Parallel Lack of Standards: the IPCC & Bust Banks

See Donna Laframboise’s “What Financial Meltdowns Teach Us About the IPCC”:

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World is Michael Lewis’ latest book on the global financial train wreck.  Brimming with sharp observations and fabulous turns of phrase, it examines recent financial shenanigans in Iceland, Greece, and Ireland among other places.

I experienced a shock of recognition while reading those case studies.  People were doing bizarre things that they—and all of those around them—should have known would lead to tears.  Yet almost everyone bought in.  Normal rules were jettisoned.  Ordinary morality was abandoned.  Disbelief was suspended.  The few souls who tried to sound the alarm were ignored, ridiculed, demoted, or fired.

In other words, the behaviour I’ve spent the past three years writing about isn’t unique to climate science.  The same pattern is horrifyingly evident elsewhere.  It’s as though our IQs have all dropped sharply in recent years.  It’s as though we have no standards anymore.  [...]

When a Danish bank wrote a report concluding that something was amiss in the Icelandic banking sector the reaction was eerily similar to what we see in climate science.  The messenger was accused of having suspect motives and the message was summarily dismissed.

When an economics professor from Chicago gave a speech five months before Iceland’s economy crashed in October 2008 (in which he declared that their banks were already dead and that the economy had no more than nine months) Lewis reports that Iceland bankers in the audience “sought to prevent newspapers from reporting the speech.”

In other words, a gang of Icelandic kids trashed their nation’s economy.  And rather than stopping them, the grownups went along for the ride.  The checks-and-balances we would all expect to have been in place, the safeguards we would imagine going hand-in-hand with financial transactions of that magnitude, were entirely absent.

Does this make rational sense?  No.  Does it sound plausible?  Not really.  But it happened.  And the people of Iceland are going to be living with the consequences for a long, long, long time.

No Acceleration of Global Sea-Level, II

Stuart Rintoul, in The Australian, reveals that despite our Government’s hysterical claims that the world’s sea-levels will rise alarmingly, a government expert explains that the rises are decelerating.   In “Sea-level rises are slowing, tidal gauge records show”, Rintoult writes:

One of Australia’s foremost experts on the relationship between climate change and sea levels has written a peer-reviewed paper concluding that rises in sea levels are “decelerating”.

The analysis, by NSW principal coastal specialist Phil Watson, calls into question one of the key criteria for large-scale inundation around the Australian coast by 2100 – the assumption of an accelerating rise in sea levels because of climate-change.

Based on century-long tide gauge records at Fremantle, Western Australia (from 1897 to present), Auckland Harbour in New Zealand (1903 to present), Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour (1914 to present) and Pilot Station at Newcastle (1925 to present), the analysis finds there was a “consistent trend of weak deceleration” from 1940 to 2000.

Mr Watson’s findings, published in the Journal of Coastal Research [...] supports a similar analysis of long-term tide gauges in the US earlier this year.  Both raise questions about the CSIRO's sea-level predictions.

Climate-change researcher Howard Brady, at Macquarie University, said yesterday the recent research meant sea levels rises accepted by the CSIRO were “already dead in the water as having no sound basis in probability”.

“In all cases, it is clear that sea-level rise, although occurring, has been decelerating for at least the last half of the 20th century, and so the present trend would only produce sea level rise of around 15cm for the 21st century.”

Dr Brady said the divergence between the sea-level trends from models and sea-level trends from the tide gauge records was now so great “it is clear there is a serious problem with the models”.

“In a nutshell, this factual information means the high sea-level rises used as precautionary guidelines by the CSIRO in recent years are in essence ridiculous,” he said.  During the 20th century, there was a measurable global average rise in mean sea level of about 17cm (plus or minus 5cm).  [...]

The federal government has published a series of inundation maps [...] showing that large areas of Australia’s capital cities, southeast Queensland and the NSW central coast will be under water by 2100.

Without acceleration in sea-level rises, the 20th-century trend of 1.7mm a year would produce a rise of about 0.15m by 2100.

Mr Watson’s analysis of the four longest continuous Australian and New Zealand records is consistent with the findings of US researchers Robert Dean and James Houston, who analysed monthly averaged records for 57 tide gauges, covering periods of 60 to 156 years.

The US research concluded there was “no evidence to support positive acceleration over the 20th century as suggested by the IPCC, global climate change models and some researchers”.

See P.J. Watson, “Is There Evidence Yet of Acceleration in Mean Sea Level Rise around Mainland Australia?” in the Journal of Coastal Research. 

See also our “No Acceleration of Global Sea-Level, I” and, at WUWT, “The battle over sea level”.

