Arguing that Global Warming exists

[Coolhand]

Hi NickB.

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my various questions. Some good food for thought. Really appreciate it.

 

[Sabina]

He wear a chemical mask.

 

[Coolhand]

Hi NickB
Hope you’re still around. I know you said you'd be dissapearing for a bit.

I’ve been pondering the information you posted, thinking hard about it and reviewing the info the sites you posted (already familiar with realclimate.org but hadn’t read the met office or royal society before.)
It’s all interesting stuff and has gone into the melting pot of my brain, but there’s just something you said I was wanting to come back on.

The IPCC has "downgraded" its estimate to up to around 60 cm by 2100 (from a maximum of, if I recall correctly, around 88 cm in 2100). However, it emphasises that this is very uncertain, and does not attempt to put probabilities on different estimates (as it has with temperatures). More recent work by Stefan Rahmstorf suggests a possible increase of up to 1.4m by 2100. In the longer term it looks like we're very likely to be committed to the loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which would add 6-7 m to global sea level. If we lose the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that's another 5-6 m. And it's possible other ice from Antarctica could be lost. The ice dynamics of Antarctica are not well understood, and some elements of these dynamics are not considered by the IPCC because they cannot be quantified. Many climate scientists, including at least some (maybe all - I don't know) of those who authored the sections on sea level in the IPCC, view the IPCC estimates as conservative. My advice to planners wanting to adapt to climate change is plan for at least a metre by 2100, and (if any were to look further ahead) at least 1m per century for the next few hundred years. I think this is pretty plausible - I wouldn't be surprised to see a rise of up to around 15 m by sometime between 250-3000, although that is no doubt too far ahead to be of more than passing interest to most people.

Cheers

Nick

Just after you posted this I read an article by a Dr Cliff Ollier from The University of Western Australia in which he basically claims that it is impossible for the Greenland and Antarctic Ice sheets to collapse in the way that models by Dr James Hanson and other predict. I’m no geologist so I’m hardly the best judge of what he says. I’ll just post the link here so that everyone can read and make up their own minds.

Klima

Any thoughts from anyone?

 

[NickB]

Hi NickB
Just after you posted this I read an article by a Dr Cliff Ollier from The University of Western Australia in which he basically claims that it is impossible for the Greenland and Antarctic Ice sheets to collapse in the way that models by Dr James Hanson and other predict. I’m no geologist so I’m hardly the best judge of what he says. I’ll just post the link here so that everyone can read and make up their own minds.

Yes, I saw this piece as well - distributed on Benny Peiser's newsletter. By the way, if you really want to see all the arguments against the "global warming orthodoxy" you can subscribe to Peiser's newsletter. Peiser is a contrarian when it comes to climate change, and he works very hard to disseminate any material that challenges the mainstream view of human-induced climate change. Google him. It's clear where he stands from the tone of some of his newsletters. But they're a good way of keeping up with stuff like this.

I've just re-read Cliff Ollier's article, and will make a few comments. First, I should say that for all I know he may have a point - I'm no glaciologist and there are always criticisms to be made of the models. But a few things make me suspicious, and I'll list these below.

1. He claims that the understanding of ice sheets (which certainly has its limitations) is based on one model (Hanson's) and a few "copycat models". So he's immediately setting us up to think this is all based on the work of just a few people using limited, badly designed models. I suspect that people working in this area would be a little upset about this - there are a lot of people working on ice sheets, using a variety of models.

2. His terminology is a bit odd. He refers to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (usually denoted by the acronym WAIS) as the "West Antarctica Ice Sheet", and then throughout the article as the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Now the WAIS and the "Antarctic Ice Sheet" are very different things, and this terminology is surprising.

3. Perhaps the conflation of the WAIS with the whole of the Antarctic ice sheet(s) is deliberate, so that he can then talk about Antarctica as a whole. By doing so he can accurately state that collapse is extremely unlikely. No-one is suggesting a collapse of, for example the East Antarctic Ice Sheet - it is the WAIS that has been exercising the minds of climate scientists. And this is just a small fraction the Antarctic ice. So if anyone suggests that people are claiming that "Antarctica" is going to melt, they're either misleading you or have been misled themselves.

