I don't believe in AGW because there is no substantive or compelling scientific evidence supporting it. That is the end of the matter on that point.
I don't like the theory of AGW because it is a tool of political and cultural warfare used by the Left as a major aspect of its ongoing program to transform society from one based on deliberative representative Democracy to a centralized, command and control, authoritarian nanny state based upon various notions of collectivist social organization (in the case of AGW as an ideology, the need to again, save the planet from free market capitalism).
A working knowledge of the history of the theory, form its first incarnation in the early eighties through its mature period over the last ten years or so, will demonstrate quite clearly that for the cultural Left, AGW functions as an ideology; as a system or body of claims about the economic, social, and cultural organization and structure of society. This ideology makes clear and vigorous statements about that society, based upon the claimed threat AGW poses to the earth as a function of its creation by human beings engaging in capitalistic (economically free) industrial activities.
The ideological component of AGW (AGW as a both a totemic symbol and as a series of alleged scientific claims that are yet understood to have clear and unmistakable political implications) is a separate yet interconnected aspect of the issue. The two can only be truly separated in the specialized professional literature. The strictly scientific and strictly ideological aspects cannot be separated in the popular media, in much non-scientific academic discourse, and in the environmental movement, which cares little about the scientific veracity of AGW (except to the extent it hopes its true) but is concerned primarily with the degree with which AGW can be used to further Kulturkampf.
I arrived at my views of the scientific validity of AGW over roughly 15 plus years of studying the issue from both sides. Reading analysis of evidence from the professional literature by proponents of both views, studying the claims of the environmental movement and its critics, and of course, immersing myself in the pop news media version of things.
The primary problem with AGW, from a scientific standpoint, is that the entire scenario is appears to be the artifact of the computer models from which it was derived. The severe limitations of those models notwithstanding, heady pronouncements from people with impressive sounding degrees seem weighty. Are they? Perhaps, but over the last decade, actual temperature measurements at both ground, upper atmosphere, and from satellites have supported precisely none of the GCM predictions. Further, actual empirical climate history, including paleoclimatic data, throw just too many wrenches into too many gears of the AGW hypothesis and pose a plethora of intermeshed questions regarding the nature of climate variation that push AGW assumptions to the periphery.
The ideology of AGW, which is a part of the larger ideology and religion of environmentalism, is another question, and is approached in a somewhat different manner, as demonstrating the huge scientific uncertainties endemic to AGW claims will not convince such people to abandon their beliefs in these matters.
All italics below are mine.
March 2007 1
Why has “global warming” become such a passionate subject?
– Let’s not lose our cool –
Syun Akasofu
International Arctic Research Center
University of Alaska Fairbanks
The new IPCC Report (2007) states, on page 10, “Most observed increase in globally
averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed
increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.” Their great effort in making
progress in climate change science is certainly commended.
The media in the world is paying great attention mostly to the term “very likely,”
meaning the confidence level of more than 90%. However, I, as a scientist, am more
concerned about the term “most,” because the IPCC Report does not demonstrate the
basis for the term “most.”
There seems to be a roughly linear increase of the temperature from about 1800, or even
much earlier, to the present. This trend should be subtracted from the temperature data
during the last 100 years. Thus, there is a possibility that only a fraction of the present
warming trend may be attributed to the greenhouse effect resulting from human activities.
One possible cause of the linear increase may be that the Earth is still recovering from the
Little Ice Age.
Thus, natural causes cannot be ignored in the present warming trend, in addition to the
greenhouse effect. This short article is my criticism on the report from the point of an
arctic researcher. The Arctic is the place where climate change is most prominently in
progress, compared with the rest of the world.
Before critically examining the new IPCC Report, it is of interest to review why global
warming has become such a passionate subject. In order to find the reasons for the
present rampant reaction to global warming, it is necessary to think back to the Cold War
period. At that time in history, both the United States and the Soviet Union had a large
arsenal of atomic bombs, which could have eliminated all living creatures on Earth many
times over. Therefore, scientists and the general public alike urged both governments to
abolish their nuclear armaments, signing statements urging this action. There was broad
consensus, both amongst the public and in the scientific community, on this issue.