Big Tobacco and Global Warming

An unofficial transcription of a part of “The Drum”, on ABC TV, with John Barron hosting a discussion with Waleed Aly, Chris Berg, Naomi Oreskes and Tom Switzer, last Tuesday:

John Barron:  Now to a book which, rather happily, draws together a couple of the stories we’ve been looking at today: tobacco and climate-change.  In Merchants of Doubt, Professor Naomi Oreskes reveals [if you accept her conspiracy-theory—a better choice of word would be “asserts”] that scientists favoured by the climate-change-sceptics are not only using the playbook from the tobacco industry’s defence against health lawsuits back in the 1970s, in many cases it’s the same scientists that wrote the playbook:  they’re back.  Naomi Oreskes is in Australia to attend this week’s Sydney Writer’s Festival, and she’s with us on “The Drum”.  Welcome.
Naomi Oreskes:  Thank you. Nice to be here.
John Barron:  Now first of all, who are these shadowy, or not-so-shadowy figures, that the scientists that were involved with big tobacco in the ’70s and are now in the climate-change denial business today.
Naomi Oreskes:  Well, in our book, Merchants of Doubt, what we asked the question was, who are these scientists who say there’s no global warming,  that it’s just caused by natural variability?  And we were able to, through historical research, trace these people back to their origins in a think-tank created in 1984 called the George C. Marshall Institute.  But, even before that, we found that the key people in the story including the founding chairman of the board of the Marshall Institute, a man by the name of Frederick Seitz, had worked in the 1970s and ’80s with the US tobacco industry.
John Barron:  Now, are these scientists who have legitimate, honestly-held doubts in the finest Rigorous Traditions of Science, or are they in some way compromised or corrupted?
Naomi Oreskes: Well, I don’t know if I would put it exactly either of those.  I mean, they were real scientists, that’s partly how they had credibility, it’s partly why people listened to them.  They were physicists, Frederick Seitz was a President of US National Academy of Sciences, so they were real scientists, and that was key to the story.  But, of course, that was what the tobacco industry had recognised, that if their claims that the science regarding tobacco was uncertain—that we didn’t really know if tobacco was hazardous—for that claim to be credible it wouldn’t really do for a tobacco industry executive to say it, because most of us would be smart enough to realise that was not a credible claim.  But if they could find scientists, prestigious scientists, who would say, “Well, we’re not sure about the the science,” that would have much more credibility with the public, and especially with the journalists. because a lot of this was about targeting journalists.  So the tobacco industry actively recruited scientists to support their position about tobacco; and, subsequently, we see the Marshall Institute and other groups actively recruiting scientists to claim that there’s no global warming.
John Barron:  Talk a bit about the rôle of the media, whether it was in the ’70s with tobacco and cancer or in more recent times with climate-change, the media tends to either want to give both sides of the argument equal air-time to set up a conflict on a panel show or, maybe just, to be fair and balanced.  In some cases, though, the media organisations have proprietors or editors who have taken a view, that are trying to push an agenda.  What did you find?
Naomi Oreskes:  Well, so, both of those; so, one of key things we talk about in the book is how the tobacco industry and then later these other organisations, like the Marshall Institute, have a conscious and explicit strategy to exploit the media ideal of balance.  They know that journalists want balance. [!]  They know that journalists want to present both sides of issues, and they know that journalists want to be objective; and so they exploit that, and they say, “Well, we have another view, you need to give us equal time for our position.”  And because journalists don’t realise that their view is not in fact supported by real science, journalists succumb to this.  And so the exploitation of journalists is really a key part of this strategy; and, again we saw that in tobacco debates back in the ’70s and ’80s, and then we see the same strategy being used throughout the 1990s, into the present day, with respect to climate change and a host of other issues as well that we talk about in the book.
John Barron:  Interesting example in the papers here in Australia today:  on the one hand, The Sydney Morning Herald, in reporting on comments from one of the top UN officials on climate change was reporting along the lines of “there is growing body of evidence to suggest that the climate change is responsible for the extreme weather events that have led to floods and hurricanes and so on.”  The Australian, owned by Rupert Murdoch, was reporting slightly differently, saying—using the same quotes—but with headlining along the lines of you know, “there’s no proof that these floods in Queensland and elsewhere are linked to climate-change.”  Same quotes being used, very different stories, very different headlines.

