Climate change - the POLITICAL debate. (Vol 5)
Discussion
Vanden Saab said:
gadgetmac said:
Diderot said:
Gadgetmac, are you attempting something resembling irony? Or is this the accidental byproduct of something more intellectually moribund? You never mention your education, qualifications or occupation, (but you keep slighting those who have) but it would appear from your irrational, illogical and ill-conceived outbursts that there are sharper tools than the sandwich that’s evidently missing from the proverbial picnic.
And are you denying the pause existed once again? This is getting tiresome. Surely you do understand that there are more than 60 peer reviewed papers from climate scientists (from your favoured consensus institutions) in a variety of journals including Nature which attempt to explain where the missing heat went on holiday? BTW, in case you were wondering, none of them thar God-like models that you blindly worship foretold the pause/hiatus. I wonder why ...
Diderot, you do know that all of the latest studies are finding that the pause didn't happen don't you.And are you denying the pause existed once again? This is getting tiresome. Surely you do understand that there are more than 60 peer reviewed papers from climate scientists (from your favoured consensus institutions) in a variety of journals including Nature which attempt to explain where the missing heat went on holiday? BTW, in case you were wondering, none of them thar God-like models that you blindly worship foretold the pause/hiatus. I wonder why ...
The 2 latest were only last month.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/1812...
Of course if you want to believe their was a pause (and the IPCC did mention it) then the warming since the end of it taken on its own is dramatic.
Of course you've been told this before but your own scientific investigations in the field and the lab (or by referencing WUWT and the Heartland Institute, who knows with you armchair professors) have concluded that these 2 studies are flawed in some way.
More studies showing the same are incoming as our knowledge increases. It's a relentless one-way flow of evidence that builds every day and must be terribly dispiriting for you. You end up having to rant about 20 year old data being wrong and using dubious sources to make your point.
Bad luck I'm afraid.
Or do you think we should restrict our knowledge to papers written at a given point in the past.
Jinx said:
gadgetmac said:
Of course if you want to believe their was a pause (and the IPCC did mention it) then the warming since the end of it taken on its own is dramatic.
.
.
GGM discovers El Nino...... news at 11. Jinx still trying to discover one scientific Institute that agrees with him...no news at 12Jinx said:
gadgetmac said:
Jinx still trying to discover one scientific Institute that agrees with him...no news at 12
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk...
Rex Tillerson
gadgetmac said:
scientific Institute
Organisations / institutions don't have a view, committees containing activists do. Memberships disagree publicly with these activists - for a prime example see the open letter from 43 Royal Society Fellows to the Royal Society leadership criticisng the RS for its unscientific stance on agw which is clearly not in their name and they represent a subset of complainants willing to put their head over the parapet. Then beyond that, argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad verecundiam are logical fallacies. Science doesn't operate by non-consensus. However there's a real will to loop this particular attrition loop for at least the third time; therefore in response, beyond Heartland there are several as already noted.
Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change
Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change
Science and Environmental Policy Project
International Climate & Environmental Change Assessment Project
International Arctic Research Centre
Institute for Energy Research
Centre on Climate and Environmental Policy
Cato Institute
Beacon Hill Institute (formerly?) of Suffolk University
New Zealand Climate Science Coalition
Société de Mathématiques Appliquées et Industrielles
Space Research Laboratory Russian Academy of Science Pulkovo Observatory
In the second loop there was very little in return from one or two pro-agw people beyond funding considerations, when the IPCC is an extremely well funded advocacy group where science is made to conform to a political summary (that's the way the IPCC operates and it's in their Ts and Cs as posted several times) i.e. the SPM - which goes to the IPCC's funding sources - forces changes in technical sections: the driving force is none other than politicians in governments.
A particularly diligent
pro-agw enquirer had little to say about several scientific institutions in the above list in Loop 2, but responded at one point to one of the listed organisations "No idea, losing interest"; due diligence never looked so good. What would be useful from agw supporters is a link to a statement from any of the above which explicitly supports dangerous permanent global warming. This hasn't been forthcoming within all the irrelevant dreck from the agw side in three loops so far.It was tricky to stop laughing last night after the claim "it's been warming, models say warming, models ace". The salient points remain that models get the degree and rate of troposphere warming wrong, the extent (not mere existence) of stratosphere cooling wrong, vertical distribution wrong, ocean warming wrong, TCR wrong, ECS wrong, hydrology wrong, feedbacks wrong, impacts including ice mass change wrong and this catalogue of failure is somehow not mentioned. It's that super-wide-view due diligence again.
See peer-reviewed publications from: Lewis & Curry, McKitrick & Christy, Fife et al, Douglass et al, Christy et al, Hanna et al, Nguyen et al, Thompson et al, Allan, Spencer & Braswell, Lindzen & Choi, Mao et al. As agw supporters are well-versed in the scientific literature, and I've already cited most of these papers previously on PH, each and every one of the above publications cannot fail to be familiar to them. There's no chance of anyone shooting the messengers or pointless reheating of SkSc, RC and other agw advocacy blog content.
I'm just going to take one of them at random as has been done before.
The Science and Environment Policy Project
This is an advocacy group set up by Phillip Morris. You know who they are right.
It's run by Fred Singer and his wife.
Fred singer admitted on TV (Nightline) that it has received funding from the following:
Exxon mobile
Shell
Unocal
Arco
All Oil and Gas companies.
BIG OIL
f
k it, I'll take another from your list.
The Cato Institute.
I'll let others search for the Big Oil connection on that one...should take all of 5 seconds. Try the Koch Brothers (the founders of the Cato Institute) and see what other companies they own...
You're examples are a joke as is your whole post.
You named these before and another on the list was taken at random and shown to be equally tainted.
How your followers fall for this tainted guff is beyond me.
Does anyone have a scientific Institute not in receipt of funding from one self interested industry or another?
The Science and Environment Policy Project
This is an advocacy group set up by Phillip Morris. You know who they are right.
It's run by Fred Singer and his wife.
Fred singer admitted on TV (Nightline) that it has received funding from the following:
Exxon mobile
Shell
Unocal
Arco
All Oil and Gas companies.
BIG OIL
f
k it, I'll take another from your list.The Cato Institute.
I'll let others search for the Big Oil connection on that one...should take all of 5 seconds. Try the Koch Brothers (the founders of the Cato Institute) and see what other companies they own...
You're examples are a joke as is your whole post.
You named these before and another on the list was taken at random and shown to be equally tainted.
How your followers fall for this tainted guff is beyond me.
Does anyone have a scientific Institute not in receipt of funding from one self interested industry or another?
In the context of the ‘not in my name’ open letter to PRS from 43 Fellows of the Royal Society complaining about the unscientific stance of the RS on global warming, and the subsequent open letter in the same vein from 33 Fellows of the Geological Society to their President (subsets consisting of those Fellows willing to put their heads above the parapet), consider this.
