“Lukewarmers” are those scientists (and others) who believe the balance of evidence is middling between “climate alarmists” (who tend to think that the global temperature rise will lie in, or even exceed, the upper half the IPCC’s 1.1°C–6.4°C range of projected temperature rise this century) and ultraskeptics, or “flatliners” (who tend to think that the addition of human-generated carbon dioxide has virtually no impact on global temperatures).

Lukewarmers have found the world to be a lonely place. But favor (think physical processes of global climate) smiled for us in 2011. Several scientific studies produced results, when considered in combination, provide evidence that the general warming of the earth’s climate is proceeding at a rate that lies in the lower half of the IPCC’s projected temperature change during the 21st century.

And with a low-end temperature rise comes along low-end impacts. Seemingly good news for all!

2011 Temperatures

First, let’s review the global average temperature, both at the surface, and in the lower atmosphere since 1979—the year that satellite observations of the temperature from the lower atmosphere become reliably available, and pretty near the beginning of the second warming episode of the 20th century.

Fig. 1 shows the temperature data from one surface dataset (from the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) and one satellite dataset of observations from the lower atmosphere (from the University of Alabama in Huntsville). There are other data compilations besides these two, but they are somewhat similar and the differences are not what I am interested in discussing here (although it is by no means an uninteresting topic).

Figure 1. Annual average global temperature anomalies from the surface (red) and from the lower atmosphere (blue), 1979-2011 (the value for 2011 in the surface record is based on only 11 months of data).

It is pretty obvious that the global temperature in 2011 have done little to hasten the observed temperature increase, but rather has acted to further ensconce the established trend (if not add a tiny bit of downward pressure on it). As the trend in global temperature rise continues to be rather low, the amount of scientific scrutiny it is subject to grows, for it pushes at the envelope of our understanding of climate change and variability under rapidly increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

Observed Trend Less Than Climate Model Simulations

A prominent paper examining the issue was published in 2011 by Dr. Benjamin Santer and a long list of colleagues including some of the bigger names in climate science. These researchers set out to see just how unusual the rather low warming rate in the lower atmosphere is when compared with climate model expectations of the evolution of the temperatures when run with a combination of the observed (through the year ~2000) and projected (through 2010: from the IPCC’s SRES A1B scenario) anthropogenic enhancements to the atmosphere’s chemical and physical composition.

What the researchers found was that the observed temperature trends calculated from periods ranging from 10 to 32 years all lie below the average trend of the same length projected by a large family of climate models (Fig. 2). Each climate model includes some representation of some of the processes which lead to “natural” (random) variability (processes such as El Niño/La Niña, volcanic eruptions, solar variability—note that not all models include all of these processes throughout the entire 1979-2010 period of study). As the time period over which the temperature trend is calculated increases, the impact of natural variability on the magnitude (and even the sign) of the trend decreases as the short-term temperature deviations caused by random variability tend to cancel out.

Therefore, the envelope of model expected trends shrinks as the period of time over which the trend is determined expands (yellow area in Fig. 2). What this means is that the observed trends in this figure begin to become much more unusual compared with model expectations as the trend lengthens.

By the time you get to trend lengths of 30 or so years, the observed trend is threatening the lower limit of the 95% confidence range of climate model expectations. Such mounting evidence begins to start to make you wonder whether there is some fundamental problem between climate models and reality.

Figure 2. A comparison between modeled and observed trends in the average temperature of the lower atmosphere, for periods ranging from 10 to 32 years (during the period 1979 through 2010). The yellow is the 5-95 percentile range of individual model projections, the green is the model average, the red and blue are the average of the observations, as compiled by Remote Sensing Systems and University of Alabama in Huntsville respectively (adapted from Santer et al., 2011).

Over the full record (1979-2010) the real world has only warmed about two-thirds as much as models indicate that it should have. If this continues to the end of the century, the IPCC’s 21st century warming range of 1.1°C to 6.4°C becomes about 0.75°C to 4.25°C —with a central value of 2.5°C. But what’s worse is that a model/observation disparity could indicate that the climate models are not faithfully reproducing reality, which would mean that they are not particularly valuable as predictive tools.

My conclusion (which, is different from that of the authors) based upon the research presented by Santer et al.—that the models are on the verge of failing—is further strengthened by the results of another paper published in 2011 by Foster and Rahmstorf.

These researchers sought to identify the magnitude of the natural signals present in the observed trends of surface and lower atmospheric temperatures and to see whether the recent slowdown in the rate of global average temperature rise could be explained by the combination of the timing of natural influences (again, solar, El Niño/La Niña, volcanoes). Ultimately, they concluded that, in fact, it could be. And when the natural signals were removed from the global temperature record, global warming was alive and well and proceeding at a remarkable steady rate since the beginning of their period of study, 1979-2010 (Fig. 3).

According to the authors “[t]here is no indication of any slowdown or acceleration of global warming, beyond the variability induced by these known natural factors.”

Figure 3. Global temperatures (from various compilations of the surface (GISS, NCDC, CRU) and the lower atmosphere (RSS, UAH)) after the natural signals have been removed, 1979-2010 (from Foster and Rahmstorf, 2011).

What makes the Foster and Rahmstorf work particularly encouraging for lukewarmers is that the authors find that for periods of 30 years or so, the removal of natural variability makes little difference on the magnitude of the observed trend in the lower atmosphere.

However, thinking back upon the results from Santer et al., the same is probably is not entirely true for all of the climate model runs for the 1979-2010 time period. Almost certainly, the combination of random variability has added some amount of noise to the trend distribution even at time frames of 30 years or so.

What this means, is that if the modeled temperatures were also stripped of their natural variability, then the 95% range of uncertainty (the yellow area depicted in Fig. 2) would contract inwards towards the model mean (green line). The net effect of which would be to make the observed trends (red and blue lines in Fig. 2) over the past 30 years or so lie even closer to (if not completely outside of) the lower bound of the 95% confidence range from the model simulations. Such a result further weakens our confidence in the models and further strengthens our confidence that future warming may well proceed at a modest rate, somewhat similar to that characteristic of the last three decades.

Climate Sensitivity

Another popular lukewarmer paper in 2011 was published by a research team led by Andreas Schmittner from Oregon State University and concerned an estimate of the earth’s climate sensitivity (and the uncertainty about that estimate) derived from some recently published determinations of land and sea surface temperatures during the Last Ice Age based on a collection of climate proxies.

Schmittner and colleagues found that when using these newly available proxies from both land and ocean areas, not only was their central estimate of climate sensitivity (how much the earth’s temperature will change with a doubling of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide) a bit lower than the IPCC central estimate, but more importantly, Schmittner et al.’s determination of the uncertainty about their estimate virtually rules out climate sensitivities above 6°C. This finding is in stark contrast to the IPCC entertaining the possibility of a “fat right-hand tail” to the distribution of potential values including climate sensitivity values as high as 10°C or greater. In their Abstract, Schmittner et al. summarized their findings:

Assessing impacts of future anthropogenic carbon emissions is currently impeded by uncertainties in our knowledge of equilibrium climate sensitivity to atmospheric carbon dioxide doubling. Previous studies suggest 3 K as best estimate, 2–4.5 K as the 66% probability range, and non-zero probabilities for much higher values, the latter implying a small but significant chance of high-impact climate changes that would be difficult to avoid. Here, combining extensive sea and land surface temperature reconstructions from the Last Glacial Maximum with climate model simulations we estimate a lower median (2.3 K) and reduced uncertainty (1.7–2.6 K 66% probability). Assuming paleoclimatic constraints apply to the future as predicted by our model, these results imply lower probability of imminent extreme climatic change than previously thought.

Anther paper with a warm reception from the lukewarmers was published by Gillett et al. (in actuality, this paper was published during the first week of 2012, but was accepted for publication in late 2011, so I’ll go ahead and include it here). Gillett and colleagues used the character and evolution of the global average temperature from 1851 through 2010 to bend the output of a climate model to best fit reality (or at least reality as captured by the Hadley Centre/Climate Research Unit global average temperature compilation).

In doing so, Gillett and colleagues concluded that the temperature rise over the course of the 21st century is probably going to be considerably less than their raw climate model projections suggest. In fact, they write in their paper titled “Improved constraints on 21st-century warming derived using 160 years of temperature observations” that:

“Our analysis also leads to a relatively low and tightly-constrained estimate of Transient Climate Response of 1.3–1.8°C, and relatively low projections of 21st-century warming under the Representative Concentration Pathways.”

Basically, they found that when their climate model is constrained by reality over the past 160 years, that the temperature projections for the end of the 21st century are reduced by about 33%. This is a result of a similar magnitude as determined by Santer et al.

2011 (Dis)Honorable Mention

I would be remiss is my review of the climate stories of 2011 if I failed to mention the release of another round of Climategate emails. The so-called Climategate 2.0 emails further many of the storylines that ran throughout the original Climategate releases back in November 2009—rampant gatekeeping, data hoarding, and general misbehavior.

To me, the most significant thing that the Climategate emails show is that the deck is stacked against the publication of research results that are critical of the established scientific consensus and that the skids are greased for papers that run in support. It is little wonder why the literature is as one-sided as it is on the issue. The folks who are responsible for establishing the consensus have also taken it upon themselves to be the protectors of it. Not a good situation for the advancement of science.

All of which goes double to show that the papers which do make it through to publication and which chink away at the icon of alarming climate change quite likely are actually on to something.

Bottom Line

So what I have documented is a collection of observations and analyses that together is telling a story of relatively modest climate changes to come. Not that temperatures won’t rise at all over the course of this century, but rather than our climate becoming extremely toasty, it looks like we’ll have to settle (thankfully) for it becoming only lukewarm.

My guess is that 2012 will hold more good news for lukewarmers, both in terms of supportive scientific findings, and also in a migration of folks towards the middle of this issue. As being lukewarm becomes a bit more comfortable, I imagine that more folks will join the happy middle–and maybe my lunch calendar will start to fill up!

References:

Foster, G., and S. Rahmstorf, 2011. Global temperature evolution 1979-2010. Environmental Research Letters, 6, 044022, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/6/4/044022

Gillett, N.P., et al., 2012. Improved constraints on 21st-century warming derived using 160 years of temperature observations. Geophysical Research Letters, 39, L01704, doi:10.1029/2011GL050226.

