Energy Probe

National Post June 29/2007

The Deniers, Part XXVIII: Open mind sees climate clearly by Lawrence Solomon

He’s the world’s most cited climatologist, according to an analysis in the journal of the British Institute of Geographers. He’s also the fifth-most-cited physical geographer in the world, and the 11th most cited among all geographers.

He has written some 230 articles and five books, including in such fields as geology, limnology, meteorology and archeology.

He has twice seen his papers in Environmental Conservation awarded prizes for being “best paper of the year,” and he’s a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honour, created to recognize “outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment.”

He’s Dr. Reid Bryson, considered by many the “father of scientific climatology,” and he’s also pronounced on the most consequential climate issue of the day – man-made global warming. His verdict: “That is a theory for which there is no credible proof.”

Dr. Bryson, aged 87 and still professionally active, has become anathema to many environmentalists for his views on global warming. But those with long histories will remember him as an inspirational figure in the 1970s who challenged the wasteful ways of our consumer society, and warned of a dire need for lifestyle changes. Mother Earth News, a bible of the environmental movement, in the preamble to an extensive 1976 interview, described him as “an environmentalist in the broadest sense and his thoughts on the planet, its human population, and that population’s activities range as widely and carry all the force of such acknowledged environmental spokesmen as Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich, and Dave Brower.”

Dr. Bryson believed then, as he believes now, that humans affect the climate, in ways that both warm and cool the atmosphere. “Dozens of scientific papers, in fact, have been published about industry’s consumption of fossil fuels, its creation of carbon dioxide, and how the resultant ‘greenhouse effect’ will cause a rise in the temperature of the atmosphere,” he told Mother Earth News.

“I find it interesting, however, that the same people who write those papers generally seem to overlook the even greater amounts of particulate matter which those same factories and foundries pump into the air, [cooling the atmosphere]. Not to mention the tremendous quantities of particulates now kicked into the atmosphere by poor farmers in primitive agricultural and marginal semi-arid regions all over the world.”

Humans change the climate in other ways, too, chiefly because “the Industrial Revolution, by making the modern megalopolis possible, has certainly concentrated the release of heat into the atmosphere. Take New York City, for example. The heat produced by human activity in New York during the winter is greater than the amount of heat the city receives from the sun.”

As a result, large cities become warmer and drier, with different rainfall patterns than the surrounding countryside.

“It is quite possible that the growing megalopolis-type urban areas here in North America and the new concentrations of people in Europe and elsewhere are already slightly modifying the atmospheric circulation patterns of the whole hemisphere. In fact, since we already know that these metropolitan areas do alter the micro-climates around them, it would be hard to believe that they have no effect at all on the macroclimate.”

Dr. Bryson’s message in the 1970s attracted environmentalists, especially those drawn to the apocalyptic. As did many in that era, Dr. Bryson warned that the Earth faced catastrophe from overpopulation, and that even a small change in climate could have far-reaching consequences. But unlike many, Dr. Bryson wanted to find out what changes in climate might be in the offing, and what their consequences might be. He urged open-mindedness and investigation: “First, let’s accept the fact that the climate could be changing on a global scale right now. Second, let’s try to find evidence which either confirms or denies that such a change is taking place. And, third, if our evidence suggests that the Earth’s climate is indeed changing in any way – let’s see if we can find a logical reason for such a change to be taking place.

“Furthermore, let’s do all this – not because we want to scare anyone – not because we want to find some terrible global calamity just over the horizon – and not because we want to draw attention to ourselves by forecasting the future. Let’s just quietly and rationally try to figure out where the climate might be headed so we’ll be able to prepare ourselves well in advance for any changes that might lie ahead.”

As things would turn out, Dr. Bryson’s advice was ignored. Science was pursued irrationally and not to seek answers, he believes, but to suit other agendas. “There is very little truth to what is being said and an awful lot of religion,” he has decided. “It’s almost a religion where you have to believe in anthropogenic global warming or else you are nuts.”

As for the biggest believer, Al Gore, and his movie, An Inconvenient Truth: “Don’t make me throw up,” he exclaims. “It is not science. It is not true.”

