Wasting energy on climate change sceptics

By Greg Jericho

It's a pity that climate change scientists have to spend so much time debunking falsehoods - especially when those spouting them have already made their minds up, writes Greg Jericho.

This time of the year often brings with it news on climate change. Partly this is because the various agencies recording global temperatures are releasing their annual measures, and partly because invariably we have some pretty hot weather here in Australia.

This year the quirk amidst the usual plethora of reporting and opinion pieces has been the response to an op-ed by the chair of Tony Abbott's "Advisory Council", Maurice Newman.

Newman usually pops up on opinion pages or in speeches to variously decry the pay of those on minimum wage; rail against wind farms because they are, among other things, "a danger to human health"; or attack climate change.

Now, he's not exactly Robinson Crusoe when it comes to writing about how climate change is all a bit a myth. Heck, it's almost a prerequisite if you wish to get a regular gig excreting your thoughts over the pages of the News Corp dailies.

Of course News Corp's head Rupert Murdoch once said we should "give the planet the benefit of the doubt", but the point of his utterly meaningless phrase is really just to allow his columnists, journalists and editors to repeat it in an attempt to suggest it balances out the avalanche of distorted (or completely wrong) information which lands on their pages.

It's to be expected though that editors and faux rational opinion writers tackle climate change. After all, they, like those who work for think-tanks such as the IPA, know it is in their financial interests to deny the science. It's as good for readership as it is good for raising donations from mining companies. And besides, you can't spend all your time pretending you care about free speech.

But when the person writing such ignorant piffle is the head of a select group of people appointed to give advice to the Prime Minister, it does perhaps behove us to treat his muttering as more than just clickbait. If only his opinions were worthy of such treatment.

After all, as Newman makes quite clear, he is "not a climate scientist", and we would all be much better off listening to experts.

The difficulty with responding to such amateur climate-change commentators is you have to parse every sentence for accuracy. For example, Newman starts his argument stating he has "closely followed this debate for more than two decades, having been seasoned originally by the global cooling certainty of the 1970s".

Alas, that "certainty" amounted to http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1 10 per cent* of all published scientific articles on climate change from 1956 to 1979. This compared to 62 per cent of such articles during that period predicting warming, with the rest taking no position.

If he thinks 10 per cent is certainty, I can't wait till Mr Newman discovers the 97 per cent support for global warming that now exists among climate scientists (or the 99.8 per cent support found in another survey).

But no. We all know that won't sway the "sceptical".

Far better instead to talk about how he really does "believe in climate change" (natural change that is).

The deniers of the science always like to suggest the issue of climate change is too much like a religion - that it's all about "belief". In reality, they are the one most linking religion to the debate - usually by suggesting their opponents are "zealots".

Do I believe in climate change? Sure, in the same way I believe Australia is a better cricket team than England at the moment based on the fact we have beaten the absolute bejeezus out of them in both Tests and one day games this summer. Just because I might use the word "believe" doesn't make my view a religious one.   

Newman doesn't rely only on faith either. He notes the "dispassionate" work of Dr Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH). Unfortunately, Mr Newman neglected to mention that the week before he wrote his piece, Dr Spencer announced the UAH measurement of global temperatures found 2013 was the fourth hottest year since 1978.

Ahh well. Next year perhaps.

[continued ...]

'Temperatures have not risen for 17 years. The pause now threatens to expose how much scientists sold their souls for cash and fame, warns emeritus professor Garth Paltridge, former chief research scientist with the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research:

    …there has been no significant warming over the most recent fifteen or so years…

    In the light of all this, we have at least to consider the possibility that the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem … in its effort to promote the cause. It is a particularly nasty trap in the context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis of society’s respect for scientific endeavour…

    The trap was set in the late 1970s or thereabouts when the environmental movement first realised that doing something about global warming would play to quite a number of its social agendas. At much the same time, it became accepted wisdom around the corridors of power that government-funded scientists (that is, most scientists) should be required to obtain a goodly fraction of their funds and salaries from external sources—external anyway to their own particular organisation.

