“If the models are as flawed as critics say … you have to ask yourself, ‘How come they work?’”

- Gavin Schmidt [NASA], quoted in David Fahrenhold, “Scientists’ Use of Computer Models to Predict Climate Change is Under Attack,” Washington Post, April 6, 2010.

 “[Model results] could also be sociological: getting the socially acceptable answer.”

 - Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), June 20, 1998.

 The above quotation by NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt suggests that quite remarkable progress has been made with climate models in recent years. Such must be the case given the verdict by leading climate scientists that climate models were not nearly ready for prime time just a decade ago.

But what do climate scientists really believe behind closed doors? Will they no longer express their innermost thoughts in emails or in fear that ‘the cause’ of climate alarm/forced energy transformation will be compromised?

Climategate 2.0: Model Quotations

<0850> [Tim] Barnett:  “[IPCC AR5 models] clearly, some tuning or very good luck involved.  I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer.”

<5066> [Gabriele] Hegerl: “[IPCC AR5 models] So using the 20th c for tuning is just doing what some people have long suspected us of doing [...] and what the nonpublished diagram from NCAR showing correlation between aerosol forcing and sensitivity also suggested.”

<4443> [Phil] Jones: “Basic problem is that all models are wrong – not got enough middle and low level clouds.”

<1982> [Ben] Santer:  “There is no individual model that does well in all of the SST and water vapor tests we’ve applied.”

[Jagadish] Shukla/IGES: ["Future of the IPCC", 2008] It is inconceivable that policymakers will be  willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.

Gerald North Quotations

Here are some quotations from Dr. Gerald North of Texas A&M, certainly a distinguished climate scientist, made during his consulting era with Enron Corp.

“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.

“[Model results] could also be sociological: getting the socially acceptable answer.”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), June 20, 1998.

“There is a good reason for a lack of consensus on the science. It is simply too early. The problem is difficult, and there are pitifully few ways to test climate models.”

     – Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), July 13, 1998.

“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.

“The ocean lag effect can always be used to explain the ‘underwarming’….

The different models couple to the oceans differently. There is quite a bit of slack here (undetermined fudge factors). If a model is too sensitive, one can just couple in a little more ocean to make it agree with the record. This is why models with different sensitivities all seem to mock the record about equally well. (Modelers would be insulted by my explanation, but I think it is correct.)”

    – Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), August 17, 1998.

Yet climate models are being taken seriously as guides to public policy. Some humility is in order when coercion and massive wealth redistribution/destruction is needed on Day 1 (forward) for a hypothetical problem calculated for some distant year.

It was money well spent. Dr. North was personable and honest, although he had a propensity to default toward alarmism if you did not challenge him. (Such is the neo-Malthusian propensity of most natural scientists who see nature as optimal and the human influence as only downside.) This is why I have called Dr. North, to his chagrin, the non-alarmist alarmist.

North distrusted climate models. He noted time and again the personal relationships and personality traits in driving the scientist’s views. And his own sensitivity estimate was at the bottom end of the IPCC range. (North’s climate sensitivity estimate of about 2ºC for a doubling of atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases in equilibrium–with a plus/minus of .25ºC I would later find out–was an intuitive number.)

Some of North’s comments in the late 1990s may prove insightful when the science finally settles out, such as:

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

“[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.”

“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.”

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

Richard Lindzen

North and I talked a lot about Richard Lindzen: his personality, his brilliance, his penchant to probe and forward hypotheses that he had to later take back. But what was important was that the theoretical pioneer was probing the weakest spot of the high-sensitivity estimates–and that a half-right Lindzen would win the debate against climate alarmism.

And so it is today that three recent peer-reviewed papers are questioning the all-important feedback effects of clouds and water vapor: Lindzen and Choi (Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences);  Spencer and Braswell (Remote Sensing), and Richard P. Allan (Meteorological Applications).

North’s colleague Andrew Dessler will have none of this–the science is reasonably settled in his view toward high warming and the need for public-policy action–but his own work is in dispute.

The science is not settled, much less settled in favor of climate alarmism.

Lindzen’s Response to Emanuel (and Frumhoff) 

Richard Lindzen is an intellectual, not only a climate scientist, who recognizes the non-sequitur of jumping from a human influence on climate to alarm to public policy action. Marlo Lewis has forcefully made this point as well.

