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Response to Malcolm
Keeping’s letter in Ndaba, February 2010.
Dear Malcolm,
Thank you most sincerely for your response last month to my
April 2009 Breaking News column in Ndaba.
I wish more of our readers would express their
views and exchange ideas. I fear though that
objectivity may be on thin ice here (pun
unintended) because we both, by our own
admission, engage for ethical reasons in what is
clearly an emotionally-charged conflict of
ideals. That is indeed dangerous ground for
science, but I know from previous discussions
with you that you will rise above the “observer
effects” and look at the facts in a sober way.
We clearly have some common purpose at the outset: We are
both greatly concerned about progressive harm to
ecology and species; and we agree that global
warming and dynamic climate change are real.
Let’s take it from there. What I say is that
there is nothing historically unusual about
current global temperatures. Global warming and
global cooling are periodic. They are perfectly
natural peaks and valleys in cycles driven
primarily by the Sun. There are no data to
support the hypothesis that greenhouse gases,
whether human-related or not, drive climate
fluctuations. This is a story of how an
unsubstantiated theory of climate, a model,
became political ideology.
To clarify, AGW stands for Anthropogenic Global Warming
(meaning, increase in the mean temperature of
Earth as a result primarily of human activities),
CO2 is carbon dioxide, and IPCC is the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In view of the constraints of this forum, my initial
response won’t attempt to address in detail the
main points in your letter, although I must
admit to being completely baffled by your
statement that my argument “fails
totally on one salient point: only a tiny
minority – 1 in 1000 – of scientific
publications on global warming dispute the
influence of human activities in affecting
climate change.” Even if Dr
Schultze’s figures were correct, and
notwithstanding that I dispute them, how would
that invalidate my general argument? Science is
not about consensus, and I mentioned the fact
that those against the motion appeared for once
to be in the majority only as a sociological
curiosity. Certainly, history shows that
opposition to ruling paradigms consists
invariably of extremely small minorities with
limited chance for expression, and the reasons
for this I should think are fairly obvious. That
we in this case find numerically more
substantial opposition than previously is borne
out by even the most cursory scan of the broader
literature (journals are notoriously
standard-model-biased). In my view, the best
single reference on the quality of opposition to
AGW is The Deniers—the world-renowned
scientists who stood up against global warming
hysteria, political persecution, and fraud
by Lawrence Solomon (2008).
Be that as it may, global temperature patterns; the demise
of polar bears; the effect of greenhouse gases;
the proportion of publications expressing doubt
about carbon-driven AGW; that “the end
justifies the means”; and the personal
culpability of Al Gore in misleading the public
and governments, could all be exhaustively
debated with copious references to the
literature on both sides. We simply don’t have
the space to do that here. In your letter you
invoke the authority of respected scientists, so
I prefer in my response to let other prominent
role-players in the AGW saga express it in their
own words. What I suggest is that we let the
facts fall where they will, irrespective of any
model or ideology. That way we can avoid a
preconceived outcome.
It has been revealed in principle by the “climategate” and
“glaciergate” scandals that IPCC officials have
by their own reluctantly-given admission
fraudulently manipulated data, or at the very
least been cavalier with the facts. In my view,
before we even start to make predictions for the
planet, we need good data to base them on. A
crucial misrepresentation on plots of climate
data is the selective positioning of the trend
line and base line for plots (your illustration
falls into this trap). If the curve commences
from the previous low point for temperature (the
Little Ice Age), for example, then the trend is
obviously upwards. If, by comparison, the plot
commences from say the peak of the Medieval Warm
Period, when temperatures were considerably
warmer than they are now, then the trend is
equally obviously downwards. A recent
paper by two eminent climatologists details the
inaccuracies and massaging of IPCC’s global
temperature measurements, like those supporting
the graph in your letter and conclusions drawn
from it. I urge you to look at it:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/surface_temp.pdf
There are many complex issues that might sidetrack us, so
let’s tackle the fundamental principle of the
Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) movement
first. The rest can follow in due time. The
question I seek to answer here is “What do
these particular experts in the field of
climatology feel about the hypothesis that human
production of atmospheric carbon or greenhouse
gases in general measurably leads to increases
in global temperatures and influences weather
patterns to the extent that we are experiencing
or are about to experience catastrophic
overheating?”I believe this question
correctly addresses the philosophy behind the
IPCC-driven mission, and the essence of the
Kyoto protocol and Copenhagen road map.
