What's all this talk about "Global Warming?"

[Sam_Stone]

For contrary views, here are the web pages of some prominent scientists who take a contrarian view towards global warming:

Dr. Roy Spencer, former Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

Richard S. Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorological Studies, MIT. Lead author of chapter 7 of the 2001 IPCC report

Dr. John Christy, Professor of Atmospheric Science, IPCC 2007 contributor and IPCC 2001 lead author
This guy is no lightweight, as you can see from his resume. On his web site, he helpfully provides links to PDFs of some of his peer-reviewed papers, such as:

A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions, International Journal of Climatology, 2007.

The abstract is particularly interesting:

ABSTRACT: We examine tropospheric temperature trends of 67 runs from 22 ‘Climate of the 20th Century’ model simulations and try to reconcile them with the best available updated observations (in the tropics during the satellite era).

Model results and observed temperature trends are in disagreement in most of the tropical troposphere, being separated by more than twice the uncertainty of the model mean. In layers near 5 km, the modelled trend is 100 to 300% higher than observed, and, above 8 km, modelled and observed trends have opposite signs. These conclusions contrast strongly with those of recent publications based on essentially the same data.

Hey Triskademus, there’s some testability and falsification for you.

I could list more, but you could just go look up the web sites of the numerous Ph.D’s who signed their names to this letter in 2007:

Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations Dec. 13, 2007

His Excellency Ban Ki-Moon Secretary-General, United Nations New York, N.Y.

Dear Mr. Secretary-General,

Re: UN climate conference taking the World in entirely the wrong direction

It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables. We therefore need to equip nations to become resilient to the full range of these natural phenomena by promoting economic growth and wealth generation.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued increasingly alarming conclusions about the climatic influences of human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2), a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis. While we understand the evidence that has led them to view CO2 emissions as harmful, the IPCC’s conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity. In particular, it is not established that it is possible to significantly alter global climate through cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions. On top of which, because attempts to cut emissions will slow development, the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it.

The IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers are the most widely read IPCC reports amongst politicians and non-scientists and are the basis for most climate change policy formulation. Yet these Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line by government representatives. The great majority of IPCC contributors and reviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts.

Contrary to the impression left by the IPCC Summary reports: - Recent observations of phenomena such as glacial retreats, sea-level rise and the migration of temperature-sensitive species are not evidence for abnormal climate change, for none of these changes has been shown to lie outside the bounds of known natural variability. - The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0. 2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century falls within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years. - Leading scientists, including some senior IPCC representatives, acknowledge that today’s computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998. That the current temperature plateau follows a late 20th-century period of warming is consistent with the continuation today of natural multi-decadal or millennial climate cycling.

In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is “settled,” significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming. But because IPCC working groups were generally instructed (see http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/docs/ wg1_timetable_2006-08-14.pdf) to consider work published only through May, 2005, these important findings are not included in their reports; i.e., the IPCC assessment reports are already materially outdated.

The UN climate conference in Bali has been planned to take the world along a path of severe CO2 restrictions, ignoring the lessons apparent from the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, the chaotic nature of the European CO2 trading market, and the ineffectiveness of other costly initiatives to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Balanced cost/benefit analyses provide no support for the introduction of global measures to cap and reduce energy consumption for the purpose of restricting CO2 emissions. Furthermore, it is irrational to apply the “precautionary principle” because many scientists recognize that both climatic coolings and warmings are realistic possibilities over the medium-term future.

The current UN focus on “fighting climate change,” as illustrated in the Nov. 27 UN Development Programme’s Human Development Report, is distracting governments from adapting to the threat of inevitable natural climate changes, whatever forms they may take. National and international planning for such changes is needed, with a focus on helping our most vulnerable citizens adapt to conditions that lie ahead. Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity’s real and pressing problems.

If you want to have an interesting afternoon of reading, google the scientists on the list, go to their home pages, and look up their publications. Many of them reprint their publications there in PDF format, which gets you around the gating problem of the various journals they were published in, where papers are not available to non-subscribers. These are generally peer-reviewed papers. There are hundreds of them, calling into question many of the foundational aspects of the current global warming consensus. If you want to dig deeper, you can look up the web sites of the various papers’ co-authors, and find even more.

What you’ll find is that the consensus view is not necessarily what it seems. The IPCC reports are actually pretty good, if you skip the politically-biased ‘summary for policy makers’ and go read the actual scientific conclusions. You’ll find a hell of a lot more uncertainty and claims of a much more modest nature than you’ll find in the general media or reproduced by global warming hysterics. I posted some of those conclusions in another thread, which appears to have killed it.

Basically, the IPCC’s ‘best estimates’ for the various scenarios they looked at range from 1.8° C to 4° C This translates into sea level rises of perhaps 180mm to 590mm, some of which would happen even if man wasn’t emitting any CO2 at all. But the uncertainty around these estimates is very high - and generally left out of the summary report. The actual scientific chapters explain the source of all the unknowns. And there are a lot of them. For example, in the section on feedback from cloud cover, they admit that the mechanisms are pretty much a mystery, while acknowledging that they are an important factor.

The problem is that these effects are modest enough, and uncertain enough, that it’s hard to get political traction for them. So as you move farther away from the real science and more politicians and fuzzy-science types (political science, economics, sociology, etc) add their bits to it, it sounds more and more extreme - to the point where people like Lindzen and Christy, who were the actual lead authors of their respective chapters of the report, have had to distance themselves from the conclusions drawn from them.

The IPCC report excluded a lot of peer-reviewed literature that cast even more uncertainty on the conclusions, but the pro-AGW side does not care about that. But when a university in Australia releases a paper on the eve of the Copenhagen summit, saying that global temperatures could rise by 7° C causing catastrophe, that’s instantly accepted as ‘scientific’ and becomes part of the consensus.

This whole issue is just a little more complicated than “scientists and the truth, vs deniers and big oil.”