According to a Reuters article on Wednesday 1/31/07, “U.S. scientists were pressured to tailor their writings on global warming to fit the Bush administration's skepticism, in some cases at the behest of a former oil-industry lobbyist, a congressional committee heard on Tuesday.
"Our investigations found high-quality science struggling to get out," Francesca Grifo of the watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
A survey by the group found that 150 climate scientists personally experienced political interference in the past five years, for a total of at least 435 incidents.”
The article leads the reader to believe that (1) there is a consensus among climatologists over anthropomorphic global warming (there’s not) and (2) that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has no scientists on it who disagree with the view that man causes global warming.
Both are refuted by Dr. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist at George Mason University and founder of the Science and Environmental Policy Project. A tenured professor at George Mason University with no known ties to the energy industry.
Moreover, as Bjorn Lomborg (The Skeptical Environmentalist) points out, the “conflict of interest” charge cuts both ways. Just as scientists who’ve worked in the private sector (mainly for energy companies) may have an innate conflict of interest, those academics who rely on governmental and extra-governmental (ie. UN) grants also have an innate conflict of interest as most grants are predicated upon their supporting various “disaster scenarios” which governments and extra-governmental agencies can use to their benefit.
PBS conducted a great interview with Dr. Fred Singer. Isn’t it odd that these “skeptics” always come across as more open-minded, less dogmatic and more willing to look at the evidence and let those results take them wherever it might lead than their more convinced colleagues?
Here’s some of that interview:
Some people hold that the threat of climate change is so great that we need to fundamentally change the way we produce and use energy. What's your response to this view?
Climate change is a natural phenomenon. Climate keeps changing all the time. The fact that climate changes is not in itself a threat, because, obviously, in the past human beings have adapted to all kinds of climate changes.
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The argument is that there's a new cause for climate change, which is human beings. And that the dimensions of this change might exceed what is natural or normal.
Well, there's no question in my mind that humanity is able to affect climate on a local scale. We all know that cities are warmer than the suburbs or surrounding countryside. So there's clear indication that human beings, in producing energy, in just living, generate heat. We're not going to go back to living without energy.
Whether or not human beings can produce a global climate change is an important question. This question is not at all settled. It can only be settled by actual measurements, data. And the data are ambiguous. For example, the data show that the climate warmed between 1900 and 1940, long before humanity used much energy. But then the climate cooled between 1940 and 1975. Then it warmed again for a very short period of time, for about five years. But since 1979, our best measurements show that the climate has been cooling just slightly. Certainly, it has not been warming.
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The surface record, however, continues to go up.
The surface record continues to go up. But you have to be very careful with the surface record. It is taken with thermometers that are mostly located in or near cities. And as cities expand, they get warmer. And therefore they affect the readings. And it's very difficult to eliminate this--what's called the urban heat island effect. So I personally prefer to trust in weather satellites.
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You've got one record that goes back 100 years, which has got imperfections in data gathering, and then you've got a much shorter record that also has questions about data gathering, the satellite record. From a statistical point of view, you get more power out of a longer record than a shorter record, don't you?
A longer record, in general, will give you more statistical power, if there is a general overall trend. But, in fact, the surface record also shows a cooling. So, which part of the surface record are you going to believe? The part before 1940, that shows a warming, or the part after 1940, that shows a cooling? See, that's the dilemma.
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The curve--as the climate modelers have it--has three segments. They would say there was a warming, a cooling, and a sharp warming now...they would say...on the land surface. And that's their problem.
Well, since we're using models to predict the future--and the only way you can predict the future is to use models--the important question is: Can these models be validated by observations? And the models very clearly show that the climate right now should be warming at about the rate of one degree Fahrenheit per decade, in the middle troposphere, that is, above the surface. But that's not what the observations show. So until the observations and the models agree, or until one or the other is resolved, it's very difficult for people--and for myself, of course--to believe in the predictive power of the current models. Now, the models are getting better. And perhaps in ten years we will have models that can be trusted, that is, that agree with actual observations.
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Let's go back to the basic physical principles. People like John Tyndall did experiments in the nineteenth century, where he filled tubes with different gases and found that certain trace gases--CO2 and also gases like water vapor-- had the ability to block infrared radiation. And that basic physics suggests the natural greenhouse effect takes advantage of this, suggests that part of the reason we have the climate we have is because of that, and that if you added to it continually and for long enough, you would increase the optical thickness of these gases and, therefore, would trap more heat in the system. From that standpoint, you don't deviate, do you?
