Climate Change Balmain-Rozelle - ClimateScepticsShow

Countering the misinformation at the Climate Sceptics Party's website

Added March 2010

Here are slide-by-slide responses to The Climate Sceptics Show.

Many statements made there are instant giveaways, so easily shot down they destroy credibility. These I've tagged [Denier Alert!]

Slide 8: Quote from Sir John Houghton

The meaning of Sir John's statement is made clearer by the rest of what he said: "It's like safety on public transport. Humans will only act when there's been an accident."

Slide 11: ClimateGate, link to http://www.climatesceptics.com.au/powerpoints/the-climategate-files.pps

There's a good detailed analysis of the hacked emails here. Mostly the 'scandal' comes from taking statements out of context then deliberately misreading the extract. What remains as a valid concern is a lack of openness. Some brief responses below:

Slide 4: Faking the Facts?

As is perfectly clear from the quote, the author is searching for the cause of a blip in the data. That's what scientists do. There is no suggestion of pretending it didn't happen or of concocting an incorrect explanation.

Slide 5: IPCC scientists are not as confident

The IPCC has never pretended to be confident about every little piece of the data. The confidence in the overall direction things are taking comes from putting all the pieces together. In general, the published reports tend to understate the alarm most of the scientists feel. Every prediction they've published for which we now have the actual data has been exceeded.

The quote about the CERES data is in reference to an article showing that although continued warming could be proven by a whole range of indirect means there were still insufficient direct measurements in place to detect it. The author regards this state of affairs as unsatisfactory.

Slide 6: The 'trick' with the data

Statisticians, engineers and physicists are forever pulling 'tricks' with data. It refers to clever but perfectly valid techniques for extracting a truth from messy and incomplete data. The use of the word "hide" was unfortunate. More accurate would have been "correct". See also slide 15 of the main presentation.

Slide 7, 8: Medieval Warm Period warmer than today^{[Denier Alert!]}

Nonsense. Details here.

Slide 9: Snubbing the journal "Climate Research"

Perfectly valid response to a journal that falls down on its claim of proper review. The editors of the journal revolted over the incident and the publisher repudiated the paper.

Slide 10: Hiding information

This was certainly an unfortunate response, but the author, rightly or wrongly, believed that he was being snowed by FOI requests deliberately. It was seriously interrupting his work. This is a difficult issue. Many government departments solve this, and go beyond to effectively deny access, by charging extortionate fees.

Slide 11: Making facts fit theory

That interpretation is a complete reversal of what the quote says. The author is rejecting an explanation for an inconsistency in the data because it doesn't work. He is asking for a theory which fits the facts.

Slide 12: Keith Briffa

Strange quote to include. It shows Briffa and whomever he sent the mail to are both determined to be open and honest.

Slide 13: Climate science very uncertain

There are always uncertainties in science, and climate science is harder than many. Worse, with the huge delays in cause and effect, we do not have the luxury of waiting until the science is more certain.

How this particular concern of Trenberth's fits into one's level of confidence in the IPCC conclusions is impossible to judge without context. It does seem that Trenberth is only complaining that this particular uncertainty invalidates any schemes for geoengineering.

Returning to the main presentation...

Slide 12: Pointer to The Greenhouse Conspiracy (Channel 4UK film)

See Monbiot's analysis.

Slide 13: Northern Hemisphere winter, 2009/2010

Record cold periods in Europe and heavy snow falls in the US. First, these are local effects, unusual wind patterns bringing cold air from the arctic. Changing wind patterns are an expected consequence of climate change. To the extent that the winds take cold air from the arctic, they will also bring warm air in, which is bad news for the icecap. Secondly, heavy snow falls are not associated with the coldest weather, which is dry. Snow is precipitation.

Slide 14: We value feedback

Not ours, they don't; they ignore it.

Slide 15: (Pointer to YouTube Climategate video on "hiding the decline")

The researchers only have adequate direct temperature measurements (thermometers) going back 50 years. Beyond that they use various "proxies", such as tree rings, corals, stalactites... These are all subject to influences other than temperature, so can diverge temporarily. But overall they tend to agree, so they're taken to be generally reliable. For the most recent few decades, the tree ring data suggest a decline, while the actual temperatures are known to have risen. Clearly something else is bothering the trees. The problem, then, was how to combine the various data to arrive at the most reliable synthesis. This is the "trick to hide the decline". "Hide" was a poor choice of word; it corrected an apparent decline, and it was "hidden" only in the sense that it was corrected in the graph. Its use was stated in the text of the paper. Good analysis here.