Naomi Oreskes:  Yeah, and the mantra, “there’s no proof,” was really invented by the tobacco industry, and this is one of the things we talk about in the book.  So, early on, the tobacco industry realised that this was a very effective strategy because, of course, it was true, because in science you can never really prove anything, you can never—it’s not, science isn’t like mathematics or logic, you can’t prove something is true.  What you can simply do is evaluate the evidence and say what is the most reasonable expectation or explanation based on what we know, based on the laws of physics and chemistry, based on all of the evidence.  And so, today, we have a situation where climate scientists have predicted for a long time that global warming would lead to an increase in extreme weather events: they predicted floods, they predicted hurricanes, they predicted cyclones, and now we are seeing all of these things that were predicted ten, twenty, thirty years ago, or even longer—all of these things are coming true.  So the most reasonable explanation is that, in fact, scientists have correctly understood the laws of nature and that this is in fact evidence for the very things that we should expect. But, of course, Rupert Murdoch and others can say, as the tobacco industry did before them, “there’s no proof”—and they’re not lying when they say that; but they are giving the public a very distorted view of the scientific evidence.
John Barron:  Tom Switzer, to you on this as well; how would you characterise your approach to climate change and mankind’s rôle in it, because it’s not as simple as being sort of a denier or a sceptic, you’ve looked at this in some depth?
Tom Switzer:  I try not to get too bogged down on the science, because I’m not an authority on it, but I would describe myself as an agnostic on the science.  I think that there is still a lot of uncertainly, although I readily concede there has been some warming of the planet over the last twenty or so years.  But, interestingly, in the IPCC models, there is a great deal of uncertainty, because the rate of the warming has not increased to the extent that the IPCC models suggested it would in the 1990s; there has been some tapering off.  Now, to the extent that that’s true, that does lead one to believe that there is more uncertainly.  But, on the issue of one-sided media campaigns—look, I think the Australian media have done themselves a disservice.  Day in and day out, in this country, we have front-page news stories, broadcast on the ABC, about the carbon debate.  And yet, with the exception of about two, maybe three columnists, the news of the Canadian election has hardly been mentioned, and this is a significant result.  This was a Canadian, conservative Prime Minister gaining seats on the back of opposing a carbon tax or an ETS.  Now, this was significant news for Australia, because Canada and Australia have very similar types of economies—they’re very resource-rich—and this hardly got picked up at all in the mainstream press.  Now, that was a classic case of how, that your argument goes both ways.  And I would argue that, in this country, especially during the time of ’07 and ’08 and ’09, it was conducted in a heretic-hunting and anti-intellectual environment where sceptics were hardly heard; and, indeed, it was not only impermissible to question the science, a lot of the time, it was impermissible to question the response.  You know, I think this debate can go both ways.
Naomi Oreskes:  May I respond to that?
John Barron: Of course.
Naomi Oreskes:  I can’t understand really what you mean when you say, “I’m an agnostic.”  I mean, to me to say that you’re an agnostic—  Excuse me, I listened to what you said so, please, let me speak.
Tom Switzer:  Yeah, sure.
Naomi Oreskes:  To say you’re agnostic about the science to me only makes sense if you in fact have not been paying attention or don’t understand the science, because the scientific evidence is now overwhelming, and anyone who’s paid attention to it, anyone who understands it, anyone who understands the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere knows that scientists predicted climate change from increased green-house gases and deforestation going back to the 1950s.  They have built models—of course, models are representations of the natural world, they are not the world itself—so, of course, there will always be uncertainties about the details, but the overall picture is overwhelmingly clear, and it’s exactly what scientists have predicted.  And if you talk about the IPCC forecasts—my graduate-students and I have studied this—we’ve looked at what these scientists have predicted on this issue over the past fifty years, and we find that in most cases scientists have actually underestimated the change:  we see sea-level rising faster than predicted; we see overall global temperatures rising faster than predicted; we see sea-surface temperatures in the Caribbean rising faster than predicted.  So, if anything, scientists have been conservative on this issue!  And now we are seeing the changes all around us.
Tom Switzer:  In your book, do you focus on any kind of scandals that have been affiliated with the IPCC, such as the glacier-gate, do you talk about that?
Naomi Oreskes:  Well, that happened after our book was finished.  But I think the so-called glacier-gate was a typographic error.  The IPCC reports are thousands of pages long.  In any human activity, in any human institution, of course, there will be some mistakes.  I’m sure there are some mistakes in your work too, but you haven’t had teams of people—
Tom Switzer:  Of course, but I’m not—
Naomi Oreskes:  Excuse me, but you haven’t had teams of people scouring it.  I actually think that the fact that the IPCC report is thousands of pages long, and the only errors that were found—
Tom Switzer:  It was a pretty significant error—
Naomi Oreskes:  No, it was a typographical error!
Tom Switzer:  No, it was more than that; it was based on dodgy research, from a travelling document, c’mon—
Naomi Oreskes:  No, studies have showed that in fact it was a typographical error—
Tom Switzer:  Please—
Naomi Oreskes:  So—no, not please—it was a typographical error—
Tom Switzer:  The IPCC Chairman nearly resigned over the matter!  This was a pretty serious issue, wasn’t it, Chris?
Naomi Oreskes:  Excuse me, the IPCC chairman was the choice of the Bush administration—
John Barron:  Let’s take a time out on that particular point because there’s a more, philosophical issue I’d like to get your thoughts on, Waleed.  Do you think that, given that, as Tom says, he’s not a scientist—I’m not a scientist, we do have a scientist here [referring, laughably, to Prof. Oreskes], but most of us are not scientists—, are people more inclined to believe one side or the other?  Conservatives seem to be more sceptical, progressives seem to be more willing to accept the fact [!] that we need to do something about man-made climate change.  You can almost sort of, you know, pick it by post-card or political affiliation.
Waleed Aly:  You can go further.  What I found interesting is that often you can match someone’s attitude to the science of climate-change with their attitudes on social issues as well. There’s this really interesting mix. What I think that demonstrates is that, for most people, this is not about the science at all:  they will cherry-pick the scientific discourse that suits their purposes, whether it’s from a blog or it’s somewhere else, or from a paid scientist; but they will shape the scientific data that they get or they choose to match their overall world view...

