Global Warming/Climate Change: Extended Discussion

Talking to legendary Chicago talk show host Milt Rosenberg, two global warming skeptics (James M. Taylor and Steve Goreham) discuss the issues in depth.

Interestingly, proponents of man-made global warming refused to appear on the show, leaving Rosenberg to play the role of devil’s advocate. This, Rosenberg explains, is almost invariably the case as warming advocates imperiously insist that warming is “settled science” about which there is no legitimate doubt.

But public opinion polls shot there most certainly is doubt among the citizenry.

So if their case is so strong, why won’t the advocates avail themselves of the opportunity to convince doubters with their (supposedly) superior arguments? It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the issue is way more complex than the warmists want the public knowing, and that they fear they would be on the defensive.

Instinctively, we should distrust people who refuse to argue their case. Their refusal implies that they live in a little bubble where everybody shares their assumptions, and they fear stepping out into the world where their assumptions will be challenged.

Global Warming: Attacks on Scientists and the Corruption of Science

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Mark Steyn at Heartland Climate Skeptics Conference

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Lots of Evidence for Global Warming Skepticism

The National Post in Canada has made a crusade of giving a voice to all the global warming skeptics -- most of whom have excellent scientific credentials -- that the mainstream media has ignored.

Here is a compilation of their articles on the subject. Warning: to see these articles you will have to register for a free trial. Unlike most such free trials, they will not ask for your credit card number, and will not bill you credit card if you forget to cancel.

• Statistics needed -- The Deniers Part I
• Warming is real -- and has benefits -- The Deniers Part II
• The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science -- The Deniers Part III
• Polar scientists on thin ice -- The Deniers Part IV
• The original denier: into the cold -- The Deniers Part V
• The sun moves climate change -- The Deniers Part VI
• Will the sun cool us? -- The Deniers Part VII
• The limits of predictability -- The Deniers Part VIII
• Look to Mars for the truth on global warming -- The Deniers Part IX
• Limited role for C02 -- the Deniers Part X
• End the chill -- The Deniers Part XI
• Clouded research -- The Deniers Part XII
• Allegre’s second thoughts -- The Deniers XIII
• The heat’s in the sun -- The Deniers XIV
• Unsettled Science -- The Deniers XV
• Bitten by the IPCC -- The Deniers XVI
• Little ice age is still within us -- The Deniers XVII
• Fighting climate ‘fluff’ -- The Deniers XVIII
• Science, not politics -- The Deniers XIX
• Gore’s guru disagreed -- The Deniers XX
• The ice-core man -- The Deniers XXI
• Some restraint in Rome -- The Deniers XXII
• Discounting logic -- The Deniers XXIII
• Dire forecasts aren’t new -- The Deniers XXIV
• They call this a consensus? - Part XXV
• NASA chief Michael Griffin silenced - Part XXVI
• Forget warming - beware the new ice age - Part XXVII

And the latest entry, “Read the sunspots.”

The fact that science is many years away from properly understanding global climate doesn’t seem to bother our leaders at all. Inviting testimony only from those who don’t question political orthodoxy on the issue, parliamentarians are charging ahead with the impossible and expensive goal of “stopping global climate change.” Liberal MP Ralph Goodale’s June 11 House of Commons assertion that Parliament should have “a real good discussion about the potential for carbon capture and sequestration in dealing with carbon dioxide, which has tremendous potential for improving the climate, not only here in Canada but around the world,” would be humorous were he, and even the current government, not deadly serious about devoting vast resources to this hopeless crusade.

Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thou-sand-year-long “Younger Dryas” cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade -- 100 times faster than the past century’s 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists.

[. . .]

Our finding of a direct correlation between variations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate indicators (called “proxies”) is not unique. Hundreds of other studies, using proxies from tree rings in Russia’s Kola Peninsula to water levels of the Nile, show exactly the same thing: The sun appears to drive climate change.

However, there was a problem. Despite this clear and repeated correlation, the measured variations in incoming solar energy were, on their own, not sufficient to cause the climate changes we have observed in our proxies. In addition, even though the sun is brighter now than at any time in the past 8,000 years, the increase in direct solar input is not calculated to be sufficient to cause the past century’s modest warming on its own. There had to be an amplifier of some sort for the sun to be a primary driver of climate change.

Indeed, that is precisely what has been discovered. In a series of groundbreaking scientific papers starting in 2002, Veizer, Shaviv, Carslaw, and most recently Svensmark et al., have collectively demonstrated that as the output of the sun varies, and with it, our star’s protective solar wind, varying amounts of galactic cosmic rays from deep space are able to enter our solar system and penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere. These cosmic rays enhance cloud formation which, overall, has a cooling effect on the planet. When the sun’s energy output is greater, not only does the Earth warm slightly due to direct solar heating, but the stronger solar wind generated during these “high sun” periods blocks many of the cosmic rays from entering our atmosphere. Cloud cover decreases and the Earth warms still more.

The opposite occurs when the sun is less bright. More cosmic rays are able to get through to Earth’s atmosphere, more clouds form, and the planet cools more than would otherwise be the case due to direct solar effects alone. This is precisely what happened from the middle of the 17th century into the early 18th century, when the solar energy input to our atmosphere, as indicated by the number of sunspots, was at a minimum and the planet was stuck in the Little Ice Age. These new findings suggest that changes in the output of the sun caused the most recent climate change. By comparison, CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.

