En 2010, 43 miembros de la Royal Society le escribieron a su entonces presidente, Paul Nurse, para quejarse sobre el tono poco científico de los mensajes de la sociedad sobre el cambio climático. Hace unos días, un grupo de 33 compañeros actuales y anteriores de la Sociedad Geológica escribió una carta abierta a su presidente en la misma línea.
Fragmento de la nueva carta:
Topics for such a dialogue could examine the evidence that
- CO2 alone as the principle driver of temperature, or climate.
- Climate Change is largely real, natural, and mostly beyond our control.
- Manipulation of climate data has been used to support ‘global warming’.[ii]
- Most climate alarms are little more than scaremongering.
- CO2 is mainly beneficial, NOT dangerous but blanket decarbonisation is.
- Industrial effluents and plastics, deforestation and overfishing are dangerous– and are being side-lined by the focus on CO2 emissions.
The world’s climate system, as defined by the IPCC, [iii] is a ‘coupled non-linear chaotic system”, for which “the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible’. This is due to the impossibility of describing precisely the initial conditions, and to instability generated by the mathematics causing cumulative errors in the modelling process, which combine to make a ‘correct’ solution impossible. This alone should make the authors of the GSL statements cautious about their very confident acceptance that CO2 alone has driven temperature and climate since 1900.The IPCC AR documents address some of the uncertainties, and are generally much less biased than the SPMs (Summary for Policymakers) which get all the media attention, which is unfortunate, as it is apparent that they are largely written not by scientists but by an ‘assemblage of representatives from governments and NGOs, with only a small scientific representation.’[iv] Their heavy political bias not only undermines the scientific content, it supercharges the ‘overwhelming consensus for human induced climate change’ which is mindlessly promulgated by the media year in, year out. The façade of consensus, helped by the data adjustments promised in the Climategate emails, negates the ‘creative conflict between theory and data’ which is missing in this debate and which we suggest the GSL can revive. It is to be hoped that the frequent use of conditionals ‘may’ and ‘could’ in the current papers will be reduced, as a document that will affect government policy for years needs to be more specific about the levels of uncertainty in its pronouncements.
We also note the difficulty of publishing anything that does not confirm the IPCC AGW position, again, as promised in Climategate emails; and also, the ‘ad hominem’ attacks rather than data refutation that too often characterises the debate, and we hope that this will not prevent the committee considering data that does not appear to support its position paper conclusions.
We do not expect that all of our concerns will survive the test of time, and we assume GSL would similarly accept that new data may well change the ‘consensus’. Climate models fail to model past climates accurately and consistently overestimate future temperature trends, nor are they able to explain the following:
- The current hiatus or pause in warming.
- Why the 285 ppm of atmospheric CO2 estimated for the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is in any way, a desirable benchmark. It coincides with the Victorian Little Ice Age, a period of starvation and population decline, which cannot possibly be a desirable target, unless you want to depopulate the earth. Climate models always predict higher temperatures than actually occur
- The absence of the predicted tropospheric hotspot – the ‘fingerprint of AGW’.
- CO2 and temperature were higher than today during the previous 50 million years plus, with no CAGW effects, why not?
- The natural warming of 8°C and ~100ppm increase in CO2 during the Holocene up to the 1800s, and the subsequent 125 ppm increase in CO2 after 1950, accompanied by a miserly ~1°C temperature rise.
- The Holocene enigma of generally falling but fluctuating temperatures from ~3,000BP, accompanied by rising CO2that predates industrial CO2 emissions.
- How AGW theory relies on radiative transfer only to heat the planet, and seemingly ignores insolation, enthalpy and water vapour.
- The inability of the science of AGW to sharpen the range of estimates of climate sensitivity (currently between 1.5 oC and 6.4°C according to GSL) despite over 30 years of hugely funded effort; surely the science has failed?
- Earth System Sensitivity concept introduced by GSL, which ‘could be twice’ climate sensitivity’ noted above (2013 Addendum, page 4)
Such rational failures have to be of concern to the GSL as they demonstrate that CO2 alone does not, nay cannot drive global warming, so how can it drive climate change?
And if it does not, there is no reason for the uncritical acceptance of the UN/IPCC focus on penalising CO2 emissions?
