Dear Malcolm,
Thank you most sincerely for your response last month to my April 2009 Breaking News column in Ndaba. I wish more of our readers would express their views and exchange ideas. I fear though that objectivity may be on thin ice here (pun unintended) because we both, by our own admission, engage for ethical reasons in what is clearly an emotionally-charged conflict of ideals. We clearly have some common purpose at the outset: We are both greatly concerned about progressive harm to ecology and species; and we agree that global warming and dynamic climate change are real. Let’s take it from there. What I say is that there is nothing historically unusual about current global temperatures. Global warming and global cooling are periodic. They are perfectly natural peaks and valleys in cycles driven primarily by the Sun. There are no data to support the hypothesis that greenhouse gases, whether human-related or not, drive climate fluctuations. This is a story of how an unsubstantiated theory of climate, a model, became political ideology.
To clarify, AGW stands for Anthropogenic Global Warming (meaning, increase in the mean temperature of Earth as a result primarily of human activities), CO2 is carbon dioxide, and IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In view of the constraints of this forum, my initial response won’t attempt to address in detail the main points in your letter, although I must admit to being completely baffled by your statement that my argument “fails totally on one salient point: only a tiny minority – 1 in 1000 – of scientific publications on global warming dispute the influence of human activities in affecting climate change.” Even if Dr Schultze’s figures were correct, and notwithstanding that I dispute them, how would that invalidate my general argument? Science is not about consensus, and I mentioned the fact that those against the motion appeared for once to be in the majority only as a sociological curiosity. Certainly, history shows that opposition to ruling paradigms consists invariably of extremely small minorities with limited chance for expression, and the reasons for this I should think are fairly obvious. That we in this case find numerically more substantial opposition than previously is borne out by even the most cursory scan of the broader literature (journals are notoriously standard-model-biased). In my view, the best single reference on the quality of opposition to AGW is The Deniers—the world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud by Lawrence Solomon (2008).
Be that as it may, global temperature patterns; the demise of polar bears; the effect of greenhouse gases; the proportion of publications expressing doubt about carbon-driven AGW; that “the end justifies the means”; and the personal culpability of Al Gore in misleading the public and governments, could all be exhaustively debated with copious references to the literature on both sides. We simply don’t have the space to do that here. In your letter you invoke the authority of respected scientists, so I prefer in my response to let other prominent role-players in the AGW saga express it in their own words. What I suggest is that we let the facts fall where they will, irrespective of any model or ideology. That way we can avoid a preconceived outcome.
In my view, before we even start to make predictions for the planet, we need good data to base them on. A crucial misrepresentation on plots of climate data is the selective positioning of the trend line and base line for plots (your illustration falls into this trap). If the curve commences from the previous low point for temperature (the Little Ice Age), for example, then the trend is obviously upwards. If, by comparison, the plot commences from say the peak of the Medieval Warm Period, when temperatures were considerably warmer than they are now, then the trend is equally obviously downwards. A recent paper by two eminent climatologists details the inaccuracies and massaging of IPCC’s global temperature measurements, like those supporting the graph in your letter and conclusions drawn from it. I urge you to look at it:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/surface_temp.pdf
There are many complex issues that might sidetrack us, so let’s tackle the fundamental principle of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) movement first. The rest can follow in due time. The question I seek to answer here is “What do these particular experts in the field of climatology feel about the hypothesis that human production of atmospheric carbon or greenhouse gases in general measurably leads to increases in global temperatures and influences weather patterns to the extent that we are experiencing or are about to experience catastrophic overheating?”I believe this question correctly addresses the philosophy behind the IPCC-driven mission, and the essence of the Kyoto protocol and Copenhagen road map.
Arno Arrak, author of the book What Warming? Satellite view of global climate change; he was a nuclear chemist on NASA’s Apollo programme: “In 2007 we got some serious cooling while climate models using carbon dioxide theory insisted on relentless warming at the same time. If a theory predicts warming and we get cooling that theory as a scientific theory has failed and must be abandoned.”
