“I am not afraid about the climate.”

- Judith Curry, quoted in Alexandre Mansur, “American Researcher Says That There Is Still a lot of Uncertainty About Global Warming, Época, May 1, 2010.

“Real Climate, I think they’ve damaged their brand. They started out doing something that people liked, but they’ve been too partisan in a scientific way.”

- Judith Curry, quoted in Eric Berger, “Judith Curry: On Antarctic sea ice, Climategate and skeptics.” August 18, 2010.

There is solid middle ground in the ever-contentious climate-change debate. And now is the time to welcome it, given that politics is not going to reverse in any detectable amount the human influence on climate.

And the shame of the post-Climategate era is that other scientists like Curry did not join her to right the wrongs of a profession that has become politicized, agendacized, and Malthusiancized. And perhaps no one more than Gerald North of Texas A&M epitomizes this lost opportunity. For North is a middle-of-the-roader who inexplicably went Left after Climategate, a story that I documented here at MasterResource.

Eric Berger of the Houston Chronicle, whom I have previously identified as a straight shooter in the climate debate, recently posted an interview he did at his blog SciGuy with Professor Curry that is reprinted below (with permission). I also attach an appendix of another Curry interview.

Judith Curry: On Antarctic Sea Ice, Climategate and Skeptics

It’s been an interesting year for climate scientist Judith Curry, who after Climategate split with most of her peers and called for reform in the climate science community. She did this most publicly via a letter published by Climate Audit, a noted skeptic web site. Curry called for more transparency in climate research.

Judith M. Curry

Since that time progressive climate sites have begun to increasingly attack Curry (see here and here, for example).

But it’s difficult to paint Curry as a skeptic, especially when considering her scholarly work, the most recent of which was published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (see abstract). It delves into the question of why the Antarctic sea ice hasn’t been melting, and builds upon the consensus climate view.

Given the new paper I thought it a good time to speak with Curry about the last year. Here’s a transcript of our discussion.

EB: We’ve seen rapid melting in the Arctic, but not in the Antarctic. Is this something that has concerned climate scientists?

JC: It’s sort of a paradox. The paradox of why the Antarctic isn’t melting and the Arctic is has gotten a lot of attention, and it’s become one of the skeptics’ arguments. The climate models have generally matched the observations, so scientists have said that’s what the climate models predict, and people haven’t been too bothered by it. But trying to understand exactly what has been going on has not been intuitive. It’s not like there’s been a big debate in the climate community, or a lot of worry about this, because observations have agreed with the models. But that didn’t really explain anything. So in this paper we’ve tried to dig in and find out what really has been going on.

What did you find?

The answer is tied up in a combination of natural variability and global warming. But the most important part of the story is it’s not so much the direct heating from above, but how the precipitation modulates the heating both from below and above. The explanation we’ve found doesn’t translate into a simple sound bite.

So give me a non-sound bite answer.

Sea ice can melt from both above and below, either heating from the ocean below or the atmosphere above. In the case of the Arctic most of the melting is driven from the warmer atmosphere above. In the Antarctic most of the melting has been driven from the ocean below. What our study has identified is that there’s been increased precipitation over the last few decades that has freshened the upper ocean, which makes it more stable so the heat below doesn’t make it up to the sea ice to melt it.

Freshens the upper ocean?

It decreases the saltiness. When you have a fresh layer on top that’s less dense it acts as a barrier to prevent the mixing of warmer water from below. It insulates the ice to some extent. We’ve also seen a big role of natural variability, over the past 30 years or so the dominant climate signal has been from the Antarctic Oscillation rather than from global warming. The net effect of all this has been an increase in precipitation, mostly snow. This diminishes the melting both from below and above. It stops the melting from above because snow has a higher albedo and reflects more sunlight.

At some point does this result in a net loss of ice rather than gains?

What happens in the 21st century projections is that the global warming signal begins to dominate. We still have the freshening of the upper ocean, but the upper ocean is getting warmer because of a warmer atmosphere. And the precipitation starts to fall more as rain than snow. Rain falling on ice speeds the melting from above.

PNAS

Three different models show Antarctic ice beginning to recede around 2060.

Aside from the new paper, you’ve certainly had an interesting year as a climate scientist.

Oh my gosh, I stepped into it with that little essay I put out. I figured, in for a penny in for a pound.

You have been among the most outspoken scientists in the wake of the Climategate e-mails. Most sought to downplay their significance. You took a position that this was a teachable moment for climate science. Has you gotten any traction on this?

The thing that’s getting traction, the most important thing, is the need for transparency, to get the methods out there and the data out there. There’s a real public demand for accountability on this subject and it’s just plain good science. With the World Wide Web it’s just easy to do. The whole transparency thing, everyone agrees on that, and it’s slowly happening. The other thing I’m seeing is that two of the professional societies, the American Meteorological Association and the American Geophysical Union, are talking about ensuring that skeptical papers get through if they’re of the right quality.

Some people were getting their papers rejected because they disagreed with the IPCC. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. Papers were getting rejected for the wrong reason. It’s good that professional societies are taking this seriously. Those are some good things that have happened in the science community.

What about on the policy side?

On the policy side of it everything seems to have fallen apart. A year ago it seems like we were on track for something to happen, but everything’s fallen apart for a whole host of reasons. It’s not like Climategate caused all that. There were a whole bunch of political and economic issues, like the developed world versus developing countries.

Frankly I think this is a good thing that it’s fallen apart in the short term so everyone can sit back and reflect a little bit more on what we should be doing — to try and really understand where our common interests lie and maybe get away from the UN Model and understand the unintended consequences of some of the policies people are talking about. There’s some no-brainer things that people can be doing, and I hope some of this can get started. But in terms of these big, huge far-reaching policies … the work that needs to be done is really in the economic and political arena to figure out what actually makes sense to do.

Solutions that make sense to a broad range of interests?

Exactly. Otherwise it’s just not going to happen.

Have the positions you’ve taken affected your standing in the climate science community?

I have no idea. I haven’t had any obvious ostracism. A few people who were directly involved in Climategate e-mailed me and weren’t particularly happy about it. But I’ve gotten encouragement from other people, and other people don’t seem to be particularly aware of it. I’ve gotten a fair amount of positive feedback but there’s probably a lot going on out there among people who don’t directly communicate with me. I think it’s fair to say it’s pretty unpopular in certain circles.

Yes, you’ve certainly been raked over pretty good by certain sites like Real Climate and Climate Progress.

Oh yes. Those guys are directly involved in Climategate so that’s not a huge surprise. (note: Joe Romm, of Climate Progress, was not directly involved in Climategate as his private e-mails were not published. Gavin Schmidt, of RealClimate, points out that he was the victim of a crime and not guilty of anything.)

Do you think those kinds of sites are helpful in trying to build public confidence in climate scientists?

That’s a tough one. Real Climate, I think they’ve damaged their brand. They started out doing something that people liked, but they’ve been too partisan in a scientific way. Their moderation hasn’t been good. There was a lot of rudeness toward me on one thread that was actually encouraged by the moderators. I don’t think that has served them well.

Why have you been so conversant with some of the so-called skeptical sites, sites that are certainly outside mainstream climate science?

One of the other positives that I think has come out of Climategate is a realization of what other bloggers like (Steve) McIntyre (of Climate Audit) are actually up to. This isn’t Merchants of Doubt, oil-company-funded effort. It’s a grassroots effort. These are people who are interested, they want to see accountability. They have a certain amount of expertise and they want to play around with climate data. There’s no particularly evil motives behind all this.

We really don’t understand the potential or impact the blogosphere is having. I think it’s big and growing. The sites that are growing in popularity are Watts Up With That, which really have huge traffic. I think there’s a real interest in the subject. I think there’s a hunger for information. I think there’s a huge potential here for public education.

People say it’s polarizing, and sure, you have Climate Progress and Climate Depot on the two extremes, but in the middle you’ve got all these lukewarmer blogs springing up. So I can also see a depolarizing effect. There seems to be a lot more stuff building up in the middle right now. With the IPCC, and the expectation that scientists hew to the party line, it was getting pretty evangelical. When I speak up about maybe there’s more uncertainty, some people regard that as heresy. That’s not a good thing for either science or policy. We’ve got to lose that.

————————————————-

Appendix: The Curry Interview in Portugal (Alexandre Mansur, “American Researcher Says That There Is Still a lot of Uncertainty About Global Warming, Época, May 1, 2010.)

ÉPOCA – Do you have any fear of the consequences of climate change?

Judith Curry – There exist significant risks associated with them. This whole question of how “dangerous” is climate change has not been adequately evaluated. But I am not personally afraid of this.

ÉPOCA – Are scientists fulfilling their mission to inform the public?

Curry – The public’s perception that global warming is a planetary emergency probably had its peak between 2005 and 2007, with Hurricane Katrina and Al Gore’s film.  Since then, interest has been falling. The skepticism of climate change now questions if the impacts of warming are large or predominantly adverse. And if anything can be done to improve the situation. The public debate has deteriorated into attempts to discredit or censor scientists. And what we see is propaganda in order to influence the politics, and not to inform the public.

ÉPOCA – What is the risk of this?

Curry – Many researchers, genuinely worried about the risks of warming, including myself, are disappointed by the political decisions for confronting the climate challenge. To begin with, I believe it is necessary to make changes to the IPCC, in order to reestablish its credibility. The process needs to be more open. It is necessary to improve the selection of authors and reviewers. A team of inspectors should supervise the process and investigate complaints. Due to the release of the e-mails, we must change the manner in which we evaluate the uncertainties. Many times, in the IPCC reports, the mere judgment of a specialist replaces the degree of uncertainty of the data of a rigorous scientific analysis. We are talking about the imprecision in the time of adjusting the temperature data in order to compensate for the effects of urban heat (the growth of cities, with a concentration of cement and asphalt, artificially increases the temperature of the region). Or to fill in regions of the Earth where there are no data available.

ÉPOCA – What do we still not know about climate change?
Curry – There are still many uncertainties. They are associated with the records of temperatures in the past. And also the climate models that researchers run on their computers to simulate the behavior of the atmosphere and to make estimates of the future.

