Thursday, May 21, 2015
RegensBurg Address
MEETING WITH THE REPRESENTATIVES OF SCIENCE
LECTURE OF THE HOLY FATHER
Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg
Tuesday, 12 September 2006
Faith, Reason and the University
Memories and Reflections
Your Eminences, Your Magnificences, Your Excellencies,
Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a moving experience for me to be back again in the university and to be able once again to give a lecture at this podium. I think back to those years when, after a pleasant period at the Freisinger Hochschule, I began teaching at the University of Bonn. That was in 1959, in the days of the old university made up of ordinary professors. The various chairs had neither assistants nor secretaries, but in recompense there was much direct contact with students and in particular among the professors themselves. We would meet before and after lessons in the rooms of the teaching staff. There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties. Once a semester there was a dies academicus, when professors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine experience of universitas - something that you too, Magnificent Rector, just mentioned - the experience, in other words, of the fact that despite our specializations which at times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason - this reality became a lived experience. The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the "whole" of the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.
I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.[1] It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor.[2] The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur'an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between - as they were called - three "Laws" or "rules of life": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur'an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point - itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole - which, in the context of the issue of "faith and reason", I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.
In the seventh conversation (διάλεξις - controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to some of the experts, this is probably one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness that we find unacceptable, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”[3] The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably (σὺν λόγω) is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...".[4]
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature.[5] The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.[6] Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.[7]
At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the λόγος". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, σὺν λόγω, with logos. Logos means both reason and word - a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: "Come over to Macedonia and help us!" (cf.Acts 16:6-10) - this vision can be interpreted as a "distillation" of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.
In point of fact, this rapprochement had been going on for some time. The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush, a name which separates this God from all other divinities with their many names and simply asserts being, "I am", already presents a challenge to the notion of myth, to which Socrates' attempt to vanquish and transcend myth stands in close analogy.[8]Within the Old Testament, the process which started at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of the Exile, when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: "I am". This new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands (cf. Ps 115). Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature. Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria - the Septuagint - is more than a simple (and in that sense really less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity.[9] A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act "with logos" is contrary to God's nature.
In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazm and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which - as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated - unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul - "λογικη λατρεία", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).[10]
This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history - it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.
The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenization of Christianity - a call which has more and more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern age. Viewed more closely, three stages can be observed in the programme of dehellenization: although interconnected, they are clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and objectives.[11]
Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself. When Kant stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.
The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenization, with Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative. When I was a student, and in the early years of my teaching, this programme was highly influential in Catholic theology too. It took as its point of departure Pascal's distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In my inaugural lecture at Bonn in 1959, I tried to address the issue,[12]and I do not intend to repeat here what I said on that occasion, but I would like to describe at least briefly what was new about this second stage of dehellenization. Harnack's central idea was to return simply to the man Jesus and to his simple message, underneath the accretions of theology and indeed of hellenization: this simple message was seen as the culmination of the religious development of humanity. Jesus was said to have put an end to worship in favour of morality. In the end he was presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message. Fundamentally, Harnack's goal was to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ's divinity and the triune God. In this sense, historical-critical exegesis of the New Testament, as he saw it, restored to theology its place within the university: theology, for Harnack, is something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific. What it is able to say critically about Jesus is, so to speak, an expression of practical reason and consequently it can take its rightful place within the university. Behind this thinking lies the modern self-limitation of reason, classically expressed in Kant's "Critiques", but in the meantime further radicalized by the impact of the natural sciences. This modern concept of reason is based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology. On the one hand it presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently: this basic premise is, so to speak, the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature. On the other hand, there is nature's capacity to be exploited for our purposes, and here only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield decisive certainty. The weight between the two poles can, depending on the circumstances, shift from one side to the other. As strongly positivistic a thinker as J. Monod has declared himself a convinced Platonist/Cartesian.
This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue we have raised. First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.
I will return to this problem later. In the meantime, it must be observed that from this standpoint any attempt to maintain theology's claim to be "scientific" would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self. But we must say more: if science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by "science", so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective "conscience" becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.
Before I draw the conclusions to which all this has been leading, I must briefly refer to the third stage of dehellenization, which is now in progress. In the light of our experience with cultural pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was an initial inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures. The latter are said to have the right to return to the simple message of the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in order to inculturate it anew in their own particular milieux. This thesis is not simply false, but it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.
And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is - as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rector - the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically falsifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.
Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought - to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: "It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being - but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss".[13] The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. "Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Saving Humanity from Catastrophic Global Cooling: A Task for Geo-Engineering
There are two kinds of ice ages; they are fundamentally different and therefore require different methods of mitigation: (i) Major (Milankovich-style) glaciations occur on a 100,000-year time-scale and are controlled astronomically. (ii) “Little” ice ages were discovered in ice cores; they have been occurring on an approx. 1500-yr cycle and are likely controlled by the Sun. The current cycle’s cooling phase may be imminent and calls for urgent action.
Major glaciations – on a 100,000-year time scale
Major glaciations – on a 100,000-year time scale
I recently published an essay on how to avoid the next major ice age; there have been nearly 20 such glaciations in the past two to three million years. The coolings are rather severe: the most recent one, ending only about 12,000 years ago, covered much of North America and Europe with miles-thick continental ice sheets and led to the disappearance of barely surviving bands of Neanderthalers; they were displaced by the more adaptable Homo Sapiens.
According to the Serbian astronomer Milankovich, glaciation timing was controlled by astronomical parameters, such as oscillations with a 100,000-year period of the eccentricity of the Earth’s elliptic orbit around the Sun; oscillations with a period of 41,000 years of the Earth’s “obliquity” (inclination of the spin axis to the orbit plane, currently at around 23 degrees); and a precession of this spin axis, with a period of about 21,000 years.
While many consider the timing issue as settled, there are plenty of scientific puzzles still awaiting solutions: For example, how to explain the suddenness of de-glaciation, transiting within only centuries from a glaciation maximum into a warm Inter-glacial, like the present Holocene period.
Most expect the next glaciation to arrive rather soon; but calculations by Prof Andre Berger of the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, suggest a delay of some 40,000 years -- so there may be no great urgency. Nevertheless, it would be useful and of great scientific interest to verify the existence of a hypothesized “trigger” that might be disabled by human action -- at low cost and negligible risk.
Little ice ages (LIA) and the Dansgaard-Oeschger-Bond (D-O-B) cycles
After digesting hundreds of comments about my essay on stopping the next major ice age, I recognized the need to explain the existence also of “little” ice ages, which are likely of solar origin. Theyseem to occur quite apart from the major glaciations, have a cycle length of about 1500 years, and demand different methods of mitigation. They were discovered in Greenland ice cores by the Danish researcher Willy Dansgaard and by (Swiss scientist) Hans Oeschger, and further observed in ocean sediments by the late US geologist Gerard Bond [see Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 years, by Singer and Avery, published by Rowman&Littlefield, 2007].
We don’t know what triggers an LIA, but suspect a strong correlation with a quiet Sun and prolonged absence of sun spots. Experts in this field – Willie Soon (Harvard Observatory), Harjit Ahluwalia (University of New Mexico), Russian astronomer Habibullo Abdussamatov, and many others -- believe that the next LIA is imminent. The most recent LIA lasted from 1400 to 1830 AD – off and on. It followed the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), when wine grapes grew in northern England and Norsemen were able to farm in southern Greenland.
The impact of the LIA was rather severe. Climatology pioneer Hubert Lamb documents crop failures, starvation, and disease in Europe, together with ice fairs on the frozen Thames. During much of the American Revolution, New York Harbor was frozen over. And we recall paintings of George Washington crossing the Delaware River, impeded by ice floes.
How to overcome an LIA
To avoid the huge human misery and economic damage, one would like to counteract the cooling phase of the D-O-B cycle – but how? The next LIA may be imminent; but there is no obvious trigger for solar
influence; our understanding of solar physics is limited by the rather short history of observation of the Sun. While data on sunspots go back centuries, modern observations using spacecraft extend only for years.
An obvious scheme to counter a cooling is to make use of greenhouse (GH) warming. However, carbon dioxide is not the answer: CO2 is limited in supply and is already saturated -- hence additional CO2 is not very effective. Synthetics, like SF6, are too long-lasting and may have risky side-effects. The answer may be water, but in the form of ice crystals; the scheme is easily tested and is transitory -- reversible and incurring little risk.
Here is how I picture the operation -- starting with a small feasibility test and validation of the theory:
A KC-135 or similar aerial-refueling aircraft carries ~100 tons of water, which is to be injected as mist just above the tropopause, at the bottom of the stratosphere, near an atmospheric temperature minimum. At a surface density of water mist of 0.1 kg/m2, the area covered would be ~1km2.
Like contrails, I expect some visible cirrus, which should disappear rapidly, leaving behind invisible cirrus ice crystals that are strong absorbers/emitters of infrared (IR) radiation, covering also the atmospheric “window” region of 8 to 12 microns – thus creating a major GH effect and possibly even some detectable warming at the Earth’s surface. Any satellite-borne IR-instrument should be able to see this emitter patch and follow its spread and decay.
