Thought du Jour

Negative reaction to last week’s column on climate change convinced Martin Wolf that climate sceptics have won. This stimulated him to write a follow-up column.

In considering this issue, a rational person should surely recognise the extent of the consensus of climate scientists on the hypothesis of man-made warming. An analysis of abstracts of 11,944 peer-reviewed scientific papers, published between 1991 and 2011 and written by 29,083 authors, concludes that 98.4 per cent of authors who took a position endorsed man-made (anthropogenic) global warming, 1.2 per cent rejected it and 0.4 per cent were uncertain. Similar ratios emerged from alternative analyses of the data.

A possible response is to insist that all these scientists are wrong. That is, of course, conceivable. Scientists have been wrong in the past. Yet to single out this branch of science for rejection, merely because its conclusions are so uncomfortable, is irrational, albeit comprehensible.

Martin Wolf, “Global inaction shows that the climate sceptics have already won“, Financial Times, 22 May 2013.

Martin goes on to outline eight policies to address climate change: carbon taxes, nuclear power, tough emissions standards, a secure regime for global trade in lower-carbon fuels, better diffusion of energy-creating and energy-saving technologies, public-private partnerships for research and innovation, investment in adaptation to climate change and, more radically, geo-engineering to reverse climate change.

The analysis that Martin refers to is in the following open access paper:

John Cook et al., “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature“, Environmental Research Letters 8:2 (2013).

CO2 is a known greenhouse gas. There are positive feedback effects from rising temperatures, via, for example, the quantity of water vapour in the atmosphere. In brief, humanity is conducting a huge, uncontrolled and almost certainly irreversible climate experiment with the only home it is likely to have. Moreover, if one judges by the basic science and the opinions of the vast majority of qualified scientists, risk of calamitous change is large.

What makes the inaction more remarkable is that we have been hearing so much hysteria about the dire consequences of piling up a big burden of public debt on our children and grandchildren. But all that is being bequeathed is financial claims of some people on other people. If the worst comes to the worst, a default will occur. Some people will be unhappy. But life will go on. Bequeathing a planet in climatic chaos is a rather bigger concern. There is nowhere else for people to go and no way to reset the planet’s climate system. If we are to take a prudential view of public finances, we should surely take a prudential view of something irreversible and much costlier.

Martin Wolf, “Why the world faces climate chaos“, Financial Times, 15 May 2013.

There is much more in the full column, and many comments (nearly all negative, so far) from readers.

Some claim that Prof Richard Muller, who heads the Berkeley Earth Project, is not telling the truth when he says: “Call me a converted sceptic.” Self-styled climate sceptic Steven Goddard (most likely a pseudonym) insists that Muller was never in his camp.

No, you are an unrepentant liar. Less than a year ago you said that you never were a skeptic.

November 3, 2011

“It is ironic if some people treat me as a traitor, since I was never a skeptic — only a scientific skeptic,” he said in a recent email exchange with The Huffington Post. “Some people called me a skeptic because in my best-seller ‘Physics for Future Presidents’ I had drawn attention to the numerous scientific errors in the movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ But I never felt that pointing out mistakes qualified me to be called a climate skeptic.” [bold added by Goddard]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/blackberry/p.html?id=1072419

December 17, 2003

“Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate.” -

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/402357/medieval-global-warming/

The big question is – Did you take money from the Koch Brothers on a fraudulent basis?

Steven Goddard, “Call Muller An ‘Unrepentant Liar‘”, Real Science, 29 July 2012.

First, some necessary definitions. The dictionary definition of sceptic (archaic & North American skeptic) is

1 a person inclined to question or doubt accepted opinions.

2 Philosophy an ancient or modern philosopher who denies the possibility of knowledge, or even rational belief, in some sphere.

Source: Oxford Dictionary of British and World English.

The first (popular) meaning seems relevant here. I was unable to find a dictionary definition for ‘climate sceptic’. The best I could find was this online definition:

A Climate Change Skeptic is someone who believes, in the context of Climate Change, that the human influence on the climate has been dramatically overplayed compared to natural processes and other external influences (such as the Sun). Source: EcoWho.

I am not pleased with this definition, since sceptics appeal to reason, never to faith. In religion, an agnostic, who doubts the existence of God, would be a sceptic. An atheist, who denies the existence of God, has no doubts, so is not a sceptic. Similarly, someone who is unsure of the scientific  evidence surrounding climate change (global warming) would be a sceptic. Someone who is convinced that climate change (global warming) is a hoax would best be described as a denier. In short, sceptics are to agnostics as deniers are to atheists.

Richard Muller most definitely was a sceptic, as all good scientists are. But he was never a ‘climate sceptic’ or, as I would prefer to say, a ‘climate denier’. This becomes abundantly clear in the two articles above that Steven Goddard cites, provided we read more than his selected excerpts. Here, for example, are the first and last sentences from the first article:

Though by no means a climate change denier, Richard Muller, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work in nuclear and astrophysics is well known, had long been suspicious of some of the science underpinning the accepted catechism on global warming.