ÉPOCA – It possible that science will be able to establish the degree of seriousness of the climate crisis?

Curry – They do not know with certainty how much of the warming that occurred in the 20th century can be attributed to human activity. And the projections for warming for this century are not exact.

ÉPOCA – Do we need to wait until these uncertainties are reduced or eliminated before we make decisions that avoid the worst consequences of climate change?

Curry – This is not what I am suggesting. The uncertainties cannot be eliminated. We make decisions all the time in uncertain situations. It is that the degree of imprecision should be taken into consideration in the decision process. The chances of tragic consequences due to warming are at a minimum at least as great as arms of mass destruction in Iraq would have been. In the end, they did not exist, but we went to war anyway. We have a history of deciding to act in order to avoid bad things even when the probability is low.

“No one knows how much of the warming that occurred in the second half of the
twentieth century can be attributed to human action”

ÉPOCA – How can we tell the legitimate skeptics from the industry lobbyists who just want to increase confusion?

Curry – The fundamental question turns on the data and scientific models. A genuine skeptic puts forth arguments and will debate these in scientific journals or technical blogs.

ÉPOCA – Do you see a lobby campaign by the fossil-fuel industry to increase confusion?

Curry – This also exists. But I do not see it as an important factor in skepticism in general in relation to climate change. The majority of people who write against the control of emissions use political or economic arguments. They are not concerned with the science. You can’t even call them skeptics. There are other skeptics who have a background in science. But few of them receive any money from oil or coal companies.  Entities like the American Enterprise Institute or the Competitive Enterprise Institute are preoccupied with the politics that could affect the competitiveness of the U.S. and our economy. So, they spend time and money organizing conferences and demanding information from climate researchers.

ÉPOCA – How do you view the controversy generated by the e-mails that were taken from the University of East Anglia?

Curry – The e-mails fed the concern about the methods used to construct the chronology of temperatures on Earth’s surface over the last 1,000 years. It is call the “hockey stick” (that shows a long period of lower temperatures and a sharp increase in the most recent years, like the end of a hockey stick).  Also, the e-mails raised doubts about the behavior of the scientists in relation to the process of evaluation by colleagues of each study, before it is published in scientific journals. And maybe there were even violations of the Freedom of Information Act (or FOA, as it is abbreviated in English, a law that gives a citizen the right to ask for access to secret government documents).

ÉPOCA – Do the messages exchanged between Michael Mann and Phil Jones demonstrate any sign of improper conduct?

Curry – There exist various investigations for evaluating this. From what I know, the answer would be “yes.”

ÉPOCA – The investigations by the British scientific committee and the University of Pennsylvania exonerated Mann and Jones.

Curry – I agree with the conclusion of the investigations that there was no evidence of incorrect scientific conduct. I did not see a sign of plagiarism or falsification of data in the work of the scientists. Not using all the data, selecting data arbitrarily and using inappropriate statistical methods do not fall under incorrect conduct. But also it does not inspire confidence in the product of the research. The behavior of these scientists, such as disqualifying critics and showing little transparency, delaying the public availability of the temperature data they used. But I think it is time to stop focusing on individual behavior and to start a reevaluation of the entire process of the IPCC’s scientific evaluation.

ÉPOCA – What needs to change in the IPCC?

Curry – It needs to be more open to different opinions and to external verification. There is a rush to publish articles in scientific journals just before the IPCC closes. Clearly, scientists want their work to be included. There is the perception that the best way to get your work included is to support the basic narrative of the IPCC. And the scientists of the IPCC tried to disqualify researchers who published articles with contrarian opinions. Thus, in order to continue to be relevant, the IPCC can no longer limit itself to summarizing the scientific literature every five years. It needs to open the range of scientific views about warming and the political options for confronting it.

“We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.”

- James Hansen, “The Threat to the Planet,” New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006.

“Desperation is setting in among climate alarmists who by their own math can see that the window is rapidly closing on ’saving the planet’.”

- Kenneth Green, ”A Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism, Redux?” MasterResource, September 30, 2009.

And what was true in June is even more true today as the failure to price carbon dioxide (CO2) is leaving Europe as the sacrificial lambs on an altar of climate-change inconsequentiality.

Here is the latest stanza on the death spiral as reported earlier this month in ClimateWire.

APPENDIX A: Lisa Friedman, “U.S. Accuses Countries of  ‘Walking Back’ from Copenhagen Accord,” ClimateWire, August 9, 2010.

Climate treaty negotiators wrapped up talks this weekend agreeing on one thing: their disappointment.

As delegates from nearly 200 countries left a weeklong negotiating session in Bonn, Germany, diplomats from the Americas to Lesotho warned that countries are moving away from agreement. Blame flew far and wide, though, depending on who was flinging the charges.

“While I came to Bonn hopeful that we would make significant strides toward a deal in Cancún, at this point, I’m very concerned,” U.S. deputy climate envoy Jonathan Pershing said.

He accused developing countries that had previously endorsed the Copenhagen Accord crafted at last year’s U.N. conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, of backpedaling. Under the voluntary agreement, all the major polluters of greenhouse gases agreed to cut or scale back the rate of emissions and submit to oversight. In return, industrialized nations vowed to mobilize up to $100 billion annually for the poorest countries, also in a way that can be monitored and verified.

Pershing declined to name names but said some countries now are challenging the notion that all major emitters should be held to the same legal obligations. Others, he said, are angling for far more than the promised $100 billion.

“Unfortunately, what we have seen over and over this week is that some countries are walking back from the progress made in Copenhagen and what was agreed there,” he said. “Instead, what we need to do is move forward. We need to be ambitious; we need to be pragmatic.” ….

The next annual U.N. climate conference is slated for Cancún, Mexico, this winter. Diplomats do not expect to complete a new treaty there, but the United States and others hope to at least put in motion some elements of the Copenhagen Accord. ….

Several said the U.S. Senate’s decision to abandon climate legislation last month poisoned the atmosphere in Bonn. “There is a perception that because there is no adequate legislation in the United States … that has been taken as a signal by some that nothing can occur, that nothing will result, because the U.S. is not legislatively on board and therefore the pace should be slowed or the process should really wait on the U.S.,” said Dessima Williams of Grenada.

And with nary a Republican vote to show with an estimated $100 million in spending, Left environmental groups are feeling the heat. This raises the question: what is the opportunity cost of the futile climate crusade? What here-and-now environmental issues are not being addressed?

Darren Samuelsohn asks some questions in his Politico piece reprinted (in part) below.

Appendix B: Darren Samuelsohn, “Carbon cap bills go into deep freeze,” Politico, August 7, 2010

When it comes to global warming, the environmental lobby is going on defense.

Stung by the failure to secure a Senate vote on climate and energy legislation and wary of a possible GOP-led Congress, leaders of some of the country’s most influential green groups are moving cash and staff away from cap and trade.
Environment America, the Sierra Club and the Union of Concerned Scientists, with more than 2.5 million members combined, now consider it their top job to defend the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to write climate rules against attacks in the courts and on Capitol Hill.

“The era of the big bill I think is over,” said an environmentalist whose group has not yet come out publicly on the issue.
The groups also are hoping to defend and expand on state and regional climate laws and compacts, including a carbon market for power plants operating in the Northeast and emerging systems in the West.

And they will work at the state public utility commission level to make carbon dioxide emissions a crux in reviewing permits for new and existing coal-fired power plants.
The Sierra Club is spending $18 million and has 100 people across the country working on challenges to coal-fired electricity, said Michael Brune, the group’s executive director. He hopes to increase the budget to $25 million next year.

“We don’t think we can fight climate change without getting a comprehensive, economy-wide cap,” Brune said. “At the same time, we think in the short term, more significant gains can be achieved by focusing on other strategies.”

Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, doesn’t want to give up on cap and trade as the method of curbing carbon dioxide emissions, but said it’s apparent the next window for such a bill won’t be until 2013 — assuming President Barack Obama either wins a second term or a climate-friendly Republican takes office.

“My sense is you never say die, even if we have fewer climate champions than today, that we still need to work with Congress to get a cap in place,” Knobloch said. “But its probability is going to be quite low to achieve that until after the next presidential election.”

Meanwhile, the environmental community is split over any shift away from cap and trade.

Two green heavies — Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council — aren’t giving up the fight. Combined, they employ several dozen experts, from attorneys to economists to public-health scientists.

“We’re going to pursue all the ways we can to make that happen,” said Franz Matzner, NRDC’s climate legislative director. “That includes going for the big enchilada. It’s too early to assume that it’s off the menu.”

“You know us, we’re not letting go of anything,” said Tony Kreindler of EDF, which spent $20 million over the past two years fighting for a climate bill.

“No air pollution problem in history has been solved without a mandatory pollution limit,” Kreindler added. “We’re open to how you structure that. But at the end of the day, that’s very much our goal.”

The National Wildlife Federation, the country’s largest environmental group with 4 million members and supporters, considers it “Job No. 1” to defend EPA against lawsuits in the federal appeals court from a broad coalition of industry and conservative state leaders, including the attorneys general in Virginia and Texas.

But Jeremy Symons, NWF’s senior vice president, said that won’t preclude lobbying for a carbon cap. “It’s not a question of doing one or the other,” he said. “We’ll do both. But we’ll focus now first and foremost on defending the Clean Air Act.”

Brune and Anna Aurilio, director of Environment America’s Washington office, downplayed the idea of a major schism between the greens.

“There may be some disagreement around the edges around what can actually move,” Aurilio said. “But I don’t think it’s a huge split.”

“I think if there wasn’t a shift occurring in the environmental community, that’d be cause for great alarm,” Brune said.
“Individually and collectively, many of the national environmental organizations are reflecting on what worked strategically, what didn’t and whether or not there should be a shift in priorities and in strategies,” Brune added. “Different groups are in different states in the process. For some it’ll be easier. Others are more wedded to some form of cap. It might be more difficult for them.”

