"Science Is The Belief In The Ignorance Of The Experts"

"So if you don’t believe scientists, do you believe poor people struggling to survive? Or you just care about your corporate fossil fuel sponsors, you spineless astroturfer, when you refute climate change?"

This is the sort of "guerilla comment" I regularly get from the anonymous "reporter" at the Taipei Times. Corporate fossil fuel sponsors? Well I don't know about anybody else, but I never get my cheques on time...

Anyway, I was moved to write this post today after stepping back into the subject of climate change; I want something on my blog to refer back to in future so that I don't have to keep repeating myself (at least, until such time as new facts come to light).

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I have to say, following the recent Spectator article by Nils-Axel Mörner and his subsequent savaging by Monbiot and others at the Guardian and elsewhere, I find it difficult to believe anything Mörner might say on sea levels. Now it may be that Mörner was correct about the 2.3mm adjustment he alleges, and certainly Monbiot didn't refute that, but I am now disinclined to believe what Mörner has to say. It's not just the fact that he got booted out of INQA and is into dowsing and other nonsense, but it was this email exchange with the Australian scientist Robert Hunter that just made me wince. Mörner sounds like a naughty schoolboy trying to keep up the lie that he did his homework but can't find it, and Hunter sounds exactly like I have sounded in the past when going after people whom I just knew were wrong.

Fraser Nelson made a big mistake in publishing that piece, and I made a mistake in trusting him that this guy's work was kosher.

That being said, sea levels at the Maldives are akin to cold or hot weather here or there in that of themselves they say nothing definitive as to whether climate change has a significant anthropogenic element. If Mörner is wrong, that only means that the scientists measuring sea level through tidge guages at the Maldives and through satellite telemetry are not guilty of manipulating their data and deserve an apology. Mörner being either wrong or untrustworthy however, does not mean that all skepticism of anthropogenic climate change is bunk.

Let's review the subject.

The Greenhouse Effect

The very first thing to note is that the subject has been cursed with a confusion spreading misnomer from the beginning - "the greenhouse effect". In an actual glass greenhouse, an increase in temperature is brought about by preventing convection from working; the air and ground beneath are exposed to sunlight but the heat is unable to escape. What happens in the earth's atmosphere is not quite the same thing at all. The heat does in fact escape by radiating into space. The convection of atmospheric gases in the earth's atmosphere is regulated by pressure. As a column of warm air rises in altitude, it expands due to the lower air pressure and this brings about a drop in temperature; as the now cooler column of air descends, it recompresses due to the increased air pressure and thus increases in temperature. That is why, in the troposphere, temperature is higher closer to the surface of the earth, and drops the higher in altitude you climb. Because some of the heat from the warm air columns in the troposphere is lost through radiation into space, the heat cannot be said to be "trapped" as in a greenhouse.

This is where much popular misconception comes in. The claim is that greenhouse gases "trap" the heat in the upper atmosphere and prevent some of it from radiating into space. That is an oversimplification; if the heat really was "trapped", then the upper atmosphere would not be so very much colder than the lower atmosphere. What actually happens is that the greenhouse gases retard the rate at which heat is radiated into space; over time, this means that the average altitude from which heat is radiated into space must increase, and therefore the pressure differential between the surface and the upper atmosphere at which heat radiates must undergo a marginal increase also.

The increase in global temperatures attributed to the "greenhouse" effect is actually a consequence of a change in the atmospheric pressure at which heat is radiated out into space.

However, the mere presence of greenhouse gases by themselves are insufficient to support the predictions of catastrophic global warming. Those predictions are based upon the supposition of positive feedback effects (e.g. increased water vapour, or higher altitude cloud cover) and the comparative absence of negative feedback (e.g. low altitude cloud cover). This is where the scientific controversy is (or isn't, if you dismiss all skeptics).

Climate Change Models & Trust

Here there is a problem.

The first point is that many of the alarming predictions of both scientists and others involved in the AGW field have been falsified by the actual facts. Recently, the IPCC's fourth assessment report contained the famously erroneous claim that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. In 2005, the UN predicted that there would be up to 50 million "climate refugees" by 2010 - which claim has proved false (and which, according to this report in Der Spiegel, has subsequently been removed from the UNEP's website). And of course, James Hansen's temperature predictions of 1988 which informed his Senate testimony of the time have been falsified by actual temperatures in the succeeding two decades since then. Here is the chart (via Jo Nova):


If you want people to trust you, you have to tell the truth and be seen to be telling the truth, together with all the uncertainty. If you attempt to hype, scare, bully or otherwise manipulate people into believing what you want them to believe - and then get caught out by facts - it should come as no surprise if people regard you as a hyperbolic, scare-mongering, manipulative bully.

Because that will be what you actually are.

