A veneer of certainty stoking climate alarm

Robert · Nov 29, 2017

https://judithcurry.com/2017/11/29/a-veneer-of-certainty-stoking-climate-alarm/#more-23606

As many of you know, Dr. Curry is one of today's finest minds on the subject of climate. She has a firm devoted to accurate predictions. I also enjoy very much Dr. Richard Lindzen who has retired. I was fortunate to have had him reply to my e mails and as difficult as it is to communicate here, e mails are not much better. Anyway, She goes into the details of two groups arguing climate. Her site is one all should book mark since a lot of scientists post there. We do not need words like deniers to show up here. This is for real science.

A veneer of certainty stoking climate alarm
Posted on November 29, 2017 | 5 Comments
by Judith Curry

In private, climate scientists are much less certain than they tell the public. – Rupert Darwall

Rupert Darwall has written a tour-de-force essay “A Veneer of Certainty Stoking Climate Alarm“, which has been published by CEI [link to full essay].

Foreword

I was invited to write a Foreword to the essay, which provides context for the essay:

While the nations of the world met in Bonn to discuss implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement, the Trump administration was working to dismantle President Obama’s Clean Power Plan and to establish a climate “red team” to critically evaluate the scientific basis for dangerous human-caused climate change and the policy responses.

The mantra of “settled science” is belied by the inherent complexity of climate change as a scientific problem, the plethora of agents and processes that influence the global climate, and disagreements among scientists. Manufacture and enforcement of a “consensus” on the topic of human-caused climate change acts to the detriment of the scientific process, our understanding of climate change, and the policy responses. Indeed, it becomes a fundamentally anti-scientific process when debate, disagreement, and uncertainty are suppressed.

This essay by Rupert Darwall explores the expressions of public certainty by climate scientists versus the private expressions of uncertainty, in context of a small Workshop on Climate organized by the American Physical Society (APS). I was privileged to participate in this workshop, which included three climate scientists who support the climate change consensus and three climate scientists who do not—all of whom were questioned by a panel of distinguished physicists.

The transcript of the workshop is a remarkable document. It provides, in my opinion, the most accurate portrayal of the scientific debates surrounding climate change. While each of the six scientists agreed on the primary scientific evidence, we each had a unique perspective on how to reason about the evidence, what conclusions could be drawn and with what level of certainty.

Rupert Darwall’s essay provides a timely and cogent argument for a red/blue team assessment of climate change that provides both sides with an impartial forum to ask questions and probe the other side’s case. Such an assessment would both advance the science and open up the policy deliberations to a much broader range of options.

Excerpts

Here are some highlights from the full essay (but you’ll want to read the whole thing!):

Introduction. How dependable is climate science? Global warming mitigation policies depend on the credibility and integrity of climate science. In turn, that depends on a deterministic model of the climate system in which it is possible to quantify the role of carbon dioxide (CO2) with a high degree of confidence. This essay explores the contrast between scientists’ expressions of public confidence and private admissions of uncertainty on critical aspects of the science that undergird the scientific consensus.

Instead of debating, highlighting and, where possible, resolving disagreement, many mainstream climate scientists work in a symbiotic relationship with environmental activists and the news media to stoke fear about allegedly catastrophic climate change, providing a scientific imprimatur for an aggressive policy response while declining to air private doubts and the systematic uncertainties.

Two Statements, Two Perspectives. Two statements by two players in the climate debate illustrate the gap between the certainty that we are asked to believe and a branch of science shot through with uncertainty. “Basic physics explains it. If global warming isn’t happening, then virtually everything we know about physics is wrong,” states Jerry Taylor, president of a group that advocates for imposing a carbon tax on the United States. In so many words, Taylor says that the case for cutting carbon dioxide emissions is incontrovertible: Science demands conservatives support a carbon tax.

The second statement was made by an actual climate scientist, Dr. William Collins of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Speaking in 2014 at an American Physical Society climate workshop, Collins, who was a lead author of the chapter evaluating climate models in the 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, talked of the challenges of dealing with several sources of uncertainty. “One of them is the huge uncertainties even in the historical forcings,” he said. Commenting on the “structural certainty” of climate models, he observed that there were “a number of processes in the climate system we just do not understand from basic physical principles. … We understand a lot of the physics in its basic form. We don’t understand the emergent behavior that results from it.”

