December 19, 2006
Climate change, a heated debate
One of the unpleasant side effects of global warming is that it makes good weather seem faintly sinister. I enjoyed wandering around London without having to wear a coat this weekend – but should this really be happening in December? Fortunately, the weather today is foul. So now I am feeling more relaxed about global warming.
David Miliband, Britain’s environment secretary and climate change evangelist, is operating on a similarly elevated intellectual level. In a blog entry he seeks to put the recent warm weather into some context.
But British climate-change sceptics –a fairly beleaguered bunch until recently – have had their morale boosted by a long and closely-argued attack on the science of global warming, published last month in the Sunday Telegraph. It seems to have become a new sacred text for climate-change sceptics.
The author is Viscount Christopher Monckton, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher – who like many Thatcherites suspects that global warming is a socialist plot. Monckton is clearly an intelligent man. But he is not a scientist. And he has proved dangerously over-confident in his own intellectual judgement in the past. He once designed and sold a puzzle and offered a million-pound profit to anyone who could solve it, confidently predicting that he would rake in royalties for years. But unfortunately, somebody cracked the puzzle rather too quickly, reportedly forcing Monckton to sell his house.
As for me, like most other non-scientists I have contracted out my judgement on global warming to “the experts”. And the sort of people I’ve been trained to defer to seem to be increasingly in agreement that global warming is not only happening, but is closely linked to a rise in emissions of carbon dioxide. On the one side of the debate we have assorted professors from Harvard, MIT and NASA, as well as Britain’s Royal Society and the experts brought together by the UN. On the other side there is, well, Christopher Monckton, Michael Crichton and Senator James Inhofe. It looks like a pretty unequal fight to me.
One of the calmer and more persuasive summaries of the state of the debate was done recently by Emma Duncan in The Economist. It was interesting partly because The Economist used to be pretty sceptical about the relative importance of climate change, compared to other global problems. But, like a lot of other people, my former colleagues at The Economist have been changing their mind as the evidence comes in.
I’m now going on holiday to sinisterly sunny Wales and will probably not be blogging again until the New Year.
It would be worth your while to read the peer-reviewed scientific literature, in which the debate about the likely degree and implications of warming is lively. Recently Khilyuk & Chilingar, for instance, published a long paper from a geological perspective, saying that all but about 0.lC of the past century’s warming was attributable to natural causes. Their calculations accord with mine. - M of B
Posted by: Monckton of Brenchley | December 20th, 2006 at 12:51 am | Report this commentAs always, a very amusing contribution from Christopher Monckton. Just in case you are interested in accessing the paper by Khilyuk and Chilingar that he cites, you can see it here: http://schwinger.harvard.edu/~motl/usc-climate.html
Somewhat surprisingly, he neglected to mention the rather scathing rebuttal by Aeschbach-Hertig that was published in the journal soon after: http://schwinger.harvard.edu/~motl/usc-rebuttal.html
Two particular passages from the rebuttal caught my eye. First:
“One of the weaknesses of the paper is that much of the cited literature is in Russian, thus not easily accessible, or refers to websites, some of them as dubious as http://www.junkscience.com. If the authors think that theories of anthropogenic global warming are junk science, they should themselves adhere to higher scientific standards, e.g., by citing the relevant literature in the fields they cover, but they fail to do so. Some of their major conclusions are simply unsupported allegations, e.g., when they claim that “the major causes of currently observed global warming are: rising solar irradiation and increasing tectonic activity”.”
And the conclusion:
“It is astonishing that the paper of Khilyuk and Chilingar (2006) (as well as Khilyuk and Chilingar 2004, for that matter) could pass the review process of a seemingly serious journal such as Environmental Geology. Such failures of this process, which is supposed to guarantee the quality of published literature, are likely to damage the reputation of this journal.”
Not exactly an endorsement of the quality of the paper that Monckton recommends as a contribution to his “lively debate”. In case you are wondering, here is how the George Chilingar, one of theco-authors on the paper, describes his research areas on the website of his Department at the University of Southern California: “Environmental aspects of oil and gas production, petrophysical properties of rocks, drilling fluids, surface and subsurface operations in petroleum production, subsidence due to the fluid withdrawal, testing and storage of petroleum products.”
Maybe Monckton could find some actual climate scientists with whom he is happy to be associated?
Posted by: Bob Ward | December 20th, 2006 at 6:56 pm | Report this commentWell said! We run a site http://www.desmogblog.com that is trying everyday to highlight the inequity between the scientists saying climate change is happening and that C02 emissions are to blame and those who say we have nothing to worry about. On one side NASA and other side Monckton indeed!
I would add though, that not only is there a serious inequity in scientfic evidence between the two groups, but further that there is a well-documented history of many so-called “think” tanks being paid large sums of money by the fossil fuel to argue that climate change is not happening. These think tanks are not paid to do scientific research, they are paid simply to do public relations to amplify the message of this small group of climate change “skeptics.”