Slide 17: Sceptic versus denier

All good scientists are sceptical. Deniers persist with arguments long after they've been shown to be invalid. Ashby is a denier.

Slide 18: No evidence that CO2 will overheat the Earth^{[Denier Alert!]}

CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Calculations based on the best available knowledge show that going to 450ppm would warm the Earth by an average of 2-4 deg C. That constitutes overheating. Ashby provides no counterargument.

Slide 19, 20: Is CO2 a pollutant^{[Denier Alert!]}

Anything is a pollutant when there's too much of it in a particular place for human health. Oh, and it is toxic in concentration, but that's irrelevant to the debate.

Slide 21, 22, 23: CO2 boosts plant growth

Quite true, when CO2 scarcity is the limiting factor, as it often is in glass greenhouses. Doesn't work so well in the open air though, and rising temperatures and droughts are likely to have a more important negative effect on many plants. See http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11655. The levels used to get the growth shown in the slide are astronomical.

Slide 24, 25: Water vapour is the most important GHG^{[Denier Alert!]}

Yes, but the amount of water vapour depends directly on the temperature. See here.

Slides 26-28: Other GHGs

It is not true that no-one is raising the alarm about other man made GHGs. But none of those listed persist so long as CO2, or are being emitted by us in anything like the volume.

Slide 29, 30: Change refrigerants from fluorocarbons to hydrocarbons

Probably a good idea, and work is being done, but there are safety concerns.

Slide 31: Only 3.4% of CO2 is anthropogenic^{[Denier Alert!]}

No, it's 28% and rising. See here.

Slide 32: Only 1.5% of emissions come from Australia^{[Denier Alert!]}

This is the silliest argument of all. See here.

To arrive at the "flea on an elephant" equivalence, Ashby combines four howlers.

The 3.4% from the previous slide is irrelevant. The problem to be solved is only the man-made emissions. If we reduce those to zero we've (almost) entirely solved the problem. Ashby's error: 30 to 1.
The proposed ETS cuts emissions in 2020 to 5% below 2000 levels. That's 33% below expected business-as-usual 2020 emissions. Ashby's error: 6.5 to 1.
Ashby thinks 0.0018% is one millionth. Error: 18 to 1.
A flea one millionth the bulk of an African elephant would be the size of a large cockroach! Error: 50000 to 1.

If we correct all these calculations, the ETS 5% would solve 1/200th of the total problem, a 25kg chunk out of the elephant. That's hugely more than Ashby's one millionth, and pretty good for a country with only 1/300th of the world's population.

Slide 33: ETS will cost $50bn/year for 40 years

This is the conclusion of Frontier Economics, but not of any grown-ups.

Slide 35: 100% reduction costs 20 times 5% reduction

Funny, but Tony Abbott made the same blunder. As noted above, the "5%" target is a reduction of 33% from what emissions would otherwise have been. The correct multiplier for zero emissions is therefore 3, not 20.

Slide 37: Only one CO2 molecule in 85,800 produced by humans

Same error as on slide 31. At least 28% in the atmosphere is due to human industry.

Slide 38: Al Gore's investments

It does seem reasonable that a climate campaigner with money to invest should invest in renewables. I wonder how many deniers have investments in carbon-based energy?

Slide 39-41: Only 5 independent scientists

Thoroughly misleading claim. See here.

Slide 42: Petition project

Good analysis of that petition here. 255 members of the American NAS put their own case here.

Slide 44: Newton not peer reviewed

False. Even in Newton's time, there was plenty of rivalry between scientists. He had several enemies. No formal publication procedures like now, but certainly studied and critiqued by all eminent scientists of the day.

Slide 45: Residence time of CO2 in atmosphere is 7 years

The atmospheric residence time is how long a molecule stays in the atmosphere, on average. This is around 5-7 years for CO2. But when CO2 is absorbed by soil, plant or ocean, that does not take it out of circulation. Most will be re-emitted to the atmosphere over another few years. In terms of getting atmospheric CO2 levels back to normal, what matters is the residence time within this cycle. Long term removal, into rocks and deep ocean, is rather slower.

