The logical basis for climate scepticism

I will try to avoid too much navel-gazing on this blog, but I think it’s important to define what’s being discussed.

Like many others, I came to scepticism over a period of time. The main claims I noted were:

·         Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was increasing dangerously due to mankind’s “addiction” to using fossil fuels;

·         The danger of increasing CO2 concentration was that it increased atmospheric temperature due to “the greenhouse effect”. The temperature increase, in turn, will cause dangerous sea level rise;

·         The global warming causes an increase in “extreme weather and climate events” such fewer extreme cold events, more extreme heat events “more heavy precipitation events”;

·         Warming is primarily caused by increased CO2 concentrations;

·         The oceans are “acidifying”;

·         By 2100 the average temperature of the Earth will rise by between 0.3 and 4.8 degrees Celsius when compared to the average temperature in the years 1986-2005.

These are paraphrased from Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This organisation is owned and operated by the UN and is charged with reviewing the scientific literature to “prove” human induced, dangerous, global warming. Not surprisingly, it does just that.

 

http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/

All of these claims are made with modifiers like “high confidence” or “medium confidence”. Normally, in a scientific paper, a statement like “the item was measured at 10 ± 2 with 95 % confidence” has a specific, statistical meaning. It reports that the measurement is accurate to within one standard deviation of the mean of 10 and, if the measurement was repeated, 95% of the measurements would lie between 8 and 12.

The IPCC’s measure of confidence is measure of feelings of the authors and is not about the confidence of measurements.  This, I feel, is seriously misleading.

My scepticism is based on the following:

·         The climate is an extremely complex interaction of the Earth’s atmosphere, its surface and the oceans. Meteorologist and father of modern chaos theory, Edwin Lorenz, in his book The Essence of Chaos tells us “[… [there is] promise for one-week forecasts, but very little hope for one-month forecasts, while two-week forecasts seemed to be near the borderline.” My study of chaos in the 1990s made claims of accurate production of weather or climate of tens or hundreds of years seem very unlikely.

·         Yes, CO2 is a green house gas. A molecule of CO2 absorbs visible light energy and then re-emits it in the infrared band. The infrared is absorbed by other gas molecules in the atmosphere, heating it slightly. The details of this process are complex and probably not fully understood. If atmospheric CO2 was doubled, there appears to be little disputing that the atmosphere would warm by about one degree, assuming nothing else changed. That’s a big assumption.  The something else is probably clouds. The scientific debate is whether more high or low level clouds would be produced. If more high level clouds are produced, then the warming is amplified.  If more low level clouds are produced, you know yourself, it would get cooler. Cloud science is anything but “settled”.

·         The links between temperature and extreme weather events is tenuous, at best. Blaming cold weather events on global warming is counter-intuitive.  One recent report suggests the number of tropical cyclones has actually fallen. The media, however, uses the human misery associated with natural disasters to push the global warming barrow.

·         The oceans are not acidifying.  They are basic, not acidic. The tiny change has made then a tiny bit less basic.  This is not the same as making them acidic. This claim appears to be made solely to frighten people.  People are afraid of acid.

·         The claim of what the average temperature will be in ten, one hundred or one thousand years is conjecture. It is probably unpredictable to any useful level of accuracy.

The last point raises another question:  How do you actually measure the Earth’s temperature to any level of accuracy? That would be hard enough right now, never mind ten, one hundred or one thousand years ago.  I’ll deal with this in further posts.

Finally, why is opposition to the conventional wisdom on global warming greeted with such virulent opposition? They are branded ‘deniers’, to put them in the same class as holocaust deniers.

Austrian professor of Musicology Richard Parncutt says people like me should be killed.  If I recanted, though, I could get away with life in prison.  The boldface in the following statemnt is his:

“If a jury of suitably qualified scientists estimated that a given GW denier had already, with high probability (say 95%), caused the deaths of over one million future people, then s/he would be sentenced to death. The sentence would then be commuted to life imprisonment if the accused admitted their mistake, demonstrated genuine regret, AND participated significantly and positively over a long period in programs to reduce the effects of GW (from jail) – using much the same means that were previously used to spread the message of denial. At the end of that process, some GW deniers would never admit their mistake and as a result they would be executed. Perhaps that would be the only way to stop the rest of them. The death penalty would have been justified in terms of the enormous numbers of saved future lives.”

David Suzuki just thinks we should be jailed. “What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they’re doing is a criminal act,” said Dr. Suzuki, a former board member of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

Blogger Matt Walsh says we can live, just not work, teach or hold office. “…climate deniers should be banned from teaching, voted out of office, and probably fired from any other job they might hold. Seriously, I can’t hardly believe that anyone could be so foolish and so delusional as to be a climate denier. ”

http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/climate-change-deniers-are-completely-insane/

Why all the angst? Why is questioning the “science” so threatening? Why is the debate always about the person and seldom about the science?

In future posts I intend to review what’s known, and perhaps what’s not, about Earth’s temperature.  I’m particularly intrigued with how you measure such a thing and how accurate the measurements are.

In the news?

The Australian has a story today about the head of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) who's resigned following sexual harassment charges.