Michael Kelly a Professor at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the Royal Society said:
During my time as a Government Departmental Chief Scientific Adviser, I was always aware that politicians made the final decision on any issue on the balance of all the evidence. For this reason, civil servants are trained to draw their attention to all the upsides and downsides of taking a particular course of action. Those who fail to provide balance are not giving advice, but lobbying. It is with the deepest regret that I must now state that this is the role which has been adopted by the Royal Society. And when scientists abandon neutral inquiry for lobbying, they jeopardise their purpose and integrity.
At least, until agw fever infected politicians and administrators, both sides were usually considered.gadgetmac said:
I'm just going to take one of them at random as has been done before.
The Science and Environment Policy Project
This is an advocacy group set up by Phillip Morris. You know who they are right.
It's run by Fred Singer and his wife.
Fred singer admitted on TV (Nightline) that it has received funding from the following:
Exxon mobile
Shell
Unocal
Arco
All Oil and Gas companies.
BIG OIL
fk it, I'll take another from your list.
The Cato Institute.
I'll let others search for the Big Oil connection on that one...should take all of 5 seconds. Try the Koch Brothers (the founders of the Cato Institute) and see what other companies they own...
You're examples are a joke as is your whole post.
You named these before and another on the list was taken at random and shown to be equally tainted.
How your followers fall for this tainted guff is beyond me.
Does anyone have a scientific Institute not in receipt of funding from one self interested industry or another?
The Science and Environment Policy Project
This is an advocacy group set up by Phillip Morris. You know who they are right.
It's run by Fred Singer and his wife.
Fred singer admitted on TV (Nightline) that it has received funding from the following:
Exxon mobile
Shell
Unocal
Arco
All Oil and Gas companies.
BIG OIL
f
k it, I'll take another from your list.The Cato Institute.
I'll let others search for the Big Oil connection on that one...should take all of 5 seconds. Try the Koch Brothers (the founders of the Cato Institute) and see what other companies they own...
You're examples are a joke as is your whole post.
You named these before and another on the list was taken at random and shown to be equally tainted.
How your followers fall for this tainted guff is beyond me.
Does anyone have a scientific Institute not in receipt of funding from one self interested industry or another?
We’ve not seen his list of institutions for a while.
Last time there was even some institutions (nobody’s heard of) on TBs list that even disagreed with his position.
All the time he’s saying institutions aren’t important, he’s still desperate to find some that are anti AGW but can’t.
Article said:
In a fresh challenge to claims that there is scientific "consensus" on climate change, Prof Ivar Giaever has resigned from the American Physical Society, where his peers had elected him a Fellow to honour his work.
The society, which has 48,000 members, has adopted a policy statement which states: "The evidence is incontrovertible: global warming is occurring."
But Prof Giaever, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize for physics, told The Sunday Telegraph. "Incontrovertible is not a scientific word. Nothing is incontrovertible in science."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/climatechange/8786565/War-of-words-over-global-warming-as-Nobel-laureate-resigns-in-protest.htmlThe society, which has 48,000 members, has adopted a policy statement which states: "The evidence is incontrovertible: global warming is occurring."
But Prof Giaever, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize for physics, told The Sunday Telegraph. "Incontrovertible is not a scientific word. Nothing is incontrovertible in science."
Everyone on here wants to read what Ivar Giaever said in 2012.
"I am not really terribly interested in global warming, like most physicists I don't think much about...however I spent half a day on Google and was horrified by what I saw".
He also seems to think that maybe man is responsible for GW but it might be the paved roads and cut down forests.
So, he's a keeper for the deniers then
"I am not really terribly interested in global warming, like most physicists I don't think much about...however I spent half a day on Google and was horrified by what I saw".
He also seems to think that maybe man is responsible for GW but it might be the paved roads and cut down forests.
So, he's a keeper for the deniers then
In an open letter Prof Hal Lewis resigns from the American Physical Society in disgust at their “appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change” and other ‘unscientific’ issues around agw.
Open letter of resignation from Professor of Physics Hal Lewis to the President of the American Physical Society said:
From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
Dear Curt
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).
Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the Climategate documents, which lay it bare. I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:
1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.
3. In the interim the Climategate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.
5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.
6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.
APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?
I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the Climategate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
Dear Curt
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).
Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the Climategate documents, which lay it bare. I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:
1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.
3. In the interim the Climategate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.
5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.
6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.
APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?
I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the Climategate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal
The ‘organisation/institution’ single voice BS has always been BS, disagreement is rife including within the IPCC as per this open letter of resignation from Dr Chris Landsea.
Hurricane specialist Dr Chris Landsea open letter of resignation from IPCC participation said:
Dear colleagues
After some prolonged deliberation, I have decided to withdraw from participating in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I am withdrawing because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized. In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns.
With this open letter to the community, I wish to explain the basis for my decision and bring awareness to what I view as a problem in the IPCC process. The IPCC is a group of climate researchers from around the world that every few years summarize how climate is changing and how it may be altered in the future due to manmade global warming. I had served both as an author for the Observations chapter and a Reviewer for the 2nd Assessment Report in 1995 and the 3rd Assessment Report in 2001, primarily on the topic of tropical cyclones (hurricanes and typhoons). My work on hurricanes, and tropical cyclones more generally, has been widely cited by the IPCC. For the upcoming AR4, I was asked several weeks ago by the Observations chapter Lead Author - Dr Kevin Trenberth - to provide the writeup for Atlantic hurricanes. As I had in the past, I agreed to assist the IPCC in what I thought was to be an important, and politically-neutral determination of what is happening with our climate.
Shortly after Dr Trenberth requested that I draft the Atlantic hurricane section for the AR4's Observations chapter, Dr Trenberth participated in a press conference organized by scientists at Harvard on the topic "Experts to warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense hurricane activity" along with other media interviews on the topic. The result of this media interaction was widespread coverage that directly connected the very busy 2004 Atlantic hurricane season as being caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas warming occurring today. Listening to and reading transcripts of this press conference and media interviews, it is apparent that Dr Trenberth was being accurately quoted and summarized in such statements and was not being misrepresented in the media. These media sessions have potential to result in a widespread perception that global warming has made recent hurricane activity much more severe.
I found it a bit perplexing that the participants in the Harvard press conference had come to the conclusion that global warming was impacting hurricane activity today. To my knowledge, none of the participants in that press conference had performed any research on hurricane variability, nor were they reporting on any new work in the field. All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin. The IPCC assessments in 1995 and 2001 also concluded that there was no global warming signal found in the hurricane record.
Moreover, the evidence is quite strong and supported by the most recent credible studies that any impact in the future from global warming upon hurricane will likely be quite small. The latest results from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate) suggest that by around 2080, hurricanes may have winds and rainfall about 5% more intense than today. It has been proposed that even this tiny change may be an exaggeration as to what may happen by the end of the 21st Century (Michaels, Knappenberger, and Landsea, Journal of Climate, submitted).
It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming. Given Dr Trenberth’s role as the IPCC’s Lead Author responsible for preparing the text on hurricanes, his public statements so far outside of current scientific understanding led me to concern that it would be very difficult for the IPCC process to proceed objectively with regards to the assessment on hurricane activity. My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy.
