Scientific heresy

The following article comes from ON LINE opinion - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

SCIENTIFIC HERESY

By Matt Ridley
Posted Friday, 4 November 2011

My topic today is scientific heresy. When are scientific heretics right and when are they mad? How do you tell the difference between science and pseudoscience?

Let us run through some issues, starting with the easy ones.

Astronomy is a science; astrology is a pseudoscience.

Evolution is science; creationism is pseudoscience.

Molecular biology is science; homeopathy is pseudoscience.

Vaccination is science; the MMR scare is pseudoscience.

Oxygen is science; phlogiston was pseudoscience.

Chemistry is science; alchemy was pseudoscience.

Are you with me so far?

A few more examples. That the earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare is pseudoscience. So are the beliefs that Elvis is still alive, Diana was killed by MI5, JFK was killed by the CIA, 911 was an inside job. So are ghosts, UFOs, telepathy, the Loch Ness monster and pretty well everything to do with the paranormal. Sorry to say that on Halloween, but that’s my opinion.

Three more controversial ones. In my view, most of what Freud said was pseudoscience.

So is quite a lot, though not all, of the argument for organic farming.

So, in a sense by definition, is religious faith. It explicitly claims that there are truths that can be found by other means than observation and experiment.

Now comes one that gave me an epiphany. Crop circles.

It was blindingly obvious to me that crop circles were likely to be man-made when I first starting investigating this phenomenon. I made some myself to prove it was easy to do.

This was long before Doug Bower and Dave Chorley fessed up to having started the whole craze after a night at the pub.

Every other explanation – ley lines, alien spacecraft, plasma vortices, ball lightning – was balderdash. The entire field of “cereology” was pseudoscience, as the slightest brush with its bizarre practitioners easily demonstrated.

Imagine my surprise then when I found I was the heretic and that serious journalists working not for tabloids but for Science Magazine, and for a Channel 4 documentary team, swallowed the argument of the cereologists that it was highly implausible that crop circles were all man-made.

So I learnt lesson number 1: the stunning gullibility of the media. Put an “ology” after your pseudoscience and you can get journalists to be your propagandists.

A Channel 4 team did the obvious thing – they got a group of students to make some crop circles and then asked the cereologist if they were “genuine” or “hoaxed” – ie, man made. He assured them they could not have been made by people. So they told him they had been made the night before. The man was poleaxed. It made great television. Yet the producer, who later became a government minister under Tony Blair, ended the segment of the programme by taking the cereologist’s side: “of course, not all crop circles are hoaxes”. What? The same happened when Doug and Dave owned up; everybody just went on believing. They still do.

Lesson number 2: debunking is like water off a duck’s back to pseudoscience.

In medicine, I began to realize, the distinction between science and pseudoscience is not always easy. This is beautifully illustrated in an extraordinary novel by Rebecca Abrams, called Touching Distance, based on the real story of an eighteenth century medical heretic, Alec Gordon of Aberdeen.

Gordon was a true pioneer of the idea that childbed fever was spread by medical folk like himself and that hygiene was the solution to it. He hit upon this discovery long before Semelweiss and Lister. But he was ignored. Yet Abrams’s novel does not paint him purely as a rational hero, but as a flawed human being, a neglectful husband and a crank with some odd ideas – such as a dangerous obsession with bleeding his sick patients. He was a pseudoscientist one minute and scientist the next.

Lesson number 3. We can all be both. Newton was an alchemist.

Like antisepsis, many scientific truths began as heresies and fought long battles for acceptance against entrenched establishment wisdom that now appears irrational: continental drift, for example. Barry Marshall was not just ignored but vilified when he first argued that stomach ulcers are caused by a particular bacterium. Antacid drugs were very profitable for the drug industry. Eventually he won the Nobel prize.

Just this month Daniel Shechtman won the Nobel prize for quasi crystals, having spent much of his career being vilified and exiled as a crank. “I was thrown out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with what I was saying.”

That’s lesson number 4: the heretic is sometimes right.

What sustains pseudoscience is confirmation bias. We look for and welcome the evidence that fits our pet theory; we ignore or question the evidence that contradicts it. We all do this all the time. It’s not, as we often assume, something that only our opponents indulge in. I do it, you do it, it takes a superhuman effort not to do it. That is what keeps myths alive, sustains conspiracy theories and keeps whole populations in thrall to strange superstitions.

Bertrand Russell pointed this out many years ago: “If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.”

Lesson no 5: keep a sharp eye out for confirmation bias in yourself and others.

