and a marked slowing in the early 1990s. He refers to IPCC, 1995, Fig 2.2 to make the point. He concludes that ‘these fluctuations have not been explained but suggest complicated feedback mechanisms between short-term climatic variations (e.g. the ENSO) and the uptake of carbon in the biosphere.
Already, it can be seen that the measurement of levels of CO2 does not have such a straightforward history as might be imagined.
Another question which can be asked is ‘how much CO2 is there in the atmosphere, and how much of it is due to fossil fuel combustion?’
Professor Robert Carter in ‘Climate – the Counter Consensus’ cites the work of Norwegian geochemist Tom Segalstad, who has concluded that human emissions account for about 4% of the total. That’s 16 molecules in a million (16ppm, or parts per million) of all atmospheric gases. The current total for CO2 is 392ppm. Of course, the total tonnages look much more impressive – a CO2 total of 3000 billion tonnes (Gt), with the human contribution being 125Gt.
All this has taken quite a while to find out, and there’s the problem. Unless someone is interested and has the time, how can a member of the public decide what to think given so much shoddy and lazy media presentation about the subject?
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May I suggest you rephrase that? How about, “5) Those who see it as a lever to political power.”?
Right-wing, Left-wing don’t matter. It just happens that, right now, the Left has their hand on the lever. Politics is not the most most honest profession regardless of its bent.
Gunga Din says at July 28, 2013 at 12:32 pm
In response to my “5) Right-wingers who didn’t like the collectivist policies promoted in the name of AGW.”
You say,
I want to say “YES” because I think you are absolutely right.
But the problem is that I am reviewing this thread – and only this thread.
And on this thread it is only right-wingers who fall into category 5. So I must say “NO“.
Your suggestion is more general.
Your suggestion is, in theory (a theory I agree with), more true.
But your suggestion is not supported by this thread and so not justified within the scope of my review.
‘Doubting Rich’ wanted empirical evidence of positive feedback. In fact the increase in water vapor has been observed and is in line with model projections. See, for example, Dessler et al 2008.
http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfiles/229/Dessler_et_al_2008b.pdf
who concluded .. The existence of a strong and positive water-vapor feedback means that projected business-as-usual greenhousegas emissions over the next century are virtually guaranFteed to produce warming of several degrees Celsius. The only way that will not happen is if a strong, negative, and currently unknown feedback is discovered somewhere
in our climate system.
Gunga Din says at July 28, 2013 at 1:19 pm…
Will do. But he’s on holiday at the moment.
And sorry. I know you’re right but I can’t justify that belief from the evidence in scope.
When Climategate ‘broke’ I wondered what it was all about and started searching the internet. Within about fifteen minutes I found the phrase ‘the science is settled’. “How can science ever be settled?” I thought. “There is something funny going on here.” After researching various sites on the internet to try to ascertain the truth, I am totally unable to accept the CAGW theory.
Thomas Traill says:
July 28, 2013 at 10:17 am
“…1. Humans have caused an increase in CO2-levels from 280 to 400 ppm in the past 200 years… I am very confident of 1…”
*
Given that 95% (or is it 98%?) of CO2 comes from nature, humans cannot be responsible alone for this increase. It’s happening naturally. Even if we are responsible for 2% or 5% of that increase, it’s still happening naturally. Every living thing on the planet is a carbon-based life form. We all emit CO2, all life, not just humans. If there were no people at all on the planet, CO2 concentrations would still be going up. It’s a natural cycle. Nature is not static.
If one is over fifty, say, he probably is less likely than a youngster to trust anything computer generated; let alone, doomsday, “The end is near“, crapola. When I was young, I saw people walking the streets wearing sandwich board signs prophesying doomsday. These alarmists were doing the same thing Al Gore and his ilk does today. Only Gore uses PowerPoint instead of the sandwich board. It’s the same thing though.
The Man-Made Global Warming scam/lie/hoax becomes evident when one looks at the narrative/language that spews from the alarmists:
Only evil and suffering can come from a warmer Earth. Constant bad-weather-from-bad-karma misanthropic guilt trip doomsday warnings
Fossil fueled, Western style prosperity must stop. This is the real agenda. Saving the Earth has little to do with it.
I say, why can’t it be? : “Congratulations children, The Energy sources that fuel our economies and our prosperity, give us long life and comfort, these fossil fuels will also cause our planet to warm gently, about 2C degrees over the next century. What luck!