My concerns go beyond the actions of Dr Trenberth and his colleagues to how he and other IPCC officials responded to my concerns. I did caution Dr Trenberth before the media event and provided him a summary of the current understanding within the hurricane research community. I was disappointed when the IPCC leadership dismissed my concerns when I brought up the misrepresentation of climate science while invoking the authority of the IPCC. Specifically, the IPCC leadership said that Dr Trenberth was speaking as an individual even though he was introduced in the press conference as an IPCC lead author; I was told that that the media was exaggerating or misrepresenting his words, even though the audio from the press conference and interview tells a different story (available on the web directly); and that Dr Trenberth was accurately reflecting conclusions from the TAR, even though it is quite clear that the TAR stated that there was no connection between global warming and hurricane activity. The IPCC leadership saw nothing to be concerned with in Dr Trenberth's unfounded pronouncements to the media, despite his supposedly impartial important role that he must undertake as a Lead Author on the upcoming AR4.
It is certainly true that "individual scientists can do what they wish in their own rights", as one of the folks in the IPCC leadership suggested. Differing conclusions and robust debates are certainly crucial to progress in climate science. However, this case is not an honest scientific discussion conducted at a meeting of climate researchers. Instead, a scientist with an important role in the IPCC represented himself as a Lead Author for the IPCC has used that position to promulgate to the media and general public his own opinion that the busy 2004 hurricane season was caused by global warming, which is in direct opposition to research written in the field and is counter to conclusions in the TAR. This becomes problematic when I am then asked to provide the draft about observed hurricane activity variations for the AR4 with, ironically, Dr Trenberth as the Lead Author for this chapter.
Because of Dr Trenberth's pronouncements, the IPCC process on our assessment of these crucial extreme events in our climate system has been subverted and compromised, its neutrality lost. While no one can "tell" scientists what to say or not say (nor am I suggesting that), the IPCC did select Dr Trenberth as a Lead Author and entrusted to him to carry out this duty in a non-biased, neutral point of view. When scientists hold press conferences and speak with the media, much care is needed not to reflect poorly upon the IPCC. It is of more than passing interest to note that Dr Trenberth, while eager to share his views on global warming and hurricanes with the media, declined to do so at the Climate Variability and Change Conference in January where he made several presentations. Perhaps he was concerned that such speculation - though worthy in his mind of public pronouncements – would not stand up to the scrutiny of fellow climate scientists.
I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound. As the IPCC leadership has seen no wrong in Dr Trenberth's actions and have retained him as a Lead Author for the AR4, I have decided to no longer participate in the IPCC AR4.
Sincerely, Chris Landsea
IPCC position seen as 'far outside current scientific understanding' After some prolonged deliberation, I have decided to withdraw from participating in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I am withdrawing because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized. In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns.
With this open letter to the community, I wish to explain the basis for my decision and bring awareness to what I view as a problem in the IPCC process. The IPCC is a group of climate researchers from around the world that every few years summarize how climate is changing and how it may be altered in the future due to manmade global warming. I had served both as an author for the Observations chapter and a Reviewer for the 2nd Assessment Report in 1995 and the 3rd Assessment Report in 2001, primarily on the topic of tropical cyclones (hurricanes and typhoons). My work on hurricanes, and tropical cyclones more generally, has been widely cited by the IPCC. For the upcoming AR4, I was asked several weeks ago by the Observations chapter Lead Author - Dr Kevin Trenberth - to provide the writeup for Atlantic hurricanes. As I had in the past, I agreed to assist the IPCC in what I thought was to be an important, and politically-neutral determination of what is happening with our climate.
Shortly after Dr Trenberth requested that I draft the Atlantic hurricane section for the AR4's Observations chapter, Dr Trenberth participated in a press conference organized by scientists at Harvard on the topic "Experts to warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense hurricane activity" along with other media interviews on the topic. The result of this media interaction was widespread coverage that directly connected the very busy 2004 Atlantic hurricane season as being caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas warming occurring today. Listening to and reading transcripts of this press conference and media interviews, it is apparent that Dr Trenberth was being accurately quoted and summarized in such statements and was not being misrepresented in the media. These media sessions have potential to result in a widespread perception that global warming has made recent hurricane activity much more severe.
I found it a bit perplexing that the participants in the Harvard press conference had come to the conclusion that global warming was impacting hurricane activity today. To my knowledge, none of the participants in that press conference had performed any research on hurricane variability, nor were they reporting on any new work in the field. All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin. The IPCC assessments in 1995 and 2001 also concluded that there was no global warming signal found in the hurricane record.
Moreover, the evidence is quite strong and supported by the most recent credible studies that any impact in the future from global warming upon hurricane will likely be quite small. The latest results from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate) suggest that by around 2080, hurricanes may have winds and rainfall about 5% more intense than today. It has been proposed that even this tiny change may be an exaggeration as to what may happen by the end of the 21st Century (Michaels, Knappenberger, and Landsea, Journal of Climate, submitted).
It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming. Given Dr Trenberth’s role as the IPCC’s Lead Author responsible for preparing the text on hurricanes, his public statements so far outside of current scientific understanding led me to concern that it would be very difficult for the IPCC process to proceed objectively with regards to the assessment on hurricane activity. My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy.
My concerns go beyond the actions of Dr Trenberth and his colleagues to how he and other IPCC officials responded to my concerns. I did caution Dr Trenberth before the media event and provided him a summary of the current understanding within the hurricane research community. I was disappointed when the IPCC leadership dismissed my concerns when I brought up the misrepresentation of climate science while invoking the authority of the IPCC. Specifically, the IPCC leadership said that Dr Trenberth was speaking as an individual even though he was introduced in the press conference as an IPCC lead author; I was told that that the media was exaggerating or misrepresenting his words, even though the audio from the press conference and interview tells a different story (available on the web directly); and that Dr Trenberth was accurately reflecting conclusions from the TAR, even though it is quite clear that the TAR stated that there was no connection between global warming and hurricane activity. The IPCC leadership saw nothing to be concerned with in Dr Trenberth's unfounded pronouncements to the media, despite his supposedly impartial important role that he must undertake as a Lead Author on the upcoming AR4.
It is certainly true that "individual scientists can do what they wish in their own rights", as one of the folks in the IPCC leadership suggested. Differing conclusions and robust debates are certainly crucial to progress in climate science. However, this case is not an honest scientific discussion conducted at a meeting of climate researchers. Instead, a scientist with an important role in the IPCC represented himself as a Lead Author for the IPCC has used that position to promulgate to the media and general public his own opinion that the busy 2004 hurricane season was caused by global warming, which is in direct opposition to research written in the field and is counter to conclusions in the TAR. This becomes problematic when I am then asked to provide the draft about observed hurricane activity variations for the AR4 with, ironically, Dr Trenberth as the Lead Author for this chapter.
