Yesterday, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) published a letter yesterday to U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, admonishing him for having the temerity to doubt that carbon dioxide is the “primary driver” of global warming.
Here is the text of the letter.
Source: https://www.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/about-ams/ams-position-letters/letter-to-doe-secretary-perry-on-climate-change/ (PDF)
Here are a few of my thoughts.
The AMS, in their letter, say skepticism is welcome:
In the interview you also mentioned that it should be quite acceptable to be a skeptic about aspects of the science. We agree, and would add that skepticism and debate are always welcome and are critically important to the advancement of science.
Yet, the very letter they sent contradicts this, suggesting that there is no debate nor room for skepticism about carbon dioxide being the primary driver of temperature change.
The fundamental problem of our knowledge boils down to the sample size. We only have about 100 or so years of temperature records that are worth anything and even the most recent records on all that good because they’re terribly polluted by the infrastructure of human existence itself. And further our understanding of atmospheric and oceanic cycles is even more limited in time than the case of global temperature data.
If you were to line up our period of first-hand scientific knowledge of Earth’s processes, against the period of humanity’s intelligence, it would just be a small speck on the timeline. To assume we have certainty in knowledge about Earth’s processes, when new processes are still be discovered, is pure folly.
Even today, we are discovering more about our atmosphere than we knew 30 years ago in June 1988 when Dr. James Hansen first declared it a problem, and there are studies that show that recent record breaking warmth, such as a paper just published in Nature, Yao et al. Distinct global warming rates tied to multiple ocean surface temperature changes. covered here on WUWT.
For the AMS to admonish Perry that there’s no room for debate on Carbon Dioxide as being the primary driver, is essentially to deny the process of science itself. Science is often right, and also often wrong, but just as often, it is self-correcting. If global warming hadn’t become such an entangled and messy social and political issue, it’s likely that science would have done some levels of self-correction on the issue already.
For example, it was once believed that the Earth’s plates did not move, until plate tectonics came along. Alfred Wegener proposed continental drift in 1912, but it took until the 1960’s for it to become generally accepted, when a drastic expansion of geophysical research, driven by the cold war, produced evidence that reopened and eventually settled the debate.¹ Science self-corrected, but it took decades because scientists are often reluctant to embrace change which threatens the validiity of their own work. It was also generally believed that stress caused stomach ulcers, until a clinician, exasperated by lack of attention to his pointing out that the real cause was the bacterium Heliobacter Pylorii infecting the stomach lining², had to prove it against the consensus, and drank a bacterial cocktail and developed an ulcer himself. He won the Nobel prize for defying that consensus³.
Science that fails to account for the possibility of being wrong is of no virtue.
The AMS should lead in science by setting an example, by showing that even in the face of overwhelming consensus on an issue, there must be room for doubt, and thus room for self-correcting science. It only takes one finding in science to refute consensus, no matter whether it’s 97%, 99%, or 100%. Science is not infallible.
Anthony Watts
1. http://www.nature.com/news/earth-science-how-plate-tectonics-clicked-1.13655
2. http://discovermagazine.com/2010/mar/07-dr-drank-broth-gave-ulcer-solved-medical-mystery
3. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2005/press.html
Note: about ten minutes after publication the article was updated to correct a spelling error, add an omitted phrase, and add references.
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Their arguement is politics and not science. Based upon the paleoclimate record and the model studies that have been performed one can conclude that the climate change we have been experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which Mankind has no control. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate. There is plenty of scientific rational to support the idea that the climate sensivity of CO2 is zero.. The radiant greenhouse effect upon which the AGW conjecture is based has not been observed anywhere in the solar system hence the AGW conjecture is science fiction. If CO2 really affected climate then one would expect that the increase in CO2 over the past 30 years would have caused at least a measureable increase in the dry lapse rate in the troposphere but such has not happened.
The GHG water vapor works every clear night to limit how cool it gets, but it also eleminates almost all the effect from the increase in co2 with negative feedback.
What happens when heresy is actually correct? That is the question!
If you are unlucky they hang you for it.
“What happens when heresy is actually correct? That is the question!”
A bigger question may be what happens when warmistas are correct?
The answer is “No one nows…it has never happened!”
The funniest jokes are the ones that are true!
micro6500 June 23, 2017 at 1:36 pm
If you’re the correct heretic Bruno, the Catholic Church burns you alive.
If you’re the correct heretic Servetus, John Calvin burns you alive.
Hanging is clearly too good for heretics in Christianity.