With the warmth and extra CO2 for plant life, millions of acres of tundra will become forests. Millions of acres of frozen steppe will become arable. Starvation will end. Prosperity will reach even the poorest people. We must keep searching for and burning oil and coal so we can improve our climate and prosper. Humanity will become wealthy. With this wealth we can preserve habitat for animals, protect the rain forest. We will clean the oceans and the land. Our future is bright. We are entering the age of abundance. “
The Earth is not warming of late though. Too bad.
Not a scientist, and it was my general skepticism of modern “science”, along with an inherent understanding that modern whacko-environmentalism was the new home of socialism and CAGW was just further manifestation of their desire to control people’s lives, that kept me from ever falling for the CAGW scare to begin with.
I say I am a skeptic of science in general. By that, I mean a skeptic of junk science, which CAGW falls into. We were told; caffeine will kill you…..oh, wait, it may be beneficial…..bran will make you live longer…..er, wait, doesnt do much really….liquor is bad bad bad…..wait, wine may be good for you….and on and on. Tack on the second hand smoke junk science, and the scare tactics the anti-tobacco lobby has heaped on us (millions die from second hand smoke every year, huh? Show me a body, with incontrovertible evidence the person died from second hand smoke….just one), the alar scare starring Meryl Streep sobbing before CONgress “what are we doing to our children”, which it turned out was…nothing. You get the point.
(As an aside, I’m not promoting the tobacco companies with the second hand smoke bit, just pointing out that the second hand smoke scare is based on so called science that’s equally as shabby as climate science)
As with everything, follow the money, or at least remember that everyone is motivated by something, the three biggest motivators being sex, money, power. If you understand human nature, and also understand that just because someone wears a white lab coat with a name badge starting with Dr. or ending with PhD it doesnt mean they are imune from injecting their political or moral world view into their work, it isn’t hard to believe the stories of turf wars, hidden science, made up science and plain old fraud that seemingly is systemic within climate “science”. It’s as old as mankind itself.
Wow, what a thread. Took me three long sittings to get through it all. My turn.
I have always “Zigged”, when everyone else “zagged”. No technical background at all. English Lit. Uni grad, 6th of 8 children. Dealing with my brothers and sisters growing up honed my internal BS meter to keen rasors edge.
Post on a rugby union site and used to watch the climate change “sh*tfights from the sidelines, followed some of the links to Sks, RC and here.
Only one of the three didn’t set the alarm bells of my BS meter off.
Guess which one that was.
I now spend more time here than there.
Anthony et al Thanks for all of your good work
M Courtney says: “on this thread it is only right-wingers who fall into category 5.”
Category “5) Right-wingers who didn’t like the collectivist policies promoted in the name of AGW.”
The statement can ONLY apply to a single group of people.
If you remove ‘When a right-winger’ from the sentence even you fit the category.
“Those who didn’t like the collectivist policies promoted in the name of (C)AGW.”
You might want to open your horizons a little
Late to the party – I wanted to read all the comments first. Thanks Jonathan for starting this wonderful thread; it should be a gold-mine for psychologists if they have any real dedication to academic integrity.
I’ve written in other threads about my own experience, but will repeat it here for the sake of convenience. I am a historian of science, and my specialty is the history of fisheries biology. I had the spectacular horror of seeing the world’s once most prolific ground-fish fishery (cod, haddock etc) collapse just when I was completing my dissertation, which focused on the Canadian development of fisheries science. I had been following the fortunes of the fisheries, which I already believed were in a profoundly bad condition based on newspaper reports (this was before the Internet) of fishermen demanding a moratorium on the offshore cod fisheries. Yet fisheries biologists at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans kept saying everything was fine -their models showed that the fish stocks were recovering from the international over-fishing that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. They did not explain the basis of their models and projections (it turned out the data was largely based on commercial fish catches by sonar-equipped trawlers that had been scooping up the last concentrations of cod.) Since then I have had a profound distrust of models.
I have to admit I was mildly convinced of global warming to begin with – very vivid memories of the summer of 1988 in Toronto with no air-conditioning in a south-facing apartment listening to ‘hot times’ beer ads on the TV in the living room while working on my studies in the bed-room. Living in Canada made one rather hopeful it was all true. However, when the issue re-heated and Kyoto was proposed as the solution, I realized the entire exercise was a scam, since the solutions would do nothing to removing carbon dioxide and everything to penalize advanced economies. I was also very concerned that the poor in all economies would suffer. I also read Ronald Bailey’s Ecoscam at about that time, which gave me a political context and framework to understand why scientists were using environmental issues for political ends. Of course, as a historian of science am was already well-aware of science as a human endeavour, with all that implies, including ideological agendas.
