NO CLEAR CONSENSUS
(Note: When I create my blogs, I draft them in a word document first in order to facilitate the writing process, and then transfer them to the blog template. Unfortunately, all the embedded hyperlinks are subsequently lost. Anyone interested in the source of a particularly numbered reference may request this source by asking for this information using teh comment feature of this blog.)

Although the mainstream media has consistently taken the side of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming and has correspondingly trumpeted the “unanimous scientific consensus,” nothing could be further from the truth. Many scientists have cast dissenting views, stating the warming trend we are witnessing (and even that can be debated) is a result of a variety of natural phenomenon. It not my intent to get into a comprehensive, point-for-point refutation of all the anthropogenic claims. There are many sources and websites that do so. And although I do analyze several contentious issues, the overriding argument I am presenting is that not only is there a clear lack of consensus among the broader scientific community, but dissent is a vital mechanism that keeps science honest and promotes the supposed diversity that liberals claim is a hallmark of progressive civilization. A good point of departure is the following text is from a petition to Congress signed by 31,478 American scientists:

"We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.'' 1

Of course, many advocates of the theory for anthropogenic global warming have questioned the credibility of these scientists, and that is a reasonable question. However, consider the following information:
• Nearly one third (9,029) of the scientists have Ph.D.s
• 3,804 of the scientists are trained in specialties directly related to the physical environment of the Earth.
• 935 scientists are trained in computer and mathematical methods
• 5,812 scientists are trained in the fundamental physical and molecular properties of gases, liquids, and solids
• 4,821 scientists are trained in the molecular interactions and behaviors of the substances of which the atmosphere and Earth are composed.
• 2,965 scientists are trained in the functional and environmental requirements of living things on the Earth.
• 3,046 scientists are trained in the functional and environmental requirements of human beings on the Earth
• 10,103 scientists are trained primarily in the many engineering specialties required to maintain modern civilization, including environmental programs.2

Surely not all of these nearly 32,000 scientists are frauds, nor could they all be bouhgt and paid for by “Corporate America.”

There are even scientists who have worked inside the very governmental institutions that are advocates of anthropogenic global warming who are now contrarians to eco-fundamentalism. One of the most outspoken scientist is Dr. Roy Spencer, climatologists and former Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Dr. Spencer, known for his work on global temperature monitoring work with satellites, states the following on his website:

“…global warming is mostly natural, and that the climate system is quite insensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and aerosol pollution. Believe it or not, very little research has ever been funded to search for natural mechanisms of warming…it has simply been assumed that global warming is manmade. This assumption is rather easy for scientists since we do not have enough accurate global data for a long enough period of time to see whether there are natural warming mechanisms at work.” 3
But to get at the crux of the issue, we have to understand the thrust and philosophical underpinnings of the work that led to the “consensus” among IPCC scientists. The cornerstone of anthropogenic global-warming is the concept of “climate sensitivity.” Dr. Spencer explains this as “the temperature response of the Earth to a given amount of ‘radiative forcing’, of which there are two kinds: a change in either the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth, or in the infrared energy the Earth emits to outer space.” 4 The IPCC is concerned with the amount of sunlight absorbed by earth, and claims that the earth’s climate is very sensitive, and hence carbon emissions create global warming. Yet, as Dr. Spencer points out, satellite data contradicts this assumption: “The resulting picture that emerges is of an IN-sensitive climate system, dominated by negative feedback. And it appears that the reason why most climate models are instead VERY sensitive is due to the illusion of a sensitive climate system that can arise when one is not careful about the physical interpretation of how clouds operate in terms of cause and effect (forcing and feedback).” 5

The point Dr. Spencer is making is that climate systems are inherently complex, and are regulated by a myriad of dynamics and forces that interact with one another in ways we are just beginning to understand. The reality is that the projections made by the IPCC report are inherently flawed because the climate model assumes inordinate climate sensitivity, and then forecast atmospheric and concomitant geological changes using an instrument based on these hypersensitive parameters, producing results that are statistically inflated and, not surprisingly, resultant apocalyptic predictions. Contrast this approach with the approach Dr. Spencer employed using satellite data, which accurate measures atmospheric dynamics: “Instead of the currently popular practice of building immensely complex and expensive climate models and then making only simple comparisons to satellite data, I have done just the opposite: Examine the satellite data in great detail, and then build the simplest model that can explain the observed behavior of the climate system.” 6


This is a profound and keen observation because of the assumption of causation stated by the IPCC. The IPCC approach makes an assumption (CO2 is the cause of global warming), creates a complex model to capture this dynamic, and then makes comparisons to established factual data in order justify their claims. To understand this better, perhaps an analogy would be helpful. Let’s suppose your car is having engine problems and you have a choice of two mechanics. Mechanic A’s approach is to presuppose there is a systemic issue with your car based on a complex theory he has about engine systems. He then proceeds with a number of complex diagnostic tests using a computer programmed with his hyper-sensitive system to confirm his diagnosis: Your engine is inherently flawed and needs to be replaced, which is alarming as well as expensive. Mechanic B, on the other hand, makes no assumptions. Rather, he listens carefully, runs some simple diagnostic tests, and uses his knowledge of basic engine mechanisms to conclude you need to replace a few moderately expensive parts to get your car back in shape. Which mechanic took the most logical path, and which mechanic would you trust? It’s obvious working with data to build a model and hypothesis is inherently superior to building a hypothesis, creating a complex model to capture this hypothesis, and then comparing this model to real data in order to infer your hypotheses.

