Archives for September 2008

 

The accusation of a lack of peer review (PR) by those who mount arguments against anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is at the heart of the elitism, consensus and ad hominem approach used by many supporters of AGW.  

It is a red herring.  Science should be like the Law; transparent and universally accessible. 

 

It should not be used by specialists to dominate the general populace, or to promulgate ideological based alterations to the social and economic structure. Nor should it be used to stifle debate because, apart from anything else, the importance of science is diminished by such oppression. Because the AGW advocates have used such tactics, and been supported by a sizeable proportion of the mainstream media, the importance of blogs has grown. Their importance has also been highlighted by the degree of vitriol leveled at anti-AGW sites.

 

Most of all the PR argument is simply wrong.

 

As a layman my AGW education curve has been steep. But it has been informed by a number of peer reviewed papers which have provided substantial critiques of AGW. In the interest of providing a rebuttal to the insidious PR stigma I present my ‘top 10’ papers which mount arguments against AGW, nine of them peer-reviewed.

 

I have had to exclude a number of valuable articles; the McLean and Quirk paper on the Great Pacific Climate Change was my first exposure to the misrepresentation of temperature base periods; the first Beck paper is a notable exclusion; the castigation against Beck was particularly condescending and elitist, no doubt because he does not have a PhD; likewise none of the valuable contributions made by Monckton, Watts, Castles, Hughes, Lucia, Bob Tisdale or Steve Short are eligible.

 

But I am going to list 10 papers, and start with a non peer-reviewed paper as an exception because of his sustained and exemplary efforts, any one of which is worthy of a Doctorate.

 

1. Steve McIntyre’s Ohio State University Address;

How do we “know” that 1998 was the warmest year of the millennium? (May 16, 2008)

http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/ohio.pdf

This is a seminal paper which synthesizes all the errors and obfuscations to do with the Hockey Stick. It also demonstrates McIntyre’s methodical, scientific and unadorned approach to the issue.

 

2. Craig Loehle’s paper;

A 2000-year global temperature reconstruction based on non-tree ring proxies, Energy & Environment 18(7-8): 1049-1058. 2007

http://www.ncasi.org/publications/Detail.aspx?id=3025

This paper was important because it was a counterpoise to Mann’s tree-ring data and provided good support for the Medieval Warming Period, a major obstacle to AGW.

 

3.Douglass, Christy et al; this is the first of the GCM critiques;

A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions. International Journal of Climatology, 2007

http://www.scribd.com/doc/904914/A-comparison-of-tropical-temperature-trends-with-model-predictions?page=6

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3058

This paper really touched a nerve and the level of hostility leveled at it was astounding; it mostly boiled down to nit-picking about Raobcore data and whether a falsification was distinct from a bias. The second link is to an addendum to the paper; comments 69-74 are entertaining.

 

4.Koutsoyiannis et al;

http://www.itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/850

Assessment of the reliability of climate predictions based on comparisons with historical time series.  Geophysical Research Abstracts, 2008

This link is to the first presentation. This was a crucial paper; it covered the 18 year predictive history of the GCM’s on a regional basis; regionalism is the Achilles Heel of AGW.

 

5.Stockwell;

http://landshape.org/stats/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/article.pdf

Tests of Regional Climate Model Validity in the Drought Exceptional Circumstances Report. 2008

This paper did the job on CSIRO and demonstrated the political imput into the AGW science.

 

6. Misckolczi;

Greenhouse effect in semi-transparent planetary Atmospheres.  Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Service, Vol. 111, No. 1, January–March 2007, pp. 1–40.

http://met.hu/doc/idojaras/vol111001_01.pdf

This is my favourite. It has everything; the dead hand of AGW censorship, and the demolition of the AGW’s semi-infinite opaque layered atmosphere. People have quibbled about the Kirchhoff equations but Miskolczian –ve feedbacks have been established.

 

7. Essex, McKitrick, Andresen;

Does a Global Temperature Exist? Journal of Non-EquilibriumThermodynamics, 32 (1) 1-27.   2007

http://www.reference-global.com/doi/abs/10.1515/JNETDY.2007.001?cookieSet=1

The fallacy of a global average temperature was taken to task in this paper, and, again, the reaction was hostile. This paper wittily compared averaging temperature to averaging the phone book; an important addition to the regionalism lexicon.

 

8. Spencer and Braswell;

Potential Biases in Feedback Diagnosis from Observational Data: A simple Model Demonstration, Journal of Climate.

 http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F2008JCLI2253.1

No list would be complete without Mr Cloud and –ve feedback. As well, Spencer has been a bastion of reliable temperature data. This was still a close call. Minschwaner and Dessler’s paper on RH decline as a response to increasing CO2 is a crucial paper, conforming to Miskolczi’s feedbacks.