The original argument that led many to accept primacy of CO2 was the correlation displayed by Mann’s fraudulent hockey stick bar graph. So now these meteorologists (who are NOT climatologists) claim that despite a lack of correlation, CO2 remains the primary driver of
warming. What warming? The history of science is the history of stmbles and bumbles and consensus opinions that are eventually shredded. To have a true consensus, the prevalent science’s theories must be near perfect in their ability to predict. It’s surprising how many very good predictive sciences, such as physics and astronomy, are riddled with non-consensus thinking.
You would think that meteorologists, of all people, would never make any claims about predictability. But NOOOOOOO!!!!!!! ………….
Maybe when we have the warmistas licked, and the CAGW fraud is dead and buried, we can turn our attention to some other ideas for which there is no direct evidence, ad hoc speculations masquerade as “The Truth”, and yet lots of apparently well educated people believe it uncritically.
Dark energy and dark matter come to mind.
I will state up front: The following is the best that I have been able to find — errors are certainly always a possibility under such circumstances. Do any of you have what you believe to be better information?
The best information that I have been able to find indicates that the atmosphere contains 75 to 100 gaseous H2O molecules (water vapor) for every CO2 molecule that is present in the atmosphere. Do I have that close to correct?
The average H2O content of the troposphere is 10,000 to 30,000 ppm (1-3%), ranging from 40,000 in the moist tropics to just a few ppm over the polar deserts. So taking the lower average, there are about 25 H2O molecules per CO2 molecule, but 100 times as many in the wettest air. CO2’s absorption bands also largely overlap with water vapor’s, so CO2 isn’t a pimple on the posterior of the major GHG, H2O.
There is less water vapor in the stratosphere.
You might expect that a fourth molecule of CO2 per 10,000 dry air molecules would have an effect over the polar deserts, where H2O is scarce in the cold air, but in fact this hasn’t been observed. There has been no warming at the South Pole since records have been kept there.
Air at a dew point of 86F contains nearly 5% water (4.86 %) IIRC.
Not sure if this is by weight or by mole fraction.
If by weight, it is even more molecules than one in twenty since water is so much lighter than air.
No?
The wet tropics rarely average that temperature globally, with half the planet in the dark. Although nights don’t cool off in the moist tropics, due to all that water in the air.
Locally H2O could be well above 4%, but that’s the figure usually given for the average in that climatic zone, which covers a lot of the earth. The polar deserts are much smaller.
100 years of data?
You are way to generous. Prior to the satellite era, there is not enough usable data to say anything meaningful about the climate.
Make that 40 years of data.
On a global basis I think that’s an accurate statement. The idea that we can talk about 1 or 2 decimal places of temperature change on a global basis for ANY time period is laughable hubris. Only liars or idiots would say anything different.
True dat!
The number of significant figures they use would have gotten a very low grade (definitely failing, maybe even a big fat round zero) in any science class I ever took, and I took a whole lot of them.
It is really unbelievable.
I’m not quite sure what has happened to Keith Seitter from the days he was a Professor of Meteorology at the then University of Lowell-Massachusetts. As a student of his in the mid-eighties, I didn’t think he was in the camp of either global warming nor cooling. He wasn’t even a believer that the ozone hole was a result of CFCs, as being pushed in the media at the time. He was a good, level-headed professor from which I learned a lot over those few years. I doubt he would’ve endorsed this type of letter back then. I’m not sure what has changed with him over the years; but, I don’t like the direction the AMS has gone under him. I voted my non-support by not renewing my AMS membership a long time ago.
The AMS is only seen via MSM.
We know who owns the MSM.
They’re NOT skeptics.
AMS must toe the MSM line.
That’s where their bread is buttered.
AMS: American Meteorological Society
MSM: Main Stream Media
You forgot this one:
Not Skeptics: Not Scientists
“Science that fails to account for the possibility of being wrong is of no virtue.”
No.
“Science” that fails to account for the possibility of being wrong is not science.
The AMS letter seems to have been written for the benefit of our
beloved Senator Al Franken to counter-balance the embarrassing,
laughable and seemingly unmentionable testimony on climate
science Mike Mann offered “under oath” a few weeks ago.
https://thinkprogress.org/al-franken-vs-rick-perry-climate-science-69fbc39619d4
Senator Franken tried to brow-beat Energy Secretary Rick Perry with
the letter’s contents as if the information was a codicil that came down
the mountain with Moses.
I can’t tell if Senator Al “…he only took tips” Franken was manipulated
to proffer the letter at the hearing, or if the AMS was responding to a
request from Franken for ammunition to feed the media and the
greens.
Pure politics !
The AMS has become political, I have been a Meteorologist for over 30 years, and I am the biggest denier of AGW, and all the Meteorologist’s I know feel the same. The whole theory is ridiculous, and damn near every observation shows this.
“..The rapid change in climate in the last half century is human induced..”
I have begun to as the question as to what climate changer are they talking about.