There's nothing wrong with the basic physics. There's nothing wrong with laboratory physics, with measurements taken in the laboratory. They can be made very precisely, and under controlled conditions. Unfortunately, the atmosphere is not a laboratory that you can put into a building and control. The atmosphere is much more complicated.
For example, as carbon dioxide increases, you would expect a warming. But at the same time that you get this warming or this slight warming, you get more evaporation from the ocean. That's inevitable. Everyone agrees with that. Now, what is the effect of this additional water vapor in the atmosphere? Will it enhance the warming, as the models now calculate? Or will it create clouds, which will reflect solar radiation and reduce the warming? Or will it do something else? You see, the clouds are not captured by the models. Models are not good enough to either depict clouds or to even discuss the creation of clouds in a proper way. So it's not possible at this time to be sure how much warming one will get from an increase in carbon dioxide.
I personally believe that there should be some slight warming. But I think the warming will be much less than the current models predict. Much less. And I think it will be barely detectable. Perhaps it will be detectable, perhaps not. And it certainly will not be consequential. That is, it won't make any difference to people. After all, we get climate changes by 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some places on the earth. So what difference does a 1-degree change make over 100 years?
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Well, for instance, it might increase the size of oceans through thermal expansion. So, over time, it would increase the water levels, which have been increasing naturally.
There's no question that if the ocean warms, the water will expand and sea level will rise. But that's just one factor. Another factor is that mountain glaciers will tend to melt and, therefore, add water to rivers, and rivers will add the water to the ocean, and that also will produce a rise.
But counterbalancing this is the fact that more water will evaporate from the ocean because it's now warmer. And this will come down as rain all over the earth. And some of the rain will come down over the Antarctic, where it will turn into ice and accumulate. Then the question is: Which is more important, the accumulation of ice --which will lower sea level because it takes water from the ocean and puts it on the ice cap--or, the other factors that raise sea level? You can't decide these questions by theory. You have to do measurements.
I have now looked at the measurements and have analyzed them, and I find that the accumulation of ice is more important. And, in fact, when I look at the data from the early part of the century, when there was a strong warming--I forget what caused it, but there was a strong warming between 1900 and 1940--during the same time, sea level actually fell. So we have, you might say, an experimental verification. We have a check on the idea that accumulation of ice will be more important if there is a modest warming. Of course, if the warming is extreme, and melts all the ice caps, all bets are off. But no one is talking about that.
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So, basically, the issue depends on the kinds of particular feedbacks that are operating. And the fact you've said-- it's so complicated and nonlinear--that a warming can produce a cooling, a cooling can produce a warming, all kinds of things like that can happen. But it is possible in principle to have forcings that are powerful enough to dominate. For example, there have been times in history when it's been very much warmer than now, where there's been more CO2.
In principle, you can get forcings that will produce strong warming, and you get forcings that produce strong cooling. For example, a volcanic eruption produces a strong cooling. No question about this. Changes in solar radiation can produce warming or cooling, depending on which way the change is going. But the feedbacks are the most important part. And these feedbacks are not properly described by models, because we don't understand how they work. That means we have to do a great deal of physical research on the atmosphere--that is, more observations--to discover what the feedbacks are, which way they operate. Are they positive feedbacks that enhance the warming, or are they negative feedbacks that diminish the warming? And the evidence, as far as I can tell, seems to be that the negative feedbacks must be important, because we do not see the warming that's expected from the current rise in carbon dioxide.
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Some people would say that we've got inertias in the system. All we're seeing are delays caused by other anthropogenic forcings we're putting into the atmosphere--like aerosols--either directly or producing clouds...or ocean lag in the system...and that actually the lack of warming isn't a cause for complacency. It's really a worry, because when it comes, it will be hard to get out of. What about that as an argument?
We have to distinguish between delays, which have their cause in the heat capacity of the ocean. That's one issue. But we also must look carefully at other human activities that can produce a cooling, like the production of aerosols. How are aerosols produced? Well, one way is to burn coal and release a lot of sulphur into the atmosphere. Fortunately, now we [are] beginning to use clean coal. We're actually taking the sulphur out of the smokestacks so that the aerosol production is no longer as important. Also biomass burning, burning of forests, produces a lot of smoke and particulates in the atmosphere. Agriculture disturbs the land surface so that winds can then pick up dust. And dust in the atmosphere is another aerosol.