Because of Dr Trenberth's pronouncements, the IPCC process on our assessment of these crucial extreme events in our climate system has been subverted and compromised, its neutrality lost. While no one can "tell" scientists what to say or not say (nor am I suggesting that), the IPCC did select Dr Trenberth as a Lead Author and entrusted to him to carry out this duty in a non-biased, neutral point of view. When scientists hold press conferences and speak with the media, much care is needed not to reflect poorly upon the IPCC. It is of more than passing interest to note that Dr Trenberth, while eager to share his views on global warming and hurricanes with the media, declined to do so at the Climate Variability and Change Conference in January where he made several presentations. Perhaps he was concerned that such speculation - though worthy in his mind of public pronouncements – would not stand up to the scrutiny of fellow climate scientists.
I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound. As the IPCC leadership has seen no wrong in Dr Trenberth's actions and have retained him as a Lead Author for the AR4, I have decided to no longer participate in the IPCC AR4.
Sincerely, Chris Landsea
gadgetmac said:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-469...
"A US research team (note: not made up of professors from the PH climate threads) examined ice cores from western Greenland that record the behaviour of the ice sheet dating back to 1650.
The group's analysis indicated that an uptick in melting began soon after the onset of industrial-era Arctic warming in the mid-1800s, and that the decade 2004-2013 experienced more sustained and intense melting than any other 10-year period in the 350-year record."
So, what global climate affecting phenomenon ended mid 1800's? Little Ice Age."A US research team (note: not made up of professors from the PH climate threads) examined ice cores from western Greenland that record the behaviour of the ice sheet dating back to 1650.
The group's analysis indicated that an uptick in melting began soon after the onset of industrial-era Arctic warming in the mid-1800s, and that the decade 2004-2013 experienced more sustained and intense melting than any other 10-year period in the 350-year record."
Wouldn't be much of a stretch to think that global temps might rise a bit after, would it?
stew-STR160 said:
gadgetmac said:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-469...
"A US research team examined ice cores from western Greenland that record the behaviour of the ice sheet dating back to 1650.
The group's analysis indicated that an uptick in melting began soon after the onset of industrial-era Arctic warming in the mid-1800s, and that the decade 2004-2013 experienced more sustained and intense melting than any other 10-year period in the 350-year record."
So, what global climate affecting phenomenon ended mid 1800's? Little Ice Age."A US research team examined ice cores from western Greenland that record the behaviour of the ice sheet dating back to 1650.
The group's analysis indicated that an uptick in melting began soon after the onset of industrial-era Arctic warming in the mid-1800s, and that the decade 2004-2013 experienced more sustained and intense melting than any other 10-year period in the 350-year record."
Wouldn't be much of a stretch to think that global temps might rise a bit after, would it?
I’ve located the letter to the GS President from 33 Fellows and former Fellows plus additional colleagues it’s certainly detailed so buckle up - it makes excellent points.
Not In My Name open letter to the President of the Geological Society of London said:
The President
Geological Society of London
Dear President
We are writing as a group of concerned primarily geoscientists, half of whom are or were Fellows, (names and affiliations listed below). Our concern is that the Society’s position on Climate Change (aka Anthropogenic Global Warming or AGW), is outdated and one-sided, and is distracting attention and funding from real issues of pollution such as plastic and other noxious industrial and domestic waste. To address this, we proposed to Colin Summerhayes that the 2010 and 2013 GSL Position Papers be posted on the Energy Matters blog, so that all sides of the discussion could be aired; and we are very grateful to Colin for effecting and taking part in this (http://euanmearns.com/the-geological-society-of-londons-statement-on-climate-change/). In addition, Colin continues to engage in an open and spirited email correspondence with some of us on the pros and cons of AGW.
The GSL position papers state they have been prepared ‘based on analysis of geological evidence, and not on analysis of recent temperature or satellite data, or climate model projections.’ And certainly, a key finding, ‘the only plausible explanation for the rate and extent of temperature increase since 1900, is the exponential rise in CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution’, is not in line with the IPCC claim (in AR5 SPM), that ‘Anthropogenic influences have likely affected the global water cycle since 1960’, and that ‘more than half’ of the warming since 1951 is due to AGW. The IPCC also claim that ‘Anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions since the pre-industrial era (variously claimed to be between 1750-1880) have driven large increases in the atmospheric concentrations of … CO2’, which nobody seriously denies, but they do not claim that this resulted in warming before 1951/60, as the GSL appears to.
The IPCC position matches observations that almost half of the warming that has occurred over the last 150 or so years since industrialisation, had already happened by 1943, well before the rapid rise of industrial CO2. This difference of opinion is critical, for if CO2 did not cause the pre-1943 warming, the claimed consensus that Catastrophic AGW is caused by human CO2 emissions since the Industrial Revolution, which is supported by GSL, must be mistaken.
While there remain other areas of disagreement over the science of Global Warming and Climate Change (which are not the same thing), we can probably all agree that the 2010 position paper and the 2013 addendum need updating. And as this update will be critical in deciding future climate policy world-wide, we propose that any updated paper should come from a full and open discussion of the science, and not just from the ideas of a small group however well qualified. We suggest that such a process could be achieved by adopting methods of review used by other professional societies, particularly the APS, AAPG, and APPEA copies of which are attached.
We also believe the GSL has a responsibility to refute the exaggerated claims that swirl around the fringes of the Climate Change debate, undermining the real science – such as that CO2 and Climate Change cause:
• more hurricanes, more rain, more drought, more asthma and now, even more terrorism (through drought in Africa),
• the exceptional cold and warm recorded over most of the sub-Arctic, Northern Hemisphere during the past winter and spring are what we should ‘expect’ from Global Warming.
As this letter makes clear, it is not true that 97% of scientists unreservedly accept that AGW theory is fixed, or that carbon and CO2 are ‘pollutants’ and their production should be penalised; how can the primary nutrient in photosynthesis be a pollutant? We also note that 700 scientists have made submissions to the US Senate expressing dissent from the consensus and 166 climate scientists issued a challenge to Ban Ki Moon on the eve of the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009 to provide proof of human induced global warming, which he did not do.
Even once respectable journals like the New Scientist, still uncritically peddle such social media nonsense as the infamous Hockey Stick, that seems to have lost the otherwise well documented Medieval Warm period. ‘Global Warming’ is on everyone’s lips with each month/year claimed to be the ‘hottest ever’ – based on IPCC’s ‘adjusted’ land and marine temperature data; however, the ‘pause’ in average temperatures since the 1998 el Niño, as documented by almost all recent temperature data, suggests global warming is no longer happening. Both claims cannot be correct, and, by saying nothing about these differences, the Society is supporting rather than resolving them.
By restricting the review to the geological evidence, independently of IPCC theory and modelling, the GSL signalled an independent scientific approach. But by excluding an evaluation of the modern climate record, the committee has failed to notice or account for these and other inconsistencies in AGW theory.
The Energy Matters blog was a useful first step in focusing on these issues but, as it is not ‘peer reviewed’[i] in the way that scientific papers generally are, we suggest something more formal is needed, such as a 2-day conference to explore all sides of the issues raised, with a strong neutral moderator.
Topics for such a dialogue could examine the evidence that
1. CO2 alone as the principle driver of temperature, or climate.
2. Climate Change is largely real, natural, and mostly beyond our control.
3. Manipulation of climate data has been used to support ‘global warming’.[ii]
4. Most climate alarms are little more than scaremongering.
5. CO2 is mainly beneficial, NOT dangerous but blanket decarbonisation is.
6. Industrial effluents and plastics, deforestation and overfishing are dangerous– and are being side-lined by the focus on CO2 emissions.