There have been some very good books on this recently. Michael Shermer’s “The Believing Brain”, Dan Gardner’s “Future Babble” and Tim Harford’s “Adapt” are explorations of the power of confirmation bias. And what I find most unsettling of all is Gardner’s conclusion that knowledge is no defence against it; indeed, the more you know, the more you fall for confirmation bias. Expertise gives you the tools to seek out the confirmations you need to buttress your beliefs.

Experts are worse at forecasting the future than non-experts.

Philip Tetlock did the definitive experiment. He gathered a sample of 284 experts – political scientists, economists and journalists – and harvested 27,450 different specific judgments from them about the future then waited to see if they came true. The results were terrible. The experts were no better than “a dart-throwing chimpanzee”.

Here’s what the Club of Rome said on the rear cover of the massive best-seller Limits to Growth in 1972:

“Will this be the world that your grandchildren will thank you for? A world where industrial production has sunk to zero. Where population has suffered a catastrophic decline. Where the air, sea and land are polluted beyond redemption. Where civilization is a distant memory. This is the world that the computer forecasts.”

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts", said Richard Feynman.

Lesson 6. Never rely on the consensus of experts about the future. Experts are worth listening to about the past, but not the future. Futurology is pseudoscience.

Using these six lessons, I am now going to plunge into an issue on which almost all the experts are not only confident they can predict the future, but absolutely certain their opponents are pseudoscientists. It is an issue on which I am now a heretic. I think the establishment view is infested with pseudoscience. The issue is climate change.

Now before you all rush for the exits, and I know it is traditional to walk out on speakers who do not toe the line on climate at the RSA – I saw it happen to Bjorn Lomborg last year when he gave the Prince Philip lecture – let me be quite clear. I am not a “denier”. I fully accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the climate has been warming and that man is very likely to be at least partly responsible. When a study was published recently saying that 98% of scientists “believe” in global warming, I looked at the questions they had been asked and realized I was in the 98%, too, by that definition, though I never use the word “believe” about myself. Likewise the recent study from Berkeley, which concluded that the land surface of the continents has indeed been warming at about the rate people thought, changed nothing.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that you can accept all the basic tenets of greenhouse physics and still conclude that the threat of a dangerously large warming is so improbable as to be negligible, while the threat of real harm from climate-mitigation policies is already so high as to be worrying, that the cure is proving far worse than the disease is ever likely to be. Or as I put it once, we may be putting a tourniquet round our necks to stop a nosebleed.

I also think the climate debate is a massive distraction from much more urgent environmental problems like invasive species and overfishing.

I was not always such a “lukewarmer”. In the mid 2000s one image in particular played a big role in making me abandon my doubts about dangerous man-made climate change: the hockey stick. It clearly showed that something unprecedented was happening. I can remember where I first saw it at a conference and how I thought: aha, now there at last is some really clear data showing that today’s temperatures are unprecedented in both magnitude and rate of change – and it has been published in Nature magazine.

Yet it has been utterly debunked by the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. I urge you to read Andrew Montford’s careful and highly readable book The Hockey Stick Illusion. Here is not the place to go into detail, but briefly the problem is both mathematical and empirical. The graph relies heavily on some flawed data – strip-bark tree rings from bristlecone pines -- and on a particular method of principal component analysis, called short centering, that heavily weights any hockey-stick shaped sample at the expense of any other sample. When I say heavily – I mean 390 times.

This had a big impact on me. This was the moment somebody told me they had made the crop circle the night before.

For, apart from the hockey stick, there is no evidence that climate is changing dangerously or faster than in the past, when it changed naturally.

It was warmer in the Middle ages and medieval climate change in Greenland was much faster.

Stalagmites, tree lines and ice cores all confirm that it was significantly warmer 7000 years ago. Evidence from Greenland suggests that the Arctic ocean was probably ice free for part of the late summer at that time.

Sea level is rising at the unthreatening rate about a foot per century and decelerating.

Greenland is losing ice at the rate of about 150 gigatonnes a year, which is 0.6% per century.

There has been no significant warming in Antarctica, with the exception of the peninsula.

Methane has largely stopped increasing.

Tropical storm intensity and frequency have gone down, not up, in the last 20 years.

Your probability of dying as a result of a drought, a flood or a storm is 98% lower globally than it was in the 1920s.

Malaria has retreated not expanded as the world has warmed.

And so on. I’ve looked and looked but I cannot find one piece of data – as opposed to a model – that shows either unprecedented change or change is that is anywhere close to causing real harm.