Santer, B.D., et al., 2011. Separating Signal and Noise in Atmospheric Temperature Changes: The Importance of Timescale. Journal of Geophysical Research, doi:10.1029/2011JD016263.

Schmittner, A., et al., 2011. Climate sensitivity estimated from temperature reconstructions of the Last Glacial Maximum. Science, 334, 1385-1388, doi:10.1126/science.1203513 .

“Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is going to cost a lot (both in terms of dollars and effort), and it is going to produce few if any demonstrable climate results for decades to come (if ever).” 

The scientific community—or especially that part of it which holds the opinion that not enough is being done to mitigate potential climate change—is struggling with why the general public (and hence policymakers) are not heeding their call to action on global warming.

In a recent post, I pointed to one reason: the fast diminishing role that any U.S.-side mitigation would have in curbing greenhouse gas emissions enough to measurably affect global climate. This is a classic bang-for-the-buck evaluation. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is going to cost a lot (both in terms of dollars and effort), and it is going to produce few if any demonstrable climate results for decades to come (if ever).

In short, a mitigation (versus a wealth-is-health adaptation strategy) is a tough sell given even the most alarming climate change projections, and becomes nearly impossible under more modest climate change scenarios.

The role of climate change science has been, and continues to be, in arbitrating between the potential climate outcomes. And although there are some who argue that the science no longer matters as far the politics go, a lot of other scientists who make at least a partial living studying climate and climate change (including myself) would like to think otherwise.

And many of us have taken the additional step of not only producing science, but also translating our results (and that of others) into more layman’s terms, describing what implications the results have on the bigger picture of climate change, and then suggesting what, if anything, should be done about it. With mixed success (depending on who you ask).

AGU Confab: Curry’s Voice of Moderation

During the annual fall meeting last week of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), several talks and sessions were focused on this theme of (climate) science communications, exploring how scientists could better get their ideas across to the public at large. The general idea being that if the public were better informed and better educated about the issue, the better would be their decisions.

Most of the AGU talks were aimed at addressing the perceived failure of climate change communications—a failure gauged by the lack of political action on the issue. After all, if the science were being effectively communicated, then the perils of climate change would be obvious, and surely the general public would be imploring their elected officials to do something about it.

Climate science researcher-cum-climate science communicator Judith Curry was in attendance of many of the AGU presentations on this topic, as well as being a presenter herself. But her take on the issue was quite a bit different than most of the presenters.

Over at her blog Climate Etc., Curry gives her opinion about many of the climate communications talks at the AGU, and also makes available her presentation.

The main gist of her talk concerns the distinction between the “linear” approach to science communication and that of a more “circular” approach. The former is more akin to preaching, the latter with engaging.

In the linear approach, the communicator is basically telling the audience what to think about a topic of the communicator’s choosing. Basically, here are our results, here is what (we think) they mean, and here are the actions that (we think) should be taken.

In the circular approach, the interests of the audience feed back to the communicator, and each takes part in the discussion. As Judith Curry describes it:

Unlike the linear model that focuses on the messenger, the circular model views the receiver as an equal partner in the communication and focuses on the process of engagement (which includes dialogue and feedback).

With the benefit being:

When a messenger actually makes the effort to understand why an individual is unconvinced, this inevitably leads to both deepening and broadening the discussion to address complexity and uncertainties. The end result can be raising the level of the public dialogue.

Judith has embraced the circular approach over the past couple of years after coming to the conclusion (with the help of insight gained from the revelations contained in the climategate emails) that her previous linear presentations backed by IPCC science weren’t nearly as clear cut as she had thought.

Her switch from preaching to engaging has not been well-received by those more inclined towards establishing a storyline and sticking to it. Said one: “Judith decided a while back that the judgment of the community on what was interesting and what was not, was not itself to be trusted.”

But as someone who has spent much of my scientific communications effort trying to illuminate things that the “community” may have not found to be “interesting,” I applaud Judith for her new-found pursuit.

Below is reproduced the narrative from Judith Curry’s AGU presentation, titled “Engaging the Public on Climate Change” (the accompanying slide set is available here), in which she explains why she chooses to tackle the issue the way that she has. It is well worth rereading. She is history-in-the-making, her’s being a courageous voice at a time when the climate profession has been going hard toward alarmism/policy activism.

Engaging the Public on Climate Change

- by Judith Curry

In his talk yesterday Michael Mann summed up the frustrations of communicating climate change in three words: WHY NO ACTION? Opinion polls show that many people are unconcerned by climate change. And there has been a failure of the public to act on the risks perceived by the climate scientists.

So what is the solution to the climate communication problem? At this Conference and in this session, we are hearing a number of ideas re improving communication:

• Better messengers?
• Clearer message?
• More exciting presentations?
• Better educated populace?
• Squashing skepticism?

These ideas for improving communication are consistent with the linear model of communication, whereby science plus communication and translation of the science, should lead to action. The current buzzword for this is “actionable science.” The communication part of the linear model generally include simplified message, appeal to consensus, effective presentation, and translation for relevance. The focus of the linear model is on the message and messenger, as a disseminator of information.

In spite of substantial efforts in communication, many people remain unconvinced.

There is another model of communication, which is the circular model of communication. Unlike the linear model that focuses on the messenger, the circular model views the receiver as an equal partner in the communication and focuses on the process of engagement (which includes dialogue and feedback).

When a messenger actually makes the effort to understand why an individual is unconvinced, this inevitably leads to both deepening and broadening the discussion to address complexity and uncertainties. The end result can be raising the level of the public dialogue.

To engage effectively with the public on the issue of climate change, we need to recognize that the public salience of climate science is intimately connected with perceived risks and the costs of potential solutions, which are filtered through an individual’s world view and politics.

The goal of engagement is not just to inform, but to enable, motivate and educate the public regarding the technical, political, and social dimensions of climate change.

In the context of a circular process, experts and decision-makers seek input and learn from the public about preferences, needs, insights, and ideas relative to scientific topics, climate change impacts, vulnerabilities, solutions, and policy options.

There is a growing community of people that is demanding such engagement, not only on the policy issues but the scientific issues as well. The idea of the extended peer community has been around since the 1990’s, from the work of Funtowicz and Ravetz. When stakes are high and uncertainties are large, there is a public demand to participate and assess the quality of the data and research. There is a segment of the unconvinced public that consists of technically educated people who want to think for themselves. They are not prepared to cede judgment on this issue to the consensus authority.Further there is a growing number of scientists and other academics from an increasingly broad range of disciplines want to bring their expertise to climate research

The size of the extended peer community associated with climate change has grown substantially in the wake of climategate, which made many lose trust in the judgement of the IPCC experts.

New information technology and the open knowledge movement is enabling extended peer communities. These new technologies facilitate the rapid diffusion of information and sharing of expertise. This newfound power has challenged the politics of expertise. Climategate illustrated the importance of the blogosphere as an empowerment of the extended peer community.

My communication efforts have targeted the technically educated scientifically literate non-experts, many of whom are unconvinced by the IPCC’s arguments. The people that I have been engaging with include engineers, statisticians, physicists, chemists, medical doctors, lawyers, and economists.

Why am I targeting this group? In terms of absolute numbers, there are a small fraction of a percent of the population. However, this group includes many opinion leaders. Failure to pay attention to this group (particular engineers interested in data quality and statistical analysis) arguably led to Climategate Further, these experts from diverse fields have much to contribute to the research, communication and the public debate.

The forum for my engagement with this group is my blog Climate Etc. at judithcurry.com. My blog is a forum for engagement of technically educated people. My role is lead with topics for discussion, many of which are suggested by participants. Sometimes I make my personal opinion known and sometimes I do not. I most definitely do not try to tell people what to think. My blog is unmoderated, where the discussion is for the most part unconstrained. I’ve tried to establish a fair place for an open debate.

The end result has been thousands of interested bloggers, laypeople and scientists interacting, arguing, disagreeing, and learning. I often feature papers that are skeptical of aspects of the consensus science. In addition to responding the concern that skeptical papers are discriminated against by the mainstream community, I find that very interesting discussions can be provoked by considering a skeptical paper.

About a month ago, I received an email from a scientist who wanted to do a guest post on two papers that he recently had published on the topic of surface temperature data. I agreed to host his post, since his papers were relevant to the discussion we had been having on the analysis of the Berkeley surface temperature data. This particular scientist was a prominent member of the German skeptic group EIKE.

One of the first comments on this thread was from an IPCC lead author who thought that these papers were deeply flawed, and thought I was irresponsible and peddling disinformation by hosting this post.

This controversy was picked up by a number of different blogs, and there was a particularly good discussion on this at collide-a-scape. The argument on this topic was a classic clash between the linear and circular models of communication: scientists as gatekeepers of information to be disseminated to the public, versus scientists as facilitators of a free-wheeling dialogue.

A well known climate scientist and blogger wrote this statement on the collide-a-scape:

“Judith decided a while back that the judgment of the community on what was interesting and what was not, was not itself to be trusted.”

My judgment on what is interesting to the broader community has been formed by actually listening to them and trying to address issues of their concern. The community that I am interacting with on my blog is interested in these issues:

• Natural climate variability and nonlinear dynamics
• Climate model verification and validation
• Data quality
• Statistical analysis, uncertainty, logic of arguments
• Scientific method and responsible conduct of research
• IPCC
• Skeptical arguments

This is a different list of issues than the climate establishment has decided are interesting. 3 years ago, I wasn’t focusing my attention on any of these issues. Over the past 2 years, I have focused extensively on these issues on my blog, and increasingly in my published academic research.

This is the difference between linear and circular communication.

So where do I see all this going? I think that social media, particularly the blogosphere, has enormous unrealized potential to:

• facilitate understanding of complex issues
• provide transparency
• identify the best contributions
• increase the signal and filter out the noise
• drive public policy innovation
• reduce polarization

Climate scientists are increasingly experimenting with the climate blogosphere, in a variety of different ways. It is something that I have found to be enormously rewarding and educational on a personal level. I will leave the impact of my efforts to be judged by others.

In closing, I will state that I hope to see many more climate scientists developing their voices and communicating publicly in the blogosphere. To quote Chris Mooney: you have nothing to lose but your irrelevance.

Michael Mann: “I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause.”

Phil Jones: “I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process.”

The above emails are representative of the sickly fare of a group of physical scientists who set out to change the world from one of open-ended economic growth to one of economic constraint via international carbon planning. The good news is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gatekeepers have once again been exposed by the e-mail release of last week, now known the world over as Climategate 2.0.