Pre-industrially, the annual exchange between atmosphere and land/ocean would have been around two thirds of the 200GtC it is now. If we stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow, that high rate of exchange would continue, with only about 2-3GtC more being absorbed than emitted each year. So it will take 70-100 years to remove the 200GtC we've added to the atmosphere.

Slide 46-48: MWP again

Details here.

Slide 49: Harris & Mann graph

Harris & Mann are not scientists, they provide no source for this graph, there's no peer-reviewed paper, and their graph doesn't match any more authoritative data even remotely. Looks like they just made it up.

Slides 50-53: Little Ice Age and other cold winters

Unclear how the LIA supports the denialist view. Ashby seems to be just complaining that the LIA does not appear in Michael Mann's "Hockey Stick" graph. And so it shouldn't, since like the MWP it did not occur everywhere at once. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

As for the other slides, nice Christmas Cards, but that's all.

Slide 54: Michael Mann's Hockey Stick graph

That graph has most certainly not been discredited. A 2006 US Congress investigation found only inconsequential errors

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy

Slide 56: McIntyre's analysis of Briffa's tree rings

McIntyre claimed Briffa's original analysis was not robust - too easily affected by choosing a different dataset. Briffa produced a subsequent broader study, but the warming was only slightly reduced. McIntyre's analysis has also been challenged.

See http://deepclimate.org/2009/10/30/briffa-teaches-but-will-mcintyre-ever-learn/

Slide 57: Upside-down lake sediment data

These data were used for a statistical process called regression analysis. This ascertains the connectedness between variables. For such purposes, it does not matter which way up you put the graph.

See http://www.pnas.org/content/106/6/E11.full

Slide 58-60: Badly sited weather stations cause warm bias

An investigation by NCDC concurred that there was a bias from poor siting, but overall it resulted in the recorded temperatures being too low. See http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/01/poorly-placed-weather-stations-produce-cool-bias-not-warm.php and http://www.noaa.gov/features/02_monitoring/weather_stations.html

Slide 61: Hide the decline

Already addressed.

Slide 62: NASA Corrections

See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/are-the-cru-data-suspect-an-objective-assessment/

Slide 64: Disappearing stations

Thoroughly explained here.

Slide 65: "US Senate Report"

It's a minority report by known denialist Inhofe.

Slide 66: UK Parliamentary inquiry

The link is to a single submission to the inquiry, not a finding by the inquiry

Slide 67: NZ NIWA data adjustment

The adjustment was appropriate since the old weather station was at a lower altitude.

See http://www.niwa.co.nz/news-and-publications/news/all/2009/nz-temp-record/seven-station-series-temperature-data

Slide 68: Darwin Zero data adjustment

OK, that one does look doubtful. The Darwin data are probably not usable at all.

Slide 69: Russian data cherrypicked.

Not able to assess this claim. No evidence presented. It originates from Russian economists, not scientists.

Slide 70, 71: Greenland ice cores

The graph shown appears to stop at around 1900.

Slide 72: Why is "Global Warming" retitled "Climate Change"?

The changed terminology reflects that not everywhere will get warmer, and other effects on weather may matter as much as the warming itself.

Slide 72: Cooled in last decade^{[Denier Alert!]}

Too short a period to measure a trend. See here

Slide 73: CO2 follows temperature

In the ice core record, yes. See here.

Slide 74, 75: Temperature changes over millions of years

Yes, we know it's been both much colder and much warmer before humans were around, and for the most part it's known why: solar variation, plate tectonics... But (a) we can only explain the extent of the changes on the basis that a resulting change in CO2 level amplified it, and (b) none of those causes explain the warming now.

Slide 78: Cooled in last decade (see slide 72)

Slide 79, 80: CO2 measured on Mauna Loa

No reason not to measure it there. It's just one of many, many places CO2 is measured.

Slide 81, 82: CO2 effect saturated^{[Denier Alert!]}

Misunderstanding of atmospheric physics. See here.

Slide 83, 84: Miskolczi

See here.

Slide 85: 1 deg F

No source offered for the graph.

Slide 86: Cooled last 12 years (slide 72 again)

Slide 88-93: It's the sun^{[Denier Alert!]}

The sun's cycles and effects on Earth's irradiation are well known. Right now we're in a low radiation period. Scientists take that into account when analysing temperature data. See here.