UPDATE (by Deadman):  See “Secondhand Smoke, Lung Cancer, and the Global Warming Debate”, by S. Fred Singer, at American Thinker, from 19 December, 2010—which John Barron (or anyone else at the ABC) could have read before interviewing Prof. Oreskes, if he were a journalist who wanted “to present both sides of issues” or who wanted “to be objective” and not a biassed, awarmist shill:

The tobacco smoking issue has also become a favourite tool for discrediting climate skeptics.  A prime example is the book Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Eric Conway, which attacks several well-known senior physicists, including the late Dr. Fred Seitz, a former president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Physical Society, and (most recently) Rockefeller University.
No matter what the environmental issue—ozone depletion, acid rain, pesticides, etc.—any and all scientific opposition based on objective facts is blamed on an imagined involvement with tobacco companies.  None of this is true, of course.  Oreskes and Conway claim to be academic historians, yet they have consistently ignored factual information, have not bothered to consult primary sources, have never interviewed any of the scientists they try to smear, and generally have operated in a completely unprofessional way.
Oreskes’ and Conway’s science is as poor as their historical expertise.  [...]  As an aside, when not engaged in smearing scientists by linking them to the tobacco lobby, Oreskes’ and Conway’s book claims that opposition to environmental regulation of greenhouse gases and other “pollutants” is based on anti-communism!
The ultimate aim of these attacks, at least in my case, has been to discredit my work and publications on global warming.  I am a nonsmoker, find SHS to be an irritant and unpleasant, have certainly not been paid by Philip Morris and the tobacco lobby, and have never joined any of their front organizations.  And I serve on the advisory board of an anti-smoking organisation.  My father, who was a heavy smoker, died of emphysema while relatively young.  I personally believe that SHS, in addition to being objectionable, cannot possibly be healthy.
So what is the truth about SHS and lung cancer?  I am neither an oncologist nor a chemical toxicologist, but I do know some statistics, which allows me to examine the EPA study without bias.  I can demonstrate that the EPA fudged their analysis to reach a predetermined conclusion — using thoroughly dishonest procedures.  EPA “scientists’ made three major errors: 1) They ignored “publication bias.” 2) They arbitrarily shifted the statistical “confidence intervals.” 3) They drew unjustified conclusions from a risk ratio that was barely greater than 1.0.  […]
So what does it all mean?  The issue is not whether SHS be healthy; it obviously is not.  One issue is the use of the “tobacco weapon” to attack the credibility of climate scientists—in place of using scientific arguments.  It bespeaks of the desperation of those who don’t have any valid scientific arguments and wish to avoid public debate.  (Imagine, if you will, Oreskes attacking the validity of the notorious “hockey stick” temperature-curve by linking its author, Michael Mann, to tobacco company Philip Morris, instead of describing his faulty use of statistics.)
The other issue is the conduct of science and the integrity of the science process:  the intrusion of government political agenda—worthy or not—on the way science is done and reported to the public.  The corruption of science in a worthy cause is still corruption, and it has led to its further corruption in an unworthy cause—the ideologically driven claim of anthropogenic global warming.

UPDATE II (8 June, 2011):  See also “Naomi Oreskes, Conspiracy Queen”, by Norman Rogers, at American Thinker, and Nicolas Nierenberg’s ’blog, particularly here.

UPDATE III (21 June, 2011):  See “Science and Smear Merchants” by S. Fred Singer, at American Thinker:

Professor Naomi Oreskes of the University of California in San Diego, claims to be a science historian.  One can readily demonstrate that she is neither a credible scientist nor a credible historian; the best evidence is right there in her recent book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, coauthored with Eric Conway.  Her science is faulty; her historical procedures are thoroughly unprofessional.  She is, however, an accomplished polemicist, who has found time for world lecture tours, promoting her book and her ideological views, while being paid by the citizens of California.  Her book tries to smear four senior physicists – of whom I am the only surviving one.  I view it as my obligation to defend the reputations of my late colleagues and good friends against her libelous charges.
Oreskes is well-known from her 2004 article in Science that claimed a complete scientific consensus about man-made global warming; it launched her career as a polemicist.  Her claim was based on examining the abstracts of some 900 published papers.  Unfortunately, she missed more than 11,000 papers through an incorrect Internet search.  She published a discreet “Correction”; yet she has never retracted her ideologically based claim about consensus.  Al Gore still quotes her result, which has been contradicted by several, more competent studies (by Peiser, Schulte, Bray and von Storch; Lemonick in SciAm, etc).
Turning first to the her science, her book discusses acidification, as measured by the pH coefficient.  She states that a pH of 6.0 denotes neutrality (page 67, MoD).  Let’s be charitable and chalk this off to sloppy proofreading.
Elsewhere in the book (page 29), she claims that beryllium is a “heavy metal” and tries to back this up with references.  I wonder if she knows that the atomic weight of beryllium is only 9, compared to, say, uranium, which is mostly 238.  A comparison of these two numbers should tell anyone which one is the heavy metal.
Her understanding of the Greenhouse Effect is plain comical; she posits that CO₂ is “trapped” in the troposphere – and that’s why the stratosphere is cooling.  Equally wrong is her understanding of what climate models are capable of; she actually believes that they can predict forest fires in Russia, floods in Pakistan and China – nothing but calamities everywhere – and tells climate scientists in a recent lecture:  If the predictions of climate models have come true, then why don’t people believe them?  Perhaps because people are not gullible.