Professor John Christy, lead author, IPCC; awarded NASA’s medal for exceptional scientific achievement in 1991; received a special award from the American Meteorological Society for fundamentally advancing our ability to measure climate: “I’ve often heard it said that there is consensus of thousands of scientists on the global warming issue, and that humans are causing a catastrophic change to the climate system. Well, I am one scientist—and there are many—who thinks that this is simply not true.”
Lord Lawson of Blaby, former British Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary for Energy: “We had a very thorough enquiry and took evidence from a whole lot of people expert in this area. What surprised me was how weak and uncertain the science was. In fact there are more and more thoughtful people…some of them openly saying, ‘hang on, wait a minute, this simply doesn’t add up.’”
Canadian environmentalist Patrick Moore , co-founder of Greenpeace: “I don’t even like to call it the environmental movement any more because it really is a political activist movement, and they have become hugely influential at a global level… These days if you are sceptical of the litany around climate change, you’re suddenly as if you’re like a holocaust denier.”
Nigel Calder, author and former editor of New Scientist: “They (the IPCC) came out with the first big report which predicted climatic disaster as a result of global warming. I remember…the total disregard of all climate science up till that time, including, incidentally, the role of the Sun, which had been discussed at a conference of the Royal Society just a few months previously.”
Professor Patrick Michaels, Department of Environmental Science, University of Virginia: “Anyone who says that CO2 is responsible for most of the warming of the 20th century hasn’t looked at the basic numbers.”
Dr Tim Ball, professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg: “The analogy I use is that my car is not running very well, so I ignore the engine, which is the Sun, and I’m going to ignore the transmission, which is water vapour, and I’m going to be looking at one nut on the right rear wheel, which is the human-produced CO2. The science is that bad. When people say you don’t believe in global warming, I say no, I believe in global warming, but I don’t believe that human CO2 is causing that warming. In the post-war years, when industry and the economies of the world really got going and human production of CO2 just soared, the global temperature was going down. In other words, the facts don’t fit the theory.”
Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, Director, International Arctic Research Centre, Alaska: “CO2 began to rise exponentially in about 1940, but temperature began to decrease (in) 1940 and continued to about 1975. So this is the opposite relation, when CO2 is increasing rapidly, but yet temperature is decreasing— then we cannot say the CO2 and the temperature go together.”
Professor Tim Ball, University of Winnipeg: “If you take CO2 as a percentage of all the gases in the atmosphere…it’s about 0.054%. It’s an incredibly small portion. And then you take the percentage that humans are supposedly adding, which is the focus of all the concern, and it gets even smaller. The atmosphere is made up of a multitude of gases, a small percentage of them we call greenhouse gases, and of that very small percentage, 95% is water vapour, the most important greenhouse gas.”
Professor Richard Lindzen, M.I.T.: “Every textbook on meteorology is telling you the main source of weather disturbances is the temperature differences between tropics and the poles. And we’re told, in a warmer world, this difference gets less. Now that would tell you, you will have less storminess, less variability…”
Professor Frederick Singer, First Director, US National Weather Satellite Service. “All the models, every one of them, calculate that the warming should be faster as you go up from the surface into the atmosphere. In fact, the maximum warming over the equator should take place at an altitude of about 10km.”
Professor John Christy, lead author, IPCC: “What we found consistently was that in a great part of the planet, the bulk of the atmosphere was not warming as much as the surface…that’s a real head-scratcher for us…the theory says that if the surface warms, the upper atmosphere should warm rapidly. The rise in temperature of that part of the atmosphere is really not very dramatic and really does not match the theory that climate models are expressing.”
Professor Richard Lindzen, IPCC; Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “If it’s greenhouse warming, you get more warming in the middle of the troposphere, the first 10 to 12 km of the Earth’s atmosphere, than you do at the surface…having to do with how the greenhouse works. That data gives you a handle on the fact that what we’re seeing is warming that is probably not due to greenhouse gases.”
Professor Frederick Singer: “The observations do not show an increase with altitude. So in a sense you can say the hypothesis of man-made global warming is falsified by the evidence.”