And so the MIT chair professor takes issue with his colleague Kerry Emanuel and a recent op-ed the latter coauthored with Peter Frumhoff. The rebuttal follows (and the op-ed is reprinted below).

The op-ed by Peter Frumhoff (with the environmental advocacy group, Union of Concerned Scientists), and the tropical meteorologist, Kerry Emanuel, epitomizes much of what is wrong with the public discourse on this issue. 

The vast majority of scientists working on climate do agree that there has been a fraction of a degree of warming since the middle of the 19th century, that CO2 has been increasing, and that this should contribute something to the warming.  This turns out to be a very innocent proposition.  Nonetheless, a politician who acknowledges this statement is labeled by some who are opposed to global warming alarm as representing softness on the issue.

On the other hand, those who promote global warming alarm treat acceptance of this rather trivial position as tantamount to acceptance of alarm.

Sensitivity, not Warming Per Se, is the Issue

Of course, the real question is one of sensitivity.  That is to say, how much warming does one expect further increases in CO2 (and other greenhouse gases like methane, nitrous oxide, various fluorocarbons, etc.) will give rise to, and even the president of the National Academy of Sciences (Ralph Cicerone) and the previous president of the Royal Society (Martin Rees) agree that this is still unknown (or as they stated in a letter to the Financial Times, “Uncertainties in the future rate of this rise, stemming largely from the “feedback” effects on water vapour and clouds, are topics of current research.”). 

Indeed, even if the increase in CO2 accounted for all of the observed warming, it would not imply a dangerous sensitivity. According to the IPCC, the current levels of anthropogenic greenhouse gases already represents approximately the greenhouse forcing that would result from a doubling of CO2. Thus, if the models on which alarm is based are correct, then man has contributed several times more warming than has been observed. Modelers skirt this issue by claiming that aerosols have hidden the difference, but this is simply the invocation of a fudge factor since the aerosol impact is unknown, and each model chooses a different value.

What the proponents of alarm are engaged in is nothing less than a ‘bait and switch’ scam, and it would appear that many of their opponents have taken the bait.

————————-

Peter Frumhoff and Kerry Emanuel, Candidates Must Deal with Facts, not Wishes, Miami Herald, September 14, 2011.

When it comes to foreign policy, the saying goes that politics stops at the water’s edge.

When it comes to climate science, we say that politics should stop at the atmosphere’s edge.

One of us is a Republican, the other a Democrat. We hold different views on many issues. But as scientists, we share a deep conviction that leaders of both parties must speak to the reality and risks of human-caused climate change, and commit themselves to finding bipartisan solutions.

Scientists have known for more than 100 years that carbon dioxide in our atmosphere traps heat. And today we know that the excess carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere from human activity – primarily, burning coal and oil and clearing forests – is altering our climate.

It’s a conclusion based on established physics and on evidence gathered from satellite data, ancient ice cores, temperature stations, fossilized trees and corals. And it’s a conclusion affirmed by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, established by President Lincoln to advise our nation’s leaders on matters of science.

But as scientific understanding of climate change has advanced, the public discourse has split along partisan lines.

Republicans who identify with the Tea Party are particularly likely to deny the reality of global warming. Several of this year’s aspiring presidential candidates are rejecting the findings of climate science – and feeling the political heat if they don’t.

After former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney reiterated his understanding that human activity is warming the planet, Rush Limbaugh denounced him for doing so, saying, “bye-bye nomination.” Romney now says that he doesn’t know what is causing climate change.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry recently accused climate scientists of “manipulating data.” In Wednesday’s Republican candidate debate, he made an argument like the one tobacco industry executives used to cast doubt on the scientific evidence of smoking’s health risks, saying, “The idea that we would put Americans’ economy in jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet to me is just nonsense.” Science is never truly settled and no responsible leader would wait for 100 percent certainty to respond to a serious threat.
Making misleading statements about science and picking on scientists is easy. Most would rather defend their findings in peer-reviewed journals than on cable TV. A lie can travel halfway around the world before we even get our lab coats on.

Some politicians, fortunately, are demonstrating a more responsible way to talk about climate change.

