How You Can Tell Some Global Warming Skeptics Aren’t Interested in the Truth
Posted by
Kevin
Look a this piece of propoganda from Senator Inhoe:
“Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming bites the dust,” declared astronomer Dr. Ian Wilson after reviewing the new study which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Another scientist said the peer-reviewed study overturned “in one fell swoop” the climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore. The study entitled “Heat Capacity, Time Constant, and Sensitivity of Earth’s Climate System,” was authored by Brookhaven National Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz.
…. The new study was also touted as “overturning the UN IPCC ‘consensus’ in one fell swoop” by the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Joel Schwartz in an Aug. 17, 2007 blog post.
“New research from Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven National Lab concludes that the Earth’s climate is only about one-third as sensitive to carbon dioxide as the IPCC assumes,” wrote AEI’s Schwartz, who hold a master’s degree in planetary science from the California Institute of Technology.
The whole piece reads like that: its a mish-mash of “the sun is the cause” nonsense that has already been thoroughly debunked and breathless claims that the new study has disproved, “in one fell swoop”, global warming consensus. People interested in the truth would not trout out the sun causes it nonsense, and people who were serious about the truth would not breathlessly claim that one study — that hasn’t even been published yet and thus hasn’t had the full thrashing out in scientific circles it needs to be taken seriously — overturns anything, much less a scientific consensus with the enormous work behind it that the global warming consensus has. There are no qualifiers in these statements, not even a token “if this holds true …”, no discussion of why this study is right and the other work done on this issue to date has been wrong. There is no attempt, then, to grapple with the very real questions about this work — or any new piece of scientific work, for that matter. There is just the headlong rush into claims of certainty and victorious whooping that their enemies have been defeated. All that is missing is the phrase “nyah-nyah” and claims that their daddy can beat up yours.
No one with an ounce of honesty or intellectual independence could look at this as anything other than a crude piece of propoganda published by people with little interest in the actual truth of the matter. If global warming skeptics want to be taken seriously, then perhaps they should act more like adults and less like eight year olds at a ballgame.
Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, now that the paper is out, its been shown to be poor work:
Usually, I am happy to let RealClimate debunk the septic dross that still infects the media. In fact, since I have teased them about their zeal in the past, it may seem slightly hypocritical of me to bother with this. However, this specific paper is particularly close to my own field of research, and the author is also rather unusual in that he seems to be a respected atmospheric scientist with generally rather mainstream views on climate science (although perhaps a bit critical of the IPCC here). However, his background is in aerosols, which suggests that he may have stumbled out of his field without quite realising what he is getting himself into.
… His numerical values for t and C are 5+-1, and 16.7+-7 respectively (with the uncertainties at one standard deviation). It is not entirely clear what he really intends these distributions to mean (itself a sign that he is a little out of his depth perhaps), but I’ll interpret them in the only way I think reasonable in the context, as gaussian distributions for the parameters in question. He claims these values gives S equal to 0.3+-0.09, although he also writes 0.3+-0.14 elsewhere. This latter value works out at 1.1C+-0.5C for a doubling of CO2. But the quotient of two gaussians is not gaussian, or symmetric. I don’t know how he did his calculation, but it’s clearly not right.
In fact, the 16%-84% probability interval (the standard central 68% probability interval corresponding to +- 1sd of a gaussian, and the IPPC “likely”) of this quotient distribution is really 0.18-0.52K/W/m^2 (0.7-1.9C per doubling) and the 2sd limit of 2.5% to 97.5% is 0.12-1.3K/W/m^2 (0.4-4.8C per doubling). While this range still focuses mostly on lower values than most analyses support, it also reaches the upper range that I (and perhaps increasingly many others) consider credible anyway. His 68% estimate of 0.6-1.6C per doubling is wrong to start with, and doubly misleading in the way that it conceals the long tail that naturally arises from his analysis.
… He estimates a “time constant” which is supposed to characterise the response of the climate system to any perturbation. On the assumption that there is such a unique time constant, this value can apparently be estimated by some straightforward time series analysis - I haven’t checked this in any detail but the references he provides look solid enough. His estimate, based on observed 20th century temperature changes, comes out at 5y. However, he also notes that the literature shows that different analyses of models give wildly different indications of characteristic time scale, depending on what forcing is being considered - for example the response to volcanic perturbations has a dominant time scale of a couple of years, whereas the response to a steady increase in GHGs take decades to reach equilibrium. Unfortunately he does not draw the obvious conclusion from this - that there is no single time scale that completely characterises the climate system - but presses on regardless.
… In fact there is an elementary physical explanation for this: the models (and the real climate system) exhibit a range of time scales, with the atmosphere responding very rapidly, the upper ocean taking substantially longer, and the deep ocean taking much longer still. When forced with rapid variations (such as volcanoes), the time series of atmospheric response will seem rapid, but in response to a steady forcing change, the system will take a long time to reach its new equilibrium. An exponential fit to the first few years of such an experiment will look like there is a purely rapid response, before the longer response of the deep ocean comes into play. This is trivial to demonstrate with simple 2-box models (upper and lower ocean) of the climate system.
Changing Schwartz’ 5y time scale into a more representative 15y would put his results slap bang in the middle of the IPCC range, and confirm the well-known fact that the 20th century warming does not by itself provide a very tight constraint on climate sensitivity. It’s surprising that Schwartz didn’t check his results with anyone working in the field, and disappointing that the editor in charge at JGR apparently couldn’t find any competent referees to look at it.
Even more here, but the above gets the gist of the matter in an easily understandable fashion. One wonders if Senator Inhofe will offer a retraction. An serious man interested in the truth would.