Dr Ian Clark, Arctic paleoclimatologist, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa: “If we look at climate in the geological timeframe, we would never suspect CO2 as a major climate driver. We can’t say CO2 will drive climate. It never did in the past. When we look at climate on long scales, we’re looking for geological material that actually records climate. If we take an ice sample for example, we use isotopes to reconstruct temperature, but the atmosphere that’s imprisoned in the ice we liberate and then we look at the CO2 content. … So, here we are looking at the ice core record from Vostok … we see temperature going up from early time to later time at a very key interval when we came out of a-glaciation … and then we see CO2 coming up. CO2 lags behind that increase, it’s got about an 800 year lag, so temperature is leading CO2 by about 800 years. CO2 cannot be causing temperature changes. It’s a product of temperature, it is following temperature changes.”
Professor Frederick Singer: “So obviously CO2 is not the cause of that warming, in fact we can say that the warming produced the CO2.”
Professor Tim Ball: “The ice core record goes to the very heart of the problem we have here. They said that if CO2 increases in the atmosphere…then the temperature will go up. But the ice core record shows exactly the opposite. So the fundamental assumption of the whole theory of climate change due to humans is shown to be wrong.”
Dr Ian Clark, University of Ottawa: “Solar activity over the last … several hundred years correlates very nicely on a decadal basis with sea ice and arctic temperatures.”
Professor Phillip Stott, University of London: “As every school child knows from their geography textbooks, the oceans and the atmosphere exchange carbon dioxide. When the oceans warm up, they release CO2 into the atmosphere, and when they cool down again, they take in the CO2 and they store it.”
Professor Nir Shaviv, Institute of Physics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “A few years ago, if you would ask me, I would tell you it’s CO2. Why? Because like everyone else in the public, I listened to what the media had to say. There were periods in the Earth’s history when we had … ten times as much CO2 as we have today, and if CO2 has an effect on climate, then you should see it in the temperature reconstruction. There’s no direct evidence that links 20th century global warming to anthropogenic greenhouse gases.”
To conclude this first exchange of thoughts, I emphasise that the ice core records show that temperature leads CO2, effectively ruling out anthropogenic carbon emissions as a driver of global temperature. In addition, measurements of temperatures in the troposphere by both satellite and weather balloon contradict the notion of a runaway greenhouse effect. Despite the elegance of the climate models, they are rendered useless by cumulative and ongoing measurements of actual conditions in the terrestrial environment, and by the exposing of unethical manipulation of those data to contrive a fit. At the very least, the claim by Gore and others that “the science is settled” is blatantly misleading and totally unsubstantiated by the facts. Does the end justify the means? I hope this dialogue survives to provide an answer.
Sincerely,
Hilton
Email: hilton@hiltonratcliffe.com
The quotes in this letter were taken from the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, produced by Martin Durkin (2008), and the books What Warming? Satellite view of global climate change by Arno Arrak (2009); A primer on CO2 and Climate by Howard Hayden (2008); Global Warming False Alarm by Ralph Alexander (2009); The Deniers—the world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud by Lawrence Solomon (2008); Red Hot Lies by Christopher Horner; Climate Confusion by Roy Spencer (2008), and Air Con by Ian Wishart (2009).
Well, I have after trial and tribulation managed to watch all of “The Age of Stupid”. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a free download site that offered the entire movie in one chunk, so ultimately I resorted to YouTube and watched it in 9 episodes. Given the emotional style of the production, which requires uninterrupted flow to carry the feelings in the intended way, this was not ideal, but perhaps, in a way, it gives me an objective advantage - the fragmentation breaks the subjective grip, and lets one more freely examine the facts without syrupy emotional overhead. The Great Global Warming Swindle is by contrast produced entirely differently, and is much more satisfying to the objective investigator, regardless of ideological persuasion. Of course, both movies strongly express a particular point of view, that’s given, but by and large, one of them relies on tears and the other on data.
Honestly, I had mixed feelings about this production. There is no question that it is technically excellent as a movie, and makes its point with both vigour and subtlety, but as a scientist seeking the truth, I don’t like the style of presentation at all - “Methinks they protesteth too much!” It definitely doesn’t let the facts stand in the way of a good cry.