The 2014 APS Climate Workshop: A Perfect Venue for Open Debate.Things are different when climate scientists are on the stand alongside their peers who know the science as well as they do, but disagree with the conclusions they draw from the same body of knowledge. Such open debate was on display at the 2014 American Physical Society climate workshop, which took place in Brooklyn and lasted just over seven hours. A unique event in the annals of the climate debate, it featured three climate scientists who support the climate change consensus and three climate scientists who do not. That format required an unusual degree of honesty about the limitations of the current understanding of the climate system. For the most part, circumspection, qualification, and candid admissions of lack of knowledge were the order of the day.

The IPCC’s Use and Abuse of Climate Models. The discussion in Brooklyn shows that putting the words “gold standard” and “IPCC” in the same sentence demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of the reliability of IPCC-sanctioned climate science.

“It’s clouds that prevent us from fundamentally in some reductive fashion understanding the climate system,” Princeton Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Professor Isaac Held, senior research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, declared from the IPCC climate consensus bench. Collins made a similar point toward the end of the session. “My sense, to be honest with you, is that, and I think this all makes us a little bit nervous,” he said; “climate is not a problem that is amenable necessarily to reductionist treatment.”

Yet the IPCC’s top-line judgment in its Fifth Assessment Report—that it is “extremely likely” that the human emissions of greenhouse gases are the dominant cause of the warming since the mid-20th century—was described by Dr. Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as likely to be conservative. The basis for this claim? General circulation models.
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Robert · Nov 29, 2017

More to sharpen your wits about you.

Yet the IPCC’s top-line judgment in its Fifth Assessment Report—that it is “extremely likely” that the human emissions of greenhouse gases are the dominant cause of the warming since the mid-20th century—was described by Dr. Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as likely to be conservative. The basis for this claim? General circulation models.

Santer’s claim would have sounded impressive if earlier in the day Collins had not presented charts showing GCMs performing poorly in reproducing temperature trends in the first half of the 20th century. Lindzen asked, what in the models causes the 1919-1940 warming? “Well, they miss the peak of the warming,” Held replied. While the IPCC is extremely certain that the late 20th century warming is mostly man-made, to this day it cannot collectively decide whether the earlier warming, which is of similar magnitude to the one that started in the mid-1970s, is predominantly man-made or natural. “It actually turns to be very hard to use the past as prologue,” Collins conceded before explaining: “We do not have a first principles theory that tells us what we have to get right in order to have an accurate projection.” And, as Held noted, over the satellite era from 1979, GCMs over- estimated warming in the tropics and the Arctic.

Steven Koonin, chairing the APS workshop, read an extract from chapter 10 of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report. Model-simulated responses to forcings—including greenhouse gas forcings—“can be scaled up or down.” To match observations, some of the forcings in some of the models had to be scaled down. But when it came to making the centennial projections, the scaling factors were removed, probably resulting in a 25 to 30 percent over-projection of the 2100 warming, Koonin said. Only the transcript does full justice to the exchange that followed.

Dr. Koonin: But if the model tells you that you got the response to the forcing wrong by 30 percent, you should use that same 30 percent factor when you project out a century.
Dr. Collins: Yes. And one of the reasons we are not doing that is we are not using the models as [a] statistical projection tool.

Dr. Koonin: What are you using them as?
Dr. Collins: Well, we took exactly the same models that got the forcing wrong and which got sort of the projections wrong up to 2100.
Dr. Koonin: So, why do we even show centennial-scale projections?
Dr. Collins: Well, I mean, it is part of the [IPCC] assessment process.

“It is part of the assessment process” is not a scientific justification for using assumptions that are known to be empirically wrong to produce projections that help drive the political narrative of a planet spinning toward a climate catastrophe.

Climate Science and Falsifiability. A lively exchange developed between Christy and Santer. Georgia Tech’s Dr. Judith Curry, the third member of the critics’ bench, had crossed swords with Santer on whether the IPCC’s statement that more than half the observed warming was anthropogenic was more than expert judgment. In subsequent testimony to the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Curry explained:

Science is often mischaracterized as the assembly and organization of data and as a collection of facts on which scientists agree. Science is correctly characterized as a process in which we keep exploring new ideas and changing our understanding of the world, to find new representations of the world that better explain what is observed. … Science is driven by uncertainty, disagreement, and ignorance—the best scientists cultivate doubt.

Curry’s approach to science stands firmly on the methods and philosophical standards of the scientific revolution—mankind’s single greatest intellectual achievement.

Politicized Science vs. Red/Blue Team Appraisals. The APS workshop provides the strongest corrective to date to the politicized IPCC process. It revealed the IPCC’s unscientific practice of using different assumptions for projecting future temperature increases from those used to get models to reproduce past temperature. One need not be a climate expert to see that something is seriously amiss with the near certainties promulgated by the IPCC. “I have got to say,” Koonin remarked to climate modeler William Collins, “that this business is even more uncertain than I thought, uncertainties in the forcing, uncertainties in the modelling, uncertainties in historical data. Boy, this is a tough business to navigate.”
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Robert · Nov 29, 2017

Let's hit the grand slam now.

