The Question of Anthropogenic Global Warming

George Rebane

Several serious people have asked me where I stand on “anthropogenic global warming”, or stated more bluntly, ‘How should we combat global warming?’. Since the public debate about global warming has now been blown past the bounds of reason, that leading question is very similar to ‘Are you still beating your wife?’. I hope the answer below will shed some light for those not yet locked down on this issue. As a point of qualification, I approach this question as a systems scientist and a practicing professional engineer trained in physics, mathematics, and complex dynamic systems. While being neither a climatologist nor an atmospheric scientist, I am the type of professional whose skills come into play in developing the data gathering systems, designing and running the simulation models, interpreting results, and structuring the response decision framework for dealing with such complex systems as the macro-climate of the earth. I also have six grandchildren who will have no choice but to live in the future that we fashion for them.

Restatement of Problem. I think of the issue in terms of the following sequence of nested questions –

1. Is the current macro-climate of the earth historically unusual?
2. Should the current dynamics of earth’s macro-climate be a cause for alarm about the future of humankind?
3. Assuming that the answers to #1 and #2 are both positive, to what extent are the dynamics of earth’s macro-climate the result of human activity?
4. Assuming that the answers to #1, 2, and 3 are all indicative, do we yet know what to do to guarantee that the dire predictions or something worse will not be the result of our planned intervention?
5. Assuming that the answers to #1, 2, 3,and 4 are all supportive, is there anything that we humans are now prepared to do collectively to change the forecasted catastrophe for humankind?

Since this is the summary of my current beliefs and not a technical paper, I will attempt short answers to the above questions.

1. Is the current macro-climate of the earth historically unusual? First, we should be clear that there is no scientific consensus on ‘global warming’ contrary to what Al Gore and the mainstream media trumpet. Michael Mann’s now famous hockey stick of global temperatures is wrong as shown in several peer reviewed papers (e.g. McKitrick and McIntyre 2003). The claimed consensus can be shown to be a statistical “group think” due to the sources, nature, and implementation of academic funding programs (Wegman 2006). The published opinions and arguments of respected mainstream scientists (e.g. R.S. Lindzen, MIT’s Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science, 2006) who counter the popular fare on global warming are suppressed. Scientific evidence abounds that earth’s current climate along with its attendant dynamics (including the two major ice packs) are neither unusual nor extreme when considered within the context of several historical frames – last hundred years, last millennium, last twenty thousand years, and even paleo episodically.

Accepting this answer does not mean that the question is closed. I think that research should continue to address the state and dynamics of earth’s climate. Earth’s climate has undergone many dramatic and relatively sudden changes in the past, all without human intervention, and will undoubtedly do so in the future. Now that we are here in large numbers, it pays to keep studying the situation because things will change.

2. Should the current dynamics of earth’s macro-climate be a cause for alarm about the future of humankind? No, simply because we don’t know yet the real dynamics of the world’s macro climate. Our weather models are myopic and may remain so for technical reasons having to do with the nature of chaotic systems and the limits of computability. Our world climate models are also primitive and give very different answers over the range of normative assumptions and inputs – they are not, and probably will never be, what control theorists call ‘robust’ because that may be the nature of Nature. Right now these faulty models are exercised with faulty inputs of parameters such as future CO2 levels. The protagonists of global warming continue to make assumptions that human development and technology will be frozen over the planning horizon (say, the next hundred years). The exact opposite is true. Driven by the confluence of nanotechnology, genomics, and machine intelligence, we are entering a period of human history that is epochal (Kurzweil 2005). The fruits of this accelerating advancement within the next twenty years will undoubtedly resolve many of the current issues about earth’s macro-climate.