Right at the beginning, we meet the alpine climber who, in his 80s, laments global warming. Pretty soon his eyes glisten with tears, and the scene of barren rock where the Chamonix ski slope should have been is overlaid with “Here at Chamonix, it’s December and there’s no snow at all. It’s a glimpse into the future.” I don’t know when that scene was shot, but in 2008 and 2009 there was record snowfall at Chamonix, so heavy in fact that for most of December both years skiing was considered dangerous. The bias is painful.
Then we have the chap who was overwhelmed by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. He too had tears in his eyes as he told of rescuing a baby from the rising waters. Then we have a TV presenter laying the blame: “Intensity of hurricanes is related to surface sea temperatures. So increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming.” What utter nonsense! There is no connection whatsoever. Hurricane intensity as far as we know is most likely related to polarity, both of the electromagnetic sheath vortex, and of the differential in temperature between the basin beneath the axis of spin (warm) and surrounding water (cold). Another factor is wind shear above warm spots, which actually weakens hurricanes. It has nothing to do with global warming. Also, the catastrophe in New Orleans was not the result of an abnormally fierce hurricane, but because of that city’s below-sea-level vulnerability and dependence on poorly constructed and maintained levees. The incidence and strength of hurricanes in 2006, as well as their landfall percentage, were well below average. The figures are freely available. Was that caused by global warming?
So I didn’t get off to a good start with this movie, but heck, I stuck it out. Well, it didn’t get better. The images of poverty and disease, corruption and barbarism, of millions struggling for food are emotionally deeply compelling. It certainly makes me sad to see evidence of the human and environmental conditions that result from the greed and megalomania of individuals who exert physical dominance over their tribes. But how on Earth is human nature a consequence of man-made climate change? Where does global warming fit in? And how will carbon caps alleviate mass hunger and endemic disease; how could massive industrial rollbacks possibly increase production so the hungry can eat? The Niger Delta scenes are such a mixed message. Corrupt, power-mad people will opportunistically use whatever currency is to hand—witness Gore’s use of AGW—whether it is opium poppies in Afghanistan or oil in Nigeria, it’s just what the Earth offers up in a particular region. We have to deal with human population pressure. We can’t just say “It’s their fault for having children so let them suffer.” It’s energy consumption versus output productivity. The granaries of the world use more energy and produce more food. It seems to me the Age of Stupid belongs to a school of thought and an ideology that is really just anti-capitalist when you boil it down, and we’ve seen how well those schemes have worked in the past. What we really need to do is let pragmatism rein in this rampant idealism. We have a job to do.
The aim of this movie as I understand it, its central message, is that we are corrupting the environment by our misuse of resources. I am wholeheartedly in support of that ethic. What I cannot tolerate is that blatantly false evidence is raised to create the popular impression that human activities control global temperatures, and that all environmental (and even many sociological) evils stem from this. The entire moral effort of a generation has been cunningly steered in a particular direction, and it has been infused with a self-satisfying moralistic anger that defies logic. While this is going on, Gore, Pachauri, and their henchmen are pocketing personal profits amounting to many millions of dollars. Our environmental conscience has been hijacked by greed of another persuasion, but greed it certainly is. This has been achieved by superbly crafted propaganda, and The Age of Stupid is perhaps the best of the lot.
By the time I reached the credits at the end of The Age of Stupid, I was as despondent as I would imagine most people are who are exposed to this sort of message. In my case though, I was most saddened by the power and effect of carefully constructed propaganda in determining, or at least reinforcing what people want to believe. It has nothing to do with the data or the measurements. An Inconvenient Truth presents 35 main scientific arguments to support Anthropogenic Global Warming. Guess how many were falsified by comparison with the measurements? 35! But pathetically few people who carry Gore’s banner ever bother to check his facts, and indeed, when faced with them, simply write them off as “denialism”. If we create a human desert in years to come—and we might—it will be because we put all our ecological effort into uselessly fighting carbon when all the while the real environmental issues, the ones that can really make a difference, are ignored. With our conscience appeased, we will go to sleep thinking we have done the right thing, and we may never wake up.