Having conversations like this is way beyond the bounds of scholarship or decent inquiry. We have heard of market failure and government failure–we need the term academic failure to describe scientists behaving badly.

For students of neo-Malthusianism (alarmism in different dimensions that began with Robert Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on Population in 1798), Climategate 1.0 and 2.0 continue a trend line. To really appreciate the desperation of climate alarmists in the face of contimuing anomolies, theoretical and empirical, context is required. That context is the failed worldview of modern neo-Malthusianism, which has promoted fear after fear with an intolerant, smartest-guys-in-the-room, above-the-rules mentality.

Remember the “population bomb” where many millions would die in food riots? Well, obesity turned out to be the real problem.

Remember the Club of Rome’s resource scare? In 1972, 57 predictions of exhaustion were made regarding 19 different minerals. All either have been falsified or will be.

Remember the global-cooling scare promoted by, among others, the Obama administration’s science czar, John Holdren? (Yes, global cooling was a big deal, although it was not a “consensus.”)

And all of the above doom merchants were uber-confident and still are loath to admit they were ever wrong. Holdren, for example, has not disowned his prediction that as many as one billion people could die by 2020 from (man-made) climate change. That’s nine years, folks.

Climategate/Climate McCarthyism

Intolerance rules in the global warming scare. Read the new flaming emails from the principals of Climategate. Read about Joseph “Climate McCarthyism” Romm by his critics on the Left.  Read the words of (non-Climategater) Michael Schlesinger, who lost his cool against New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin.

And of course there is John Holdren, now science advisor to President Obama, who graciously rejoined as follows when I asked him to critically review my essay evaluating his 2003 criticism of Bjorn Lomborg, “The Heated Energy Debate.”  Holdren responded:

What exactly entitles you to the evidently self-applied label of ‘energy expert’?  …. You are of course entitled to (verbally) attack me in any legal way you like, but please don’t then pretend in personal notes to me that we are colleagues, each doing our best to get at the truth…. [Y]ou appear to be … lacking both discernible qualifications in the real world and the ability to tell a good argument from a bad one. I want nothing further to do with you.

A strange intellectual dude.

Remember Julian Simon

Today’s Climategate is predictable with some of the same players at work–and many new ones as well. Remember how Paul R. Ehrlich treated his intellectual rival Julian Simon? The Stanford University biologist refused to debate Simon or even meet him in person. He insulted Simon repeatedly in print. Ehrlich even scolded Science magazine for publishing Simon’s 1980 breakthrough essay “Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of Bad News,” with the words: “Could the editors have found someone to review Simon’s manuscript who had to take off this shoes to count to 20?” (quoted in Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource II, 1996, p. 612).

Here is the full story from chapter 11 of my Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy (pp. 272–73):

Science magazine in mid-1980 published an essay by Julian Simon that “raised the blood pressure of the scientific community a good twenty points,” one Malthusian environmentalist recalled. “Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of False Bad News” presented official statistics to refute high-profile media scare stories. In so doing, Simon challenged the interrelated notions of a fixed supply of land, fixed and depleting resources, a growing inadequacy of food supply, an inverse relationship between population and progress, and a worsening environment.

Simon’s cherry-on-top was answering, Why do we hear phony bad news? Part of his explanation was “bad news sells books, newspapers, and magazines: good news is not half so interesting.” He asked, “Is it a wonder that there are lots of bad-news best-sellers warning about pollution, population growth, and natural-resource depletion but none telling us the facts about improvement?”

The provocative essay, published on the home turf of the neo-Malthusians, put Simon’s ideas in play. Princeton University Press rushed ahead to publish what became Simon’s signature book, The Ultimate Resource. The sustainability debate was finally joined.

A flood of dissent filled the offices of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in response to Simon’s cannon shot. Paul Ehrlich asked: “Could the editors have found someone to review Simon’s manuscript who had to take off his shoes to count to 20?” Paul and Anne Ehrlich, John Holdren, and John Harte in a reply challenged Simon’s contention that oil was not becoming permanently scarcer. “The fact is that OPEC’s price hikes and the ‘improved market power’ of coal and uranium both reflected a new reality based on emerging scarcity of oil and natural gas.” Record oil prices gave at least superficial credence to their depletionism, but Simon, like M.A. Adelman, would soon have the upper hand.

Simon designed The Ultimate Resource (1981) to irresistibly engage his opponents. Using The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith as his model, Simon sought to write a popular book that would influence academia via the general public. Thus Simon turned over his trump cards in the introduction.

Hold your hat—our supplies of natural resources are not finite in any economic sense…. If the past is any guide, natural resources will progressively become less scarce, and less costly, and will constitute a smaller proportion of our expenses in future years. And population growth is likely to have a long-run beneficial impact on the natural-resource environment.

Energy. Grab your hat again—the long-run future of our energy supply is at least as bright as that of other natural resources, though political maneuvering can temporarily boost prices from time to time. Finiteness is no problem here either. And the long-run impact of additional people is likely to speed the development of a cheap energy supply that is almost inexhaustible.

Twenty-three chapters and thousands of data points later, his book ended: “The ultimate resource is people—skilled, spirited, and hopeful people who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit, and so, inevitably, for the benefit of us all.” This was Erich Zimmermann resurrected—but backed by a much richer empirical record within a wider framework. It was Zimmermann who had written decades earlier, “Freedom and wisdom, the fruits of knowledge, are the fountainhead of resources.” A science of expansionism, and the integration of “depletable resources” in the corpus of general economics, was at hand.

The Ultimate Resource, condensing and building upon Simon’s 1977 book, The Economics of Population Growth, offered a new way to view the world. Science historian Thomas Kuhn, two decades before, had explained the whirlwind that Simon now found himself in. In Kuhnian terms, Simon’s time-series data revealed a gaping anomaly in an entrenched neo-Malthusian paradigm. The process of normal science had now to give way to extraordinary science, a scientific revolution whereby a new gestalt came forth. Not surprisingly, the establishment, viewing the world in a preformed and relatively inflexible box, was intolerant of the new theory.

Paradigm shifts, Kuhn explained, overturn the established order. Emotions run high. The process begins with scientists … behav[ing] differently and continues with pronounced professional insecurity where years and perhaps lifetimes of work and writing are put at risk. If the paradigm is powerful and useful, with open questions answered, it prevails until only a few elderly hold-outs remain.

Simon’s shift of vision was not verifiable as in the laboratory sciences, where experimentation under controlled conditions can objectively settle matters. While taking into account physical laws, social science issues such as the costs and benefits of population growth offered plenty of wiggle room for scientists to interpret the data differently or hold out for new data. Julian Simon would practically have to go it alone until economists—a few, more, then many—joined him against an entrenched core of largely environmental scientists wed to Malthusian notions.

Is there a paradigm crisis with exaggerated climate science? Is this why, in Kuhnian terms, so many–far too many–scientists are behaving strangely and badly?

——————–

This post is slightly revised from December 8, 2009, given the respark of Climategate with the new release of emails.

In an executive order issued last week, Governor Deal stripped Dr. Stooksbury of his title and conferred it to a current employee of the state’s Environmental Protection Division—a position under direct government control, unlike Stooksbury’s rather independent office at the University of Georgia.

Certainly, the Governor can do as he chooses. And the newly tapped Georgia State Climatologist, Bill Murphey is seemingly qualified for the job. But, the move has all the signs of haste, and none of an orderly, well-thought out and coordinated transition. Which hints of something fishy going on.

It is worth bearing in mind that politics should consider scientific opinion, not shape it.

Stooksbury’s ouster is just the latest in a string of State Climatologists have been “replaced” in recent years for what seem like political reasons.

Patrick Michaels in Virginia. David Legates in Delaware. George Taylor in Oregon. Those three now-former state climatologists were on the rather cautious (and outspoken) side when it came to the possibility for alarming climate changes to occur as a result of human changes to the large-scale composition of the atmosphere. All three were ushered out by governors who had a different take on the issue. Michaels, Legates, and Taylor were victims of their title of “state” climatologist, even though, in this case, “state” referred primarily to geographical location more so than “government.” I guess the governors wanted to alleviate any confusion associated with the name and put someone in that position whose view better reflected that of the “State” (with a capital ‘S’).

What Is a “State Climatoligist”

According to the American Association of State Climatologists (AASC), “State Climatologists are individuals who have been identified by a state entity as the state’s climatologist and who are also recognized by the Director of the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as the state climatologist of a particular state.” Primarily, the State Climatologist does things like:

• Coordinate and collect weather observations for the purpose of climate monitoring

• Summarize and disseminate weather and climate information to the user community

• Demonstrate to the user community the value of climate information in the decision making process

• Perform climate impact assessments and weather event evaluations

• Conduct climate research, diagnosis, and projections

Usually, such activities don’t really attract the attention of the Governor, and so there never really is much conflict between “state” as a geographical location and “state” as the government. A change in Administration did not result in a change of the State Climatologist.

Until recently—when climate has been pushed to forefront of politics. Now having a State Climatologist whose views on climate change are not harmonious with that of the State Governor can sometimes be attention grabbing—and usually not in a good way for one of the two entities involved. Governors who previously were probably unaware that there was such a thing as a State Climatologist, now want to make sure they are on the same page.  I would think that would involve the Governor setting up a meeting with the scientist and getting briefed on the issue. However, with increasing frequency, it seems to be the other way around.

Certainly this was the case with Stooksbury.

The Governor’s Executive Order transferring the position of State Climatologist came as a complete surprise to seemingly everyone involved. In fact, Stooksbury learned of his ouster through a media inquiry. “There was word in June they were considering having the state climatologist report to [Environmental Protection Division], but as far as what happened this week, I was totally blindsided” Stooksbury said. Not only did Stooksbury lose his post, but so too did Pam Knox, the Assistant State Climatologist (Pam was the one-time State Climatologist of Wisconsin).  Both Stooksbury and Knox were eminently qualified for their position.

As to the forwarded reason for the switch, the governor’s spokesman said that it made sense to “centralize the [state climatology] office in state government.”

Stooksbury explains the implications of this move in an interview with Tom Crawford of the Georgia Report (in an article well worth reading,)

“You’ve kind of lost that independent voice for informing the public and informing decision-makers,” Stooksbury said. “I’m not sure that is good for the state in the long term. In a university setting, there is more independence, more access to the latest scientific information.”