However, all this is based on theory and calculations, which I published in 1988 in the peer-reviewed journal Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics. Obviously, all predictions must be validated by direct observations. Once the scheme is scientifically verified, operational planning for countering the cooling can take over.
As usual, there are many scientific questions that require answers – chiefly, understanding the physical mechanism that drives the D-O-B cycles; how to explain the size, shape, and duration of the abrupt quasi-periodic warmings. Currently, there is a hot dispute about the synchronicity of the cycles between the two polar regions, revolving about the limited accuracy of ice-layer dating in Antarctic cores.
While the science is certainly interesting and important, there is no need to delay the crucial and urgent tests of geo-engineering; they involve only minor costs and little risk to the atmospheric environment.
S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project. His specialty is atmospheric and space physics. An expert in remote sensing and satellites, he served as the founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service and, more recently, as vice chair of the US National Advisory Committee on Oceans & Atmosphere. He is a Senior Fellow of the Heartland Institute and the Independent Institute. He co-authored NY Times best-seller Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 years. In 2007, he founded and has chaired the NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change), which has released several scientific reports [See NIPCCreport.org]. For recent writings see http://www.americanthinker.com/s_fred_singer/ and also Google Scholar.
While many consider the timing issue as settled, there are plenty of scientific puzzles still awaiting solutions: For example, how to explain the suddenness of de-glaciation, transiting within only centuries from a glaciation maximum into a warm Inter-glacial, like the present Holocene period.
Most expect the next glaciation to arrive rather soon; but calculations by Prof Andre Berger of the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, suggest a delay of some 40,000 years -- so there may be no great urgency. Nevertheless, it would be useful and of great scientific interest to verify the existence of a hypothesized “trigger” that might be disabled by human action -- at low cost and negligible risk.
Little ice ages (LIA) and the Dansgaard-Oeschger-Bond (D-O-B) cycles
After digesting hundreds of comments about my essay on stopping the next major ice age, I recognized the need to explain the existence also of “little” ice ages, which are likely of solar origin. They
We don’t know what triggers an LIA, but suspect a strong correlation with a quiet Sun and prolonged absence of sun spots. Experts in this field – Willie Soon (Harvard Observatory), Harjit Ahluwalia (University of New Mexico), Russian astronomer Habibullo Abdussamatov, and many others -- believe that the next LIA is imminent. The most recent LIA lasted from 1400 to 1830 AD – off and on. It followed the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), when wine grapes grew in northern England and Norsemen were able to farm in southern Greenland.
The impact of the LIA was rather severe. Climatology pioneer Hubert Lamb documents crop failures, starvation, and disease in Europe, together with ice fairs on the frozen Thames. During much of the American Revolution, New York Harbor was frozen over. And we recall paintings of George Washington crossing the Delaware River, impeded by ice floes.
How to overcome an LIA
To avoid the huge human misery and economic damage, one would like to counteract the cooling phase of the D-O-B cycle – but how? The next LIA may be imminent; but there is no obvious trigger for solar
influence; our understanding of solar physics is limited by the rather short history of observation of the Sun. While data on sunspots go back centuries, modern observations using spacecraft extend only for years.
An obvious scheme to counter a cooling is to make use of greenhouse (GH) warming. However, carbon dioxide is not the answer: CO2 is limited in supply and is already saturated -- hence additional CO2 is not very effective. Synthetics, like SF6, are too long-lasting and may have risky side-effects. The answer may be water, but in the form of ice crystals; the scheme is easily tested and is transitory -- reversible and incurring little risk.
Here is how I picture the operation -- starting with a small feasibility test and validation of the theory:
A KC-135 or similar aerial-refueling aircraft carries ~100 tons of water, which is to be injected as mist just above the tropopause, at the bottom of the stratosphere, near an atmospheric temperature minimum. At a surface density of water mist of 0.1 kg/m2, the area covered would be ~1km2.
Like contrails, I expect some visible cirrus, which should disappear rapidly, leaving behind invisible cirrus ice crystals that are strong absorbers/emitters of infrared (IR) radiation, covering also the atmospheric “window” region of 8 to 12 microns – thus creating a major GH effect and possibly even some detectable warming at the Earth’s surface. Any satellite-borne IR-instrument should be able to see this emitter patch and follow its spread and decay.
However, all this is based on theory and calculations, which I published in 1988 in the peer-reviewed journal Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics. Obviously, all predictions must be validated by direct observations. Once the scheme is scientifically verified, operational planning for countering the cooling can take over.
As usual, there are many scientific questions that require answers – chiefly, understanding the physical mechanism that drives the D-O-B cycles; how to explain the size, shape, and duration of the abrupt quasi-periodic warmings. Currently, there is a hot dispute about the synchronicity of the cycles between the two polar regions, revolving about the limited accuracy of ice-layer dating in Antarctic cores.
While the science is certainly interesting and important, there is no need to delay the crucial and urgent tests of geo-engineering; they involve only minor costs and little risk to the atmospheric environment.
S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project. His specialty is atmospheric and space physics. An expert in remote sensing and satellites, he served as the founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service and, more recently, as vice chair of the US National Advisory Committee on Oceans & Atmosphere. He is a Senior Fellow of the Heartland Institute and the Independent Institute. He co-authored NY Times best-seller Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 years. In 2007, he founded and has chaired the NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change), which has released several scientific reports [See NIPCCreport.org]. For recent writings see http://www.americanthinker.com/s_fred_singer/ and also Google Scholar.
There are two kinds of ice ages; they are fundamentally different and therefore require different methods of mitigation: (i) Major (Milankovich-style) glaciations occur on a 100,000-year time-scale and are controlled astronomically. (ii) “Little” ice ages were discovered in ice cores; they have been occurring on an approx. 1500-yr cycle and are likely controlled by the Sun. The current cycle’s cooling phase may be imminent and calls for urgent action.
Major glaciations – on a 100,000-year time scale
I recently published an essay on how to avoid the next major ice age; there have been nearly 20 such glaciations in the past two to three million years. The coolings are rather severe: the most recent one, ending only about 12,000 years ago, covered much of North America and Europe with miles-thick continental ice sheets and led to the disappearance of barely surviving bands of Neanderthalers; they were displaced by the more adaptable Homo Sapiens.
According to the Serbian astronomer Milankovich, glaciation timing was controlled by astronomical parameters, such as oscillations with a 100,000-year period of the eccentricity of the Earth’s elliptic orbit around the Sun; oscillations with a period of 41,000 years of the Earth’s “obliquity” (inclination of the spin axis to the orbit plane, currently at around 23 degrees); and a precession of this spin axis, with a period of about 21,000 years.
While many consider the timing issue as settled, there are plenty of scientific puzzles still awaiting solutions: For example, how to explain the suddenness of de-glaciation, transiting within only centuries from a glaciation maximum into a warm Inter-glacial, like the present Holocene period.
Most expect the next glaciation to arrive rather soon; but calculations by Prof Andre Berger of the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, suggest a delay of some 40,000 years -- so there may be no great urgency. Nevertheless, it would be useful and of great scientific interest to verify the existence of a hypothesized “trigger” that might be disabled by human action -- at low cost and negligible risk.
Little ice ages (LIA) and the Dansgaard-Oeschger-Bond (D-O-B) cycles
After digesting hundreds of comments about my essay on stopping the next major ice age, I recognized the need to explain the existence also of “little” ice ages, which are likely of solar origin. Theyseem to occur quite apart from the major glaciations, have a cycle length of about 1500 years, and demand different methods of mitigation. They were discovered in Greenland ice cores by the Danish researcher Willy Dansgaard and by (Swiss scientist) Hans Oeschger, and further observed in ocean sediments by the late US geologist Gerard Bond [see Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 years, by Singer and Avery, published by Rowman&Littlefield, 2007].
We don’t know what triggers an LIA, but suspect a strong correlation with a quiet Sun and prolonged absence of sun spots. Experts in this field – Willie Soon (Harvard Observatory), Harjit Ahluwalia (University of New Mexico), Russian astronomer Habibullo Abdussamatov, and many others -- believe that the next LIA is imminent. The most recent LIA lasted from 1400 to 1830 AD – off and on. It followed the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), when wine grapes grew in northern England and Norsemen were able to farm in southern Greenland.
The impact of the LIA was rather severe. Climatology pioneer Hubert Lamb documents crop failures, starvation, and disease in Europe, together with ice fairs on the frozen Thames. During much of the American Revolution, New York Harbor was frozen over. And we recall paintings of George Washington crossing the Delaware River, impeded by ice floes.
How to overcome an LIA
To avoid the huge human misery and economic damage, one would like to counteract the cooling phase of the D-O-B cycle – but how? The next LIA may be imminent; but there is no obvious trigger for solar
influence; our understanding of solar physics is limited by the rather short history of observation of the Sun. While data on sunspots go back centuries, modern observations using spacecraft extend only for years.
An obvious scheme to counter a cooling is to make use of greenhouse (GH) warming. However, carbon dioxide is not the answer: CO2 is limited in supply and is already saturated -- hence additional CO2 is not very effective. Synthetics, like SF6, are too long-lasting and may have risky side-effects. The answer may be water, but in the form of ice crystals; the scheme is easily tested and is transitory -- reversible and incurring little risk.