    The scientists in environmental research laboratories, since they are not normally linked to any particular private industry, were forced to seek funds from other government departments. In turn this forced them to accept the need for advocacy and for the manipulation of public opinion. For that sort of activity, an arm’s-length association with the environmental movement would be a union made in heaven…

The trap was partially sprung in climate research when a number of the relevant scientists began to enjoy the advocacy business. The enjoyment was based on a considerable increase in funding and employment opportunity. The increase was not so much on the hard-science side of things but rather in the emerging fringe institutes and organisations devoted, at least in part, to selling the message of climatic doom. A new and rewarding research lifestyle emerged which involved the giving of advice to all types and levels of government, the broadcasting of unchallengeable opinion to the general public, and easy justification for attendance at international conferences—this last in some luxury by normal scientific experience, and at a frequency previously unheard of…

The trap was fully sprung when many of the world’s major national academies of science (such as the …  Australian Academy of Science) persuaded themselves to issue reports giving support to the conclusions of the IPCC. The reports were touted as national assessments that were supposedly independent of the IPCC and of each other, but of necessity were compiled with the assistance of, and in some cases at the behest of, many of the scientists involved in the IPCC international machinations. In effect, the academies, which are the most prestigious of the institutions of science, formally nailed their colours to the mast of the politically correct.

Since that time three or four years ago, there has been no comfortable way for the scientific community to raise the spectre of serious uncertainty about the forecasts of climatic disaster… It can no longer escape prime responsibility if it should turn out in the end that doing something in the name of mitigation of global warming is the costliest scientific mistake ever visited on humanity.'

http://www.thegwpf.org/gareth-paltridge-global-warming-pause-destroy-reputation-science/

From the original story posted in Quadrant=

'The World Meteorological Organisation of the United Nations took its first steps towards establishing the World Climate Program in the early 1970s. Among other things it held a conference in Stockholm to define the main scientific problems to be solved before reliable climate forecasting could be possible. The conference defined quite a number, but focused on just two.

The first concerned an inability to simulate the amount and character of clouds in the atmosphere. Clouds are important because they govern the balance between solar heating and infrared cooling of the planet, and thereby are a control of Earth’s temperature. The second concerned an inability to forecast the behaviour of oceans. Oceans are important because they are the main reservoirs of heat in the climate system. They have internal, more-or-less random, fluctuations on all sorts of time-scales ranging from years through to centuries. These fluctuations cause changes in ocean surface temperature that in turn affect Earth’s overall climate.

The situation hasn’t changed much in the decades since. Many of the problems of simulating the behaviour of clouds and oceans are still there (along with lots of other problems of lesser moment) and for many of the same reasons. Perhaps the most significant is that climate models must do their calculations at each point of an imaginary grid of points spread evenly around the world at various heights in the atmosphere and depths in the ocean. The calculations are done every hour or so of model time as the model steps forward into its theoretical future. Problems arise because practical constraints on the size of computers ensure that the horizontal distance between model grid-points may be as much as a degree or two of latitude or longitude—that is to say, a distance of many tens of kilometres.'

'The trap was fully sprung when many of the world’s major national academies of science (such as the Royal Society in the UK, the National Academy of Sciences in the USA and the Australian Academy of Science) persuaded themselves to issue reports giving support to the conclusions of the IPCC. The reports were touted as national assessments that were supposedly independent of the IPCC and of each other, but of necessity were compiled with the assistance of, and in some cases at the behest of, many of the scientists involved in the IPCC international machinations. In effect, the academies, which are the most prestigious of the institutions of science, formally nailed their colours to the mast of the politically correct.'

extracts: https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2014/01-02/fundamental-uncertainties-climate-ch
ange/

I suggest a read of the full article.

By the way what is the attribution to your quote?

go Quadrant 

So Catmando is a veterinarian?

lee wrote on Jan 27^th, 2014 at 9:32pm:


There is lots of segmented trends that you can cherry pick from the data set but its clear what the general trend is and what is driving it.

Your lunacy can only lead to your own cerebral impotency