Who'd've Discredited It?

'Case against climate change discredited by study' shrieked the Independent yesterday. That must be one hell of a study. Except that it isn't:

A difference in the way British and American ships measured the temperature of the ocean during the 1940s may explain why the world appeared to undergo a period of sudden cooling immediately after the Second World War.

Scientists believe they can now explain an anomaly in the global temperature record for the twentieth century, which has been used by climate change sceptics to undermine the link between rising temperatures and increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Not only does the study (published this week in Nature) not claim to discredit what the Independent's headline claims it discredits, but it doesn't even discredit what the scientists behind the study claim it discredits. Moreover, what the scientists claim their work does discredit was, according to prominent Environmentalists, discredited years ago. And finally, what everybody seems to be trying to discredit isn't even something that sceptics seem to be crediting in the first place.

Yes, sceptics are concerned about the post-war temperature slump, but not because of the sudden steep drop around 1945; it is the downward trend in temperatures between about 1945 and 1975 that they suggest needs explaining (which is actually longer than the upward trend between 1975 and 1998, just so you know), given that greenhouse gas emissions were rising throughout that period.

And as the graph used by the Independent to bolster its case (supplied by CRU, apparently) demonstrates, the Nature study does absolutely nothing to address that concern:



In fact, the most striking thing about the graph is that, once the sampling errors identified by the study have been taken into account, the period of warming in the latter half of the twentieth century was shorter than previously thought, and that the '45-'75 temperature slump is more pronounced.

According to Phil Jones, a co-author of the paper, the study

lends support to the idea that a period of global cooling occurred later during the mid-twentieth century as a result of sulphate aerosols being released during the 1950s with the rise of industrial output. These sulphates tended to cut sunlight, counteracting global warming caused by rising carbon dioxide.

"This finding supports the sulphates argument, because it was bit hard to explain how they could cause the period of cooling from 1945, when industrial production was still relatively low," Professor Jones said.

That might be so. But the aerosols issue is supposed to have been done and dusted long ago. One of the central criticisms aimed at the infamous Great Global Warming Swindle, for example, is precisely that it failed to entertain the idea that the post-1940 decline in global temperatures was the result of increases in sulphurous emissions that masked the forcing effect of rising atmospheric CO2. George Monbiot described the omission as 'straightforward scientific dishonesty'. After all, he said, that 'temperatures declined after the Second World War as a result of sulphate pollution from heavy industry, causing global dimming...is well-known to all climate scientists.' And as we have reported before, this was also one of the main points raised by the Royal Society's Bob Ward and 36 scientific experts in their open letter to Swindle producer Martin Durkin.

And yet, as we've reported elsewhere, other experts in the field just don't agree. UC San Diego atmospheric physicist Veerabhadran Ramanathan, for example, told us that the empirical evidence for the sulphate masking of warming is 'pretty flimsy'. We do not doubt that the Nature study is an important contribution to the field. (Although it's interesting that Steve McIntyre seems to have produced a similar analysis more than a year ago.) What we do doubt is that the headlines, soundbites, and wild interpretations from newspapers and scientists alike bear much relevance to what is a dry, technical, scientific study, which, while increasing our ability to understand and predict climate trends, says little in itself about the truth or otherwise of global warming.

That said, the BBC's Richard Black has demonstrated uncharacteristic reserve in his coverage of the paper, which includes the following quote from CRU's Mike Hulme:

Corrections for this measurement switch have not yet been applied to produce a new graph of 20th Century temperatures - that work is ongoing at the UK Met Office - but as the land temperature record shows a flattening of the upwards trend from the 1940s to the 1970s, clearly something did change around the 1940s to ameliorate the warming.

"It perhaps suggests that the role of sulphate aerosols, that cooling effect, was less powerful than we thought," said Mike Hulme from the University of East Anglia (UEA), who was not involved in the study.

George Monbiot and the Royal Society are just plain wrong - the science is plainly not 'settled'. And so is Steve Connor, the author of the Independent article. As he wrote last year in response to the Swindle:

The programme failed to point out that scientists had now explained the period of "global cooling" between 1940 and 1970. It was caused by industrial emissions of sulphate pollutants, which tend to reflect sunlight. Subsequent clean-air laws have cleared up some of this pollution, revealing the true scale of global warming - a point that the film failed to mention.