Here is how I picture the operation -- starting with a small feasibility test and validation of the theory:
A KC-135 or similar aerial-refueling aircraft carries ~100 tons of water, which is to be injected as mist just above the tropopause, at the bottom of the stratosphere, near an atmospheric temperature minimum. At a surface density of water mist of 0.1 kg/m2, the area covered would be ~1km2.
Like contrails, I expect some visible cirrus, which should disappear rapidly, leaving behind invisible cirrus ice crystals that are strong absorbers/emitters of infrared (IR) radiation, covering also the atmospheric “window” region of 8 to 12 microns – thus creating a major GH effect and possibly even some detectable warming at the Earth’s surface. Any satellite-borne IR-instrument should be able to see this emitter patch and follow its spread and decay.
However, all this is based on theory and calculations, which I published in 1988 in the peer-reviewed journal Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics. Obviously, all predictions must be validated by direct observations. Once the scheme is scientifically verified, operational planning for countering the cooling can take over.
As usual, there are many scientific questions that require answers – chiefly, understanding the physical mechanism that drives the D-O-B cycles; how to explain the size, shape, and duration of the abrupt quasi-periodic warmings. Currently, there is a hot dispute about the synchronicity of the cycles between the two polar regions, revolving about the limited accuracy of ice-layer dating in Antarctic cores.
While the science is certainly interesting and important, there is no need to delay the crucial and urgent tests of geo-engineering; they involve only minor costs and little risk to the atmospheric environment.
S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project. His specialty is atmospheric and space physics. An expert in remote sensing and satellites, he served as the founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service and, more recently, as vice chair of the US National Advisory Committee on Oceans & Atmosphere. He is a Senior Fellow of the Heartland Institute and the Independent Institute. He co-authored NY Times best-seller Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 years. In 2007, he founded and has chaired the NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change), which has released several scientific reports [See NIPCCreport.org]. For recent writings see http://www.americanthinker.com/s_fred_singer/ and also Google Scholar.
Major glaciations – on a 100,000-year time scale
I recently published an essay on how to avoid the next major ice age; there have been nearly 20 such glaciations in the past two to three million years. The coolings are rather severe: the most recent one, ending only about 12,000 years ago, covered much of North America and Europe with miles-thick continental ice sheets and led to the disappearance of barely surviving bands of Neanderthalers; they were displaced by the more adaptable Homo Sapiens.
According to the Serbian astronomer Milankovich, glaciation timing was controlled by astronomical parameters, such as oscillations with a 100,000-year period of the eccentricity of the Earth’s elliptic orbit around the Sun; oscillations with a period of 41,000 years of the Earth’s “obliquity” (inclination of the spin axis to the orbit plane, currently at around 23 degrees); and a precession of this spin axis, with a period of about 21,000 years.
While many consider the timing issue as settled, there are plenty of scientific puzzles still awaiting solutions: For example, how to explain the suddenness of de-glaciation, transiting within only centuries from a glaciation maximum into a warm Inter-glacial, like the present Holocene period.
Most expect the next glaciation to arrive rather soon; but calculations by Prof Andre Berger of the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, suggest a delay of some 40,000 years -- so there may be no great urgency. Nevertheless, it would be useful and of great scientific interest to verify the existence of a hypothesized “trigger” that might be disabled by human action -- at low cost and negligible risk.
Little ice ages (LIA) and the Dansgaard-Oeschger-Bond (D-O-B) cycles
After digesting hundreds of comments about my essay on stopping the next major ice age, I recognized the need to explain the existence also of “little” ice ages, which are likely of solar origin. They
We don’t know what triggers an LIA, but suspect a strong correlation with a quiet Sun and prolonged absence of sun spots. Experts in this field – Willie Soon (Harvard Observatory), Harjit Ahluwalia (University of New Mexico), Russian astronomer Habibullo Abdussamatov, and many others -- believe that the next LIA is imminent. The most recent LIA lasted from 1400 to 1830 AD – off and on. It followed the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), when wine grapes grew in northern England and Norsemen were able to farm in southern Greenland.
The impact of the LIA was rather severe. Climatology pioneer Hubert Lamb documents crop failures, starvation, and disease in Europe, together with ice fairs on the frozen Thames. During much of the American Revolution, New York Harbor was frozen over. And we recall paintings of George Washington crossing the Delaware River, impeded by ice floes.
How to overcome an LIA
To avoid the huge human misery and economic damage, one would like to counteract the cooling phase of the D-O-B cycle – but how? The next LIA may be imminent; but there is no obvious trigger for solar
influence; our understanding of solar physics is limited by the rather short history of observation of the Sun. While data on sunspots go back centuries, modern observations using spacecraft extend only for years.
An obvious scheme to counter a cooling is to make use of greenhouse (GH) warming. However, carbon dioxide is not the answer: CO2 is limited in supply and is already saturated -- hence additional CO2 is not very effective. Synthetics, like SF6, are too long-lasting and may have risky side-effects. The answer may be water, but in the form of ice crystals; the scheme is easily tested and is transitory -- reversible and incurring little risk.
Here is how I picture the operation -- starting with a small feasibility test and validation of the theory:
A KC-135 or similar aerial-refueling aircraft carries ~100 tons of water, which is to be injected as mist just above the tropopause, at the bottom of the stratosphere, near an atmospheric temperature minimum. At a surface density of water mist of 0.1 kg/m2, the area covered would be ~1km2.
Like contrails, I expect some visible cirrus, which should disappear rapidly, leaving behind invisible cirrus ice crystals that are strong absorbers/emitters of infrared (IR) radiation, covering also the atmospheric “window” region of 8 to 12 microns – thus creating a major GH effect and possibly even some detectable warming at the Earth’s surface. Any satellite-borne IR-instrument should be able to see this emitter patch and follow its spread and decay.
However, all this is based on theory and calculations, which I published in 1988 in the peer-reviewed journal Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics. Obviously, all predictions must be validated by direct observations. Once the scheme is scientifically verified, operational planning for countering the cooling can take over.
As usual, there are many scientific questions that require answers – chiefly, understanding the physical mechanism that drives the D-O-B cycles; how to explain the size, shape, and duration of the abrupt quasi-periodic warmings. Currently, there is a hot dispute about the synchronicity of the cycles between the two polar regions, revolving about the limited accuracy of ice-layer dating in Antarctic cores.
While the science is certainly interesting and important, there is no need to delay the crucial and urgent tests of geo-engineering; they involve only minor costs and little risk to the atmospheric environment.
S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project. His specialty is atmospheric and space physics. An expert in remote sensing and satellites, he served as the founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service and, more recently, as vice chair of the US National Advisory Committee on Oceans & Atmosphere. He is a Senior Fellow of the Heartland Institute and the Independent Institute. He co-authored NY Times best-seller Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 years. In 2007, he founded and has chaired the NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change), which has released several scientific reports [See NIPCCreport.org]. For recent writings see http://www.americanthinker.com/s_fred_singer/ and also Google Scholar.
Saturday, May 02, 2015
Constitutional preamble
Preamble for All of Us
Our Constitution says it all for all of us: it documents the limits of legislation within which our parliaments enact laws; it influences bureaucratic implementation of laws and caters for the provision of justice on issues arising from compliance with laws. Thus, and despite hugely differing capabilities and variously motivated aspirations in our lives of capriciously random opportunities, we still expect to be regarded as equal before the law.
So when politicians speculate about privileging a group of Australians above the rest of us, even to the extent of setting aside a specific number of seats in federal parliament for them, it is understandable that people take umbrage and object: any referendum proposal which attempts to entrench in our Constitution the claims of some Australians as being innately superior, or inherently more entitled, will almost certainly be rejected by a majority of Australian voters in a majority of Australian states.
This is not to say that sections of the Constitution which could disadvantage Aborigines (and others) should not be changed; they probably should. I’m thinking of Section 25 (which allows disqualification from voting by persons of any race) and Section 51, subsection xxvi (which allows parliament to make special laws deemed necessary for people of any race); there may well be other sections that demand attention.
The technicalities of wording such changes must, necessarily, be left to lawyers: that’s their province. The preamble, however, has a different purpose: it serves to say who we are, why we expect to feel free, what government can do to maintain that freedom and how the nation’s affairs might ideally be arranged. This inspirational and aspirational description of the role of the Constitution in our daily lives should, ideally, be written by a national poet: and that’s my province.
Whilst my draft preamble, below, does not purport to be poetry, it is written with a poet’s feel for the rhythms and nuances of Australian English. Five of the six lines begin with verb forms that encompass everything I’ve described above in an easy-to-read and inclusive format that says what every Australian would want to read, hope to hear, or expect to feel from the introduction to this otherwise boring, but fundamentally important constitutional document that defines Australia for Australians. I have also quite deliberately left out any reference to the god or gods, saints, prophets and other revered figures in the variety of religions practised by Australians in public and private worship. Indeed, as Section 116 prohibits the Commonwealth from making laws establishing any religion, imposing religious tests or observance, or interfering with the free exercise of any religion, it would seem both inconsistent and pointless to include in the preamble an invocation to a specific deity to look with favour upon the operation of the Constitution itself.