So I guess we are both depressed by what is going on. I just don’t see the moral justification in lying about it. I look forward to hearing your reaction to The Great Global Warming Swindle. I have the DVD if you’d like to organise a viewing.
Best wishes
Hilton
And a very good morning to you. It’s 4:30am, and I was awakened by a cat and this oppressive, sweltering Durban heat. I do have aircon in my home, but don’t like to use it continuously. I suppose that subliminally, I’m embracing the warmth as we start an irreversible slide into the headwaters of a looming Ice Age. Not that I’m worried about it. It’s out of my hands.
In this world as it is, there are far more pressing issues I would say. Like the Great Global Warming Swindle, for instance. From a sociological point of view, it is rich ground for contemplation. I didn’t want to get involved, but I have to; my social conscience won’t let me ignore the greatest scam - by orders of magnitude - ever perpetrated. When one looks at the sheer scale of the deception, it blows the mind - it’s now a multi-trillion dollar burglary, feeding without mercy on those scraps of decency that let Homo sapiens feel guilty about environmental hygiene and the way that we prey on and decimate other species. Chairman of the IPCC Dr Rajendra Pachauri has already pocketed (personally) millions of dollars, and he’s only just started. The head of this bloated fish is indeed rotten.
What’s the good news? The light at the end of the tunnel for me is that when climategate is eventually exposed, and we sheepishly admit that we’ve been horrendously duped, and we’ve guillotined whoever we’ve caught, perhaps broader society will have insight enough to the corruptions of power and greed, and the horrifying social tumours growing out of propaganda, to see that essentially, it is science and education that are corrupted. The walls of mathematical sophistry are all but impenetrable, and the $13,000,000,000 underground redoubt called the Large Hadron Collider is safe haven for those toying with the personal consequences of owning the Theory of Everything. “Playing God” is the ultimate fascination for man, and I use the gender term advisedly. It is utterly shameful that the unrepentant patriarch in the male of our species reduces us to this. Al Gore could never, ever have been a woman.
Outside the birds have woken, and the day beckons promisingly. I think that my emerging book “Stephen Hawking Smoked My Socks” is going to be a deeply passionate expression of my environmental sadness. Perhaps we can forgive each other, eventually, but I fear that war is the usual panacea for a smoking soul. The Carbon Diaries are written in blood, and Gore’s surname is suddenly sickeningly prophetic.
Lord have mercy!
Breathe in, breathe out, look left and right, and step onto the highway…
Take it easy.
Hilton
Take an hour or so out of your life to watch this. It’s worth the trouble.
http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=9SiB868VEFc
Dear Oliver, friends,
I’m an interested observer of this discussion, and look at it through the lens of physics (oh how I envy chemists that freedom to practice their art without strictures of meta-geometrical topology that afflict extra-terrestrial physics. Imagine if we tried to discuss chemical reactions in varying space curvatures).
For some years now, Oliver and I have collaborated on a Solar System model that aligns with conventional chemistry and physics rather than opposes them. Thus, we have an explosive progenitor in the form of an iron-rich supernova. Isotope sequences put that event at ~4.5GYA. That much is empirically verifiable, and is no longer controversial in the mainstream. What happens next is where physics and consensus depart each other.
How could the SN debris settle and accrete gravitationally so that the lightest element known, H, forms the nucleus of the nascent Solar System? How does iron float on hydrogen? It is clear, short of resorting to metaphysics, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the basics of the Standard Solar Model, and that our spectral analysis of the photosphere cannot be representative of what lies beneath.
And that, in my view, is why we’re looking at other processes besides predominantly H fusion to satisfy the Sun’s energy requirements. The proposal of n-repulsion should be seen against the background of a physically sound, fundamentally secure solar model. That is the mistake that Eddington and Bethe fell prey to: They let their theory of energy production in stars dictate the chemical composition of stars, instead of the other way around.
All the best for Christmas and the New Year, however you choose to celebrate them.
With kind regards
Hilton
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