 

9.Chilingar;

Cooling of Atmosphere Due to CO₂ Emission, Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization, and Environmental Effects.  Volume 30, Issue  1, January 2008 , pages 1 – 9

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15567030701568727

An important paper about convective heat transfer which relegates CO2 radiative heating to its proper subordinate position; and incorporates atmospheric pressure as a heating factor. Thanks to Louis for alerting me to the paper. An honourable mention to the Gerlich and Tscheuschner paper on the fallacy of the greenhouse concept and a host of other errors AGW science makes.

 

10. Pielke Sr et al;

Unresolved issues with the assessment of multidecadal global land surface temperature trends. Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol 112. 2007.

http://climatesci.colorado.edu/publications/pdf/R-321.pdf

An elegant paper which uses Stefan-Boltzman to support regionalism and show that the notion of a radiative imbalance is defeated by regional temperature based energy differentials. Somewhat superfluous since AR4, FIG 1 shows no global radiative imbalance.

 

Given the above, what 10 papers can AGW supporters produce to vindicate AGW?

 

Cohenite,

Newcastle, Australia

ROSS Garnaut made it clear in his interim report that his climate change review takes as a starting point – not as a belief but on the balance of probabilities – that the claims made in the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are correct.

Had he made even a cursory examination of the integrity of those IPCC claims he would have found a very troubling picture.

The IPCC encourages us to believe that about 2500 climate scientists supported the claim of a significant human influence on climate. It fails to clarify that the claim was made in chapter nine of the working group one contribution and that the contributions of working groups two and three were based on the assumption that the claim was correct. The first eight chapters of the WG1 contribution were mainly concerned with climatic observations and the authors expressed no opinion about the claim made in chapter nine, and chapters 10 and 11 assumed the claim to be correct. The entire IPCC thesis therefore stands or falls on the claims of just one chapter.

We are also led to believe that chapter nine was widely supported by hundreds of reviewers, but just 62 IPCC reviewers commented on its penultimate draft. Only five of those reviewers endorsed it but four of the five appear to have vested interests and the other made just one comment for the entire 11-chapter WG1 contribution.

As is the normal IPCC practice, chapter nine has co-ordinating lead authors, who are responsible for the chapter as a whole; lead authors, who are responsible for sections of the chapter; and contributing authors, who provide their thoughts to the lead authors but take no active part in thewriting.

The IPCC procedures state that the authors at each level should reflect a wide range of views, but this is not true of chapter nine.

The expansion of the full list of authors of each paper cited by this chapter reveals that 37 of 53 chapter authors form a network of people who have previously co-authored scientific papers with each other: or make that 38 if we include a review editor.

The two co-ordinating lead authors are members of this network. So are five of the seven lead authors. Thirty of 44 contributing authors are in the network and two other pairs of contributing authors have likewise co-authored scientific papers.

In other words, the supposedly 53 independent voices are in fact one dominant voice with 37 people behind it, two voices each with two people behind them, and perhaps 12 single voices. A closer check reveals that many of those 12 were academic or work colleagues of members of that larger network. One lead author was from the University of Michigan, as were three contributing authors, two of whom were not members of the network. Another lead author was associated with Britain’s Hadley Centre, along with eight contributing authors, one of whom was not included in that network of co-authors.

All up, the 53 authors of this chapter came from just 31 establishments and there are worrying indications that certain lead authors were the superiors of contributing authors from the same organisation. The very few viewpoints in this chapter might be alleviated if it drew on a wide range of references, but among the co-authors of 40 per cent of the cited material are at least one chapter author.

Scientists associated with the development and use of climate models dominate the clique of chapter nine authors and by extension the views expressed in that chapter.

Perhaps the increase in the processing power of their computers has increased their confidence in the software they have been nurturing for years. Imagine, though, the consequences were they to imply that the accuracy of the models had not improved despite the extra funding.

These models are said to require a human component to reasonably match historical temperatures and the modellers claim that this proves a human influence on climate, but the human factor is an input so a corresponding output is no surprise. A more plausible reason for the mismatch without this influence is that the models are incomplete and contain errors, but of course chapter nine could never admit this.

Garnaut didn’t need to evaluate the science behind the IPCC’s claim to find that its integrity is questionable and that the report’s key findings are the product of scientific cronyism.

The IPCC has misled us into believing the primary claims were widely endorsed by authors and reviewers but in fact they received little support and came from a narrow self-interested coterie of climate modellers.

We should now ask what else the IPCC has misled us about and why Garnaut, a skilled academic, so blithely accepted its claims.

John McLean is a climate data analyst and a member of the Australian Climate Science Coalition.

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Republished from the The Australian with permission from the author.  

Climate case built on thin foundation, John McLean, The Australian September 9, 2008