The wording of this preamble also allows for the substitution of the word Republic forCommonwealth, should the nation, by referendum, eventually require it.
Note, also, the reference to the Dreamtime with a capital “D”: this neatly genuflects to prior Aboriginal occupation of Australia without privileging them or any other group of Australians over anyone else. On the question of definition, an Australian in this reading is anyone born in, or made welcome to, Australia. There are other, more playful definitions: asked, on occasion, what I thought constituted an Australian, my answer, initially facetious, but these days less so, is always the same: “An Australian is anyone with a line of mine in memory.” Well, I am a national poet!
An earlier version of this preamble was first published in my book Occasions for Words(Wakefield Press, 2006). Now, however, I’m ceding copyright in this preamble to the Commonwealth of Australia if (after publication in Quadrant) the preamble is needed, to be adopted or adapted, in whole or in part, in any new preamble to our Constitution—I don’t mind being one of Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the world”. The version given below contains 145 words in a title and one sentence.
Preamble to the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia
RECOGNISING the humanity of peoples who have lived here from the Dreamtime and of peoples who, wherever born and whenever made welcome, have settled in Australia;
KNOWING that we belong to or are descendants of such peoples;
CONVINCED that political, religious and commercial freedoms will maximise the potential and nourish the achievements of all Australians, and
PRIZING the sciences which develop such achievements, the built environments which exhibit them, the natural environments which locate them and the arts which celebrate them,
THEREFORE and AS SOVEREIGN AUSTRALIANS we
ADOPT THIS CONSTITUTION of the COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA for democratically elected representatives to enact laws to protect our freedoms, applaud our efforts and reward our enterprise, whether of individuals acting alone or communities acting together, and which we hope our descendants will value, preserve and look to for inspiration.
Timoshenko Aslanides is a full-time, professional (and national) poet. His fourteenth book of poetry, Letterature: Verse Letters from Australian Women, was published by Hybrid Publishers in June 2014.
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
What of our future?
In the West, progressive really means regressive
Our economic decline is not terminal. But fighting back will require major changes
Landing at an Australian airport from a major Asian city leaves you conscious that the look and feel of your destination is significantly inferior to the standard at your departure. Compared to Asia, the facilities pale and a sense of indifference is what greets you. There are no dedicated APEC channels and express lanes are honoured in the breach. The Prime Minister may boast “Australia is open for business”, but you wouldn’t guess that from your arrival.
Hop on the train from Shanghai International to the city and you will travel at 430km/h and be downtown in no time. Choose the wrong time to get from Tullamarine to the Melbourne CBD and see how long it takes?
Of course, airports, railways and super highways alone don’t tell the story of a country’s relative prosperity or prospects. But they can be emblematic of national priorities. In Australia’s case it seems to fit.
As the mining boom fades to bust, tough choices have to be made. The prevailing commentary seems to affirm Australians are stuck in the present. The focus is on which taxes to increase, not which programs to cut. Tomorrow is an orphan. This predisposition was evident when the NSW government limited its leasing of the electricity grid to 49 per cent when it could have leased it all. A spurious union scare that leasing would result in an immediate hike in electricity prices meant a larger, more productive investment in the future was lost. (Does anyone really think we’ll have poles and wires in 99 years?) But that was the decision and generations to come won’t praise its timidity.
Yet a coalition of Labor, Greens and other so-called progressives continue to oppose fiscal responsibility. They want to restrict prosperity by increasingly applying handicaps to private enterprise, particularly through workplace laws. They call for the closure of our vital fossil fuel industries. They promote renewable energy knowing the harm it does to manufacturing jobs. They condemn meat consumption because of flatulent cattle, the wool industry because of animal cruelty and cropping because of water usage. Their vision for future generations — North Korea.
This is not just an Australian story. It is a familiar tale and typical of the Alice in Wonderland world Westerners inhabit. It’s where hopeless dreamers masquerade as credible reformers and where “progressive” means regressive. It’s where promises of equality deliver greater wealth disparity, where governments are rewarded by how much they spend and how many laws they pass irrespective of the consequences.
In Europe, where the masses have most fallen prey to the progressive spin, jobless youth and the elderly face bleak futures. Democracy is fraying and desperate voters are opting for extreme solutions. Syriza, a radical leftwing party now governs Greece. Podemos a party similarly opposed to austerity and capitalism is finding strong support in Spain. Buoyed by Syriza’s success Trotskyists are gaining traction in France and Germany. When poverty comes in at the door, freedom flies out the window.
Barack Obama is promising a similar inheritance to Americans. His health and environmental policies are economically damaging. His administration is responsible for a record flood of regulations, adding to what the Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates already costs American businesses $1.8 trillion a year. Obama leans far to the Left and believes the rich are indebted to the collective for their success. He blames Cuba’s poverty not on Castro’s Marxist policies, but on US sanctions. He clearly has no idea about wealth or how it’s created. However, the politics of envy won’t sustain a superpower, especially one that is so heavily indebted.
The West’s economic decline is feeding into defence budgets and foreign policy. Like America’s greatness, it is falling by the wayside. Obama’s latest capitulation — to Iran’s Supreme Leader, who was told: “Khamenei, I am at your service” — is reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler. These are unpredictable times which call for a strong economy to back a confident foreign policy and effective defence capabilities.
Regrettably, we in the West are now discovering the policies we have enthusiastically embraced have led us into an interminable economic and social trap. While we scramble for exits, others are reaching for the stars. China is leaving to the market and the price mechanism the primary task of taking its economy to new heights. India is “re-energising its growth engine” and harnessing its huge demographic advantage. As industrial output grows, India is set to become the world’s largest importer of thermal coal. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is on a mission and has frozen the bank accounts of Greenpeace on the grounds the activist organisation “was working against India’s economic interests”. He is determined to lift the Indian people out of poverty as quickly as possible and won’t tolerate outside interference.
Our region is renowned for what nations can achieve, even with limited natural resources. Their successes were neither inevitable or accidental and, while our systems may differ, they demonstrate a strong sense of national purpose from which we can learn. And learn we must. It would be foolish to think our living standard and way of life will somehow remain unimpaired regardless of economic fortunes. They won’t. Perhaps after 23 years of uninterrupted growth it is difficult to accept we are falling behind. We may need a considerable jolt to accept the institutional and attitudinal changes necessary for change. But with an unshakable national will, we too can reach for the stars.
Who knows, given time, we may even find close neighbours are better than distant relatives?
Friday, February 27, 2015
Upping the heat on climate number-crunchers
THE AUSTRALIAN FEBRUARY 28, 2015 12:00AMGraham Lloyd
Environment Editor
Sydney
CRICKET legend Donald Bradman is a useful metaphor for the escalating global row over claims the world’s leading climate agencies have been messing with the weather.
Imagine, for instance, if some bureau of sport were to revise the Don’s batting average in Test cricket down from 99.94 to 75 after adjusting for anomalies and deleting innings of 200 runs or more.
What if the bureau then claimed another batsman had exceeded the Don’s revamped record to become the greatest ever?
Critics could be told the adjustments “don’t matter” because they had not affected overall global batting averages. Just as many batsmen had been adjusted up as down. And complaints could easily be dismissed as the “cherrypicking” of a few, isolated batsmen.
David Stockwell, Australian Research Council grant recipient and adjunct researcher at Central Queensland University, raised the Bradman analogy in his submission to a newly formed independent panel that will oversee the operation of the Bureau of Meteorology’s national temperature dataset.
Stockwell was highlighting public concerns at the BoM’s use of homogenisation techniques to adjust historical temperature records to remove anomalies and produce a national dataset called ACORN-SAT (Australian Climate Observations Reference Network — Surface Air Temperature). The panel, or technical advisory forum, which will hold its first discussions with BoM staff on Monday, was formed in December after a series of questions were raised publicly about the treatment of historic temperature records that has resulted in temperature trends at some Australian sites being changed from long-term cooling to warming.
Liberal senator Simon Birmingham, former parliamentary secretary to Environment Minister Greg Hunt, instructed BoM to fast-track the appointment of the panel, which was recommended in 2011 in a peer review of ACORN-SAT’s establishment. The make-up of the panel was announced by Birmingham’s replacement as parliamentary secretary, Bob Baldwin, in January.
In the meantime, controversy about homogenisation of climate records has exploded into a global concern after similar trend changes to those raised in Australia were identified in Paraguay and in the Arctic. Accusations of “fraud” and “criminality” have been made against some of the world’s leading weather agencies. There is now the prospect of a US Senate inquiry.
Respected US climate scientist Judith Curry has facilitated a wideranging debate on the issue, saying more research was needed, but that it is probably not the “smoking gun” for climate science, as some had claimed.
There is a long history regarding complaints about how climate data has been handled by authorities and how poorly those making complaints have been treated.
The general trend is made clear in a 2007 email exchange, now known as Climategate, between a senior BoM official and scientists at East Anglia University in Britain. BoM’s David Jones said Australian sceptics could be easily dissuaded if deluged with data.