Dr Roy Spencer, senior scientist for climate studies at
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre: “Models
are only as good as the assumptions that go into
them, and they have hundreds of assumptions. All
it takes is one assumption to be wrong for the
forecast to be way off.”
Arno Arrak, author of the book What Warming? Satellite
view of global climate change; he was a
nuclear chemist on NASA’s Apollo programme:
“In 2007 we got some serious cooling while
climate models using carbon dioxide theory
insisted on relentless warming at the same time.
If a theory predicts warming and we get cooling
that theory as a scientific theory has failed
and must be abandoned.”
Professor John Christy, lead author, IPCC; awarded NASA’s
medal for exceptional scientific achievement in
1991; received a special award from the American
Meteorological Society for fundamentally
advancing our ability to measure climate:
“I’ve often heard it said that there is
consensus of thousands of scientists on the
global warming issue, and that humans are
causing a catastrophic change to the climate
system. Well, I am one scientist—and there are
many—who thinks that this is simply not true.”
Lord Lawson of Blaby, former British Chancellor of the
Exchequer and Secretary for Energy: “We had a
very thorough enquiry and took evidence from a
whole lot of people expert in this area. What
surprised me was how weak and uncertain the
science was. In fact there are more and more
thoughtful people…some of them openly saying,
‘hang on, wait a minute, this simply doesn’t add
up.’”
Canadian environmentalist Patrick Moore, co-founder of
Greenpeace: “I don’t even like to call it the
environmental movement any more because it
really is a political activist movement, and
they have become hugely influential at a global
level… These days if you are sceptical of the
litany around climate change, you’re suddenly as
if you’re like a holocaust denier.”
Nigel Calder, author and former editor of New Scientist:
“They (the IPCC) came out with the first big
report which predicted climatic disaster as a
result of global warming. I remember…the total
disregard of all climate science up till that
time, including, incidentally, the role of the
Sun, which had been discussed at a conference of
the Royal Society just a few months previously.”
Professor Patrick Michaels, Department of Environmental
Science, University of Virginia: “Anyone who
says that CO2 is responsible for most of the
warming of the 20th century hasn’t
looked at the basic numbers.”
Dr Tim Ball, professor of climatology at the University of
Winnipeg: “The analogy I use is that my car
is not running very well, so I ignore the
engine, which is the Sun, and I’m going to
ignore the transmission, which is water vapour,
and I’m going to be looking at one nut on the
right rear wheel, which is the human-produced
CO2. The science is that bad. When people say
you don’t believe in global warming, I say no, I
believe in global warming, but I don’t believe
that human CO2 is causing that warming. In the
post-war years, when industry and the economies
of the world really got going and human
production of CO2 just soared, the global
temperature was going down. In other words, the
facts don’t fit the theory.”
Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, Director, International Arctic
Research Centre, Alaska: “CO2 began to rise
exponentially in about 1940, but temperature
began to decrease (in) 1940 and continued to
about 1975. So this is the opposite relation,
when CO2 is increasing rapidly, but yet
temperature is decreasing— then we cannot say
the CO2 and the temperature go together.”
Professor Nir Shaviv, Institute of Physics, Hebrew
University of Jerusalem: “A few years ago, if
you would ask me, I would tell you it’s CO2.
Why? Because like everyone else in the public, I
listened to what the media had to say. There
were periods in the Earth’s history when we had
… ten times as much CO2 as we have today, and if
CO2 has an effect on climate, then you should
see it in the temperature reconstruction.
There’s no direct evidence that links 20th
century global warming to anthropogenic
greenhouse gases.”
Professor Tim Ball, University of Winnipeg: “If you take
CO2 as a percentage of all the gases in the
atmosphere…it’s about 0.054%. It’s an incredibly
small portion. And then you take the percentage
that humans are supposedly adding, which is the
focus of all the concern, and it gets even
smaller. The atmosphere is made up of a
multitude of gases, a small percentage of them
we call greenhouse gases, and of that very small
percentage, 95% is water vapour, the most
important greenhouse gas.”
Professor Frederick Singer, First Director, US National
Weather Satellite Service. “All the models,
every one of them, calculate that the warming
should be faster as you go up from the surface
into the atmosphere. In fact, the maximum
warming over the equator should take place at an
altitude of about 10km.”