In some fields the science is indeed “settled.” For example, plate tectonics, once highly controversial, is now so well-established that we rarely see papers on the subject at all. But the science of global climate change is still in its infancy, with many thousands of papers published every year. In a 2003 poll conducted by German environmental researchers Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, two-thirds of more than 530 climate scientists from 27 countries surveyed did not believe that “the current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases.” About half of those polled stated that the science of climate change was not sufficiently settled to pass the issue over to policymakers at all.

We don’t claim to have the scientific knowledge to judge the “global warming due to human activity thesis.”

But we do know enough about science to know that groupthink, careerism and political ideology have often distorted scientific findings. Indeed, these things have often created a consensus that has later proven to be nonsense.

Never Quite Getting It

Global Warming Dissent

We have blogged fairly regularly on the fact that the notion of anthropogenic global warming has become an official orthodoxy, not a scientific theory subject to debate and discussion.

Yesterday’s column by Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe outlines how much serious dissent there is among reputable scientists.

You know that big United Nations report on global warming that appeared last week amid so much media sound and fury? Here’s a flash: It wasn’t the big, new United Nations report on global warming.

Oddly enough, most of the news coverage neglected to mention that the document released on Feb. 2 by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was not the latest multiyear assessment report, which will run to something like 1,500 pages when it is released in May. It was only the 21-page “Summary for Policymakers,” a document written chiefly by government bureaucrats -- not scientists -- and intended to shape public opinion. Perhaps the summary will turn out to be a faithful reflection of the scientists’ conclusions, but it wouldn’t be the first time if it doesn’t.

In years past, scientists contributing to IPCC assessment reports have protested that the policymakers’ summary distorted their findings -- for example, by presenting as unambiguous what were actually only tentative conclusions about human involvement in global warming. This time around, the summary is even more confident: It declares it “unequivocal” that the Earth has warmed over the past century and “very likely” -- meaning more than 90 percent certain -- that human activity is the cause.

That climate change is taking place no one doubts; the Earth’s climate is always in flux. But is it really so clear-cut that the current warming, which amounts to less than 1 degree Celsius over the past century, is anthropogenic? Or that continued warming will lead to the meteorological chaos and massive deaths that alarmists predict? It is to the media. By and large they relay only the apocalyptic view: Either we embark on a radical program to slash carbon-dioxide emissions -- that is, to arrest economic growth -- or we are doomed, as NBC’s Matt Lauer put it last week, to “what literally could be the end of the world as we know it.”

Perhaps the Chicken Littles are right and the sky really is falling, but that opinion is hardly unanimous. There are quite a few skeptical scientists, including eminent climatologists, who doubt the end-of-the-world scenario. Why don’t journalists spend more time covering all sides of the debate instead of just parroting the scaremongers?

Only rarely do other views pierce the media’s filter of environmental correctness. A recent series by Lawrence Solomon in Canada’s National Post looked at some of the leading global-warming dissenters, none of whom fits the easy-to-dismiss stereotype of a flat-Earth yahoo. There is, for example, Richard S.J. Tol -- IPCC author, editor of Energy Economics, and board member of the Centre for Marine and Climate Research at Hamburg University. Tol agrees that global warming is real, but he emphasizes its benefits as well as its harms -- and points out that in the short term, the benefits are especially pronounced.

“Tol is a student of human innovation and adaptation,” writes Solomon. “As a native of the Netherlands, he is intimately familiar with dikes and other low-cost adaptive technologies, and the ability of humans in meeting challenges in their environment.” Whatever changes global warming may bring, Tol is confident that human beings will adjust to them with ingenuity and resourcefulness.

Another dissident is Duncan Wingham, professor of climate physics at University College London and principal scientist of the European Space Agency’s CryoSat Mission, which is designed to measure changes in the Earth’s ice masses. The collapse of ice shelves off the northern Antarctic Peninsula is often highlighted as Exhibit A of global warming and its dangers, but Wingham’s satellite data shows that the thinning of some Antarctic ice has been matched by thickening ice elsewhere on the continent. The evidence to date, Wingham says, is not “favorable to the notion we are seeing the results of global warming.”

Still other scientists profiled by Solomon contend that the sun, not man, plays the dominant role in planetary climate change.

Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Center, for instance, believes that changes in the sun’s magnetic field, and the corresponding impact on cosmic rays, may be the key to global warming. Nigel Weiss, a past president of the Royal Astronomical Society and a mathematical aerophysicist at the University of Cambridge, correlates sunspot activity with changes in the Earth’s climate. Habibullo Abdussamatov, who heads the space research laboratory at Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, points out that Mars is also undergoing global warming -- despite having no greenhouse conditions and no activity by Martians. In his view, it is solar irradiance, not carbon dioxide, that accounts for the recent rise in temperature.

Climate-change hyperbole makes for dramatic headlines, but the real story is both more complex and more interesting. Chicken Little may claim the sky is falling. A journalist’s job is to check it out.

But when journalists have signed onto a moralistic crusade, don’t expect much checking.