Richard Jones
Part 3: Global Climate Change?
I had intended for this instalment simply to look at the facts about the climate record (expecting to find confirmation that average temperature has been rising, and then in later instalments examine the evidence as to causes, the oracles predicting how this will evolve, and the pundits telling us what to do about it). Instead I found that when I looked for science I found politics. So I am led (also) to continue with the theme of science versus consensus.
One of my first thoughts when I started to enquire into global climate change was the question: What does global climate mean?
Before all this climate politics, I “knew” a couple of things….
Different places have different climates. North west Europe, for instance, had a milder climate than, for instance, higher latitudes in North America, due to the influence of the Gulf Stream. As a gardener, I was aware of classifications, like ‘temperate’, arid’, ‘tropical’, ‘mediterranean’, etc, but obviously ‘global climate’ can’t be any of these.
Globally, the geological record shows periods called ice ages, which apparently include ‘interglacials’ that are more like ‘intraglacials’ in that they are milder periods during a long ice age. These are gross variations that affect the whole world, even if not uniformly. Hence global. However….
Before all this climate politics, did anyone ever look finely at averages of temperature over the whole surface of the earth and report small (I am comparing with large changes between ice age and interglacial) changes as being changes in ‘global climate’?
I don’t think I’m splitting hairs here. Maybe climate experts are on to something important, but the publicity about climate change is of two kinds: dramatic attention-grabbing stuff that is local, and commonly local weather rather than even local climate. Then there is the global stuff, a small increase in average temperature and a small rise in sea level.
Then there is the matter of glaciers and arctic ice.
As a young child living in Geneva, I saw moraines on the Rhône and elsewhere, and learned that they were from episodes where glaciers terminated at that location. Also, I visited glaciers quite frequently and learned that the alpine glaciers were still retreating following the last ice age. Ice age to interglacial, that is meaningful global warming, global climate change. The imagery of glaciers calving and reports of glaciers retreating are impressive, but how does one distinguish whether this is the continuation of the process beginning thousands of years ago, or something new and a genuine emergency?
If a glacier is calving more iceberg volume now than a while ago, does that indicate that the glacier is moving faster (why?) or that there has been an increase in its volume, leading to greater pressure and driving force? Or something else?
I have been posing questions that scientists would frame when first giving attention to the matter. If the input to public discussion were primarily scientific, it seems to me that it should predominantly be presenting scientific questions and answers. Instead it is overwhelmingly persuasive.
When I said above that I found that when I looked for science I found politics, I was referring to the ‘information’ flow. Clearly, if there is a climate emergency due to the ability of humans to change the global climate, then there is a political emergency based on the need for humans to change the climate beneficially. So, the validity of politics concerning remedial action depends on what is the real state of affairs with ‘global climate’ and human input. That is not what bothered me. The problem with the climate politics is that it serves persuasion instead of science.
Scientists who are confident in their knowledge do not usually engage in persuading their peers or the public. Mostly they do not address the general public at all. If they do, it is to try to explain a topic in a way to make its ideas accessible. To persuade as to its validity would be pointless, as that assessment commonly requires years of learning, although there may well be descriptions of key experiments that lent support to a hypothesis.
With climate change, on the other hand, hordes of scientists are recruited to publicise the matter. Do they explain? No, they persuade, and we are to be persuaded mainly by the supposed consensus among scientists. An Australian dissenter writes:
“When science was born, the consensus at that time was driven by religion, politics, prejudice, mysticism and self-interested power. From Galileo to Newton and through the centuries, science debunked the consensus by experiment, calculation, observation, measurement, repeated validation, falsification and reason. Appeals to consensus are not new. The methodology of science allows problems to be solved, whereas the science of the global warmers is designed to confirm a political opinion. There is a consensus regarding the science of global warming but only amongst ascientific environmental activists.
“Scientific fact now no longer seems to be necessary. Human-induced global warming is one such example, where one camp attempts to demolish the basic principles of science and install a new order based on political and sociological collectivism. Science is becoming a belief system wherein the belief with the greatest number of followers becomes the established fact and received knowledge. This belief is sustained by consensus and authority. With this new authoritarian science based on consensus and espoused by UN’s IPCC and other agencies as authorities, it appears that true science does not matter anymore. If Mann’s “hockey stick” chart showing rising global temperature is based on fraud and invalid statistical methods, it just does not matter because we still have a consensus.”
(Ian Plimer – Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science)
It turns out that the scientific consensus is quite an industry. The journals have a remarkable output on the subject. I will cite one example. This from a paper by Naomi Oreskes, an accomplished geologist who turned her attention to areas such as history and philosophy of science. She has written books on plate tectonics and addressed specifically the fact that in its early years, there was something like consensus, especially in the US. that the theory of continental drift was bunk. So this is someone who is fully aware that scientific consensus counts nothing in determining the validity of a proposition.