Environmentalists aren’t giving up on energy and climate legislation entirely. On Capitol Hill, the greens are pressing for new national standards on renewable energy, as well as more aggressive automobile fuel-economy limits and incentives for electric and natural gas vehicles.

That strategy shift could have a major impact, some longtime cap-and-trade advocates said.

“That would be significant,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who co-sponsored three major climate bills that have hit the Senate floor over the past decade. “I look forward to talking to them. I know they have the same goals. And they may be right about the political practicality.” ….

Even so, Lieberman and others make the argument that a carbon cap represents the least expensive option for dealing with emissions. And they note the origins of the issue started with former President George H.W. Bush, who campaigned 20 years ago for a cap-and-trade plan to fight acid rain.

“Before we walk away from that mechanism, I’d like for us to think long and hard about it,” said Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.).
For their part, industry officials welcomed the challenge from environmental groups in the courtroom as they go after power plants and other industries via the EPA.

“It’s ironic because that’s what killed the prospect of the legislation to begin with,” said Karen Harbert, a top energy official at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Certainly, from an economic perspective this is a very self-defeating approach. Continued balkanization of the regulations doesn’t contribute to a healthy economy.”

American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard said the climate bill died because it lacked public support, something that won’t improve by pursuing a strategy that emphasizes EPA, states and power plant permits given concerns about other pocketbook issues.

“If they push too hard, there’s potential for further backlash,” Gerard said. “As they continue to raise the specter that they’re threatening jobs and economic recovery, then I think they’ve failed to listen closely to what the public is saying.”

Coal-state Democrats and Republicans are also taking aim at EPA’s rule-writing authority. Sen. John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) predicted a floor vote as early as September on his bill to stop the agency’s efforts for two years to give Congress more time on comprehensive legislation.

“At this point, there’s going to be a rebellion,” said Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.). “EPA is likely to see its powers substantially curtailed.”

“Death Spiral” Posts by Ken Green:

The Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism Continues (June 2, 2010)

Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism, Redux? (September 30, 2010)

“As I have argued for years, we simply do not know the answer [to the sensitivity of climate to greenhouse gas forcing]. There is a wide margin of error in many of the ingredients that go into the [climate] models. For example, we do not know some of the radiative properties of the aerosols to a factor of 5. No matter how good your climate model is, you cannot compensate for that uncertainty. The range of uncertainty is broad enough to accommodate [Patrick] Michaels (well, maybe North) and [Jerry] Mahlman.”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), September 17, 1999

“One has to fill in what goes on between 5 km and the surface. The standard way is through atmospheric models. I cannot make a better excuse.”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), October 2, 1998

“We do not know much about modeling climate. It is as though we are modeling a human being. Models are in position at last to tell us the creature has two arms and two legs, but we are being asked to cure cancer.”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), November 12, 1999

The quotations above are what Gerald North privately believes–or believed prior to Climategate, an event that pushed him to the Left unlike his scientific colleague Judith Curry. I reproduce his quotations (there are many others) in light of a recent op-ed published by geophysicist and Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham in the Houston Chronicle , “Climate Change Alarmists Ignore Scientific Methods.”

Cunningham makes a number of worthy points that should not be dismissed by the political “mainstream” climate scientists such as Andrew Dessler at Texas A&M. Cunningham can find support from many sources, from pollsters to economists to physical scientists.

Consider all three in turn:

Public Concern: The public is fatigued by and skeptical of sky-is-falling environmentalism when most objective indicators of environmental welfare are trending positive. (Even the worst-case oil spill by “beyond petroleum” BP has not turned into the disaster that anti-technology, anti-capitalism environmentalists had expected and hoped–the subject of a forthcoming post at MasterResource.)

Political Economy: Programs to regulate CO2 are all pain and no gain. Compare the costs of any local, state, federal, or international climate program versus the associated temperature reduction. It is tears in the ocean of benefit versus economic waste and politicization–and a loss of freedom.

We know more than ever before how government failure of  regulating  CO2 is as great or greater than the alleged market failure of not regulating CO2. International and national efforts to regulate CO2 smell so bad that more and more environmentalists are holding their nose.

Physical Science: Cunningham’s case against high-sensitivity warming can find support from not only middle-of-the-roaders such as Gerald North of Texas A&M (see quotations above) but also the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on close inspection.

Here are two salient IPCC quotations that were part of John Droz’s recent post at MasterResource:

“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.

And turning to public policy:

“Limited and early analytical results from integrated analyses of the cost and benefits of mitigation indicate that these are broadly comparable in magnitude, but do not as yet permit an unambiguous determination of an emissions pathway or stabilization level where benefits exceed costs.”

- IPCC, Climate Change 2007: Mitigation of Climate Change (Working Group III Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 18.

Let’s move on, in other words, to real environmental problems. After all, we live in a world of opportunity costs where resources spent in one direction cannot be used in another.

APPENDIX: Walter Cunningham, “Climate Change Alarmists Ignore Scientific Methods,” Houston Chronicle, August 14, 2010.

When it comes to global warming, the public at large doesn’t know what to believe anymore. Global warming alarmists have been hammering at us for years; the media is made up mostly of true believers; and politicians, who, in the absence of understanding and knowledge about climate science, have put themselves out on a limb from which it is difficult to retreat. Given the economic interests and the political powers involved, this dilemma will not go away quietly.

Alarmists are appealing to so-called “consensus science” and trying to scare the world into throwing away hundreds of billions of dollars in a fruitless effort to control the temperature of the Earth. In the absence of supporting facts, they have moved the issue into the court of public opinion where politics, media and money play important roles.

The question of human-caused global warming should not be resolved on the publicized opinions of influential journalists, but in the court of scientific inquiry based on the scientific data. The interested public can find legitimate and easily understood empirical data online. None of it supports the alarmists’ belief in human-caused global warming.

It makes good sense to look at the history of climate science.

Empirical data, collected over several centuries, led to a provisional theory of climate change. Scientists have long known that the sun, oceans and variations in the Earth’s orbit are the principal drivers of climate change. Although we don’t fully understand all of the mechanisms or interactions involved, this theory has stood the test of time. In the process, it became the de facto theory of climate change.

It is the job of science to develop the theories that explain our natural world. Scientific theories, even those that evolved over centuries, are subject to challenge and change — when supported by the appropriate scientific data. This enables new hypotheses to modify, or even replace, currently accepted theories.

About 20 years ago, a small group of scientists became concerned that temperatures around the Earth were unreasonably high and a threat to humanity. In their infinite wisdom, they decided: 1) that CO2 (carbon dioxide) levels were abnormally high, 2) that higher levels of CO2 were bad for humanity, 3) that warmer temperatures would be worse for the world, and 4) that we are capable of overriding natural forces to control the Earth’s temperature.

Not one of these presumptions (opinions) has proven to be valid.

The group decided to challenge the accepted theory of climate change when they hypothesized that human-generated CO2 was responsible for global warming. They have been trying to generate support for their beliefs ever since. Their new hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) gained immediate traction with environmentalists, the media and, eventually, politicians. It has gained little acceptance among legitimate scientists.

For a new hypothesis to be accepted by the scientific community, it must be confirmed by considerable evidence and must survive all attempts to disprove it. The hypothesis claiming that human-generated carbon dioxide is a principal driver of the earth’s temperature has not satisfied either of these criteria.

AGW alarmists could have made their case quite simply by collecting and making available solid evidence to support their hypothesis, and by defending it in the court of scientific inquiry. Not in the court of public opinion. Instead, they refused to release their data that would permit other scientists to look at the problem and come up with similar results – if possible.

The only thing alarmists are able to cite in support of their simplified hypothesis are mathematical models that they have developed to make their case. The earth’s atmosphere is currently impossible to model well, so it is no surprise that their models have been unable to use past data to correctly predict today’s temperatures. In any event, models are not data.

When alarmists could produce none of the required confirmation for their hypothesis, scientific principles were put on the back burner in favor of interpretation and opinion. They invented something called “consensus science,” switched from “global warming” to “climate change” and appealed to fear with the question, “What if CO2 is responsible and we do nothing?”

The media, in general, have lost some enthusiasm for consensus science. While journalists cannot be expected to understand the science without specialized training, that doesn’t keep individual journalists from aggressively pushing AGW and influencing a great many readers.

Take Paul Krugman, a nationally syndicated columnist and Nobel Prize winner in economics who has no understanding of the science of climate change. In “Greed, cowardice killed climate bill” (Page B7, July 27), he whines about the $23 million that Exxon Mobil spent over 10 years trying to support objective climate research, while ignoring the $30 billion selected scientists have received from the government in the last 20 years to support an alarmist global warming hypothesis.

Thirty billion dollars may influence scientists and public opinion, but it has not added a lot to understanding climate change.

Krugman further claims, “Every piece of valid evidence – long-term temperature averages that smooth out year-to-year fluctuations, Arctic sea ice volume, melting of glaciers, the ratio of record highs to record lows – points to a continuing, and quite possibly accelerating, rise in global temperatures.” He is obviously not familiar with the empirical data.

Saying a tax on carbon will have little or no impact on our economy is ridiculous, especially for an economist. He is presupposing that it would save the world from a global warming disaster while ignoring the fact that man-made CO2 represents only .0002 percent of the atmosphere and 0.12 percent of our greenhouse gases. Eliminating the human contribution of CO2 completely would not mitigate any ongoing global warming.

Most readers will listen to Paul Krugman without ever realizing how far climate science is removed from his specialty – as it is with almost all journalists.

The “greed” referred to in Krugman’s column is the greed for money and control by the Washington power elite. The “cowardice” is what is displayed by those afraid of letting the question of global climate change be answered by the science, not by opinions or the politics.

Most alarmists refuse to accept the evidence disproving AGW. True believers in global warming are loathe to admit how little control we have over nature. That’s why AGW is frequently referred to as a religion with them.

But global warming is not something that you have to take on faith. It is your prerogative to reject what has been learned about climate change over several centuries and to embrace the unproven hypothesis of humans being responsible for global temperature changes.