More evidence

Conclusion: Climate Policy’s Democratic Deficit. Open debate is as crucial in science as it is in a democracy. It would be contrary to democratic principles to dispense with debate and rely on the consensus of experts. The latter mode of inquiry inevitably produces prepackaged answers. But, as we have seen, relying on “consensus” buttresses erroneous science rather than allow it to be falsified.

The IPCC was created to persuade, not provide objectivity and air disagreement. By contrast, the APS workshop gave both sides an impartial forum in which they could ask questions and probe the other side’s case. In doing so, it did more to expose the uncertainty, disagreement, and ignorance—to borrow Judith Curry’s words—around climate science than thousands of pages of IPCC assessment reports.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s proposal for red/blue team assessment is a logical progression from the workshop. The hostile reaction it elicited from leading consensus advocates strongly suggests that they fear debate. Climate scientists whose mission is to advance scientific understanding have nothing to fear and much to gain. Those who seek to use climate science as a policy battering ram have good reason to feel uncomfortable at the prospect. The biggest winner from a red/blue team assessment will be the public. If people are to buy into policies that will drastically alter their way of life, they should be fully informed of the consequences and justifications. To do otherwise would represent a subversion of democracy.

JC reflections

I’m very pleased to have this opportunity to revisit the APS Workshop on Climate Change, and am delighted to see that a journalist of Darwall’s caliber interpreting this. Drawl’s essay provides an eloquent argument in support of a climate red team, perhaps more so than what I, Steve Koonin or John Christy have provided.

The thing that really clicked in my brain was this statement by Bill Collins:

We understand a lot of the physics in its basic form. We don’t understand the emergent behavior that results from it.

Trying to leverage our understanding of the infrared emission spectra from CO2 and other ‘greenhouse’ gases into a ‘consensus’ on what has caused the recent warming in a complex chaotic climate system is totally unjustified — this is eloquently stated by Bill Collins.

My key take away conclusion from the APS Workshop is that the scientists on both sides are considering the same datasets and generally agree on their utility (the exception being the 2 decade debate between Santer and Christy on the uncertainties/utility of the satellite derived tropospheric temperature data). There is some disagreement regarding climate models, although I can’t say that I disagreed with much if anything said by Held and Collins in this regard.

The real issue is the logics used in linking the varied and sundry lines of evidence into drawing conclusions and assessing the uncertainties and areas of ambiguity and ignorance. I don’t think that any of the 6 scientists were using the same chain of reasoning about all this, even among scientists on the same ‘sides’.

Darwall’s essay deserves to be widely read. Here’s to hoping that it will reignite the discussion surrounding the climate red team.

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This entry was posted in Policy, Scientific method, Sociology of science. Bookmark the permalink.
5 RESPONSES TO “A VENEER OF CERTAINTY STOKING CLIMATE ALARM”

Hifast | November 29, 2017 at 12:29 pm | Reply
Reblogged this on Climate Collections and commented:
“I’m very pleased to have this opportunity to revisit the APS Workshop on Climate Change, and am delighted to see that a journalist of Darwall’s caliber interpreting this. Drawl’s essay provides an eloquent argument in support of a climate red team, perhaps more so than what I, Steve Koonin or John Christy have provided.

The thing that really clicked in my brain was this statement by Bill Collins:

We understand a lot of the physics in its basic form. We don’t understand the emergent behavior that results from it.

Trying to leverage our understanding of the infrared emission spectra from CO2 and other ‘greenhouse’ gases into a ‘consensus’ on what has caused the recent warming in a complex chaotic climate system is totally unjustified — this is eloquently stated by Bill Collins.” —Dr. Judith Curry

matthewrmarler | November 29, 2017 at 12:56 pm | Reply
Dr Curry, Thank you once again!

Is the full transcript available to the rest of us?

Don Bishop | November 29, 2017 at 1:25 pm | Reply
APS workshop transcript:

http://www.aps.org/policy/statements/upload/climate-seminar-transcript.pdf

JCH | November 29, 2017 at 1:02 pm | Reply
There fairy and the tale fib:

Instead of debating, highlighting and, where possible, resolving disagreement, many mainstream climate scientists work in a symbiotic relationship with environmental activists and the news media to stoke fear about allegedly catastrophic climate change, providing a scientific imprimatur for an aggressive policy response while declining to air private doubts and the systematic uncertainties.

matthewrmarler | November 29, 2017 at 1:19 pm | Reply
JCH: many mainstream climate scientists work in a symbiotic relationship with environmental activists and the news media to stoke fear about allegedly catastrophic climate change, providing a scientific imprimatur for an aggressive policy response while declining to air private doubts and the systematic uncertainties.