Slide 95 to 97: Atolls sinking

Funny that they should choose to sink now, and all together! Some probably are sinking because of tectonic movement, but it is absolutely known that sea levels are rising.

Slide 98: Tuvalu tide record

It's likely rising at between 0.4 and 2 mm/y. See here.

Slide 99 to 101: Nils-Axel Morner

None of his peers seem to agree with him or be able to reproduce his findings. See here.

Slide 102: Great Barrier Reef

Acidification is observed. See here.

Slide 104: Droughts in Australia

Climate change alters weather patterns. Some places get wetter, others dryer. In the short term, northern Australia is expected to get wetter, but more because of pollution from further north. Southern WA's rain seems to have been redirected to Antarctica.

Slide 106 to 109: Sun's magnetic reversal and clouds

The Sun's field flips every 11 years, so this cannot explain the long-term trend. In fact, it is yet another reason for not reading too much into a 10-year pause in warming.

Note also that most of Ashby's presentation says climate change isn't happening, yet here he advances a theory to explain why it is happening!

Slide 110: Pilot's view of clouds

Broken link in Ashby's presentation.

Slide 112: Bushfires

If any scientists or climate activist groups are claiming the Victorian Black Saturday fires were a consequence of AGW then we're not aware of it. Ashby needs to provide a reference. We do say that such events are likely to become more frequent.

Slide 114: CO2 extinguishes bushfires

Irrelevant rubbish. By the time CO2 levels measurably inhibit bushfires we'll all be gasping for air!

Slide 116: Oceans cooling

The originally published Argo data was found to be wrong. Correction published 2008 shows the warming since 2003 is more than expected. See here.

Slide 117: Arctic refreezes normally each winter

Even if this were so and continues to be so, it doesn't mean there's no problem. Less summer ice means more of the sun's rays absorbed by the ocean, and more methane released from clathrates on the ocean floor. But it does not refreeze "normally". The winter ice now is quite thin, mostly being only a year or two old.

Slide 118: Arctic Summer Sea Ice increasing

Some recovery, but still in a bad way. See here.

Slide 119: Volcanoes under the Arctic

The amount of heat involved is tiny compared with ice melt. See here.

Slide 120: Antarctic sea ice increasing

Antarctic sea ice undergoes huge fluctuations over tens of years. The satellite record is far too short to show a trend. Ice core proxies show a massive decline over 150 years. See here.

Slide 121: GlacierGate

This was indeed an unfortunate blunder by the IPCC. But the problem was detected and publicised by an IPCC scientist, which rather destroys any conspiracy theory. And removing this wrong data does almost nothing to change the overall AGW picture. See here.

Slide 122: Malaria, etc.

While it is true that increased temperatures will probably not of themselves expand the range of disease-carrying mosquitoes much in the developed world, flooding and, paradoxically, droughts might. In Australia, a drier climate in Queensland and northern NSW will lead to more domestic water tanks, many of which will be inadequately screened.

Slide 123: Cyclones have not increased

Not expected to, but the severity is. The cited graph shows total energy in the cyclones, but that's not what matters. The destructive power of a cyclone is disproportionate to its energy, so fewer but more powerful cyclones is bad news. See here.

Slide 124: Polluter pays = you pay

Yes, the polluting producers will pass on the increased cost of permits or carbon tax to the consumer. But the government can/will give back a substantial slice to the people in other ways. Meanwhile, green energy will cost no more than today, and steadily less as the technology matures.

Slide 125: Coal-fired stations don't pollute

Bizarre to suggest that if you can't see it it can't hurt you! CO2, SO2 and NOx are all colourless gases emitted by power stations, and they're all naturally occurring. But excessive levels are pollution.

Slide 127, 128: Media show pictures of cooling towers

Sloppy journalism is not the scientists' fault.

Slide 129: Fragility of solar reflectors

He must think engineers are dolts.

Slide 130: Wind cannot provide baseload

No, but it can be teamed with dispatchable solar thermal.

Slide 131: Wind turbine failures

The thesis studying failure modes makes no suggestion that unreliability is a major issue. It merely identifies the best areas for improvement, which no doubt will happen.