Objective science is slowly making inroads with politicians and the public. That is why prospects for a bill to tax and restrict CO2 emissions is losing support. A growing percentage of the public is coming to their senses on the limits of what humans can do to influence the Earth’s temperature.

But climate change is a scientific question, and you should look at the empirical data that is made available by objective scientists. Empirical data speaks for itself. The last place you want to look for objective data is the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Individuals should look at the evidence/data, and then judge for themselves whether the evidence supports the alarmists’ hypothesis. I have, and it does not.

Human-caused global warming is simply not a threat to be concerned about. It is nature, not human activity, that rules the climate. Humans have adjusted to temperature changes for at least 100,000 years, and they will certainly do so in the future.

Twenty years ago, the alarmists were talking about the science. Now, without the facts on their side, they are reduced to talking about other justifications, like consensus science. Those of us who never bought into AGW talk about empirical data. After years of looking, I have not found one piece of empirical evidence that man-made CO2 has a significant impact on global climate.

The first red flag is the fact that Science (by definition) is skeptical, so why the repetition in the name? It’s something like naming a site “The attractive fashion model”.

Of more concern is the fact that (c0ntrary to what one might be led to believe by the title) the site is actually focused against skeptical scientists — specifically those who have the temerity to question anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Hmmm.

Mr. Cook says he’s motivated by his young daughter’s future. Great — all the more reason he should want to get it right.

I was fascinated by his site’s supposedly comprehensive list of 119 reasons given by “AGW skeptics,” as well as his rather cursory dismissal of each of these.

For instance, his answer to the consensus matter (#3) is that “97% of climatologists support AGW.” Well that in itself is debatable, but nowhere do I see any discussion that addresses the larger issue: the fact that science is not decided by consensus. What was the consensus of 99% of the “experts” about the solar system in Galileo’s time? Twenty-five years ago what was the consensus of 99% of the “experts” about the cause of ulcers? In both cases (and in many others) 99% of the experts were 100% wrong. That is exactly why science is not decided by consensus.

Another example is item #94: “Over 31,000 scientists signed the OISM Petition Project” and his response is  “The ‘OISM petition’ was signed by only a few climatologists.” Maybe I’m missing something, but I thought that this was a scientific matter (remember the website title?). Is he really saying something so elitist as “physicist, chemists, biologists and other scientists are not qualified to assess the scientific legitimacy of AGW”? Apparently so.

Oops — if so then that means that Dr. Hansen’s theories should be discarded, since he is a physicist!

Further, if Mr. Cook is saying we should listen only to specialists, and if Mr. Cook is not a specialist in climate science, what is his authority for reaching such a conclusion?  Should I also ask my barber who to listen to?

The OISM petition should be looked at as a peer-review process where a great number of scientists (from many fields) have concluded that a relatively small number of specialized scientists (climatologists) have diverged from good scientific practices. In other words, the 31,000± petition signers have concluded that the methodology for supporting AGW was more political than scientific.

The IPCC’s Own (Back Door) Skepticism: Two Examples for Mr. Cook

The Skeptical Science website can begin its revision with these two quotations from the IPCC itself to introduce skepticism toward climate alarmism and open-ended policy activism. Here they are:

“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.

“Limited and early analytical results from integrated analyses of the cost and benefits of mitigation indicate that these are broadly comparable in magnitude, but do not as yet permit an unambiguous determination of an emissions pathway or stabilization level where benefits exceed costs.”

- IPCC, Climate Change 2007: Mitigation of Climate Change (Working Group III Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 18.

So in my opinion (as a physicist), the most surprising thing is that his exhaustive list of 119 reasons does not get to the fundamentals of the AGW debate in its scientific and public policy dimensions. How can such an extensive enumeration omit the most important core issues?

Maybe it’s partly our fault. In response to the AGW claims of its proponents, it seems that good sites like this tend to respond with a shotgun approach, instead of using a rifle. For example, look at the recent articles in WattsUpWithThat. They cover an exceptionally diverse list of topics.

That’s good in some ways, but it’s bad if it leads any of us to lose our focus.

So what IS the number one concern about AGW? The answer lies in what science is all about.

The Scientific Method

Science is NOT a collection of data. Science is a PROCESS. (That’s why when 31,000 scientists criticize the process, it is apropos and significant.) When an answer (e.g., AGW) is proposed to a technical problem it is entirely up to the proponents to subject it to the SCIENTIFIC METHOD.

This has NOT been done — and is by FAR the number one deficiency of the AGW hypothesis.

AGW promoters are well aware of this key shortcoming. Their solution is to devalue the merits of the Scientific Method. Of course, they usually aren’t foolish enough to come out and say that specifically, but that is the effect of their actions.

So how are AGW proponents attempting to undermine real science? It’s in their assertions that “consensus” trumps the Scientific Method; that computer models are superior to empirical evidence; that we don’t have the time to get down and dirty so the precautionary principle justifies specious extrapolation; that “Post Normal Science” is a better way of resolving complex technical issues, etc., etc.

This is, in a word, bunk.

The Scientific Method is at the core of real science. Until AGW (and other illegitimate offspring — e.g., wind energy) are truly subjected to the Scientific Method, they remain entirely in the category of being unproven hypotheses.

We simply must keep this is mind as the most fundamental of ALL issues here.

[This post, an abstract of a longer article from The American, was written with the assistance of Hiwa Alaghebandian, an energy and environment research assistant at AEI. Dr. Green's post The Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism Continues (June 2, 2010) is one of the most viewed and influential published at MasterResource.]

In a Wired article published at the end of May, writer Erin Biba bemoans the fact that “science” is losing its credibility with the public. The plunge in the public’s belief in catastrophic climate change is her primary example. Biba wonders whether the loss of credibility might be due to the malfeasance unearthed by the leak of emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, but comes to the conclusion that malfeasance isn’t the cause of the public’s disaffection. No, people have turned against science simply because it lacks a good public relations outfit. Biba quotes Kelly Bush, head of a major PR firm, on the point:

Bush says researchers need a campaign that inundates the public with the message of science: Assemble two groups of spokespeople, one made up of scientists and the other of celebrity ambassadors. Then deploy them to reach the public wherever they are, from online social networks to “The Today Show.” Researchers need to tell personal stories, tug at the heartstrings of people who don’t have PhD’s. And the celebrities can go on “Oprah” to describe how climate change is affecting them—and by extension, Oprah’s legions of viewers.

“They need to make people answer the questions, What’s in it for me? How does it affect my daily life? What can I do that will make a difference? Answering these questions is what’s going to start a conversation,” Bush says. “The messaging up to this point has been ‘Here are our findings. Read it and believe.’ The deniers are convincing people that the science is propaganda.”

While nobody would dispute the value of a good PR department, we doubted that bad or insufficient PR was the primary reason for the public’s declining trust in scientific pronouncements. Another view is that science is not losing its credibility because people no longer like or believe in the idea of scientific discovery, but because science has taken on an authoritarian tone, and has let itself be co-opted by pressure groups who want the government to force people to change their behavior.

In the past, scientists and science reporters were generally neutral on questions of what to do. Instead, they just told people what they found, such as “we have discovered that smoking vastly increases your risk of lung cancer” or “we have discovered that some people will have adverse health effects from consuming high levels of salt.” Or “we have found that obesity increases your risk of coronary heart disease.” Those were simply neutral observations that people could find empowering, useful, interesting, etc., but did not place demands on them. In fact, this kind of objectivity was the entire basis for trusting scientific claims.

But along the way, an assortment of publicity-seeking, and often socially activist, scientists stopped saying, “Here are our findings. Read it and believe.” Instead, activist scientists such as NASA’s James Hansen, heads of quasi-scientific governmental organizations such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, editors of major scientific journals, and heads of the various national scientific academies are more inclined to say, “Here are our findings, and those findings say that you must change your life in this way, that way, or the other way.” Science reporters and activists also adopted the authoritarian voice.

So, objective statements about smoking risk morphed into statements like “science tells us we must end the use of tobacco products.” A finding of elevated risk of stroke from excess salt ingestion leads to: “The science tells us we must cut salt consumption in half by 2030.” Findings that obesity carries health risks lead to a “war on obesity.” And yes, a finding that we may be causing the climate to change morphed into “the science says we must radically restructure our economy and way of life to cut greenhouse gas emissions radically by 2050.”

A Lexis Nexis search, indeed, finds a growing trend toward “authoritarian” phrasing of scientific findings in recent decades. Phrases such as ”science says we must,” “science says we should,” “science tells us we must,” “science tells us we should,” “science commands,” “science requires,” “science dictates,” and “science compels” have become all too common. One phrase, in particular, “Science says we must,” has become dramatically more frequent in recent years.

Does the Public Smell a Rat?

Whether because of media sensationalism, a desire by some senior academics for greater relevance, or just the spread of activism through the university and media, scientists and their translators in the media stopped speaking objectively and started telling people what to do. And people don’t take well to that, particularly when they’re unable to evaluate the information that supposedly requires them to give up their SUV, their celebratory cigar, or their chicken nuggets.

The public’s trust is further undermined by scientific scandals, such as the recent ClimateGate affair, when it became apparent that climate scientists, if not overtly cooking their books, were behaving as partisans out to create a unified perception of the climate in order to advance a policy agenda. The climate community is probably the biggest user of the authoritarian voice, with frequent pronouncements that “the science says we must limit atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to 350 parts per million,” or some dire outcome will eventuate.

Friends of the Earth writes, “For example, science tells us we must reduce our global greenhouse gas emissions to prevent dangerous climate change.” America’s climate change negotiator in Copenhagen is quoted by World Wildlife Fund as saying, “China must do significantly more if we are to have a chance to solve the problem and to arrive at an international agreement that achieves what science tells us we must.” Science as dictator—not a pretty sight.

Conclusion

If science wants to redeem itself and regain its place with the public’s affection, scientists need to come out every time some politician says, “The science says we must…” and reply, “Science only tells us what is. It does not, and can never tell us what we should or must do.” If they say that often enough, and loudly enough, they might be able to reclaim the mantle of objectivity that they’ve given up over the last 40 years by letting themselves become the regulatory state’s ultimate appeal to authority. Hey, you know, perhaps Biba has something there—maybe science does need better PR!