All of these particles in the atmosphere have some effect on climate. Some will cause a cooling. Some will cause a warming. Different particles act in different ways. Depends on whether the particles are black (soot), in which case they absorb solar energy, or whether they're reflecting...whether they reflect solar energy back into space. That has to be done carefully.
One of the leading climate modelists is Jim Hanson. He actually was the man who, ten years ago, went out on a limb and said he was sure the enhanced greenhouse effect was here. He now says we can't really tell. He says the forcings are so uncertain that they're much more important than the climate models. In other words, until we get the forcings straight, the climate-model predictions are not worth very much. That is basically what he said.
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But there's this argument: Yes, the aerosols are there and might counteract some of the enhanced greenhouse effect. But, they will be washed out within a few days and, therefore, wouldn't continue to accumulate in the way that CO2 does. CO2 stays around for 100 years. Therefore, the two things really aren't in balance. They might balance for a bit, but over a long period of time, if you go on producing CO2, this will concentrate, while the other will get washed out. And if you look ahead and project the use of fossil fuels, isn't it going to overwhelm the other forcing factors?
Aerosols have a very short lifetime in the atmosphere, measured typically in a matter of a week, two weeks, something like that. And then they rain out, or they fall out. Carbon dioxide has a lifetime measured in decades. Some of it survives even beyond 100 years. So if carbon dioxide effects were important, then they would eventually predominate.
But the question is: Are they important in relation to the aerosol effects? Or, put it this way: Are the aerosol effects hiding the effect of carbon dioxide now? We can tell. We can find an answer to this, because we can look for fingerprints in the climate record. Since aerosols are mostly emitted in the northern hemisphere, where industrial activities are rampant, we would expect the northern hemisphere to be warming less quickly than the southern hemisphere. In fact, we would expect the northern hemisphere to be cooling. But the data show the opposite. Both the surface data and the satellite data agree that, in the last 20 years, the northern hemisphere has warmed more quickly than the southern hemisphere. So it contradicts the whole idea that aerosols make an important difference.
This is very embarrassing to the modelists, because they have been using the aerosol as an excuse to explain why the models do not agree with observations. I suggest that they now will have to look for another excuse.
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Talk about the models. What is a computer model, and what isn't it? What is its purpose in science?
There are many kinds of computer models. But the ones that people mostly talk about these days are the giant models that try to model the whole global atmosphere in a three-dimensional way. These models calculate important parameters at different points around the globe--and these points are roughly 200 miles apart--and at different levels of the atmosphere. You can see that if you only calculate temperature, winds, and so on at intervals of 200 miles, then you cannot depict clouds, or even cloud systems, which are much smaller. So until the models have a good enough resolution to be capable of depicting clouds, it's very difficult to put much faith in them.
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But, still, they're playing quite an important role in this debate. Take me through a history of what the models have predicted. You've alluded to this, and how some of their predictions have had to be scaled down. What can models do, and what can't they do?
You have to understand that these models are calibrated to produce the seasons. That is to say, the models are adjusted until they produce the present climate and the seasonal change.
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So they're faked, you're saying?
They're tweaked. I think that's a polite way of putting it. They're adjusted, or tweaked, until they produce the present climate and the present short-term variation. You have to also understand there's something like two dozen climate models in the world. And one question to ask is: Do they agree? And the answer is: They do not. And these models are all produced by excellent meteorologists, fantastic computers. Why do they not agree? Why do some models predict a warming for a doubling of CO2, of, let's say, five degrees Centigrade--which is eight degrees Fahrenheit)--and why do other models predict something like one degree?
Well, there's a reason for this. These models differ in the way they depict clouds, primarily. In some models, clouds produce an additional warming. In some models, clouds produce a cooling. Which models are correct? There's no way of telling. Each modeler thinks that his model is the best. So I think we all have to wait until the dispersion in the model results shrinks a little bit--until they start to agree with each other.
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What happens when you use these models to try and reproduce past climates, when other forcings are known, like ice ages and so forth? Can they succeed at that?