And as for the often claimed scientific consensus on climate change, he doubts it: “I know of no vote having been taken, and know that if such a vote were taken of those who are most vocal about the matter, it would include a significant fraction of people who do not know enough about climate to have a significant opinion.”

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

CV OF A DENIER

Reid Bryson joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1946 and in 1948 became the founding chairman of its department of meteorology. In 2007, he became emeritus professor of the university’s department of oceanic and atmospheric sciences. Dr. Bryson’s research broke path in diverse fields, among them the Indian monsoon, airstreams and the reconstruction of past climates. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Meteorological Society. He received his PhD in meteorology at the University of Chicago.

Judith E. McKay

June 18, 2007

Judith E McKay, Chief Administrative Office of DuPont Canada, delivers a presentation to the Shared Air Summit in Toronto.

read the full presentation in .pdf format 

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
June 8, 2007

The head of NASA – the National Aeronautical and Space Association is – “an idiot” and “in denial.” He is also “surprisingly naive” and “a fool.” With his judgment and competence so lacking, demands abound for his resignation as head of the largest and most accomplished science agency in the world.

Those comments and others in the past week have come from scientists shocked to learn that NASA chief Michael Griffin thinks differently than they about global warming. Among the most shocked is one of Dr. Griffin’s own employees, James Hansen, a top climate scientist who “almost fell off my chair” when he learned that his research hadn’t convinced his boss. “It’s an incredibly arrogant and ignorant statement,” he told ABC News, referring to an interview of Dr. Griffin on National Public Radio. “It indicates a complete ignorance of understanding the implications of climate change.”

Some might think Dr. Griffin is entitled to think for himself. Apart from his PhD in aerospace engineering, he holds five masters degrees, he is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the International Academy of Astronautics, he manages a US$1.1-billion climate-research budget and was unanimously confirmed to head NASA by the United States Senate.

But no. He is either “totally clueless” or “a deep anti-global warming ideologue,” concludes Jerry Mahlman, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in a statement similar to many.

Dr. Griffin’s radio interview drew this storm of controversy after he was asked about the seriousness of global warming. He replied by saying, “I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had, and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change.”

Dr. Griffin doesn’t dispute that the Earth has been warming. He does dispute that we can – or even should – do anything about it. “First of all, I don’t think it’s within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings, where and when, are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now, is the best climate for all other human beings. I’m, I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.”

Dr. Griffin’s interview was prompted by criticisms from environmental journalist Greg Easterbrook, who charged that Dr. Griffin is wasting NASA’s time and money on misguided space exploration projects, such as a manned mission to Mars and the establishment of a permanent base on

the moon. Instead, Easterbrook argued, Dr. Griffin should be exercising his right to free speech, coming out against misguided NASA policies and spending more on legitimate priorities, such as greater global-warming research.

The Easterbrook charge led National Public Radio to ask Dr. Griffin why he wasn’t “battling [global warming] as an army might battle an enemy.” Dr. Griffin’s response: “Nowhere in NASA’s authorization, which of course governs what we do, is there anything at all telling us that we should take actions to effect climate change in either – in one way or another . . . . NASA is not an agency chartered to, quote, ‘battle climate change.'”

More howls from critics, who believe Dr. Griffin should be using his discretion to skew NASA’s mission away from its core purpose – and away from his fiduciary responsibilities to his organization – and toward the service of fighting climate change.

To which Dr. Griffin responds, not unreasonably, “The question is, in a democratic society, who gets to choose. Unfortunately for Greg, it’s not him.”

Unfortunately for society, Greg Easterbrook happened to be wrong in another claim: that Dr. Griffin hadn’t lost his right to speak out. For all intents and purposes, he has. Within days of the uproar, Dr. Griffin decided that he should not have discussed “an issue which has become far more political than technical.” In an apology to his staff, he said, “I feel badly that I caused this amount of controversy over something like this,” adding that, “it would have been well for me to have stayed out of it.”

Dr. Griffin is now one more scientist who will not dispute the existence of a “scientific consensus on global warming.”