Where’s the Beef?

Could the Governor have some beef with Stooksbury? Well, in this politically charged climate of climate change, Gov. Deal is on the conservative side of the issue. Stooksbury is somewhere in the middle—not particularly alarmed, but neither in denial that human greenhouse gas emissions et al. are having an impact on the climate. Stooksbury was not overly outspoken about the issue, instead spending the vast majority of his time doing the more mundane climate services tasks that State Climatologists do. However, Stooksbury would discuss his views on the topic of climate change if asked (See here, for example).

But, Stooksbury was hardly outspoken on the issue of climate change, saying that “I’ve tried not to make any comments on policy. I am a scientist. In public, I’ve been very quiet.”

Where’s the Outcry?

Admittedly, it is just speculation at this point that politics were involved in Stooksbury’s ouster but such speculation has not previously stopped outcry from various channels of the web when other State Climatologists were booted for seemingly political reasons.  So I am at a loss to understand why Stooksbury’s situation has not grabbed wider attention outside north-central Georgia. So far, the response has been little more than a trickle . I certainly don’t want to think that folks’ concern over political pressure only flows in one direction!

So, I’ll say it loud and clear—Georgia governor Nathan Deal made a poor decision in replacing David Stooksbury as Georgia State Climatologist. If politics were involved—then the decision was egregious. There is no better individual to serve the climate needs of the people of the state of Georgia. I am confident that everyone who has directly interacted with David Stooksbury (or with Pam Knox) would be in agreement. Clearly, Governor Deal never did.

Both the “state” and the “State” of Georgia have lost a valuable resource.

[disclaimer: I attended graduate school with David Stooksbury at the University of Virginia back in the late 1980s when we were both students of Dr. Patrick Michaels studying climatology in the Department of Environmental Sciences. David and I both worked for several years in the Virginia State Climatology. Even back then, he always had his sights set on becoming the Georgia State Climatologist—a goal that he ultimately achieved and at which he excelled.]

While the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency would surely love to use the findings of the Independent Climate Change Email Inquiry (aka the Muir Russell report) to brush aside the many challenges mounted, in response to the Climategate email scandal, to the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases endanger the public’s health and welfare (a finding which enables the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions), they’ll find little in the Muir Russell report to help in their defense.

Well, I should qualify that. They’ll find little scientifically to help their defense. Politics is another matter.

Since the EPA has largely based its Endangerment Finding on an appeal to authority—the primary authority being the IPCC—rather than its own investigations, the Muir Russell report plays right into the EPA’s hands when concluding (emphasis in original):

[W]e do not find that their [influential scientists from the Climate Research Unit of the U.K.’s University of East Anglia] behaviour has prejudiced the balance of advice given to policy makers. In particular, we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments.

At face value, it seems as if the EPA could take this as the only proof needed to dismiss all of the post-Climategate calls for it to reconsider it pre-Climategate Endangerment Finding.

But, as with just about everything else about the EPA’s Endangerment Finding, such action would be a gross oversimplification, a side-step around the deeper complexities, and an incomplete address of the issues raised against it.

Background

The Muir Russell panel was hired by the University of East Anglia (of which the Climate Research Unit, or CRU, is a part) to look into many of the allegations levied against CRU scientists as a result of the contents of the leaked Climategate emails. The Muir Russell panel found that while generally some of the CRU scientists did not play well with others whom they didn’t like, that their poor social skills did not result in any gross perversion of the scientific process—or at the very least, they didn’t subvert things enough to “undermine the conclusions of the IPCC.”

Of course they didn’t—their subversion was integral in establishing the conclusions of the IPCC!

It is the scientific truth (or our uncertainty thereof) which undermines the conclusions of the IPCC, not the contributions of the CRU scientists that erected it.

And establishing scientific truth was not a focal point of the Muir Russell panel.

IPCC “Assessments”

What the Climategate emails expose is how the CRU scientists, with the help of many others (whose behavior was not investigated by the Muir Russell panel), went about constructing the IPCC foundation—by selectively and purposefully portraying the science of climate change the way that they did.

As I have said repeatedly, the IPCC produced “assessment” reports—that is, selective presentations of climate science. Pick a different group of assessors, and you get a different “assessment.” Case and point, the NIPCC assessment report which has a fundamentally different take on things than the IPCC does.

Apparently, there is some debate as to whether or not the IPCC was supposed to operate in this manner. The Muir Russell panel claimed that is was (emphasis added):

The IPCC produces assessments of the current state of understanding of climate change, its causes and implications. Its approach is to produce the most probable account of these issues; together with their uncertainties, and to identify where there is insufficient evidence to discriminate between different interpretations of a phenomenon. Its purpose is to produce a “best estimate” of what is currently understood, through the work of a group of scientists chosen for their expertise and experience to make reasoned assessments on the balance of evidence. It is not to produce a review of the scientific literature.

While Roger Pielke Jr. claims that they were not:

The idea that the IPCC presents a “best estimate” understanding based on the views of a selected group of scientists is completely contrary to how the IPCC characterizes its own work. To suggest that the IPCC is “not to produce a review of the scientific literature” is just plain wrong.

However, since the title of the latest IPCC report is “The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” and not something like “The Fourth Comprehensive Review of the Science of Climate Change by the IPCC,” I side with Muir Russell rather than Roger Pielke Jr. on this one. Whether or not that is how the IPCC was supposed to function, that is how it did function. And as such, the CRU scientists involved in the IPCC process helped develop and flavor the IPCC conclusions, as revealed in Climategate emails in their full glory.

The Climategate, the EPA, and Muir Russell

What the EPA has been asked to do by its reconsideration petitioners (in light of the Climategate emails and its fallout), is to consider just how much influence the actions of the CRU scientists and the many other leading climate scientists not investigated by Muir Russell had in shaping the assessment in a particular manner in lieu of other valid and in many cases more compelling evidence pointing to different conclusions.

The petitions to the EPA asked many more questions, and presented far more evidence—both from the body of the Climategate emails and from the scientific literature produced subsequent to the latest IPCC report—than the Muir Russell panel answered or even investigated.

Here are a few examples of questions from one particular EPA petition, the Peabody Petition, that the Muir Russell panel did not adequately address (because it was beyond their scope, they glossed over the issue, or both).

“Divergence”

On the influence of the issue of “divergence” (i.e. in the past couple of decades some tree ring records fail to respond as expected to rising temperatures which calls into question the reliability of using them as temperature proxies in the pre-instrument era—for which they have been used), the Muir Russell panel has this to say (emphasis in original):

We do not find that the way that data derived from tree rings is described and presented in IPCC AR4 and shown in its Figure 6.10 is misleading. In particular, on the question of the composition of temperature reconstructions, we found no evidence of exclusion of other published temperature reconstructions that would show a very different picture. The general discussion of sources of uncertainty in the text is extensive, including reference to divergence. In this respect it represented a significant advance on the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR).

OK, so the IPCC included a discussion of uncertainty and a brief mention of divergence in its text. But the IPCC grossly downplayed how significant an issue divergence may be in interpreting the temperature reconstructions. In fact, as pointed out in the Peabody Petition (which acknowledges how the IPCC dealt with the topic), there have been at least three papers published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature since the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) was released that concluded that divergence eviscerates the reliability of temperature reconstructions. According to the Peabody Petition:

More importantly, after AR4 was issued, at least three studies have been published reanalyzing the data used in the proxy reconstructions cited in AR4, including two by authors whose reconstructions were used in AR4. These studies concluded that, in fact, the divergence problem makes the reconstructions unreliable. According to one study, the divergence problem “serve(s) to impede a robust comparison of recent warming during the anthropogenic period with past natural climate episodes such as the Medieval Warm Period or MWP.”⁵⁷ Another study found that the divergence problem makes it “impossible to make any statements about how warm recent decades are compared to historical periods.”⁵⁸ Another concluded that the divergence problem “is of importance, as it limits the suitability of tree-ring data to reconstruct long-term climate fluctuations, particularly during periods that might have been as warm or even warmer than the late twentieth century.”⁵⁹

It would seem, therefore, that the IPCC should have been more cautious in dismissing the divergence problem. It would also seem that the IPCC may have understood that there was something to hide after all.

⁵⁷ Rosanne D’Arrigo, et al., On the ‘divergence problem’ in northern forests: a review of the tree-ring evidence and possible causes, 60 GLOB. PLANET. CHNG. 289 (2008).
⁵⁸ Craig Loehle, A mathematical analysis of the divergence problem in dendroclimatology, 94 CLIM. CHNG. 233 (2009).
⁵⁹ Jan Esper and David Frank, Divergence pitfalls in tree-ring research, 94 CLIM. CHNG. 261, 262 (2009).

Clearly, Muir Russell in no way provides any scientific help for the EPA on the topic of divergence.

Transparency and Openness

Nor does it provide much assistance to the EPA on other topics raised in the Peabody Petition, including the (mis)match between recent temperature trends and climate model projections, demonstrable (and in some cases, admitted) errors in the IPCC reports, or the lack of openness and transparency in the preparation of the IPCC reports or the underlying literature upon which they rely. In fact, as to the latter, the Muir Russell finds (emphasis in original):

But we do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness, both on the part of the CRU scientists and on the part of the UEA, who failed to recognise not only the significance of statutory requirements but also the risk to the reputation of the University and, indeed, to the credibility of UK climate science

This is a huge blow to the EPA’s claims of a rigorous, transparent and neutral scientific process.

Subversion of Peer-Review

Further, the exposed infractions run far beyond “failing to display the proper degree of openness” and in fact spill over into perverting the peer-review process—one of the most fundamental elements of modern science.

Astonishingly, the Muir Russell panel gives the CRU scientists a free pass when it comes to their actions regarding peer-review (emphasis in original):

In addition, we do not find that their behaviour has prejudiced the balance of advice given to policy makers. In particular, we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments.

But the Muir Russell panel only focused on a few cases of peer-review meddling involving only a few CRU scientists. As a whole, Climategate reveals a much larger number of instances involving a much larger number of people. So the Muir Russell panel’s results are woefully inadequate for the EPA’s purposes.

And even in the cases that they did review, Muir Russell’s allegations that the way the Climategate scientists acted to wield their influence on the peer-review process was “ordinary,” is simply absurd.