“Fortunately in Australia our sceptics are rather scientifically incompetent,” Jones wrote. “It is also easier for us in that we have a policy of providing any complainer with every single station observation when they question our data (this usually snows them)”, he said.
Even better, noted East Anglia University’s Phil Jones, was to give troublemakers a big package of data with key information missing, making it impossible to decipher.
But more than seven years on, as the world’s weather bureaus report more and more broken temperature records and further examples emerge of incongruous adjustments, the pressure is building for a transparent process to finally untangle the numbers.
In Australia, ACORN-SAT was created in 2009 to replace BoM’s so-called high-quality dataset after questions were raised about the quality and accuracy of that network.
ACORN-SAT, which the Senate was told this week is managed by a two-person team in BoM, uses information from a select range of weather stations and computer modelling to compile its national temperature record. The data is also used to help create the global temperature record.
The panel to oversee ACORN-SAT will be headed by CSIRO scientist Ron Sandland and includes a wide range of experts in statistics and mathematics.
Sandland tells Inquirer he will hold a teleconference with BoM on Monday to decide how the process would be run.
The panel was first recommended by a peer review in September 2011 headed by Ken Matthews. The peer review gave ACORN-SAT a glowing report, describing it as conforming to world’s best practice. But it also called for greater transparency, better communication and independent oversight.
Despite criticisms about transparency and the results of homogenisation at some sites by members of the public, BoM was slow to act on the peer review recommendation to establish a technical advisory forum.
BoM is one of Australia’s most widely trusted organisations. Millions of people use its online weather services and a Senate estimates hearing was told this week that more than 30,000 people followed BoM’s Twitter feed in the wake of cyclones Marcia and Lam, which landed simultaneously in Queensland and the Northern Territory this week.
However, as one of the government’s lead agencies on climate change, BoM has come under greater scrutiny. A vocal chorus has been claiming that there is a pattern of historic temperatures being reduced to make the warming trend of the late 21st century look more acute.
The questioners were quickly labelled “amateurs” by atmospheric scientist David Karoly, from the University of Melbourne, as he and other climate science academics rushed to support BoM’s work.
But the issue has exploded internationally following a declaration by US agencies NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that 2014 was the hottest year on record. As in Australia, regions were found where warming temperature trends had been created or increased through a process of homogenising records with neighbouring areas, some in other countries hundreds of kilometres away.
Published examples include Paraguay in South America and the Arctic, where a warm period in the 1930s and a well-documented period of intense cold around 1970 were erased from the record by homogenisation to give a steady rising temperature trend.
“How can we believe in ‘global warming’ when the temperature records providing the ‘evidence’ for that warming cannot be trusted?” asked British contrarian and climate change sceptic James Dellingpole.
“I’m not saying there has been no 20th-century global warming, I think there probably has been,” he said. “But I don’t honestly know. The worrying part … is that neither — it would appear — do the scientists.”
The website of Britain’s The Sunday Telegraph registered more than 30,000 comments under an article by columnist Christopher Booker saying the fiddling of temperature data has been “the biggest science scandal ever”. “What is now needed is a meticulous analysis of all the data, to establish just how far these adjustments have distorted the picture the world has been given,” Booker wrote.
The integrity of global temperature records after homogenisation is fiercely defended by global climate agencies, despite the fact that satellite measurements available from 1979 show a slightly different warming trend to surface-based records.
Australia’s BoM has issued two statements ahead of the Sandland review panel. In one it says temperature records are influenced by a range of factors such as changes to site surrounds, measurement methods and the relocation of stations.
“Such changes introduce biases into the climate record that need to be adjusted for, prior to analysis,’’ BoM says.
“Adjusting for these biases, a process known as homogenisation is carried out by meteorological authorities around the world as best practice, to ensure that climate data is consistent through time.”
BoM’s American counterpart, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Centre, says for global temperatures it is important to keep in mind that the largest adjustment in the global surface temperature record occurs over the oceans.
“All NOAA methodologies go through the peer-review process standard in scientific inquiry,” it says. Despite this, there remains enormous and heated debate about the issue.
Climate scientist Curry has opened an online debate that includes key scientists from the independent organisation Berkeley Earth, which compiles its own global temperature record, the results of which accord with those of other international agencies.
The Berkeley scientists conclude that Dellingpole and Booker’s claims of the “biggest fraud” of all time and a “criminal action” by climate scientists amount to nothing.
“Globally, the effect of adjustments is minor because on average the biases that require adjustments mostly cancel each other out,” they say.
But their web post generated heated discussion covering both the science of homogenisation and the standing of science.
European climate change economist Richard Tol, responding to Curry’s post, says the more important question raised by the debate over temperatures is perhaps why the public has lost so much trust in climate science that it prefers to believe columnists such as Booker over climate scientists at Berkeley. A Telegraph poll suggested that 90 per cent of 110,000 readers had sided with Booker.
“I would hypothesise that the constant stream of climate nonsense — we’re all gonna die, last chance to save the planet, climate change is coming to blow over your house and eat your dog — has made people rather suspicious of anything climate ‘scientists’ say,” according to Tol.
“If my hypothesis is correct, instead of arguing with Booker about the details of homogenisation, you should call out the alarmists.”
Curry tells Inquirer her main conclusions from the heated exchange in response to the Berkeley post are that “the stated uncertainties in global average temperatures are too small”.
“More research needs to be done to understand the impacts of the adjustments and to make individual locations more consistent with the historical record,” she says.
She says much more data work is needed to clarify the temperatures in the Arctic, which is a big source of difference among the different datasets in the northern hemisphere.
“I suspect that all this won’t change the qualitative result from the dataset, that is that the Earth is warming,” Curry says.
The way in which the Australian review of the BoM ACORN-SAT data is conducted could go a long way towards answering some of the questions being asked worldwide.
A common criticism of climate authorities such as BoM is that justifications for temperature smoothing may sound reasonable in the broad, but are often poorly explained in the detail of individual adjustments.
It is the task of the high-powered review panel to satisfy itself that the integrity given to BoM’s dataset by the initial peer review has been maintained.
Sitting on the panel with Sandland will be:
• Bob Vincent, emeritus professor in the school of chemistry and physics at the University of Adelaide.
• Phillip Gould, from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
• John Henstridge, who founded Data Analysis Australia, now the largest private statistical organisation in Australia,
• Susan Linacre, a former president of the International Association of Survey Statisticians.
• Michael Martin, professor of statistics in the research school of finance, actuarial studies and applied statistics at Australian National University.
• Patty Solomon, professor of statistical bioinformatics at the University of Adelaide.
• Terry Speed, a former president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
Declining an invitation for David Jones, BoM’s manager of climate change and prediction, to write for Inquirer, a BoM spokeswoman says establishment of the technical advisory forum will provide “an independent framework for quality assurance tests and analysis of the bureau’s climate dataset, and it would not be appropriate to pre-empt this process.”
But critics of BoM are already lining up to have their questions answered.
Research academic Jennifer Marohasy has accused BoM of using “creative accounting practices” in both the homogenisation of data to remodel individual series as well as the choice of stations and time periods when the individual series are combined to calculate a national average for each year.
Marohasy says BoM’s methodologies have turned a cycle of warming and cooling over the past century into one of continuous warming.
In a submission to the review group, Marohasy makes three recommendations to render the overall official national temperature trend for Australia “more consistent with history, and reasonable accounting practices”.
The first is to use the same locations when calculating average mean temperatures for different years.
Marohasy’s research shows that while the national average temperature is calculated from a set of just 104 weather stations, the same 104 stations are not used every year.
“In particular, hotter places are added later in the time series, which currently begins in 1910”, she says.
“For example, Wilcannia is a very hot town in western NSW.
“There is a long continuous maximum temperature record for Wilcannia that extends back to 1881, but the bureau only adds Wilcannia into the mix from 1957.
“Obviously, if the national average temperature is calculated from a mix of hotter locations in the 1990s than, say, in the 1920s, then it will appear that Australia was hotter in the 1990s, even if the temperatures at individual weather recording stations were the same during these two periods,” Marohasy says.
Her second recommendation is to start the official record from 1880, not 1910, thus including the hot years of the Federation drought in the official record.
Lastly, Marohasy says adjustments should not be made to temperature series unless an irregularity exists in the original series that was caused by a known, documented change in the equipment at that weather recording station and/or a known change in the siting of the equipment.
Her view is supported by retired certified practising accountant Merrick Thomson, who has told the panel there is a lack of transparency associated with the change in the mix of weather stations used to calculate the national average.
Thomson says when BoM transitioned to the new ACORN-SAT system in 2012 it removed 57 stations from its calculations, replacing them with 36 on average hotter stations.
“I calculate that this had the effect of increasing the recorded Australian average temperature by 0.42C, independently of any actual real change in temperature,” Thompson says.
“Of the 57 stations removed from the calculation of the national average temperature, only three have actually closed as weather stations,” he adds.
Thomson asks the panel: “Why was the mix of stations changed with the transition to ACORN-SAT, and why was this not explained and declared, particularly given that it has resulted in a large increase in the 2013 annual temperature for Australia, I calculate 0.56 degree Celsius?”
He asks what criteria were used to determine whether a station becomes part of the national network.