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

CV OF A DENIER

Prior to heading NASA, Michael Griffin served as space department head at Johns Hopkins University’s applied physics laboratory in Laurel, Md. He was previously president and chief operating officer of In-Q-Tel, Inc. and chief executive of Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Magellan Systems division. Earlier, Dr. Griffin served as chief engineer and as associate administrator for exploration at NASA, and as deputy for technology at the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization. He is the lead author of more than two dozen technical papers, as well as the textbook Space Vehicle Design. He earned his doctorate at the Michael Griffin University of Maryland.

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
June 2, 2007

Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled.

So said Al Gore . . . in 1992. Amazingly, he made his claims despite much evidence of their falsity. A Gallup poll at the time reported that 53% of scientists actively involved in global climate research did not believe global warming had occurred; 30% weren’t sure; and only 17% believed global warming had begun. Even a Greenpeace poll showed 47% of climatologists didn’t think a runaway greenhouse effect was imminent; only 36% thought it possible and a mere 13% thought it probable.

Today, Al Gore is making the same claims of a scientific consensus, as do the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of government agencies and environmental groups around the world. But the claims of a scientific consensus remain unsubstantiated. They have only become louder and more frequent.

More than six months ago, I began writing this series, The Deniers. When I began, I accepted the prevailing view that scientists overwhelmingly believe that climate change threatens the planet. I doubted only claims that the dissenters were either kooks on the margins of science or sell-outs in the pockets of the oil companies.

My series set out to profile the dissenters – those who deny that the science is settled on climate change – and to have their views heard. To demonstrate that dissent is credible, I chose high-ranking scientists at the world’s premier scientific establishments. I considered stopping after writing six profiles, thinking I had made my point, but continued the series due to feedback from readers. I next planned to stop writing after 10 profiles, then 12, but the feedback increased. Now, after profiling more than 20 deniers, I do not know when I will stop – the list of distinguished scientists who question the IPCC grows daily, as does the number of e-mails I receive, many from scientists who express gratitude for my series.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists – the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects – and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction. Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC, many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility. In one case, a top scientist told me that, to his knowledge, no respected scientist in his field accepts the IPCC position.

What of the one claim that we hear over and over again, that 2,000 or 2,500 of the world’s top scientists endorse the IPCC position? I asked the IPCC for their names, to gauge their views. “The 2,500 or so scientists you are referring to are reviewers from countries all over the world,” the IPCC Secretariat responded. “The list with their names and contacts will be attached to future IPCC publications, which will hopefully be online in the second half of 2007.”

An IPCC reviewer does not assess the IPCC’s comprehensive findings. He might only review one small part of one study that later becomes one small input to the published IPCC report. Far from endorsing the IPCC reports, some reviewers, offended at what they considered a sham review process, have demanded that the IPCC remove their names from the list of reviewers. One even threatened legal action when the IPCC refused.

A great many scientists, without doubt, are four-square in their support of the IPCC. A great many others are not. A petition organized by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine between 1999 and 2001 claimed some 17,800 scientists in opposition to the Kyoto Protocol. A more recent indicator comes from the U.S.-based National Registry of Environmental Professionals, an accrediting organization whose 12,000 environmental practitioners have standing with U.S. government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. In a November, 2006, survey of its members, it found that only 59% think human activities are largely responsible for the warming that has occurred, and only 39% make their priority the curbing of carbon emissions. And 71% believe the increase in hurricanes is likely natural, not easily attributed to human activities.

Such diversity of views is also present in the wider scientific community, as seen in the World Federation of Scientists, an organization formed during the Cold War to encourage dialogue among scientists to prevent nuclear catastrophe. The federation, which encompasses many of the world’s most eminent scientists and today represents more than 10,000 scientists, now focuses on 15 “planetary emergencies,” among them water, soil, food, medicine and biotechnology, and climatic changes. Within climatic changes, there are eight priorities, one being “Possible human influences on climate and on atmospheric composition and chemistry (e.g. increased greenhouse gases and tropospheric ozone).”

Man-made global warming deserves study, the World Federation of Scientists believes, but so do other serious climatic concerns. So do 14 other planetary emergencies. That seems about right.

