Articles Tagged "Royal Society Review"

THE Royal Society's September report, Climate Change: A Summary of the Science, has brought into the open the widening difference of views about how the science of climate change should be assessed. It comes after a prominent resignation from the American Physical Society (the top body of US physicists) for the refusal of the society's executive to undertake a similar review despite requests from a large number of members.

In Australia, too, an examination of the Inter-Academy Council's review of the processes and procedures of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that, although the council's chairman claims the IPCC's findings stand, the review itself exposes serious flaws in the panel's information and analysis. The examination by this group, which is a follow-up to its recent publication in the British journal Energy & Environment, is now being widely distributed in Australia.

All three assessments reflect the revelations provided by the exchanges between scientists actively involved in climate research - now known as Climategate - that some research results appear to have been falsified. These reports have spread widely in science circles in Australia. However, apart from The Australian, there has been almost no reference to these revelations in the Australian media. The Age, which had not bothered to cover the Royal Society's report, was quick to report that the Royal Society's vice-president John Pethica (who chaired the report committee) had rejected suggestions that the society had changed its position on climate change.

Professor John Beddington dismisses 'unreasonable' comments from groups including Nigel Lawson's thinktank, as Royal Society responds to critics with new climate science guide.

The government's chief scientific adviser has hit out at climate sceptics who attack global warming science on spurious grounds.

The statements from Professor John Beddington appeared to be a veiled attack on the former Tory chancellor and arch climate sceptic Nigel Lawson.

Beddington said that he had met Lord Lawson to brief him about the science of global warming.

His comments came as the Royal Society announced that it would publish a new guide to climate science for the public following criticism of existing statements on the topic, reportedly from 43 of the society's 1,489 fellows.

"It has been suggested that the society holds the view that anyone challenging the consensus on climate change is malicious – this is ridiculous," said Professor Martin Rees, the society's president.

"Science is organised scepticism and the consensus must shift in light of the evidence.

"In the current environment we believe this new guide will be very timely. Lots of people are asking questions, indeed even within the fellowship of the society there are differing views."

Although it is encouraging that the Royal Society now acknowledges that climate science may not be as settled as it previously implied, the Society’s new report still stands as an embarrassment to science because it fails to offer justifications based on science (and policy analysis) for a number of its (politically correct) statements.

First, it claims in its opening sentence, “Changes in climate have significant implications for present lives, for future generations and for ecosystems on which humanity depends.” But two paragraphs later it acknowledges that, “[T]he impacts of climate change … are not considered here.” Hence, the RS has no scientific (or other basis) for this claim. At most it could say, “ALTHOUGH WE DID NOT CONSIDER THEIR IMPACTS, changes in climate COULD have significant implications for present lives…, IF SUCH CHANGES ARE VERY LARGE.” [Suggested INSERTIONS in the RS’s original language are in UPPERCASE letters.]

For the same reason, the RS’s statement in the very last paragraph (number 59), “However, the potential impacts of climate change are sufficiently serious that important decisions will need to be made”, is unsupported by any evidence.

Equally embarrassing are statements regarding the cause (or attribution) for recent warming. In paragraph 2, it states, “There is strong evidence that the warming of the Earth over the last half-century has been caused largely by human activity.” But we are talking climate, not weather, and half a century doesn’t even span a one full cycle of the AMO or PDO, nor does it span the length of the Little Ice Age, Medieval Warm Period, or other historical periods of climatic change.

Click source to read FULL report from Indur M. Goklany

The UK’s leading scientific body has decided to rewrite its own definitive guide on climate change, now admitting that it is “not known” how much warmer the planet will become.

The Royal Society has released a new guide which outlines its retreat from its former vanguard stance on the threat of climate change and man-made global warming. The decision to update their scientific guide came after 43 of its members complained that the previous versions failed to take into account the opinion of climate change sceptics.

The new guide, entitled ‘Climate change: a summary of the science’, concedes that there are now major ‘uncertainties’ regarding the once sacred ‘scientific consensus’ behind man-made global warming theory, admitting that not only is it impossible to know for sure how the Earth’s climate will change in the future but it cannot possibly know what the effects may be. The 19-page guide states clearly, ’It is not possible to determine exactly how much the Earth will warm or exactly how the climate will change in the future, but careful estimates of potential changes and associated uncertainties have been made”.

The guide continues stating, “There is currently insufficient understanding of the enhanced melting and retreat of the ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica to predict exactly how much the rate of sea level rise will increase above that observed in the past century for a given temperature increase”.

In a recent article published in the UK Mail, Professor Antony Kelly explains, ”The previous guidance was discouraging debate rather than encouraging it among knowledgeable people. The new guidance is clearer and a very much better document”.

Click source to read FULL report from Patrick Henningsen

The latest institutional retreat from uncritical support of the AGW hypothesis is one that will chill warmists to the core: the Royal Society has announced it is to review its public statements on climate change. The Society now believes that its previous communications did not properly distinguish between what was widely agreed on climate science and what is not fully understood. It has appointed a panel to review its statements, assisted by two critical sub-groups, including a number of Fellows who have doubts about the received view on the risks of increasing CO2 levels.

