The strident attempt to silence the skeptics who question the popular thesis that humans are adversely affecting the earth’s climate hit a new high over the past couple of weeks with the release of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project (BEST) report from a group of scientists centered at U.C. Berkeley. It was supposed to be an impeccably crafted review of existing temperature data from worldwide stations which would settle the argument once and for all. Its lead author, Richard Muller, did indeed report that the earth had been warming – and that was enough for the true believers, from the mainstream media on down. Time ran a blunt quote from Muller featuring him as a converted skeptic, and the New York Times ran a scurrilous comic strip (“The Strip”) in its Sunday review section mocking the skeptics, thousands (yes) of them reputable scientists, with unusually fierce calumny, treating them all as fools or tools of corporate interests. Even the Wall Street Journal sub-headlined its report, “There were good reasons for doubt, until now.”
As if the BEST report were not enough, now comes the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body responsible for much of the climate alarmism. This one is about extreme weather events, and they claim that these will increase over the next 20-30 years due to global warming. Put simply, just like that, the usual media suspects seized upon the document as further proof that the skeptics should shut up and go home.
There are two issues here: What did the BEST study and the IPCC report show, or prove? And what difference does it make? Although Muller was incautious (“You should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer,” he wrote) and although he committed the scientific faux pas of submitting his paper to the popular media before its peer review, the BEST report is actually rather cautious. Its data have always been contaminated by improperly sited recording stations, and deal with land temperatures only. At most they show a slight uptick in land temperatures over the past half-century and a curious plateau over the last decade or—curious, because CO2 in the atmosphere, supposedly the main driver of global warming, has been steadily increasing. The oceans go through cycles of warming and cooling, and anyway a third of the BEST land stations report cooling. What warming there has been is modest enough that it easily falls within natural 100-year climate variability. Muller’s co-author, Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, has publically distanced herself from his publicity release, saying that his claim to have proved the skeptics wrong was an unscientific “huge mistake.”
The IPCC report is surprisingly downbeat, considering the group’s track record of scary predictions. It anticipates more heat waves and flooding, but does not make judgments about many natural disasters like ocean storms, and, most tellingly, says that for the next two or three decades there will be little or no discernible human influence on climate. The human imprint, it acknowledges, will not be distinguishable from natural climate variability. There can be no confidence in any predictions for a longer term.
The real issue is not whether the earth is warming at the present time (over longer periods it both warms and cools), but whether humans are causing it, and if so, whether mitigation measures are possible and worth the economic cost. Both of these reports abstain from identifying human action as the principal cause of global warming. “The human component of global warming may be somewhat overestimated,” says BEST, in a noteworthy retreat from the reigning paradigm. If humans are not the culprits, then the proposals for human action to change nature’s course look a lot less possible. Moreover, they involve some terrible economic sacrifices which are even now creating real hardship wherever they are being tried, in the UK for example, where the cost of heating one’s home has driven many households into “fuel poverty” and “green” taxes of various sorts are seriously hurting the British economy. It is even arguable that the economic shrinkage meant to “save the planet” may actually cost more lives than it saves. Given the real scientific uncertainty the moral course of action is at least open to debate, and attempts to foreclose the debate by demonizing the skeptics are in gross moral error. And if anyone doubts that the alarmists are trying to do exactly that, please look at the second round of “climate gate” e-mails released this week.