The world’s climate system, as defined by the IPCC, [iii] is a ‘coupled non-linear chaotic system”, for which “the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible’. This is due to the impossibility of describing precisely the initial conditions, and to instability generated by the mathematics causing cumulative errors in the modelling process, which combine to make a ‘correct’ solution impossible. This alone should make the authors of the GSL statements cautious about their very confident acceptance that CO2 alone has driven temperature and climate since 1900.The IPCC AR documents address some of the uncertainties, and are generally much less biased than the SPMs (Summary for Policymakers) which get all the media attention, which is unfortunate, as it is apparent that they are largely written not by scientists but by an ‘assemblage of representatives from governments and NGOs, with only a small scientific representation.’[iv] Their heavy political bias not only undermines the scientific content, it supercharges the ‘overwhelming consensus for human induced climate change’ which is mindlessly promulgated by the media year in, year out. The façade of consensus, helped by the data adjustments promised in the Climategate emails, negates the ‘creative conflict between theory and data’ which is missing in this debate and which we suggest the GSL can revive. It is to be hoped that the frequent use of conditionals ‘may’ and ‘could’ in the current papers will be reduced, as a document that will affect government policy for years needs to be more specific about the levels of uncertainty in its pronouncements.
We also note the difficulty of publishing anything that does not confirm the IPCC AGW position, again, as promised in Climategate emails; and also, the ‘ad hominem’ attacks rather than data refutation that too often characterises the debate, and we hope that this will not prevent the committee considering data that does not appear to support its position paper conclusions.
We do not expect that all of our concerns will survive the test of time, and we assume GSL would similarly accept that new data may well change the ‘consensus’. Climate models fail to model past climates accurately and consistently overestimate future temperature trends, nor are they able to explain the following:
• The current hiatus or pause in warming.
• Why the 285 ppm of atmospheric CO2 estimated for the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is in any way, a desirable benchmark. It coincides with the Victorian Little Ice Age, a period of starvation and population decline, which cannot possibly be a desirable target, unless you want to depopulate the earth.
• Climate models always predict higher temperatures than actually occur
• The absence of the predicted tropospheric hotspot – the ‘fingerprint of AGW’.
• CO2 and temperature were higher than today during the previous 50 million years plus, with no CAGW effects, why not?
• The natural warming of 8°C and ~100ppm increase in CO2 during the Holocene up to the 1800s, and the subsequent 125 ppm increase in CO2 after 1950, accompanied by a miserly ~1°C temperature rise.
• The Holocene enigma of generally falling but fluctuating temperatures from ~3,000BP, accompanied by rising CO2 that predates industrial CO2 emissions.
• How AGW theory relies on radiative transfer only to heat the planet, and seemingly ignores insolation, enthalpy and water vapour.
• The inability of the science of AGW to sharpen the range of estimates of climate sensitivity (currently between 1.5 oC and 6.4°C according to GSL)
despite over 30 years of hugely funded effort; surely the science has failed?
• Earth System Sensitivity concept introduced by GSL, which ‘could be twice’ climate sensitivity’ noted above (2013 Addendum, page 4)
Such rational failures have to be of concern to the GSL as they demonstrate that CO2 alone does not, nay cannot drive global warming, so how can it drive climate change? And if it does not, there is no reason for the uncritical acceptance of the UN/IPCC focus on penalising CO2 emissions?
The discussions in the Energy Matters blog suggests that the GSL position papers do not ‘prove’ that average global temperatures are accurately measured or agreed, or that human CO2 driven ‘warming’ is real and/or dangerous, or that CO2 is effective in changing the climate beyond natural variability. The position papers would not have included the beneficial effects of CO2 in greening the planet, as this was not widely reported until July 2013 CSIRO study. However, the benefits that cheap reliable electricity can bring in preventing over 4 million annual deaths from indoor air pollution from burning bio and other solid fuels, has been obvious for some time. Even if CO2 did drive some warming, is it more dangerous to more people than this very real pollution faced daily by well over 200 million in the developing world?
We fully support the Society’s involvement in the climate change debate but believe that the apparent failures of AGW theory noted herein, calls for a re-think. Climate is and always will change, but the evidence that this is due primarily to CO2, is not forthcoming. If the strong natural forcings that are so well described in the GSL papers have more impact than CO2, then we should be spending more of our limited resources on finding ways to adapt to negative climate change.
We are aware that the board has duties to the Society, to the prestige of the science and to Fellows, in that order perhaps, but think any formal statement by the Society should at least acknowledge the views of dissenting Fellows. Climate Change (which is only ever portrayed, without any justification, as dangerous) has become the critical issue of our time and informed dissent, cannot be swept under the carpet or dismissed as ‘unscientific’ or ‘denialist’, as it too often is; ‘Rebellion is the deepest root of science; the refusal to accept the present order of things,’[v] but seemingly not anymore in Climate Studies.
The GSL has taken a strong independent position; the Carbon Cycle is a genuine geological concern, but interpretation of the data is subject to increasing uncertainty as one goes back or forward in time, so firm conclusions based only on experimental data (the geological record) are likely to be unsound. As one of my correspondents puts it ‘The Society can make comments regarding the complexity of the physics and mathematics and inevitable uncertainty of predictions of nonlinear dynamical system behaviour etc., and there is nothing wrong with having a debate about this… But … their conclusions are unwarranted and unsound science if based on geological evidence alone.’
Science is supposed to use all the available tools at its disposal and by excluding the modern record it would be even more sound to avoid tacit support for the proposition that ‘the science is settled’. And even if everything the IPCC is frightened of looks inescapable, applying the precautionary principle by penalising carbon regardless has shut down debate creating more harm than benefit. Better by far to look at ways of mitigating possible effects until the evidence becomes firmer, one way or the other.
The strength of the Society is that Fellowship is not just open to people who share a current ‘consensus’, what was once accepted has often fallen by the wayside as arguments are overturned; Murchison and Sedgwick, uniformitarianism and catastrophism, Piltdown Man.
We would like to make a presentation of our findings to the board, as much of what is relevant can best be understood with reference to data. However, we have no wish to monopolise this discussion in any way, as we believe the issues need raising before as many interested parties as possible. And it is for this reason we are calling this an open letter and will circulate it through media channels after the forthcoming AGM.