'Scientists' have 'explained' nothing of the sort. As this case shows, the science is not settled. Indeed science is never settled. It is constantly re-evaluating what it understands about absolutely everything. And that's especially crucial to bear in mind when the science in question has been bestowed with the kind of political significance that climate science has. To claim otherwise is to do a disservice to both science and politics. It reduces science to a flimsy fig leaf used simply to hide the embarrassing inadequacies of the latest political fad; and it reduces politics to an aimless exercise in number-crunching.

Lucas and the Majority of Some Scientists

In a conversation about EU policy on restricting CO2 emissions from aircraft, on BBC Radio 4's Today program, this morning, Caroline Lucas, Green MEP for the Southeast region said

Well, when you hear scientists say that we have about eight years left in order to really tackle climate change, I don't think what the public actually want is cautiousness, what they want is real leadership, and that is what the EU is promising to give, and yet that's what we're failing to do here.

More often than not, what green politicians mean by "what scientists say" is actually "what green politicians say". So this morning, we rang Caroline Lucas's office to ask her which scientists are telling her that we've only got eight years left. We've never heard them say it, and we listen out for them saying it. They said they'd get back to us...

Meanwhile... this is not Lucas's first comment of this nature. Back in July, we picked up on her comments on climate change scepticism being the equivalent of holocaust denial.

What's prompted me is real concern that a recent opinion poll showed that half the population still don't think that there's scientific certainty about climate change; they still think there's a real debate to be had there. And it worries me enormously because if we don't have a population that really understands that 99.999% of international scientists do believe that climate change is happening and do believe that it's human caused, if people don't understand that then they're not going to put the pressure on the politicians that is so desperately needed and so urgently needed because we’re being told we've literally got between five and ten years in which to put in place a proper policy framework to address climate change. And unless people are really convinced that it's a problem they're not going to act to change it.

Dr Lucas's comments this morning seem equally confused. On the one hand, she appears to be claiming that people are terrified into demanding action because they've heard scientists say we've only got eight years left to save the world. On the other, she's demanding that air travel is restricted. But if people really are as concerned about what Lucas says scientists say as Lucas says they are, then there would be no need to respond to their fear with new EU legislation, people simply wouldn't fly. But, as she points out, aviation is a growing industry.

So if Lucas isn't talking on behalf of the frightened public, (the ones who manage to find their way to the airport in spite of their fear) is Lucas speaking for science at least?

It turns out not, because in answer to our question, Lucas's press office emailed us back with a bunch of links, saying,

The quote in question - that which contains the estimated 'deadline' of 8 years for the world's government to act seriously on climate change - has been used generically for some time now, and is taken from a consensus view among a number of scientists.

"The consensus of a number of scientists". Would that be the same as "the majority of some of the population"? We read the links to find out. They consisted of:

* Guardian Environment Correspondent David Adam's interpretation of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report - "Governments are running out of time to address climate change and to avoid the worst effects of rising temperatures, an influential UN panel warned yesterday". (The influencial UN panel don't actually seem to say that).

* A BBC Online article claiming that "The world may have little more than a decade to avert catastrophic climate change, politicians and scientists say". But what they mean is a scientist, not scientists, because, all that "The taskforce's scientific adviser is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" says is "I think in the last few years the increase in emissions does cause concern. It gives you the feeling we might end up in the middle of that temperature range [1.5 and 5.5C], and if we do that wouldn't make very good news." Note that Pachauri isn't a climate scientist, but has doctorates in industrial engineering and economics. Also note that Pachauri isn't exactly what you'd call "balanced" about the politics of climate change, previously asking "What is the difference between Lomborg's view of humanity and Hitler's?... If you were to accept Lomborgs way of thinking, then maybe what Hitler did was the right thing".

* An article from the Socialist Workers Website. Enough said.

* A link to the IPCC's website.

We pointed out to Lucas's press officer that these links leave a bit to be desired. We've been reading the IPCC website for years, and hadn't noticed a statement about 8 year windows, and the articles she linked to were subject to the interpretations and prejudices of their authors. And asking David Adam for an objective view of climate science is like asking Bin Laden for a balanced view of the USA. Who were these scientists? Where do they say "we've only got 8 years left"?