In the US, coal power plants are shut down for scheduled maintenance for 6% of the year, and for unscheduled maintenance for another 6% of the year. The combined downtime (scheduled and unscheduled) for wind turbines is 0-2% per year and for CSP is 0-4% per year. Moreover, wind turbine failures happen at the level of individual turbines, and solar thermal repair is generally at the level of individual mirrors; a coal-fired failure takes out the whole station.

Slide 134: How accurate are IPCC models?

To plot a trend from just two consecutive years' data (around 2006) is ridiculous. Of course, temperatures kicked back up again in 2008 and 2009. See here.

Slide 135: How accurate have IPCC's projections been?

Ashby's slide has the temperature "now" only 0.4 deg C above 1960. The NOAA graph here shows it's 0.6 deg C. That small difference puts the us within the IPCC projection.

Slide 140: Al Gore would not make time to meet Steve Fielding

Neither did he hang around with the drunks in the park, which would have been about as worthwhile.

Slide 141: Gore buys offsets through a company of which he is director.

And no doubt some directors of Woolworths shop at Woolworths. Ashby seems to be hinting that the money simply gets directed back into Gore's own pocket, which would of course be illegal. Perhaps Mr Ashby would care to be clearer.

Slide 142: Link to Senator Fielding's questions to Penny Wong

To answer Sen. Fielding:

QUESTION 1.Cooled since 1998 despite more CO2? ^{[Denier Alert!]}

As must have been explained to Sen Fielding many times by now, 1998 was exceptionally hot, and the pause in warming since is well within normal decade-long variations. Look at a longer timescale.

QUESTION 2.
Is it the case that the rate and magnitude of warming between 1979 and 1998 (the late 20th century phase of global warming) was not unusual in either rate or magnitude as compared with warmings that have occurred earlier in the Earth's history.

The prehistoric record cannot discriminate short enough periods to answer reliably the question on rate. The rate of rise for the last 100 years exceeds anything that can be detected. Higher temperatures have occurred, but you would not want to have been around then.

QUESTION 3.
Is it the case that all GCM computer models projected a steady increase in temperature for the period 1990-2008, whereas in fact there were only 8 years of warming were followed by 10 years of stasis and cooling?

Computer models of climate do not pretend to predict actual temperatures in any given year. That's weather. Climate is long term averages.

Slide 146: Psychologists analyse denialism

Seems reasonable. There has to be some explanation why so many deny all the evidence. But I can't find any evidence for the claim that they recommend treatment.

Slide 148: Historical predictors of doom

Except for Y2K, none shown were based on what we would today recognise as science. Nostradamus is listed, though he never predicted doom unequivocally. Cassandra is omitted - ah, but of course: she was right. As for Y2K, it may have been overblown by some, but people forget that a lot of work was done to avoid a disaster, so we shouldn't be too surprised there wasn't one.

Slide 149: 20th Century History of scares

Strange graph to include: there's no pattern. It shows when it was cold in 1900-1920 people worried about warming, then 1950-1970 it was warm and people worried about an ice age. Now that it's warmer any time that century, people worry about... oh, warming. Anyway, there's no indication what is being measured here.

Slide 150: Christine Stewart quote; Al Gore quote: "[over-represent] factual presentations"

Politicians say dumb things sometimes.

Christine Stewart is not a scientist.

Not clear whether Gore's saying overstate the facts or just state them more often than you'd think necessary. Either way, there's certainly a suggestion of exaggeration, and that is not to be endorsed. Gore's credibility has suffered, and the rest of the climate movement has been hurt by association.

Slide 151: Gore v. Unabomber

As noted in the link, it's the difference in proposed solutions that matters.

Slide 152: Piers Corbyn and other weather predictions

After some early modest successes, Corbyn's novel weather prediction methods seem to have let him down.

The "dogmatic believers" link is broken. But isolated cold snaps like that experienced in the UK in 2009 are more to do with shifting wind systems. Scientists don't claim that isolated droughts or heat waves are down to warming, nor that a cold snap disproves it. Even Monckton gets that.

Slide 153: Nils-Axel Mörner (again)

Plenty of evidence that seas are rising.

Slide 154, 155: IPCC 1995 report rewrite

Read it carefully: there's no contradiction between the two sets of statements. The first are how scientists speak to each other: they don't claim a fact as established until the evidence is very solid. But they understand that what the politicians need to know is which way the balance is tipping, and that's what appears in their summary, and is clearly stated as such.