Yours sincerely
Howard Dewhirst FGS,
on behalf of the following:
Active fellows:
Chris Atkinson Singapore BSc, PhD FGS, PESGB, SEAPEX
Nigel Banks United Kingdom BA, DPhil FGS, AAPG, SPE, PESGB
Dave Bodecott United Kingdom BSc, MSc FGS, AAPG, PESGB, IOD
David Boote United Kingdom MSc, PhD FGS, AAPG, PESGB
Bernard Cooper United Kingdom BSc FGS
John Cope United Kingdom BSc, PhD, DSc, C. Geol FGS (Snr Fellow), GA
Cameron Davies United Kingdom BSc, PhD, DIC FGS
Howard Dewhirst United Kingdom BA, MA FGS, AAPG, SPE, PESGB, PESA
Tim Harper United Kingdom BSc, PhD, MSc, DIC, C. Eng FGS, IOM3,
Graham Heard United Kingdom BSc FGS, CGeol, PESGB, AAPG, PESA
David Jenkins United Kingdom MA, PhD FGS, AAPG,
Chris Matchette-Downes United Kingdom BSc, MSc, C. Geol FGS, PESGB
James Moffatt South Africa MA FGS, GSA, AAPG, EAEG, PESGB
Philip Mulholland United Kingdom BA, MSc FGS, AAPG, EAGE, PESGB
Michael Oates United Kingdom BSc, PhD FGS, GA
Ian Plimer Australia BSc, PhD FGS (Hon), FTSE, FAIMM
Chris Pullan United Kingdom BSc FGS, PESGB
Michael Ridd United Kingdom BSc, PhD FGS
Michael Seymour United Kingdom MA, MSc, DIC FGS, PESGB (former Chair)
Richard Stabbins United Kingdom BSc, PhD, C. Geol FGS (Snr Fellow), PESGB (Hon Mbr)
Barry Squire United Kingdom BSc, PhD FGS
David Warwick United Kingdom BSc FGS, PESGB
Alastair Woodrow United Kingdom BSc (Physics) FGS, EAGE, EI, PESGB
Wyss Yim Hong Kong China DSc, PhD, DIC FGS
Enzo Zappaterra United Kingdom PhD, C. Pet Geol FGS, AAPG, PESGB
Former fellows:
David Bowen United Kingdom BSc, PhD FGS (former); Life Fellow INQUA
Frank Brophy Australia
Gary Couples United Kingdom BS, MA, PhD FGS (former), SPE, AGU, AAPG
Trish Dewhirst Australia BSc, B. Ecom FGS, AusIMM, PESGB (all former)
Henry John Dodwell United Kingdom BSc, MSc FGS (former), currently PESGB
Martin Keeley United Kingdom BSc, PhD FGS (former),
Dennis Paterson United Kingdom BSc, MSc, DIC FGS, AAPG, PESGB (all former)
William J Pyke United Kingdom BS, MSc, MA FGS (former),
Concerned colleagues:
Nils-Axel Morner Sweden PhD P&G, ICG
Tim Ball Canada BA, MA, PhD
Dave Bratton USA Na Na
Doug Buerger Australia BSc, MPhil Aus IMM, MAICD
John Conolly Australia BSc, MSc, PhD AAPG, PESA
Isabel Davies United Kingdom BSc, MSc, DIC PESGB
Paul Dostal Australia BE MIE Aust (former)
Philip Foster United Kingdom MA SMP
Ashley Francis United Kingdom BSc FRAS, EAGE, SEG, PESGB, IAMG, BSSS, MI Soil Sci
Andrew Gillies Australia BSc Aus IMM
Peter Gill United Kingdom BSc (Physics) FEI, Inst P, CEng, C Phys, Eur. Ing
John Graham United Kingdom BA EAGE, SEG retired
Tom Harris Canada B Eng, M Eng, ICSC
Bruce Harvey Australia BSc, MBA Aus IMM
Michael Haseler United Kingdom BSc (Physics), MBA na
Robert Heath United Kingdom BSc (Physics) SPG India (EAGE, SEG & PESGB, all former)
Yvon Houde Canada AAPG, SEG, SPE, HGS, CSPG
Richard Karn Australia BA, MA na
Pamela Klein Portugal BSc MSc ICG,
Richard Lindzen USA PhD MIT, Mbr US NAS
Sebastian Luening Germany Dr habil AGU
Andy May USA BSc AAPG, SPE, SPWLA
Peter McCarthy Australia BSc, M. Geosc AusIMM, MAICD
Robert Merrill USA PhD AAPG, SPE, GSA
Paul Messenger Australia BSc, PhD Aus IMM (former), GSA (former)
Steve Munro New Zealand BSc, Post-Grad Dipl, MBA ASEG
Thomas E O’Connor USA BS, MS AAPG, Houston Geo. Soc
Alex Pope USA BS NASA retired
Gordon P Riddler United Kingdom BSc, MBA CEng, FIMMM
Bill Trojan USA BS, MS AAPG, Westminster College SLC Utah
Mark Wharton United Kingdom na na
Subsequent signatories:
Viv Forbes Australia BSc AusIMM
Peter B Gibbs United Kingdom BSc FGS, PESGB
Roger Higgs United Kingdom BSc, MSc, DPhil AAPG, (FGS, PESGB, GSA, SEPM former)
Simon Kendall United Kingdom BSc, MSc FGS (former)
Carlos Venturini United Kingdom BSc, MSc, PG Dipl FGS, PESGB
Geological Society of London
Dear President
We are writing as a group of concerned primarily geoscientists, half of whom are or were Fellows, (names and affiliations listed below). Our concern is that the Society’s position on Climate Change (aka Anthropogenic Global Warming or AGW), is outdated and one-sided, and is distracting attention and funding from real issues of pollution such as plastic and other noxious industrial and domestic waste. To address this, we proposed to Colin Summerhayes that the 2010 and 2013 GSL Position Papers be posted on the Energy Matters blog, so that all sides of the discussion could be aired; and we are very grateful to Colin for effecting and taking part in this (http://euanmearns.com/the-geological-society-of-londons-statement-on-climate-change/). In addition, Colin continues to engage in an open and spirited email correspondence with some of us on the pros and cons of AGW.
The GSL position papers state they have been prepared ‘based on analysis of geological evidence, and not on analysis of recent temperature or satellite data, or climate model projections.’ And certainly, a key finding, ‘the only plausible explanation for the rate and extent of temperature increase since 1900, is the exponential rise in CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution’, is not in line with the IPCC claim (in AR5 SPM), that ‘Anthropogenic influences have likely affected the global water cycle since 1960’, and that ‘more than half’ of the warming since 1951 is due to AGW. The IPCC also claim that ‘Anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions since the pre-industrial era (variously claimed to be between 1750-1880) have driven large increases in the atmospheric concentrations of … CO2’, which nobody seriously denies, but they do not claim that this resulted in warming before 1951/60, as the GSL appears to.
The IPCC position matches observations that almost half of the warming that has occurred over the last 150 or so years since industrialisation, had already happened by 1943, well before the rapid rise of industrial CO2. This difference of opinion is critical, for if CO2 did not cause the pre-1943 warming, the claimed consensus that Catastrophic AGW is caused by human CO2 emissions since the Industrial Revolution, which is supported by GSL, must be mistaken.
While there remain other areas of disagreement over the science of Global Warming and Climate Change (which are not the same thing), we can probably all agree that the 2010 position paper and the 2013 addendum need updating. And as this update will be critical in deciding future climate policy world-wide, we propose that any updated paper should come from a full and open discussion of the science, and not just from the ideas of a small group however well qualified. We suggest that such a process could be achieved by adopting methods of review used by other professional societies, particularly the APS, AAPG, and APPEA copies of which are attached.
