Sceptics will have their day

One very clear result from last year’s Federal election is that the greenhouse activists have won the political battle. Now the government is set on several years of bad policy decisions based on terrible science, with the majority support of a public which may have largely misunderstood what the debate is about, and there is nothing much sceptics can do but retire to a corner and mutter.

Although I admire the On Line Opinion site very much, I doubt whether articles by myself and others or articles in, say, the Australian Skeptic, will make the slightest difference, for the moment. We can point to long lists of scientists, as Bob Carter recently did, including climatologists and meteorologists, who declare that the case that humans have caused some part of the current warming is based on little more than hot air, and still read in the newspaper the next day a dozen articles quoting activists as saying that there is a “concensus” that industrial gases are driving the change.

What sceptics need is irrefutable proof that temperatures are ignoring the greenhouse theory and I would recommend laying low until that proof comes along. No one is listening in any case.

We may not have to lay low very long. For, as the attached graphic shows, the Earth’s climate is ignoring greenhouse theories. Temperature records kept by the Hadley Centre in England (one of the main centres for climate studies) show that global mean annual temperatures actually fell slightly last year, and the year before that, and to judge from the early results are set for a major fall this year (see note 1 at the end of the article).

Source: Hadley Centre (see note 1)

Although residents of Adelaide, and perhaps Melbourne, may trouble believing it, January proved a much cooler month in global terms than in previous years, as did February. This year’s monster low is, in part, due to the La Niña climate cycle - the opposite of the warm El Niño cycle - which is cooling temperatures in the Pacific.

Three years worth of results means little in climate terms, of course - although, as has been repeatedly noted, not much has happened since the monster high of 1998. Greenhouse proponents do not want to hear about subdued warming, of course, and they particularly do not want to hear about temperatures going down rather than up. Hence there have been various efforts to show that long term warming has been masked by short term climate cycles, of which there are many, some acting over decades.

One group at the UK Meteorological office declared in August last year that an improved model, taking into account short term effects, showed that temperatures would remain subdued this year, and then start increasing at about 0.3C a decade (see note 2).

Another group, headed by Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of Potsdam University in Germany claimed that the warming is actually at the top end of the range predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001. In effect, the group is saying the earth is really warming at a rate of 0.6C per decade, once these short term effects are taken into account (see note 3) - not the 0.1C or so that had been measured at the time of the paper and less now.

It says a lot about the state of debate in this country, that the last claim was picked up and repeated by government policy advisor Professor Ross Garnaut in recent public comments on his efforts to hammer out policy approaches to climate change, and went virtually unquestioned. I later queried Professor Rahmstorf by email: he referred me to material on climate cycles and his paper, which I found to be puzzling. The figures must have been adjusted by a substantial amount for the conclusions to make any sense but the paper barely bothers to mention this. There is a laconic note deep in the paper, which is not otherwise explained or footnoted, that all trend lines are “computed with an embedding period of 11 years”. Given the still patchy knowledge of climate cycles, and that the paper’s conclusions are vastly different from observations, this point should have been discussed in far greater detail.

For the record I have also asked several Australian scientists if they can be specific about which climate cycles are apparently masking the warming over more than a decade and, apart from the aforementioned La Niña causing the current monster low, have received only vague replies about natural variability.

For the moment all this is to just shout into a hurricane. Colleagues occasionally express amazement that I am denying climate change, and point triumphantly to stories about the Arctic melting or whatever. I point out that the argument is actually whether human activity has added to the current, natural warming cycle and, most contentious of all, whether serious projections are possible from what we know.

Later, we return to exactly the same point, and I suspect this deep confusion is shared by the bulk of the electorate. They have not grasped that Australia is about to spend a great deal of money - and it will be a lot of money - on the strength of a decidedly dodgy set of climate projections. They think that because climate is changing it must be something to do with human activities.

Give the issue perhaps two years, with temperatures still falling (they may either fall or rise, but I suspect they may fall) and electricity bills increasing sharply due to a carbon trading regime, and this attitude may change. Consumers will suddenly realise that talk about the environment means money out of their back pocket; take a closer look at graphs of falling temperatures, and at the scientific arguments, and start asking what they are paying for.

Although the details of the expected carbon trading scheme have not been finalised, there are early indications that, unlike in Europe where there an emissions trading regime has been in place for three years without making any appreciable difference to the electricity industry or consumers, big carbon emitters here are likely to be hit hard the moment an Australian scheme is introduced. There may be policies to offset the effects of these changes on the poor and elderly, and preliminary discussions have canvassed ways of returning the additional payments to families. But carbon trading still represents an extra cost and, one way or another, I suspect the mass of consumers will end up paying it.

The sceptics may yet have their day.

1. The graph uses data from the Hadley Centre - then click on climate monitor online, then on climate data visualisation then on global and hemispheric temperature. Numbers from a data file attached to the annual global graph has been plugged into an office Excel spread sheet. The five years rolling average had to be calculated by me. The graph starts from 1990 as that is the Kyoto year. The figure for 2008 is only for January and February, with the force of la Nina evident. The final annual result for 2008 will certainly be higher than the result shown here, but it hardly amounts to run away warming.

2. Improved Surface Temperature Prediction from a Global Climate Model (Science, August 10, 2007) Smith et al.

3. Recent Climate Observations Compared to Projections (Science May 4, 2007), Rahmstorf et al.