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, for example, reaffirmed his acceptance of the science in Wednesday’s presidential debate. And New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has also been speaking up for climate science, even as he has backed away from taking action.

“When you have over 90 percent of the world’s scientists who have studied this stating that climate change is occurring and humans play a contributing role, it’s time to defer to the experts,” Christie said last month.

The right rebuked Christie for recognizing the reality of climate change. And the left lambasted him for using the same speech to pull out of a regional pact to curb emissions.

We question Christie’s policy decision. But we commend him for acknowledging the reality of climate change, and for providing New Jersey voters a chance to decide whether they agree with his policy choice. That’s how our democracy should work.

Republicans skeptical about climate policy should follow Christie’s and Huntsman’s lead and realize that they don’t need to misrepresent the science.

And Democrats must speak out as well.

Candidate Barack Obama spoke forcefully about global warming, but has been far too quiet as president. In a rare public statement on climate, he recently told two “kid reporters” with Scholastic News that climate change is one of the chief challenges their generation will face.

That’s not enough. Science tells us that the extent and severity of climate change faced by our children’s generation will be determined by the hard choices we must make today. Political leadership is about ensuring that we adults face up to this task.

We cannot afford to have those leading our nation misrepresent, or be silent about, the reality and risks of climate change.

Whoever wins the next election will lead a nation increasingly affected by climate change, command a Pentagon that calls climate change a national security threat, and preside over federal scientists already working to help states and cities prepare for climate change impacts.

It is time for leaders of both parties to take seriously what science tells us we are doing to our common atmosphere, so we can take up the urgent task of finding solutions on common ground.

“[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

“I agree that the case for 2C warming [for a doubling of manmade greenhouse gas forcing in equilibrium] is pretty strong.”

- Gerald R. North to Rob Bradley, email communication, August 13, 2007.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published my letter-to-the-editor rebutting Kerry Emanuel’s letter, which, in turn, was critical of his fellow MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen’s op-ed, “Climate Science in Denial.”

My arguments opposing those of Professor Emanuel (see entire letter below) are fairly straightforward, but I end with this challenge:

“But when will many climate scientists, including Mr. Emanuel, face Climategate and the fact that the human influence on climate, on net, is as likely to be positive than negative?”

Is this challenge rash, or is it backed by the facts?  Well, let’s consider the views of an esteemed climate economist and an esteemed climate scientist. They are, respectively,

Robert O. Mendelsohn (Edwin Weyerhaeuser Davis Professor of Forest Policy; Professor of Economics; and Professor, School of Management)

Gerald R. North (Distinguished Professor, Physical Section, Department of Atmospheric Sciences and the
Department of Oceanography).

Dr. North’s long held sensitivity estimate of 2ºC for a doubling of atmospheric greenhouse concentrations is one-third below the “best guess” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or the IPCC’s best guess is one-half greater than that of Dr. North). That is a big difference, and if you believe Mendelsohn et al. that a 2ºC for 2x results in net positive benefits for the world, then voila!

Is it radical to believe that the human influence on climate, on net, has more positives than negatives for many decades out and even beyond a century or more?  After all, the CO2 fertilization effect is a strong positive, and warmer and wetter is going in the right direction for the biopshere…

Perhaps CO2 as the green greenhouse gas is ’closet’ mainstream, if North’s (private) views are considered.

Therein lies one of the peculiarities of the multi-disciplinary climate-change debate, for Gerald North may privately believe something that he is unwilling to admit in public.

Appendix: Robert Bradley Jr. “Doubts on Climate Are Reasonable” (Wall Street Journal letter-to-the-Editor)

Kerry Emanuel’s letter of April 28 illustrates some of the major points of Richard Lindzen’s op-ed, “Climate Science in Denial” (April 22). It is bad enough that Mr. Emanuel refers to major misrepresentations, errors and unethical behavior among scientists involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports as “minor errors.” But claiming that Mr. Lindzen’s opinions are at odds with basic climate theory, which does not support climate alarmism, is worse.

Mr. Emanuel suggests that such disputed matters as sea-level rise and glacier dynamics (which depend on factors other than global warming) form a “vast body of evidence” for climate change. But no one disputes that climate is changing and has always been changing. So what is his point?