Nor is Dr. Roy the only credible expert in climatology to offer countering causations to anthropogenic global warming. Dr. Jens Bischof, instructor in the Department of Ocean, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences, and foremost expert in artic ice drift, puts it aptly: “In science, as in other sectors of public life, outcomes of investigations are very often guided, if not determined, by an a priori idea, a tenet. One could also call it a belief. In the case of global warming, this belief is that, if enormous amounts of greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere, a temperature rise must occur. This prior assumption has guided scientific thinking and triggered a true deluge of investigations, all desperately trying to prove just that. What has been totally forgotten is the fact that natural climate changes occur as well as manmade ones, and on time scales on the order of decades, in some cases.” 7 Dr. Bischof’s research has led him to conclude that the disappearing of the artic ice cap, one of the most contentious and emotionally charged issues associated with global warming, is mostly the result of “ice drift,” a natural geologic phenomenon in which artic wind patterns push ice sheets unattached to land toward warmer climes. This in turn, causes less ice to reflect sunlight (albedo), and this decreased albedo, or reflection of light, leads to a general warming trend in the artic waters, which further amplifies the phenomenon of ice drift. But it is important to understand it is the natural drift of ice that is leading to decreased albedo, which then leads to warming, rather than global warming leading to accelerated melting. Even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federally funded and run organization which has provided data to support anthropogenic global warming theory, had the following commentary on their Arctic NOAA Report Card: “The climate of the Arctic is influenced by repeating patterns of sea level pressure that can either dominate during individual months or represent the overall atmospheric circulation flow for an entire season. The main climate pattern for the Arctic is known as the Arctic Oscillation (AO) with anomalous winds that blow counter-clockwise around the pole when the pattern is in its positive phase. A second wind pattern has been more prevalent in the 21st century and is known as the Arctic Dipole (AD) pattern. 8 NOAA also makes the observation that the Arctic has more ice now than in 2007. Of course, NOAA also observes there has been an overall trend in Artic ice in the past decade. But think about it rationally for a moment. If CO2 emissions are the culprit, and each year we have increased our CO2 output, then there should be no increase in ice gain. Of course, global warming advocates could rightfully point out this is an anomaly and the result of natural perturbations, such as El Nino, La Nina, etc. But that is the same naturalistic argument others and I have been making to begin with. We either have intellectual honesty and consistency, or we don’t.

There has also been great exaggeration about the effects of ice-melt in Greenland. According to Patrick J. Michaels, a Distinguished Senior Fellow in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “there's nothing very new going on in Greenland,” pointing out that “[T]he longest record is from Angmagssalik. In the summer (when Greenland's ice melts) the temperature has averaged 43.1 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 10 summers. There was one very warm summer, in 2003, but the other nine years aren't unusual at all. From 1930 through 1960, the average was 43.7 degrees. In other words, it was warmer for three decades, and there was clearly no large rise in sea level. What happened between 1945 and the mid-1990s was a cooling trend, with 1985-95 being the coldest period in the entire Angmagssalik record, which goes back to the late 19th century. Only in recent years have temperatures begun to look like those that were characteristic of the early 20th century.” 9 This argument is bolstered by Petr Chylek a researcher for Space and Remote Sensing Sciences at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who recently summarized Greenland's climate history in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Chylek wrote "Although the last decade of 1995-2005 was relatively warm, almost all decades within 1915 to 1965 were even warmer at both the southwestern [Godthab Nuuk] and southeastern [Ammassalik] coasts of Greenland."10




So this begs the question: What is causing the glaciers to melt in Greenland, if recent temperatures have not been out of the ordinary from an expanded geological point of view? According to Professor David Vaughan, a co-author of a recent study on Artic ice thinning, "The majority of the thinning we see is not due to increased melting from higher atmospheric temperatures, but because the glaciers are flowing faster thanks to their interaction with the oceans.” 11 This interaction is a broad geologic occurrence in which oceans cycle through extended periods of warming and cooling (much like the earth as a whole) known as the multidecadal cycle. It is this cycle that is causing the ice melt in Greenland. This is substantiated by the work Willie W.-H. Soon of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Soon concludes that these “thermal perturbations lead to both natural modulation of the Arctic sea ice and to transport of fresh water through the Bering Straits and from the Arctic through both the Greenland Sea and Denmark Strait and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago pathways to deep water formation sites spread across the North Atlantic from the Greenland–Icelandic–Norwegian (GIN) Seas to the east and at the Labrador Sea to the west.”12 This is particularly compelling when you consider that, according to the IPCC report, the earth has warmed about a degree, something which could never account for the velocity of ice melt we are presently seeing.