In “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” (10.1126/science.1103618) Oreskes opens
‘Policy-makers and the media, particularly in the United States, frequently assert that climate science is highly uncertain. Some have used this as an argument against adopting strong measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, while discussing a major U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report on the risks of climate change, then–EPA administrator Christine Whitman argued, “As [the report] went through review, there was less consensus on the science and conclusions on climate change” (1). Some corporations whose revenues might be adversely affected by controls on carbon dioxide emissions have also alleged major uncertainties in the science (2). Such statements suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is not the case.
‘The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).’
A few scientific organisations are listed as compliant, then we get to the nitty-gritty: nearly a thousand papers were found in a search for “climate change” and these were examined for consensus. A quarter were not relevant but ‘Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.’
The conclusion is indeed remarkable when many scientists have been active in opposing the supposed consensus. A clue as to the discrepancy may lie in the subsequent correction: the search term that assembled the articles was not as stated. Rather, it was “global climate change”. Can it simply be that dissenting articles would not use that phrase? On the other hand the consensus in question is that average surface temperature has increased and that human activity has contributed. Dissent is mostly about projections and whether there is a climate emergency. This is not unlike claiming a consensus for Israeli treatment of Palestinians by reference to people agreeing with the right of Jews to defend themselves.
Another response to the widespread criticism by scientists is that the critics are not ‘climate scientists’.
This set me wondering “What is a climate scientist? What is climate science?”
Study of climate and climate change involves input from many scientific disciplines. To name a few, meteorology, geophysics, fluid dynamics, chemistry, thermodynamics, mathematics and mathematical computing and modelling. True Believers seem to rely on the weakest link among these: computer models of past and present climate. Dissent from experts in any of these and other relevant disciplines can be dismissed as ‘not climate scientists’, even though they may have used their expertise to analyse the matter. So, apparently, a climate scientist does not mean a scientist using relevant expertise to examine questions of climate change. It means someone with climate science in their job description.
It occurred to me to examine the use of this terminology with the Google Ngram viewer. This is a very useful tool for examining the historical currency of a phrase. Google has a massive database of books digitised and OCR’d (extraction of text from scanned images–this contains errors but these will usually be insignificant in bulk statistics for searched phrases).
Lo, it turns out that usage of the terms ‘climate science’ and ‘climate scientist’ surged in just the period of the climate emergency narrative. See
As these terms have only been widely used in the same period as the climate emergency narrative, it seems likely that everyone (ever) employed as ‘climate scientist’ was appointed in this context. What are the chances that someone with that appointment would be a dissenter?
That question is the weak conclusion. The stronger one is to ask whether or not promoting the climate emergency was in the job description. This question is not available for scientific or even forensic enquiry as such matters are inevitably shrouded in secrecy and evasion.
This instalment of my ‘Reflections’ was to examine the matter of recent climate change. I have not mentioned sea level. Alarms about sea level are entirely predictive, as it is a gradual process not subject to the extremes of weather that can be popularised as climate change. I will look at this topic in the next article about climate forecasts.
To conclude, the discussion about recent climate change, global warming, call it what you will, has been dominated by persuasion and extravagant claims (from both sides). There has been manipulation of data, but more often manipulation of how the data are presented. For the reality, and I don’t consider this the holy grail, just a reasonable and probably impartial assessment, I will cite Jonathan E. Martin in his text “Introduction to Weather and Climate Science”
“It is an undeniable observational fact that the average surface temperature of the Earth has increased by about 0.8°C (1.5°F) over the last 150 years or so. This increase has prompted considerable scientific study … computer models of the climate system … suggesting … additional warming, the degree of which is not certain, as there is some variability among the projection….
“A warmer planet means that, even without an increase in relative humidity, the actual water vapor content of the atmosphere … will increase. A current high-profile question regarding future climate concerns how such increased water vapor content might change the nature of the general circulation of the Earth’s atmosphere.”
The role of water vapour in the atmosphere is of course much more dynamic than carbon dioxide, due to condensation and evaporation. So we have a trivial increase in average temperature so far, and an enormous challenge for forecasting future climate change.
One thing that we can be sure about is that global climate is a very complex system. As such it has numerous feedback mechanisms, and most of these (as in the human body) are negative feedback: they respond to oppose change. The suddenness (on a geological time scale) of transition between ice age and interglacial implies that there are also positive feedback mechanisms. An example may be the change in albedo (reflection of solar radiation) accompanying gain or loss of ice cover–significant in temperate latitudes for ice ages, less so currently for arctic ice.
Labour Affairs 