Whither a Climate Debate?

Gavin Schmidt writes at RealClimate

“The obvious ineptitude of this contribution underlines quite effectively how little debate there is on the fundamentals if this is the best counter-argument that can be offered.”

But it has been my impression that the main story, Monckton’s press releases notwithstanding, has been (and still is) the FPS Editor remarking that there is a considerable number of scientists skeptical of the IPCC conclusions.

The FPS Executive Committee now states on the FPS July 2008 page that they do not agree with the previous remark, suggesting it is all a matter of opinion.

However, with the APS jumping in against Monckton’s paper with red inks (thankfully now turned to black), and more than one call for the FPS Editor to be “fired” from his volunteer position for the mere reason that he made that remark, I wonder what kind of “debate” could at all be possible?

Actually, I’d rather the APS had replied with Gavin’s words “The obvious ineptitude of this contribution etc etc” challenging any of its readers to come up with something better than Monckton’s.

That would have given debate a chance. As things stand, I pretty much doubt any against-consensus contribution would appear on the FPS in the future, even were such a contribution to surface (and am sure, it won’t: otherwise yet more people’s bosses will receive e-mails asking to “fire the heretics”, an ominous metaphore it there’s ever been one)

Amartya Sen, Terry Barker and the Stern Report

Terry Barker (Co-ordinating Lead Author, Working Group 3 (Mitigation), Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change and Director, 4CMR, Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research) responds to Nigel Lawson in a letter to the Financial Times that “the Stern review has been praised by the Nobel Prize-winning economists Kenneth Arrow, Robert Solow, James Mirrlees, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz“.

Is that true? A well-known quote by Mr Sen on the Stern review: “The stark prospects of climate change and its mounting economic and human costs are clearly brought out in this searching investigation. What is particularly striking is the identification of ways and means of sharply minimizing these penalties through acting right now, rather than waiting for our lives to be overrun by rapidly advancing adversities. The world would be foolish to neglect this strong but strictly time-bound practical message“.

Case closed? Not yet.

Here’s some more in-depth thoughts by Mr Sen: “[...] for the purpose for which the report was solicited, the job that was done [...] adequately, and you know to say that whether you can judge whether it’s a good economics report that’s a different issue, its not a good economic question to ask the very specific question [...]“

As Clive Spash reports, one is left wondering if Mr Sen has read the Stern review, or perhaps just a brief summary. For example, how else could a Nobel Prize in Economics make the mistake of “wrongly refer[ring] to the control benefits as costs and the Report as a cost-effectiveness analysis. This is not a cost-effectiveness analysis as the statement from Stern makes clear“?

The conclusion is: endorsements by famous names are no guarantee of quality.

Actually, such endorsements may mean absolutely nothing, because famous names may be too busy to read what they are endorsing.

And in the case of Amartya Sen and the Stern review, it appears that the former was already convinced enough of the urgency of the climate change issue, not to deem it necessary to read what Stern had actually written.

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My feeling is that Terry Barker knows all that very well. The whole polemics with Nigel Lawson would have no meaning, without Barker’s mentioning of “The prospect of climate chaos is alarming but not, I submit, alarmist.”

In other words: the only way the IPCC Co-ordinating Lead Author for the WG3 (Mitigation) is able to justify mitigation, is by talking of the “prospect” (i.e. a future possibility for which no probability is given) of “climate chaos“: a prospect that goes beyond the IPCC’s own WG2 findings.

Comparing that unknowable prospect with the real-and-present evidence of climate change mitigation policies including biofuels being one of the causes of worldwide hunger and unrest, I opt for no mitigation, thank you.

IPCC Data Show “Global” Warming Still Unproved

A series of exchanges at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub is a good occasion to re-iterate a simple point: the IPCC has to this day failed to prove that climate change is a worldwide effect.

In other words, there still is no solid evidence of the “global” character of “global warming”.

Let’s look at the IPCC AR4-WG2, Chapter 1.

I presume a “climate non-skeptic” would treat that document as an authoritative source. Better than vague reports on insurance companies or moving plants.

And so: the IPCC AR4-WG2 Chapter 1, dedicated to report ALL changes in a warming planet, lists:

(a) 26,285 significant changes compatible with warming

(b) 3,174 significant changes not compatible with warming (around 11% of the total of 29,459 significant changes)

Plenty to pick-and-choose from, I am sure. But then there are also other quite important numbers from the same report:

(c) 28,234 significant changes are from Europe alone

(d) 1,225 significant changes are from the rest of the world (4.15% of the total)

(e) 25,135 significant changes compatible with warming are from Europe alone

(f) Only 1,150 significant changes compatible with warming are from the rest of the world (4.4% of the total of 26,285 significant changes compatible with warming)

Note that (b) is almost two times bigger than (f). And I haven’t even mentioned the fact that the vast majority of non-European significant changes, come just from North America.

And so, in a sense, it is the IPCC itself that says that the “global” in “global warming” is something that definitely still needs to be demonstrated.

Global Warming “has not occurred in the last 4 years”

From Roger Pielke, Sr. “Climate Science” “Reality Check On This Year’s Cold and Snowy Weather - Implications For Global Warming“: we can state that global warming has not occurred in the last 4 years

With respect to the change in upper ocean heat content, as reported on a Climate Science weblog on February 15 2008, the paper

Willis, J. K., D. P. Chambers and R. Steven Nerem, 2008: Assessing the Globally Averaged Sea Level Budget on Seasonal and Interannual Time Scales. Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans (in press),

reports on no upper (700m) ocean warming since  2004.

Thus while we cannot state that the recent widely distributed cold waves or overall cooling of the troposphere are evidence of the end of global warming over decadal and longer time scales, we can state that global warming has not occurred in the last 4 years. This is a major issue for both climate science and for policymakers, as only those who blindly (or deliberately) ignore the scientific evidence can still accept the 2007 IPCC conclusions as settled science.

This is part of the original quote from Chambers and Nerem:

“Despite the short period of the present analysis, these results have important implications for climate. First, from 2004 to the present, steric contributions to sea level rise appear to have been negligible. This is consistent with observations of ocean surface temperature, which show relatively little change in the global average between 2003 and 2006 [Smith and Reynolds, 2005, see NCDC global surface temperature anomalies]. It is in sharp contrast, however, to historical analyses of thermal expansion over the past decade [Willis et al., 2004] and the past half-century [Antonov et al., 2005; Lombard et al., 2005; Ishii et al., 2006]. Although the historical record suggests that multiyear periods of little warming  (or even cooling) are not unusual, the present analysis confirms this result with unprecedented accuracy.”

Nobel Abuse

“scientists on the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change“

The text above (from AP’s Seth Borenstein, but he’s not alone…) should be denounced for what it is: a gross abuse of the term “Nobel”.

The _only_ acceptable text is “Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change“.

Everything else is just disgusting propaganda.

Who would try to give credibility this way to Kofi Annan, J. M. Coetzee, President Carter, Gabriel García Márquez for their opinions on scientific matters?

Not all Nobel Prizes are alike.