3. Assuming that the answers to #1 and #2 are both positive, to what extent are the dynamics of earth’s macro-climate the result of human activity? Since there is strong evidence of big climatological changes in both the recent and distant pasts along with the absence of good climate models, it is hard to pin today’s climate dynamics on human activity. Nevertheless, political activists see a definite ‘yes’ answer to this question as a necessary underpinning for their larger political, social, and economic agendas and therefore trumpet accordingly. To date their tactics have been successful with a population that is to a large extent illiterate (can’t understand points made through the printed word) and almost totally innumerate (don’t possess the tools for critical thinking). This assessment is supported by the politically proscribed longitudinal survey of adult literacy by the Department of Education now in its third edition (National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 2003). It is within the context of these results that our country’s popular reaction to global warming alarums and other important social issues of the day should be understood.

4. Assuming that the answers to #1, 2, and 3 are all indicative, do we yet know what to do to guarantee that the dire predictions or something worse will not be the result of our planned intervention? From a scientific perspective we have absolutely no idea how to drive the earth’s future climate into any specified state. As mentioned above, the current blatherings about limiting human CO2 being a solution are based on the exercise of faulty models exercised under faulty assumptions. There is even a reasonable argument that the current levels atmospheric CO2 are saving us from an insipient ice age that is long overdue. In sum, the so-called answers to global warming are all over the place, carefully winnowed, and made bite-sized for large scale consumption by folks with much broader agendas than saving us from noxious climate changes. The Kyoto accord, which has no chance of world-wide adoption, is just the poster child of the global warming advocates. The technical reader will understand that it is not clear yet that the macro-climate system is observable let alone controllable. Attempting large scale changes at this stage of knowledge may be equivalent to putting a chimpanzee into the cockpit of a 747 at 30,000 feet.

5. Assuming that the answers to #1, 2, 3,and 4 are all supportive, is there anything that we humans are now prepared to do collectively to change the forecasted catastrophe for humankind? The obvious answer to this is a resounding no. The so-called Kyoto compliant nations led by the EU have made no progress in cutting their ‘greenhouse emissions’ and have instead increased them. Champion polluters China and India are exempt from Kyoto and the other under-developed nations (led by Russia) will exercise the same option the moment they come to believe that their beneficent future lies in wealth generation and not waiting for its redistribution from the developed countries. Kyoto compliance is guaranteed to make and keep nations poor, and populous poor nations have a dismal record of treating the environment with anything short of self-serving disregard and/or contempt.

The Bottom Line

I believe we should continue and even accelerate the study of atmospheric sciences since it is possible that we will discover that indeed we can purposefully impact macro-climate. It is highly probable that before this century ends, the world’s major source of energy will be something other than fossil fuels. It is also likely that we will have gone beyond the maximum global population point (about 10-12 billion) that is now projected to be achieved sometime in mid-century (UN publication ST/ESA/SER.A/242, 2005).

It is clear to many of us that along any potential course of human (or trans-human) development we would like to control our environment and make more of the earth more hospitable. This dictates that we continue discovering what makes everything in this universe tick. Right now the proposed precipitous programs to attempt a macro-climate change should continue to be challenged through unfettered research and reasoned debate.

Comments

[Anna Haynes]

Thank you George for making your position known.

I take it you haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth?

BTW, some perspective on Lindzen is available at Crooked Timber -
http://crookedtimber.org/2006/04/23/credibility-up-in-smoke
- "Among the scientists taking a public position sceptical of global warming, Richard Lindzen has always seemed the most credible..."

and if you google
Oreskes 928
you'll get Naomi Oreskes' article (BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change) published in Science, analyzing the climate science literature and finding a consensus.

The Scientific American blog
http://blog.sciam.com
is a good place to keep up-to-date on this stuff.

But thanks again for being willing to explicitly state your position.

[ncmedia]

Anna: Some insight to Beyond the Ivory Tower:

From: Prof. Benny Peiser, Liverpool John Moores University

On December 3rd, only days before the start of the 10th Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP-10), Science Magazine published the results of a study by Naomi Oreskes (1): For the first time, empirical evidence was presented that appeared to show an unanimous, scientific consensus on the anthropogenic causes of recent global warming.