4. Ollier talks about the location of Vostok, and the Vostok ice core, arguing that temperatures here are too cold for ice to melt and that the Vostok core reveals continuous layers of ice going back hundreds of thousands of years. This is all correct. But Vostok is in East Antarctica, not on the WAIS, so this is a bit of a red herring.

5. Ollier states that "Some of the present-day claims that ice sheets ‘collapse’ are based on false concepts. Ice sheets do not melt from the surface down – only at the edges". The concern about ice sheet "collapse" is not that this will occur as a result of melting from the top down, but that ice sheets will become unstable where they are grounded on submerged land in warming waters, or where fringing ice shelves which act as a break on glacier flow at the margins of ice sheets, collapse, allowing more rapid glacier flow and altering the balance between accumulation and loss of ice.

6. As for past analogues, it's thought that the Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) contributed up to 5 metres to global sea-level rise during the last interglacial some 130,000 - 110,000 years ago, when global mean surface temperature was probably 1.5 - 2 degrees warmer than it has been over the past century. Projections for global mean surface temperatures by the end of the 21st century are between 2 and 6 degrees. There now appears to be more consensus about the more or less inevitable loss of the GIS than about the less certain loss of the WAIS. Note that Ollier's figure for the antiquity of ice cores in Greenland doesn't reach back into the last interglacial.

7. There is a lot of confusion about the term "collapse", which might indicate the sudden loss of a huge ice sheet in a few years. We're talking about centuries for the loss of the GIS and WAIS, if indeed they do "collapse", and "disintegration" would probably be a better term - this would likely consist of fairly gradual trends on which were superimposed episodes of relatively rapid loss. The term "collapse" does sound catastrophic, and plays into the hands of those who want accuse scientists of doom mongering.

8. Ollier is using the polemical language of the climate contrarians, which makes me suspicious. I'm not above a bit of polemic myself, but I tend to restrict this to blogs and keep it out of articles that are meant to make a scientific contribution to a debate. His concluding paragraph seems to say it all. He states that "The global warming doomsday writers claim the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting catastrophically, and will cause a sudden rise in sea level of 5 or more metres." Are the "doomsday writers" the scientists here? People are talking about rapid melting at the fringes of large ice sheets, but no-one is saying catastrophic melting/collapse is already happening - loss of the GIS and WAIS is a distinct possibility (many researchers believe we're committed to loss of the GIS, but pretty much everyone agrees that the future of the WAIS is more uncertain). No-one is saying there will be a "sudden" (whatever that means" rise in sea level of 5 metres or more. I wouldn't be surprised to see anything up to 15 metres over the next 1000 years, but I wouldn't call that sudden. The worst case scenario for this century, which has any scientific credibility, is probably 1.4 metres (based on work by Stefan Rahmstorf, which post-dates most of the stuff in the IPCC).

9. Ollier states "The existence of ice over 3 km thick preserving details of past snowfall and atmospheres, used to decipher past temperature and CO2 levels, shows that the ice sheets have accumulated for hundreds of thousands of years without melting." This is based on his discussion of the Vostok core, and he is simply extrapolating this to all ice sheets, relying on the fact that a non-specialist audience sympathetic to the contrarian viewpoint will miss this sleight of hand.