Kenneth P. Green is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, where Hiwa Alaghebandian is an energy and environment research assistant.

And yet, as Jim Manzi’s recent exchange with uber-alarmist Joe Romm makes perfectly clear, even the latest IPCC report punctures holes in the alarmist claims. Perhaps without realizing it, Romm implicitly admits that the IPCC AR4 report never supported the alarmist view.

Manzi Uses the IPCC to Take Down Al Gore

In his relatively new position as “in-house critic” at The New Republic, Manzi criticized a characteristically alarmist piece that Al Gore had published in the same venue. Manzi wanted to show that Gore was misleading the public on what the “scientific consensus” actually had to say about the risks of climate change.

First Manzi quoted Gore who had written:

Over the last 22 years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has produced four massive studies warning the world of the looming catastrophe that is being caused by the massive dumping of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere.

To which Manzi responds:

According to the IPCC’s currently-governing Fourth Assessment Report, under a reasonable set of assumptions for global economic and population growth (Scenario A1B), the world should expect to warm by about 3°C over roughly the next century (Table SPM.3). Even in the most extreme IPCC marker scenario (A1F1), the best estimate is that we should expect warming of about 4°C over roughly the next century. How bad would that be? Also according to the IPCC (page 17), a global increase in temperature of 4°C should cause the world to have about 1 to 5 percent lower economic output than it would otherwise have. So if we do not take measures to ameliorate global warming, the world should expect sometime in the 22nd century to be about 3 percent poorer than it otherwise would be (though still much richer per capita than today).

Prior to consideration of the more detailed economic issues—e.g., costs versus benefits of attempts to forestall the problem; the danger of worse-than-expected outcomes, etc.—pause to recognize that according to the IPCC the expected economic costs of global warming under the plausible scenarios for future economic growth are likely to be about 3 percent of GDP more than 100 years from now. This is pretty far from the rhetoric of global destruction and Manhattan as an underwater theme park. [Emphasis in Manzi's original.]

Manzi is entirely correct: If you wade hip-deep into the actual chapters of the IPCC AR4 report, you will find that yes, most practicing scientists in the relevant fields believe that human activities are leading to climate change, and in particular global warming.

However, you will not find that these trends are pushing humanity towards Armageddon. Contrary to Al Gore’s claim, the IPCC’s latest report does not support the alarmist case.

Joe Romm Punts the IPCC AR4

Of course, Al Gore is not a professional climate scientist. We shouldn’t be looking to him as the standard-bearer of the alarmist position. Instead, let’s see what Joe Romm had to say about Manzi’s critique.

First, Romm quotes extensively from John Bruno, who is “a marine ecologist, Associate Professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.” In the interest of brevity, I won’t address each of his responses to Manzi, point by point. Yet if you follow the link to Romm’s post, you will see that Bruno doesn’t dispute Manzi’s numbers per se; he simply says that the IPCC’s official figures leave out many important considerations. (To be clear, Bruno quotes the IPCC report itself on what things it is leaving out of its calculations. So it’s true that the IPCC itself admits its assessments of the dangers of climate change may be understating the risks.)

Then Romm comes back to offer his own, further criticisms of Manzi’s treatment of Gore:

Let me amplify some of Bruno’s points about Manzi’s errors on the science and economics.

If Manzi knows the scientific literature well, he keeps it to himself . The science since the IPCC has evolved considerably, as I review here:  “An illustrated guide to the latest climate science.”  In a AAAS presentation this year, William R. Freudenburg of UC Santa Barbara discussed his research on “the Asymmetry of Scientific Challenge”: “New scientific findings are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected,” rather than “not as bad as previously expected.” It simply isn’t true that 4°C is the worst-case scenario.  Here are two of the best recent analysis of business as usual warming…

Obviously, the sea level rise estimates have jumped in most every recent study (see “Scientists withdraw low-ball estimate of sea level rise and “Sea levels may rise 3 times faster than IPCC estimated, could hit 6 feet by 2100”

And if you really want the plausibly worst-case, go here:  UK Met Office: Catastrophic climate change, 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 27°F in the Arctic, could happen in 50 years, but “we do have time to stop it if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon.”

And that is why scientists led by a former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a major report last year concluding the “net present value of climate change impacts” of $1240 TRILLION on current emissions path, making mitigation to under 450 ppm a must…

…The areas where the IPCC underestimated adaptation costs include water resources, health, infrastructure, sea level rise, and ecoystems.  Anyway, if you’re interested in the important stuff — the enormous benefit of stabilizing at 450 ppm — just jump to Chapter 8, page 103, here.

For a cost-benefit analysis of just focusing on US legislation, New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity demonstrated last year that the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) is “cost-benefit justified under most reasonable assumptions about the likely social cost of carbon.’” In “The Other Side of the Coin: The Economic Benefits of Climate Legislation,” the Institute for Policy Integrity finds that the “benefits of H.R. 2454 could likely exceed the costs by as much as nine-to-one” (see “Waxman-Markey clean air, clean water, clean energy jobs bill creates $1.5 trillion in benefits“).

Now that is certainly an intimidating list of new papers and findings, which would make the average person think that Jim Manzi was out of his league! It looks like disaster really is imminent, after all.

But hold on …. Manzi was NOT arguing, “Governments around the world should do nothing, because the IPCC says there is no threat.” Rather, Manzi was merely pointing out that Al Gore was wrong to claim that the IPCC report justified the alarmist calls for drastic and immediate action.

Ironically, Bruno and Romm implicitly agree with Manzi. Their position is that if you look at all the factors that the IPCC omitted from its analysis, and if you look at the literature that has come out since the AR4 was released, then you will see that the alarmists are correct.

Yet this defeats the whole (ostensible) purpose of having an IPCC process in the first place. The public has been told that the IPCC takes all the divergent views of expert researchers in various fields, and boils them down into a “consensus” that the vast majority of true scientists can support. This will help policymakers make informed decisions, because obviously a politician can’t decide whether Expert A or Expert B is a credible source on the issue.

When all is said and done, the IPCC AR4 report gave the very modest projections that Manzi reported, concerning the benefits and costs from taking government action to arrest climate change. Manzi certainly wasn’t claiming these projections were infallible, he was merely correcting Al Gore’s misleading statement.

Conclusion

The climate alarmists are trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, they use the IPCC as a weapon to bash “deniers” over the head with, claiming that “the consensus” is clear. But then when someone like Jim Manzi comes along and actually reports what the IPCC has to say, the alarmists point out all the shortcomings of the IPCC analysis.

It is certainly true that there are reputable climate scientists and economists who think that the central projections of the IPCC AR4 report are woefully optimistic. But on the other hand, there are reputable climate scientists and economists who believe its conclusions are woefully pessimistic, and that humanity will be just fine even if governments do nothing to impede emissions.

To repeat, the whole point of having an IPCC was to consolidate these divergent views into a “consensus” that most experts could get behind, and that policymakers could take as a firm foundation for making their legislative decisions. As Manzi has tirelessly documented, the latest IPCC report does not support the case for climate alarmism.

“Such [progressive] leadership [on climate change] may give BP Amoco better access to government-controlled oil deposits and more operating flexibility.”

- Kimberly O’Neill Packard and Forest Reinhardt, “What Every Executive Needs to Know About Global Warming,” Harvard Business Review, July/August 2000.

The Worldwatch Institute sang the praises of BP’s it’s-a-problem, we-can-solve-it approach to climate change. Far Left environmentalist Joe Romm featured John Browne/BP in his book Cool Companies as a leading example of corporations going green for profits and virtue.

Both Worldwatch and Romm were wrong–dead wrong–about BP, just as they were also wrong about climate-alarmist Enron and Ken Lay.

It turns out that a lot of political profit-making and greenwashing was going on at both rogue companies. Remember what Jeff Skilling told one of Enron’s coal executives who complained that the company’s greenwashing was hurting his division:

“We are a green company, but the green stands for money.”

- Jeff Skilling, CEO, Enron Corp., quoted in Robert Bradley, Jr., Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy, p. 310.

Corporate altruism? A wise man’s suspicion in 1776 still applies. “I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the publick good,” wrote Adam Smith. “It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.” (Wealth of Nations, p. 456)

And Enron, as it turned out, had seven profit centers that stood to benefit from government-priced CO2. Altruism–or naked rent-seeking at the expense of broader society? Wake will Left environmentalists smell the skunk?!

“What Every Business Executive Needs to Know About Global Warming” (by Kimberly O’Neill Packard and Forest Reinhardt)

And in the pages of the esteemed Harvard Business Review, a trendy essay cajoling business executives to buy into climate alarmism as a new corporate ethic put BP and John Browne on a high pedestal.

The article begins by assuming the problem and the solution–two fatal flaws. “The [Kyoto] Protocol underscores the growing consensus among scientists that global climate change is a threat that must be taken seriously” (p. 130). The essay warned of “catastrophes” in-the-making were business to continue as usual. Corporations were urged to get on board or face even more punitive and disruptive regulation (such as the Kyoto Protocol).

Enter BP and John Browne–the Great Company and Great Man of the new era of social corporate responsibility. The essay states:

“BP Amoco [BP] has been a leader in supporting international efforts to slow climate change….

CEO John Browne and other BP Amoco executives … believe that taking a leadership position on climate change gives the company a distinctive identity in the eyes of government officials, scientists, and environmental groups. Such leadership may give BP Amoco better access to government-controlled oil deposits and more operating flexibility.

Furthermore, the company’s experiments with emissions trading are likely to give it clout at the negotiating table when international regulatory frameworks are being devised; company executives will be able to present hard data on how their system works.”

And still more benefits!

BP Amoco’s leaders also believe that by announcing the 10% cutback they’ll release the creativity of employees and increase their commitment to the company. ‘Do not underestimate the power of preemptive, aspirational target setting,’ says Chris Gibson-Smith, BP Amoco’s executive director for policy and technology. ‘The role of leadership is to invent actions that naturally have the consequence of transforming people’s thinking.’