No doubt, there will be plenty of people thinking “what about x?” Well, if you have an X that persuades you that rapid and dangerous climate change is on the way, tell me about it. When I asked a senior government scientist this question, he replied with the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. That is to say, a poorly understood hot episode, 55 million years ago, of uncertain duration, uncertain magnitude and uncertain cause.

Meanwhile, I see confirmation bias everywhere in the climate debate. Hurricane Katrina, Mount Kilimanjaro, the extinction of golden toads – all cited wrongly as evidence of climate change. A snowy December, the BBC lectures us, is “just weather”; a flood in Pakistan or a drought in Texas is “the sort of weather we can expect more of”. A theory so flexible it can rationalize any outcome is a pseudoscientific theory.

To see confirmation bias in action, you only have to read the climategate emails, documents that have undermined my faith in this country’s scientific institutions. It is bad enough that the emails unambiguously showed scientists plotting to cherry-pick data, subvert peer review, bully editors and evade freedom of information requests. What’s worse, to a science groupie like me, is that so much of the rest of the scientific community seemed OK with that. They essentially shrugged their shoulders and said, yeh, big deal, boys will be boys.

Nor is there even any theoretical support for a dangerous future. The central issue is “sensitivity”: the amount of warming that you can expect from a doubling of carbon dioxide levels. On this, there is something close to consensus – at first. It is 1.2 degrees centigrade. Here’s how the IPCC put it in its latest report.

“In the idealised situation that the climate response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 consisted of a uniform temperature change only, with no feedbacks operating…the global warming from GCMs would be around 1.2°C.” Paragraph 8.6.2.3.

Now the paragraph goes on to argue that large, net positive feedbacks, mostly from water vapour, are likely to amplify this. But whereas there is good consensus about the 1.2 C, there is absolutely no consensus about the net positive feedback, as the IPCC also admits. Water vapour forms clouds and whether clouds in practice amplify or dampen any greenhouse warming remains in doubt.

So to say there is a consensus about some global warming is true; to say there is a consensus about dangerous global warming is false.

The sensitivity of the climate could be a harmless 1.2C, half of which has already been experienced, or it could be less if feedbacks are negative or it could be more if feedbacks are positive. What does the empirical evidence say? Since 1960 we have had roughly one-third of a doubling, so we must have had almost half of the greenhouse warming expected from a doubling – that’s elementary arithmetic, given that the curve is agreed to be logarithmic. Yet if you believe the surface thermometers (the red and green lines), we have had about 0.6C of warming in that time, at the rate of less than 0.13C per decade – somewhat less if you believe the satellite thermometers (the blue and purple lines).

So we are on track for 1.2C. We are on the blue line, not the red line.

Remember Jim Hansen of NASA told us in 1988 to expect 2-4 degrees in 25 years. We are experiencing about one-tenth of that.

We are below even the zero-emission path expected by the IPCC in 1990.

Ah, says the consensus, sulphur pollution has reduced the warming, delaying the impact, or the ocean has absorbed the extra heat. Neither of these post-hoc rationalisations fit the data: the southern hemisphere has warmed about half as fast as the northern in the last 30 years, yet the majority of the sulphur emissions were in the northern hemisphere.

And ocean heat content has decelerated, if not flattened, in the past decade.

By contrast, many heretical arguments seem to me to be paragons of science as it should be done: transparent, questioning and testable.

For instance, earlier this year, a tenacious British mathematician named Nic Lewis started looking into the question of sensitivity and found that the only wholly empirical estimate of sensitivity cited by the IPCC had been put through an illegitimate statistical procedure which effectively fattened its tail on the upward end – it hugely increased the apparent probability of high warming at the expense of low warming.

When this is corrected, the theoretical probability of warming greater than 2.3C is very low indeed.

Like all the other errors in the IPCC report, including the infamous suggestion that all Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 rather than 2350, this mistake exaggerates the potential warming. It is beyond coincidence that all these errors should be in the same direction. The source for the Himalayan glacier mistake was a non-peer reviewed WWF report and it occurred in a chapter, two of whose coordinating lead authors and a review editor were on WWF’s climate witness scientific advisory panel. Remember too that the glacier error was pointed out by reviewers, who were ignored, and that Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, dismissed the objectors as practitioners of “voodoo science”.

Journalists are fond of saying that the IPCC report is based solely on the peer-reviewed literature. Rajendra Pachauri himself made that claim in 2008, saying:

“we carry out an assessment of climate change based on peer-reviewed literature, so everything that we look at and take into account in our assessments has to carry [the] credibility of peer-reviewed publications, we don't settle for anything less than that.”