Also, for me as a historian, confirmation that CAGW was apolitical and not a scientific exercise came with the Stalinist attempts to erase the Medieval Warm Period. How could something that was historically non-controversial be the spur for so much revisionism and nastiness? I was delighted when Steve McIntyre took on Mann’s hockey-stick graph because of this concern, and when I finally began to use the Internet for more than e-mail and direct historical research, around 2006, I was delighted when I discovered Climate Depot, and quickly thereafter WUWT and Climate Audit, and slightly later Bishop Hill. I felt a sense of relief as I returned to WUWT with increasing frequency, delighted to be learning so much from this website – especially Bob Tisdale’s threads on ocean warming trends, and the solar threads – and to be able to feel I was among friends. Previously, my main outlet had been ranting at my hapless family, and my main life-line was the National Post’s occasional series on climate skeptics and articles my McIntyre and McKitrick.
I deeply resent the need I have professionally to remain anonymous here. I keep hoping the scam will blow up in a spectacular fashion, and that I can come out of the closet – or at least say what I really think when this issue is brought up – before I retire.
I, like others here, wish to express the hope that Richard Courtney will return.
I hope you don’t me taking up so much space here to share how I became sceptical.
I am an engineer too; over 25 years in advanced product research and development. I am also a very keen outdoors person spending most of my holidays trying to leave the modern world behind exploring remote places and mountains and I feel very strongly about the way we are destroying the natural world. Through my interest in the natural world and survival and my engineering background I am very conscious how important it is to understand our world that we live and try and survive in. In engineering and survival if we get our facts and understanding wrong we could be in serious trouble. I do not know enough to say if the CO2 AGW theory is wrong or right but I am very sceptical, it doesn’t make sense to me and I’m extremely concerned that it could be wrong putting the science back decades and seriously hindering any chances of getting to the truth in the near future.
My climate scepticism started in the mid to late 1980’s. I love sciences and during my childhood in the 70’s I was absorbing lots of scientific information from textbooks and the media. When I was first aware of the CO2 AGW concern I assumed it was right and couldn’t understand why others weren’t taking it more seriously. I realised I didn’t understand the relevant science well enough because I couldn’t explain to others why they should be more concerned so I tried to find out more. The more I tried to understand the CO2 AGW theory the less sense it made. Just because it’s warming and possibly relatively warm compared to recent history and CO2 increasing doesn’t prove CO2 caused it or justify invoking the precautionary principle if that becomes the justification for letting wrong scientific conclusions and recommendations continue – if we get the science wrong and fail to correctly understand what is or isn’t actually happening we could be in an even more dangerous situation and fail to recognise or predict it and adapt in time. E.g. (as a purely hypothetic example) what if the Sun is a major player and this unusually inactive period causes different weather patterns which disrupts agriculture, animal and plant life, economies, results in more extremes and advancing glaciers. As scientists/engineers we will have let society down.
In my engineering work I enjoy working with a lot of clever people on complex products and problems and you have to get to the truth (with never enough resources or time!) or your products fail and you go out of business. You need to try and develop the ability to be able to take a reality check and realise when a clever theory is just that and not the real world. I became very sceptical of complicated theories; theories that have to explain away lots of evidence that at first glance seems to contradict it (I prefer to be more hands on or observational and not to get too reliant on theory, and usually the real answer is surprisingly simple). Only the clever guys can explain the complex theory, you can’t argue with them and given a bit of time they can find a seemingly plausible answer for almost anything they need convincing themselves and everyone else they must be right, anyone who tries to pull their theory apart is made to look stupid. Such theories can stand up to thorough theoretical checking so in a way they are not wrong, but they are wrong.
Science sometimes finds out that its previous view was wrong but since the 1980’s to me this seems to be happening suspiciously often with climate science, that adds to my scepticism. Because that rewriting is spread over more than 30 years I think few people are aware of the implications or are not noticing it happening, I think if we could condense those 30 years or more of ‘discovery’ and rewriting what they said earlier into a presentation lasting a few hours maybe the penny would drop for a lot more people.