Stockwell says although many had rushed to defend the BoM, saying the adjustments “don’t matter” as they do not change the global temperature graphs appreciably, they clearly do matter to a lot of people.
In a submission to the panel, Stockwell highlights what he considered unsound practices by BoM in handling the national data.
“Every portrayal of historical data should be historically accurate,” he says, “else it becomes revisionism and strays out of the domain of science and into the domain of ideology and politics.”
Self-declared “citizen scientist” Ken Stewart has been more pointed. “The apparent lack of quality assurance means ACORN-SAT is not fit for the purpose of serious climate analysis including the calculation of annual temperature trends, identifying hottest or coldest days on record, analysing the intensity, duration and frequency of heatwaves, matching rainfall with temperature, calculating monthly means or medians, and calculating diurnal temperature range,” he says.
“In conclusion, ACORN-SAT is not reliable and should be scrapped.
“ACORN-SAT shows adjustments that distort the temperature record and do not follow the stated procedures in the bureau’s own technical papers, generating warming biases at a large number of sites, thus greatly increasing the network wide trends,” Stewart says in his submission.
“Furthermore, the bureau does not take account of uncertainty, and the data are generally riddled with errors indicating poor quality assurance.
“Finally, its authors have not followed up on most undertakings made more than three years ago to permit replication and improve transparency.
The obvious and widespread depth of feeling about BoM’s treatment of historical records underscores the wisdom of recommendations made by the 2011 ACORN-SAT peer review.
The review panel encouraged BoM to improve the public transparency of ACORN-SAT arrangements.
“This will not only build public confidence in the dataset but should assist the bureau in its continuous improvement efforts and its responsiveness to data users,” the peer review panel said.
“The panel also encourages the bureau to more systematically document the process used, and to be used, in the development and operations of ACORN-SAT.
“Some aspects of current arrangements for measurement, curation and analysis are non-transparent even internally, and are therefore subject to significant ‘key persons risk’, as well as inconsistency over time.”
Current criticism of BoM over the temperature series is obviously unfamiliar territory for what remains one of Australia’s most highly regarded public institutions.
This criticism is by no means an existential threat to BoM but a rigorous and transparent review of ACORN-SAT data, methodology and communication is clearly needed, and long overdue.
BoM’s new stations ‘explain warming’ in Australia
ALMOST half of the 20th-century warming for Australia’s national average surface temperatures could be due to changes in the weather stations chosen for analysis, rather than changes in the climate, according to a submission to an independent review of the Bureau of Meteorology’s national records.
Merrick Thomson, a retired certified practising accountant, has asked the independent panel to investigate how and why stations were selected for inclusion to make up the national trend.
The panel of experts, headed by Ron Sandland from the CSIRO, will begin its review of BoM’s national temperature data next week, amid growing controversy about the homogenisation of climate records worldwide.
The issue has been the subject of fierce debate in Britain and the US in recent weeks, following the declaration by NASA that last year was the hottest year on record.
In his submission to the review panel, Mr Thompson said when the BoM transitioned to the new ACORN-SAT system it had removed 57 stations from its calculations, replacing them with 36 on-average hotter stations.
“I calculate this has had the effect of increasing the recorded Australian average temperature by 0.42 degrees Celsius, independently of any actual real change in temperature,” Mr Thomson said.
“Of the 57 stations removed from the calculation of the national average temperature, only three of these have actually closed as weather stations,” he added.
Mr Thomson asked that the review panel investigate why the mix of stations changed with the transition to ACORN-SAT, and why this was not explained and declared, particularly given that it has resulted in a large increase in the 2013 annual temperature for Australia.
The BoM has steadfastly defended its treatment of historic temperature records and its management of the ACORN-SAT network. The bureau came under fire last year when it was called to explain why temperature trends at some stations had changed from cooling or slightly warming to more substantial warming after a process of homogenisation to give a national temperature picture.
The BoM, and a number of supportive climate scientists, said adjustments were made to historic temperature recordings for reasons including site moves, equipment changes and after reference to neighbouring areas.
The bureau said a peer review of ACORN-SAT said it had adhered to world’s best practice.
However, similar claims are now being made against climate agencies internationally.
A BoM spokesman said the establishment of the Technical Advisory Forum to review ACORN-SAT would provide “an independent framework for quality assurance tests and analysis of the bureau’s climate data set and it would not be appropriate to pre-empt this process”.
BoM did not respond to questions about the submission to the review in time for publication.
Friday, January 23, 2015
Heated retorts to a genteel luke warmer
Heated retorts to a genteel luke warmer
The Weekend AustralianMATT RIDLEY Matt Ridley is the author of The Rational Optimist and a member of Britain’s House of Lords.THE TIMES
I AM a climate luke warmer. That means I think recent global warming is real, mostly man-made and will continue, but I no longer think it is likely to be dangerous and I think its slow and erratic progress so far is what we should expect in the future.
That last year was the warmest yet, in some data sets, but only by a smidgen more than 2005, is precisely in line with such lukewarm thinking.
This view annoys some sceptics who think all climate change is natural or imaginary, but it is even more infuriating to most publicly funded scientists and politicians, who insist climate change is a big risk. My middle-of-the-road position is considered not just wrong but disgraceful, shameful, verging on scandalous. I am subjected to torrents of online abuse for holding it, very little of it from sceptics.
I was even kept off the shortlist for a part-time, unpaid public sector appointment in a field unrelated to climate because of having this view, or so the headhunter thought. In the climate debate, paying obeisance to climate scaremongering is about as mandatory for a public appointment, or public funding, as being a Protestant was in 18th-century England.
Kind friends send me news almost weekly of whole blog posts devoted to nothing but analysing my intellectual and personal inadequacies, always in relation to my views on climate.
Writing about climate change is a small part of my life but, to judge by some of the stuff that gets written about me, writing about me is a large part of the life of some of the more obsessive climate commentators.
It’s all a bit strange. Why is this debate so fractious?
Rather than attack my arguments, my critics like to attack my motives. I stand accused of “wanting” climate change to be mild because I support free markets or because I receive income indirectly from the mining of coal in Northumberland. Two surface coalmines (which I do not own), operating without subsidies, do indeed dig coal partly from land that I own. They pay me a fee, as I have repeatedly declared in speeches, books and articles.
I do think that coal, oil and gas have been a good thing so far, by giving us an alternative to cutting down forests and killing whales, by supplying fertiliser to feed the world, by giving the global poor affordable energy, and so on. But instead of defending the modern coal industry, I write and speak extensively in favour of gas, the biggest competitive threat to coal’s share of the electricity market. If we can phase out coal without causing too much suffering, then I would not object.
Besides, I could probably earn even more from renewable energy. As a landowner, I am astonished by the generosity of the offers I keep receiving for greenenergy subsidies. Wind farm developers in smart suits dangle the prospect of tens of thousands of pounds per turbine on my land — and tens of turbines.
A solar developer wrote to me recently saying he could offer more than £1 million of income over 25 years if I were to cover some particular fields with solar panels. I argue against such subsidies, so I don’t take them.
I was not always a luke warmer. When I first started writing about the threat of global warming more than 26 years ago, as science editor of The Economist, I thought it was a genuinely dangerous threat. Like, for instance, Margaret Thatcher, I accepted the predictions being made at the time that we would see warming of a third or a half a degree (Centigrade) a decade, perhaps more, and that this would have devastating consequences.
Gradually, however, I changed my mind. The failure of the atmosphere to warm anywhere near as rapidly as predicted was a big reason: there has been less than 0.5C of global warming in four decades — and it has slowed down, not speeded up. Increases in malaria, refugees, heatwaves, storms, droughts and floods have not materialised to anything like the predicted extent, if at all. Sea level has risen but at a very slow rate — about 30cm a century.
Also, I soon realised that all the mathematical models predicting rapid warming assume big amplifying feedbacks in the atmosphere, mainly from water vapour; carbon dioxide is merely the primer, responsible for about a third of the predicted warming. When this penny dropped, so did my confidence in predictions of future alarm: the amplifiers are highly uncertain.
Another thing that gave me pause was that I went back and looked at the history of past predictions of ecological apocalypse from my youth — population explosion, oil exhaustion, elephant extinction, rainforest loss, acid rain, the ozone layer, desertification, nuclear winter, the running out of resources, pandemics, falling sperm counts, cancerous pesticide pollution and so forth.
There was a consistent pattern of exaggeration, followed by damp squibs: in not a single case was the problem as bad as had been widely predicted by leading scientists. That does not make every new prediction of apocalypse necessarily wrong, of course, but it should encourage scepticism.
What sealed my apostasy from climate alarm was the extraordinary history of the famous “hockey stick” graph, which purported to show that today’s temperatures were higher and changing faster than at any time in the past 1000 years. That graph genuinely shocked me when I first saw it and, briefly in the early 2000s, it persuaded me to abandon my growing doubts about dangerous climate change and return to the “alarmed” camp.
Then I began to read the work of two Canadian researchers, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. They and others have shown, as confirmed by the National Academy of Sciences in the US, that the hockey stick graph, and others like it, are heavily reliant on dubious sets of tree rings and use inappropriate statistical filters that exaggerate any 20th-century upturns.
