After reading some of the False Alarm website, which is highly critical of the scientific “consensus” that humans are the principal cause of global warming, a friend sent me an email the other day that read, in part:

How can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong about this (if your premise is correct)?  I don’t think it could be a conspiracy, or incompetence…  Has there ever been another case when so many “leading” scientific minds got it so wrong?

This is a really good question. I’m not a climate scientist (but, then, neither is Al Gore); I’m an ex-journalist, now an academic. I teach professional writing. How dare I claim to know more than, say, the 2,000 or so scientists who contribute to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports? These are the experts, after all, and they say that humans are the principal cause of global warming at the moment. How could the experts possibly be wrong?

Of course, many, many people (not just scientists) have been wrong before on many, many topics. Until the 1960s, few scientists believed in continental drift. Millions of intelligent people continue to believe in communism even after the collapse of the Soviet Union  in 1989. After Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring came out in 1962, many, many people believed DDT was bad when in fact, if used properly, DDT could have saved millions of lives in places like Africa. Science is a process of systematically weeding out the wrong ideas and replacing them with better wrong ideas, as it were.

But getting on to global warming:

How can so many be so wrong?

Well, for a start, here’s a comment from the Summary of the IPCC’s 2007 report:

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.

The only problem with this statement is that it isn’t true: it’s now widely accepted in scientific circles that the climate system hasn’t warmed since 1998. Yet, somehow, the writers of the 2007 IPCC report managed to find increases in warming when the planet wasn’t warming, which was a triumph of ideology over fact.

Curiously enough, this lack of warming still hasn’t been officially announced to the public. Why not? You’d think the news would make big, bold, front-page headlines: GLOBAL WARMING OVER (at least for now). Unfortunately, too many scientific careers (and billions in scientific grants) are riding on the hypothesis that humans are the main cause of warming to give it up that easily.

How can so many be so wrong?

Ten years of no warming is a bit more than the normal year-to-year fluctuations — it’s more like a trend — but none of the IPCC’s sophisticated computer models predicted it. Yet, since carbon emissions are continuing to increase, the trend should be continuous warming if humans are the principal cause of climate change, as the IPCC believes (although it puts its bias in probabilistic language-”it is highly likely that…”).

How can so many be so wrong?

Here’s the IPCC’s mission statement:

The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation(1)  [my italics].

There’s nothing wrong with having a mission; it’s unavoidable. The IPCC is a kind of global-warming think tank and most think tanks have a mission. The mission of the Fraser Institute, for example, is to promote free markets. The mission of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is to promote socialism, although its mission statement doesn’t say this directly. Both seek to be as “objective” as possible, but they start from different premises.(2)

Similarly, the mission of the IPCC is to investigate and promote the idea that human activities are the main cause of global warming. Its mandate isn’t to explore the idea that perhaps humans aren’t at fault. However, a key difference between the IPCC and the Fraser Institute, or the IPCC and the Centre for Policy Alternatives, is that most readers of a Fraser Institute or CPA document know that the organization has a bias and take that into account in assessing the information they are receiving. (3)  The IPCC, on the other hand, promotes itself to the public as a fully scientific, unbiased source of information on climate change, when, in fact, as anyone who carefully reads its mission statement (few, apparently, have bothered) would know, it is not.

How can so many be so wrong?

The next sentence of the IPCC’s mission statement reads: “Review by experts and governments is an essential part of the IPCC process” [my italics added]. Yet, surely if the IPCC was taking an “objective” look at climate change from a balanced, purely scientific perspective, its findings would not be subject to “review by governments,” which are political bodies with political, not scientific, agendas. Does anyone today believe that Galileo should have had to present his findings to the Church before publishing them? True science is not subject to review by governments.

How can so many be so wrong?

No truly objective scientific body would be striving for “consensus” in its reports, although we expect consensus from think-tank publications — the Fraser Institute isn’t going to put out a document calling for the nationalization of the Canadian oil industry, for example. This striving for consensus meant that the IPCC was not interested, right from the start, in giving legitimacy to views that didn’t fit its mandate. For example, the 1990 IPCC report said of dissenters: “Whilst every attempt was made by the Lead Authors to incorporate their comments, in some cases these formed a minority opinion which could not be reconciled with the larger consensus“(4)  [italics added]. So why not publish the minority reports along with the majority report so the public can see the full range of opinion?

Yet reaching a consensus was the IPCC’s task when it was started in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program. What consensus? The one approved by the politicians who bankrolled the process, which is why, again, and incredibly, the IPCC’s conclusions undergo “review by governments.”(5)  That is, the IPCC has to meet a political (ideological) as well as a scientific agenda.

Since the IPCC’s mission isn’t to investigate possible natural causes of climate change but to determine the role of “human-induced” climate change, it’s not surprising that the IPCC finds what it seeks. How do we know there is bias rather than objective science at work? Because when scientists who aren’t part of the “consensus” suggest other, natural mechanisms for climate change, they not only do not receive a respectful hearing, as you’d expect from disinterested scientists, they are denounced as heretics.

For example, when physicist Henrick Svensmark suggested that cosmic rays might be one explanation for climate change, former IPCC chairman Bert Bolin denounced his theory as “extremely naïve and irresponsible,” and another scientist at a conference called it “dangerous.”(6)  Similarly, research questioning the validity of ice-core CO2 readings was declared “immoral.” These responses are reminiscent more of religion than science.

What is the proper scientific attitude toward new ideas? Here’s what philosopher of science Karl Popper had to say:

If you are interested in the problem which I tried to solve by my tentative assertion, you may help me by criticizing it as severely as you can; and if you can design some experimental test which you think might refute my assertion, I shall gladly, and to the best of my powers, help you to refute it.(7)

This is the opposite of the IPCC’s approach, which is to shout down or ignore critics, and even make it difficult for them to continue their research or get published. When the Official Science peer-reviewed journals refuse to publish articles by skeptics, as they do, Official Science can then say the skeptical science doesn’t have peer-reviewed publications: it’s a Catch-22. Official Climate Science has made up its mind as to the (human) culprit in global warming and isn’t interested in any other suspects.

All of the above may be wrong, of course: the IPCC may be doing a totally accurate, bang-up job of assessing the science on climate change. Unfortunately, the process — “review by governments” and a bias toward human causes of climate change  — means that the IPCC is not the objective scientific body it presents itself as to the public. It is driven by agendas other than science.

I began serious research into climate change in May, 2007, following an attack by Dr. Andrew Weaver, a leading computer-modeling climatologist from the University of Victoria’s, over a column I’d written in the Times Colonist newspaper.

Curiously, while agreeing with me on many of the scientific points I’d made in the column (temperature precedes CO2 increases, for example), Weaver then declared the column to be lacking in “scientific literacy,” presumably because it challenged the “consensus” view that humans are the primary cause of climate change at the moment.

We know this is Weaver’s view because he says so: “Anthropogenic forcing alone is insufficient to explain the warming from 1910 to 1945 but necessary to reproduce the warming since 1976.”(8)  Somehow, the planet warmed from 1910 to 1945 without our help, but apparently it couldn’t have warmed after 1976 without our help.

I read a lot of science, so the “scientific illiterate” charge didn’t make much sense to me, but perhaps I was lacking in knowledge. So started to seriously investigate the issue of climate change.  Read rest...