There is a lot more to say here - I've just scratched the surface, but time and the fact that I don't have the entire edifice of climate change research committed to memory mean that I'll leave it there for now. I'll try and do some more digging on this and perhaps get back to the forum with it. In summary, it looks to me as if this is a polemic driven by a dogmatic position. A lot of his statements are (it appears deliberately) misleading, and dogmatic statements such as "collapse is impossible" are just not scientific. Ollier is using the well-worn tactic of setting up a straw man - in this case the apparent claim by doom mongers that we're going to see a "rapid" (over years, decades?) increase in sea levels of many metres. He plays down the amount of scientific work going on in the area of ice sheet dynamics, and simply dismisses what he does acknowledge. He states that ideas of ice sheet collapse are based on surface melting, when they are not. His argument that ice sheets are affected only by creep and not by interactions with the surfaces on which they are grounded, and with processes occurring at their edges, seems simplistic at best and absurd at most. Ditto for his statements about glacier retreat being nothing to do with warming (Ok there is a debate about Kilimanjaro, but glacier retreat is seen across the globe and in most cases the relationship with climate is less controversial).

If he does have a valid argument and is able to demonstrate convincingly, and scientifically, that the orthodoxy is wrong, then great. Let him put it in a scientific paper and submit it to a journal so that it can be peer reviewed. I think it's a pretty safe bet to say that this won't happen. He might (I don't know) argue that the peer review process is rigged against anything challenging the orthodoxy, but if he did he'd be joining the ranks of the conspiracy theorists. I think he's probably another contrarian scientist from outside the field of climate change, writing outside his main area of expertise. On the University of Western Australia website he is listed as an Honorary Research Fellow whose interests are "Africa, Australia, Geomorphology, Mountain Evolution" (the last but one word is somewhat corrupted in my browser). His stated interests don't cover ice sheets or polar regions. This might sound like sour grapes on my part, but it seems that this particular piece on ice sheets is written by someone who isn't an expert in that particular field. So what's his motivation?

Hope this helps a bit.

Nick

 

[Coolhand]

Thanks Nick.

 

[NickB]

No problem. For all their lunacy, dogma, and lack of scientific rigour the contrarians do serve to keep us on our toes.

I'm away for a while as of next week, so will probably not be posting much here until the New Year (and even then things are busy). But I'll try and keep up with the thread.

All the best

Nick

 

[Coolhand]

NickB, I appreciate that you know a hell of a lot more about this subject than I do, and I appreciate your taking the time to chat, but…

No problem. For all their lunacy, dogma, and lack of scientific rigour the contrarians do serve to keep us on our toes.

…I’m afraid I do take issue with that, just the same as I’d take issue with someone who dismissed the non-contrarians as tree hugging hippies or scare-mongering media junkies. The contrarians appear to contain quite a number of serious scientists who appear to have no motive other than genuinely believing what they say and believing they have the data to prove it. It’s true that they form the minority opinion and are outside of the accepted scientific consensus, but I don’t for one second buy them one-and-all as looney, dogmatic or lacking scientific rigour.

Anyway, have a good holiday.

 

[NickB]

NickB, …I’m afraid I do take issue with that, just the same as I’d take issue with someone who dismissed the non-contrarians as tree hugging hippies or scare-mongering media junkies. The contrarians appear to contain quite a number of serious scientists who appear to have no motive other than genuinely believing what they say and believing they have the data to prove it. It’s true that they form the minority opinion and are outside of the accepted scientific consensus, but I don’t for one second buy them one-and-all as looney, dogmatic or lacking scientific rigour.

We'll have to agree to disagree here. You say that "The contrarians appear to contain quite a number of serious scientists who appear to have no motive other than genuinely believing what they say and believing they have the data to prove it". If you'd like to name them we can assess their credentials. The overwhelming majority of the contrarians are not specialists in the area of climate change. There are a few meteorologists and one or two people with a background in climate-related research, and most of these take money from vested economic interests and/or publish little or anything in the peer reviewed scientific literature. There is one eminent contrarian with a background in meteorology who is always wheeled out as the voice of science, but who hasn't published anything in 20 years. There is another who describes himself as a "state climatologist", where the state he purports to serve has disowned him. I'm not going to get into names and mud-slinging - you can always google "prominent climate change contrarians" or some such. There is also a handful of astrophysicists determined to place all climatic variation at the door of the sun, or cosmic rays. I disagree about the extent to which serious scientists are represented in the contrarian camp.