For instance, it is not “ordinary” for a group of scientists to organize a boycott of a particular journal—in this case Climate Research.

Amusingly, in its submission to the Muir Russell panel (located here in its gory detail), the CRU maintains that the “CRU staff have not ‘boycotted’ the journal Climate Research.” An admission which indicates to me that they think “boycotting” a journal is not ordinary practice. Yet, back in the 2003/2004 time period, I specifically heard the term “boycott” being used to describe what was being organized against Climate Research for publishing papers that were not liked by some folks—and the Climategate emails confirm that such organization was taking place.

So what to make of CRU’s claim that they did not “boycott” Climate Research?

On the CRU web site there is a listing of publications by CRU scientists. On that list, I count 16 papers published by CRU scientists in the journal Climate Research during the 7 years prior to 2003/04 (by the likes of scientists like Phil Jones, Mike Hulme, Tim Osborn, Claire Goodess—all folks who make an appearance in the Climategate emails)—so obviously Climate Research was a journal frequented by CRU. In the years since 2003/04, CRU scientists published 2 papers in Climate Research (both papers by a pair of scientists, neither of whom was caught up in the Climategate scandal). Sounds like something changed in the 2003/04 timeframe.

And just in case you were wondering whether the (non)boycott had any impact on the types of papers accepted by the Climate Research editors, I was a co-author on 7 papers published in Climate Research from 1996-2004 and none since. In fact, the editors at Climate Research haven’t considered my last two submissions worthy of even being sent out for review, a fate that I would guess happens to less than 5% of all papers submitted to Climate Research, and one most commonly reserved for submissions that aren’t written in readable English. I may not be the world’s greatest writer, but I do write in English.

So, once again, it sounds like something changed at that journal in the 2003/2004 timeframe.

If you think the stink raised by CRU et al. didn’t have something to do with it, then you must sit on the Muir Russell panel.

And the Climate Research affair is just one of the instances of strong-arming peer-review that is evident in the Climategate emails. There are plenty of others—all well-documented in, for example, the Peabody Petition.

Bottom Line

While the Muir Russell panel may look the other way on most of these issues (after all they only had to answer to the University of East Anglia, the very folks they were investigating), the EPA does not have that luxury—because the EPA serves the American public, and the American public deserves, and hopefully will insist, that EPA does a more in-depth and open-minded job in responding the points well-raised in the various petitions to reconsider its Endangerment Finding.

A diligent EPA will find little of substance in the Muir Russell report and instead will conduct a thorough investigation of its own into the points raised by the petitions brought against it.

We’ll find out what course the EPA decided to take pretty soon, as the EPA is supposedly scheduled to release its Response to the Reconsideration petitions sometime in the next few weeks.

And now that the Senate seems unlikely to take up the issue of greenhouse gas emissions control anytime soon, all eyes will be on the EPA. Hopefully it will conduct itself in a scientifically responsible manner.

The Muir Russell panel—hired by the University of East Anglia (UEA)—concluded (some add, predictably) that the scientists from for the Climate Research Unit (CRU, which is part of the UEA) had not really done anything wrong aside from not being particularly cooperative with folks that they didn’t like.

The CRU scientists and their close colleagues who were caught up in the Climategate affair claim vindication (see RealClimate), alarmists love it (see ClimateProgress, Newsweek), those in the middle were a bit displeased (see The Atlantic, New Scientist) or wishy-washy (see DotEarth), and those feel that the Climategate emails revealed glaring problems with how climate change research is being conducted and brought to the public were crying “whitewash” (see Wall Street Journal, Watts Up with That).

It makes me wonder why Muir Russell bothered in the first place.

I find my reaction somewhere between the last two categories, which I guess would make me wishy-whitewashy. I don’t think Climategate revealed any great fractures in the general concept that human greenhouse gas emissions are leading to a warmer world, but it most definitely did confirm what I felt had been the case all along—that the Climategaters were not playing fair. And not playing fair has a lot more consequences than the Muir Russell panel cared to admit—this is where the “whitewash” comes in for me.

The lead editorial in the July 19th Wall Street Journal—which was largely reflects the op-ed by Patrick Michaels published a week prior by the WSJ—touches on some of the most glaring shortcomings of the Muir Russell panel and its findings—from non-independence, to circular logic, to evading the hard questions.

But anyone who has spent anytime with the Climategate emails, or read any of the myriad of blogs detailing their contents and adding behind the scenes insight from the folks who were actually involved in what was going on (myself included) hardly needs Muir Russell, or any of the other “independent” reviews to tell them what to think.

Aside from posing some questions directly to the CRU folks caught up in the whole Climategate affair (from scientists to administrators), there was little that Muir Russell’s group had available to them that all the rest of us didn’t already have. And just because Muir Russell queried CRU scientists Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, et al. directly about some of the allegations/implications of their emails doesn’t really give Muir Russell any special insight. I think that pretty much everyone could already anticipate the CRU response—duck, dodge, and parry. And CRU didn’t disappoint.

So Muir Russell’s “findings” shouldn’t be given any more credence than anybody else’s “findings.” It really doesn’t take any special talent to read through the Climategate emails and see that something was amiss—either in the layfolks’ opinions as to how scientists conduct themselves or as to how the scientists actually conducted themselves.

The shenanigans on display in the Climategate emails are just not right, no matter how you look at them.

The (mis)behavior revealed in the Climategate emails not only negatively impacted the work of those who it was directed towards, but also the general scientific community as well—which in turn effects each and every one of us, as the topic of anthropogenic climate change and what and whether to do anything to try to mitigate it is among the burning topics of the day. Gaming of the science has huge implications—look no further than the EPA to see this. Since the EPA relied largely on appeal to authority (largely the IPCC) to base its groundwork for regulating greenhouse gas emissions, if the “authority” has been tainted by a misapplication of basic scientific principles, then the EPA’s foundation is built on an unsure footing.

The Muir Russell findings underplays this danger in its three main conclusions, reproduced below (emphasis in original, British spelling retained).

• Climate science is a matter of such global importance, that the highest standards of honesty, rigour and openness are needed in its conduct. On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt.

• In addition, we do not find that their behaviour has prejudiced the balance of advice given to policy makers. In particular, we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments.

• But we do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness, both on the part of the CRU scientists and on the part of the UEA, who failed to recognise not only the significance of statutory requirements but also the risk to the reputation of the University and, indeed, to the credibility of UK climate science.

Their second point is the one which rubs me completely the wrong way. It is a pretty broad statement considering that Muir Russell took a pretty narrow look at the potential abuses. Muir Russell focused specifically on the actions of only CRU scientists (the Climategate emails involved a lot of scientists other that those directly employed by the CRU) and involved only a few cases of the potential for abusing power. And even in those cases, they did not look very deeply and gave out free passes.

For instance, in shrugging off the potential influence on science by the man-handling of the peer-review process evident in the Climategate emails, the Muir Russell panel defers to the opinions of editor of the medical journal The Lancet, Dr. Richard Horton. Somehow, Horton dismisses the behavior on display as “ordinary.”

Regardless of what the Horton claims about the behind-the-scenes behavior of scientists regarding peer-review, organizing a boycott of specific journals is NOT “ordinary” behavior nor should it be condoned.

And if all of the other activities that Horton claims are “ordinary”—then no one ever told me.

For all these years I have been submitting papers to journals, respectfully arguing my case with the reviewers and editors when given the opportunity, and then waiting to see what happens.

Silly me.

I now find out that I should have been pressuring journals to remove editors who were responsible for papers that I didn’t like, organizing everyone I could convince to boycott journals that occasionally published papers that I thought were bad, sending in unsolicited comments to journals and editors about papers which I found out through the grapevine were being considered, coercing editors to fast-track my submissions and delay publication of rival papers, writing nasty emails to people who found results that were a bit different than mine (and copying journal editors on the correspondence), generally creating an intimidating atmosphere, etc.

If not everyone knows that this is how it it done, it is little wonder that the literature—and the assessment reports thereof—is dominated by those who do.

In the closing thoughts of its editorial, the Wall Street Journal presages how the Muir Russell report may be used:

We realize that, for climate change true believers, last week’s report will be waved about as proof that the science of climate change is as “settled” as the case for action. It’s never hard to convince yourself of what you’re already disposed to believe.

In a follow-up to this post, I’ll look at an example of how the Muir Russell report may be “waved around”—in this case by the EPA in defending itself from myriad of challenges to its “Endangerment Finding”—that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions endanger the public health and welfare—a finding which paves the way for EPA to issue regulations of the GHG emissions. A string of recent petitions have implored the EPA to consider how the Climategate emails cloud the EPA’s vision of the state of climate science and to look into the matter for itself. However, if the past is any indication of the future, the EPA will quite likely “wave around” the findings of the Muir Russell panel—as incomplete, superficial, and uncompelling as they are—and in one fell swoop, dismiss all the challenges. I’ll discuss why this is both inappropriate and unsatisfying.

But do the experts opinions actually reflect the scientific knowledge on these subjects?

The answer is no.

In fact, the experts’ opinions tended towards the extreme, despite recent science which should have reeled them in. Which is a lesson in and of itself.

How much confidence would you place in expert assessments such as the IPCC reports, when the experts themselves disregard some science in favor of others (namely the science that they themselves have been involved in), despite any good reasons to do so?

Not much would be my answer.

A prime example of experts disregarding scientific knowledge is found in the PNAS survey conducted by Kirsten Zickfeld and colleagues.

Zickfeld et al. interviewed 14 experts about what they thought the climate future holds in store under various scenarios of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. The experts’ responses to the scenario in which atmospheric CO2 levels reach about 1000 parts per million (ppm) by the year 2200 is the one which got the most attention—predictably so, why pay any attention to outcomes which aren’t dramatic.

In fact, as evidence that the experts were themselves prone to the dramatic, Dr. Myles Allen (one of the experts interviewed), was quoted in the UK’s The Independent, that “We are certainly capable of committing ourselves to an emissions trajectory that make 1,000 ppm in 2200 almost inevitable if we make the wrong decisions over the next 20 years.”

This seems a little short-sighted and moralistic, but hey, these guys are experts.

And 13 out of 14 stated that there was a greater than 50% likihood that some sort of climate tipping point would occur by 2200 under the 1000ppm CO2 scenario while 9 of them put the probability as over 80%.