When I discovered Realclimate it added to my scepticism – they didn’t seem to be discussing/explaining/dealing with scientific issues the way I’ve become used to working with others in ‘getting to the truth’ in engineering – when I would try and follow the leading climate scientists arguments I would frequently have this uneasy feeling like when you’re watching a magician, a slight of hand that could convince a lot of people but made alarm bells ring in my mind.
My instinct would be to try to understand/model the basic thermodynamics and do a simple energy balance. But as I think about it it soon gets very complicated. I have no idea how climate models work so I should not really be commenting, however I thought I heard a scientist say the models do not include the physics of CO2, only an assumed forcing or sensitivity!? I could not believe what I was hearing! In other words, and I could be wrong but the models don’t appear to be built from first principles around the laws of physics/thermodynamics in the way I had assumed they would. I’m probably missing something or showing my ignorance of physics/thermodynamics but I don’t understand why we talk about sensitivity to CO2 (I’m not sure it’s sensible to define it as a number or simple equation?), or global/average things; they strike me as meaningless and misleading – a world where everywhere is, say 15degC, 5m/s wind speed, x% humidity, xmm/hr, rain, ymb pressure etc is a totally different one thermodynamically from one with the same averages but massive variations from one time/place to another. Even if we did build a model up from first principles I’m still struggling to understand where the envelope of the model would be – do we include just the sea surface, or how far down do we go? How far down (e.g. underground) do we go with snow and ice, rocks, forests, low vegetation when including heat content, conduction, radiation, etc, changes of state, work done, winter snow over warm ground, ice over water, etc. AND it strikes me the system has so many degrees of freedom; so many different ways it could use/convert/store energy that we haven’t got a chance – for example this current rather large discrepancy between modelled and measured temperatures is being blamed on some as yet unexplained mechanism by which the heat is supposedly going into the oceans: I’m struggling to buy that particular argument whilst still buying the rest of their modelling, but that’s the sort of potential freedom the system has to do its own thing that I mean. So what I’m getting to is I’m wondering if the system is so complex compared to our current understanding that to just do an energy balance; try and measure energy in and energy out, or thinking in terms of losing or gaining heat or warming or cooling is a waste of time because it has so many freedoms to decide what to do with that energy and where is the envelope of this system (how far into our planet, oceans, crust etc), hence it’s probably confusing us by trying to model it and concentrate on temperature or average/global measures, or sensitivities. Warmers and sceptics can argue and theorise about sensitivity, temperatures etc, but I wonder if that’s really going to get us anywhere.
I’m wondering if, instead of thinking global/average, temperatures, sensitivity, climate models etc we should be analysing weather/jet streams and changes in weather patterns etc. A year without extremes may have the same averages as a year with extremes, but is totally different. Factors on/in/outside our planet could affecting the thermodynamic behaviour which affects the weather, measuring an average for the planet (e.g. temperature) might show, as a result of the changing system/weather a warming, but some places warmed, some cooled, some used energy/heat in a different way and trying to plot the usual suspects/drivers – greenhouse effect, volcanoes, solar activity etc verses average temperature, say, is not going to be very meaningful, perhaps instead we should be looking at some measure of the weather or thermodynamic system verses potential drivers.
I’m surprised the rest of science is not asking more probing questions. In engineering we have procedures and independent audits (if we fail to maintain certification we would probably lose our customers), as an example it sounds to me like the paper trail, archiving of raw data, methods etc to allow independent verification of their work, for example the hockey stick, was probably inadequate and I’m surprised the rest of science let them get away with it. Similarly the thermometer network I’m surprised they did not themselves require an audit or the rest of science did not require an audit for both the paper trail (station history) and siting of the thermometers etc – how do they know what the data is that they are analysing and making very important conclusions with? They are investing a lot of their work on the results of the analysis of that raw data.
At 4:29 PM on 28 June, Paul in UK had written:
You’re not “taking up so much space” at all. You’re addressing issues pertinent to first principles of investigation and analysis, and on these none of us should ever lose focus.
I was first taught about the Greenhouse Effect in my Environmental Science degree course at the University of Lancaster in the early 1970s. I have spent my entire career working as a Geoscientist. The more Geoscience I study the greater the inconsistencies I find in the theory that atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations control the climate.
For example during the Carboniferous Visean the major Gondwana Continental Glaciation occurred at the South Pole. Geological field studies of the marine deltaic Yoredale strata in Yorkshire showed the presence of cyclothems, repeated patterns of sedimentation for which the preferred geological explanation is ice-cap controlled global eustatic sea-level variations. This conclusion was reached before the modern theory of continental reconstruction was accepted and the Carboniferous glacial deposits of the southern continents were linked together in the combined paleo-continent of Gondwanaland.
