Energy Probe

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
August 15, 2007

Iceland is shrouded in a permanent low-pressure system. Far to the south, the Azores are shrouded in permanent highs. Both pressure systems rock, from east to west and with ever-changing intensity, in the process controlling the North Atlantic’s westerly winds. When the westerlies are strong, Europe’s summers are cool, its winters are mild and rain is frequent. When westerlies are weak, rainfall decreases and temperatures become extreme, leading to summer heat waves and winter deep freezes.

These year-to-year variations in the North Atlantic are known as the North Atlantic Oscillation. Though in many ways mysterious, their effects are quite predictable and long established. A missionary in Greenland in the 18th century wrote of one such effect: “In Greenland, all winters are severe, yet they are not alike. The Danes have noticed that when the winter in Denmark was severe, as we perceive it, the winter in Greenland in its manner was mild, and conversely.”

The North Atlantic Oscillation is but one of many on the planet. Others include the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the El Nino/Southern Oscillation and the North Pacific Oscillation, all with their own chaotic characteristics, all having profound and well-known effects on the climate of their regions.

Thanks to the work of Anastasios Tsonis and his colleagues, we now know that these four separate and major oscillations can and do act in unison. And when they do, the world climate turns.

Prof. Tsonis applied mathematical procedures from chaos and network theory to the oscillations that occurred over the 20th century, for each of the four major oscillations. Out of the chaos, he found coherence. All four oscillations demonstrated independent characteristics most of the time, operating at different intensities and wave patterns in their own complex dynamics.

But several times they synchronized. And within those synchronized periods, they sometimes coupled to act in phase and in increasing strength. This increasing coupling strength culminated in dramatic climate shifts.

“The first synchronization of the 20th century occurred around 1910,” Prof. Tsonis explains. “For almost three years, the coupling strength increased and then in late 1912 or early 1913, the synchronous state among the oscillations vanished. That coincided with a sharp increase in global temperatures.”

Other synchronizations occurred in the 1920s and 1930s, but these were marked by an absence of increasing coupling strength, and the global temperature didn’t shift. “In the 1940s, we again saw synchronization accompanied by increasing coupling strength, and we again saw a dramatic change in global temperatures – this was the period of global cooling that is so often remarked upon, and which led some scientists to predict that we were entering a new Ice Age,” Prof. Tsonis continues. For several decades, more synchronizations occurred, but without increasing coupling strength. The temperature continued to cool. “Then, in the late 1970s, we once more saw the phenomenon of synchronization among the oscillations, plus increasing coupling strength. When the synchronization ended, the climate turned again, and the current period of global warming began.”

Climate change over the entire 20th century, Prof. Tsonis has convincingly demonstrated, see-sawed between cooling and warming periods, in sync with the regional oscillations. He did more, too. He applied the same mathematical mechanism to a state-of-the-art model that reliably simulates the activities of the same oscillations. The model – the same one used by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – produced results consistent with his chaos-theory mechanism.

“In the simulation over the next century, the climate shifts twice: first a cooling period beginning in 2027, and then a warming period beginning in 2065,” he states. Moreover, the shifts in global temperature are independent of human activities.

“The model shows that the climate changes are intrinsic to the natural climate system,” he elaborates. “Man-made activities doubtless also influence the climate, but not through the profound synchronizations that have foretold the climate in the past and will foretell it in the future.”

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.

CV OF A DENIER

Anastasios Tsonis, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Mathematical Sciences, was among the first scientists to promote the application of chaos theory and nonlinear data analysis to atmospheric sciences and the first scientist to apply the concepts of “small-world” networks to atmospheric sciences. He originated or co-originated the Tsonis criterion, the Tsonis-Elsner method and the Elsner-Tsonis test. Early in his career, he developed a method of estimating rainfall from satellite images that is still being used today. Prof. Tsonis, the author or co-author of some 160 publications, received his Ph.D. in meteorology from McGill University.