As far as I am concerned there is no professional equivalence between the contrarians and the climate scientists who contribute to the IPCC. The vast majority of contrarians are actually professional lobbyists (a number are economists) and these characters purport to base their arguments on the work of scientists who actually aren't climate scientists, and who generally know little about the science of climate change. The "science" that you see presented from the contrarian camp is usually either fake science, or deliberate distortion and misinterpretation of real scientific data. Often the "alternative" explanations are old arguments that were had by the scientific community years or decades ago - the science has now moved on. In other cases they are wildly speculative. An example is the idea that climate change is controlled by cosmic rays. Cosmic rays may play a role in cloud formation but at this stage this mechanism has not been seriously investigated. Nonetheless, this doesn't stop the contrarians wanting to jettison the entire edifice of climate change science, which offers a good explanation of the dynamics of climate change which is consistent with observations, in favour or a speculative theory with no supporting data other than a plausible hypothesis (which is what the contrarians dismiss "global warming" as). There is a lot of clutching at straws going on here.

I have absolutely no problem with any real evidence that challenges or undermines the existing scientific "orthodoxy". That is the essence of science - challenging existing models with new data. But every time I see an article from the contrarian camp and examine it in detail it dissolves in a puff of propaganda, word play and pseudo-science. I'm afraid if you think the contarians have the same degree of credibility as those involved in the real science, then you've been duped. This is precisely their intention - to set up opinion and pseudo-science as equivalent in weight to science. In fact this is something that has been a feature of the Bush White House of the last seven odd, which is pretty cosy with the contrarians, particularly via the oil industry. The latest US administration has placed faith on a similar or higher level to evidence - it's not what you know but what you believe that's important. This has characterised policy from climate change to the Iraq war. This is incredibly damaging to science, and to the public understanding of science, because it makes all opinions appear equally valid, whatever their origin. Ironic that science has been the victim of a neocon-inspired relativism when the political right is always using the charge of relativism to attack its opponents. If we're going to give the same weight to the pseudo-scientific nonsense emanating from the contrarian camp as we do to science, we may as well shut down the computer models, stop carrying out research in to the behaviour of the climate through studies of past climates, and employ an army of clairvoyants instead. After all, crystal balls are much cheaper than research.

Our understanding of climate change will certainly change and evolve, and we may revise our existing models of what is actually going on. But this isn't going to happen as a result of anti-scientific lobbying by people who dismiss climate change as, for example, “…the Left's best excuse for increasing government control over our actions in ways both large and small …the ideal scare campaign for those who hate capitalism and love big government… anti-American, anti-capitalist, and anti-human" - that's Christopher C Horner, a Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming". He no doubt does a great job of putting across the "alternative scientific evidence" within its august pages.

I think if you want to understand what's going on here you should look to the debate between evolutionary biology and creationism. Like climate science, evolutionary theory is not perfect, and there are outstanding questions there. Arrayed against the necessary careful and cautious approach of the scientists trying to unpack our apparent evolutionary past is an army of very articulate and intelligent people who use and distort science to their own ends, jumping on the smallest disagreement or controversy, in order to argue that evolutionary theory is entirely wrong. They claim that there is scientific evidence for "intelligent design", and in their single mindedness can sound very convincing. They invoke science even as they pervert it, and I maintain that this is precisely what the climate contrarians do. Listening to an especially effective advocate of intelligent design is enough to make any non-specialist doubt the credentials of evolutionary theory. Now maybe God made the world and planted the fossils there for fun, and maybe pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere isn't making it any warmer (perhaps it really is cosmic rays). But as a scientist I feel compelled to interpret the world based on the best scientific evidence - this gives me a flawed and incomplete model of the world around me which I nonetheless believe is more useful, sensible and accurate than any amount of wishful thinking, idle speculation, or ideologically-driven model building. Climate contrarians and creationists start from the other end - with a belief of how the world should be, and then bend the evidence to fit their favourite world view, ignoring evidence that doesn't fit.