Oreskes claims to have analysed 928 abstracts she found listed on the ISI database using the keywords "climate change". However, a search on the ISI database using the keywords "climate change" for the years 1993 - 2003 reveals that almost 12,000 papers were published during the decade in question (2). What happened to the countless research papers that show that global temperatures were similar or even higher during the Holocene Climate Optimum and the Medieval Warm Period when atmospheric CO2 levels were much lower than today; that solar variability is a key driver of recent climate change, and that climate modeling is highly uncertain?

These objections were put to Oreskes by science writer David Appell. On 15 December 2004, she admitted that there was indeed a serious mistake in her Science essay. According to Oreskes, her study was not based on the keywords "climate change," but on "global climate change" (3).

Her use of three keywords instead of two reduced the list of peer reviewed publications by one order of magnitude (on the UK's ISI databank the keyword search "global climate change" comes up with 1247 documents). Since the results looked questionable, I decided to replicate the Oreskes study.

METHOD

I analysed all abstracts listed on the ISI databank for 1993 to 2003 using the same keywords ("global climate change") as the Oreskes study. Of the 1247 documents listed, only 1117 included abstracts (130 listed only titles, author(s)' details and keywords). The 1117 abstracts analysed were divided into the same six categories used by Oreskes (#1-6), plus two categories which I added (# 7, 8):

explicit endorsement of the consensus position
evaluation of impacts
mitigation proposals
methods
paleoclimate analysis
rejection of the consensus position.
natural factors of global climate change
unrelated to the question of recent global climate change
RESULTS

The results of my analysis contradict Oreskes' findings and essentially falsify her study:

Of all 1117 abstracts, only 13 (or 0.1%) explicitly endorse the 'consensus view'.
322 abstracts (or 29%) implicitly accept the 'consensus view' but mainly focus on impact assessments of envisaged global climate change.
Less than 10% of the abstracts (89) focus on "mitigation".
67 abstracts mainly focus on methodological questions.
87 abstracts deal exclusively with paleo-climatological research unrelated to recent climate change.
34 abstracts reject or doubt the view that human activities are the main drivers of the "the observed warming over the last 50 years".
44 abstracts focus on natural factors of global climate change.
470 (or 42%) abstracts include the keywords "global climate change" but do not include any direct or indirect link or reference to human activities, CO2 or greenhouse gas emissions, let alone anthropogenic forcing of recent climate change.

[Anna Haynes]

Russ/ncmedia, you might want to read Tim Lambert on this, at
http://timlambert.org/2005/05/peiser
- he looked at Benny Peiser's abstracts and was not impressed.

plus, from a Lambert comment to the post, at
http://timlambert.org/2005/05/peiser#comment-1648

(in reading the comment, understand that James Hansen is one of the scientists raising the alarm, that Bush is trying to muzzle - Hansen's saying "we have about 10 years left to turn this around". He's head of Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA.)

Lambert's comment, with [my clarifications]:
-----------
May 9th, 2005 at 12:18 am

Benny’s list of “400 sceptical references” is just as bad as his 34 abstracts. For example, it includes about a dozen papers by notorious skeptic James Hansen, including, for example Defusing the global warming time bomb”
[which said this: "] Global warming is real and the consequences are potentially disastrous ["]

This is rejecting the consensus????
-----------
BTW, RealClimate (climatologists' blog) covers the Orekes 'consensus' paper at
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/a-statistical-analysis-of-the-consensus/
( tinyURL for it is http://tinyurl.com/ztaf5 )

In short: there is a scientific consensus. It's real. People who continue to argue otherwise will have some explaining to do, to their children.

[Anna Haynes]

Also - George and Russ, my offer to pay for your tickets to see An Inconvenient Truth at Del Oro still stands. Please take me up on it, and if there's any counterpart presentation that you'd like me to see/listen to in exchange, I'll do it.