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
July 28, 2007

He’s called the world’s most famous hurricane expert, not because he likes to fly into hurricanes to experience them up close – which he does – but because of what he’s learned from them, up there, buffeted by the fury of nature. William Gray has developed an intuitive sense when it comes to understanding the atmosphere in its infinite complexity. This intuition rooted in experience allowed him to pioneer the science of hurricane forecasting more than two decades ago, and subsequently to practice his craft with an unprecedented precision that he keeps refining year after year. He and his colleagues have now reached a 95% accuracy rate in predicting the number of major storms and hurricanes that will occur next season. Insurance companies set their premiums, and government emergency-preparedness authorities set their budgets, on the basis of his pioneering work

How has Dr. Gray adapted his methods of prediction in light of global warming, to maintain his accuracy rate? He hasn’t. Dr. Gray views recent climate-change science as meaningless “mush,” the product of simplistic computer models that crudely track a handful of factors and ignore the myriad others that influence the weather. Climate is not a contraption with a set number of easily manipulated variables, as you might find in a child’s science construct. Those who try to reduce the climate to suit the rudiments of computer models, he believes, accomplish nothing but the debasing of science. The models, he has demonstrated time and again, are utter failures, incapable even of explaining the past.
Dr. Gray dates his intimacy with hurricanes from Helene, the strongest in the 1958 season. Together with his renowned mentor at the University of Chicago, Herbert Riehl, they talked the pilot of their plane, a converted B-50 Superfortress bomber, into dangerously close encounters with Helene as she skirted the Carolina coasts. Amid 150-mile-per-hour winds pummelling the plane – “we took Dramamine,” he says – he garnered his first inkling of the awesome force of sea and wind.

That real-world experience, and the many other hurricane-hunting forays that followed over the decades, gave him the insights that would lead to brilliant discoveries of how weather and climate worked, insights that theorizing in the abstract could not have produced.
After years of collecting data by flying into storms off Florida, for example, and finding no meaningful local patterns, he decided to investigate whether the forces commanding the immensely variable storms of the Atlantic lay oceans away. He searched for, and found, distant relationships – El Nino in the Pacific correlated with Atlantic storms, as did Atlantic hurricanes and quasi-biannual oscillations. QBIOs are winds in the tropical stratosphere that reverse their course every 12 to 14 months. The westerly QBIOs, Dr. Gray discovered, foretold major Atlantic storms, as did rain in West Africa and Caribbean sea-level pressure.
“The problem was that we’d been looking locally,” Dr. Gray explains. “You had to look globally.” When Dr. Gray says “look,” he means that literally. The fruits of measurement and observation, he believes, can be trusted. Those of theoretical models at odds with the real world are likelier to mislead than to inform.

In 1984, Dr. Gray publicly predicted 17 major events for the coming hurricane season, seven hurricanes and 10 named storms. Startlingly, 17 occurred, almost as predicted (five hurricanes and 12 named storms materialized). He has been publicly predicting ever since, with a success rate that has been growing over the years as new insights, born of new experiences, led him to more suppositions about how the atmosphere could and could not work.
“In tropical cyclones, he’s got the best legacy of anyone,” acknowledges Greg Holland, who earned his doctorate under Dr. Gray’s tutelage and is now a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “He’s got former students running major organizations around the world.” Yet this former student, like many of the others whose careers Dr. Gray launched, now disparages Dr. Gray’s skepticism of climate change, and believes his time has passed.

Many of those former students now running major organizations, and others too, now shun this legendary figure in his field, saying that he has marginalized himself. Most funders now refuse to back his work at Colorado State University, some whispering that his success rate in predictions has come of dumb luck. To carry on with the limited funding available to him – he still receives two modest research grants, one from the National Science Foundation for hurricane research, the other from Lexington Insurance Co. of Boston for U.S. hurricane landfall probability prediction – Dr. Gray, now in his 70s, has scaled back his projects and also contributed some $100,000 from his retirement savings.

If he recanted on his views of global warming and subscribed to fears of catastrophe, if he rehabilitated himself and embraced computer models over observation, generous funding would almost certainly appear. But Dr. Gray has no intention of recanting: “I have a bit of an obligation, at my age – I was trained to tell the truth. There’s a lot of hogwash in this.”

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.

