Opinion: Can we please stick to the science?

The Galileo Movement, an Australia group dedicated to exposing flaws behind the country's push for a carbon tax, responds to a Daily Climate report and counters that modern climate variations are natural.

Daily Climate coverage

Galileo Movement fuels Australia carbon divide

Carbon facts don't tell the whole story

Oct. 5, 2011

By Bob Carter

for the Daily Climate

Two articles published by The Daily Climate on Aug. 16 criticize and attempt to rebut statements made by the Galileo Movement. Galileo members are themselves concerned with combating the misleading arguments - many of which stem from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - that are being used to justify an environmentally ineffectual and expensive new tax on carbon dioxide emissions in Australia.

The first article, by Daily Climate editor Douglas Fischer, heaps scorn on Galileo supporters, to whit: "ideological group," "sceptical of the science" (as if that were a defect!), "draw from a deep history of denial and distortion," "straw man arguments," and part of "the global climate-denier movement." Fischer also accuses the Galileo Movement of using the same approach as "the tobacco industry," by making "pervasive, stubborn" arguments "independent of the facts of the situation" and by "abusing the science."

As an environmental journalist and editor, Fischer surely knows that science is about hypothesis testing, not name-calling. And as for badging people as "sceptics," all scientists are, or should be, professional sceptics, and especially so for any hypotheses that they personally favour.  The primary expert quoted in the second article - NASA computer modeller Gavin Schmidt - clearly does not take such precautions in his speculations on the dangerous global warming hypothesis.

Important findings

The second story in Daily Climate sets out to assess the veracity of the arguments put by the Galileo Movement, building upon an initial lofty statement that many of the facts espoused by Galileo members are "perfectly true ... but also irrelevant in the climate debate."

Facts that Schmidt avers are irrelevant include:

• That carbon dioxide is not toxic, nor a pollutant, but rather a colorless, odourless and tasteless gas essential for life on earth;
• That, through the part that it plays in photosynthesis, carbon dioxide is a plant fertilizer that enhances crop yields, and therefore an environmental benefit that helps to feed humanity and green the planet<Citation 1>;
• That changes in global temperature precede changes in carbon dioxide at both the short-term (annual) and long-term (100,000 year-long glacial-interglacial cycles) scale; 
• That, granting the supposition that most of the increase in carbon dioxide seen since 1750 has resulted from the accrual of about half of all human emissions, these emissions have not yet been shown unequivocally to cause measurable warming

Contrary to Schmidt's discussion, these facts - and others, such as that Earth has now been cooling for 10 years despite an increase in carbon dioxide of about 5 percent - lie at the very heart of the debate.

No convincing support

In the real world (as opposed to the virtual reality of GCM computer modelling that a small coterie of IPCC advisors inhabit), tens of thousands of independent scientists, cognisant with the above facts, have cumulatively signed statements similar to this one currently posted by the International Climate Science Coalition, viz:

We, the undersigned, having assessed the relevant scientific evidence, do not find convincing support for the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide are causing, or will in the foreseeable future cause, dangerous global warming. 

Thereby, a strong consensus is exhibited amongst scientists worldwide that human-caused global warming is not a significant planetary threat. Importantly, these alternative views by independent scientists are expressed non-politically. They address the science of the issue, rather than providing the political advice that has become the perhaps unintended hallmark of the IPCC.

Thousands of research papers

Whilst dangerous warming was a sensible issue to have raised in the 1980s, we are now 25 years down the track and have expended more than $100 billion on related research. Despite the clamorous protestations of Schmidt and his IPCC colleagues, this research has failed to identify empirical evidence for dangerous warming caused by human emissions. Instead, recent research contributions have shown that:

• Climate sensitivity to a doubling of carbon dioxide is low and almost certainly less than 1 degree Centigrade<Citation 2>.
• Both the ocean and the atmosphere are presently failing to warm, despite continuing increases in carbon dioxide; and the rate of sea-level rise is decelerating<Citation 3>;
• Modern climate variation is adequately explained by natural causes that include solar variation, climatic oscillations and multi-decadal rhythms and phase locks<Citation 4>.

These articles, and thousands of other recent research papers, contain abundant empirical evidence consistent with the null hypothesis that historic and modern climate variations are of natural origin<Citation 5>, like the similar variations that occur throughout the geological record.

In contrast, very few papers present unequivocal empirical evidence for measurable human-caused warming, and a recent study that claims to have identified a human influence can only detect it since 1942 and at a maximum, unthreatening and expected-to-decrease rate of +0.66 degree per century<Citation 6>.

Bob Carter  is an adjunct research fellow at James Cook University in Townsville , Australia, and an emeritus fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne.  He is the chief science advisor for the International Climate Science Coalition and author of the book, Climate: the Counter Consensus.

Photo credits: Earth's atmosphere courtesy NASA. Bob Carter courtesy International Climate Science Coalition.

DailyClimate.org is a nonprofit news service covering climate changes. Opinions are those of the author and do not reflect the views of DailyClimate.org. 

Contact editor Douglas Fischer at dfischer [at] DailyClimate.org

Find more Daily Climate stories in the TDC Newsroom