What shocked me more was the scientific establishment’s reaction to this: it tried to pretend that nothing was wrong.
And then a flood of emails was leaked in 2009 showing some climate scientists apparently scheming to withhold data, prevent papers being published, get journal editors sacked and evade freedomof-information requests, much as sceptics had been alleging. That was when I began to re-examine everything I had been told about climate change and, the more I looked, the flakier the prediction of rapid warming seemed.
I am especially unimpressed by the claim that a prediction of rapid and dangerous warming is “settled science”, as firm as evolution or gravity. How could it be? It is a prediction! No prediction, let alone in a multi-causal, chaotic and poorly understood system like the global climate, should ever be treated as gospel. With the exception of eclipses, there is virtually nothing scientists can say with certainty about the future.
It is absurd to argue that one cannot disagree with a forecast. Is the Bank of England’s inflation forecast infallible?
Incidentally, my current view is still consistent with the “consensus” among scientists, as represented by the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The consensus is that climate change is happening, not that it is going to be dangerous.
The latest IPCC report gives a range of estimates of future warming, from harmless to terrifying. My best guess would be about one degree (1C) of warming during this century, which is well within the IPCC’s range of possible outcomes.
Yet most politicians go straight to the top of the IPCC’s range and call climate change things like “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction” (US Secretary of State John Kerry), requiring the expenditure of trillions of dollars. I think that is verging on grotesque in a world full of war, hunger, disease and poverty. It also means that environmental efforts get diverted from more urgent priorities, like habitat loss and invasive species.
The policies being proposed to combat climate change, far from being a modest insurance policy, are proving ineffective, expensive, harmful to poor people and actually bad for the environment: we are tearing down rainforests to grow biofuels and ripping up peat bogs to install windmills that still need fossil-fuel back-up.
These policies are failing to buy any comfort for our wealthy grandchildren and are doing so on the backs of today’s poor. Some insurance policy.
To begin with, after I came out as a luke warmer, I would get genuine critiques from scientists who disagreed with me and wanted to exchange views. I had long and time-consuming email exchanges or conversations with several such scientists.
Yet I grew steadily more sceptical as, one by one, they failed to answer my doubts. They often resorted to meta-arguments, especially the argument from authority: if the Royal Society says it is alarmed, then you should be alarmed. If I want argument from authority, I replied, I will join the Catholic Church.
“These are just standard denialist talking points,” scoffed another prominent scientist, unpersuasively, when I raised objections — as if that answered them.
My experience with sceptical scientists, many of them distinguished climatologists at leading universities, was different. The more I probed, the better their data seemed. They did not resort to the argument from authority.
Sometimes I disagreed with them or thought they went too far. I have yet to be convinced, for example, that changes in the output of the sun caused the warming of the 1980s and 90s — an idea that some espouse.
So for the most part, I found myself persuaded by the middleof-the-road, lukewarm argument — that CO2-induced warming is likely but it won’t be large, fast or damaging.
Then a funny thing happened a few years ago. Those who disagreed with me stopped pointing out politely where or why they disagreed and started calling me names. One by one, many of the most prominent people in the climate debate began to throw vitriolic playground abuse at me. I was “paranoid”, “specious”, “risible”, “self-defaming”, “daft”, “lying”, “irrational”, an “idiot”.
Their letters to the editor or their blog responses asserted that I was “error-riddled” or had seriously misrepresented something, but then they not only failed to substantiate the charge but often roughly confirmed what I had written.
I have seen bad-tempered polarisation of scientific debates before, for example during the nature-nurture debates of the 70s and 80s between those who thought genes affected behaviour and those who thought upbringing was overwhelmingly important. That debate grew vicious.
What caused the polarisation, I realised then, was not just that people on one side read the articles they agreed with, reinforcing their prejudices, but something more. They relied on extreme distortions of their enemies’ arguments, written by self-appointed guardians of the flame on their own side, so they were constantly attacking straw men.
It’s the same here. Most of the people who attack me seem to think I am a “denier” of climate change because that’s what a few hyperventilating bloggers keep saying about me.
It’s not, of course, true. It’s these flame guardians who polarise such debates. The most prolific of them is a man named Bob Ward. Although employed at the London School of Economics, he is not a researcher or lecturer, but policy and communications director, somebody whose day job is to defend the climate orthodoxy in the media. Some might call him a spin doctor.
It appears he feels compelled to write something rude about me every time I publish on this topic and although his letters to editors are often published, he throws an online tantrum if they are not. He is hilariously obsessed with my peerage, lovingly reciting my title every time he attacks me, like a Bertie Woosterish snob.
As an example of playing the man and not the ball, Ward and Lord Deben, chairman of the government’s official committee on climate change, are both wont to mock the fact that my Oxford DPhil thesis in 1983 was on the behaviour of birds. Good luck to them but I notice they don’t mock the fact that the DPhil thesis of Lord Krebs was also on birds, earned in the same research group as me: the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology. Lord Krebs is the chairman of the adaptation subcommittee of the committee on climate change.
John Krebs, a fine scientist and superb lecturer, was the internal examiner of my thesis, which he praised at the time, after telling me to correct a couple of silly mistakes he had spotted in the calculation of a probability result. I did so. Imagine my surprise when he recently told several separate people (who reported it to me) that I should not be listened to on climate change because my DPhil thesis, all those years ago, contained mathematical errors.
Lord May even used this argument against me in a debate in the House of Lords: that because I got a number wrong in a calculation 31 years ago, I cannot ever be right again. This is the kind of hilarious thing that happens to you if you come out as a lukewarmer.
Talking of the committee on climate change, last year Lord Deben commissioned an entire report to criticise something I had said. Among other howlers, it included a quotation from the IPCC but the quote had a large chunk cut from the middle. When this cut was restored the line supported me, not Lord Deben. When I pointed this out politely to Lord Deben, he refused to restore the excision and left the document unchanged on the committee’s website. Presenting quotations so they appear to mean something different from what they do is quite a sin in journalism. Apparently not in Whitehall committees.
I suppose all this fury means my arguments are hitting home. If they were easily demolished, they would demolish them rather than try to demolish me.
Many of the things that I was abused for saying have since proved to be right. I was one of the first to write an article in the mainstream media (in The Wall Street Journal in 2012) arguing that the latest data supported much lower estimates of climate sensitivity (the amount of warming induced by a doubling of carbon dioxide levels) than those being assumed by the models used by the IPCC.
This produced the usual vituperation online from about a dozen high-profile science commentators with nothing better to do. Since then four papers have appeared in the scientific literature, authored by very prominent climate scientists, giving low estimates of climate sensitivity, some even lower than I had said. I am waiting for my critics to acknowledge that my story was sound.
I have never met a climate sceptic, let alone a lukewarmer, who wants his opponents silenced. I wish I could say the same of those who think climate change is an alarming prospect.
The Weekend AustralianMATT RIDLEY Matt Ridley is the author of The Rational Optimist and a member of Britain’s House of Lords.THE TIMES
I AM a climate luke warmer. That means I think recent global warming is real, mostly man-made and will continue, but I no longer think it is likely to be dangerous and I think its slow and erratic progress so far is what we should expect in the future.
That last year was the warmest yet, in some data sets, but only by a smidgen more than 2005, is precisely in line with such lukewarm thinking.
This view annoys some sceptics who think all climate change is natural or imaginary, but it is even more infuriating to most publicly funded scientists and politicians, who insist climate change is a big risk. My middle-of-the-road position is considered not just wrong but disgraceful, shameful, verging on scandalous. I am subjected to torrents of online abuse for holding it, very little of it from sceptics.
I was even kept off the shortlist for a part-time, unpaid public sector appointment in a field unrelated to climate because of having this view, or so the headhunter thought. In the climate debate, paying obeisance to climate scaremongering is about as mandatory for a public appointment, or public funding, as being a Protestant was in 18th-century England.
Kind friends send me news almost weekly of whole blog posts devoted to nothing but analysing my intellectual and personal inadequacies, always in relation to my views on climate.
Writing about climate change is a small part of my life but, to judge by some of the stuff that gets written about me, writing about me is a large part of the life of some of the more obsessive climate commentators.
It’s all a bit strange. Why is this debate so fractious?
Rather than attack my arguments, my critics like to attack my motives. I stand accused of “wanting” climate change to be mild because I support free markets or because I receive income indirectly from the mining of coal in Northumberland. Two surface coalmines (which I do not own), operating without subsidies, do indeed dig coal partly from land that I own. They pay me a fee, as I have repeatedly declared in speeches, books and articles.
I do think that coal, oil and gas have been a good thing so far, by giving us an alternative to cutting down forests and killing whales, by supplying fertiliser to feed the world, by giving the global poor affordable energy, and so on. But instead of defending the modern coal industry, I write and speak extensively in favour of gas, the biggest competitive threat to coal’s share of the electricity market. If we can phase out coal without causing too much suffering, then I would not object.
Besides, I could probably earn even more from renewable energy. As a landowner, I am astonished by the generosity of the offers I keep receiving for greenenergy subsidies. Wind farm developers in smart suits dangle the prospect of tens of thousands of pounds per turbine on my land — and tens of turbines.