Where is the fib?

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waltky · Jan 6, 2018

Climate change not good for the oceans...

Climate change is making the oceans sicker: studies
Sat, Jan 06, 2018 - Global warming is making the world’s oceans sicker, depleting them of oxygen and harming delicate coral reefs more often, two studies show.

The lower oxygen levels are making marine life far more vulnerable, the researchers said. Oxygen is crucial for nearly all life in the oceans, except for a few microbes. “If you can’t breathe, nothing else matters. That pretty much describes it,” said study lead author Denise Breitburg, a marine ecologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. “As seas are losing oxygen, those areas are no longer habitable by many organisms.” She was on a team of scientists, convened by the UN, who reported that the drop in oxygen levels is getting worse, choking large areas, and is more of a complex problem than previously thought. A second study found that severe bleaching caused by warmer waters is hitting once-colorful coral reefs four times more often than it used to a few decades ago. Both studies were in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science.

When put all together, there are more than 32 million square kilometers of ocean with low oxygen levels at a depth of 200m, according to scientists with the Global Ocean Oxygen Network. That amounts to an area bigger than the continents of Africa or North America, an increase of about 16 percent since 1950. Their report is the most comprehensive look at oxygen deprivation in the world’s seas. “The low oxygen problem is the biggest unknown climate change consequence out there,” said Lisa Levin, a study coauthor and professor of biological oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Levin said researchers have seen coastal “dead zones” from fertilizer pollution from farms before, as well as areas of low oxygen in open ocean blamed on warmer waters, but this study shows how the two problems are interconnected with common causes and potential solutions. “Just off southern California, we’ve lost 20 to 30 percent of our oxygen off the outer shelf,” Levin said. “That’s a huge loss.”

Some low oxygen levels in the world’s ocean are natural, but not this much, Breitburg said. A combination of changes in winds and currents — likely from climate change — is leaving oxygen on the surface and not bringing it down lower as usual. On top of that, warmer water simply does not hold as much oxygen, and less oxygen dissolves and gets into the water, she said. “Oxygen loss is a real and significant problem in the oceans,” said University of Georgia marine scientist Samantha Joye, who was not part of the study, but praised it. Levels of ocean oxygen are “changing potentially faster than higher organisms can cope,” she said. In a separate study, a team of experts looked at 100 coral reefs around the globe and how often they have had severe bleaching since 1980.

Bleaching is caused purely by warmer waters, when it is nearly 1?C above the normal highest temperatures for an area. In the early 1980s, bleaching episodes would happen at a rate of once every 25 to 30 years. As of 2016, they were happening just under once every six years, the study found. Bleaching is not quite killing the delicate corals, but making them extremely sick by breaking down the crucial microscopic algae living inside them. Bleaching is like “ripping out your guts” for coral, said study coauthor Mark Eakin, coordinator of the Coral Reef Watch program for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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waltky · Mar 29, 2018

What Can Caribou and Mosquitos Tell Us About Climate Change?...

The Caribou and the Mosquito
The impacts of climate change ripple through ecosystems in unexpected ways.

Rain or shine, Lauren Culler does her pond-side fieldwork in full rain gear. She’s not worried about getting wet. It’s the mosquitoes. Oh, the mosquitoes. In the spring, when the ponds on the fringes of Greenland thaw, the mosquitoes emerge in great, buzzing, voracious clouds. Culler is a Dartmouth College ecologist who studies the web of life in and around these ponds. That means long stretches of time working next to mosquito breeding grounds. “It can be quite miserable,” she said. Impermeable outerwear and a headnet are essential mosquito deterrents. Otherwise, “they will drive you crazy.”

They’re a nuisance to biologists, but they are a real threat to caribou. These animals, a species of deer, spend the brief summer months grazing on Arctic greenery. Harassment from the biting mosquito hordes can be so bad that the caribou flee their grazing grounds for cooler snowbanks, which mosquitoes avoid. But time spent escaping mosquitoes is time not spent fattening up for the long winter ahead. The intensity of the mosquito attacks can mean the difference between life and death.