In other words, confronting the climate challenge will stimulate the company’s employees—line workers and managers alike—to think more imaginatively. And to the extent that the employees see their values reflected in BP Amoco’s goals, they may become more committed to their jobs and to the company.”

- Kimberly O’Neill Packard and Forest Reinhardt, “What Every Executive Needs to Know About Global Warming,” Harvard Business Review, July/August 2000.

Favoritism for drilling on government land? Greater operational flexibility?  Thinking more imaginatively? Company values?

What if carbon dioxide (CO2) was/is the wrong target–the great distraction?

What if the same effort had been expended on clear-and-present environmental and safety dangers? Where would BP be today? And how much better would our environment and our safety be?

Here is my challenge to Kimberly O’Neill Packard (formerly with McKinsey), Forest Reinhardt (the John D. Black Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School), and Harvard Business Review: do you care to revisit this article and issue and provide all of us with an update? Start with climate science, and bring us all the way to BP and Enron. And on the physical science, start with Gerald North, a mainstreamer who has privately spilled some beans on the climate alarmists. You will find this to be very interesting–and perhaps even psychologically therapeutic.

[Editor note: This is Part V of a series of posts on the political activism of climate scientists at Texas A&M.]

“I really enjoyed the ‘fact’ that I saved you from being a ‘climate alarmist’. Frankly, your descriptions of my colleague Andrew Dessler are outrageous. You seem to forget that he spent several hours tutoring you and your student from [Kinkaid] on climate change during a university holiday. As I said to Steve McIntyre after spending hours trying to help him, then being mocked in his blog, ‘No good deed goes unpunished’. I am afraid to say anything more to you via email.”

- Gerald North to Rob Bradley, April 17, 2010 (cc Eric Berger, William Dawson, Andrew Dessler)

Dear Jerry:

I asked for substantive feedback from you to my post(s) and instead got a sarcastic, emotional response. You are clearly annoyed, but open debate about contentious public public policy issues should not be compromised by personal relationships or ‘favors’. And there is nothing wrong about a ‘challenge culture’ and mid-course corrections, either. We are talking about climate science, after all.

I am going to elaborate as best I can and bring in some more of your own quotations for the record.

[North as My Enron Consultant]

Jerry: you are a very interesting and important figure in the climate-change debate–and one whose views future historians of science should note.

Back in 1998, I picked you out of many candidates as a corporate consultant because you seemed to be more open to finding the middle than many of your colleagues. Thinking that Enron was progressive on the climate issue (and they unfortunately were–Ken Lay saw many rent-seeking opportunities with CO2 pricing), you said yes.

“In talking over consulting with ENRON with many friends, I decided to do it, only because of the open-minded position ENRON seems to be taking. I decided that I might even have an influence on what course ENRON eventually takes. I am not concerned with one ideological position or another—just the truth. If ENRON makes use of the truth to make a profit, good show. If ENRON wants to twist the truth to the detriment of everyone else, I will drop out—tarnished but wiser.”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), March 25, 1998

I think you provide an excellent ‘case study’ to understand:

1) how the climate alarm got out of control, and

2) how/why a good many in your profession got off scientific track (as evidenced by Climategate and the growing recognition of problems with the IPCC reports).

My Major Point: You Have ‘Gone Political’ and ‘Gone Left’ Post-Climategate Despite Your Skepticism About Climate Alarmism–and Climategate Itself

I have a treasure trove of emails from you that are fair and insightful, in retrospect. (And you have stated that you write your emails as if they would be made public–nothing to fear from your own views.) Some of them are very critical of scientists–skeptics and alarmists. Your criticisms of the skeptics are public (I can provide citations); your more ‘private’ views against alarmism should be made public too.

This is why, coming out of our decade-long experience, I was so disappointed that you rented your good name to [Andrew] Dessler’s attack on the State of Texas regarding its petition against EPA’s endangerment finding.

What happened to the Gerald North of old?

“I did worry that my comment on my not being willing to sign on to Kyoto right now got into the [Houston] Chronicle and in our local paper. I do not like being too public on policy matters. It ain’t my thing.”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), October 2, 1998

And your rejection of knee-jerk alarmism:

“As you know I am a subscriber [to man-made warming], but hardly in the Al Gore category. Nor do I have any preconceived ideas about what should be done about GW if anything. I have been busy fending off reporters trying to connect the unusual [El Nino-driven] summer [heat spike] to GW. I even sent an e-mail to Gore.”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Richard Lindzen with cc Rob Bradley (Enron), August 11, 1998

Which also included an open mind toward low-sensitivity warming and the quite possible net positive externalities of GHG emissions, particularly CO2.

“[Robert] Mendelsohn’s position is rather similar to yours…. He believes the impacts are not negative at all for the US and most of the developed countries. Most impact studies seem to be showing this. It leads us to think that a little warming is not so bad. Glad I have kept my mouth shut on this issue of which I know so little.”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), November 12, 1999

And given your views, why did you not jump on Climategate in the way that Judith Curry did?  You went public (Washington Post, etc.) that Climategate was no big deal and then said you had not read the emails! Have you read Climategate: The Crutape Letters? Why would you not read it with great interest? Where there are plumes of smoke, there is fire. 

Some years back, I challenged you on the obvious scientific errors of Al Gore’s book/movie, An Inconvenient Truth–including his show-stopper ice age graph on CO2 levels vs. temperature, the very one you had me take out of Enron’s stock presentation:

“I do not remember, but I think Gore has used the famous ice age graph correlating CO2 and climate change. I think I had you take it out of your [Enron] presentation if you recall. [Pat] Michaels is right about its irrelevance, but it is really not new to the research community as I stated.”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), May 5, 1999

But you simply claimed that you had not and did not want to watch the movie (the ‘I-know-nothing’ Sgt. Schultz defense that Enron execs used). Yes, you finally reviewed the book beyond its political moment and in a rather apologetic way. But what if you had greeted the book and movie with some tough, sober scientific assessment? You could have really done some good for maintaining scientific standards in the heat of political battle.

And then your tepid Climategate response.

AND then the Chronicle op-ed, which I criticized as scientific ’spin’.

So much for trying to find the middle of the debate, a middle that your own views champion.

So now let me respond to your email reply in its entirety:

1. Comfort against Climate Alarmism

 “I really enjoyed the ‘fact’ that I saved you from being a ‘climate alarmist’.”

In fact, your middle-of-the-road stance has been quite comforting to me. I have greater confidence that climate alarmism is very exaggerated. Your warming range is outside of the official IPCC range on the low side–the world should know that, even though you have kept this unadvertised. And you alerted me to some bad scientific actors that were pushing the alarm–more comfort amid all of the uncertainty.

Third, your recognition of the exaggerated climate mini-alarms (super storms, disruption of thermohaline circulation, etc.) in personal emails and in a letter-to-the-editor in the Houston Chronicle has been comforting too. The 1998 temperature spike and, more recently, the very bad Gulf Coast hurricanes–why wouldn’t I think the something bad from the human influence might be probable?

And so the balance of scientific evidence is against anthropogenic global warming being the mother of all negative externalities. You helped me realize this (wish Enron could have toned down the climate alarmism … I certainly failed on that one). 

Here is some of what you told me:

“[A review of the models] (together with my own toy model prejudice) has led me to think that sensitivity [of climate to greenhouse gas forcing] is collectively ‘coming down.’”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), February 1, 1998

“My own conclusion is that we can see the [enhanced greenhouse and aerosol] signals (G and V) but they might we weaker than we originally thought.”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), May 7, 1999

“As I have argued for years, we simply do not know the answer. There is a wide margin of error in many of the ingredients that go into the models. For example, we do not know some of the radiative properties of the aerosols to a factor of 5. No matter how good your climate model is, you cannot compensate for that uncertainty. The range of uncertainty is broad enough to accommodate [Pat] Michaels (well, maybe North) and Mahlman.”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), September 17, 1999

“I am buying the Lindzen story as far as the importance of upper level water vapor…. I am beginning to sense a sea change.”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), November 12, 1999

“[Richard] Kerr’s article delved a bit beneath the surface to find who some of the silent skeptics (really noncommittals) are. I suspect there are many more.”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), September 17, 1999

“As usual we may have been caught believing our models before we should.”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), June 17, 1998

“I think Dick [Lindzen] and I agree on the role of lag in the oceans and the freedom modelers have in using the oceans to help in the fit to the record.”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), August 18, 1998

And on extreme events, your message to me back to Enron is unchanged–more comfort.

“In his article Sunday, Rob Bradley reminds us of the errors made about dire climate predictions proffered by some climate science outliers. These have been given undue coverage by politicians and the media (the same can be said about the nay-saying fringe).  Virtually all of these dire predictions were never made or endorsed by the mainstream climate community of researchers in the field.

- Gerald North, “Fringe Predictions,” Letter to the Editor, Houston Chronicle, April 1, 2008.

Square this with (Dessler’s) recent op-ed co-signed by you that said in part:

“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.”

Settled science … really? Human driven and bad. All bad? Nothing benign or good? Will the real Jerry North please stand up?

2. Andy Dessler

“Frankly, your descriptions of my colleague Andrew Dessler are outrageous. You seem to forget that he spent several hours tutoring you and your student from [Kinkaid] on climate change during a university holiday.”

First of all, I am all for Dr. Dessler the scientist refuting or correcting any climate “skeptic” or anyone else on science. But I would expect that he (like you) would call out bad science by the Al Gores of the world and the ‘dire climate predictions’ that you mention above. Has he? No, he teams up with the infamous Joe Romm for science presentations for the media and offers no criticism of the alarmists–and Romm’s serial exaggerations. I can’t help but think that Dessler’s political views drive his science rather than the other way around.

At our lunch, I found it a bit ‘outrageous’ that Dessler said:

1) humankind could be living underground in the future because of the human influence on climate and

2) fossil fuel usage was akin to human slavery.