The press office again pointed us to the IPCC, emphasising that Pachauri is the "highly respected chair of the IPCC and is quoted as a spokesperson on climate change across all levels of the media". (But does he speak 'for scientists'?) They then referred us to the IPCC's Working Group III Fourth Assessment Report, Summary for Policymakers which, according to the press offcier "focused on economic changes that need to be made, pointing out that emissions must start declining by the year 2015 to prevent the world's temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrialized temperatures".

So we were now faced with an economic argument, rather than a scientific one. Even so, we read it. There is indeed a reference to 2015. But only one. It is the "peaking year" for CO2 emissions in one of several categories of scenarios, where CO2 is stabilised at various concentrations or less, thereby stabilising average global temperature at an amount above the "preindustrial average". But all that is said in the report about the six categories of 177 scenarios assessed by the 33 authors is

In order to stabilize the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere, emissions would need to peak and decline thereafter. The lower the stabilization level, the more quickly this peak and decline would need to occur. Mitigation efforts over the next two to three decades will have a large impact on opportunities to achieve lower stabilization levels (see Table SPM.5, and Figure SPM. 8)

There is no mention of impending catastrophe. There is no mention of deadlines. There is no mention of this being a consensus amongst scientists that we have to meet the 2015 deadline, nor any deadline over another. In spite of the fact that neither Lucas nor her press officer can produce anything which supports her claim that "scientists say we have about eight years left in order to really tackle climate change", they continue to make it. The press officer finally told us that,

Both the UN and the IPCC subscribe to the figure of eight years, and many in the scientific community have also supported the need to drastically reduce emissions by 2015. Caroline has primarily relied upon both the UN conclusions and the IPCC report, and as a busy MEP without the scientific resources to physically perform independent large-scale research on climate change, working across a vast range of issues in her South East constituency and in the European Parliament on a daily basis, Caroline trusts that the IPCC and the UN provide accurate and well-researched reports.

Lucas's press office don't seem to want to continue the conversation, so we have had to look for statements by IPCC scientists for ourselves. You don't need your own pocket-sized IPCC to evaluate claims made about climate science... We found two pertinent quotes on this very site.

Prof Mike Hulme of the UK's Tyndall Centre tells us that,

The language of catastrophe is not the language of science. It will not be visible in next year's global assessment from the world authority of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)[Note: AR4]. To state that climate change will be "catastrophic" hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from empirical or theoretical science. Is any amount of climate change catastrophic? Catastrophic for whom, for where, and by when? What index is being used to measure the catastrophe? The language of fear and terror operates as an ever-weakening vehicle for effective communication or inducement for behavioural change.

And of the projections in WGII, which Lucas's press office seem to think amount to a "scientific consensus", Kevin Trenberth tells us that,

In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers “what if” projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios. There are a number of assumptions that go into these emissions scenarios. They are intended to cover a range of possible self consistent “story lines” that then provide decision makers with information about which paths might be more desirable. But they do not consider many things like the recovery of the ozone layer, for instance, or observed trends in forcing agents. There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess.Even if there were, the projections are based on model results that provide differences of the future climate relative to that today. None of the models used by IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate.

There is no escaping the fact that Caroline Lucas has made up what "the scientists" are telling us. However busy she is, given that 'climate science' is the basis of her entire political agenda, there is no excuse for not knowing what she's talking about. Lucas neither accurately nor honestly reflects scientific opinion, yet attempts to use it to win moral arguments. Worse still is the fact that whilst she claims to be representing people who are frightened by scientific reports and reflecting the views of scientists, she is in fact doing the frightening by misrepresenting the scientists.

Just how deep does Lucas's love of science really run? That depends on whether the science in question promises to make life better, or legitimises her alarmism. In the case of science making our lives better, ban it. "Nanotechnology will revolutionise our lives - it should be regulated" she writes in a 2003 Guardian article called "We must not be blinded by science". Oh, sweet, sweet irony.

Battle of the Planet

The Institute of Ideas have put the video of The Science and Politics of Climate Change debate from this years Battle of Ideas festival online.



We've given Mike Hulme of the Tyndall Centre a bit of stick in our time, but he's very good in this - "The real issues are about why we disagree about what to do about climate change, and science cannot provide us with the script from which we all read from" - as are Chris Rapley of the British Antarctic Survey, Hans Von Storch, and Joe Kaplinsky. It's a very cool and positive debate, and they discuss their differences in good humour, avoiding the angry exchanges and accusations that too often accompany the meetings of different opinions on climate change politics and science. It's well worth watching in its entirety.