(And Al Gore isn't making money on the film, he's donating his share of the proceeds to a foundation that's dedicated to increasing awareness. So you can rest easy on that score.)

[George Rebane]

For those wanting to see the recent British Channel 4 program 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' that counters Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth', google the title or go to

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6IPHmJWmDk&mode=related&search=

gjr - 28mar07

[Anna Haynes]

re the Swindle -
One of the interviewees in the film describes it as
"an out-and-out propaganda piece, in which there is not even a gesture toward balance or explanation of why many of the extended inferences drawn in the film are not widely accepted by the scientific community. There are so many examples, it’s hard to know where to begin...my own discussion was grossly distorted by context..."
(from here)

Monbiot:
"The problem with The Great Global Warming Swindle, which caused a sensation when it was broadcast on Channel 4 last week, is that to make its case it relies not on future visionaries, but on people whose findings have already been proved wrong. The implications could not be graver. Just as the [U.K.] government launches its climate change bill..., thousands have been misled into believing there is no problem to address."

[Anna Haynes]

Links for my comment -
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/03/12/swindlers
and (Monbiot)
http://preview.tinyurl.com/32kf79

[Ted Clayton]

George Rebane & Co.,

I was highly amused reading your "systems scientist" qualifications ... having recently watched Dr. Alder Fuller use the same qualifications/methodology to assert the opposite conclusions. Alder runs the Euglena Academy at Eugene, OR, and says systems science gives him a better view of the human-induced climate-peril awaiting us.

But of course, as the sunspots continue to languish etc, we know with every passing month what will be required to avoid an AGW-incompatible global cooling becomes ever more radical - and unlikely.

I think it's time to shift from predicting the gross outlines of coming climate-cycles, and begin instead to anticipate the outlines of the social, political & professional (scientific) consequences of the unraveling of AGW/CO2 premises.

Popularly/personally, conservatism will be vindicated and energized, while liberalism/environmentalism will be shaken. The 2012 Presidential campaign may well match or exceed the epic of 2008! Professionally/institutionally, there could be real damages to our intellectual corp.

Following WWII, there emerged a movement identifiable as "Urban Man". The Jetsons cartoon franchise is based directly on their vision & predictions. The movement succeeded to the extent of having a White House cabinet position and major new Federal Agency created on behalf of its convictions & premises. The element of intense commitment to over-leveraged premises, I find comparable with AGW/CO2.

I prefer to use Urban Man as my lead analogy, but no doubt there are good parallels in Lysenkoism and McCarthyism, too. Especially, that the aftermath of these movements took considerable time to play out. Individuals, professions and institutions struggled for years and often many years to work through & put behind them the 'confusion' that so many had so enthusiastically embraced.

The confusion-factor had a much smaller role, with Urban Man ... which was very much systems-science, too. ;-)

Ted Clayton

[Russ]

Ted I am not sure what you were trying to say, but I did visit Dr Alder blog where he writes:

Global heating & climate change, the greatest challenges that humans have faced in the history of our species. We examine the probability that we have passed a critical threshold (tipping point) that is rapidly transforming our climate into one characterized as “chaotic, extreme & violent, a climate that hasn’t existed on Earth for 55 million years since the PETM.

Really! First I would like to see Dr Alders evidence that we have reached a tipping point in climate change. The temperature today are not much different than they were in the late 1980s when Dr. Hansen introduces us to global warming and the dreaded CO2 gas. We have not seen any warming for the last ten years and in the last two years have seen a rapid decline. Now, with a quiet sun, there is a good possibility that we may be headed for an other Dalton Minimum, or worse yet, another Little Ice Age.

Maybe the transformation we should be worrying about is how we will survive on a plant without the necessary agricultural resources to feed the growing billions of people on this planet. If you want chaos and extreme violence, wait until the hungry mobs arrive at your door.

[Andrew]

A few papers Oreskes missed...

450 Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of "Man-Made" Global Warming

http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html