In fact this review has been forced on the Society by 43 of its Fellows who demanded last January that the pamphlet Climate Change Controversies, produced in 2007 and published on its website, should be rewritten to take a less aggressive stance in support of AGW and respect climate change “agnostics”. In such partisan activities the Royal Society has form: in 2005 it published “A guide to facts and fictions about climate change”, which denounced 12 “misleading arguments” which today, post Climategate and the subsequent emboldening of sceptical scientists to speak out, look far from misleading.

This development does not, of course, mean that the Royal Society is embracing climate scepticism. On the contrary, it is very reluctantly modifying its stance to accommodate some of its Fellows who take the very scientific position that a degree of agnosticism is good practice when hypotheses remain unproven. Yet this retreat from absolutist global warming orthodoxy will deeply dismay the AGW lobby. For years, there was no fiercer proponent of the AGW theory than the Royal Society. Its previous president Lord May notoriously stated: “The debate on climate change is over.”

The UK today has made it official. With the release of its revised guide to climate change by the Royal Society, the nation’s preeminent scientific organization, the UK now formally joins the ranks of the denier nations. The science on climate change is no longer certain, the Society now says.

Climate change: a summary of the science was commissioned in May after a revolt by 43 Fellows of the Royal Society, who felt that the society had been acting more as hot-headed advocates than cool-headed scientists. Its previous president, Lord May, had particularly rankled Royal Society scientists by claiming, without having canvassed his membership, that “The debate on climate change is over” and that “On one hand, you have the entire scientific community and on the other you have a handful of people, half of them crackpots.”

The debate is now officially not over, the society says. “The size of future temperature increases and other aspects of climate change, especially at the regional scale, are still subject to uncertainty,” it explains, appearing to chide scientists who have tried to make scary predictions about the future that had no basis in science: “There is little confidence in specific projections of future regional climate change, except at continental scales.”

Moreover, the Royal Society now states that so little is known about how different today’s climate is from the past that “some uncertainties are unlikely ever to be significantly reduced.”

To see how far the Royal Society has come from its past pronouncements on climate change, see its notorious 2005 document, “A guide to facts and fictions about climate change.”

The Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, has today launched a new short guide to the science of climate change. The guide has been written to summarise the evidence and to clarify the levels of confidence associated with the current scientific understanding of climate change. It makes clear what is well-known and established about the climate system, what is widely agreed but with some debate about details, and what is still not well understood.

Climate change: a summary of the science, describes how and why the earth is currently warming, and explains the wide range of independent measurements and observations which underpin this understanding. It shows that there is strong evidence that over the last half century, the earth’s warming has been caused largely by human activity. It also explains the uncertainty involved in predicting the size of future temperature increases. There are many potentially serious consequences of climate change, so that important decisions need to be made. The guide concludes that, as in many other areas, policy choices will have to be made in the absence of perfect knowledge, but that the scientific evidence is an essential part of public reasoning in this complex and challenging area.

In the past week, two mainstream media giants have apparently recognized that the debate over manmade global warming is far from over.

On Monday, the NY Times broke with years of blatant warmist bias in reporting that Climate Fears Turn to Doubts Among Britons. The article cited a February BBC survey which “found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that ‘climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,’ down from 41 percent in November 2009.” The Times attributed the public opinion swing in Great Britain and similar shifts in Germany and the US to what it referred to as “a series of climate science controversies unearthed and highlighted by skeptics since November.” In other words, the climate fraud uncovered at the University of East Anglia (aka Climategate) and the multitude of errors uncovered in the latest IPCC (AR4) report.

Of course, the Times abhor the new public awareness as it “will make it harder to pass legislation like a fuel tax increase and to persuade people to make sacrifices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” But shouldn’t facts drive policy? Not according to Greenpeace spokesman Ben Stewart, quoted by the Times complaining that “[l]egitimacy has shifted to the side of the climate skeptics, and that is a big, big problem.”

Really?

Britain’s Royal Society, the UK’s preeminent scientific body, has joined national science bodies in India and France in validating the views of global warming sceptics.

The Royal Society’s decision, which follows a revolt by 43 Fellows of the Royal Society, will see it rewrite its position on climate change in a tacit admission that it and in particular its previous president, Lord May, had been acting more as lobbyists for a cause than as agents for scientific reason. Without canvassing his membership, May had famously stated that “The debate on climate change is over” and that “On one hand, you have the entire scientific community and on the other you have a handful of people, half of them crackpots.”

Following the revolt over the society’s recent history of alarmism and hyperbole, the current president, Lord Rees, by no means a sceptic, has nevertheless decided to take a more balanced view: “Climate change is a hugely important issue but the public debate has all too often been clouded by exaggeration and misleading information,” he said. “We aim to provide the public with a clear indication of what is known about the climate system, what we think we know about it and, just as importantly, the aspects we still do not understand very well.”

The Royal Society review of its position, expected this summer, comes at the same time that France’s National Academy of Sciences has asserted that it has taken no position on climate science, that it respects the views of both camps, and that, in the interests of furthering understanding, it will sponsor a high-profile debate this fall. This decision by the National Academy of Sciences has distressed the country�s manmade global warming camp, which had lobbied the Academy and the French government to denounce and even expel the sceptics.

The UK's Royal Society is reviewing its public statements on climate change after 43 Fellows complained that it had oversimplified its messages

They said the communications did not properly distinguish between what was widely agreed on climate science and what is not fully understood.

The society's ruling council has responded by setting up a panel to produce a consensus document.

The panel should report in July and the report is to be published in September.