Thomas Sieger Derr is professor emeritus of religion and ethics at Smith College and the author of Environmental Ethics and Christian Humanism
November 25th, 2011 | 11:03 am
Superstition, omen worship, sacrificing goats and witch burning combined, are no match to the absurdity of this advanced stage of human achievement regarding the powers of the cosmos as being weak, fragile and delicate and in need of Human stewardship. Nature laughs at Humans regarding themselves as immortal Gods because if we too can boil planets, so too are we immortal Gods with the powers of Gods. Climate change wasn’t about a changing climate; it was about CONTROLLING a changing climate. How you ask? By taxing the air we breathe with bank funded and corporate-run Carbon Trading Markets ruled by politicians. Were the scientists lying? No, not within the confines of their equation that first assumes climate change to be real. They virtually studied the effects, not causes of a crisis that hasn’t happened through 25 years of this consultant’s wet dream of CO2 climate research. It was pure correlation and nothing else and despite there being tropical fossils under the melting ice and on every continent, it still “assumed” this climate of the last 200 years or so as “never” to have happened before. And no, ice cores are not like some temperature dipstick from a Harry Potter movie. There are more papers written on how to interpret them than anything else. Keep in mind that you can’t have a little catastrophic climate crisis. Only a comet hit is worse than a climate crisis so ask yourself why are these countless thousands of consensus scientists not making themselves visible and acting like it’s the crisis they say it is? They outnumber the climate change protesters and sit on their thrones spewing lies and needless fear with complete immunity. Studying a worst case scenario isn’t a crime, but it sure acts like tool of immunity for these exaggerating lab coat consultants. Too bad exaggerating isn’t lying anymore. We missed getting Bush so let’s get these fear mongers in court and let’s not forget the decades of “science”, denying the toxicity of the deadly pesticides they gave us that poisoned the planet in the first place.
The climate blame movement is officially now an insignificant cult judging by the fact that occupywallstreets list of demands made no mention of CO2, climate change or greenhouse gas and the greenhouse gas ovens you condemn billions to with such glee. Obama didn’t even mention the “crisis” in his state of the union address and if you still think there are enough voters to vote YES to taxing the air to make the weather colder, YOU are the new denier. Climate change was unsustainable and history has a special place for you fear mongers.
November 25th, 2011 | 11:40 am
Although Muller was incautious (“You should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer,” he wrote) and although he committed the scientific faux pas of submitting his paper to the popular media before its peer review, the BEST report is actually rather cautious. Its data have always been contaminated by improperly sited recording stations, and deal with land temperatures only. At most they show a slight uptick in land temperatures over the past half-century and a curious plateau over the last decade or—curious, because CO2 in the atmosphere, supposedly the main driver of global warming, has been steadily increasing. The oceans go through cycles of warming and cooling, and anyway a third of the BEST land stations report cooling. What warming there has been is modest enough that it easily falls within natural 100-year climate variability.
This is misleading and biased.
Most of these claims are adequately addressed in BEST’s own online FAQ.
For instance, Muller explicitly addresses the accusation of the “faux pas” of not waiting for peer review with the simple observation that scientists always publish their results among fellow scientists and do road-show presentations to help get feedback before submitting to a peer-reviewed journal. The media naturally picks up on research before it hits the journals and so it is better for scientists to engage with popular-audience media early on to ensure their research is accurately represented.
As to the substance, the point of BEST was to test whether or not the objections over the two land-based temperature data series that exist (HadCRU and GISS) were valid or not. BEST has come to the preliminary conclusion that they are not valid by replicating a data series that is highly correlated to both HadCRU and GISS.
All data series (including the two satellite data series that go back to 1979) show a consistent warming trend over the past 50 years of between 0.1 and 0.2 degrees Celcius per decade and there is no evidence that this has slowed or stopped.
Any claim about the “natural 100-year climate variability” is going to have to be supported with citations to peer-reviewed research that rigorously reconstructs a pre-modern temperature series with just as much rigor as Prof. Derr appears to expect from the modern temperature series (constructed from literally billions of data points from satellite measurements as well as thousands of temperature stations on the ground).
November 25th, 2011 | 12:37 pm
Blaming the changing climate on “climate change” seems a tad oxymoronic. Like blaming motion on “location change.”
November 25th, 2011 | 5:55 pm
Just thought I would warn any serious commentators that the shill who posts as ‘mememine’ is a full time climate-change troll who spams the above nonsense (with a few stock block and paste variations along the same lines) to any and all climate change threads in every online newspaper and blog.
He can be easily identified by the inclusion of such ravings as:
“Superstition, omen worship, sacrificing goats and witch burning” etc.
Please don’t assume all skeptics are as uniformed as he is.
November 26th, 2011 | 12:14 pm
The NAS has already made conclusions about this issue:
http://americasclimatechoices.org/
Given that, long-term financial crises due to a debt-driven global economy, and concerns about peak oil raised by various groups, from the U.S. military to Lloyd’s of London, it becomes irrelevant to be skeptical about human-induced climate change, never mind environmental damage and pollution.