I'm not saying that anyone who challenges the existing scientific understanding is wrong - that would be unscientific and stupid. There are a number of debates about the impacts of climate change in which is appears existing or early models of the sensitivity of systems such as the North Atlantic circulation and the Amazon rainforest may be what we could call alarmist. But these are debates within the scientific community, based on scientific understanding, observation and modelling. This is a world away from what I will still maintain is the dogmatic approach of the contrarians, who start from the assumption that everything is OK, then cherry pick the "data" that support their view. We have to distinguish between arguments about the science, and arguments that invoke the science but are acutally not scientific in nature.

I wouldn't bother arguing the point with a contrarian any more than I would with a creationist. There's no point having a scientific argument with someone for whom science isn't important, and who believes that faith is a better foundation than science for understanding the world. You're comparing apples and oranges, and have lost before you've begun. Although I suspect that a lot of the contrarians believe their own propaganda a lot less than the creationists believe their own arguments. The debates that you see between the "two alternative views on climate change" are not scientific debates - they are ideological debates dressed up as, and drawing on, science. That's not to say that there can't be a debate about whether we are warming the Earth that IS based on science - but first we need some decent scientific data challenging the existing scientific understanding. As yet we have none.

Anyway, I'm off to do lots of (work-related) flying, so on my behalf you can hope that I and my colleagues are wrong about climate change - at least then I'm off the hook ethically. And by the way I won't be offsetting, as I think this is a dubious and unsustainable way of addressing the issue that may actually be counterproductive by encouraging us to believe that we can carry on as normal as long as we plant enough trees. I'd just be doing it to assuage my guilt, which perversely would make me feel more guilty, and indeed unbearably smug. As I believe I've said before, I don't think we're going to take sufficient action to avert climate change of a magnitude and rapidity that is likely to be very problematic. So those of use who do accept the science may as well fly without too much guilt and embrace the inevitable, as everyone else seems determined to wait and wait for more and more "proof" before doing anything about climate change ;-)

 

[HardScienceFan]

let's just say I'm careful about stating that there is a secular,longlasting trend towards higher average annual temperatures,and that it is anthropogenic.

 

[NickB]

let's just say I'm careful about stating that there is a secular,longlasting trend towards higher average annual temperatures,and that it is anthropogenic.

Well, I'm obviously more convinced, and so are my colleagues who have been working for decades in the field of climate change, many of them working precisely on the question of long-term trends and attribution. The evidence for a trend is incontrovertible - the upward trend hasn't been smooth with each year necessarily being hotter than the last (no-one would expect that to be the case), and without the huge amount of work on climate modelling and projection there would be no reason to believe it would necessarily continue, but it is there nonetheless. And once you start looking more deeply the evidence that this is very largely (not necessarily entirely, for example at the beginning of the 20th century) due to anthropogenic emissions is extremely strong. In fact this seems to be the only satisfactory explanation - i.e. that works.

I suggest you take a look at Working Group I of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report. Chapters 3 and 9 are most pertinent, on observed surface changes and attribution of these to human activity respectively, but other chapters may also be of interest (e.g. on sea-levels, and snow and ice cover). You can download the IPCC material chapter by chapter, for free. Just Google "IPCC" (I can't post links here). Once you've digested these feel free to come back and offer a point by point refutation of the material therein if you are still not convinced.

Alternatively, you can dismiss the IPCC and not bother to look at it, disregard the views of many hundreds - indeed thousands - of bona fide scientists who have been working on this issue, maintain that peer review is a fiction to mask a vast conspiracy, and instead take the word of a collection of lobbyists, businessmen, ideologues and TV producers that we are all lying to you. It would be a shame if you'd been had by the army of vested interests arrayed against the science, and believed their pseudo-scientific straw grasping over the real science that underpins our understanding of climate change.

It's up to you - if you prefer the latter route I'm not going to bother arguing about it - there really would be no point.

Regards

Nick