UPDATE III (24 June, 2011):  See “Circuitous attempts to smear AGW skeptic scientists”, by Russell Cook, and also JoNova’s “Oreskes’ clumsy, venomous smear campaign: busted”.

Good News from New Satirist

The alleged science-magazine New Pscientist continues to publish articles which, though at times droll, are seemingly meant to be taken seriously; read, for instance, “Greenland ice in no hurry to raise seas”, by Michael Marshall:

Good news is rare when it comes to the Greenland ice sheet.  Yet a model that accurately mimics the way the ice responds to rising temperatures by slipping and sliding into the sea suggests the resulting rise in sea levels may be smaller than feared.

In its 2007 forecasts of sea-level rise, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change famously excluded contributions from the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets because the physics were too poorly understood and complex to model.  As a result, the IPCC’s estimate that seas could rise by 18 to 59 centimetres by 2100 is almost certainly too low.  Indeed, levels are already rising faster than the models predicted.

Using data from the last decade, Stephen Price of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has shown that his modelled ice sheet moves in the same way as the real one does.  In particular, the model accurately reproduces how disruptions to the edge of the ice sheet leads to a large initial movement, which is followed by several decades of smaller movement.

Price has calculated that changes which the ice sheet experienced between 1997 and 2007 in response to a thermal disruption in the early 2000s will eventually lead to a rise of 0.6 centimetres.  Assuming that similar thermal disruptions happen every decade, the moving ice sheet will raise sea levels by about 4.5 centimetres by 2100.

That is about half of a widely quoted previous estimate of 9 centimetres, calculated by Tad Pfeffer at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and colleagues. But Pfeffer's study was a worst-case scenario, in which all the processes driving sea-level rise were pushed to their absolute limits (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1159099).

Pfeffer says Price’s study is a more plausible estimate of what might actually happen.  “They use a much more realistic scenario,” he says, “and their model is really grounded in physics.”

Notice that levels “rising faster than the models predicted” inevitably lead “to a rise of 0.6 centimetres.”  Oh, no!  Notice too that Tad Pfeffer admits that his own, alarmist, exaggerated predictions were not “really grounded in physics.”  Actual observations, of course, shew that the seas have not been rising—and will not rise—by anything near as much as the semi-illiterate hacks of Pseudo-Scientist and other alarmist publications have been shouting and fearing all these years.  See the post, “No Acceleration of Global Sea-Level”, below.

See also “Fake Sea Level Rise Approved by NASA in Climate Fraud”, by John O’Sullivan:

NASA researchers admit adding fake inches to sea level rises.  Skeptics denounce desperate attempt to salvage government global warming policies.

In a disturbing development in the ongoing global warming fiasco the U.S. government-funded Sea Level Research Group has been given a green light from NASA to exaggerate sea level rises [... so] policy makers can falsely blame humans for adding to natural rises in sea levels.

No Acceleration of Global Sea-Level, I

The renowned, crazed NASA employee, Dr James Hansen, a notorious, irrationally misanthracist fruitcake, has predicted that sea-levels may rise five metres a century or (on days when his navel lint sends messages by way of his breakfast cereal, perchance) over twenty-five metres.*  The famed, award-winning profiteer of doom, Al. Gore, a serial liar, has predicted that sea-levels will rise by more than seven metres by the end of this century.†  The late Robyn Williams predicted a rise of one hundred metres.  In the Fourth Assessment Report (4AR) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), however, Bindoff et al. (2007) project a global sea-level rise relative to 1990 of up to 79 cm by 2100.  The data suggest that even the less outrageous predictions of Prof. Bindoff et alii are unlikely to occur.
From J.R. Houston and R.G. Dean, “Sea-Level Acceleration Based on U.S. Tide Gauges and Extensions of Previous Global-Gauge Analyses” in the Journal of Coastal Research:

The current sea-level trend of about 1.7 mm/y will produce a rise of about 19 mm [sic‡] over 110 years from 1990 to 2100, but a rise to 79 cm will require an acceleration of about 0.10 mm/y² [...].

