Skeptic Rubbishes Computer modelling on Climate Change
Brendan O’Keefe From: The Australian February 06, 2010
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/sceptic-rubbishes-computer-modelling-on-climate-change/story-e6frg6xf-1225827285274
CLIMATOLOGISTS were downplaying the uncertainty of the long-term computer models used to predict climate change, a leading sceptic said yesterday, as repercussions spread from the mistaken IPCC claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.
Climate change sceptic William Kininmonth, a former director of the Bureau of Meteorology’s National Climate Centre, questioned the reliability of long-term predictions, given that the limit of accurate forecasts was about 10 days.
“The whole issue about the global warming scenario is that the uncertainty of computer modelling is being downplayed,” he said.
“People are saying `we know there are certain aspects of physics the system will respond to and that’s what we’ll go with’, and not recognising the feedback process from weather systems that we just can’t control.”
Mr Kininmonth said the lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report, Michael Oppenheimer, who was questioned about the glacier mistake on ABC TV’s 7.30 Report on Thursday, was hiding behind the excuse that there was a “fundamental uncertainty” in climate projections.
Mr Kininmonth said: “Twenty years ago, at an early climate change convention, he was strongly supportive of anthropogenic global warming”, based on modelling and forecasts made with crude computer systems that lacked data about ocean circulation.
For Professor Oppenheimer now to cite uncertainty to defend mistakes in the IPCC report on glaciers was “disingenuous”, Mr Kininmonth said.
The flawed glacier claim found its way into a 2008 report by Australian government adviser Ross Garnaut.
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change executive Yvo de Boer has been forced to defend UN climate adviser Rajendra Pachauri against calls that he should resign.
Dr Pachauri said calls for his resignation had come from fossil fuel companies. “This is an organised block of vested interests,” he said.
Mr Kininmonth said the current El Nino weather system was a case in point on uncertainty.
“If we can’t predict short-term or seasonally, or the extent of an El Nino, how can we make predictions about what might happen 20, 30 or 100 years hence?” he said.
“The best computer models are predictive for six to eight days — that’s the limit of our weather forecasting ability.”
NCC climatologist and El Nino specialist Grant Beard said short-range and long-range forecasting were “two different problems” and uncertainty was a given beyond the short term.
“You need to know very precisely the conditions of the atmosphere and ocean . . . but eventually you depart from reality after about 10 days,” he said.
“A forecast for 30 or 40 years in the future is not a forecast . . . we’re just trying to get a gross measure of the global atmosphere and surface.”
ADDITIONAL REPORTING: AFP
A Vatican of the Laboratory
Brendan O’Neill From: The Australian February 06, 2010
THE recent climate science scandals have been revealing. For those of us who have had the experience of environmentalists accusing us of being “deniers” and “doubters of The Science”, as if science is a gospel truth that you question or ignore at your peril, they have also been enjoyable.
Take the revelations that academics at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia bent over backwards to keep “deniers” out of respected journals, and tried desperately to wriggle out of Freedom of Information demands on their work, or the expose of the bizarre story of the Himalayan glaciers melting by the year 2035, which turned out to be the flighty speculation of a single scientist.
The scandals have revealed that leading lights in the climate change story sought to suppress debate and demonise their opponents, and allowed their moral conviction about humanity’s hubris bringing about the end of the world to sprint ahead of the “scientific facts”.
The scandals reveal that many climate change alarmists are intolerant and censorious. Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has attacked the sceptics who are asking entirely rational questions about some of the IPCC’s claims, accusing them of indulging in “skulduggery of the worst kind”.
Behaving more like a secular Vatican than a genuinely enlightened, open-minded, inquisitive gathering of investigative scientists, the IPCC’s overlords treat dissent as something disgusting.
Of course it is a serious problem when wrong or skewed or speculative science is promoted as “the truth” to the public. And what the recent climate-science scandals reveal is that such dodgy science becomes more likely as science is politicised and used to motor social policy and social-control initiatives.
The elite flattering of scientists as oracles of wisdom whose work can help both to illuminate and possibly offset what is allegedly the worst crisis mankind has ever faced – global warming – must inevitably pollute and distort the scientific process.
Some now claim, disingenuously, that the melting glacier thing was just one little claim in the IPCC’s 3000-page report. This slyly overlooks how that one little claim became one of the most widely cited pieces of climate-change evidence among both green-leaning journalists and world leaders.
Why did that happen? Not because it was scientifically airtight – it was no such thing – but because it chimed perfectly with the ridiculous biblical prophecies of a future doom brought about by mankind’s sinful behaviour that underpin green thinking today. The glacier claim suggested that millions of people in Asia would run out of water and die of thirst or spread around the world like crazy, politically destabilising environmental refugees.
The various climategate scandals suggest that the most alarming-sounding science tends to get bigged up, and that peer review has become an increasingly politicised, back-patting exercise where science that is “politically right” gets elevated over science that is “politically wrong”.
But it is not enough to pick apart the bad science of the politics of environmentalism, and to call for the IPCC either to apologise for that bad science or to expunge it in the interests of putting its documents once more “beyond criticism”.
The bigger, more profound problem is the elevation of science itself to such a sacred, esteemed position in politics, society and international debate. In many ways it doesn’t matter if that science is airtight or flimsy, its sanctification is deeply problematic either way.
Fundamentally, the IPCC is a scientific crutch for elites that are bereft of political vision and stunningly lacking in an inspiring or human-based morality. Science has become one of the only sources of authority for politically exhausted and morally bankrupt governments and institutions.
The politicians and green activists desperately calling for the IPCC to get its house in order, to get rid of the crap science and only keep the allegedly good stuff, know which side their bread is buttered. They know that the IPCC is the emperor’s last shred of clothing, providing otherwise denuded rulers and campaigners with a form of unquestionable authority for their backward, killjoy, misanthropic agendas.
They are really demanding the preservation of the IPCC by any means necessary because they value the way it provides them with a God-like authority for Orwellian action at a time when serious democratic debate is notable by its absence. And perhaps we should call for the abolition of the IPCC, not because some of its science is daft, but for precisely those same reasons.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. His satire on the green movement – Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas – is published by Hodder & Stoughton.
RELATED COVERAGE
UN climate head under pressure to quit, The Australian, 3 days ago Pachauri admits damage to UN climate change panel, The Australian, 3 days ago It’s time for some time out, The Australian, 5 days ago Don’t trust the weatherman’s forecasts, The Australian, 8 days ago
At last, some cool heads on global warming, The Australian, 10 days ago
