Articles Tagged "Thomas Fuller"

John Christy is an atmospheric scientist and Professor of same at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and winner of achievement awards from NASA and the American Meteorological Society. He was a lead author of the IPCC's 2001 Assessment Report, but in 2007 was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying, "I'm sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see."

The awards he received were for his work in helping develop a temperature dataset based on satellite measurements, and one of the major datasets used in climate science is just known as UAH. He is commonly perceived as a skeptic, but as has been the case with every interview I've done in this sector, the truth is far more nuanced. Professor Christy was kind enough to respond to my request for an interview very quickly, so without further ado...

Examiner: You are commonly labeled as a 'skeptical' scientist who does not agree with the IPCC consensus regarding human contributions to climate change. How accurate is that, and how would you describe your own beliefs regarding this?

J.C. I am mainly skeptical about those who claim to be so confident in understanding the climate system that they know what it is going to do in the next 100 years. This is my main complaint - overconfidence. We of all professions should be the most humble because there is so much about the climate system that we simply do not know. See my testimony given to the Inter Academy Council in June concerning these ideas - I think you will appreciate it.

For a number of years the most zealous of climate activists acted as though they didn't need to convince anybody, because they intended to compel everybody to follow their commandments. They also acted as though those commandments were chiseled on stone tablets.

We've reached a turning point, where (almost) everyone realizes that the IPCC reports are not holy writ. What happens next does not really depend on skeptics or lukewarmers. It depends on the faithful.

There are climate activists writing today who are pretending Michael Mann has been exonerated (he faces further investigation next month). There are those who are saying that the IPCC reports only have a few mistakes scattered among 6,000 pages of reports. The smarter activists aren't saying much of anything these days, waiting, as they have in the past, for things to settle down so they can pretend nothing happened at all. I don't think that's going to work this time, but it has in the past, so.... you can't blame them for trying.

What the really smart activist (haven't seen signs of one... but maybe they're swamped by the marketing drivel their team puts out) would do right now is to say some very obvious things.

Yamal, the northern Russian territory I discussed in yesterday's article means 'The End of the World.' There's deep symbolism here for those on both sides of the global warming mud-slinging match. For AGW believers, Yamal buttresses their claims of speedily advancing global warming. For skeptics, it signifies the end of the scientific techniques used to create what they believe is an illusion--the global warming that never was.

For at least part of the argument (I do believe that human generated CO2 has caused some of the global warming we saw between 1976 and 1998, and may well do so in the future), I am with the skeptics. This needs to draw a line in the sand about how science is conducted and communicated going forward. We have already spent too much money and interfered with the lives of too many people based on what now looks like a botched lab experiment that a student is trying to hide in his locker, and the proposals being deliberated in the halls of the great and the mighty make our efforts to date look like peanuts.

A new age of scientific journals, journalism and scientific communication was born with the Internet. There was an explosion of new journals, new editors, new rules, new owners and new readers. A lot of rules got lost in the shuffle. Some of those rules need to come back. Some new rules are needed, as well.

Keith Briffa and his fellow scientists have published a series of articles in scientific publications since 2000, all of them saying that warming is occurring faster than predicted, and all of them misusing statistical analysis and referring to data that they have resisted making available to others who would like to check their work.

Like any good science fiction novel or movie, global warming starts from a reasonable premise, and then carries it to an extreme and starts looking at the possible effects on our heroes--which means us, in this case. The reasonable premise--that increased concentrations of CO2 will cause more heat to be trapped in the atmosphere--has been around for a century. Claims of 20 foot rises in sea level or Greenland ice sheets melting, or Antarctica becoming the only habitable place on the Earth are more recent, more foolish and are now being quickly exploded as the scare stories they are.

If I do this right, at the end you should be convinced of two things--first, that a lot of people are trying to scare you to advance a political agenda. Second, and don't forget this, that global warming is not a crazy hallucination--it is an issue at about the same level as many other issues we are addressing today, which means we can't ignore it, but we don't have to let it panic us. It will certainly take more than one article, so consider this Part 1 of umpteen parts.

One of the most popular images thrown at us by global warming alarmists is sea level rise due to global warming. The sea level has risen since the end of the Ice Age, partly because the Ice melted and partly because when the oceans heat up they expand. But it's only in the past few years that hysterics have been saying the Greenland ice cover would melt quickly, as would the Antarctic, pushing sea levels up drastically and catastrophically.

I'm not entirely sure that global warming, common sense and expert opinion have much to do with each other, but let's try and establish a connection.

First, for global warming (or climate change, or whatever the accepted term now is), to be accepted as a scientific hypothesis, it must include details of how to prove it wrong--'falsifiability.' If it doesn't have these details, it's no more than an interesting idea or a dogmatic belief--but either way it has nothing to do with science. This is the definition of science, basically, but I have yet to see any proponent of global warming as a potentially serious problem for us offer a set of conditions which would lead him or her to say, 'Whoops--we've got it wrong.' And they need to do that.

The reason is that people with common sense are looking at what's coming out of the media and realise that the alarmists are changing the rules of the game and seizing on anything as evidence of global warming. They are radically over-hyping the issue, as acknowledged by those qualified to have an expert opinion, such as the UK Meterological Office, which called recently for the hyperbole to stop. But it hasn't, and whether it gets hotter or colder, it is offered as evidence of global warming. If Arctic ice decreases, it is evidence of global warming. But if it recovers, as it has recently... it is evidence of global warming.

Global warming has been around long enough for the major players to both be recognised and establish a track record. Remembering I am skeptical (not about the greenhouse effect, not about some global warming, but skeptical about an upcoming catastrophe), you will see the skeptical bias in the quotes I offer below. I would imagine global warming alarmists could offer up a similar sheet of quotes from their side of the issue. But I've never seen one. Skeptical scientists, and there are many, notwithstanding repeated statements that the issue is settled, seem to behave more, well, scientifically.

So: This is not objective reporting. This is cherry-picking quotes from people that have influenced my opinions on the issue. Nothing more. I do not offer this as a balanced look at all. Ready?