The alarmists have claimed:
More hurricanes which has not happened
More tornadoes which has not happened
Acceleration of Sea level which has not happened since seal level rise has been steady per gauges
Streets in Manhattan under sea water
Strife for Polar Bears which has been disproved with solid evidence.
Arctic ice free by now which has not happened
Himalayan ice disappearing (yes, the IPPC included that with zero peer review)
Droughts which have recently ended and have been normal over the years (California)
Seas becoming acidic
Crop failures
Extinction of Penguins
Kids will not know what snow is
Ski lift closures
And many more http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htme
Of course there has been modest warming since the late 1800’s when the earth was brutally cold, why do they start at that time rather than the medieval warm period?
The AMS throws out the climate change term, of course over history climate does change, like ice ages. What climate change are they claiming in the last 50 years which is only 2/3 of my lifetime?
Where is the claimed rapid climate change (AMS claim)?
If temperature change were significant why do they have to manipulate the data?
Obviously they are sufficiently well educated in these issues to know shit from shinola…and yet they stomp purposefully through the whole mountain of horseshit.
There is only one explanation: They are lying liars who lie, and they are telling big whoppers and they know it.
Good point. I always said that the so called “scientists” would possibly have some credibility if they debunked the many obvious wild claims by Al Gore, instead of keeping silent apparently motivated by greed or “the end justifies the means”. Where is the integrity never speaking out about hockey sticks, climategate, karlization, data adjustments, other fake claims, etc.
“Even the most recent records { on } all that good because they’re terribly polluted by the infrastructure”
{ on } = Aren’t “
Aww, they forgot to annex the image summarising more than thousand words
http://thepeoplescube.com/Future/images/GlobalWarmingConsensusGraph.gif
Who is Keith L Seitter to lecture anyone really? According to the AMS webite, the President-Elect Dr. Roger Wakimoto is in charge of the massive AMS bureaucracy. Keith has five isolated boxes in the top left corner.
https://www.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/about-ams/ams-organization-and-administration/organizational-chart/
Yeah, these fools – along with the thirty or so international scientific institutions that explicitly endorsed the ICCP’s assessments – should stick to politics, and leave the science to the politicians. Er… hang on…
Yeah, dvaytw! And we ought to punish Russia for putting out that hacked climate model that tracks observations!
Energy Sec Perry astutely and concisely stated ocean heat drives air temps. He’s right:
http://climate4you.com/images/AllInOneQC1-2-3GlobalMonthlyTempSince1979.gif
http://climate4you.com/images/HadSST3+SST2%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1979%20With37monthRunningAverage%20WithARGO.gif
What drove the warming of the ocean? Not CO2. Not MM emissions.
From the graphs alone (eyeballing, using the top edge of my screen), three things jump out from looking at the period 1979 to about 2014 (avoiding the end period ENSO and Blob stuff):
1) The surface temperature anomalies run a trend of less than 1 degree C per century; from about – 0.05 to about + 0.25 degree C over the 33 year period.
2) The SST temperature anomalies run a trend of less than 1 degree C per century; from about 0.05 to about 0.35 degree C over the 33 year period.
3) ARGO seems to run about 0.2 degree C lower than SST; from about 0.15 to about 0.35 degree C.
Whatever drove ocean temperatures, they are not in any way alarming.
After several email exchanges with Seitter, it’s clear that his position is that climate science has been settled by peer review is immutable and that he seems unwilling to acknowledge that peer review can be flawed, especially when its being shaped by money, politics and fear.
He seems to deny that the science is controversial which further bolsters my observation that the first line of defense warmists have against skeptics is to deny that a controversy exists which provides the rationalization to avoid having to examine and explain contraindicative theory, data and analysis.
The second line of defense is claim that work like mine and many other skeptics isn’t ‘peer reviewed’ and thus deserves no consideration. This is bizarre since most of my work consists of falsifying a high sensitivity and as far as I’m concerned, falsification tests are peer review of a hypothesis. So since when is peer review subject to peer review itself? The burden of proof is on the purveyor of a hypothesis to either adequately explain away the failed tests of its predictions or modify the theory. But then again, as we all know, the scientific method has been absent from climate science since the inception of the IPCC.
I’ve showed you my work. I sent it to Joe Bastardi, got a response like “Yeah, I can see that”, then “but it’s never been about the science”
Or something like that.
But, he’s right. What I found shows water vapor compensating every night to limit how cool it gets, and Co2 little to no impact on Min T. That’s why it’s been so hard to measure sensitivity, if co2 goes up, water vapor just condenses a little less water, as temps regulate to dew points.
Fantastic, co2isnotevil! “Skepticism IS peer review!” My new slogan; along with “IPCC climate models are bunk!”