You remained silent when he made both statements. But how can you not say that this guy is getting over the top, particularly given your own sensitivity estimates and the fact that GHG forcing on climate is logarithmic, not linear, and the enhanced greenhouse signal is more about minimum (nighttime) temperatures going up rather than maximum (daytime) temps rising?

As far as you and him doing me a favor, I used my holiday to drive from Houston to College Station and back with a very top student from a very top high school where I volunteer teach each January. Dessler only came for lunch and declined a post-lunch visit. I bought lunch for everyone out of my own pocket. I paid you well at Enron for consulting–and arranged to pay you $2,500 for speaking at two Houston events a couple of weeks after our lunch. Dessler did you a favor by coming to lunch–and he did me a favor through his favor to you. Fair enough?

The lunch was very valuable for all of us to understand Dr. Dessler’s mindset. I was not impressed. He seems to be to be mad at the world and locked-in to a dangerously invasive, open-ended agenda of government planning in the name of ’stabilizing climate’.

Is Andrew Dessler even capable of agreeing with your views and not the IPCC’s? Can he even admit that the possibility that the human influence on climate has strong positive effects–and maybe even net positive effects? As a scientist, can he not reasonably make a case that the balance of evidence is working against climate alarmism?

3. Being ‘Mocked’ in a Blog

“As I said to Steve McIntyre after spending hours trying to help him, then being mocked in his blog, ‘No good deed goes unpunished’.”

Not fair to me, whatever the story is with McIntyre.

My post did not mock you–it exposed you by using your own quotations in a very public debate given your sign-on of the Chronicle op-ed. You mock yourself by leading a double life as a closet ’skeptic’ of climate alarmism. Indeed, before the recent Houston debates, you emailed me on not associating you with climate alarmism–just climate concern.

Rob and Dick [Lindzen],

Could we change it from “alarm” to “concern”? I won’t be claiming alarm.

Jerry North, January 4, 2010

Climate concern? A ‘concernist’ and not an ‘alarmist’? Well, lots of us are concerned about all sorts of things that may or may not turn out to be real problems. On the public policy front, I am concerned about energy unaffordability, energy unreliability, energy poverty, carbon trade wars, cap-and-trade profiteering, bogus offsets, and an intrusive carbon bureaucracy. That is why I challenge Dessler and Joe Romm and the like on ’settled’ alarmist physical science.

And have you not stated that climate change might be positive and not negative under some realistic scenarios? This gets us back to Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn + North = CO2 as a positive externality and certainly not a ruinously negative one.

My MasterResource blog documented how you have gone Far Left by joining alarmist Dessler in your criticism of the State of Texas petition against EPA.

This is probably the most sensitive sentence in my post: Yet Dr. North dare not advertise his dissent or what he believes is climate realism versus model-contrived climate and the resulting alarmism. But you have clear quotable views on climate sensitivity, climate model fudging, and extreme events. What else can you or I say other than I ‘outed’ you (sorry–but I had to…)? The ball is in your court for a rebuttal if I have misrepresented your views.

Responding to the Real Issues

Can you directly respond to the key issues for the record?  Climate alarmism and its adjunct, government activism, is a huge public policy issue. You and your Texas A&M colleagues are paid by the taxpayer and are knee deep in taxpayer-funded climate studies. You went public with Dessler in a very public way against the State of Texas despite your own caution against getting political. I think you owe a lot of us, and even the State of Texas, a forthright airing of your ‘private’ views.

Specifically,

1) Will you forthrightly explain your own ‘best guess’ sensitivity estimate and what it really means for the debate–and how your estimate is different from the IPCC and certainly Andy Dessler?

2) In light of #1, should the Texas A&M ‘litmus’ test of climate sensitivity

“If we do nothing to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases, future warming will likely be at least two degrees Celsius over the next century.” (emphasis added)

be changed or even dropped? And is such ‘political correctness’ what you really want to subject your department too? (You might have to overrule Dessler on this….)

3) Will you respond to my analogy of Climategate and the bad behaviors at Enron, a company you got to know well?

[And speaking of Enron analogies, something crossed my mind when I tried to understand your going Left with Dessler post-Climategate. Remember how Ken Lay co-opted Enron's board of directors by giving them use of the company planes and other perks? Conflict of interest.  Andy Dessler largely put together the conference in your honor last June.

Just might this have clouded your judgment in a very public policy matter regarding the op-ed? Do you have the capability with your very close friendship with Andy to tell him "you have gone too far" or "that is not correct" or at least "be careful on that"? Just asking ... and this might be worth thinking about. Friendships and loyalty in place of a tough-love, challenge culture can lead to organizational failure as my forthcoming book, Enron and Ken Lay: An American Tragedy, will explain.]

4) I responded paragraph-by-paragraph and even line-by-line to your Chronicle op-ed critical of the State of Texas re the EPA endangerment finding.

I put a lot of time into it. Your response? [Andy, your response?]

Correct Me On Any Particulars

“I’m afraid to say anything more to you via email.”

Let me have it–but on the substance only. You are a great, nice guy, and I ain’t so bad myself. (Let’s go to an Astros game after this is over….) I do not enjoy what I am doing here–or the conflicts I have found myself in with Rice’s Baker Institute at Rice (the Neal Lane problem–we had to go around him/Baker to have your climate debate with Lindzen at Rice) or other conflicts that I find myself in (including at my high school that has had a huge political correctness problem that is now being addressed).

I did not enjoy fighting Enron on windpower and their other (BTW, all money losing) ‘green’ initiatives–I put my job at risk and was penalized financially for my views expressed inside and outside of the company (http://www.politicalcapitalism.org/enron/).  If I was a ‘whistleblower’ at Enron, or if I am a ‘whistleblower’ on you, this email is a plea to deal with the issues and come clean. The time for hiding should be over. It’s a new ball game post Climategate.

A Final Question (and sorry for having to ask it)

Are you an honest man in a partially dishonest profession?

Are too many of your colleagues so imbued with an anti-industrial mentality, a back-to-nature mindset, and government dependence that alarms must be sounded and wagons circled when there is bad behavior, even cheating (Climategate)? Your scathing remarks about Tom Wigley of NCAR, for example (http://masterresource.org/?p=735, and other quotations I have not made public), a relatively clean Climategater, reveal that a number of scientists just don’t have the temperament to be scholars and disinterested seekers of truth in the political fire.

Here is hoping that you step back, reevaluate things, and get back to your once noble work of finding the middle ground of the debate between ultra-skepticism and Dessler-style alarmism. Judith Curry could use some company–and maybe other ‘closet skeptics’ (or just ‘closet non-alarmists’) will have the courage to come forward. It’s the best thing you could do for your profession and for your place in history. And now is the time.

- Rob

Appendix: Final Exchange With Gerald North

My 12-year relationship with Dr. North may now be at an end. “Politics’ killed it–but not only from my side but from his. North’s decision to go political by signing onto Andrew Dessler’s op-ed was the major blow, but his muted, peculiar reaction to Climategate spoke volumes about how he is protecting his friends and even his wayward profession rather than as a senior fellow of his trade, dressing down some of his colleagues.

Enron went bankrupt when the market lost faith in the company; climate science can chug along quite well on government grant money even if the public has lost faith in this profession.

Here is the way the two of us left it for the historical record.

I have made the decision to post our controversy so you and Andy will every reason to explain yourselves in this very public, contentious public policy debate. http://www.masterresource.org/2010/04/gerald-north-the-non-alarmist-alarmist/*

And remember:

1) both of you are public servants of the State of Texas as full time paid employees of a state university, and

2) you are on record as challenging the State of Texas on the state’s petition against EPA’s endangerment finding. I believe this post (and the other related ones at MasterResource) are relevant in this regard.

I am afraid you are ’in denial’ under the perverse incentive (grant $$$), group think (‘tribalism’ as Judith Curry would put it), and mind set (Malthusianism) of most of your profession.

I thought that if you would take a month or two to step back and really think about what you believe, there was a chance you would ‘own up’ to your private beliefs and how they diverge from the IPCC–just like how your beliefs have diverged from the mini-alarms that big names in your profession have championed (your Chronicle letter-to-the-editor was quite important and even courageous, in retrospect). Judging from the last emails from you to me, I was wrong.

I was also naive to think you would take a closer look at Climategate a la Judith Curry. “These are all her opinions and she has a right to hold and exhibit them” is a cop out when you as a ‘middle of the roader’ really have an obligation to speak truth to power. She has courage and you do not. She and all of us deserve better from you. This cop-out is what you have told me about James Hansen as a duck (I can pull out those emails if you would like). Is Al Gore or John Holdren excused in this way too? Can anyone hold any belief as if there was not a ‘balance of evidence’ in the whole climate debate?

Shoot back. If I am wrong, I am wrong. But I think there needs to be a lot of explaining on what the heck you believe on models, sensitivity, fudge factors, and the rest of it given your (private) history.

The ball is in your court. And there is also time to come clean with your beliefs and not hide behind the IPCC, Dr. Dessler, or anyone else. You are your own man and not like a young scientist who cannot professionally or financially afford to buck the establishment on the quite unsettled science of climate change and politically-forced scientific ’consensus’.

From: Gerald North [mailto:grnorth38@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Gerald North
Sent: Sunday, April 25, 2010 11:16 AM

Until recently, our relationship has been pedagogical. You asked me questions over the years and I tried to answer them as best I could. I have enjoyed that because it caused me to learn as I taught. 

We are no longer in that mode. You are using me to advance a political agenda. I have asked you not to post these private communications, but you persist. 

This has come to an end. I am sorry, but it must be.

From: Robert Bradley [mailto:rbradley@iertx.org]
Sent: Sunday, April 25, 2010 11:35 AM
To: ‘Gerald North’
Cc: ‘Andrew Dessler’

Climate science is ‘nonpolitical’? What world do you live in?

Would you like me to pull out the emails with your political statements in them? Was your Chronicle op-ed with Dessler nonpolitical?

Yes, I knew this could be the end. But this is a small price to pay to try to get toward the truth as you experts state it.

And if you would ‘come clean’ with a full response, you might actually thank me for all this on down the road. I have emails from you thanking me for my ‘public policy’ push on the science–want me to pull those out too?