Clearly the cyclothems show that the planet was experiencing Ice-house atmospheric conditions in the Carboniferous, however the Carboniferous was also a time of marine sapropel deposition in deep sea marine shales associated with warm dense bottom water anoxia. It therefore appears that in the Carboniferous planetary Ice-house world and Green-house world ocean water conditions occurred at the same time.
But the Carboniferous was a long time ago and the world has changed since then. True; so ask how it is possible under current low carbon dioxide atmospheric conditions for the modern Red Sea Bottom Water (RSBW) to have a year round temperature of +21.7C and a salinity of 40.6 psu, which means that the RSBW has a density of 1028.59 kg/m3. By contrast modern Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) has a temperature of -0.8C and a peak salinity of 34.7 psu. This means that the coldest sea water on the planet, which has a density of 1027.89 kg/m3, is less dense than Red Sea Bottom Water. In a straight contest between these two marine waters the Red Sea Bottom Water would win and the deeps of the ocean would be filled with warm oxygen poor bottom water from the tropics and not cold oxygenated water from the polar seas.
The implication is that tropical seas can create warm dense bottom water irrespective of atmospheric gas conditions. In the Carboniferous the waters of the world ocean were filled with warm tropical and anoxia prone bottom water producing the abundant organic carbon found in the deep marine shales of the Culm, yet at the same time the Gondwana Ice-cap controlled sea-level variation and produced the observed shallow water cyclothems. Both Green-house and Ice-house conditions occurred at the same time. There is no paradox here; the truth is that it is the oceans which control world climate and not the atmosphere.
At 4:42 PM on 28 July, Philip Mulholland had written:
Say rather that the oceans have greater effect upon global climate than does the atmosphere. When we’re speaking of “control,” the principal factors are extraterrestrial – chiefly solar.
At any rede, there is no statistically significant role played by anthropogenic increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide content as the result of the purposeful combustion of petrochemical fuels, and therefore no possible way in which the political machinations of the Watermelon alarmists could make any impact whatsoever upon “man-made global climate change.”
“If some have gone from genuine scepticism to accepting CAGW, I would find that especially fascinating.”
It is very interesting that almost all conversions have been the other way. In fact I don’t know of anyone who was once a skeptic and became an alarmist. In my own case, seven years ago I invested the time to read the case for strong AGW, including IPCC reports. I was flabbergasted at the weakness of it and the presence of obvious finagling and omissions in some of the papers and chapters.
It was a life changing experience because it put me on notice that there may be other scientific sacred cows out there that are false. It is now a voyage of discovery.
First, I’d like to thank Anthony and all the WUWT contributors for providing an engaging and informative forum on climate issues! I’ve been visiting this site for several years after retiring as a research materials engineer in the aerospace sector. My knowledge of climate science remains limited, but my materials engineering and modeling experience has taught me to be risk averse, humble when confronted by a multiplicity of complex, interacting, competing physical mechanism involving a range of length scales and time scales. . . whether attempting to model behavior using, statistical methods, phenomenology, or using physically-based methods. Rather than expounding on this further, let me summarize the main reasons I’m skeptical about CAGW.
(1) Proclamations that “The Science is Settled” seems to be a red herring. Yes many of the mechanisms contributing to climate behavior may be reasonably well understood when studied in isolation under laboratory controlled conditions. However, understanding and modeling such ideal isolated scientific mechanisms is the easy part. . . the key to progressively building climate understanding is to establish the relationships and associated uncertainties among mechanisms using the strategies and tools used to predict the behavior and performance of a complex aeronautical machine (whether by data or model). My experience tells me that typically academics and those that view themselves as “scientists” have limited training, experience, or interest in systems engineering tools and research.
(2) Aerospace design and materials engineers quickly learn to question both data and modeling results particularly when confronted by a new material, design concept, or manufacturing process. This risk aversion stems from (a) professional responsibility (given that carelessness can lead to injury, loss-of-life, and the destruction of costly aircraft), (b) rigorous design engineering practices and risk averse management oversight, and (3) review and acceptance by regulatory and certification authorities (e.g., FAA). However, CAGW advocates often appear to be cavalier, seemingly unfettered by any skeptical oversight by anyone or group empowered to seriously review, question, or set standards or requirements for data gathering or model development. This despite that CAGW, if pursued politically to the extreme, could have enormous, societal, economic, and human impact globally.
