A further riposte from a flat earther

On-Line Opinon kindly put up a recent post 'A riposte from a 'Flat Earther'which attracted 66 comments. Since that post I attended a talk given by Dick Warburton who among his various roles was the Chair of the Board of Taxation 2000-2011. While the contents of talk are bound by Chatham House rules, it is worth noting that Dick began his talk by saying that when he first saw An Inconvenient Truth and because he has eight grandchildren he immediately thought that he had failed them. However as he began to investigate the issue of anthropogenic global warming further he began to have doubts. You can read a summary of his views in the March 2011 issue of Quadrant The Intelligent Voter's Guide to Global Warming (Part I)but suffice to say when he raised these doubts with Penny Wong, he was told that the Climate Science was proven and she would brook no further discussion.

The talk and articles raised further issues in my mind and I would like to lay them out.

How can you not believe in anthropogenic global warming when the all climate scientists say it exists.

In 1980 99.999% of the medical and scientific community believed ulcers of the stomach and duodenum were caused by stress. When Dr Warren, 68, and Dr Marshall, 54, announced in 1982 that Helicobacter pylori, a rare bacterium, caused ulcers of the stomach and duodenum, they faced intense scepticism from the medical community.

Many doctors doubted whether bacteria could thrive in such an acidic environment.

To prove the point, Dr Marshall became his own guinea pig, drinking a culture of H pylori to give himself an ulcer and then clearing it up with antibiotics.

"This extraordinary act demonstrated outstanding dedication and commitment to his research," said Lord May, Australian president of the Royal Society in London. "The work by Barry Marshall and Robin Warren produced one of the most radical and important changes in the last 50 years in the perception of a medical condition."

Even so, said Brian Spratt, professor of microbiology at Imperial College, London, "they had a hell of a job convincing everyone that ulcers are not physiological but were in fact an infectious disease".

Dr Warren and Dr Marshall subsequently shared the 2005 Nobel Prize for Medicine.

It was not consensus that proved or disproved the theory but an experiment or set of observations.

I know that in 2007 Al Gore and the IPCC won the Nobel Peace Prize but I am unaware that any climate change scientist has actually won a Nobel Science Prize.

Is there a critical experiment that proves or disproves the climate change models?

In 1915 Einstein released his Theory of General Relativity which in part predicted that light rays would bend as they passed by a sun. In 1919 a team of researchers led by Sir Arthur Eddington confirmed this prediction by measuring the location of stars during an eclipse. It was this experimental confirmation that established the Theory of General Relativity and Einstein's credibility.

This is what climate change needs; an hypothesis that is proved or disproved by experimental observation. The best attempt at this I have been able to find is in a 2006 report, Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere by the US government's Climate Change Science Program (CCSP). According to this report if greenhouses gases are warming the planet, that warming will happen first in the cold blob of air 8-12 km above the tropics. It is freezing cold up there, but it ought to be slightly less freezing cold thanks to greenhouse gases. The report clearly states that all 20-odd climate models predict warming there first-it's the fingerprint of greenhouse gas warming, as opposed to warming by some other cause, like solar magnetic effects, volcanic eruptions, solar irradiance, or ozone depletion etc.

This "hotspot" should have emerged over the period of global warming which occurred from the late 1970s until the end of the twentieth century. But many thousands of radio sonde and satellite measurements from 1979 to 1999 found it did not.

In the words of the 2006 CCSP Report: "In the tropics, most observational data sets show more warming at the surface than in the troposphere, while almost all model simulations have larger warming aloft than at the surface." In other words, the observations disprove the hypothesis.

The best explanation of this that I have been able to discover is that the increase in humidity does not lead an increased greenhouse gas effect (positive feedback) but increased cloud cover which reduces the sunlight reaching the earth and so has a negative feedback effect.

In our climate, water vapour concentration is closely tied to temperature. A reduction in temperature reduces water vapour concentration, which reduces the effects of clouds more than the greenhouse effect so the temperature goes up. A rise in temperature increases water vapour, which increases the effects of clouds more than the greenhouse effect, and the temperature goes down again.

Look at all the disasters currently being caused by the weather such as the Queensland floods. How can you not believe in Global Warming?

Supposedly the worst floods to hit Australia were the Maitland floods of 1955. Yet these are well before the increases in carbon dioxide. Yet when flooding now occurs in this country the Maitland Floods are never mentioned.

Doing nothing about climate change is reckless

To quote Malcolm Turnbull: " ...this is an exercise in risk management. Given that the consequences of unchecked global warming would be catastrophic, responsible leaders should give the planet the benefit of the doubt. Few of us imagine our house is going to burn down tonight, but most of us will have taken out insurance. So the political or indeed moral issue is not whether you are totally convinced by the climate change thesis, but what you propose to do about it. Being sceptical about climate change is not unreasonable; doing nothing about it is reckless."

A similar argument I have heard is that you adopt Pascal's reason for believing in God, if he does not exist, you lose nothing.

My problem with this view is that the economic costs of the policies being proposed are going to be catastrophic for Australia. It is not a 1% cost. Bob Brown has already stated he wants to close down completely coal mining in Australia. Gillard's riposte that Australia will develop 'clean' coal lacks credibility. One is reminded of Labor Minister Rex Connor who in 1975 wanted to ban the exports of iron ore and natural gas. If he had succeeded, where would Australia be now? What I find amazing is that the trade union leaders, normally so vocal about the protection of jobs, are making no comments.