CV OF A DENIER
William Gray is Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, where he has worked since 1961. His many tropical field experiments were directed to the study of cumulus convection, condensation heating, evaporation cooling, sea-air energy-moisture exchange and hurricane formation. He heads the university’s Tropical Meteorology Project, which publishes yearly forecasts for tropical storms, named storms, typhoons, hurricanes and intense hurricanes. He holds M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in meteorology and geophysical sciences from the University of Chicago.

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
July 17, 2007

Bob Carter, a professor at James Cook University (Queensland) and the University of Adelaide (South Australia), is a paleontologist, a stratigrapher, and a marine geologist.

He has been chair of the National Marine Science and Technologies Committee, director of the Australian Office of the Ocean Drilling Program, and chair of the Earth Sciences Discipline Panel of the Australian Research Council.

He is Cambridge educated.

And he is an outspoken global-warming skeptic.

Most global-warming skeptics criticize the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on limited grounds – they might view the science put forth by the IPCC to be at odds with science in their particular discipline, for example, or they might object to the IPCC’s secrecy, or they might object to the IPCC’s failure to observe standard peer-review practices. Moreover, when they object they generally do so quietly, often without naming names and only in private.

Prof. Carter objects on multiple grounds and in multiple arenas; he names names and he will set the record straight, even when those he believes to be in the wrong are fellow skeptics.

NASA chief Michael Griffin, for example, is a skeptic because he thinks that global warming may be beneficial, that it is not worth worrying about, and that, in any case, we wouldn’t be able to stop it, even if we wanted to. But Dr. Griffin also thinks that a global-warming trend is certainly underway, and to this Prof. Carter takes objection.

Dr. Griffin’s “opinion is unsupported by the evidence,” Prof. Carter wrote in rebuttal. “The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4%) in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
“Second, lower-atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little, if any, global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17%).” Moreover, Prof. Carter adds, credible scientists predict global cooling. How then can Dr. Griffin boldly assert that humans are causing global warming?
One of the most contentious areas of climate-change science involves computer General Circulation Models (GCMs), the predictive tool that generate most of the scary scenarios that arouse public alarm. Prof. Carter has long been a critic of these models, which claim to project for us what the climate will be in the year 2100.

In the past, Prof. Carter has drawn the ire of global-warming proponents with his GCM critiques. Now, to his satisfaction, he has support in his critique from an unlikely source – Kevin Trenberth, whom he thinks of as “one of the advisory high priests of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

As Dr. Trenberth recently acknowledged to Nature journal’s Climate Feedback blog, IPCC models cannot predict future climate because they don’t reflect reality: “None of the models used by IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate,” he stated.
“Moreover, the starting climate state in several of the models may depart significantly from the real climate owing to model errors. I postulate that regional climate change is impossible to deal with properly unless the models are initialized.”

While these statements warrant Prof. Carter’s approval, others do not, such as Dr. Trenberth’s claim that people have mistakenly believed that the IPCC makes predictions: “In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been,” claims Dr. Trenberth.
To which Prof. Carter notes an audit at the 27th International Symposium on Forecasting presented earlier this month. It found that “in apparent contradiction to claims by some climate experts that the IPCC provides ‘projections’ and not ‘forecasts,’ the word ‘forecast’ and its derivatives occurred 37 times, and ‘predict’ and its derivatives occur 90 times” in a chapter from the IPCC’s latest report.

There is no predictive value in the current generation of computer GCMs and therefore the alarmist IPCC statements about human-caused global warming are unjustified,” he concludes. Until others conclude so too, expect Prof. Carter to continue his critiques without fear or favour.
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.

CV OF A DENIER
Bob Carter is a Research Professor at University of Adelaide (South Australia) and James Cook University (Queensland), where he headed the School of Earth Sciences between 1981 and 1999. He has published more than 100 papers in international science journals and received numerous awards and prizes from bodies such as the Australian Research Council, the Geological Society of New Zealand, and the Royal Society of New Zealand. He received his PhD in palaeontology in 1968 from the University of Cambridge.