The fear of nuclear war subsided as the Soviet Union began to collapse. It so happened
that just before the collapse of the USSR, some groups of US scientists, using
supercomputers, were studying future trends in the earth’s climate. They announced in
1988 that increasing levels of CO2, if unchecked, would cause substantial warming of the
earth’s temperature, resulting in various disasters. It is easy to understand why some
advocative scientists, who were searching for new, significant themes, took up the grand
subject of global warming as their new area of focus. This theme was successfully
presented to the United Nations and an organization called the International Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988. Suddenly, the quiet scientific backwater
of “climate research” was in the world spotlight. Perhaps, the initial motivation should
not necessarily be faulted.
At the same time, many environmental protection organizations and advocacy groups
were anxious; it was proving difficult to attract the attention of the general public. In
addition, some government officials were also searching for new, globally significant
problems to tackle, avoiding more urgent problems of African poverty and other critical
problems. It is not too great a leap to infer that at least some of these groups seized the
opportunity to make global warming their main theme in the hopes of attracting public
interest.
Meanwhile, the IPCC mobilized a large number of climatologists and meteorologists and
published several impressive, voluminous publications, one after the other. In one of
them, “Climate Change 2001,” for example, a figure that became known as “the hockey
stick,” was used prominently in the “Summary for Policy Makers,” in which the
temperature shows a dramatic increase during the most recent 100 years, after a slow
decrease in temperature over the first 900 years. The nickname “hockey stick” was
coined because the temperature-time curve had this sudden, upward kink near the end,
like a hockey stick. (Since then, this particular figure has been discredited; the new IPCC
Report (2007) does not include the figure.)
With voluminous publications participated by hundreds of scientists, it is therefore
understandable that policy makers would trust the “summary,” providing them the
confidence to base major policy-making decisions on the “summary,” as indicated by the
“hockey stick” figure.
Indeed, many policy makers, environmental protection groups, the press, and even some
scientists took the IPCC reports to mean that all the participating scientists had come to a
shared broad consensus that global warming is a very serious issue facing mankind. It is
important to recognize that this consensus is of quite a different nature from the one
reached on nuclear disarmament. A large number of atomic bombs did, in fact, exist;
there was no uncertainty, compared with global warming, which requires much more
efforts to understand for the causes.
The reason for emphasizing this point is that whenever someone says there is some
uncertainty in projections of future temperature increase, someone else will assert that the
danger of global warming has been accurately predicted to be 3°C, as shown in the IPCC
Reports, and agreed upon by hundreds of top researchers. Do all the participating
scientists agree on the term “most?” If they do, what are their scientific bases?
A supercomputer, as complex and powerful as it may be, is a far cry from the complexity
of our real earth! It is simply a very poor virtual earth. Actually, the modelers themselves
should know best the limitations of their results as they continue to improve their models,
and perhaps modelers should, at times, be a little more cautious about their findings.
In any case, modeling is nothing more than an academic exercise, at least at this stage.
There is a considerable difference among results obtained by different researchers. To
give just one example, the predicted year when Arctic Ocean sea ice would disappear
entirely in the summer months spans a range from 2040 to at least 2300. This shows the
uncertainty in modeling studies. Since sea ice plays the role of the lid in warming water
in a pan, it plays a significant role in climate change and future prediction.
To exacerbate this situation, the media, by and large, tend to report worst-case scenarios
and disasters, for example using only the 2040 story. It is understandable that disaster
stories draw more readers than stories about the benefits of global warming.
Unfortunately, most reporters have little or no background in understanding debates on
the simulation results. For these reasons, the initial effort of IPCC has gotten out of
control.