[...]

“Scientists,” he said, “have a professional responsibility to be skeptical.”

Tom Zeller Jr., “Richard Muller, Climate Researcher, Navigates The Volatile Line Between Science And Skepticism“, HuffPost Green, 3 November 2011.

And here are the paragraphs that come just before and after the paragraph that Goddard quotes:

It was unfortunate that many scientists endorsed the hockey stick before it could be subjected to the tedious review of time. Ironically, it appears that these scientists skipped the vetting precisely because the results were so important.

Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate. I would love to believe that the results of Mann et al. are correct, and that the last few years have been the warmest in a millennium.

Love to believe? My own words make me shudder. They trigger my scientist’s instinct for caution. When a conclusion is attractive, I am tempted to lower my standards, to do shoddy work. But that is not the way to truth. When the conclusions are attractive, we must be extra cautious.

Richard Muller, “Medieval Global Warming“, Technology Review (MIT), 17 December 2003.

(Bold added by TdJ)

In a US newspaper opinion piece, Prof Richard Muller says: “Call me a converted sceptic.”

Muller leads the Berkeley Earth Project, which is using new methods and some new data to investigate the claims made by other climate researchers. ….

In a piece authored for the New York Times, Prof Muller, from the University of California, Berkeley, said: “Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming.

“Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.” ….

Prof Michael Mann, director of the Earth Science System Center at Penn State University, said that there was “a certain ironic satisfaction” in seeing a study funded by the Koch Brothers “demonstrate what scientists have known with some degree of confidence for nearly two decades: that the globe is indeed warming, and that this warming can only be explained by human-caused increases in greenhouse gas concentrations”.

“Ex-sceptic says climate change is down to humans“, BBC News, 30 July 2012.

Muller’s team of 10 scientists includes Saul Perlmutter, who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with two other physicists. Their funding came in part from the Koch brothers, billionaire US industrialists who contribute large sums to organisations lobbying against acceptance of human-caused global warming.

The full text of Muller’s op-ed can be downloaded here.

The report of the Berkeley Earth Land Temperature Project, “A New Estimate of the Average Earth Surface Land Temperature Spanning 1753 to 2011″, can be downloaded here.

Below is a chart, from page 7 of the report, showing 10-year moving averages of estimated land surface temperatures. The shaded areas are one- and two-standard deviation uncertainties.

Wolfgang Wagner,a professor of remote sensing at Vienna University of Technology, resigned last week as editor of the scientific journal Remote Sensing. He blames himself for having approved publication, in July, of a flawed paper. The paper, co-authored by climate sceptic Roy Spencer, was ‘off topic’ for the journal, so managed to pass peer review.

The editor of a science journal has resigned after admitting that a recent paper casting doubt on man-made climate change should not have been published.

The paper, by US scientists Roy Spencer and William Braswell, claimed that computer models of climate inflated projections of temperature increase.

It was seized on by “sceptic” bloggers, but attacked by mainstream scientists.

Wolfgang Wagner, editor of Remote Sensing journal, says he agrees with their criticisms and is stepping down. ….

Roy Spencer, however, told BBC News: “I stand behind the science contained in the paper itself, as well as my comments published on my blog at drroyspencer.com.

“Our university press release necessarily put our scientific results in lay language, and what we believe they mean in the larger context of global warming research. This is commonly done in press statements made by the IPCC and its scientists, too, when reporting on research which advocates the view that climate change is almost entirely caused by humans.

“The very fact that the public has the perception that climate change is man-made, when in fact there is as yet no way to know with any level of scientific certainty how much is man-made versus natural, is evidence of that.”

Dr Spencer is one of the team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville that keeps a record of the Earth’s temperature as determined from satellite readings.

He is also on the board of directors of the George C Marshall Institute, a right-wing think tank critical of mainstream climate science, and an advisor to the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, an evangelical Christian organisation that claims policies to curb climate change “would destroy jobs and impose trillions of dollars in costs” and “could be implemented only by enormous and dangerous expansion of government control over private life”.

Richard Black, “Journal editor resigns over ‘problematic’ climate paper” BBC News, 2 September 2011.

Here is Prof Wagner, in his own words:

[T]he problem I see with the paper by Spencer and Braswell is not that it declared a minority view (which was later unfortunately much exaggerated by the public media) but that it essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents. This latter point was missed in the review process, explaining why I perceive this paper to be fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted by the journal. This regrettably brought me to the decision to resign as Editor-in-Chief ….

Wolfgang Wagner, “Editorial: Taking Responsibility on Publishing the Controversial Paper “On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” by Spencer and Braswell, Remote Sens. 2011, 3(8), 1603-1613″, Remote Sensing 3:8 (2 September 2011), pp. 1603-1613.

There is more information (with links) here.

William Braswell, co-author of the controversial paper, is a colleague of Spencer at the Earth System Science Center, University of Alabama.