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
May 26, 2007

Germany’s Hans von Storch, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, believes that climate change is for real and that humans are responsible. He also believes that we shouldn’t fear climate change, that predictions of doom are “hysterical” when they aren’t “completely idiotic and dubious,” and that many of the science establishment’s pronouncements on climate change are bereft of scientific merit.

“Theories of global warming have left laboratories far behind. Now, they are the stuff of Hollywood,” he wrote in Der Spiegel, in an article that castigated global warming alarmists for debasing scientific inquiry and intimidating those who would challenge the conventional wisdom. Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear has it right in its portrayal of environmental extremism, Dr. Storch believes.

“Despite some artful fictionalization of the facts, Crichton has certainly delivered an accurate portrayal of the dynamics of communication among the scientific community, environmental organizations, government and civil society.

“Like the protagonists in Crichton’s thriller, the general belief is that in order to keep public attention focused on the issue of ‘climate catastrophe’ [it must] be presented ‘somewhat more attractively.'”

The “climate catastrophe” is hype, he stated. “In the early 1990s, just as Germany was being hit by severe windstorms, the German media were reporting that the storms were becoming more and more severe. Since then, storms of this magnitude have once again become less common in Northern Europe, a fact now ignored by the media. They have also ignored the fact that changes in barometric pressure measured in Stockholm since the days of Napoleon reveal no systematic change in the frequency and severity of storms.”

The fear of climate change, and the blaming of humans for them, did not start with global warming and the Kyoto Protocol of the 1990s. This fear is a feature of human history, and likely part of human nature, he explained in a 2005 paper entitled: “A History of Human Perceptions of Anthropogenic Climate Change in the Past 1,000 Years.”

In the last half century, global cooling theories arose, with man the culprit due to industrial pollution. Nuclear weapons testing also prompted an explosion of theories about the implication on the weather.

In the first half of the 20th century, First World War gunfire was blamed for wet summers, as was shortwave transatlantic radio communication. Because of a major warming that took place in large parts of the world, Monthly Weather Review in 1933 published an unsettling article entitled: “Is the Climate Changing?”

In the 19th century, European and North American scientists claimed that the water levels of rivers would fall continuously, leading to fears that the weather would change and to the laying of blame on both deforestation and reforestation. Europe’s abnormally wet summer of 1816, meanwhile, was blamed on the lightning rods that had just come into vogue.

In earlier centuries, such as the 14th, which saw a prolonged wet period in England, the cause was man’s wicked lifestyle, which precipitated divine retribution. “And nowadays it’s those hedonistic wastrels who pollute the air so that they can look at some pretty fish in the South Seas,” Dr. Storch states, adding that “many scientists see themselves too much as priests whose job it is to preach moralistic sermons to people? It would be better if we just presented the facts and scenarios dispassionately – and then society can decide for itself what it wants to do to influence climate change.”

But scientists don’t, and neither do the governments and quasi-governmental scientific establishments that now lend their own authority to climate-change myth-making.

Dr. Storch thinks it would be helpful to learn why humans keep forgetting how wrong we have been in our past dire forecasts. Until we do, we are doomed to repeat history.

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

Hans von Storch is director of the Institute of Coastal Research of the GKSS Research Centre and professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg. From 1987 to 1995, he was senior scientist and leader of the Statistical Analysis and Modelling Group at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. He is the author of 11 books and 120 peer-reviewed articles. He is a member of the advisory boards of the Journal of Climate and Meteorologische Zeitschrift and the Annals of Geophysics. Dr. von Storch was a lead author of the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC. He received his PhD from the Meteorological Department of the University of Hamburg in 1979

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
May 18, 2007

If you’re the type of person who sets aside money today for the university education of your great-great-great grandchildren, even if it means that you may not be able to afford university tuition for your own children, you may think it sensible for society to invest now in major measures to stop global warming.

If you’re not this type – and who in his right mind is – you should forget about Kyoto-like greenhouse-gas reduction targets and the crash programs that would be required to meet them. Doing so would not only be economically prudent, it would be – by almost any measure – the ethical thing to do.