Thanks to Al Gore and his penchant for fear mongering using the goblin of anthropogenic global warming, the public has also been simultaneously duped into believing that hurricane frequency and intensity are the cause of our decadent and out of control carbon footprint as we have stepped all over mother nature in our headlong way to enjoy our prosperity. Al Gore stated the following in his thinly veiled “documentary” “An Inconvenient Truth”: “For a long time, the scientists have been telling us global warming increases the temperature of the top layer in the ocean, and that causes the average hurricane to become a lot stronger. So, the fact that the ocean temperatures did go up because of global warming, because of man-made global warming, starting around in the seventies and then we had a string of unusually strong hurricanes outside the boundaries of this multi-decadal cycle that is a real factor; there are scientists who point that out, and they're right, but we're exceeding those boundaries now.” 13 However, you can either believe Al Gore, or you can put your money on NOAA, which had the following to say: “The nation is now wrapping up the 11th year of a new era of heightened Atlantic hurricane activity. This era has been unfolding in the Atlantic since 1995, and is expected to continue for the next decade or perhaps longer. NOAA attributes this increased activity to natural occurring cycles in tropical climate patterns near the equator. These cycles, called ‘the tropical multi-decadal signal,’ typically last several decades (20 to 30 years or even longer). As a result, the North Atlantic experiences alternating decades long (20 to 30 year periods or even longer) of above normal or below normal hurricane seasons. NOAA research shows that the tropical multi-decadal signal is causing the increased Atlantic hurricane activity since 1995, and is not related to greenhouse warming.” 14

Whew! That consensus thing seems to be fraying at the edges a bit, doesn’t it?
The idea that natural phenomenon are causative agents of global warming is also corroborated by Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former IPCC scientist. Lindzen has been critical of the catastrophic predictions regarding global warming as well as their false attribution to anthropogenic origins. In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, Dr. Lindzens stated: “The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on the confluence of many factors.” 15 Lindzen also lends support to the idea of guilt and sacrifice explored in my earlier blog posting. To wit: “Our perceptions of nature are similarly dragged back centuries so that the normal occasional occurrences of open water in summer over the North Pole, droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level variations, etc. are all taken as omens, portending doom due to our sinful ways (as epitomized by our carbon footprint). All of these phenomena depend on the confluence of multiple factors as well.”16 Of course, to be fair, Lindzen has been purported to have dubious associations with the oil industry, and has received monies for speaking engagements and consulting. Is he a tool of the “evil oil industry?” Possibly, but he, again, is hardly alone in his protestations.
In reality, there is even dissent amongst both current and former IPCC scientists. According to a 2007 U.S. Senate report from the Committee on Environment and Public Works, more than 400 scientists have disputed IPCC anthropogenic global-warming claims. 17 Unfortunately, due to the fundamentalist dynamics I explore in my previous posts, these scientists have been either censored or censured. Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor of Dynamical Meteorology and
Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, made the following observation about this repressiveness: “Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media,” Paldor wrote. 18 And this intimidation goes beyond the pale of rationale disagreement, morphing into a form of political bullying. Consider the following email excerpt written by Michael T. Eckhart, president of the environmental group the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), to Marlo Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI):

“It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by Corporate America. Go ahead, guy. Take me on." 19
This perception was also echoed by Chylek, who has stated the following in an open letter to the climate research community: “For me, science is the search for truth, the never-ending path towards finding out how things are arranged in this world so that they can work as they do. That search is never finished. It seems that the climate research community has betrayed that mighty goal in science. They have substituted the search for truth with an attempt at proving one point of view. It seems that some of the most prominent leaders of the climate research community, like prophets of Old Israel, believed that they could see the future of humankind and that the only remaining task was to convince or force all others to accept and follow.” 20
Now amaybe everyone of the scientists I have mentioned are merely charlatans and toadies for Big OIL and Coal (impossible), and maybe Mr. Eckhart is nothing more than a shill for “Corporate America.” Or possibly he is just a citizen concerned about the economic fallout of proposed climate-change legislation. But it really doesn’t matter. Since when did the way we conduct science and communicate it’s myriad findings devolve into a frenzy of punitive retaliation rather than vigorous, healthy dissension and debate? Since when did the meaning of consensus become so meaningless? And since when is an organization such as the IPCC, which has been shrouded in controversy and is also under pressure to capture grant money, so morally superior for those that speak up for the economic interest of companies that could be irreparably damaged by ill-conceived schemes such as cap and trade? The bottom line is we need large, multifaceted long-scale studies based on a multitude of data with no intention of finding a particular cause; rather, the data should speak for itself in the most objective terms possible. This should then be followed by intense analysis and spirited debate. Anything less is a disservice to the public and a blow to the democratic process. And, if we are going to castigate people for their ties to money, then let us do so. But the path does not lead us back to the IPCC, for in reality, they are just a puppet for the puppet masters in Washington D.C. However, these waters are treacherous and deep, so I will defer exploring them in depth on the next installment of my blog.