Posted on 02/11/2007 2:45:07 AM PST by alnitak
When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months’ time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.
The small print explains “very likely” as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain’s top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latterday Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.
Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers. And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.
Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heatwaves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winter’s billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages. The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adélie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean.
So one awkward question you can ask, when you’re forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is “Why is east Antarctica getting colder?” It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. While you’re at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it’s confirmed that global warming has stopped. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.
That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago.
Climate history and related archeology give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval Warming.
The Chinese population doubled then, while in Europe the Vikings and cathedral-builders prospered. Fascinating relics of earlier episodes come from the Swiss Alps, with the rediscovery in 2003 of a long-forgotten pass used intermittently whenever the world was warm.
What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on long before human industry was a possible factor? Less than nothing. The 2007 Summary for Policymakers boasts of cutting in half a very small contribution by the sun to climate change conceded in a 2001 report.
Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate. The sun’s brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism.
He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun’s magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier.
The only trouble with Svensmark’s idea — apart from its being politically incorrect — was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.
In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.
Thanks to having written The Manic Sun, a book about Svensmark’s initial discovery published in 1997, I have been privileged to be on the inside track for reporting his struggles and successes since then. The outcome is a second book, The Chilling Stars, co-authored by the two of us and published next week by Icon books. We are not exaggerating, we believe, when we subtitle it “A new theory of climate change”.
Where does all that leave the impact of greenhouse gases? Their effects are likely to be a good deal less than advertised, but nobody can really say until the implications of the new theory of climate change are more fully worked out.
The reappraisal starts with Antarctica, where those contradictory temperature trends are directly predicted by Svensmark’s scenario, because the snow there is whiter than the cloud-tops. Meanwhile humility in face of Nature’s marvels seems more appropriate than arrogant assertions that we can forecast and even control a climate ruled by the sun and the stars.
The Chilling Stars is published by Icon. It is available for £9.89 including postage from The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585
"Where is John Galt?"
Two questions libs don't have the answers for.
Which leads to the next series of questions; what other scientific "facts" are at the 90% level of surety?
Depends on what you mean by 90% level of surety. When its a poll of subjective feeling by an echo chamber, it's rather meaningless.
Mix UN/IPCC consensus driven politics with science the animal you get is anything but science.
By the way the genesis (one of the historical heavy lifters in the anthropogenic global warming crew) of the UN/IPCC's current uncertainty guidance paper comes from the concepts expressed in this paper authored by Steven Schneider on the subject of how uncertainty should be expressed in IPCC papers, :
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/UncertaintiesGuidanceFinal2.pdf
"A final note before turning to the specific recommendations themselves-the paper assumes that for most instances in the TAR, a "Bayesian" or "subjective" characterization of probability will be the most appropriate (see, e.g., Edwards, 1992, for a philosophical basis for Baysian methods; for applications of Bayesian methods, see e.g., Anderson, 1998; Howard et al., 1972). The Bayesian paradigm is a formal and rigorous language to communicate uncertainty. In it, a "prior" belief about a probability distribution (typically based on existing evidence) can be updated by new evidence, which causes a revision of the prior, producing a so-called "posterior" probability. Applying the paradigm in the assessment process involves combining individual authors' (and reviewers') Bayesian assessments of probability distributions and would lead to the following interpretation of probability statements: the probability of an event is the degree of belief that exists among lead authors and reviewers that the event will occur, given the observations, modeling results, and theory currently available. When complex systems are the topic, both prior and updated probability distributions usually contain a high degree of (informed) subjectivity. Thus in the TAR, we expect Bayesian approaches to be what is most often meant when probabilities are attached to outcomes with an inherent component of subjectivity or to an assessment of the state of the science from which confidence characterisations are offered."
And the intent of the use of such terms:
"It is certainly true that "science" itself strives for objective empirical information to test theory and models. But at the same time "science for policy" must be recognized as a different enterprise than "science" itself, since science for policy (e.g., Ravetz, 1986) involves being responsive to policymakers' needs for expert judgment at a particular time, given the information currently available, even if those judgments involve a considerable degree of subjectivity. "
The same Steven Schneider responsible for this quote:
"On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but - which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both."
(Steven Schneider, Quoted in Discover, pp. 45-48, Oct. 1989; and (American Physical Society, APS News August/September 1996).
Limits to Growth--what memories that brings back! We had to read that in poly sci at Univ. of Mich. back in the early 70s. I think one of its assertions (and I'm probably exaggerating here) was that most of the world would be starving to death by 1978.
Thanks, interesting how the global warming hysteria correlates with the recent warm spell...if we get a colder spell I wonder how the global warming prophets will explain it!
they can't, which is why the mantra now is changing from "global warming" to "climate change"..climate change is inclusive of cold, heat etc...iow, any weather extreme is now the fault of man..
Exactly right - by the late 70's we were all supposed to be dead. In the words of Monty Python, "I'm not dead yet!"
But, as Rush points out, how can you say there is a consensus on this issue when at least 10% of the scientist disagree, and I say: not to mention another suspected considerable number who are afraid to disagree!
ping
Peer review basically tends to support whatever is the dominant paradigm. Every career researcher has a file drawer full of data which he worked hard to collect, may be methodologically very sound, is interesting to him, may be very important to science--but which is unpublishable because it does not conform to the prevailing assumptions.
This pervasive pattern has already clamped a veritable death grip on the global warming hypothesis.
The interesting thing about their experiment is that it happened without supersaturing the air with watervapor as the wilson cloud chamber does to do it's trick.
The experiment was set up with typical conditions found in the cloud forming regions of the troposphere.
Here's a piece covering the experiment and background in a bit more detail:
http://www.sciencebits.com/CosmicRaysClimate
Actually, that's not entirely accurate. I need to find and article. I'll ping you when I find it.
Thanks, you saved me a great deal of searching, as I hadn't saved the link.
When will I learn to save EVERYTHING.
I always thought science produced hard facts, like the earth revolves around the sun, but this establishes a whole new view of scientific research/consensus. Wonder if these scientists ever studied the migration habits of lemmings.
gw ping
I always thought science produced hard facts, like the earth revolves around the sun, but this establishes a whole new view of scientific research/consensus.
What can one say.
There's the hard science such as physics chemistry et., then there's political science et al.
It is a good sign when the Times of London starts running articles like this. Other papers in the UK tend to follow them and unlike the NYT, they are not a liberal rag.
My whole point was that it was once a heretical view to believe in sunspots because the dogma of the time was that heavenly bodies were perfect and without blemish. And now it is a heretical view to add sunspots to the global warming equation because today's dogma holds that global warming is exclusively man made. I did not mean to suggest that Galileo was persecuted just for his discovery of sunspots -- there were bigger issues he was in trouble for. I mentioned his view of sunspots as one example of where Galileo did not support the official dogma. And now scientists who do not believe the official envoronmentalist dogma about sunspots are considered heretics against the church of environmentalism, as it were. I think it is ironic that 400 years after sunspots were discovered, the environmentalists have an almost religious dogma about sunspots.
Bttt...
Scientism is doing its damndest to be be the neo-fascists of the 21st Century.
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