Archives for February 19, 2008

Philosopher Karl Popper claimed in his book ‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’ that a hypothesis, proposition or theory is scientific only if it is falsifiable:

“Logically, no number of positive outcomes at the level of experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory, but a single counterexample is logically decisive: it shows the theory, from which the implication is derived, to be false. Popper’s account of the logical asymmetry between verification and falsifiability lies at the heart of his philosophy of science.”

It seems that whatever happens in the climate system is consistent with climate model predictions. Warmer, colder, less ice, more ice, droughts, floods, more hurricanes, less hurricanes, stronger hurricanes, weaker hurricanes, and so on.

An recent example from the media:

Cold wave in India attributed to global warming

Mumbai: The recent cold wave sweeping across Mumbai and other parts of India could be attributed to global warming, experts said on Tuesday here at an environmental conference.

Would the observed mid-troposphere warming of less than the 2 to 3 times increase over surface warming predicted by climate models represent falsification? Or would a prolonged period of global cooling do the job?

So, what event or observation, or series of events/observations over what timescale are required to falsify the climate modelled hypothesis of CO2 driven climate change or global warming?

This post was inspired by a couple of blog posts over at Prometheus:

The Consistent-With Game: On Climate Models and the Scientific Method

Climate Model Predictions and Adaptation

Serious answers to a serious question, please.

A 15-year research project has revealed that changes in wind patterns are contributing to rising sea temperatures in the Southern Ocean.

ABC News: ‘Research shows Southern Ocean wind currents weakening’

CSIRO Media release: ‘Antarctic route highlights new ocean-climate links’

Thanks to Luke for alerting me to this story.

Christopher Monckton’s 2007 presentation to the Cambridge (University) Union

Monckton begins by saying that he is going to present a perspective on climate change science that the audience will have not seen in the media, from politicians or in reports on the science. Like Al Gore, Monckton is not a scientist and he has as much right as Al Gore to talk about climate change. His scientific approach is one of enquiry rather than advocacy. He talks about correct scientific method and quotes T. H. Huxley on scepticism being the improver of knowledge:

“The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.”

He then explains that the debate is not about whether we can freely pollute the planet without care for our fellow creatures, or their or our future, or whether we are adding greenhouse gases to atmosphere, because we are, or that adding greenhouse gases doesn’t enhance temperature – because it does.

Monckton turns his attention to climate alarmism about what might happen if the planet becomes a little warmer, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

Monckton points out that Sir John Houghton, the first IPCC chairman, said, “unless we announce disasters no one will listen.”

Al Gore is quoted as saying “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is.”

The science is being exaggerated to make people listen and there is political bias regardless of scientific truth. Hurricane expert Chris Landsea, resigned from the IPCC in 2005, saying, “I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized.”

Monckton shows the error that he found in the supposedly highly scrutinised 2007 IPCC report on the melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, where there are four wrong decimal points causing the figures to be in error by a facor of 10. See more here on page 14.

The IPCC is a ‘corporation’ that puts itself first. It therefore has an interest in maintaining its existence and status.

In order to demonstrate IPCC political bias, Monckton shows 3 statements that were in the 1995 IPCC draft report:

1. None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gasses.

2. No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of observed of observed climate change] to anthropogenic causes.

3. Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced.

Politicians ‘got at it’ and took out the above from the final report which stated:

“The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.”

The Consensus is questioned. Monckton suggests that the BBC has abandoned objectivity and then quotes a literature study of 539 papers published between 2004 and 2007, using the search term’ global climate change,’ where only one paper claimed catastrophe, but offered no evidence.

Hansen’s 1988 temperature predictions are examined. Scenario ‘C’ was based on CO2 in the atmosphere being stabilised, but the actual temperature trend has tracked this despite the non-stabilisation of CO2.

So are today’s temperatures unprecedented? Monckton talks about the Medieval Warm Period. The UN IPCC report of 1990 showed a clear Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and a Little Ice Age (LIA), but the IPCC 2001 report showed the ‘Hockey Stick’ graph 6 times in colour with no MWP. So how was this achieved? Data showing a hockey stick shape from Sheep Mountain in California was given 390 times the weighting of the data Mayberry Slough in Arizona, which had a MWP.

The tree ring data set that included MWP was left out, despite the researchers saying that it was included in the publications of 1998 and 1999. It was actually in a computer file marked ‘censored data.’ Monckton asserted that researchers should make both data and methods available to be checked by other scientists. The US National Academy of Sciences panel described the hockey stick as plausible at best, and the ‘validation skill’ not significantly different from zero.