November 26th, 2011 | 9:21 pm
The link given by Monk tells us that, “The report finds that the significant risks that climate change poses to human society and the environment provide a strong motivation to move ahead with substantial response efforts.”
Two of the world’s leading climate scientists who have served on the IPCC tell us otherwise:
“One of the things the scientific community is pretty agreed on is those things [CO2 limits] will have virtually no impact on climate no matter what the models say. So the question is do you spend trillions of dollars to have no impact? And that seems like a no brainer.”–Prof. Richard Lindzen, MIT
“Our ignorance about the climate system is enormous, and policy makers need to know that. This is an extremely complex system, and thinking we can control it is hubris.” [THIS is the most important fact of the whole issue.]–Dr. John R. Christy, Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama–Huntsville
November 27th, 2011 | 7:14 am
Slavoj Žižek has proposed the following four measures for dealing with climate change:
“- strict egalitarian justice (all people should pay the same price in eventual renunciations, i.e., one should impose the same world-wide norms of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, etc.; the developed nations should not be allowed to poison the environment at the present rate, blaming the developing Third World countries, from Brazil to China, for ruining our shared environment with their rapid development);
- terror (ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective measures, inclusive of severe limitations of liberal “freedoms,” technological control of the prospective law-breakers);
- voluntarism (the only way to confront the threat of the ecological catastrophe is by means of large-scale collective decisions which will run counter the “spontaneous” immanent logic of capitalist development – it is not the question of helping the historical tendency or necessity to realize itself, but to “stop the train” of history which runs towards the precipice of global catastrophe;
- and, last but not least, all this combined with the trust in the people (the wager that the large majority of the people support these severe measures, see them as their own, and are ready to participate in their enforcement).”
This is a sign of things to come. Tracking, transparency, certification, eco-taxes, environmental excellence, and the policing of water, all give us an idea of the coming state of ecological emergency. Everything is permitted to a power structure that bases its authority in Nature, in health and in well-being.
November 27th, 2011 | 9:07 am
Most of my experience with complex, large-scale modeling involves battlefield simulations used by the U.S. and other military forces. Some years back, the Army Research Lab contracted me to conduct a study of their accuracy and utility for predicting future conflict results.
What I discovered was rather disturbing: the models had never been properly validated or verified, in the sense of comparing their output to the outcome of historical battles. Instead, they had been validated by comparing their output to the output of the previous generation of simulations; and those in turn had been validated by comparing their output to the output of their predecessors, etc., back to the first computerize conflict simulations, which were based on the intuition of the men who programmed them.
The first thing we did, then, was run more than a hundred historical battles through the most widely used conflict simulation employed by the U.S. military. The results were enlightening: in every case, the model’s prediction of casualties incurred on both sides was an order of magnitude higher than in reality; the amount of territory gained significantly greater; and the tempo of operations dramatically higher. In a significant number of cases, the outcome of the battle was entirely wrong (i.e., the winners lost).
Further investigation showed the reason for the inaccuracy of the model was failure to incorporate human behavior and the psychological effects of weapons and other aspects of the battlefield environment. They were not included because it was difficult to quantify them, and what could not be quantified was simply ignored.
I see a similar problem with the current array of long-term, large-scale climate models: they rest on a base of sand, validated against other models, validated in turn against the gut feeling of their designers.
Nobody has demonstrated the ability of these models to replicate known historical climate changes (e.g., the Roman maximum, the Dark Age cooling, the Medieval Optimum and the Little Ice Age). Therefore, the models have not yet been validated.
As a fundamental rule, a simulation that cannot replicate history cannot be trusted to predict the future.
November 27th, 2011 | 4:47 pm
Just a brief rejoinder to the anonymous statistician: Plenty of statistically minded people, including the formidable Steve McIntyre (a target of the warmists who want to discredit him, as we learn from the recent e-mail release), are behind my comments on the relation of recent warming to natural fluctuations; and the recent decadal temperature plateau is established to my satisfaction from reading many graphs. As for the untimely release. by Muller, of the BEST report before peer review, note the uproar over it and especially the vast annoyance of his co-author Judith Curry. Not such an innocent act.
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