Throwing stones in the glass greenhouse

The public debate over the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and what, if anything, should be done about the dire future it forecasts is extraordinary in two main respects. In one respect the public is utterly confused about the status of the IPCC forecasts; and in the second, the debate has been marked by a degree of name calling and mud slinging that puts it below the already low level of political debate in this country. And the greenhouse industry must bear much of the blame for this.

On the first point, the public at large have been confused into believing that some form of scientific consensus underpins the IPCC forecasts of major temperature increases - ranging from 1.1C to 6.4C over 100 years, with a “best guess” at about 3.4C. Consensus on this is impossible as we shall see in a moment. The general hierarchy of agreement about climate change goes something like this:

Climate Change - yes, the earth’s climate is changing. No one is arguing with that. It is always changing. Temperatures have gone up by about a degree or so, through a couple of ups and downs, since the 1860s.

Carbon dioxide increase - yes, the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing due to human activities. We have a consensus there.

Human activity is influencing climate change - there is some sort of agreement (not a consensus) on that, but certainly none on how much.

IPCC projections - no consensus, or even general agreement. The IPCC has certified its own work as being 90 per cent correct, which is nice, but there has been no external review of its work.

The nature of the work, with a lot of judgment in areas where the science is largely unknown, means that it is not possible for another group to reproduce the work. There is an honourable opposition to this method of forecasting, with the most difficult for the pro-IPCCers to ignore being: Carl Wunsch, a professor of physical oceanography at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; John Christy, Professor and Director of the Earth System Science Center, University of Alabama, Huntsville; besides a number of other eminent names.

However, these scientists have been ignored, more or less, and the debate confused to the point where the public at large believe there is a consensus on the IPCC findings.

Much more could be said on this. The ABC recently bought a program from the UK entitled the Great Global Warming Swindle which has been already attacked in the Australian media although it has yet to be shown here. (The program has been accessible through the Internet for some time.)

Further discussion on most points can be left until the program is aired, but one point it does not make is that the IPCC’s forecasting effort is unprecedented. The only comparable attempts to computer model a complex system on this scale for any length of time into the future involve the economy, but those are much simpler and are never expected to be accurate beyond about a year or so, at best.

The IPCC is, in fact, trying to predict the state of a very complex physical system a full century out when, on the panel’s own admission, scientists know nothing about most of the variables in the model (page 16 of the physical science summary of the IPCC’s fourth assessment report).

In other words, there is still considerable room for balanced scientific debate but the debate, at times, has been extraordinarily bitter, personal and involving some very dodgy debating tricks indeed.

One prominent critic of the IPCC is Robert Balling, director of the Office of Climatology at Arizona State University. But when confronted with this, an IPCCer will point triumphantly to assertions that Balling has “links” with oil companies, as if that wipes him out as a credible sceptic. It does not, or if it did, then the bulk of the pro-greenhouse scientists would also be swept from the board. For not only do most of the greenhouse scientists take salaries and immense research grants from Greenhouse bodies of one sort or another, they have invested a lot of their careers in the Greenhouse story, and may even tell you they are “passionate” about the environment to boot.

For the environmental lobby to complain about oil company grants is not just throwing stones in the glass greenhouse, it is chucking around enormous boulders.

In any case, the amounts cited in allegations about grants to public policy bodies (to which the scientist in question may be connected) - $10,000 here $100,000 there - are tiny, even derisory in US terms, compared to the enormous amounts being lavished on greenhouse research.

The Australian Greenhouse Office’s website indicates that the AGO, the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology alone have a four-year $90 million research program ending next year. The University of New South Wales recently announced a $6 million Climate Change Research Centre headed by two distinguished scientists.

I humbly suggest that these examples are just the tip of the funding iceberg.

In contrast, the oil and coal industry may be well-funded but they could not give away any of those funds for research if they tried. No environmental scientist would dare touch that source of funds and would have a great deal of trouble getting any subsequent research published.

No, the debate is being driven by the greenhouse industry and, as noted, certain elements of the industry are not about to permit balanced debate.

Another prominent sceptic is William M. Gray, Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at CSU's Department of Atmospheric Sciences. A greenhouser may typically dismiss Professor Gray’s objections by saying that his expertise is in hurricanes and that he is not very good at predicting them, and that he is a meteorologist not a climatologist.

All three points may be true to some extent but, again, they are not relevant. Meteorology is not very far from climatology at all and Professor Gray is an eminent scientist indeed. In any case, the greenhouse industry has been banging-on about how storms will become more powerful in a warmed up world. Professor Gray, above many other scientists, would be in a position to know the truth of those assertions and he seems to have doubts, so maybe the emphasis should be on listening to what he has to say rather than on finding gossamer thin excuses for pushing his objections aside.

Confronted with a list of eminent sceptics, a greenhouser may use the above tricks to cast doubts on a few then wave the whole list away as “doubtful”, although the list may include those whom they can find no pretext for dismissing. Those others include the likes of Associate Professor Stewart Franks, a hydro climatologist at the University of Newcastle in NSW, or Tim Ball, a former Professor of Climatology at the University of Winnipeg.

Another argument frequently used is that many of the sceptics are senior or even retired scientists. This is certainly true, although why seniority should be a problem I don’t know. However, in the current climate (pun intended) only a brave mid-career environmental scientist would voice scepticism. The scientist’s funding would almost certainly depend on some greenhouse body, and discrimination can be expected.

The best known example of discrimination against sceptics concerns Hendrik Tennekes, a former director of research at the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute and now a professor of aeronautical engineering at Pennsylvania State University. Considered the elder statesman of the sceptics, he was forced out of his job at the Dutch Institute in the 1980s for daring to speak out against climate change dogma.

Closer in time and distance, Garth Paltridge, emeritus professor of the University of Tasmania and a former director of the Antarctic Co-operative Research Centre, says that when he was setting up the centre in the early 1990s he made the mistake of saying to the media there was still a lot of doubt about the science of global warming.

In an article in the Australian Financial Review (February 22, 2006) he says he was quickly told by executives at the “highest levels” of the CSIRO - a partner in the centre - that he should keep such doubts to himself or see the organisation withdraw from the centre. At the time the CSIRO was trying to get tens of millions of dollars of funding from the newly formed Australian Greenhouse Office.

Any attempt to rein in greenhouse scientists, on the other hand, results in endless expressions of horror in the media and programs expressing outrage on the ABC. In that atmosphere (another intended pun) it is little wonder that mid-career scientists shut up. Those free to speak their minds are the retirees such as Brian Tucker, a former chief of the CSIRO’s Division of Atmospheric Research, and Dr Brian O'Brien, a strategic and environmental consultant, who was the foundation Director and Chairman of the WA Environmental Protection Authority. There are more.

There is some evidence that this peculiar attitude to scientific debate also seems to occur, in different forms, among the scientists themselves. Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, alleges that the main scientific journals Science (US) and Nature (UK) commonly refuse, without review, papers that raise questions about accepted climate wisdom as being without interest. Writing last year in the Wall Street Opinion Journal he says that even when such papers are published, standards shift.

“When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an ‘Iris Effect,’ wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2. Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as ‘discredited’.”

That is another common tactic when faced with an inconvenient piece of scepticism, pointing to a hastily-contrived counter-argument, no matter how flimsy, and claiming that it “discredits” the scepticism. But logic is never the aim in this debate. The aim is to push the opposition to one side and get on with the politics.