Monckton then provides some of the evidence for a warm MWP:

Data from 6000 bore holes give a rough idea that there was a warm MWP, Stalagmites from the Austria Alps and Southern Africa, Sediments from Sombre lake, Signy Island in Maritime Antarctica, and Lake Huguangyan, Leechow, South China. Formanifera from the NorthWestern Arabian Sea, Oman. The Sargasso sea, North Island NZ, sediment core from Spanish Pyrenees, pollen profile from Northern Fennoscandia, 3 examples of glacial variations from Swiss Alps. Canada, British Columbia, Azores, two from coastal Peru, the summit of Greenland ice sheet. He then shows a graphic of a timescale sensitive reconstructed Northern Hemisphere temperature showing the MWP and the LIA. Next he shows a Sediment-based treeline for the species ‘Zelkova Carpinifolia’ demonstrating the Holocene Climate Optimum, the Roman Warm Period, and the MWP. He presents a slide of a 1340AD tree stump in California, well above today’s tree-line.

Monckton points out that warmer is better – most species live in the tropics and hardly any at the poles. He concludes that, because there was a MWP up to 3C warmer than today:

1. Today’s temperatures are not exceptional

2. Nature caused medieval climate warming

3. There was no medieval climate cataclysm

4. Nature may be causing most warming today

5. Climate catastrophe is not looming or likely

He then moves on to talk about natural causes of climate change where his attention inevitably turns to the sun.

First he mentions William Herschel who in 1801 noticed an inverse correlation between the number of sunspots in the 11-year cycle and the price of grain. He then quotes Solanki (2004) who claimed that the past 70 years of solar activity exceptional and similar to 8000 years ago. During the past 11400 years the sun has spent only 10% of the time at a similarly high level of magnetic activity and almost all earlier higher periods of activity were shorter than the current episode.The Sun has been more active than at any time since the last ice age

Monckton then shows a graph for 1880 – 1990 of CO2 and temperature mismatch, pointing out that there is not a good correlation.

A graph of solar cycle length plotted against temperature is a better match – Solanki/Fligg (1999), as is the Central England Temperature (CET) series plotted against sunspot number, for1750 to 2000.

The next slide is from Neff et al (2001), showing Monsoon activity tracking solar activity, followed by a graph of solar activity versus temperature for the Arctic (Soon, 2004).

So, how much influence can the sun have? A slide of the CET, the world’s longest instrumental temperature series, shows a 2.2C rise in just 35 years, 1700 to 1735, suggesting that the sun was the cause of the recovery from the Maunder Minimum. Monckton concedes that this is evidence from one place and one temperature series, but it is evidence nevertheless. He then shows a slide of the rising trend in solar activity from 1715 attributed to NASA’s David Hathaway, followed by conclusions from the International Astronomical Union Symposium in 2004:

1. Solar changes cause most climate change

2. Solar cycles are 11, 80, and 200 years long

3. The Sun caused today’s global warming

4. Today’s warming is normal, not unusual

5. Today’s global warming will end soon

So how do we distinguish natural from anthropogenic warming?

CO2 and temperature is not a good match as we have already seen.

A good match is temperature anomalies for 1979 to 2001 and tropical outgoing long wave radiation. Why? The sun is incident on the tropics – the azimuth angle is 90 degrees – so most heating is in the tropics – the atmospheric transport engine takes heat away from tropics to northern latitudes and to a lesser extent southern latitudes. So, the tropics are the place to look for a ‘hot spot’ of anthropogenic warming. Monckton shows the IPCC 2007 modelled climate forcings for anthropogenic greenhouse gasses, aerosols, ozone, plus solar and volcanic. If they are combined into a single graph, there should be an anthropogenic fingerprint or hot spot in the tropics. However, the fingerprint is absent from the actual troposphere data, or shows only a small signal at best, suggesting a small effect of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Monckton then discusses some of reasons why computer models are wrong and can’t provide proof of anthropogenic global warming, whereas a mathematical model of the pythagorous theorem can provide absolute proof. Physical sciences with inadequate data cannot provide proof. He quotes Syun-Ichi Akasofu as saying, “No supercomputer, no matter how powerful, is able to prove definitively a simplistic hypothesis that says the greenhouse effect is responsible for warming.”