Our analyses do not indicate acceleration in sea level in U.S. tide gauge records during the 20th century.  Instead, for each time period we consider, the records show small decelerations that are consistent with a number of earlier studies of worldwide-gauge records.  The decelerations that we obtain are opposite in sign and one to two orders of magnitude less than the +0.07 to +0.28 mm/y² accelerations that are required to reach sea levels predicted for 2100 by Vermeer and Rahmsdorf (2009), Jevrejeva, Moore, and Grinsted (2010), and Grinsted, Moore, and Jevrejeva (2010).  Bindoff et al. (2007) note an increase in worldwide temperature from 1906 to 2005 of 0.74ºC.  It is essential that investigations continue to address why this worldwide-temperature increase has not produced acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years, and indeed why global sea level has possibly decelerated for at least the last 80 years.^§

UPDATE:  see “A Fairy Tale:  Jimmy and the Lump of Coal”.

*  Hansen, in “Climate Change:  On the Edge”, writes, “How far can it go?  The last time the world was three degrees warmer than today—which is what we expect later this century—sea levels were 25m higher.  So that is what we can look forward to if we don’t act soon.”

†  see, for example, earlier posts here and here.

‡  110 years of 1.7 mm a year would equal 187 mm or about 19 cm, not 19 mm.
UPDATE II:  James R. Houston kindly responded to an enquiring e-mail, writing that the “mm” is indeed an error for “cm”.
§  of course, one simple explanation could be that temperatures did not rise by 0.74ºC.

Climate & Non-Falsifiable Hypotheses

Prof. David Flint asks, “Why aren’t we being told?” at Quadrant Online:

The Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science, Alabama’s State Climatologist and the Director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, Professor John R Christy, has served both as a Lead Author and Contributing Author of IPCC assessments.  He told Congress […] that it has become popular to try to  attribute certain “extreme events” to human causation.  […]

In his testimony, Professor Christy assesses a number of recent “extreme events” and the explanations that have been offered as to their cause.  […]

Professor Christy finds there has been a relative lull in Queensland flooding events after 1900, with only four reaching the moderate category in the past 110 years.  But fourteen such events were recorded in the 60 years before 1900.  He says the recent floods have been exceeded six times in the last 170 years.  Two of them recorded almost double the level of flooding last year.  And what exactly was the role of the emergency releases from the Wyvenhoe Dam in the recent Brisbane floods is yet to be determined.

Professor Christy also considers the floods in England, Russia and Pakistan and snowfall in the US.  His conclusion is that the history charts indicate that severe flooding and other extreme events occur from “natural unenforced variability.”  The climate system, he says, has always had within itself the capability of causing devastating events.  And these will certainly continue—with or without human influence.

What should we do?

He says nothing about a carbon dioxide tax, or a carbon price or bank induced carbon trading, instead we should plan for the infrastructure projects to be able to withstand the worst that we already know has occurred.

We must understand the obvious—that the worst events should be expected within such a dynamic system.  That is what anyone with common sense realises.  […]

Just as an exercise he pulls out some US statistics which would make you think the weather in the relevant states is in fact getting less extreme and colder.  But, he says, he is not trying to prove either.  His point is that extreme events are poor tools to use for detecting climate change.

Indeed it is by using extreme events to bolster a claim about any type of climate change, the proponents risk setting up a classic inverted “non-falsifiable hypothesis.”

Thus we were told by the IPCC that milder winter temperatures would increase heavy snowstorms.  But after the winters of 2009-10 and 2010-11, we are told the opposite by IPCC advocates.

He says the non-falsifiable hypothesis works this way.  “Whatever happens is consistent with my hypothesis.”  In other words there is no event which would falsify the hypothesis.

Such assertions, he says, cannot be considered science or in any way informative since the hypothesis’ fundamental prediction is “anything may happen.”  […]

Given that we are told that “the science” points only one way and everyone else is a “ratbag denier”, surely the Australian people are entitled to know of testimony by an expert which flies in the face of the establishment position.  The fact that it coincides with the common sense you find in the rank and file is not sufficient reason to censor it.

What Has Happened to Scientific Method?

Available at Quadrant Online is “Science without Method”, by John Nicol:

