I don’t doubt the climate is changing. There is plenty of evidence to support that, even when you take out the flaws and discrepancies in the modeling that claim to support the anthropomorphic causes of this change. Often when discussing this topic, or pointing out a recent report that contradicts the current belief that it’s all mankind’s fault, someone always replies that “it’s just one report”. There is far more than “just one report” that disputes the extent of which man has and does affect the climate, and there are far more than just a handful of scientists who also believe that the effect of man is minute compared to natural climate change.
I question the approach of so many to blindly follow the popular and promoted scientific theories simply because “they know more than me”. If I find evidence, and properly researched theories and hypotheses to contradict a popular and commonly held theory , I will examine them, research them and dig deeper myself, rather than dismiss them out of hand because “everyone knows…” or “but all the scientists agree..”. Everyone doesn’t know, and the scientists Don’t agree.
As a starting point, there are currently 9 authorities that provide datasets of monthly global tempertaure anomalies. They are:
- NOAA’s National Climate Data Center (NCDC, GHCN-COADS)
- NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS)
- Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (HadCRUT2v)
- NOAA radiosonde network , (RATPAC
- Hadley Centre Radiosonde Network (HadAT2)
- University of Alabama Lower Troposphere TLT MSU (UAH )
- Remote Sensing Systems Lower Troposphere TLT MSU (RSS)
- National Center for Environmental Protection Reanalysis (NCEP50)
- European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts Reanalysis (ERA40)
Only GISS supports the idea that the climate is warming.[1]
One of the biggest reasons I question the stance that man is having such a profound effect on the climate is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself. The IPCC has been behind much of the drive to enforce the idea that man has irreversibly changed, and is changing the climate, is made up of 350 Government officials and climate change experts. Of the actual meetings that the IPCC have held, on average over 80% of the attendees have been Government officials and not experts. The reports that the IPCC submit for peer review are selected by Government researchers, not the experts. Of the approximately 70 IPCC experts, several have resigned after disputing the findings of the IPCC as a whole.
- Dr Chris Landsea “personally could not in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound.”
- Dr Vincent Gray: “This Climate Change Statement is veritably an orchestrated litany of lies, to borrow a phrase. As a longstanding member of the Royal Society of New Zealand I am unable to tolerate such a departure as this from the supposed objectives of fair or responsible comment on scientific matters, so I have resigned in protest.”
- Dr Richard Lindzen resigned from the IPCC process after his contributions were completely rewritten by the panel.
- TGGWS malaria expert Paul Reiter resigned from the IPCC over alarmist claims about malaria and global warming
- Dr. Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute resigned because, “My colleague and I repeatedly found ourselves at loggerheads with persons who insisted on making authoritative pronouncements, although they had little or no knowledge of our specialty.”
Another reason to question the validity of The IPCC’s findings is that they are misleading about the support their findings have. They claim that their reports and findings have been verified by over 4000 independent contributors. When you take into account the fact that they are counting some contributors multiple times (where they count someone who reviews 2 documents and write one as being 3 “independent” contributions) and have even counted individuals multiple times where their name has been misspelt in contributing to different documents (61 instances). The real figure is closer to 2879, and of that, only 2% explicitly supported the IPCC findings (around 60)[2]. Add to that, that the reports do not actually state what proportion of the reviewers actually supported the findings and the IPCC “findings” seem to become less and less like the authoritative, peer-reviewed, scientifically sound papers they are touted as.
The IPCC also frequently wheel out the “hockey stick” graph to support their warming figures. This graph, the “Millennial Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction” from a paper by Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes[3] shows a predicited massive increase in temperatures now, compared to between 1000ad and 1900ad. When the methodology was criticised[4], the paper’s authors pointed out that their original article had said that “more widespread high-resolution data are needed before more confident conclusions can be reached” and that the uncertainties were “the point of the article.” [5] and yet this graph is often touted as far more conclusive than it actually is.
Within the modeling used itself, there are flaws. As far as I can tell, ALL models that support man-made global warming are based on one underlying climate model, and are just variations and augmentations on that model. The uncertainty of the IPCC climate models is often downplayed. The Independent Summary for Policy Makers [6] provides a review of the IPCC Assesment Report 4 (AR4), and finds that “The hypothesis that greenhouse gas emissions have produced or are capable of producing a significant warming of the Earth’s climate since the start of the industrial era is credible, and merits continued attention. However, the hypothesis cannot be proven by formal theoretical arguments, and the available data allow the hypothesis to be credibly disputed.” Furthermore, it shows that while the IPCC report AR4 discusses the limitations and uncertainties of their own climate models, the summary, model projections and data-trends highlighted by the AR4 report do not take those uncertainties into account.
I don’t doubt the climate is changing, and it might well be warming due to man’s influences. What I do dispute is that it’s decided, that it’s fact, definite and indisputable. I’m not supporting the nay-sayers who deny climate change, nor say it’s nothing to do with humans, but I DO support further investigation and questioning of scientific “fact” when it only seems to be supported at a political level.
[1] Karl et al 2007: http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/default.htm
[2] http://nzclimatescience.net/images/PDFs/ipcc_numbers.pdf
[3] http://www.caenvirothon.com/Resources/Mann,%20et%20al.%20Global%20scale%20temp%20patterns.pdf
[4] http://www.climate2003.com/pdfs/2004GL012750.pdf
[5]http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/442627b
[6] http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/ISPM.pdf