So argues celebrated economist William Nordhaus, author of pathbreaking books and studies on global warming, and generally considered the most authoritative economist in the climate change field. His verdict on global warming alarmism, as exemplified by the UK’s Stern review, which demanded drastic measures now to avert climate change calamity later: “Completely absurd.”

The Stern review, released last year to banner headlines, argues that the cost of inaction greatly exceeds the cost of action. It has been much criticized for its selective use of data – Sir Nicholas Stern piles one worst-case scenario upon another to arrive at his fantastical costs, and Dr. Nordhaus is among those who note this failing. In fact, Sir Nicholas uses Nordhaus as a source for global-warming costs that could present themselves well after the year 2100, although Nordhaus characterized that data as particularly unreliable.

But a series of unreliable, worst-case scenarios centuries off, by themselves, still would not warrant the extreme greenhousegas prevention investments that the Stern review recommends. To make an economic case for immediate action, Sir Nicholas adjusted his model to have us paying now for potential damage that could be happening hundreds of years from now.

Sir Nicholas estimates the potential costs of climate change to be so great as to force on us a “20% cut in per-capita consumption, now and forever.” Yet his data showed low damages from climate change in the next two centuries. To overcome his data, he applied to his model what economists call a “near-zero social discount rate.” Doing so brings forward future expenses – in the Stern review’s case, expenses that might occur in the 23rd and 24th centuries. The Stern review then presents us with a tab that includes these far-out costs, and the invoice is eye-popping indeed.

But the Stern review approach defies logic, as Dr. Nordhaus illustrates by demonstrating just where zero social-discount-rate thinking leads. “Suppose that scientists discover that a wrinkle in the climatic system will cause damages equal to 0.01% of output starting in 2200 and continuing at that rate thereafter,” he explains. “How large a onetime investment would be justified today to remove the wrinkle starting after two centuries? The answer is that a payment of 15% of world consumption today (approximately US$7-trillion) would pass the review’s costbenefit test. This seems completely absurd. The bizarre result arises because the value of the future consumption stream is so high with near-zero discounting that we would trade off a large fraction of today’s income to increase a far-future income stream by a very tiny fraction.”

Moreover, who should be asked to forgo that consumption? It hardly seems fair to keep back poor countries, yet, if paid by the rich countries alone, the decline would far exceed that of the Great Depression.

Some climate-change alarmists argue that we should invest in combating climate change now as an insurance policy against the risk of future damage. Sounds prudent, until you consider the premium to be paid.

“Suppose that we suddenly learn that there is a 10% probability of the wrinkle in the climatic system that reduces the post- 2200 income stream by 0.01%,” Dr. Nordhaus explains, again to illustrate the Stern review’s logic. “What insurance premium would be justified today to reduce that probability to zero? With conventional discount rates, we would probably ignore any tiny wrinkle two or three centuries ahead. If we did a careful calculation using conventional discount rates, we would calculate a break-even 0.0002% insurance premium to remove the year 2200 contingency, and a 0.0000003% premium for the year-2400 contingency. Moreover, these dollar premiums are small whether the probability is large or small.
“With the review’s near-zero discount rate, offsetting the low-probability wrinkle would be worth an insurance premium today of almost 2% of current income, or $1-trillion. We would pay almost the same amount if that threshold were to be crossed in 2400 rather than in 2200.”

Dr. Nordhaus’s conclusion about such scares: “We are in effect forced to make current decisions about highly uncertain events in the distant future, even though these estimates are highly speculative and are almost sure to be refined over the coming decades.”

Dr. Nordhaus discounts climate-change alarmism, but not climate change itself. He advocates research to better understand its consequences and to develop more efficient technologies. He advocates the elimination of subsidies that artificially increase greenhouse-gas emissions, and other “no-regrets” measures that would benefit the environment without harming the economy. The costs of climate change are real, he believes, and society should act. But not overreact.

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

CV OF A DENIER
William Nordhaus is the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University. He is the co-author with Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson of Economics, the classic textbook, now in its 18th edition. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 1977 to 1979, he served Jimmy Carter as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He serves on the Congressional Budget Office Panel of Economic Experts and is chairman of the advisory committee for the Bureau of Economic Analysis. He received his PhD in economics in 1967 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.