Next, Monckton discusses the Stefan-Boltzmann equation and the huge range of temperature changes published in the literature for a doubling of CO2. Monckton’s own calculation, based on IPCC 2007, is 1.6C for a doubling of CO2, but the IPCC says 3C. He points out that Svante Arrhenius calculated a 4C to 8C temperature change for a doubling of CO2 in 1896, but in 1906, he had the Stefan-Boltzmann equation available to him and re-calculated everything to give 1.6C.

With the wide range of temperature predictions in mind, Monckton looks at the constraints on CO2, which mean that it is not a major factor in climate:

In 1750, CO2 was 0.03% by volume in the atmosphere; in 2007 it is about 0.04%, a change of +0.01%. The IPCC has reduced CO2 forcing by one-fifth in 12 years (1995 to 2007), yet it has kept climate sensitivity at 3C.

Monckton shows a graph of CO2 v temperature over 600,000 years where CO2 and temperature often go in opposite directions, suggesting CO2 is not the main driver of global temperature. The IPCC admits that CO2 went up to about 6000 ppmv in the Cambrian period and the global average temperature was 22C. He claims CO2 residency time is about 5 to 10 years from various publications. The IPCC claim 50 to 200 years based on “the time required for the atmosphere to adjust to a future equilibrium state if emissions change abruptly,” (IPCC 1990). Monckton considers that the IPCC definition has nothing to do with a genuine residency time.

Monckton’s conclusions on the constraints on CO2 as a cause of global temperature change are:

1. There is very little additional CO2 in the air

2. CO2 has few principle absorption bands

3. At the surface, water vapour dominates CO2

4. CO2’s effect diminishes logarithmically

5. CO2 is not potent, only 1/23 the effect of CH4

6. There’s no tropical mid-troposphere hot spot

7. CO2’s atmospheric residency time is short

8. CO2 correlates very poorly with temperature

He then moves on to some of the ’35 errors’ in Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ which I won’t dwell on as they are explained in detail here.

Monckton then discusses CO2 emissions saying that China is the one to watch; if the UK reduced emissions to zero, then they would be made up by just the increase in Chinese emissions in less than 2 years. Apply that to Europe, US and Canada, and then China plus India would make up the difference in their own emissions growth in 10 to 15 years. Shutting down the western economy will therefore not make any difference.

He presents a graphic of child mortality up to the age of 5 per thousand born, against CO2 emissions demonstrates that the higher the CO2 emissions per capita, the lower the child mortality. Population increase is faster in developing countries – denying developing CO2 emissions will likely increase their populations.

Monckton then attacks what he calls the murderous ‘Precautionary Principle’ as an expedience used by environmentalist lobby to push policies that would otherwise be unacceptable. He looks at two previous global scares: one real, and one bogus where the policies were wrong because of the effect of pressure groups.

The first is HIV, where he says the correct policy would have been to isolate cases in order to prevent spread of the disease, but this was regarded as totally unacceptable.

The result: 25 million died, with 40 million infected worldwide. 0.7% infected in the US, 1% is the epidemic threshold. 7.5% infected south of the Sahara.

The second is Malaria, where the 3 letters ‘DDT’ are absent from IPCC ramblings in its latest report.

Before DDT was ‘banned,’ there were 50,000 deaths per year from Malaria. After the ban, there were 1,000,000 deaths per year. As a result, excess deaths are put at between 30 and 50 million.

On 15th September 2006, the DDT ban was lifted by WHO. Dr Arata Kochi or WHO said, “Quite often in this field politics comes first and science second. We must take a position based on the science and the data.”

Monckton then addresses the claim by Gore and others that there are ‘moral issues’ in the climate change debate. He agrees that there are – exaggeration, alarmism, false claims, false claims of consensus, to allow insertion of false claims or data into reports by politicians, to exalt computer models over data, lack of objectivity, inflicting energy starvation, false denial of past temperatures higher than today’s, claiming extreme weather events are caused by humans, and so on, are all moral issues.

He concludes with reference to the human race, “We must get the science right, or we shall get the policy wrong. We have failed them and failed them before. We must not fail again.”

After the applause dies down, there is time for a number of good questions, which Monckton handles well. In my view the presentation was well prepared, well referenced and eloquently delivered, with emotional pleas over the genuine moral issues. Christopher Monckton comes across as a sincere man who is persuaded by objective science. The cause of climate realists has been enhanced by his involvement in the climate change debate, and this DVD is recommended viewing for those seeking an antidote to the daily dose of climate alarmism in the media, or an alternative scientific perspective.

The DVD is available here.

18th February 2008

Paul Biggs