You have stated that you do not write emails that you do not want to be public. What are you hiding other than what you have said in the past?

Is the ‘private’ Jerry North just an extension of Climategate–emails that reveal what is really going on behind the curtain? What if we could see all of the emails of the climate alarmists and the closet non-alarmists? Wow!

What do you really believe, Jerry, to inform the policy debate? Sounds like you will just ignore this and hope it goes away….. That is a pretty bad way to deal with it–and I gave you a golden opportunity to come clean in a much better manner than what is now the case. You are a student of the philosophy and history of science. I have to believe you care about how a philosopher or historian of science will view your legacy.

Why not explain yourself? It is not the end of the world to own up to 2C, for gosh sakes….. And the problems of models….. And the obvious lessons of Climategate…. This is not ultra-skepticism but good middle-of-the-road stuff.

[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.

Let’s ignore the snarky reference to “deniers” and ask: is science and are scientists under attack? The answer is Yes. But in an intellectual sense, isn’t this the essence of falsifiable, non-verifiable  physical science?

Climategate (et al.) is not simply about “deniers” and Waldrop’s complaint that skeptics are “stok[ing] the angry fires of talk radio, cable news, the blogosphere and the like.” It’s much more nuanced than that.

As a quick aside, perhaps Dr. Waldrop can be forgiven for failing to see the big picture. To critics (can he tolerate them?), he is a deer in the headlights of universal, Internet-quick scientific scrutiny. And there are a lot of smart ‘amateurs’ mixing it up with the pros (who likes competition?).  Consider the view of his colleague-in-arms Paul Ehrlich, who profoundly stated in the same March 10th editorial: “Everyone is scared shitless, but they don’t know what to do.”

Perhaps we can help them.

Three Key Issues

Sorting this out, there are three important issues:

(1) Is science under attack?

(2) Are scientists under attack? and

(3) Who is doing the attacking?

The third questions is by far the most interesting, but let us first dispose of questions one and two.

Is Science Under Attack?

To question one, the answer is of course it is. That’s how science works. One of the simplest explanations of this is often used by Martin Hertzberg, a retired Navy meteorologist with a PhD in physical chemistry-–in other words, a real scientist.  He writes:

The difference between a scientist and propagandist is clear. If a scientist has a theory, he searches diligently for data that might contradict it so that he can test it further or refine it. The propagandist carefully selects only the data that agrees with his theory and dutifully ignores any that contradicts it. The global warming alarmists don’t even bother with data! All they have are half-baked computer models that are totally out of touch with reality and have already been proven to be false.

Science is always under attack, and the best science is under attack by the very scientists who construct the hypotheses at issue. Sadly, this is not what is generally going on with climate change.

To help our climate science friends, which would include anyone who worked on the IPCC Work Group I report, here are just two hypotheses that they might wish to diligently examine:

• There is no evidence of historic temperature increases or temperature levels similar to what we have observed in the past 40 years that could arise from natural causes.
• The climate models upon which the IPCC reports rely fully incorporate the influences of water vapor, the El Nino southern, the Pacific decadal oscillation, the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation, the Arctic oscillation, and the causes of long-term (1,500, 5,000 and 20,000 year) climate variation, thus eliminating the potential to mistake a natural cause in climate variation with a man-made cause of variation.

If the IPCC scientists were able to falsify either of these, then the entire basis for alarmism about climate change would fall apart, as these are the “fundamental” climate science about which Dr. Waldrop is so concerned.

There is some hope, however. After being bludgeoned by criticism and demands for data from scientists outside his personal circle of climate alarmists, and apparently a scientist within his own offices who released the now infamous Climategate emails, Dr. Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Institute at East Anglia University, and IPCC scion, has admitted the following (as summarized by Indur Goklany):

• Neither the rate nor magnitude of recent warming is exceptional.
• There was no significant warming from 1998-2009. According to the IPCC we should have seen a global temperature increase of at least 0.2°C per decade.
• The IPCC models may have overestimated the climate sensitivity for greenhouse gases, underestimated natural variability, or both.
• This also suggests that there is a systematic upward bias in the impacts estimates based on these models just from this factor alone.
• The logic behind attribution of current warming to well-mixed man-made greenhouse gases is faulty.
• The science is not settled, however unsettling that might be.
• There is a tendency in the IPCC reports to leave out inconvenient findings, especially in the part(s) most likely to be read by policy makers.

Are Scientists Under Attack?

It is unusual that scientists fighting other scientists make newspaper headlines. One isn’t supposed to be bludgeoned at all, and the discourse isn’t supposed to be on the BBC webpage, but rather in the scientific literature. Hence, the second question: Are scientists under attack?

Here nuance begins to enter. Some scientists who should be under attack are under attack. Some who should be are not, and some who should not be are. A small number of examples make this point.

Scientists at the East Anglia University’s Climate Research Center (CRU), the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the Pennsylvania State University, to name but three, have refused to respond to Freedom of Information requests seeking data and the code for the computer models they have used in preparation of scientific papers. These scientists deserve to be under attack. As the Institute of Physics explained in its submission to Parliament regarding the released CRU emails:

Fundamentally, we consider it should be inappropriate for the verification of the integrity of the scientific process to depend on appeals to Freedom of Information legislation. Nevertheless, the right to such appeals has been shown to be necessary.

If honest science is to survive, the information underlying scientific studies must be available to anyone seeking to validate or replicate the work. Any scientist who stands in the way of that principle should not only be under attack, they should be cashiered from the profession.

Now, as to those who are not under attack but should be. These are often individuals who have reached emeritus status and are “too big to fail”, one supposes. Let me offer but one example, Professor Steven Schneider. He served as a climate researcher for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado for two decades and is one of the most ardent advocates of the Global Warming Theory. He joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1991 and remains there today. He has stated the following:

• “It is journalistically irresponsible to present both sides [of the global warming theory] as though it were a question of balance.” (Quoted in the Boston Globe, May 31, 1992.)
• “Looking at every bump and wiggle… is a waste of time…. I don’t set very much store by looking at the direct evidence.” (Quoted in the Washington Times, June 12, 1992)
• “[We] have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” (Quoted by Dixy Lee Ray in Trashing the Planet, 1990)

Schneider is a Hertzberg propagandist. He and his fellow travelers should be the focus of intense examination as they seek to deflect debate away from the science itself. I don’t, however, see the bastions of science, including the National Academy, cleaning up its own messes. These supposed leaders of science have the rostrum and they are not going to give it up. They control the science purse strings, access to journals, and most of the lay press. They are the emperors without clothing.

These propagandists are not to be confused with the majority of scientists who have no political agenda and who simply want to be scientists. These are often the scientists who are under attack and should not be. Among them are Richard Lindzen, MIT, Roger Pielke, Sr., University of Colorado – Boulder, and John Christy, UAH. These people refuse to go beyond where observation takes them. They are under attack because they refuse to participate in the propaganda campaigns.

Who’s Doing the Attacking?

Now for the fascinating question, who is attacking the “settled science”? The answer reflects an entirely new paradigm.

In the past, adversarial science most often played out in the courts. A perfect recent example is found in the recent matter of Native Ecosystems Council v. Tidwell. The court held that government scientists were arbitrary and capricious in their decision-making because they relied on models instead of actual observation. Specifically, the Forest Service attempted to claim that a 40,000 acre area of sagebrush was a breeding ground for the sage grouse, even though they had diligently looked for these birds and had not been able to find either one bird or one breeding site in over 15 years. Nevertheless, the government scientists claimed that their habitat model suggested that it should be a breeding ground and thus it was one and thus it demanded protection. As the court stated, that “just doesn’t cut it.”

Notably, in dissent, one judge was prepared to rely on the authority of the government instead of the science itself. That is, of course, the crux of the problem. It is time to get past “authority” and get to the science, and that is the new paradigm.

Propagandists like Steve Schneider loudly argue that the “deniers” or “skeptics” should be disregarded. To him the debate should be within the scientific community. The skeptics aren’t scientists but shills for Big Oil. Even Nature editor Waldrop proclaims that “the IPCC error [regarding glaciers] was originally caught by scientists, not skeptics”. (Brit. Spelling).

Schneider and Waldrop are wrong. There is a new breed of scientist in this fray, and they don’t take money from Big Oil (or little oil), and they publish in the peer-reviewed literature and they are not afraid of big data sets or complex computer code. I call them the “mad-as- hell, won’t-take-it-anymore” scientists.

Who are These Guys?

In the main, these are the now retired baby-boomers who have nothing better to do with their time than apply their considerable skills in attempting to replicate or falsify climate alarmism science. Steve McIntyre, working with Ross McKitrick, destroyed Michael Mann’s infamous “hockey stick”, and in the process demonstrated that data does exist to show that natural causes can result in temperatures higher than what we observed in the 1990’s.

McIntyre continues to seek the data underlying the IPCC reports. Although McIntyre and McKitrick publish in the peer-reviewed literature, their work on the Internet at Climate Audit has been the more powerful driver for scientific openness and honest analysis. They put science on open display in a manner that allows others to replicate or critique their work. Others of this ilk are Ken Stewart, Anthony Watts, S. Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz, Chauncey Starr, and the father of the Gaia theory, James Lovelock.

Lovelock, the 90-year-old British scientist, who has worked for NASA and paved the way for the detection of man-made aerosol and refrigerant gases in the atmosphere, called for greater caution in climate research. Reflecting on the current status of climate science, Lovelock makes the pithy point that “quite often, observations done by hand are accurate but all the theoretical stuff in between tends to be very dodgy and I think they are seeing this with climate change.”

Conclusion

So, what would a real scientist do? Perhaps they should look backward to see what their retired parents are doing and try to do as well. Bit embarrassing when the old man or old woman takes the children to task for abandoning the touch stone of science. Happily, until they are dead, it looks like the grey-haired old biddies are going to look askance at their propaganda progeny.

David W. Schnare, Esq. Ph.D., is director of the Center for Environmental Stewardship, Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. For more biographical information on Dr. Schnare, see here.