We also believe the GSL has a responsibility to refute the exaggerated claims that swirl around the fringes of the Climate Change debate, undermining the real science – such as that CO2 and Climate Change cause:
• more hurricanes, more rain, more drought, more asthma and now, even more terrorism (through drought in Africa),
• the exceptional cold and warm recorded over most of the sub-Arctic, Northern Hemisphere during the past winter and spring are what we should ‘expect’ from Global Warming.
As this letter makes clear, it is not true that 97% of scientists unreservedly accept that AGW theory is fixed, or that carbon and CO2 are ‘pollutants’ and their production should be penalised; how can the primary nutrient in photosynthesis be a pollutant? We also note that 700 scientists have made submissions to the US Senate expressing dissent from the consensus and 166 climate scientists issued a challenge to Ban Ki Moon on the eve of the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009 to provide proof of human induced global warming, which he did not do.
Even once respectable journals like the New Scientist, still uncritically peddle such social media nonsense as the infamous Hockey Stick, that seems to have lost the otherwise well documented Medieval Warm period. ‘Global Warming’ is on everyone’s lips with each month/year claimed to be the ‘hottest ever’ – based on IPCC’s ‘adjusted’ land and marine temperature data; however, the ‘pause’ in average temperatures since the 1998 el Niño, as documented by almost all recent temperature data, suggests global warming is no longer happening. Both claims cannot be correct, and, by saying nothing about these differences, the Society is supporting rather than resolving them.
By restricting the review to the geological evidence, independently of IPCC theory and modelling, the GSL signalled an independent scientific approach. But by excluding an evaluation of the modern climate record, the committee has failed to notice or account for these and other inconsistencies in AGW theory.
The Energy Matters blog was a useful first step in focusing on these issues but, as it is not ‘peer reviewed’[i] in the way that scientific papers generally are, we suggest something more formal is needed, such as a 2-day conference to explore all sides of the issues raised, with a strong neutral moderator.
Topics for such a dialogue could examine the evidence that
1. CO2 alone as the principle driver of temperature, or climate.
2. Climate Change is largely real, natural, and mostly beyond our control.
3. Manipulation of climate data has been used to support ‘global warming’.[ii]
4. Most climate alarms are little more than scaremongering.
5. CO2 is mainly beneficial, NOT dangerous but blanket decarbonisation is.
6. Industrial effluents and plastics, deforestation and overfishing are dangerous– and are being side-lined by the focus on CO2 emissions.
The world’s climate system, as defined by the IPCC, [iii] is a ‘coupled non-linear chaotic system”, for which “the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible’. This is due to the impossibility of describing precisely the initial conditions, and to instability generated by the mathematics causing cumulative errors in the modelling process, which combine to make a ‘correct’ solution impossible. This alone should make the authors of the GSL statements cautious about their very confident acceptance that CO2 alone has driven temperature and climate since 1900.The IPCC AR documents address some of the uncertainties, and are generally much less biased than the SPMs (Summary for Policymakers) which get all the media attention, which is unfortunate, as it is apparent that they are largely written not by scientists but by an ‘assemblage of representatives from governments and NGOs, with only a small scientific representation.’[iv] Their heavy political bias not only undermines the scientific content, it supercharges the ‘overwhelming consensus for human induced climate change’ which is mindlessly promulgated by the media year in, year out. The façade of consensus, helped by the data adjustments promised in the Climategate emails, negates the ‘creative conflict between theory and data’ which is missing in this debate and which we suggest the GSL can revive. It is to be hoped that the frequent use of conditionals ‘may’ and ‘could’ in the current papers will be reduced, as a document that will affect government policy for years needs to be more specific about the levels of uncertainty in its pronouncements.
We also note the difficulty of publishing anything that does not confirm the IPCC AGW position, again, as promised in Climategate emails; and also, the ‘ad hominem’ attacks rather than data refutation that too often characterises the debate, and we hope that this will not prevent the committee considering data that does not appear to support its position paper conclusions.
We do not expect that all of our concerns will survive the test of time, and we assume GSL would similarly accept that new data may well change the ‘consensus’. Climate models fail to model past climates accurately and consistently overestimate future temperature trends, nor are they able to explain the following:
• The current hiatus or pause in warming.
• Why the 285 ppm of atmospheric CO2 estimated for the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is in any way, a desirable benchmark. It coincides with the Victorian Little Ice Age, a period of starvation and population decline, which cannot possibly be a desirable target, unless you want to depopulate the earth.
• Climate models always predict higher temperatures than actually occur
• The absence of the predicted tropospheric hotspot – the ‘fingerprint of AGW’.
• CO2 and temperature were higher than today during the previous 50 million years plus, with no CAGW effects, why not?
• The natural warming of 8°C and ~100ppm increase in CO2 during the Holocene up to the 1800s, and the subsequent 125 ppm increase in CO2 after 1950, accompanied by a miserly ~1°C temperature rise.
• The Holocene enigma of generally falling but fluctuating temperatures from ~3,000BP, accompanied by rising CO2 that predates industrial CO2 emissions.
• How AGW theory relies on radiative transfer only to heat the planet, and seemingly ignores insolation, enthalpy and water vapour.
• The inability of the science of AGW to sharpen the range of estimates of climate sensitivity (currently between 1.5 oC and 6.4°C according to GSL)
despite over 30 years of hugely funded effort; surely the science has failed?
• Earth System Sensitivity concept introduced by GSL, which ‘could be twice’ climate sensitivity’ noted above (2013 Addendum, page 4)
Such rational failures have to be of concern to the GSL as they demonstrate that CO2 alone does not, nay cannot drive global warming, so how can it drive climate change? And if it does not, there is no reason for the uncritical acceptance of the UN/IPCC focus on penalising CO2 emissions?
The discussions in the Energy Matters blog suggests that the GSL position papers do not ‘prove’ that average global temperatures are accurately measured or agreed, or that human CO2 driven ‘warming’ is real and/or dangerous, or that CO2 is effective in changing the climate beyond natural variability. The position papers would not have included the beneficial effects of CO2 in greening the planet, as this was not widely reported until July 2013 CSIRO study. However, the benefits that cheap reliable electricity can bring in preventing over 4 million annual deaths from indoor air pollution from burning bio and other solid fuels, has been obvious for some time. Even if CO2 did drive some warming, is it more dangerous to more people than this very real pollution faced daily by well over 200 million in the developing world?
We fully support the Society’s involvement in the climate change debate but believe that the apparent failures of AGW theory noted herein, calls for a re-think. Climate is and always will change, but the evidence that this is due primarily to CO2, is not forthcoming. If the strong natural forcings that are so well described in the GSL papers have more impact than CO2, then we should be spending more of our limited resources on finding ways to adapt to negative climate change.
We are aware that the board has duties to the Society, to the prestige of the science and to Fellows, in that order perhaps, but think any formal statement by the Society should at least acknowledge the views of dissenting Fellows. Climate Change (which is only ever portrayed, without any justification, as dangerous) has become the critical issue of our time and informed dissent, cannot be swept under the carpet or dismissed as ‘unscientific’ or ‘denialist’, as it too often is; ‘Rebellion is the deepest root of science; the refusal to accept the present order of things,’[v] but seemingly not anymore in Climate Studies.