Nature’s Rube Goldberg devices

Around the world, climate change is rippling through ecosystems, affecting creatures great and small. But how these changes will affect ecosystems is hard to predict. Each one is a complex web of life, a Rube Goldberg device of predators and prey. In Greenland, the caribou’s fate is intertwined with that of an aquatic beetle. Every spring when the ice melts in the Arctic ponds, a battle for survival begins. Thousands upon thousands of mosquito larvae wriggle in the shallow water. They provide an all-you-can-eat buffet for the beetle larvae. The beetles “feed like spiders feed,” Culler said. “They inject these digestive enzymes first. And they liquefy the internal contents of the prey and suck it back up.” Culler thought climate change might give the beetles an edge and cut down on the mosquito hordes. Warmer waters speed up the beetles’ metabolism. They eat more mosquito larvae per day. The question was, would it make a difference? “Is it that more mosquitoes are being eaten in a warmer year, so fewer are likely to emerge? That was kind-of what we thought would happen,” Culler said. But it didn’t.

In their computer model, warmer conditions actually favored the mosquitoes. They matured a few days faster in warm water than in cold. The less time they spend in the water, the better for them. “That’s three or four fewer days where you have the risk of being eaten by one of those beetles,” she explained. “In the simulations that we did, we found that actually really matters, and that the mosquitoes win in that situation.” When mosquitoes win, caribou may lose. Fewer may survive the winter. But beetles are not the only mosquito-eaters lurking in the tundra. Culler is studying what role spiders may play in controlling the mosquito hordes. “They seem to be able to cue in on the ponds right when the mosquitoes are emerging,” she said. Locked up in ice for most of the year, the tundra ecosystem is relatively simple. Untangling the web of connections here offers a taste of the complex ways climate change is altering the entire planet.

https://projects.voanews.com/greenland/caribou/
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waltky · Apr 11, 2018

Cooler temps from climate change?...

Climate change dials down Atlantic Ocean heating system
11 Apr.`18 - A significant shift in the system of ocean currents that helps keep parts of Europe warm could send temperatures in the UK lower, scientists have found.

They say the Atlantic Ocean circulation system is weaker now than it has been for more than 1,000 years - and has changed significantly in the past 150. The study, in the journal Nature, says it may be a response to increased melting ice and is likely to continue. Researchers say that could have an impact on Atlantic ecosystems. Scientists involved in the Atlas project - the largest study of deep Atlantic ecosystems ever undertaken - say the impact will not be of the order played out in the 2004 Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow. But they say changes to the conveyor-belt-like system - also known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) - could cool the North Atlantic and north-west Europe and transform some deep-ocean ecosystems.

The circulation system plays a "significant role" in regulating the Earth's climate by distributing heat around the globe.

That could also affect temperature-sensitive species like coral, and even Atlantic cod. Scientists believe the pattern is a response to fresh water from melting ice sheets being added to surface ocean water, meaning those surface waters "can't get very dense and sink". "That puts a spanner in this whole system," lead researcher Dr David Thornalley, from University College London, explained. The concept of this system "shutting down" was featured in The Day After Tomorrow. "Obviously that was a sensationalised version," said Dr Thornally. "But much of the underlying science was correct, and there would be significant changes to climate it if did undergo a catastrophic collapse - although the film made those effects much more catastrophic, and happening much more quickly - than would actually be the case."

Nonetheless, a change to the system could cool the North Atlantic and north-west Europe and transform some deep-ocean ecosystems. That is why its measurement has been a key part of the Atlas project. Scientists say understanding what is happening to Amoc will help them make much more accurate forecasts of our future climate. Prof Murray Roberts, who co-ordinates the Atlas project at the University of Edinburgh, told BBC News: "The changes we're seeing now in deep Atlantic currents could have massive effects on ocean ecosystems. "The deep Atlantic contains some of the world's oldest and most spectacular cold-water coral reef and deep-sea sponge grounds. "These delicate ecosystems rely on ocean currents to supply their food and disperse their offspring. Ocean currents are like highways spreading larvae throughout the ocean and we know these ecosystems have been really sensitive to past changes in the Earth's climate."

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) was the basis of the a 2004 science fiction blockbuster

To measure how the system has shifted over long timescales, researchers collected long cores of sediment from the sea floor. The sediment was laid down by past ocean currents, so the size of the sediment grains in different layers provided a measure of the current's strength over time. The results were also backed up by another study published in the same issue of Nature, led by researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. This work looked at climate model data to confirm that sea-surface temperature patterns can be used as an indicator of Amoc's strength and revealing that it has been weakening even more rapidly since 1950 in response to recent global warming. The scientists want to continue to study patterns in this crucial temperature-regulating system, to understand whether as ice sheets continue to melt, this could drive further slowdown - or even a shutdown of a system that regulates our climate.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43713719
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