Global warming, and its euphemistic sibling “climate change”, remain much in the news.  Specialist research groups around the world continue to produce an unending sequence of papers aimed at demonstrating a litany of problems which might arise should global warming resume.  The authors’ prime expertise is often found to be not in atmospheric physics or aeronomy, as one might have anticipated.  However, the topic of climate change itself provides for abundant research funding, from which they feed, more easily than other areas of research of greater interest and practical use.  Most of these papers are, of course, based upon the output from speculative and largely experimental, atmospheric models representing exercises in virtual reality, rather than observed, real-world, measurements and phenomena.  Which leads to the question “What scientific methodology is in operation here?”
Though much has been written concerning the scientific method, and the ill-defined question as to what constitutes a correct scientific approach to a complex problem, comparatively little comment has been made about the strange mix of empirical and virtual reality reasoning that characterises contemporary climate change research.  It is obvious that the many different disciplines described as being scientific, rather than social, economic, or of the arts, may apply somewhat different criteria to determine what fundamental processes should define the “scientific method” as applied for each discipline.  Dismayingly, for many years now there has been a growing tendency for many formerly “pure” scientific disciplines to embody characteristics of many others, and in some cases that includes the adoption of research attitudes and methods that are more appropriately applied in the arts and social sciences.  “Post-modernism”, if you like, has proved to be a contagious disease in academia generally.
Classical scientific method generally follows the simple protocol of first defining an hypothesis concerning the behaviour or cause of some phenomenon in nature, either physical, biological or chemical.  In most well defined areas of research, previous theory and experiment may provide such a wide and complex corpus of knowledge that a new hypothesis is not easily nor singly defined, and may even be left unstated.
This is most commonly the case when a number of diverse disciplines, all important for attaining an understanding of a particular problem, are providing results which lead to contradicting conclusions.  A contemporary example of this is discussions of the greenhouse effect, which is one of the most controversial topics ever to be considered within the scientific community.  Conventional thinking on the greenhouse effect is encapsulated in the IPCC’s statement that “We believe that most of the increase in global temperatures during the second half of the twentieth century, were very likely due to the increases in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide”.
Clearly this statement would be better worded were it to have been framed as a hypothesis rather than a belief, and treating the statement that way allows it to be rigorously tested (“beliefs”, which are unable to be tested, fall outside of the spectrum of science).  In the real scientific world, for such an hypothesis to survive rigorous scrutiny, and thereby to perhaps grow in strength from a hypothesis to a theory, requires that it be examined and re-examined from every possible angle over periods of decades and longer.
In conventional research, the next step—following the formulation of the hypothesis in whatever form it may take—is to select what measurements or analyses need to be done in order to test the hypothesis and thus to advance understanding of the topic.  Most often, theoretical reasoning as to why an hypothesis might be correct or incorrect is followed by the development of experiments in laboratories, or the making of careful observations in nature, which can be organised and classified, and from which measurements can be made and conclusions drawn.  [...]
Out of [a] cut and paste “history” of physics, comes the strongest criticism of the mainstream climate science research as it is carried on today.  The understanding of the climate may appear simple compared to quantum theory, since the computer models that lie at the heart of the IPCC’s warming alarmism don’t need to go beyond Newtonian Mechanics.  [...]  Yet in contemporary research on matters to do with climate change, and despite enormous expenditure, not one serious attempt has been made to check the veracity of the numerous assumptions involved in greenhouse theory by actual experimentation.
The one modern, definitive experiment, the search for the signature of the green house effect has failed totally.  [...]
In addition, the data representing the earth’s effective temperature over the past 150 years, show that a global human contribution to this temperature can not be distinguished or isolated at a measurable level above that induced by clearly observed and understood, natural effects, such as the partially cyclical, redistribution of surface energy in the El Niño.  [...]
So how do our IPCC scientists deal with this?  Do they revise the theory to suit the experimental result, for example by reducing the climate sensitivity assumed in their GCMs?  Do they carry out different experiments (i.e., collect new and different datasets) which might give more or better information?  Do they go back to basics in preparing a new model altogether, or considering statistical models more carefully?  Do they look at possible solar influences instead of carbon dioxide?  Do they allow the likelihood that papers by persons like Svensmark, Spencer, Lindzen, Soon, Shaviv, Scafetta and McLean (to name just a few of the well-credentialed scientists who are currently searching for alternatives to the moribund IPCC global warming hypothesis) might be providing new insights into the causes of contemporary climate change?

Unfortunately, the meretricious Ross Garnaut’s Garnaut Climate Change Review—in order, surely, to reach its premeditated, predetermined conclusion—relies on governmentally-approved, “settled science”, a fetish for peer-reviewed papers (but, of course, from only one sub-set of officially approved papers), and the fallacious argumentum ad vercundiam:

The Review took as its starting point:

... on the balance of probabilities and not as a matter of belief, the majority opinion of the Australian and international scientific communities that human activities resulted in substantial global warming from the mid-20th century (Garnaut 2008).

Also underpinning the Review was the knowledge from the majority science, that continued growth in greenhouse gas concentrations caused by human-induced emissions would generate high risks of dangerous climate change.  [...]

The Review drew extensively on the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published in 2007.  The IPCC Assessment Reports are a consolidation of all the peer-reviewed science on climate change, its impacts, and mitigation.[*]  They represent the research and input of thousands of scientists and are the authoritative point of reference on climate change.

*  The same IPCC reports which derived claims that ice is disappearing from the world’s mountain tops from a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine; which based claims that the Amazonian rainforest is remarkably vulnerable on “anonymous propaganda published on the website of a small Brazilian environmental advocacy group”; which first asserted that the Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035, but then admitted that the claim was completely unfounded; etc.

Three Posts at the Hockey Shtick

Three excellent posts at The Hockey Shtick are well worth reading:

Physicist:  Carbon dioxide has negligible effect on climate

Semi-retired physicist Dr. Daniel M. Sweger has been a research scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where he was active in a variety of research areas, including cryogenic thermometry, solid state and nuclear physics, and molecular spectroscopy.