One line of defense to this, is that those false predictions were made by people at the fringes of the AGW network rather than by the professional climate scientists themselves. Yet the leaked email cache of 2009 and 2011 appears to reveal otherwise. In the 2009 cache* we learned about how they denied FOI requests by third parties to replicate their temperature record, how their coding was poorly programmed, how they tried to prevent other scientists from publishing in certain journals, how they deleted emails once they knew there was a leak and so on. In the 2011 cache we learn more about their own uncertainties about their climate models and internal disagreements with one another. One such chap writes of Michael Mann for instance:

"I am afraid that Mike is defending something that increasingly cannot be defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the science move ahead."

Another writes:

"What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably."

It is against this background of private doubt and possible deceit, that the certainty with which climate predictions are made in public appear so cynical and manipulative. As Lord Turnbull put it earlier this year:

"The Really Inconvenient Truth is that the propositions of the IPCC do not bear the weight of certainty with which they are expressed."

That is not the same thing as a catagorical denial that there may be some truth to the AGW hypothesis, just that the IPCC's claims ought to be regarded with caution - which is a very far cry from the manner in which they have been advanced in the past.

We would also be remiss however, in failing to note that climate science has been politicized for over two decades now, and that - suprise, surprise - it was politicized by those who have tirelessly sought to expand the power of the State: the Left**. Here is Andrew Orlowski on the destructive effects of politicization on climate science:

"While in private, the scientists despair of their lack of understanding of the chaotic physics of climate, and are scathing about the quality of temperature reconstructions (for example), they are faced with constant demands from the bureaucracy and the media to tell a convincing story. Groupthink takes over, and evidence to the contrary is shunned, and scientists who advance it ostracised or smeared."

The confirmation bias Orlowski refers to here is (although I must admit I am somtimes guilty of it myself, most recently in regards to Nils-Axel Mörner's piece in the Spectator) also noted by Matt Ridley in his recent Angus Millar lecture in Edinburgh. Following his introduction to the subject, Ridley describes how he himself changed his mind on AGW. In his own words:

"In the mid 2000s one image in particular played a big role in making me abandon my doubts about dangerous man-made climate change: the hockey stick*. It clearly showed that something unprecedented was happening. I can remember where I first saw it at a conference and how I thought: aha, now there at last is some really clear data showing that today’s temperatures are unprecedented in both magnitude and rate of change – and it has been published in Nature magazine. Yet it has been utterly debunked by the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick."

He goes on...

"I urge you to read Andrew Montford’s careful and highly readable book The Hockey Stick Illusion*. Here is not the place to go into detail, but briefly the problem is both mathematical and empirical. The graph relies heavily on some flawed data – strip-bark tree rings from bristlecone pines -- and on a particular method of principal component analysis, called short centering, that heavily weights any hockey-stick shaped sample at the expense of any other sample. When I say heavily – I mean 390 times.

This had a big impact on me. This was the moment somebody told me they had made the crop circle the night before."

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The qustion of how best to respond to climate change is separate from the question of why, and to what degree it is occuring. Naturally, those of a liberal/conservative mindset advocate market and technological solutions, whereas those on the Left might pragmatically accept some of those suggestions whilst nevertheless advocating a great expansion of the administrative-regulatory State into those few remaining un-politicized aspects and elements of social life. The fact that the Left have long advocated expanded State powers to deal with this or that social problem is the historical reason for why small government liberals/conservatives are skeptical about the politicization of climate science - we see it as an elaborate excuse for expanding the State (and for many people on the Left, it certainly is that).

To add to this, there is the fanatical zealotry of the media pundits and other politicizing figures on the Left (people like George Monbiot at the Guardian, and the blogger Michael Turton here in Taiwan). People who dare express skepticism about AGW are immediately branded as "denialists" and shunned in public, banned from journals, newspapers and blogs, subjected to vociferous ad hominem attacks, even so far as being called "liars" and "hate-mongers" and so on. As if that wasn't enough, skeptics are now routinely referred to as the "anti-science crowd", even though many of the skeptics are themselves scientists or otherwise have a scientific background.

I am however, uncertain as to how to judge the implications of the current poisonous political atmosphere concerning climate science. On the one hand, it has indeed provided yet another angle from which the Left can advocate the further expansion of the State toward what they idealistically think it should be. On the other hand, however, vociferous and bad-tempered debate can serve to concentrate the mind; the persistence of skeptics and critics of the Left - added to the manner in which we have been treated - has been, I think, absolutely vital. We are in a fight, for sure, but this is a fight which can only be won by reason and the discipline of finding, communicating - and admitting - the truth.

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*The Russell inquiry did not take testimony from a single knowledgeable critic of the AGW hypothesis.
**I can still recall reading Al Gore's book "Earth In The Balance" many years ago before I became a skeptic.