Re: [asa] Creation Care

Has the scientific community of experts on climate been trapped in a cycle of self-delusion, whether unintentional or intentional for whatever reason, and is virtually unanimously propagating a perspective of future climate change that is in significant error? This is a serious question and must be investigated carefully. That's why I spent time reading the critics and looking for the scientific data that indicates there's something seriously amiss with the prevailing paradigm.

My conclusion was that the only hoax on this topic is that there is controversy or uncertainty or a hoax or a conspiracy in the mainstream climate scientists. I found no sound argument in all the contrarian views I could find. The ones I did investigate did not hold up under scrutiny. In this forum, I will recount only one in detail. I'll pick one advocated by Michael Crichton, one of the more vocal and more widely read critics of environmentalism, and one of his observations that has been used very widely to spread the perspective that there is too much uncertainty in this field to justify any action. Crichton states in his appendix to his novel "State of Fear" that he personally thinks there is global warming and that human activity may be contributing to it, but that he feels there is too much uncertainty in the field to justify any action. That's a fair question and based on the many posts in this forum, it seems to be a common position here as well. So let's take a closer look.

Crichton likes to say that "environmentalism is a religion." I'm saddened by the use of "religion" as a pejorative term. If he merely meant they have a lot of passion, he would certainly be right and it would characterize every one on this topic. I presume what he really means is that those who warn of impending climate change are clinging to that opinion independent of sound scientific methodology.

Crichton wrote his novel "State of Fear" as a fictional set of characters dealing with a lawsuit involving global warming. He says his footnotes are non-fiction as well as his discussion of those footnotes. One of his episodes forms the basis for his critique of climatologist Jim Hansen and that critique brought Crichton to Congress and the White House where his criticism was most welcome. It can be found on p. 273 of the paperbook edition by Avon Books.

"When Hansen announced in the summer of 1988 that global warming was here, he predicted temperatures would increase .35 degrees Celsius over the next ten years. Do you know what the actual increase was?" "I'm sure you'll tell me it was less than that." "Much less, Peter. Dr. Hansen overestimated by three hundred percent. The actual increase was .11 degrees." "Okay. But it did increase." "And ten years after his testimony, he said that the forces that govern climate change are so poorly understood that long-term prediction is impossible."

Over the next few pages Crichton proceeds to mock and ridicule how a scientist could be wrong by 300percent and be believed while in all other situations, errors had to be much much less than that. One example will suffice from p. 275:

"In the real world of human knowledge," Kenner said, "to be wrong by three hundred percent is taken as an indication you don't have a good grasp on what you are estimating. If you got on an airplane and the pilot said it was a three-hour flight, but you arrived in one hour, would you think that pilot was knowledgeable or not?" Evans sighed. "Climate is more complicated than that." "Yes, Peter. Climate is more complicated. It is so complicated that no one has been able to predict future climate with accuracy..."

Crichton returns to that issue later and keeps hounding on that " more than three hundred percent error."

A few questions immediately arise:

1) How does Crichton calculate the three hundred percent error? He only gives two data points, claiming Hansen predicted a .35 degree increase in a decade and the actual was .11. Arithmetically, the only way to get more than three hundred percent is to divide .35 by .11 but not even an elementary student of statistics would make such an egregious error. Crichton never says how he calculated that.

2) How did Crichton handle the error bars on the data? Hansen published several scenarios with quite a spread of values. Why didn't he acknowledge that Hansen had various scenarios and a range of numbers in his prediction? And what about the uncertainty in the actual increase in temperature? Is this .11 a precise number? Annual temperatures fluctuate quite a bit so why isn't there an error bar on this number? Not even an elementary student of statistics would make such an egregious error as to ignore the error bars in assessing the accuracy of a model.

3) Where did the number .35 come from in the first place? Hansen's paper presents three scenarios, A, B, and C. Scenario A is what he calls "high side of reality, B is "the most plausible" and C is an "alternate scenario" which assumed (in 1988!) that the US would take action to reduce carbon emissions by the year 2000. Scenario A assumes there would be no global event like a major volcano and also assumes other worst case scenarios. In B, Hansen includes the possibility of a major earth-cooling volcano in 1995. It turned out that Mt. Pinatuba erupted in 1991 causing significant cooling.The warming rates Hansen published for those three scenarios are .35, .19, and .24 degrees C per decade. Did Crichton actually take only the "high side of reality" and not even acknowledge that Hansen had published a much lower "most plausible scenario" in that same paper? Not even an elementary student in statistics would make such an egregious error.

4) Where did the number .11 come from for the actual data? Crichton doesn't say. If we look at the data, the global land-ocean index from 1988-2005 showed a .19 degrees/decade and the meteorological station analyses show .21 degrees/decade. Is it possible that Crichton used a subset of the data? Taking only 1988-1997 (too short for meaningful comparison) gives something close to .11 but recall that Mt. Pinatubo caused an enormous cooling in 1991 and 1992 and it wasn't till 1998 that there was a super hot year due to a very strong El-Nino. These years have to be weighted carefully. There isn't a meaningful comparison with a model with only a few years. Crichton's book is copyrighted 2004 so he had no reason not to at least include years to 2003.

In other words, Crichton's assessment of the accuracy of Hansen's model would never have passed a scientific peer-review. It is an inaccurate, and one might say unethical, assessment of Hansen's work. Yet it formed the very basis of generating enormous doubt about Hansen and the entire climate modeling process. Instead of being in error by three hundred percent, he was actually more accurate than his model justifies, as he points out very carefully.

Whose work is more closely described as religious in the sense of "clinging to an opinion independent of sound scientific methodology?" Crichton? or Hansen?

This example is not in isolation. It typifies the claims of those who say there is too great uncertainty to believe in global warming. I won't go into detail but there are many claims of solar energy being the cause, of Antarctica ice actually thickening, of climate trends that are cooling, and many other bits of data taken out of context that the climatologists actually understand very well and that do not negate the views of global warming.

For this reason, I have concluded that it is high time to recognize that it is fallacious to claim that "The whole "global warming" thing is a political movement full of people trying to cash in on the latest "scare"." It simply isn't true.

It's time to move on to focus on the real data in the next note.

Randy

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Received on Sun Jan 21 22:10:59 2007