A solar developer wrote to me recently saying he could offer more than £1 million of income over 25 years if I were to cover some particular fields with solar panels. I argue against such subsidies, so I don’t take them.
I was not always a luke warmer. When I first started writing about the threat of global warming more than 26 years ago, as science editor of The Economist, I thought it was a genuinely dangerous threat. Like, for instance, Margaret Thatcher, I accepted the predictions being made at the time that we would see warming of a third or a half a degree (Centigrade) a decade, perhaps more, and that this would have devastating consequences.
Gradually, however, I changed my mind. The failure of the atmosphere to warm anywhere near as rapidly as predicted was a big reason: there has been less than 0.5C of global warming in four decades — and it has slowed down, not speeded up. Increases in malaria, refugees, heatwaves, storms, droughts and floods have not materialised to anything like the predicted extent, if at all. Sea level has risen but at a very slow rate — about 30cm a century.
Also, I soon realised that all the mathematical models predicting rapid warming assume big amplifying feedbacks in the atmosphere, mainly from water vapour; carbon dioxide is merely the primer, responsible for about a third of the predicted warming. When this penny dropped, so did my confidence in predictions of future alarm: the amplifiers are highly uncertain.
Another thing that gave me pause was that I went back and looked at the history of past predictions of ecological apocalypse from my youth — population explosion, oil exhaustion, elephant extinction, rainforest loss, acid rain, the ozone layer, desertification, nuclear winter, the running out of resources, pandemics, falling sperm counts, cancerous pesticide pollution and so forth.
There was a consistent pattern of exaggeration, followed by damp squibs: in not a single case was the problem as bad as had been widely predicted by leading scientists. That does not make every new prediction of apocalypse necessarily wrong, of course, but it should encourage scepticism.
What sealed my apostasy from climate alarm was the extraordinary history of the famous “hockey stick” graph, which purported to show that today’s temperatures were higher and changing faster than at any time in the past 1000 years. That graph genuinely shocked me when I first saw it and, briefly in the early 2000s, it persuaded me to abandon my growing doubts about dangerous climate change and return to the “alarmed” camp.
Then I began to read the work of two Canadian researchers, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. They and others have shown, as confirmed by the National Academy of Sciences in the US, that the hockey stick graph, and others like it, are heavily reliant on dubious sets of tree rings and use inappropriate statistical filters that exaggerate any 20th-century upturns.
What shocked me more was the scientific establishment’s reaction to this: it tried to pretend that nothing was wrong.
And then a flood of emails was leaked in 2009 showing some climate scientists apparently scheming to withhold data, prevent papers being published, get journal editors sacked and evade freedomof-information requests, much as sceptics had been alleging. That was when I began to re-examine everything I had been told about climate change and, the more I looked, the flakier the prediction of rapid warming seemed.
I am especially unimpressed by the claim that a prediction of rapid and dangerous warming is “settled science”, as firm as evolution or gravity. How could it be? It is a prediction! No prediction, let alone in a multi-causal, chaotic and poorly understood system like the global climate, should ever be treated as gospel. With the exception of eclipses, there is virtually nothing scientists can say with certainty about the future.
It is absurd to argue that one cannot disagree with a forecast. Is the Bank of England’s inflation forecast infallible?
Incidentally, my current view is still consistent with the “consensus” among scientists, as represented by the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The consensus is that climate change is happening, not that it is going to be dangerous.
The latest IPCC report gives a range of estimates of future warming, from harmless to terrifying. My best guess would be about one degree (1C) of warming during this century, which is well within the IPCC’s range of possible outcomes.
Yet most politicians go straight to the top of the IPCC’s range and call climate change things like “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction” (US Secretary of State John Kerry), requiring the expenditure of trillions of dollars. I think that is verging on grotesque in a world full of war, hunger, disease and poverty. It also means that environmental efforts get diverted from more urgent priorities, like habitat loss and invasive species.
The policies being proposed to combat climate change, far from being a modest insurance policy, are proving ineffective, expensive, harmful to poor people and actually bad for the environment: we are tearing down rainforests to grow biofuels and ripping up peat bogs to install windmills that still need fossil-fuel back-up.
These policies are failing to buy any comfort for our wealthy grandchildren and are doing so on the backs of today’s poor. Some insurance policy.
To begin with, after I came out as a luke warmer, I would get genuine critiques from scientists who disagreed with me and wanted to exchange views. I had long and time-consuming email exchanges or conversations with several such scientists.
Yet I grew steadily more sceptical as, one by one, they failed to answer my doubts. They often resorted to meta-arguments, especially the argument from authority: if the Royal Society says it is alarmed, then you should be alarmed. If I want argument from authority, I replied, I will join the Catholic Church.
“These are just standard denialist talking points,” scoffed another prominent scientist, unpersuasively, when I raised objections — as if that answered them.
My experience with sceptical scientists, many of them distinguished climatologists at leading universities, was different. The more I probed, the better their data seemed. They did not resort to the argument from authority.
Sometimes I disagreed with them or thought they went too far. I have yet to be convinced, for example, that changes in the output of the sun caused the warming of the 1980s and 90s — an idea that some espouse.
So for the most part, I found myself persuaded by the middleof-the-road, lukewarm argument — that CO2-induced warming is likely but it won’t be large, fast or damaging.
Then a funny thing happened a few years ago. Those who disagreed with me stopped pointing out politely where or why they disagreed and started calling me names. One by one, many of the most prominent people in the climate debate began to throw vitriolic playground abuse at me. I was “paranoid”, “specious”, “risible”, “self-defaming”, “daft”, “lying”, “irrational”, an “idiot”.
Their letters to the editor or their blog responses asserted that I was “error-riddled” or had seriously misrepresented something, but then they not only failed to substantiate the charge but often roughly confirmed what I had written.
I have seen bad-tempered polarisation of scientific debates before, for example during the nature-nurture debates of the 70s and 80s between those who thought genes affected behaviour and those who thought upbringing was overwhelmingly important. That debate grew vicious.
What caused the polarisation, I realised then, was not just that people on one side read the articles they agreed with, reinforcing their prejudices, but something more. They relied on extreme distortions of their enemies’ arguments, written by self-appointed guardians of the flame on their own side, so they were constantly attacking straw men.
It’s the same here. Most of the people who attack me seem to think I am a “denier” of climate change because that’s what a few hyperventilating bloggers keep saying about me.
It’s not, of course, true. It’s these flame guardians who polarise such debates. The most prolific of them is a man named Bob Ward. Although employed at the London School of Economics, he is not a researcher or lecturer, but policy and communications director, somebody whose day job is to defend the climate orthodoxy in the media. Some might call him a spin doctor.
It appears he feels compelled to write something rude about me every time I publish on this topic and although his letters to editors are often published, he throws an online tantrum if they are not. He is hilariously obsessed with my peerage, lovingly reciting my title every time he attacks me, like a Bertie Woosterish snob.
As an example of playing the man and not the ball, Ward and Lord Deben, chairman of the government’s official committee on climate change, are both wont to mock the fact that my Oxford DPhil thesis in 1983 was on the behaviour of birds. Good luck to them but I notice they don’t mock the fact that the DPhil thesis of Lord Krebs was also on birds, earned in the same research group as me: the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology. Lord Krebs is the chairman of the adaptation subcommittee of the committee on climate change.
John Krebs, a fine scientist and superb lecturer, was the internal examiner of my thesis, which he praised at the time, after telling me to correct a couple of silly mistakes he had spotted in the calculation of a probability result. I did so. Imagine my surprise when he recently told several separate people (who reported it to me) that I should not be listened to on climate change because my DPhil thesis, all those years ago, contained mathematical errors.
Lord May even used this argument against me in a debate in the House of Lords: that because I got a number wrong in a calculation 31 years ago, I cannot ever be right again. This is the kind of hilarious thing that happens to you if you come out as a lukewarmer.
Talking of the committee on climate change, last year Lord Deben commissioned an entire report to criticise something I had said. Among other howlers, it included a quotation from the IPCC but the quote had a large chunk cut from the middle. When this cut was restored the line supported me, not Lord Deben. When I pointed this out politely to Lord Deben, he refused to restore the excision and left the document unchanged on the committee’s website. Presenting quotations so they appear to mean something different from what they do is quite a sin in journalism. Apparently not in Whitehall committees.
I suppose all this fury means my arguments are hitting home. If they were easily demolished, they would demolish them rather than try to demolish me.
Many of the things that I was abused for saying have since proved to be right. I was one of the first to write an article in the mainstream media (in The Wall Street Journal in 2012) arguing that the latest data supported much lower estimates of climate sensitivity (the amount of warming induced by a doubling of carbon dioxide levels) than those being assumed by the models used by the IPCC.
This produced the usual vituperation online from about a dozen high-profile science commentators with nothing better to do. Since then four papers have appeared in the scientific literature, authored by very prominent climate scientists, giving low estimates of climate sensitivity, some even lower than I had said. I am waiting for my critics to acknowledge that my story was sound.
I have never met a climate sceptic, let alone a lukewarmer, who wants his opponents silenced. I wish I could say the same of those who think climate change is an alarming prospect.
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