That’s a voodoo claim. The glacier claim was not peer reviewed; nor was the alteration to the sensitivity function Lewis spotted. The journalist Donna Laframboise got volunteers all over the world to help her count the times the IPCC used non-peer reviewed literature. Her conclusion is that: “Of the 18,531 references in the 2007 Climate Bible we found 5,587 - a full 30% - to be non peer-reviewed.”

Yet even to say things like this is to commit heresy. To stand up and say, within a university or within the BBC, that you do not think global warming is dangerous gets you the sort of reaction that standing up in the Vatican and saying you don’t think God is good would get. Believe me, I have tried it.

Does it matter? Suppose I am right that much of what passes for mainstream climate science is now infested with pseudoscience, buttressed by a bad case of confirmation bias, reliant on wishful thinking, given a free pass by biased reporting and dogmatically intolerant of dissent. So what?

After all there’s pseudoscience and confirmation bias among the climate heretics too.

Well here’s why it matters. The alarmists have been handed power over our lives; the heretics have not. Remember Britain’s unilateral climate act is officially expected to cost the hard-pressed UK economy £18.3 billion a year for the next 39 years and achieve an unmeasurably small change in carbon dioxide levels.

At least sceptics do not cover the hills of Scotland with useless, expensive, duke-subsidising wind turbines whose manufacture causes pollution in Inner Mongolia and which kill rare raptors such as this griffon vulture.

At least crop circle believers cannot almost double your electricity bills and increase fuel poverty while driving jobs to Asia, to support their fetish.

At least creationists have not persuaded the BBC that balanced reporting is no longer necessary.

At least homeopaths have not made expensive condensing boilers, which shut down in cold weather, compulsory, as John Prescott did in 2005.

At least astrologers have not driven millions of people into real hunger, perhaps killing 192,000 last year according to one conservative estimate, by diverting 5% of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel.

That’s why it matters. We’ve been asked to take some very painful cures. So we need to be sure the patient has a brain tumour rather than a nosebleed.

Handing the reins of power to pseudoscience has an unhappy history. Remember eugenics. Around 1910 the vast majority of scientists and other intellectuals agreed that nationalizing reproductive decisions so as to stop poor, disabled and stupid people from having babies was not just a practical but a moral imperative of great urgency.

“There is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact,” said George Bernard Shaw, “that nothing but a eugenics religion can save our civilization from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilizations.’’ By the skin of its teeth, mainly because of a brave Liberal MP called Josiah Wedgwood, Britain never handed legal power to the eugenics movement. Germany did.

Or remember Trofim Lysenko, a pseudoscientific crank with a strange idea that crops could be trained to do what you wanted and that Mendelian genetics was bunk. His ideas became the official scientific religion of the Soviet Union and killed millions; his critics, such as the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, ended up dead in prison.

Am I going too far in making these comparisons? I don’t think so. James Hansen of NASA says oil firm executives should be tried for crimes against humanity. (Remember this is the man who is in charge of one of the supposedly impartial data sets about global temperatures.) John Beddington, Britain's chief scientific adviser, said this year that just as we are "grossly intolerant of racism", so we should also be "grossly intolerant of pseudoscience", in which he included all forms of climate-change scepticism.

The irony of course is that much of the green movement began as heretical dissent. Greenpeace went from demanding that the orthodox view of genetically modified crops be challenged, and that the Royal Society was not to be trusted, to demanding that heresy on climate change be ignored and the Royal Society could not be wrong.

Talking of Greenpeace, did you know that the collective annual budget of Greenpeace, WWF and Friends of the Earth was more than a billion dollars globally last year? People sometimes ask me what’s the incentive for scientists to exaggerate climate change. But look at the sums of money available to those who do so, from the pressure groups, from governments and from big companies. It was not the sceptics who hired an ex News of the World deputy editor as a spin doctor after climategate, it was the University of East Anglia.

By contrast scientists and most mainstream journalists risk their careers if they take a skeptical line, so dogmatic is the consensus view. It is left to the blogosphere to keep the flame of heresy alive and do the investigative reporting the media has forgotten how to do. In America, Anthony Watts who crowd-sourced the errors in the siting of thermometers and runs wattsupwiththat.com;

In Canada, Steve McIntyre, the mathematician who bit by bit exposed the shocking story of the hockey stick and runs climateaudit.org.

Here in Britain, Andrew Montford, who dissected the shenanigans behind the climategate whitewash enquiries and runs bishop-hill.net.

In Australia, Joanne Nova, the former television science presenter who has pieced together the enormous sums of money that go to support vested interests in alarm, and runs joannenova.com.au.