Undoubtedly, a leading factor in these beliefs comes down to the experts’ opinions as to what is the true value of the earth’s climate sensitivity. It turns out, that this has been a hard value to pin down—largely because uncertainties abound in both our understanding of the observed climate as well as how it got that way.

Zickfeld et al. report that the experts consider the leading cause of uncertainty about the behavior of the climate system to lie with cloud processes. Others causes consistently listed near the top were feedbacks involving ice and snow, water vapor feedback, and large-scale ocean circulation.

It is interesting to note that Zickfeld found that the experts had little confidence that scientific research would reduce the impacts of these uncertainties by half even if research budgets were increased by 3 times current levels.

Considering all that we don’t know, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can only state that the “likely” range (a confidence of between 66 and 90%) of the true value of the climate sensitivity lies between 2°C and 4.5°C, which, as Zickfeld explains, means that the IPCC thinks that there is just a 5% to 17% chance that the climate sensitivity is greater than 4.5°C.

But what to the experts think about the range of climate sensitivity? Figure 1 shows their expert opinion.

Figure 1. Range of values which are thought to contain the true value of the earth’s climate sensitivity, as given by 14 experts. The tick marks on the whiskers bound the 90% range, the boxes bound the 50% range and the small, thick horizonal mark reprents the median value of the distribution. The values in parentheses under the number of each reviewer is the probability that the climate sensitivity is greater than 4.5°C. (the grayed out boxes associated with some experts are how those experts responded to the question in a similar survey more than 10 years ago).

Now, before I go much further, let me discuss briefly who Zickfeld’s experts are. Probably a good half of them have been directly involved in research projects which have determined that very high climate sensitivity values were a distinct possibility, and exactly none of them were involved in research projects (such as those being carried out by Richard Lindzen or Roy Spencer) which suggest that the climate sensitivity is at (or below) the low end of the IPCC range.

So, the following results will hardly be surprising.

Zickfeld et al. report:

The IPCC report assesses that the “equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely to lie in the range 2– 4.5°C, with a most likely value of about 3°C.” IPCC defines likely as a 0.66–0.90 probability, which in Chapter 19, Working Group II (WGII) is interpreted as a 0.05–0.17 probability that climate sensitivity is >4.5°C. Examining the elicited distributions obtained from our experts, we find that 10 of the 14 experts placed >0.17 of their probability above 4.5 °C. [emphasis added]

So 10 of the 14 experts think the chance of a high sensitivity value is greater than that laid out in the IPCC. As a note, the other 4 experts listed the probability at 7%, 10%, 12% and 15%.

Even more enlightening is that 9 of the 14 experts consider a climate sensitivity of greater than 6°C as having a not insignificant 5% chance of being the true value.

What is so incredible about these numbers is that there is solidly argued scientific research (appearing in the peer-reviewed literature) that constrains the climate sensitivity range to a much greater degree than these experts do.

Most notable is a string of papers published by James Annan, a climate researcher at the Research Institute for Global Change of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and his colleagues. James argues that his research pretty strongly suggests that the upper end of the range of potential climate sensitivity is much more constrained than the experts realize (or admit to).

In his most recent paper on the subject, James concludes:

Based on some conservative assumptions regarding the value of independent estimates, we conclude that climate sensitivity is very unlikely (<5% probability) to exceed 4.5°C. We cannot assign a significant probability to climate sensitivity exceeding 6°C without making what appear to be wholly unrealistic exaggerations about the uncertainties involved. This represents a significant lowering of the previously-estimated bound.

Apparently, most of Zickfeld’s experts weren’t above “making wholly unrealistic exaggerations about the uncertainties involved” as 9 of them included a probability of 5% or more that the true climate sensitivity was above 6°C (and not a one had a probability as low as 5% for the climate sensitivity being above 4.5°C).

Clearly, the experts did not think too highly of James’ analysis.

All of this has left James shaking his head (from his review of the Zickfeld article):

So even though as far as I can tell everyone accepts that the fundamental points we make in our two papers are valid, they still stick to these old discredited results with long tails to high values. – in fact the answers are more alarmist than 15 years ago. Makes us wonder why we bother…

Read more of why James is disheartened at his blog post “Oh noes we’re all going die…by 2200.”

All of this shines interesting light on the latest entry over at the blog RealClimate—a prayer of sorts, that Gavin Schmidt picked up at a recent climate meeting which he offers for discussion:

Grant us…
The ability to reduce the uncertainties we can;
The willingness to work with the uncertainties we cannot;
And the scientific knowledge to know the difference.

The way I see it, there is real work being done to reduce the uncertainties on the estimate of the climate sensitivity, but the experts would rather not recognize these results and instead, they prefer to treat climate sensitivity as a type of uncertainty that can’t be known, because this allows them to better entertain the high end leading to future catastrophe and tipping points.

Which gets to the bottom of the bigger issue—that is, what is wrong with Assessment reports such as those from the IPCC.

Simply put, they reflect the opinion of experts rather than a comprehensive, or even unbiased, review of the scientific literature. The assumption that expert assessments draw upon the best scientific knowledge is a false one—what experts do drawn upon are their own ideas, some borne by their own work, and even if subsequent work seriously calls their own work into question, they stick to their old ideas. This is on display here, and also throughout the Climategate emails.

References:

Annan, J. D., and J. C. Hargreaves, 2006. Using multiple observationally-based constraints to estimate climate sensitivity. Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L06704.

Zickfeld, K., et al., 2010. Expert judgments about transient climate response to alternative future trajectories of radiative forcing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doi:10.1073/pnas.0908906107.

[The other parts of this series on the activism of Texas A&M climatologists are here: Part I, Part II, Part IV, and Part V]

Scientists find themselves fighting science when it comes to the highly unsettled physical basis of climate change. An example of this is the March 7th Houston Chronicle op-ed by two Texas A&M climate scientists (and four colleagues from other universities), “On Global Warming, the Science is Solid.”

I took general exception to their piece in Part I in this series, titled “Andrew Dessler and Gerald North on Climategate, Climate Alarmism, and the State of Texas’s Challenge to the U.S. EPA’s Endangerment Finding.” Chip Knappenberger yesterday took issue with their claim that the Texas Petition was flawed because it “contains very little science.”

This post critically reconsiders the op-ed, which argued, in effect, that the science behind climate alarmism is settled and that Climategate is a distraction from the core issues. Just the opposite may well be true.

Some Background

Evidently, Dr. Dessler wrote this op-ed and got sign-on from other Texas scientists to make it a ‘consensus’ statement. Here is how the Houston Chronicle attributed it:

This article was submitted by Andrew Dessler, professor of atmospheric sciences, Texas A&M University; Katharine Hayhoe, research associate professor of atmospheric sciences, Texas Tech University; Charles Jackson, research scientist, Institute for Geophysics, The University of Texas at Austin; Gerald North, distinguished professor of atmospheric sciences, Texas A&M University; André Droxler, professor of earth science and director of the Center for the Study of Environment and Society, Rice University; and Rong Fu, professor, Jackson School of Geosciences, The University of Texas at Austin. 

I refer to the piece as Dessler/North because the activist-oriented Dr. Dessler is the leader, and the most distinguished climate scientist of the six named authors is Dr. North.

Criticism of Dessler/North (et al.) Piece

A critique follows with the exact language of the (entire) op-ed in quotation and black and my comments in blue for ease of reading.

————————————————–

“In recent months, e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in the United Kingdom and errors in one of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports have caused a flurry of questions about the validity of climate change science.”

Comment: Why not use the term that everyone knows–Climategate (one can always use quotation marks to qualify it)? And if you know the emails were stolen, can you solve the mystery for the rest of us? If this presumption is no more than informed speculation, what does this say about your scientific belief system? You are speaking as professional scientists, after all, and not public relations specialists.

“These issues have led several states, including Texas, to challenge the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide (also known as greenhouse gases) are a threat to human health.

However, Texas’ challenge to the EPA’s endangerment finding on carbon dioxide contains very little science.”

A straw man argument? As Chip Knappenberger explained yesterday, the Texas Petition was not supposed to present science, it was filed to ask the EPA to revisit the science based upon recent revelation that many aspects of the process which produced the current state of science were flawed.

“Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott admitted that the state did not consult any climate scientists, including the many here in the state, before putting together the challenge to the EPA.”

The climate science world does not revolve around College Station, Texas, any more than it does/did Norwich, England (the home of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia of Climategate infamy). There is no reason to believe that the best of the best (much less politically impartial) climate scientists reside here in Texas. Non-Texas scientists regularly challenge Texas scientists, as the Richard Lindzen-Gerald North debate here in Houston in January attests.

There are other issues lurking below the surface–is a ”skeptic” or just “non-alarmist” hirable in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences or the Department of Oceanography at Texas A&M? Is there groupthink going on? Must junior faculty members at your and other Texas universities remain quiet? Does your statement advance open thinking and a ‘challenge culture’ at our universities? Why is there no such statement at, say, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Harvard University? Is climate science politicized where there are such statements?

 “Instead, the footnotes in the document reveal that the state relied mainly on British newspaper articles to make its case.”

Again, the case being made is about challenges to the state of existing climate science. It doesn’t matter where those challenges are presented, but rather their merit. Along with the investigative and summary reporting from some British newspapers (and other sources), the Texas Petition also includes much direct evidence of scientific misconduct found directly within the Climategate emails themselves.

“Contrary to what one might read in newspapers, the science of climate change is strong.”

“Strong”? Compared to what? Can science be “strong” but not settled? Is it being claimed that the science is settled too?

The error bars around past and future temperature projections are large, even huge. The whole range is in dispute. (Dr. North’s warming estimate has a range that lies outside of the IPCC range, for example.) Aerosols? Oceanic thermal lag? Cloud feedbacks? Stratospheric water vapor? And last but not least, given the slowdown of warming in the last decade or more–what about natural variability?  These crucial areas are in open dispute with profound implications for sensitivity estimates of greenhouse gas forcing.

Are today’s climate models “strong”? The IPCC report stated in its last assessment:

“The set of available models may share fundamental inadequacies, the effects of which cannot be quantified.”  - IPCC, Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis (Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 805.

That does not sound like “strong science” to me. (Whether or not it is “best science” is another question.) 

“Our own work and the immense body of independent research conducted around the world leaves no doubt regarding the following key points:

• •?The global climate is changing.”