It is also a serious problem that global warming can so easily be blamed for everything
bad that happens, such as floods (which often result instead from massive deforestation or
from loss of wetlands) or extinction of some species (which may result from overharvesting,
loss of habitat, invasion of exotics, pollution problems), etc. In the meantime,
those who are really responsible for these calamities can easily hide under the umbrella of
global warming.
Most reporters, who come to Alaska to try to find the greenhouse disasters, have little
knowledge of the Arctic. They take photographs of large blocks of ice falling from
glaciers at their termini and report that global warming is in progress before their very
eyes. However, glaciers are not static piles of ice, but instead are constantly flowing
rivers of ice. It is normal for tidewater glaciers to calve large blocks of ice from the face
as they reach the sea, and they will do so regardless of how warm or cold it is. Most
glaciers in the world have been receding since 1800 or earlier, well before 1940, when
CO2 began to increase significantly. Why do major media of the world flock all the way
to Alaska, if global warming is a global phenomenon? So far, what they would find is
broken houses in Shishmaref, a little island in the Bering Sea coast, because of coastal
erosion that is difficult to relate to a direct result of global warming. Some of the current
global warming stories, including “The Day after Tomorrow,” are based on science
fiction, not science.
Some of the weak points in the present IPCC Report are:
• There has recently been so much attention focused on the CO2 effect, the Little
Ice age has been forgotten. The recovery rate from the Little Ice Age may be as
much as 0.5°C/100 years, comparable to the present warming trend of 0.6°C/100
years. The warming caused by the linear change must be carefully evaluated and
subtracted in determining the greenhouse effect.
• There was no critical analysis of the mid-century change; the temperature rose
between 1910 and 1940, similar in magnitude and rate to the present rise after
1975. Further, the temperature decreased from 1940 to 1975, in spite of the fact
that the release of CO2 increased rapidly. At that time, we had similar debates
about imminent “global cooling” (the coming of a new ice age) in the 1970s.
• It is crucial to investigate any difference between the 1910-40 increase and the
increase after 1975, since the former is likely to be due to natural causes, rather
than the greenhouse effect.
• The most prominent warming (twice the global average) took place in the Arctic,
particularly in the continental arctic, during the last half of the 20th century, as
stated in the IPCC Report, but it disappeared during the last decade or so. Further,
the IPCC models cannot reproduce the prominent continental warming, in spite of
the fact that the measured amount of CO2 was considered. This particular
warming is likely to be part of multi-decadal oscillations, a natural cause.
• It is also important to know that the temperature has been increasing almost
linearly from about 1750, or earlier, to the present, in addition to multi-decadal
oscillations, such as the familiar El Niño. These are natural changes.
• Both changes are significant. Until they can be quantitatively more carefully
examined and subtracted from the present trend, it is not possible to determine the
man made greenhouse effect. Therefore, there is no firm basis to claim “most” in
the IPCC Report.
• The IPCC should have paid more attention to climate change in the Arctic.
• The mid-century (1940-1975) alarm of a coming Ice Age teaches a very important
lesson to all of us, including climate researchers. It is not possible to forecast
climate change (warming or cooling) in the year 2100 based on a few decades of
data alone.
• Further, it is very confusing that some members of the media and some scientific
experts blame “global warming” for every “anomalous” weather change,
including big snowfalls, droughts, floods, ice storms, and hurricanes. This only
confuses the issue.
At the International Arctic Research Center, which was established under the auspices of
the “US-Japan Common Agenda” in 1999, our researchers are working on the arctic
climate change issues mentioned in the above, in particular, in distinguishing natural
changes and the man made greenhouse effects in the Arctic. The term “most” is very
inaccurate.
We must restore respectability – by that I mean scientific rigor - to the basic science of
climatology. We must also stop “tabloid” publications in science. Only then, can we
make real progress in projecting future temperature change. Although I have been
“designated” by the news media as “Alaska’s best known climate change skeptic,” I am a
critic, not a skeptic. Science without criticism could go astray...