Mr. Emanuel implicitly attacks a recent paper by Mr. Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi (2009) that, indeed, did have important errors as acknowledged by Mr. Lindzen. But according to the authors, corrections have not altered its conclusion of a low climate sensitivity to man-made greenhouse gases.

The majority of the public is right to discount anthropogenic climate change as an environmental concern. But when will many climate scientists, including Mr. Emanuel, face Climategate and the fact that the human influence on climate, on net, is as likely to be positive than negative?

Robert Bradley Jr.

CEO & Founder, Institute for Energy Research, Houston

[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 II, and Part III]

“If the models are as flawed as critics say … you have to ask yourself, ‘How come they work?’”

- Gavin Schmidt [NASA], quoted in David Fahrenhold, “Scientists’ Use of Computer Models to Predict Climate Change is Under Attack,” Washington Post, April 6, 2010.

“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

A Washington Post piece last week, “Scientists’ use of computer models to predict climate change is under attack,” has brought attention to the importance of climate modeling in the current debate over climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases (GHGs). And not surprisingly, few mainstream IPCC scientists want to cast doubt on the current state of the art.

But what do open-minded climate scientists who are not formal modelers say behind closed doors? For part of this answer, I have collected these quotations from Dr. Gerald North of Texas A&M’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences and Department of Oceanography.

Prior to Climategate, at least, North was a straight shooter on the problems of climate models. [North's Left turn to go arm-in-arm with Andrew Dessler with regard to Climategate is examined here , here, and here.] 

North’s estimate of climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases is about one-third below that of the model average that make up the IPCC projection (about 3ºC). As he said:

“I agree that the case for 2ºC warming [for a doubling of manmade greenhouse gas forcing in equilibrium] is pretty strong.”

- Gerald R. North to Rob Bradley, email communication, August 13, 2007.

North’s error range is 1/4th of a degree, so his warming estimate for a doubled GHG forcing is between 1.75ºC and 2.25ºC, the low end of which is outside of the IPCC range of 2ºC–4.5ºC. Yet Dr. North dare not advertise his dissent or what he believes is climate realism versus model-contrived climate and the resulting alarmism.

Climate models are only as good as what goes into them and our understanding of some of the physical processes that control key aspects of the climate (for instance, cloud behavior) and their response to human alterations of the atmospheric composition is less than ideal. Models cannot magically generate the real, operative microphysics of climate to inform us what will happen when climate forcings are altered. However, a preference for a particular outcome can quickly turn a garbage in-garbage out situation into alarmism in-alarmism out.

Models are not ready for prime time and may not be for many more years if not decades. But this inconvenient fact is downplayed by the scientists involved for two reasons. One is the massive government funding of climate modeling predicated on an assumed “climate problem.”  And two, there is a widespread Malthusian virus among natural scientists–a belief that nature is optimal, man’s influence is bad. (Just the opposite might be the case.) So the happy middle of the debate has been absent.

Alarming, but Flawed, Climate Models

One of the reasons I am not a climate alarmist is because of Dr. North. I believe North points us toward the elusive happy middle of the science debate between ultra-skepticism and alarmism.

Below are some quotations from North on climate models. Given that temperatures are not much different today than they were at the time of these (Enron-era) emails, and that temperatures in the last 10–13 years are at the very lower end of model projections, I would doubt that one could say that models have ‘solved’ climate in this period.

Jerry North on Climate Models

“[Model results] could also be sociological: getting the socially acceptable answer.”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), June 20, 1998

“There is a good reason for a lack of consensus on the science. It is simply too early. The problem is difficult, and there are pitifully few ways to test climate models.”

     – Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), July 13, 1998

“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 ocean lag effect can always be used to explain the ‘underwarming’….

The different models couple to the oceans differently. There is quite a bit of slack here (undetermined fudge factors). If a model is too sensitive, one can just couple in a little more ocean to make it agree with the record. This is why models with different sensitivities all seem to mock the record about equally well. (Modelers would be insulted by my explanation, but I think it is correct.)”

    – Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), August 17, 1998

 Appendix: Excerpts from WP Article

“The computer models used to predict climate change are far more sophisticated than the ones that forecast the weather, elections or sporting results. They are multilayered programs in which scientists try to replicate the physics behind things such as rainfall, ocean currents and the melting of sea ice. Then, they try to estimate how emissions from smokestacks and auto tailpipes might alter those patterns in the future, as the effects of warmer temperatures echo through these complex and interrelated systems….

To check these programs’ accuracy, scientists plug in data from previous years to see if the model’s predictions match what really happened.

But these models still have the same caveat as other computer-generated futures. They are man-made, so their results are shaped by human judgment.

This year, critics have harped on that fact, attacking models of climate change that have been used to illustrate what will happen if the United States and other countries do nothing to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Climate scientists have responded that their models are imperfect, but still provide invaluable glimpses of change to come.

They have found themselves trying to persuade the public — now surrounded by computerized predictions of the future — to believe in these.

If policymakers don’t heed the models, “you’re throwing away information. And if you throw away information, then you know less about the future than we actually do,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

“You can say, ‘You know what, I don’t trust the climate models, so I’m going to walk into the middle of the road with a blindfold on,’ ” Schmidt said. “But you know what, that’s not smart.”

Climate scientists admit that some models overestimated how much the Earth would warm in the past decade. But they say this might just be natural variation in weather, not a disproof of their methods.

As computers have become faster and cheaper, models both simple and sophisticated have proliferated across government, business and sports, appearing to offer precise answers to questions that used to be rhetorical.

They also depend on the computers running them. To accurately depict how individual clouds form and disappear, for instance, the computers that model climate change would need to be a million times faster. For now, the effects of clouds have to be estimated….

There are more than a dozen such models running around the world: mega-computers whose job is creating a virtual Earth.

These usually combine a weather simulation with other programs that mimic effects of rain and sun on the land, currents in the ocean, and emissions of greenhouse gases. First, these models imagine all the factors interacting within a “grid box” — an imaginary cube of land, water and sky that might be 60 miles long and 60 miles wide….

The pattern is the point. It is man’s signature, a guide to what could happen in the real world. All the major climate models seem to show that greenhouse gases are causing warming, climate scientists say, although they don’t agree about how much. A 2007 United Nations report cited a range of estimates from 2 to 11.5 degrees over the next century.

“It’s an educated, scientifically based guess,” said Michael Winton, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “But it’s a guess nonetheless.”

But Warren Meyer, a mechanical and aerospace engineer by training who blogs at www.climate-skeptic.com, said that climate models are highly flawed. He said the scientists who build them don’t know enough about solar cycles, ocean temperatures and other things that can nudge the earth’s temperature up or down. He said that because models produce results that sound impressively exact, they can give off an air of infallibility.

But, Meyer said — if the model isn’t built correctly — its results can be both precise-sounding and wrong.

“The hubris that can be associated with a model is amazing, because suddenly you take this sketchy understanding of a process, and you embody it in a model,” and it appears more trustworthy, Meyer said. “It’s almost like money laundering.”

Last month, a Gallup poll provided the latest evidence of a public U-turn on climate change. Asked if the threat of global warming was “generally exaggerated,” 48 percent said yes. That was up 13 points from 2008, the highest level of skepticism since Gallup started asking the question in 1997.

But scientists say that, during this time, they have only become more certain that their models work.

Put in the conditions on Earth more than 20,000 years ago: they produce an Ice Age, NASA’s Schmidt said. Put in the conditions from 1991, when a volcanic eruption filled the earth’s atmosphere with a sun-shade of dust. The models produce cooling temperatures and shifts in wind patterns, Schmidt said, just like the real world did.

If the models are as flawed as critics say, Schmidt said, “You have to ask yourself, ‘How come they work?’

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

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

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

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

Some Background

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

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

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

Criticism of Dessler/North (et al.) Piece

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

————————————————–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• •?The global climate is changing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And the Sins of Omission …

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Texas Petition

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

Overview of  Science-related Argument

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dessler/North ”Very Little Science“ Claim

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

This is a hollow accusation.

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

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

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

To which Abbott responded:

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

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

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

And that is the heart of the matter.

The Real Science Issue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MasterResource Posts to Come

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

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

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

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

Let’s Pull Back the Curtain Some More

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

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

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

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

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

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