A 1.5-degree Fahrenheit increase in global temperature over the past century has been documented by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Numerous lines of physical evidence around the world, from melting ice sheets and rising sea levels to shifting seasons and earlier onset of spring, provide overwhelming independent confirmation of rising temperatures. Measurements indicate that the first decade of the 2000s was the warmest on record, followed by the 1990s and the 1980s. And despite the cold and snowy winter we’ve experienced here in Texas, satellite measurements show that, worldwide, January 2010 was one of the hottest months in that record.”

Recovery from a Little Ice Age since the mid-19th century? El Nino influencing current temperature trends? What is being hidden in a rush to equate climate change to humans? Natural variability is very important too.

This general recitation of facts about the earth’s climate behavior ignores the details that matter to human health and welfare–exactly what is being considered by the EPA. And it is in such details that Climategate and the IPCC error (as laid out in the Texas Petition) have the most potential to misdirect our scientific knowledge (for example, the melting of Himalayan glaciers).

Whether or not this past winter was warm globally is small consolation to many Americans who dealt with harsh winter weather. Certainly, a bad winter in the South doesn’t disprove anthropogenic global warming. But what it does disprove is the notion that weather/climate events that most impact us are eminently knowable and preordained by “global warming.” Regional impacts of climate change, after all, are a health-and-welfare issue. And regional predictions from climate models are unreliable.

“• •?Human activities produce heat-trapping gases.

Any time we burn a carbon-containing fuel such as coal or natural gas or oil, it releases carbon dioxide into the air. Carbon dioxide can be measured coming out of the tailpipe of our cars or the smokestacks of our factories. Other heat-trapping gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, are also produced by agriculture and waste disposal. The effect of these gases on heat energy in the atmosphere is well understood, including factors such as the amplification of the warming by increases in humidity.”

Again, what is really important is in the missing detail.

Yes, human greenhouse gases lead to a general warming pressure on the earth’s climate. But there are many processes in between a higher GHG atmospheric concentration and higher temperatures. And it is within the complex interaction of these processes (many of which are not fully understood, or perhaps even recognized), that the ultimate climate response is determined. And the science is far from settled in precisely this crucial area.

” •?•?Heat-trapping gases are very likely responsible for most of the warming observed over the past half century.”

“There is no question that natural causes, such as changes in energy from the sun, natural cycles and volcanoes, continue to affect temperature today. Human activity has also increased the amounts of tiny, light-scattering particles within the atmosphere. But despite years of intensive observations of the Earth system, no one has been able to propose a credible alternative mechanism that can explain the present-day warming without heat-trapping gases produced by human activities.”

As Chip Knappenberger has argued in-depth at MasterResource, the use of the term “very likely” to describe a human role in ”most of the warming over the past half century” is unjustified—rendered so by recent scientific findings. Dessler/North/EPA/IPCC are behind-the-times on this claim. Again, the details matter.

“• •?The higher the levels of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, the higher the risk of potentially dangerous consequences for humans and our environment.”

Is this a ‘maybe’ or ‘possibility’ statement? Could increasing concentrations also improve benefits, even with extreme scenarios such as man-made warming preventing a new ice age (as may already have occurred, according to the suggestion by environmentalist James Lovelock)?

“A recent federal report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, commissioned in 2008 by the George W. Bush administration, presents a clear picture of how climate change is expected to affect our society, our economy and our natural resources. Rising sea levels threaten our coasts; increasing weather variability, including heat waves, droughts, heavy rainfall events and even winter storms, affect our infrastructure, energy and even our health.”

This Report is hardly the bastion of scientific credibility that Dessler/North make it out to be. Knappenberger described a draft of this report as “a fantasy piece on how [the authors] wished the state of climate science to be, rather than how it actually is.”

 

The final product was little better—emphasizing the potential negatives over the positives, and presenting, in general, an overly pessimistic view of the potential impacts of potential climate change on the U.S.—when there is plenty to be optimistic about. 

“The reality of these key points is not just our opinion. The national academies of science of 32 nations, and every major scientific organization in the United States whose members include climate experts, have issued statements endorsing these points. The entire faculty of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M as well as the Climate System Science group at the University of Texas have issued their own statements [here and here) endorsing these views. In fact, to the best of our knowledge, there are no climate scientists in Texas who disagree with the mainstream view of climate science.”

This is the argument from authority. Consensus is not science, and if there was clear science and a ‘consensus,’ Climategate would be unknown to history.

There have been previous “consensus” views across the sciences that have been proven wrong, from central planning as a social ideal to the false alarms of the Malthusian/neo-Malthusian scares (the “population bomb,” mineral resource exhaustion, etc.).

There was a consensus that Enron was a great company too (I fell for that one …), which brings up the parallels between Enron and Climategate for students of fads and fallacies–and internal groupthink.

The global cooling scare was not a consensus, but don’t tell that to such ferocious climate alarmists (now warmists) Stephen Schneider and Obama science advisor John Holdren. Humility is in order to those who want to say the science speaks with one voice for climate policy.

“We are all aware of the news reports describing the stolen e-mails from climate scientists and the errors in the IPCC reports. While aspects of climate change impacts have been overstated, none of the errors or allegations of misbehavior undermine the science behind any of the statements made above.”

Talking about Climategate? Why not use the term–even in quotation marks to indicate that it is a catch term, in your opinion?

“Errors”–what and how severe? In fact, what the “stolen” emails reveal is a hurried, panicked push to spin the science toward alarm. And if the authors have not read the emails (as North has admitted), are you sure there is not fire where there is smoke?

“In particular, they do not alter the conclusions that humans have taken over from nature as the dominant influence on our climate.”

Is nature optimal and the human influence bad, much less catastrophic? What value system is being snuck into the physical science debate? Many, myself included, fear that the natural scientists sounding the climate alarm have an unwavering, almost religious, notion that the natural world is fragile, and the human influence, whatever and whenever, is bad and worse. But the history of failed mini-climate alarms, as stated by Dr. North on other occasions, gives pause for such a gloomy view of the world. 

  And the Sins of Omission …

These scientists could have trumpeted the positives of the human influence on climate (and in particular CO2 as the “green” greenhouse gas); the benign distribution of the enhanced greenhouse effect (toward nights and the coldest regions’ winters); and the less-than-linear (logarithmic) effect of greenhouse forcing on temperature. But that is the detail–detail that goes missing when a case for alarm is condensed into a 750-word op-ed. A qualitative finding of a human influence on climate, after all, does not translate into a quantitative case for climate alarm. The human influence can be benign, and it can be positive. This is where the work of climate economists such as Robert Mendelsohn of Yale University becomes very important.

Conclusion

As is true of many polarized debates, the truth is somewhere in the middle. That middle has been explored by none other than Gerald North, the subject of Part IV in this series. His long held personal views suggest that the alarm of his colleague Dr. Dessler is exaggerated. But will the real Dr. North please stand up?

[The other parts of this series on the activism of Texas A&M climatologists are here: Part I, Part III, Part IV, and Part V]

“Texas’ challenge to the EPA’s endangerment finding on carbon dioxide contains very little science….”

- Andrew Dessler, Gerald North, et al….., “On Global Warming, the Science Is Solid,” Houston Chronicle, March 7, 2010. [Also see yesterday's Part I post on Dessler/North.]

Last month, the State of Texas filed a petition for reconsideration in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (summary here) against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The Petition lays out why the EPA’s reliance on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to provide an assessment of climate change science was a very bad idea.

After documenting flaws in the scientific literature, flaws in scientific behavior, flaws in the IPCC process, and flaws in the IPCC’s conclusions, Texas asks the EPA to re-examine its conclusions regarding climate change and its potential impacts on human health and welfare, and this time, not to rest its conclusions on the biased opinion of the IPCC.

In other words, Texas asks the EPA to do the work themselves—something they are mandated to do anyway.

The complete Texas Petition is available here in a single pdf file. But for easier navigatation, we have broken the full Petition up into its individual sections, and linked them into the Table of Contents page, which is reproduced below.

Hopefully, this will enable you to read through it in a more directed fashion so that you can go straight to which ever section you may be most interested in and see how Texas lays out its case for Reconsideration.

The Texas Petition

I. Introduction
II. Overview
III. Standard of Review
IV. The State of Texas’ Commitment to the Environment
V. The Endangerment Finding
VI. The IPCC Report’s Central Relevance to the Endangerment Finding
     A. The Relationship between the Endangerment Finding, the IPCC and the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University’s Hadley Center
     B. The IPCC’s—and the CRU’s—Expanded Footprint
     C. The Central Relevance of the IPCC, USGCRP, and the NRC
VII. Improper Conduct Revealed by Disclosure of CRU Emails
     A. The Lack of Integrity of the IPCC’s Data
          1. The IPCC’s Manipulation of Its Climate Change Data
          2. Loss or Destruction of Critical IPCC Records
     B. IPCC’s Routine Reliance on Questionable Source Materials
          1. Conclusions on Glaciers Admittedly Wrong
          2. Findings on Chinese Weather Tainted by Allegations
          3. Rain Forest Conclusions Based on Non-Peer Reviewed Sources
     C. The Lack of Objectivity & the Suppression of Dissent
          1. The Abuse of the Peer Review Process
          2. Suppressing Dissent
     D. Conflicts of Interest between The IPCC and Some Who Profit from Its Climate Change Conclusions
     E. Lack of Transparency at IPCC Points to a Result-Oriented Process
VIII. Harm to Texas
     A. Farming and Ranching
     B. Revenue from Mineral Interests
     C. Oil and Gas Sector
IX. Fallout
X. Conclusions

Overview of  Science-related Argument

Here is a taste of what you will find inside—in this case, from the “Overview” (in Section II):

Despite the Endangerment Finding’s remarkably broad impact, EPA’s Administrator relied on a fundamentally flawed and legally unsupported methodology to reach her decision. And although the Administrator is legally required to undertake a scientific assessment before reaching a decision that is supposed to be based on scientific conclusions, the Administrator outsourced the actual scientific study, as well as her required review of the scientific literature necessary to make that assessment. In doing so, EPA relied primarily on the conclusions of outside organizations, particularly the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”).