Not surprisingly, I can find no mention of this event on the ABC. The Age reprinted a brief article from the Washington Post.

Climate chief quits over suit

• The Australian
• February 25, 2015 12:00AM

Graham Lloyd

Environment Editor

Sydney

RAJANDRA Pachauri has stood down as chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and been admitted to hospital as details of his ­alleged sexual harassment of a junior employee were tended to a Delhi court.

Dr Pachauri is embroiled in allegations of sexual harassment from a 29-year-old research analyst at the The Energy and Resources Institute he heads.
A Delhi court says Dr Pachauri cannot be arrested until ­tomorrow, but the woman at the centre of the allegations has started recording her statement in camera.
According to Indian media, the lawyer for the alleged victim said the instances of sexual harassment “were so many that she will resume recording her statement tomorrow also”.
Lawyers for Dr Pachauri describe the complaint as “false, baseless and motivated”.
The IPCC last night said it had appointed vice-chairman ­Ismail El Gizouli to act in Dr Pachauri’s place.

What is Climate Science? continued

In my last post, I started to look at what comprises the modern phenomena of “climate science”. The definition I used had three main points:

1.      It’s a science:

2.      It’s about average conditions, not weather; and

3.      It’s about average conditions over time.

Average Conditions

Climate science is concerned with “average conditions”. We all know what average means.  “He’s of average height.” “I had an average day.” etc.

The “average” or “mean” is a term from the branch of mathematics called statistics.

So climate science is about using statistics to analyse various climactic conditions. Which conditions?

Some of the obvious ones are:

·         Temperature;

·         Wind speed and direction; and

·         Rain, snow, hail and other precipitation.

Some other, less obvious ones include:

·         Clouds of various types, shapes and configuration;

·         Storms; and

·         Total solar irradiance, the amount of the sun’s energy at various wavelengths, that hits the Earth.

The biggie, of course is temperature. We’re not told to be worried about polar bears getting wind burn, or getting fur-rot from too much rain. Temperature’s the problem, supposedly.

One of the things left out of the definition above is that all of these conditions can vary at different places on the planet’s surface. Obviously the temperature’s different at different places and, of course, at different times.  There’ll be more about that in the next section.

While climate science deals with averages, it also deals with other statistical measures like minimums and maximums, as in “It was the hottest/ coldest/ wettest/ driest/ cloudiest/ clearest Tuesday afternoon in February since last month”.  Maximums and minimums can also be treated with appropriate statistical tools.

Statements about averages, minimums, maximums and other statistical quantities can help us understand “the big picture”.  They can also confuse and, in the worst cases, deceive.

The most important idea in statistics is this:

Everything we measure has an error.  The temperature in my office wasn’t 29 degrees Celsius a moment ago. It was somewhere between a little less than 29 degrees and a little more than 29 degrees. Thermometers, and in fact all the stings we use to measure, have errors in their mechanisms that mean there’s always a bit of error or uncertainty in the measurement.

There are some statistical tools that allow us to estimate how much error is present in a measurement or set of measurements.

Over time

The third qualifier in the definition of “climate science” is that the average conditions are studied “over some time period”.

Sticking to the temperature example we might ask “What’s the temperature, where I’m standing, now?”, meaning over a very short period of time, say, a second.

Another, quite different question would be “What’s the average temperature of my office over the last year?”

I could actually answer this with some confidence if I got an electronic thermometer, connected it to my computer and got a reading of temperature every second for a whole year.  That’s 365 x 24 x 60 X 60 = 31,536,000 seconds and, of course, the same large number of measurements.

To find the average I’d just add up the 31,536,000 measurements and divide by 31,536,000. (Of course, I’d get the computer to do the adding and dividing.)

I would certainly get a number.  No doubt about that.  How accurate would it be?  That’s a topic for another post.

I could simplify this whole thing enormously by just measuring the temperature once or twice per day. Maybe I could measure it at midnight one day and noon the next or maybe whenever I got up or went to bed. I wonder if that would affect the uncertainty or accuracy of my measurement.

Recap

In summary, then, “climate science” is the study of the average values of conditions like temperature across varying periods of time.

In order to hypothesise an effect, like “Humans are causing global warming by burning fossil fuels.” We obviously need to make a before and after comparison.

Breaking the question down, we can ask:

“What was the average temperature of the Earth before wicked humans started burning fossil fuels?”

“What is the average temperature of the Earth now?”

“What’s it likely to be in one month?

“What’s it likely to be in one year?”

“What’s it likely to be in ten years?”

“What’s it likely to be in one hundred years?”

“What’s it likely to be in one thousand years?”

You get the idea.

Take note of the difficulties with all this:

·         Thermometers have built-in errors that cannot be gotten rid of;

·         We’re asked to measure the average temperature of the planet, but we only have thermometers in a relatively few places, mostly in North America.  What do we do about all the places in between?

·         How do we determine what the average temperature of the Earth was one hundred years ago? There were thermometers back there, but how accurate were they?

·         How about one thousand years ago, before the invention of the thermometer?

It appears to me that “climate science” has set itself an impossible task.