They fail spectacularly in explaining, for example, why an ice age starts, or why an ice age stops. The most recent result on this was published in early 1999. It's always been known that, for example, the deglaciation--that is, the transition from an ice age to the warm interglacial, which is spectacular--suddenly the ice age ends and the warming starts. And at the same time, you see an increase in carbon dioxide in the record. And these are records taken from ice cores--good measurements.
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They go up and down together.
Well, you certainly find an association between carbon dioxide changes and temperature changes. Now, scientists have been very careful to just call it an association without identifying which is the cause and which is the effect. Politicians have been less careful. In fact, our Vice President, Al Gore, has a standard presentation where he shows the results of the Antarctic ice core (called the Vostok core), and you see changes in temperature and changes in carbon dioxide. And he points to this and says, "You see? These carbon dioxide changes caused a temperature increase in the past."
Well, it's not so. In fact, in early 1999, there was a paper in Science in which they have now gotten adequate resolution so they can measure which came first, the temperature change or the carbon dioxide change. And guess what? The temperature change came first, followed by the carbon dioxide change about 600 years later. This means that something changed the temperature, not the carbon dioxide. But then as the climate warmed, more carbon dioxide apparently was released from the ocean into the atmosphere.
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Which could of course, in principle, make a feedback.
Yes, I would expect so. But how much of a feedback, we cannot tell. In other words, we're back again to the question of how much of a temperature increase is produced by a change in carbon dioxide.
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But to go back to my question: What can the models do? Can they take an era and plug in some figures and reproduce what happens?
A number of researchers have actually tried to reproduce past climates, using models. And to some extent, they've been successful. And to another extent, they have not been successful, in the sense that you cannot derive what is called the climate sensitivity. In other words, what we really are after is some way of valiating these models. We'd like to know how much of a temperature change is produced if carbon dioxide doubles in the atmosphere? That's called the climate sensitivity. What is the climate sensitivity? As I've mentioned earlier, it can range from as little as one degree in some models to as much as five degrees Centigrade, which equals eight degrees Fahrenheit, in other models. That's a big difference, a huge difference.
Which of these numbers is correct, if any? You cannot just take the median or the average. There's no reason why the average should be correct. Maybe it's the high number; maybe it's the low number. We don't know. We need to find out by making observations and understanding really what happens in the atmosphere.
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Some say we don't have the time for that, and that it would be prudent, since this is at least a plausible scenario, that we do something about it now, because as you said, these measurements are very difficult to take. You need to do it over a long period of time and very accurately. It might take fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years. Should we do nothing until that point?
Well, the question is what you mean by "doing" something. I'm not a great believer in buying insurance if the risks are small and the premiums are high. Nobody in his right mind would do that. But this is the case here. We're being asked to buy an insurance policy against a risk that is very small, if at all, and pay a very heavy premium. We're being asked to reduce energy use, not just by a few percent but, according to the Kyoto Protocol, by about 35 percent within ten years. That means giving up one-third of all energy use, using one-third less electricity, throwing out one-third of all cars perhaps. It would be a huge dislocation of our economy, and it would hit people very hard, particularly people who can least afford it.
For what? All the Kyoto Protocol would do is to slightly reduce the current rate of increase of carbon dioxide. And in fact, the UN Science Advisory Group has published their results. And they clearly show that the Kyoto Protocol would reduce, if it went into effect and were punctiliously observed by all of the countries that have to observe it--by the year 2050, --about 50 years from now--it would reduce the calculated temperature increase by .05 degrees Centigrade. That amount is not even measurable. So this is what you are being asked to buy.
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Anything else? . . .
Let me say something about this idea of scientific consensus. Well, you really shouldn't go by numbers. I think it's significant to straighten out misconceptions. One misconception is that 2,500 IPCC scientists agree that global warming is coming, and it's going to be two degrees Centigrade by the year 2100. That's just not so. In the first place, if you count the names in the IPCC report, it's less than 2,000. If you count the number of climate scientists, it's about 100. If you then ask how many of them agree, the answer is: You can't tell because there was never a poll taken. These scientists actually worked on the report. They agree with the report, obviously, in particular with the chapter that they wrote. They do not necessarily agree with the summary, because the summary was written by a different group, a handful of government scientists who had a particular point of view, and they extracted from the report those facts that tended to support their point of view. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/warming/debate/singer.html