EPA’s reliance on the IPCC’s assessment to make a decision of this magnitude is not legally supported. Since the Endangerment Finding’s public comment period ended in June, 2009, troubling revelations about the conduct, objectivity, reliability, and propriety of the IPCC’s processes, assessments, and contributors have become public. Previously private email exchanges among top IPCC climatologists reveal an entrenched group of activists focused less on reaching an objective scientific conclusion than on achieving their desired outcome. These scientists worked to prevent contravening studies from being published, colluded to hide research flaws, and collaborated to obstruct the public’s legal right to public information under open records laws.

In addition to the improper collusion and cover-ups revealed by the release of these emails, since the public comment period ended, some of the IPCC’s methodologies and conclusions have been discredited. Not surprisingly, respected scientists and climatologists from around the globe have roundly criticized and correctly questioned the IPCC’s process, while calling for programmatic reforms.

Indeed, there has been worldwide fallout from scandals enveloping the IPCC. In Britain, four separate investigations have been launched, and the British Broadcasting Corporation has convened an inquiry into the journalistic appropriateness of its IPCC coverage. India has announced that it will create its own climate change institute rather than rely exclusively on the IPCC. And the United States Department of Commerce has created a new Climate Science Institute—though it has remained noticeably silent on the scandals plaguing the IPCC.

As a result, bipartisan legislation has been introduced in both chambers of Congress to prevent implementation of the Endangerment Finding and the related regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Notwithstanding the multitude and scope of these responsive measures, EPA has not indicated a willingness to review allegations that have shocked and appalled policy makers, regulators, scientists, and concerned citizens worldwide. Thus, while the State of Texas remains committed to work in cooperatively with EPA to protect the environment, this State must exercise its legal right to challenge a fundamentally flawed and legally unjustifiable process that will have a tremendously harmful impact on the lives of Texans and the Texas economy.

In light of the disturbing revelations detailed in the State’s Petition which strike directly at the heart of the objectivity, procedural legitimacy, and scientific validity of the assessments relied on by the Administrator—EPA should grant the State of Texas’ Petition for Reconsideration, conduct the rigorous, agency-led assessment that fully complies with Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”) rules governing federal agency processes, and then rely on that scientifically—and legally—sound mechanism before reaching a potentially trillion-dollar decision as to whether greenhouse gases from mobile sources constitute a danger to the public health and welfare.

Dessler/North ”Very Little Science“ Claim

The filing of the Petition prompted an op-ed article in the Houston Chronicle by Texas A&M’s Dr. Andrew Dessler and five of his colleagues who accused the Texas Petition of containing “very little science.”

This is a hollow accusation.

Texas’s Petition is not about presenting new science. It is about asking the EPA to do its own review of the science of climate change in light of the fact that the organization it has mainly relied on for assessing the science—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—as been shown in recent months to have been guided more by preconceived ideas of how they wanted the science to be, rather than what the actual science itself is. And further, and perhaps even more serious, are allegations that some aspects of existing climate change science may not even represent good, clean science, but instead, manipulation of the science by a prominent collection of influential scientists (who also are involved in the IPCC).

It seems that everyone understands this except Dessler and co-signers. A few days after the Texas Petition was filed, the Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott was interviewed by the Houston Chronicle’s SciGuy Eric Berger. Berger asked AG Abbott this question:

I noted that the state of Texas has a number of eminent climate scientists. Did he ask any of them about these issues before proceeding with a legal brief?

To which Abbott responded:

“Not yet and here’s why. At this stage we’re not focused on, nor need we be focused on, needing to prove anything from a scientific basis ourselves. An unceasing flow of waves in which the scientific information the EPA relied upon has been discredited. We need to be able to put to rest all the flaws in the information the EPA relies upon. There’s an unmitigated taint to the information the EPA has relied upon. The EPA can’t stick its head in the sand and ignore that, it must address that.”

Dessler and co-signers overlooked this justification in their op-ed. Abbott once again, in his own op-ed this past weekend, made perfectly clear the intent of the Petition:

The Environmental Protection Agency recently concluded that man-made greenhouse gas emissions — including carbon dioxide — are harmful pollutants and must be regulated. The lawsuit I filed challenging that finding does not address the disputed science surrounding global warming. Instead, it focuses on the indisputable fact that the EPA relied on information that has been discredited, manipulated, lost or destroyed, and sometimes evaded peer review. The lawsuit does not attempt to show that the globe is not warming. It does, however, show that the process used by the EPA in deciding to regulate greenhouse gases is riddled with errors that render its conclusion untrustworthy.

And that is the heart of the matter.

The Real Science Issue

The Texas’ Petition is not supposed to be about the science (nor should it be). It is about building a case why the EPA ought to take another look at the science in light of the recent indications that the science isn’t all that it is cracked up to be.

While Dessler and colleagues want to discuss the existing science—in their Chronicle letter they present their own ideas of the current state of climate change science, (some details of it are somewhat debatable, see tomorrow’s post)—the issue is much broader than that.

The bigger, and more unknown problem is in the non-existing science—that is, what should be part of the current science but isn’t because of the improper practices which have taken place as evidenced in the Climategate emails and described in the Texas Petition.

Here is how I summed up the situation a few months ago:

It is not so much what has appeared in the scientific literature after ‘decades of work by thousands of scientists around the world’ regarding human-caused climate change, but what has not appeared in the literature. The Climategate emails [as described in the Texas Petition] reveal signs of manipulation of the peer-review process, and what’s worse, intimidation of individual researchers, from a group of prominent scientists who seek to closely guard their view of the evidence and are who are largely intolerant of countervailing hypothesis or interpretations. The degree to which the extant scientific literature can be judged a fair representation of what our scientific understanding may have been like absent these tactics is impossible to ascertain. The unfortunate, but undeniable side effect, is that the foundation of state, national, and international assessments of the potential impacts of climate change and considerations of what actions may be necessary to mitigate them has been shaken—not by what our knowledge is, but by what it should be. The latter of which, through the actions revealed in the emails, has been rendered largely unknowable.

This is the aspect that Dessler and co-signers want to brush under the carpet, because this aspect is particularly difficult, if not downright impossible to overcome in the short run—and thus may set back the EPA’s ability to make an defensible assessment of the potential impacts of climate change for many years to come. It is that bad.

See for yourself by exploring the Texas Petition above. And when you are through with Texas’ submission, you can look through the eight other Petitions for Reconsideration received thus far by the EPA. They can be found, in their entirety, here.

[The other posts in this series on the activism of Texas A&M climatologists are here: Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V]

On March 7th, the Houston Chronicle published an editorial by two Texas A&M climate scientists, Andrew Dessler and Gerald North (et al.):  “On Global Warming, the Science is Solid.” The op-ed argued that Climategate was a mere distraction and that climate science was settled in favor of alarm–both points being intended to challenge the State of Texas’s Petition for Rehearing to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding, which was based on a belief of “settled science.”

A week later, a response/defense followed in the Chronicle, written by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott: “State Suing for Responsible Scientific Conclusions.” His argument was that significant scientific uncertainties (nonsettled science) were tweaked away at Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, England, and major errors in the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have come to light.

Challenging the Dessler/North (et al.) Op-Ed

The general problem of the Dessler opinion piece was oversimplification and the use of half-truths. I took issue with it in this (unpublished) letter-to-the-editor that I sent to the Chronicle:

[This op-ed] is a perfect example of groupthink, argument from authority, and agenda-driven science. If climate alarmism is really settled science as asserted by the coauthors, then why did their leading brethren get caught desperately communicating with such phrases as “the lack of warming” and “hide the decline”? Why did these leading scientists refuse to release their data and methods? Why are hearings being held and official temperature reconstructions now underway? Climategate, the Enron of science, is not fiction but fact.

Six weeks ago, hundreds of Houstonians witnessed two global warming debates, one hosted by the Houston Forum and the other by two science groups at Rice University. One of the two participants, Richard Lindzen, Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT, debated one of the authors of this op-ed, Gerald North of Texas A&M.

Dr. Lindzen’s viewpoint was that climate science has been politicized by the likes of Al Gore; that carbon dioxide warming is modest and probably beneficial; and that the whole dizzying debate between natural and manmade warming after a century of greenhouse gas buildup concerns tenths of one degree, hardly a basis for alarm.

There are strong arguments against a Climategate-is-small, science-is-settled rationale behind climate alarm and policy activism–and thus against the U.S. EPA’s finding that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and a danger to human health. A scientific case can be made that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are positive, not negative, for the environment and society. Part of this conclusion has come from my decade-plus interaction with Gerald North, a co-author of the piece in question.

MasterResource Posts to Come

This is the first in a series at MasterResource regarding the pushback by Texas A&M climate scientists against the Texas Petition and, more generally, their pushback against the breakdown of the ‘scientific consensus’ of climate alarmism.

Part II (tomorrow) will  post a summary of the Texas Petition for Rehearing regarding Climategate and IPCC science.  Chip Knappenberger will provide commentary.

Part III (Friday) will offer a point-by-point rebuttal to the above linked op-ed which I feel is subtly deceptive and obfuscates the real issues by attacking straw men.

Part IV next week will examine some emails from Gerald North (most from his/our Enron consulting period) that show climate alarmism in a somewhat different light, and thus suggest that North and other “mainstream” scientists have circled the wagons and not confronted Climategate’s agenda-driven, ends-justifies-the-means perversion of scientific endeavor.

Let’s Pull Back the Curtain Some More

The thousand Climategate emails, reproduced and categorized on the Internet and summarized in book form by two self-described ‘global lukewarmers’, speak for themselves.

The communications to and from the IPCC insiders reveal much more than just a lack of ethics and professionalism. The treasure trove confirms the worst suspicions that a lot of us have harbored as a result of having interacted with alarmist scientists (including Tom Wigley of NCAR, who tried to silence my skeptical views while I was at Enron with a scathing letter to CEO Ken Lay).

There are thousands more unearthed emails from climate scientists that also need to see the light of day to inform the current debate–and give philosophers and historians of science more data for their stocktaking of this debate.

To this end, I have retrieved more than a decade of emails between many leading climate scientists on all sides of the scientific debate and myself. Many of these involve Dr. North in a professional capacity as a paid consultant for Enron. And I believe that they will show a “skeptic” side that has been sacrificed to a help-our-colleagues, save-the-IPCC mentality at Texas A&M.

Political activist Andrew Dessler has been in the middle of this, and Dr. North seems to have gone hard Left to join him. This, in my view, is a very negative development that should be exposed and debated by all of us. (I welcome their rebuttal here or at another website.)

May a more informed debate–and a narrowing of one’s private and public opinions–ensue.