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
July 7, 2007

We are doomed, say climate change scientists associated with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that is organizing most of the climate change research occurring in the world today. Carbon dioxide from man-made sources rises to the atmosphere and then stays there for 50, 100, or even 200 years. This unprecedented buildup of CO2 then traps heat that would otherwise escape our atmosphere, threatening us all.

“This is nonsense,” says Tom V. Segalstad, head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and formerly an expert reviewer with the same IPCC. He laments the paucity of geologic knowledge among IPCC scientists – a knowledge that is central to understanding climate change, in his view, since geologic processes ultimately determine the level of atmospheric CO2.

“The IPCC needs a lesson in geology to avoid making fundamental mistakes,” he says. “Most leading geologists, throughout the world, know that the IPCC’s view of Earth processes are implausible if not impossible.”
Catastrophic theories of climate change depend on carbon dioxide staying in the atmosphere for long periods of time – otherwise, the CO2 enveloping the globe wouldn’t be dense enough to keep the heat in. Until recently, the world of science was near-unanimous that CO2 couldn’t stay in the atmosphere for more than about five to 10 years because of the oceans’ near-limitless ability to absorb CO2.

“This time period has been established by measurements based on natural carbon-14 and also from readings of carbon-14 from nuclear weapons testing, it has been established by radon-222 measurements, it has been established by measurements of the solubility of atmospheric gases in the oceans, it has been established by comparing the isotope mass balance, it has been established through other mechanisms, too, and over many decades, and by many scientists in many disciplines,” says Prof. Segalstad, whose work has often relied upon such measurements.

Then, with the advent of IPCC-influenced science, the length of time that carbon stays in the atmosphere became controversial. Climate change scientists began creating carbon cycle models to explain what they thought must be an excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. These computer models calculated a long life for carbon dioxide.

Amazingly, the hypothetical results from climate models have trumped the real world measurements of carbon dioxide’s longevity in the atmosphere. Those who claim that CO2 lasts decades or centuries have no such measurements or other physical evidence to support their claims.
Neither can they demonstrate that the various forms of measurement are erroneous.

“They don’t even try,” says Prof. Segalstad. “They simply dismiss evidence that is, for all intents and purposes, irrefutable. Instead, they substitute their faith, constructing a kind of science fiction or fantasy world in the process.”

In the real world, as measurable by science, CO2 in the atmosphere and in the ocean reach a stable balance when the oceans contain 50 times as much CO2 as the atmosphere. “The IPCC postulates an atmospheric doubling of CO2, meaning that the oceans would need to receive 50 times more CO2 to obtain chemical equilibrium,” explains Prof. Segalstad. “This total of 51 times the present amount of carbon in atmospheric CO2 exceeds the known reserves of fossil carbon – it represents more carbon than exists in all the coal, gas, and oil that we can exploit anywhere in the world.”

Also in the real world, Prof. Segalstad’s isotope mass balance calculations – a standard technique in science – show that if CO2 in the atmosphere had a lifetime of 50 to 200 years, as claimed by IPCC scientists, the atmosphere would necessarily have half of its current CO2 mass. Because this is a nonsensical outcome, the IPCC model postulates that half of the CO2 must be hiding somewhere, in “a missing sink.” Many studies have sought this missing sink – a Holy Grail of climate science research – without success.

“It is a search for a mythical CO2 sink to explain an immeasurable CO2 lifetime to fit a hypothetical CO2 computer model that purports to show that an impossible amount of fossil fuel burning is heating the atmosphere,” Prof. Segalstad concludes.
“It is all a fiction.”

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.
BACKGROUND SOURCES

CV OF A DENIER
Prof. Tom V. Segalstad is head of the Geological Museum within the Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo. Formerly, he was head of the Mineralogical-Geologic-al Museum at the University of Oslo, director of the Natural History Museums and Botanical Garden of the University of Oslo, and program chairman for mineralogy/petrology/ geochemistry at the University of Oslo. His research projects include geological mapping in Norway, Svalbard (Arctic), Sweden and Iceland, and have involved geochemistry, volcanology, metallogenesis (how mineral and ore deposits form) and magmatic petrogenesis (how magmatic rocks form). He was an expert reviewer to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change’s Third Assessment Report.