Professor John Christy, lead author, IPCC: “What we found
consistently was that in a great part of the
planet, the bulk of the atmosphere was not
warming as much as the surface…that’s a real
head-scratcher for us…the theory says that if
the surface warms, the upper atmosphere should
warm rapidly. The rise in temperature of that
part of the atmosphere is really not very
dramatic and really does not match the theory
that climate models are expressing.”
Professor Richard Lindzen, IPCC; Massachusetts Institute of
Technology: “If it’s greenhouse warming, you
get more warming in the middle of the
troposphere, the first 10 to 12 km of the
Earth’s atmosphere, than you do at the
surface…having to do with how the greenhouse
works. That data gives you a handle on the fact
that what we’re seeing is warming that is
probably not due to greenhouse gases.”
Professor Frederick Singer: “The observations do not show
an increase with altitude. So in a sense you can
say the hypothesis of man-made global warming is
falsified by the evidence.”
Dr Ian Clark, Arctic paleoclimatologist, Department of Earth
Sciences, University of Ottawa: “If we look
at climate in the geological timeframe, we would
never suspect CO2 as a major climate driver. We
can’t say CO2 will drive climate. It never did
in the past. When we look at climate on long
scales, we’re looking for geological material
that actually records climate. If we take an ice
sample for example, we use isotopes to
reconstruct temperature, but the atmosphere
that’s imprisoned in the ice we liberate and
then we look at the CO2 content. … So, here we
are looking at the ice core record from Vostok …
we see temperature going up from early time to
later time at a very key interval when we came
out of a-glaciation … and then we see CO2 coming
up. CO2 lags behind that increase, it’s got
about an 800 year lag, so temperature is
leading CO2 by about 800 years. CO2 cannot
be causing temperature changes. It’s a
product of temperature, it is following
temperature changes.”
Professor Frederick Singer: “So obviously CO2 is not the
cause of that warming, in fact we can say that
the warming produced the CO2.”
Professor Tim Ball: “The ice core record goes to the very
heart of the problem we have here. They said
that if CO2 increases in the atmosphere…then the
temperature will go up. But the ice core record
shows exactly the opposite. So the fundamental
assumption of the whole theory of climate change
due to humans is shown to be wrong.”
Dr Ian Clark, University of Ottawa: “Solar activity over
the last … several hundred years correlates very
nicely on a decadal basis with sea ice and
arctic temperatures.”
Professor Phillip Stott, University of London: “As every
school child knows from their geography
textbooks, the oceans and the atmosphere
exchange carbon dioxide. When the oceans warm
up, they release CO2 into the atmosphere, and
when they cool down again, they take in the CO2
and they store it.”
Professor Richard Lindzen, M.I.T.: “Every textbook on
meteorology is telling you the main source of
weather disturbances is the temperature
differences between tropics and the poles.
And we’re told, in a warmer world, this
difference gets less. Now that would tell
you, you will have less storminess, less
variability…”
Dr Piers Corbyn, solar physicist and long range forecaster:
“None of the major climate changes in the
last 1,000 years can be explained by CO2. The
Sun is driving climate change. CO2 is
irrelevant.”
To conclude this first exchange of thoughts, I emphasise
that the ice core records show that temperature
leads CO2, effectively ruling out
anthropogenic carbon emissions as a driver of
global temperature. In addition, measurements of
temperatures in the troposphere by both
satellite and weather balloon contradict the
notion of a runaway greenhouse effect. Despite
the elegance of the climate models, they are
rendered useless by cumulative and ongoing
measurements of actual conditions in the
terrestrial environment, and by the exposing of
unethical manipulation of those data to contrive
a fit. At the very least, the claim by Gore and
others that “the science is settled” is
blatantly misleading and totally unsubstantiated
by the facts. Does the end justify the means? I
hope this dialogue survives to provide an
answer.
Sincerely,
Hilton Ratcliffe
Email:
hilton@hiltonratcliffe.com
The quotes in this letter were taken from the documentary
The Great Global Warming Swindle, produced
by Martin Durkin (2008), and the books What
Warming? Satellite view of global climate change
by Arno Arrak (2009); A primer on CO2 and
Climate by Howard Hayden (2008); Global
Warming False Alarm by Ralph Alexander
(2009); The Deniers—the world-renowned
scientists who stood up against global warming
hysteria, political persecution, and fraud
by Lawrence Solomon (2008); Red Hot Lies
by Christopher Horner; Climate Confusion
by Roy Spencer (2008), and Air Con by Ian
Wishart (2009).
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