Global Warming Debunked?

limbicsystem writes, "I'm a scientist. I like Al Gore. I donate to the Sierra club, I bicycle everywhere and I eat granola. And I just read a very convincing article in the UK Telegraph that makes me think that the 'scientific consensus' on global warming is more than a little shaky. Now IANACS (I am not a climate scientist). And the Telegraph is notoriously reactionary. Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong? Because it seems to be solid, well researched, and somewhat damning of a host of authorities (the UN, the editors of Nature, the Canadian Government) who seem to have picked a side in the global warming debate without looking at the evidence." The author of the Telegraph piece is Christopher Monckton, a retired journalist and former policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher.

Comments

probably but

[east coast]

From the blurb: Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong?

I'm sure we got a couple thousand people here who will tell you why it's wrong... the question is; are they right?

I'm afraid that you're probably going to get a lot of shoddy answers to a legitimate question here.

I am not a Climate Scientist either...

[DragonWriter]

...but I don't look to newspapers for serious scientific research, I look to peer-reviewed scientific journals. But, that aside, the accusations in the article all seem to be things (relative role of solar forcing, the "medieval warm period", etc.) that have been discussed and dealt-with repeatedly in the literature, both as to their accuracy and their impact, there doesn't seem to be anything, on the first impression, new here.

Not too surprising

[Alcimedes]

Granted I haven't had a chance to read the entire article yet, but it sounds like it's in line with what the climate scientists at my University have been saying for a while. Two things actually.

The first is that funding shapes science whether you want it to or not. If the general consensus is that global warming is happening, you're much more likely to get funded if you decide to do research on "why global warming is going on" or "what are the major contributors to global warming" etc. However, if you were to submit a proposal along the lines of "what if any effect has global warming had on climate change", good luck.

Therefore there's going to be a lot of science out there saying "Yes, global warming is happening and is the reason for climate change!", since that's what pays the bills, gets you published, and gets you invited to all sorts of posh international conventions on global warming. No one wants to invite the guy/gal that says "yes it's happening but it's not the cause, or certainly not the only cause behind global climate change".

Just my two cents. Keep and open mind, even when reading "science". At the end of the day scientists are human beings too, they have to pay the bills, report to a boss, have a reputation among their peers. Science is rarely about pure facts. The facts usually need to be teased out of the agenda, aggrandizing and ego of those doing the work.

Re:Not too surprising

[binarybum]

but surely there are a lot of corporations and oil companies and the like that would certainly like to see research stating, "nothing to see here, move along." I imagine there is some decent funding to be found in the private sector for this kind of research.

The issue isn't. . .

[smooth wombat]

whether global warming is happening. We know it is. We're recording it as it happens.

What is the issue is is this a natural process, a man-made process or a combination?

While we have evidence that warming and cooling cycles have happened in the past, this is the first time (that we know of) that the cycle has been recorded by man. If nothing else, it behooves us to study this phenomenon as critically as possible and determine if we are influencing things by our activities.

So no, global warming is not debunked. It is real and it is happening. The real question is why.

Your Premise

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

...And I just read a very convincing article in the UK Telegraph that makes me think that the 'scientific consensus' on global warming is more than a little shaky. Now IANACS (I am not a climate scientist). And the Telegraph is notoriously reactionary. Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong?

The article referenced goes through several studies and papers and points out poor methodologies and statistical analysis that is likely fraudulent. From this you can conclude, these studies are possibly flawed. So where does that leave you? Can you logically conclude from this that global warming is not occurring or even not occurring faster than any time in the past? Of course not. Discrediting a study does not prove the opposite of that study is true. It simply provides you a reason to place more weight on other, more credible, studies.

From my reading I have little doubt that global warming is occurring. Just look in peer reviewed journals and other credible sources. It may not be as dramatic as some would like, and the dramatic, but ill-concieved, doomsday scenarios painted by the popular media are entertainment, not fact. The truth is, there are very real indications of climactic problems, which will probably be gradual, but may be practically irreversible by the time they are apparent to skeptics.

Just be careful of your sources and pay attention. Both industrial concerns and people working for government grant dollars have incentive to obtain particular results. Look for peer reviewed results from experiments and observations that have been repeated by numerous scientific studies. Be cautious of interpretations of this data by the popular media, who are more interested in selling ads than presenting the truth.

So...yea...that's why it's wrong.

[Wah]

"When men have ceased to believe in Christianity, it is not that they will believe in nothing. They will believe
in anything." - G.K. Chesterton.

There ya go. From his preface. People believe in climate change because they have lost their faith.

If that's not his argument...why is this one of the first things he says?

Also, he cites the concept that all climate scientists are saying there's a problem so they'll keep their jobs...before he gets to any actual numbers.

Then he says this...

The snows of Kilimanjaro have been receding. So have the glaciers in Glacier National Park,
Washington State, and many other (though not all) mountain glaciers in temperate or equatorial
latitudes. However, very nearly all of the world's 160,000+ glaciers (this surprisingly large figure is
from the UN's 2001 report) have never been visited by humankind or measured in detail. They are on
the high, central plateaux Antarctica and Greenland. The great majority are not melting. They are
growing.

This is not true.

Then he says.

I conclude that the rise in temperatures since 1900 has been far from uniform globally. Overall,
temperatures may have risen at only three-quarters of the rate assumed by the UN in its 2001 report. As
will be seen later, even a small discrepancy between the UN's assumed 0.6C and the true 20th-century
increase in temperature has a significant effect on the calibration of climate-projecting models, and
hence on the magnitude of their projections of future climate.

Which is a classic mistake of mistaking weather for climate..and local for global.

Then he says it's not greenhouse gases...but the sun that is getting hotter.

I conclude that the Sun is very likely to have contributed rather more to the past century's warm period than the UN has assumed, and that assumptions about the contribution of greenhouse gases to warming should be revised downward accordingly.

So, uh, it's not even that it's "global warming" that has been debunked...it's that the U.N. is wrong about what is causing it.

(yes, the headline is wrong).

Then he goes into the calculations...none of which is data he personally gathered (because if he did, that would be he is a climate scientist...which would mean he couldn't be trusted...as he would then be being paid to study the climate).

So...yea..that's why it's wrong.

Sure, and smoking's good for you, too.

[PopeRatzo]

If there wasn't such a huge incentive for industry to fund research that "debunks" the theory of global warming, I might be a little more willing to listen. But the fact is, you've got researchers on one side, and believe me, there's absolutely no upside to telling Americans that dumping tons of pollutants into the atmosphere is going to have a bad effect, so researchers on one side who are going where the data takes them and researchers on the other who are paid handsomely to find out that there's absolutely no problem with spewing ever-growing quantities of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere.

Who you gonna believe?

Re:Sure, and smoking's good for you, too.

[dlt074]

"there's absolutely no upside to telling Americans that dumping tons of pollutants into the atmosphere is going to have a bad effect"

sure there is! it's called government grants. funding every year.

don't be so naive.

Re:you'll get answers

['nother poster]

And the consequences of over reacting in the other direction could be just as scary. Instaed of cooking like Venus we freeze like Mars. Maybe we are hastening our doom no matter what we do. The science on both sides looks questionable. Big gaps in data and lots of assumptions based on their emotional baggage. I'll just keep waiting until someone comes out with a model that is accurate for a few years and they can explain why it is.

Re:So many lies.

[electroniceric]

As a someone with some graduate education in oceanography, I have a pretty direct interest in this, and I think you've hit on something very important. When Mann's paper came out, I was still skeptical about the anthropogenic nature of warming for several reasons. One was that I felt the uncertainties on many estimations were still rather large. For example, the lack of understanding on whether the ocean is presently a net source or net sink of carbon was a pretty big hole in the carbon budget. I don't think that one has been thoroughly resolved, but there's been progress.

Mann's original "hockey stick" paper is another such example. The criticism and counter-criticism of Mann's paper is a great example of good science in action. Van Storch and the other Canadian guys (McKitrick and McIntyre, one a geophysicist with an oil exploration company, and the other an economist) raised reasonable criticism about the type of noise fed in, and how the medieval warm period was treated. Others (e.g. http://web.mit.edu/~phuybers/www/Hockey/Huybers_Co mment.pdf), including Mann wrote counter-criticism, Von Storch et all wrote counter-coutner-criticisms, etc., and notwithstanding the cute quote in this Monckton guy's PDF about "CENSORED_DATA", Mann's finding still looks to be an important one. Now models are models and not measured events, but the use of those findings was a pretty big step in modeling future climate change based on paleological proxy data. There are only a few credible scientists among this climate-change denier lot, and they themselves are pretty old guard (e.g. Richard Lindzen, William Gray).

For myself, the process around Mann's result did a lot to convince me that in fact the was certainty that humans are an important driver of the observed warming.