The GSL has taken a strong independent position; the Carbon Cycle is a genuine geological concern, but interpretation of the data is subject to increasing uncertainty as one goes back or forward in time, so firm conclusions based only on experimental data (the geological record) are likely to be unsound. As one of my correspondents puts it ‘The Society can make comments regarding the complexity of the physics and mathematics and inevitable uncertainty of predictions of nonlinear dynamical system behaviour etc., and there is nothing wrong with having a debate about this… But … their conclusions are unwarranted and unsound science if based on geological evidence alone.’
Science is supposed to use all the available tools at its disposal and by excluding the modern record it would be even more sound to avoid tacit support for the proposition that ‘the science is settled’. And even if everything the IPCC is frightened of looks inescapable, applying the precautionary principle by penalising carbon regardless has shut down debate creating more harm than benefit. Better by far to look at ways of mitigating possible effects until the evidence becomes firmer, one way or the other.
The strength of the Society is that Fellowship is not just open to people who share a current ‘consensus’, what was once accepted has often fallen by the wayside as arguments are overturned; Murchison and Sedgwick, uniformitarianism and catastrophism, Piltdown Man.
We would like to make a presentation of our findings to the board, as much of what is relevant can best be understood with reference to data. However, we have no wish to monopolise this discussion in any way, as we believe the issues need raising before as many interested parties as possible. And it is for this reason we are calling this an open letter and will circulate it through media channels after the forthcoming AGM.
Yours sincerely
Howard Dewhirst FGS,
on behalf of the following:
Active fellows:
Chris Atkinson Singapore BSc, PhD FGS, PESGB, SEAPEX
Nigel Banks United Kingdom BA, DPhil FGS, AAPG, SPE, PESGB
Dave Bodecott United Kingdom BSc, MSc FGS, AAPG, PESGB, IOD
David Boote United Kingdom MSc, PhD FGS, AAPG, PESGB
Bernard Cooper United Kingdom BSc FGS
John Cope United Kingdom BSc, PhD, DSc, C. Geol FGS (Snr Fellow), GA
Cameron Davies United Kingdom BSc, PhD, DIC FGS
Howard Dewhirst United Kingdom BA, MA FGS, AAPG, SPE, PESGB, PESA
Tim Harper United Kingdom BSc, PhD, MSc, DIC, C. Eng FGS, IOM3,
Graham Heard United Kingdom BSc FGS, CGeol, PESGB, AAPG, PESA
David Jenkins United Kingdom MA, PhD FGS, AAPG,
Chris Matchette-Downes United Kingdom BSc, MSc, C. Geol FGS, PESGB
James Moffatt South Africa MA FGS, GSA, AAPG, EAEG, PESGB
Philip Mulholland United Kingdom BA, MSc FGS, AAPG, EAGE, PESGB
Michael Oates United Kingdom BSc, PhD FGS, GA
Ian Plimer Australia BSc, PhD FGS (Hon), FTSE, FAIMM
Chris Pullan United Kingdom BSc FGS, PESGB
Michael Ridd United Kingdom BSc, PhD FGS
Michael Seymour United Kingdom MA, MSc, DIC FGS, PESGB (former Chair)
Richard Stabbins United Kingdom BSc, PhD, C. Geol FGS (Snr Fellow), PESGB (Hon Mbr)
Barry Squire United Kingdom BSc, PhD FGS
David Warwick United Kingdom BSc FGS, PESGB
Alastair Woodrow United Kingdom BSc (Physics) FGS, EAGE, EI, PESGB
Wyss Yim Hong Kong China DSc, PhD, DIC FGS
Enzo Zappaterra United Kingdom PhD, C. Pet Geol FGS, AAPG, PESGB
Former fellows:
David Bowen United Kingdom BSc, PhD FGS (former); Life Fellow INQUA
Frank Brophy Australia
Gary Couples United Kingdom BS, MA, PhD FGS (former), SPE, AGU, AAPG
Trish Dewhirst Australia BSc, B. Ecom FGS, AusIMM, PESGB (all former)
Henry John Dodwell United Kingdom BSc, MSc FGS (former), currently PESGB
Martin Keeley United Kingdom BSc, PhD FGS (former),
Dennis Paterson United Kingdom BSc, MSc, DIC FGS, AAPG, PESGB (all former)
William J Pyke United Kingdom BS, MSc, MA FGS (former),
Concerned colleagues:
Nils-Axel Morner Sweden PhD P&G, ICG
Tim Ball Canada BA, MA, PhD
Dave Bratton USA Na Na
Doug Buerger Australia BSc, MPhil Aus IMM, MAICD
John Conolly Australia BSc, MSc, PhD AAPG, PESA
Isabel Davies United Kingdom BSc, MSc, DIC PESGB
Paul Dostal Australia BE MIE Aust (former)
Philip Foster United Kingdom MA SMP
Ashley Francis United Kingdom BSc FRAS, EAGE, SEG, PESGB, IAMG, BSSS, MI Soil Sci
Andrew Gillies Australia BSc Aus IMM
Peter Gill United Kingdom BSc (Physics) FEI, Inst P, CEng, C Phys, Eur. Ing
John Graham United Kingdom BA EAGE, SEG retired
Tom Harris Canada B Eng, M Eng, ICSC
Bruce Harvey Australia BSc, MBA Aus IMM
Michael Haseler United Kingdom BSc (Physics), MBA na
Robert Heath United Kingdom BSc (Physics) SPG India (EAGE, SEG & PESGB, all former)
Yvon Houde Canada AAPG, SEG, SPE, HGS, CSPG
Richard Karn Australia BA, MA na
Pamela Klein Portugal BSc MSc ICG,
Richard Lindzen USA PhD MIT, Mbr US NAS
Sebastian Luening Germany Dr habil AGU
Andy May USA BSc AAPG, SPE, SPWLA
Peter McCarthy Australia BSc, M. Geosc AusIMM, MAICD
Robert Merrill USA PhD AAPG, SPE, GSA
Paul Messenger Australia BSc, PhD Aus IMM (former), GSA (former)
Steve Munro New Zealand BSc, Post-Grad Dipl, MBA ASEG
Thomas E O’Connor USA BS, MS AAPG, Houston Geo. Soc
Alex Pope USA BS NASA retired
Gordon P Riddler United Kingdom BSc, MBA CEng, FIMMM
Bill Trojan USA BS, MS AAPG, Westminster College SLC Utah
Mark Wharton United Kingdom na na
Subsequent signatories:
Viv Forbes Australia BSc AusIMM
Peter B Gibbs United Kingdom BSc FGS, PESGB
Roger Higgs United Kingdom BSc, MSc, DPhil AAPG, (FGS, PESGB, GSA, SEPM former)
Simon Kendall United Kingdom BSc, MSc FGS (former)
Carlos Venturini United Kingdom BSc, MSc, PG Dipl FGS, PESGB
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