Posted by: KGrandia | December 20th, 2006 at 7:27 pm | Report this commentThe “skeptics” are no more corrupted by money than those in the “consensus” that man-made warming is a danger. I would bet a lot that the governments of the West are spending a great deal more $$ on Climate Change research than Exxon and its industry brethren. If all these “consensus” scientists can’t find a potentially catastrophic problem, then their funding will dry up. Is the “corruption” criticism good only for the goose? Or also against the gander?
Posted by: DPulliam | December 20th, 2006 at 8:31 pm | Report this commentIncidentally, if it’s Ivy League professors you seek, Richard Lindzen, cited in Monckton’s piece, is a professor of Climatology at MIT. There are many such highly placed skeptics.
I’m not talking about science, I am talking about public relations.
As far as “there are many such highly placed skeptics.” If there are “many” such scientists, why are they not doing science and disproving the consensus that climate change is happening and humans are to blame?
If Exxon was openly funding scientists to do science aimed at disproving the conclusions of most of the worlds body of climatolgists, fine. But they are not, they are funding a public relations campaign.
Posted by: KGrandia | December 20th, 2006 at 9:18 pm | Report this commentOne needs to be very careful about speculating about the motives people have for holding particular views. There are obviously some climate scientists out there who do not agree with the ‘consensus’ view, as articulated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC just summarises the published scientific literature, and over the past twenty years there have been thousands of papers that have presented evidence of anthropogenic climate change, and just a handful that have suggested otherwise.
Richard Lindzen is the most prominent of the dissenting climate scientists, but they are a minority. I don’t think Lindzen’s views are in any way motivated by his own financial interests. He does, however, seem to revel in adopting a minority stance, and it remains to be seen to what extent he might revise his views as new evidence emerges. That question also applies, of course, to those who agree with the consensus view.
Similarly, I don’t believe that Christopher Monckton’s views on climate change is motivated by financial gain. Perhaps a touch of bloody-mindedness and arrogance in thinking that his amateur analysis trumps the peer-reviewed evidence of the worldwide climate research community. It is also interesting that both his brother-in-law (Dominic Lawson), and his wife’s father (Nigel Lawson) have both attacked the consensus view - the latter comparing climate scientists with Islamic fundamentalists.
But I do think there are very big question marks over why ExxonMobil continues to publish material that seeks to undermine the scientific consensus. The company also provides a lot of funding to groups that promote views that are not consistent with the overwhelming majority of the scientific literature. Of organisations they funded in the category of ‘public information and policy research’ in 2005 that published information on their websites about climate change, 25 expressed views consistent with the majority of the scientific literature, but 39 presented views that were not representative of the consensus. And remember, this is not the funding for university research on climate chnage, which ExxonMobil classifies separately. This category includes organisations such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a host of other ‘free market’ lobby groups that appear to be ideologically opposed to environmental regulations, including the restriction of greenhouse gases.
ExxonMobil’s public oppostion to the scientific consensus on climate change is all the more puzzling if one considers what would happen if they adopted the same approach to other aspects of their business. What if they decided to ignore the consensus view on which rocks provided the best reservoirs for hydrocarbons and instead drilled into granite!
Posted by: Bob Ward | December 21st, 2006 at 9:09 am | Report this commentWell said Gideon. Some of your readers may also find this article a very interesting read in the context of your post:
http://www.celsias.com/blog/2006/12/06/stop-feeding-us-lies/
Posted by: Craig Mackintosh | December 21st, 2006 at 9:29 am | Report this commentThe problem with this ‘debate’ is that many don’t understand the nature of science: it is a structured process of inquiry that leads to testable hypotheses. It is not made of bold, unfounded assertions. This makes it vulnerable to those who either don’t understand it, or simply wish to exploit its open nature. Public relations and skepticism based in ideology subvert the scientific process, making true, scientific skepticism - one of the fundamental aspects of scientific inquiry, not to accept things at face value but to probe and test - much more difficult.
Posted by: Jason Anderson | December 22nd, 2006 at 8:34 am | Report this commentIt is ultimately a matter of the degree to which those who wish to misuse science can pull the wool over the eyes of those who don’t understand it - very few would listen to sceptics about gravity, as it is instantly testable to everyone’s satisfaction. But once the system under discussion is more complex, some seem to feel complexity equals the right to throw out the rules of inquiry with impunity.
The satisfying aspect of such a farcical movie as ‘the day after tomorrow’ was the come-uppance, the instant response a la gravity, given to skeptics. We won’t see that, and so the burden is higher on all people to understand, practice and explain real science. Citing one peer-reviewed paper or one tenured professor does not simply make assertions true: skeptics do this constantly, while scientists both cite those papers, their provenance, the context and subsequent replies, putting them well in their place.
Whether the exact level of warming is x or y, or the attribution of warming is x% anthropogenic or y% natural cycles is something that is honestly discussed in real scientific inquiry. There is obviously a place for discussing the policy and social implications of what to do about what science is telling us. But trying to change the science to suit our policy and social views is both wrongheaded and dangerous, as it ultimately won’t work anyway, while muddying the waters of proper debate.