Battling On

The Institute of Ideas are putting online a series of essays called 'Battles in Print' to complement their yearly Battle of Ideas festival of debates. One of the essays was written by us. You can read it here. And here's a preview of Climate science: truth you can wear on your hands,

’We are armed only with peer reviewed science’, declared the banner at the head of the Climate Camp march along the proposed route of the third runway at Heathrow in August. And in one sense they were - literally. The protesters were wearing gloves made from photocopied research papers and waving them at the police and television cameras as though nothing more needed to be said. For anyone still labouring under the misapprehension that behind the gloves was a careful argument for why the runway should not be built, Climate Camp spokesperson Timothy Lever was on hand to put them straight. ‘It’s not us saying you need to stop flying’, he said, ‘it’s the science that is telling us that we all need to fly less.’

One of the 70+ debates likely to be interesting to anyone concerned with the rise of environmentalism is The science and politics of climate change, which features:

Professor Mike Hulme, professor of climate change, University of East Anglia; founding director, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research
Joe Kaplinsky, science writer
Professor Chris Rapley CBE, director, Science Museum; outgoing director, British Antarctic Survey
Hans von Storch, director, Institute for Coastal Research, GKSS Research Centre; professor at Meteorological Institute, University of Hamburg

Check out the full program for a host of other debates which will also be interesting, whichever side of the warming debate you find yourself on.

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We have exceptionally busy over the last two months, which means we've been unable to post anything new for a while. But please keep an eye on the site, as we're hoping things will return to normal shortly.

Word of the Day: Extravagate

Sir Harry Kroto laments the fall in applications to science degrees at UK universities. "Without first-class science graduates, how will we understand and deal with the crises caused by global warming?"

The facts that a) we use in one year an amount of fossil fuel that took a million years to accumulate, b) we may be on the verge of a climate change catastrophe of global proportions and c) powerful technologies may soon fall into the hands of disturbed individuals with minds riven with those twin cancers of nationalism and religious fanaticism, seem to concern the scientific community a lot more than they do politicians or the media. As my Sussex colleague, the Nobel laureate Sir John Cornforth, has written: "If you are a scientist, you realise before long that if the world is in anyone's hands, it is in yours."

Kroto extravagates. That's BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh's word. And he didn't make it up either.*

Ghosh is writing about concerns expressed by Professor Mike Hulme of the UK's Tyndall Centre that scientists and the media are prone to exaggerate and dramatise matters of global warming.

He says extravagated claims simply generate a feeling of helplessness in the public.

Good word. Extravagant, exaggerated, vague. And it is refreshing to hear a high-profile climate scientist complain about it.

"There has been over-claiming or exaggeration, or at the very least casual use of language by scientists, some of whom are quite prominent," Professor Hulme told BBC News [...] "My argument is about the dangers of science over-claiming its knowledge about the future and in particular presenting tentative predictions about climate change using words of 'disaster', 'apocalypse' and 'catastrophe'," he said.

But Hulme's reason for disapproving of scientific extravagation is disappointing. It's not that society needs the best information available to make difficult decisions about its future, or that scientists should not be confusing scientific knowledge with science fiction, or that we need to be able to distinguish science from politics. He is worried that extravagation is politically counter-productive:

"What we are concerned about, and some of our research has shown, is if those dangers are presented in too catastrophic a way, on too large a scale, then people just distance themselves and are less likely to take actions to reduce their own carbon emissions. That's our concern."

One is left wondering whether Hulme wouldn't object to making stuff up, just as long as it got people to act on the message.

Meanwhile, the Tyndall research he refers to reads like another attempt (albeit more sophisticated and politically-correct than likening people to rats) to explain in psychological terms why individuals aren't acting on climate change.

Kroto wonders why students are being put off science. He blames lots of things - the government, universities, religion - but perhaps the culprit is closer to home and perhaps part of the problem is that leading scientists are bent on creating the sort of bleak and biblical statements that Kroto himself comes out with. Science once promised a better future. Now it hopes for a less terrible one. It creates extravagated visions of a Hell on Earth we need to be saved from. That doesn't turn scientists into heroes. It just turns humans into sinners.

*Extravagate v.i. 1. Stray from a right course, a text, into error, etc. 2. Wander at large; roam at will. 3. Exceed what is proper or reasonable.