(3) Engineering groups (e.g., American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Computational Solid Mechanics) have established recommended practices for verifying and validating computational models. Maybe I’m wrong, but I see no evidence that there is any systematic discipline-wide effort to do the same for climate studies and modeling.
(4) It strikes me that climate models involve a fair level of calibration. Yet it’s well know that calibrated models have limited extrapolation power. This appears particularly dangerous given that CAGW advocates are projecting unprecedented climate changes that differ significantly from regimes included in climate model hind casts.
(5) My industrial experience taught me that unquestioning, good-boy rain-makers and engineering politicians are sometimes the most dangerous type of engineer of all. . . for the most fundamental reason. . . you can’t trust them. . . and too often they cause harm.
Again, Anthony thanks for a great climate web site!
I’m an infantryman, not a scientist, and my grades in calculus, chemistry, and physics were, let’s say on the up slop of the curve not the down slope, if you know what I mean. However, I grew up as a farm boy in the midwest of the united states. My experience is much the same as yours, I noticed the political language, the certainty, the religious fervor, and most of all, the absence of any real reliance on the scientific method that I had been taught in school (that much I did retain).
At 6:48 PM on 28 July, J. Locke had written:
It’s not surprising that a ground-pounder should be grounded. Every field training exercise (FTX) upon which a serving soldier embarks is a nose-rubbing experience of empiricism in which the need for congruence between the manuals and the real world is driven home.
With regard to “the political language, the certainty, the religious fervor” of the climate catastrophists, you obviously experienced what I like to call a Cyrano de Bergerac moment in your assessment of these specimens:
In the 1970’s I worked at a small local ski area, I litteraly skied to work. This was about the time that scientists were being alarmists about a coming ice-age (they can deny that all the want, I was there). Then a few years later the ski area was closed due to a warming climate, so much for a coming Ice-age! Later after being in the Army in a Germany with uncharecteristicaly warm muddy winters, I went to college and studied a fair amount of science and computer science and learned enough about science and what computers can and can’t do, to be highly sceptical of the claims of AGW. Even with my formal training and after the prevoius false claims of comeing ice-age, I was looking into the AGW and just about the time I was starting to think that there might be something to it, Climategate broke out. Climategate lead me to believe that climatology is not worthy of the title science.
Philip Mulholland says:
July 28, 2013 at 4:42 pm
I agree it’s the oceans, although the positions of & connections among the continents can influence oceanic circulation patterns. And in the case of the Pleistocene glaciations, orbital mechanics & the Earth’s wobbles.
Noblesse Oblige says:
July 28, 2013 at 5:17 pm
“… I was flabbergasted at the weakness of it … It was a life changing experience because it put me on notice that there may be other scientific sacred cows out there that are false.”
—
Amen. Plenty of them — a whole thundering herd of sacred cows, although none of those I can think of is quite as politically charged and foisted on the public with the same kind of intense, relentless propaganda. But it is very common for groups of scientists to gang together and promote a “new field” of research, make pie-in-the-sky promises to the public about curing cancer and whatnot in order to funnel a disproportionate amount of research dollars their way. It has become a way of life for many, and is on the whole very detrimental to science and to society.
At first I believed the global warming siren song and growing up in the southern coast of Sicily I was for a warmer climate and not too fund of cold climate but as I researched the pros and cons I became aware of the increasing demonizing of those who disagreed I became more and more disgusted with the mud slinging by the warmists and their more doomsday predictions. To put it in a more plain way not only I smelled a rat but a whole plague of political liars who would say and do anything to impose their nefarious agenda and leave us poor and shivering in the dark just as is being done to the pensioners in Great Britain who have to chose between eating or heating resulting in the doubling and tripleling of the death rate of pensioners. A truly demonic agenda by those who were elected to serve the people who voted for them! Betrayal would be also a way to describe their action!
Golden;
Your “bullock” list is “bollocks”. A bullock is a young castrated bull. “Bollocks” is a vulgar Brit expression for “claptrap”, “junk” etc., probably referring to the discarded parts of the poor bullocks. 🙂
;p
My moment of revelation came a few years ago when Prof. Nir Shaviv posted some comments on an Internet forum, proposing his theory about the connection between the sun’s activity and Eearth climate.
It set me off reading on the Web where very quickly I found WUWT.
The rest is history.