Dr. Sweger’s new paper, Earth’s Climate Engine (PDF), finds that if carbon dioxide [have] any effect on climate, it must be negligible.  Instead, he finds on the basis of data and theory that water vapour is the dominant influence on climate, and its influence is the opposite of that assumed by the IPCC climate computer models.

Greenpeace co-founder:  ‘Global warming is obviously a natural phenomenon’

Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace and author of the new book, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist, states [...] “we do not have any scientific proof that we are the cause of global warming.”  Moore also explains how the green movement has been co-opted by the political left and has come to support policies which are harmful for the environment and humanity.

How scientific is climate science?

What is arguably the most important reason to doubt global warming can be explained in plain English.  [This article is also available here.]

By Douglas J. Keenan  WSJ.com

For years, some researchers have argued that the evidence for global warming is not nearly as strong as has been officially claimed.  The details of the arguments are often technical.  As a result, policy makers and other people outside the debate have relied on the pronouncements of a group of climate scientists.  I think that is unnecessary.  I believe that what is arguably the most important reason to doubt global warming can be explained in terms that most people can understand.

Facts on Climate Change & Energy

Available at Quadrant Online is “Climate facts Labor overlooked”, by Bob Carter, Alan Moran & David Evans:

An internal strategy paper has been provided to Labor MPs for use in the promotion of the Government’s proposed new carbon dioxide tax.
We offer critiques of the two most substantive parts of that paper, namely “Carbon Price” and “Climate Impact on Australia”.  [...]
The claims in the strategy paper that we have to stabilize carbon dioxide emissions immediately or dangerous warming will occur, with manifold dramatic environmental consequences, are based on faulty computer models that are unchanged in basic character from those that have proved to be inaccurate since 1988.  [...]
In the real world, over the last ten years, and despite a 5% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide:

Global temperature has declined slightly (Liljegren, 2011)
Ocean heat content has declined slightly (Knox & Douglass, 2011); and
Global sea-level rise has remained stable, with no net acceleration (Houston & Dean, 2011)

A PDF [2.9 MB] of the document, “Labor’s Tax Stategy”, is available hence, or JPEGs of the individual pages (minus the title page) can be viewed here.

UPDATE:  See “Combet: 10 big errors”, by Bob Carter, David Evans, Stewart Franks & Bill Kininmonth; and see also “Combet: unbalanced advice”, by the same authors, at Quadrant Online:

In a speech at the National Press Club on April 13th, Climate Minister Combet revealed again that he is receiving unbalanced scientific advice, and that his understanding of the problem of hypothetical dangerous global warming is inadequate.  His predecessor, Senator Penny Wong, exemplified the same weaknesses and so does the government.  [...]

It is time that the Australian government shook itself free from the baleful influence of the IPCC by, first, commissioning a review by fully independent scientists as to the relative risks of natural and hypothetical human-caused climate change; and, second, by adopting a cost-effective national climate policy of preparation and adaptation.

UPDATE II:  See “Wrong advice, wrong policy”, by Bob Carter, David Evans, Stewart Franks, Bill Kininmonth & Des Moore, at Quadrant Online:

Politically committed to introducing a new carbon dioxide tax, the government campaign to condition public acceptance of it has moved into overdrive over the last few months.  Steps taken since the election include the establishment of a parliamentary Multi-Party Climate Change Committee, a Climate Commission chaired by Professor Tim Flannery and an address at the National Press Club by Climate Minister Combet.

These and other conduits of government influence are transmitting messages based on the same unaudited, partial IPCC advice that has dominated global warming politics worldwide for the last 10 years.

Yet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an unelected, unaccountable (to Australian citizens) United Nations body made up of government officials, and its reports on climate change are authored by persons selected by the IPCC and supported by their respective governments.  [...]
Despite the ready public availability of our reports, and of similar analyses by other independent scientists that also demonstrate there is no justification for continued alarm about global warming, neither the government nor its scientific advisors have offered answers to the criticisms presented.  Meanwhile, the MPCC continues on its stately way, its members making major public policy decisions awhile that are based upon patently flawed and inadequate scientific advice.

More Inconvenient Propagandist Nonsense

Some people—overly credulous when accepting fictions from the IPCC or Al Gore, but overly sceptical when criticising Alfred’s review of his SAH class—have cast doubts on Alfred’s account because he refers to the teacher claiming that the seas would rise by 20 feet.  See for instance, Bill’s comment:  he scoffs, “You go to school in Tasmania and they’re talking to you about measurements in feet?”  Yes, Bill, that’s because the teacher—from laziness, or incompetence, or both—was uncritically relying on a discredited, American source.
At the time of Alfred’s review the teacher had not permitted students to keep hand-outs, but she has since relented.  One hand-out was a photocopy of this page, which she also displayed in a PowerPoint presentation; it comes from a PDF supplied by ClimateCrisis.net, “AIT in the Classroom:  A series of lessons designed for science classrooms as a companion to the documentary An Inconvenient Truth”, p. 30: