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

you'll get answers

[aliscool]

"Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong?"

This is /. buddy, what you'll get is a bunch of reasons why its right or wrong from people that didn't read the article.

Re:you'll get answers

[FhnuZoag]

A bunch of errors leap up from a random scan.

Hansen's testimony to congress: Hansen presented three graphs, giving three possible scenarios of future events. The 0.3 (in fact, 0.45 C) claim comes from Scenario A.

http://www.cato.org/testimony/images/pm072998a.gif

But the fact that it is called Scenario A is because there are also scenario B and C. A is a 'business as usual' scenario, involving exponential growth in emissions. What happened since 1988 was nothing like that. If anything, industrialisation declined in the West, creating a situation closer to B and C - moderate controls to emissions.

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/edu/gwdebate/00fig1.gif

It's not like this is secret information. NASA itself has discussed this.

The objective was to illustrate the broad range of possibilities in the ignorance of how forcings would actually develop. The extreme scenarios (A with fast growth and no volcanos, and C with terminated growth of greenhouse gases) were meant to bracket plausible rates of change.

By quoting this assertion, the author of this article has shown that he is either deliberately deceptive, or has not looked at all of the evidence. Don't listen to the regurgitated rants of this non-expert.

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:you'll get answers

[Ruff_ilb]

I was just ready to mod, but your comment caught my eye.

There are several things to this:

A) Reducing emissions doesn't mean an overall reduction in green house gasses - it just means a reduction in the rate of increase. So we're still increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses, just at a slower rate.

B) The environment doesn't turn around that fast; it probably takes longer than 30 or so years for our efforts to have a noticible effect.

C) Our measurement systems might not be precise enough to account for any differences, even if they did happen. AFAIK, a lot of the evidence comes from really old-school ice-core samples from a long time ago. Now, it's hard to prove a correlation (much less causation) with only 30 years of data, however precise. Climatologists are much more worried about (and, thus, I think, do more research about) trends spanning at least a century.

Re:you'll get answers

[Bastian]

No offense, but I think you're doing little more than spewing vitriol.

Er, another way to phrase that is, "we made a bunch of sh** up." I'm shaking my head right now. That's EXACTLY what says! "Ignorance of how forcings would actually developed."

Would you prefer he really did make a bunch of shit up? Because that's what he would have been doing if he didn't make a bunch of scenarios. In the absence of a crystal ball, all you can do is figure out what the range of possible future events is, and then plug that into a model in order to bracket what might happen. Those graphs were never meant to be final predictions. The way things like this are used are that, if anybody has any information that can help predict the likelihood of certain events (say, a massive volcanic eruption) over a range of time, you can start narrowing the probability cone.

I certainly don't understand the assertion that this set of scenarios was wrong because reality turned out to be closer to scenarios B and C rather than A, especially when history turned out to follow the "future events" models used to produce those scenarios. To me, the fact that what has happened pretty closely matches the results he predicted for the hypothetical that turned out to be true means he was pretty damn right about these predictions.

What he did is pretty standard practise in everything from monitoring potential asteroid strikes to forming business plans and family budgets. If you don't like it, I'd suggest you come up with an alternative. The only other two I know are making firm assumptions about the future and proceeding with an attitude that these arbitrary predictions are prophecy; or failing to think about consequences at all and stumbling blindly into the future without a care in the world. Which would you prefer?

Hell, I can give you "extreme" scenerios that would "bracket" plausible rates of change without knowing a damn thing!
Moot. How closely would they bracket them?

Note that the article in question actually misquotes and misinterprets NUMBERS and SCIENCE
Quote edited to improve accuracy.

versus the typical, "W-w-w-well, what if THE SKY STARTED FALLING!!! WE NEED TO TAKE ACTION JUST IN CASE!!!!"
I like hyperbolie as much as the next person, but pointing out that there are people who are standing out there screaming the end is near is not useful for arguing that people who are making much more moderate predictions and suggesting much more reasonable risk management policies are wrong. I don't think the US economy is likely to collapse without warning anytime soon, but that doesn't keep me from maintaining a nest egg just in case I lose my job.

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.

Re:Great Site For Debunking

[Macthorpe]

I'm hoping that was a joke, because I thought it was fairly common knowledge (amongst those interested in this kind of thing, anyway) that JunkScience is maintained by someone in the employ of ExxonMobil and Philip Morris, a Mr. Steven Milloy, who also works for Fox News. Hardly a neutral point of view, or an authoritative source.

There are plenty more reputable sources to find your debunkings, most of them far preferable than "JunkScience".

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.

Re:Why doesn't anybody do the easy thing?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

When biomass dies, it either rots or is burnt.

Yes, which then goes to feed more biomass- the idea is to match our logrithmic curve of carbon production with a logrithmic curve of biomass creation.

As much as I'd like the answer to Global Warming to be as simple as planting a few trees, it really isn't. Tree planting has its place, but isn't nearly as effective as reduction in man-made CO2 levels.

Actually, if you could just replace the area lost in the Brazilian rain forest in the last 3 years, you'd do more than 20 Kyoto Accords put together. Trees are *extremely* efficient in this, and some trees that we've found that grow here in America can survive up to 20 centuries if taken care of.

Re:My Two Cents

[Jeremy Erwin]

Community Climate System Model. Enjoy.

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

[HappySqurriel]

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

I would actually disagree with this because (for the most part) we have a gigantic media circus that works by making sure everyone is too afraid to not watch the news (or read the newspaper) that will make you "famous" if you play into their fears; this strategy has existed for decades with the world being on the "brink of destruction" whether the threat was from Nuclear Weapons or Global Warming. Rational voices are usually silenced in favour of more radical messages to increase ratings and readership.

Now, there have been several pieces of evidence that bring into question the conclusion that "Humans are causing global warming" that have not been brought to public attention because they're in a field that requires much stronger proof than climate science does. The most damaging piece of evidence I have seen is that the cycles of heating and cooling are directly related to sunspot activity (the greater the sunspot activity the warmer the earth is) even though the irradiant energy arriving from the sun to the earth doesn't change; currently the sun is at a historic high for sunspot activity (historic from studying it for ~400 years). Even though we see this relationship (which could explain global warming) it can not be published until we understand why it would influence the temperature of the earth; is the electromagnetic energy from the sunspots doing something to the atmosphere that allows the irradiant energy to reach the earth more effectively?

Have you ever heard of the connection between sunspots and global temperature? Was this because the science isn't strong enough or because it is a more moderate explanation of global warming?

So many lies.

[FhnuZoag]

Let's carry on debunking this debunkation, then.

First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison.

Yes, but where did the UN actually say that CO2 ended the ice ages? How is the author reading their minds? Such a view would certainly be contrary to must of mainstream science, of course, so where's the evidence that the author isn't setting up a strawman?

The Co2 graphs show the reliability of ice core CO2 data as a proxy for finding out historical temperature levels, and also the potential for positive feedback effects if temperatures rise. They give an idea as to the sensitivity of the situation to perturbations.

They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).

So how does the author know, then?

They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".

This is pure and simply a lie. It's a lie, because all of these critics have ever show is the tendency for hockey sticks in PV01. But PV01 is a certain statistical consequence that is not the same as the actual reconstruction. Studies searching for the hockey stick tendency in the full reconstruction have come up with nothing, because there are other components in the full reconstruction that cancel out the first term.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/11/0 5/nwarm05.gif

This graph is comparing apples to oranges. The top graph is a global temperature anomaly graph. The bottom is the temperature of a relatively small continent, dominated by a warm ocean current. One is a average data over the world, and the other is strongly affected by local effects - such as the medieval warm period. The top graph is what global warming is talking about. The bottom graph is not relevant to the debate at all.

You don't need computer models to "find" lambda. Its value is given by a century-old law, derived experimentally by a Slovenian professor and proved by his Austrian student (who later committed suicide when his scientific compatriots refused to believe in atoms). The Stefan-Boltzmann law, not mentioned once in the UN's 2001 report, is as central to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein's later equation is to astrophysics.

From wikipedia:

The Stefan-Boltzmann law, also known as Stefan's law, states that the total energy radiated per unit surface area of a black body in unit time (known variously as the black-body irradiance, energy flux density, radiant flux, or the emissive power), j*, is directly proportional to the fourth power of the black body's thermodynamic temperature T (also called absolute temperature):

Stefan Boltzmann applies to a perfect blackbody. The Earth is not a perfect blackbody. In fact, not alot of things are. Doesn't it seem wrong to say that energy exposure always raises temperature to the same degree regardless of the object?

And so on and so forth.

Re:So many lies.

[The_Wilschon]

Stefan Boltzmann applies to a perfect blackbody. The Earth is not a perfect blackbody. In fact, not alot of things are. Doesn't it seem wrong to say that energy exposure always raises temperature to the same degree regardless of the object?

IAAPhysicist, and I can tell you that the Stefan-Boltzmann law applies quite well to an awful lot of things, even though they are not perfect blackbodies. For a perfect blackbody, the Stefan-Boltzmann law is exactly right. For most other things, it is a quite good approximation. The earth is far closer to a perfect blackbody than you might expect.

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.

Re:So many lies.

[icensnow]

The earth is far closer to a perfect blackbody than you might expect.

IAAClimatologist, and the earth-atmosphere-clouds system is not a surface and follows the Stefan-Boltzmann blackbody law quite poorly. That's why we have a greenhouse effect. Usually, we parameterize outgoing longwave flux in a way that the sensitivity to temperature is about half of what S-B predicts. A reference to which I cannot provide a link without (c) violations: Bintanja, R., 1996: The parameterization of shortwave and longwave radiative fluxes for use in zonally averaged climate models. J. Climate, 9, 439-454

Re:So many lies.

[tbo]

I am also a physicist. Lambda is dT/dP, evaluated at some temperature approximately equal to the earth's mean surface temperature. Taking the derivative and inverting, you get dT/dP = 1 / (4 sigma epsilon T^3). For epsilon = 1 and T=280 K, this gives lambda ~= 0.2. Wikipedia claims the average albedo of earth is about 30%, which very roughly implies the emissivity epsilon = 0.7 (since a blackbody is 0% albedo, and perfect reflectivity is 100% albedo). I'm ignoring frequency dependence and other effects, but this is a first order calculation. With that value for epsilon, I get lambda = 0.29 for the aforementioned parameters. So far, things look good for Monckton.

Now, let's try to refine our estimate of epsilon to account for frequency dependence. The 30% albedo given by Wikipedia is based on reflection of sunlight, and is thus probably heavily weighted to the visible spectrum, which is where the sun's radiated power peaks. Earth's thermal radiation, on the other hand, peaks in the infrared, since earth is much cooler. Due to the natural greenhouse effect, the 30% albedo may not be accurate at infrared frequencies. Thus, we want to calculate epsilon', the emissivity of the earth at infrared frequencies. The natural greenhouse effect provides an excellent mechanism for us to do this. Let s be the solar constant, 1366 W / m^2. Multiplying by (1-0.3) to account for the albedo of earth, and dividing by 4 to account for the ratio of the earth's cross-section to its surface area, we obtain an average absorbed power flux of 240 W / m^2. We then solve the Stefan Boltzmann Law to determine the value of epsilon' necessary to achieve equilibrium, substituting Earth's mean surface temperature for T: 240 W / m^2 = sigma epsilon' T^4 ==> epsilon' ~= 0.7. Thus, it looks like our first estimate was good.

To recap, we use the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, the (measured) albedo of earth, the approximate mean temperature of earth, and the solar constant to estimate the effective emissivity of earth for infrared. We find it agrees with Earth's mean albedo. Using this value of the emissivity and the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, we estimate lambda as 0.29 K / (W / m^2), in good agreement with Monckton, and poor agreement with the other estimates he mentioned.

Re:My Two Cents

[Coryoth]

Since this is science, that information *should* be publicly available somewhere.

There are vast amounts of data available from the NOAA, from tree rings, to coral, to pollen, to ice cores, complete with search engines and mapping systems to help you locate the dataset you want. All of it is freely available for download and analysis. As for modelling - a quick search pulled up this page which provides R code for the MBH graph. Feel free to grab that, check their assumptions, and redo whatever you wish.

More debunkation.

[NeutronCowboy]

You started well, so I'll just stick to what I know.

* Monckton mentions that there is a direct correlation between number of sunspots and grain prices falling, attributing it to the fact that more sunspots mean that the sun is hotter. Actually, that's wrong. Sunspots are cooler regions on the surface of the sun (3800 K vs 5400K on the rest of the surface), which means that the sun is actually radiating *less* energy in the visible and infrared spectrum. So his entire point completely falls apart with this basic item of astrophysics.

* Monckton categorically states that the temperature of the oceans has decreased, without using sources. From what I know though, temperatures have increased. Can't find a bullet proof link for it (was looking for NOAA timelines, but no luck), but you can use coral-reef die-offs as a good proxy. There was also a lot of hubbub when people tried to tie the increase in surface temperature of the Gulf of Mexico to the increased strength and number of Hurricanes that hit the US coast.

These are the two things that I categorically to be false. As for the rest of his arguments, they lack the data support I would expect from a debunking report. For example, why exactly did the ICCP remove the old temperature graph that showed in extreme fashion the warm and cold periods of the middle-ages? Besides, the temperature differences are still there - they are just not as blatant as before. There are also his 10 points which he thinks needs to be proven for Global Climate Change to be true, and what he thinks of them. Point 1 is a nice straw man, as someone pointed out already. Point 3 is another one, as people aren't arguing that the sun doesn't influence temperatures. They are arguing that the sun is less important than greenhouse gases. For the other points, I can give him the benefit of the doubt, even though all have significant problems with their wordings and his assessment of them.

In short, he might not be a shill - but there are enough problems in his "debunkation" to make me doubt the sincerity of his approach and his intentions. This might still be ok, if there weren't some massive errors in some of his arguments, which completely invalidate the points he is trying to make. As a result, I'm filing this under "waiting without bated breath to be properly ripped apart by people who know more".

Quite frankly, one reason I'm confident that we are in the beginning of Global Climate Change is that the only counter-arguments I see are poorly thought out, rife with personal attacks, lack data and make lots of statements without supporting data. If a group arguing for a position sounds like a bunch of idiots, I tend to take the opposite view.