The remarkable thing about the heretics I have mentioned is that every single one is doing this in his or her spare time. They work for themselves, they earn a pittance from this work. There is no great fossil-fuel slush fund for sceptics.

In conclusion, I’ve spent a lot of time on climate, but it could have been dietary fat, or nature and nurture. My argument is that like religion, science as an institution is and always has been plagued by the temptations of confirmation bias. With alarming ease it morphs into pseudoscience even – perhaps especially – in the hands of elite experts and especially when predicting the future and when there’s lavish funding at stake. It needs heretics.


Matt Ridley is the author of 'Genome.- the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters' (1999) and Chairman, International Centre for Life, Newcastle.

© The National Forum and contributors 1999-2011. All rights reserved.

FORMER LIBERAL MP TO STAND AGAINST TROY BUSWELL AT THE NEXT STATE ELECTION

The following media statement was issued on Friday September 2, 2011

Bernie Masters, the former Liberal turned independent MP for Vasse, has issued a challenge to the Liberal Party of WA and to Troy Buswell, the Liberal candidate who beat him at the 2005 election.

Mr Masters has called upon the Liberal Party to preselect a candidate for Vasse who is prepared to live in the Vasse electorate and effectively represent Vasse electors in Parliament and to the elected government.

He has also called upon Mr Buswell to consider whether it is in the best interests of the Liberal Party and of Mr Buswell himself to continue to seek reelection for a seat that he effectively abandoned in 2007 to live in Perth.

"I have serious concerns about the quality of representation that Mr Buswell gives to his electors," Mr Masters said.

"On his occasional visits to the Vasse electorate, Mr Buswell takes great care to be seen at sporting and cultural events so that his photo can then appear in the local newspapers," he said.

"However, this fly in-fly out representation is a poor substitute when compared with actually being part of the community you're elected to represent."

"I also have concerns about Mr Buswell's ability to provide leadership and serve as an example to his electors, based upon the many 'incidents' that have afflicted his time as an elected representative of the people."

"To be quite blunt, I believe that Mr Buswell lacks a moral compass and has great trouble deciding between what is moral and ethical in many of the decisions that a member of Parliament needs to make on a regular basis."

"If the Liberal Party endorses Mr Buswell to be its candidate at the next state election due in March 2013, I will stand against him as an Independent Liberal."

"And my election campaign will start the day after he's officially endorsed."

Mr Masters was elected as the Liberal member for Vasse in 1996, reelected in 2001 and then lost to Mr Buswell in 2005 by just 209 votes.

Having lost Liberal Party endorsement for the seat of Vasse in late 2003, he resigned from the Party in early 2004 and remained in Parliament as an independent.

Since 1982, Mr Masters has lived at Peppermint Grove Beach, just a few kilometres outside the current boundaries of the Vasse electorate but well within the electorate until a redistribution occurred prior to the 2005 election.

He is actively involved in many community groups within the Busselton Shire and served as a Shire councillor between 2008 and 2009.

Planetary temperature controls CO2 levels — not humans

Finally, here is a possible answer to the climate change/global warming questions that have worried me from a geological perspective over the last few years. The article shown below neatly and plausibly explains why CO2 increases in the atmosphere have post-dated rises in global temperatures over the last few million years. It also explains why, for the last 100 or more years, we have had global atmospheric CO2 going up at the same time as global temperatures have increased. The reason suggested is that most of the CO2 entering the atmosphere at present comes from natural sources such as the oceans and tropical rainforests as a result of global temperature increases caused by non-human - presumably solar - sources. In other words, increases in the amount of solar radiation being received here on earth are causing CO2 emissions from non-anthropogenic sources to also increase, with the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities responsible for just less than 20% of the variation in CO2 levels.

******************************************************

There goes another “fingerprint”…

It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO2 levels.

Judging by the speech Murry Salby gave at the Sydney Institute, there’s a blockbuster paper coming soon.

Listen to the speech: “Global Emission of Carbon Dioxide: The Contribution from Natural Sources”

Professor Murry Salby is Chair of Climate Science at Macquarie University. He’s been a visiting professorships at Paris, Stockholm, Jerusalem, and Kyoto, and he’s spent time at the Bureau of Meterology in Australia.

Over the last two years he has been looking at C12 and C13 ratios and CO2 levels around the world, and has come to the conclusion that man-made emissions have only a small effect on global CO2 levels. It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO2 levels.

CO2 variations do not correlate with man-made emissions. Peaks and falls correlate with hot years (e.g. 1998) and cold years (1991-92). No graphs are available from Salby's speech or paper yet. This graph comes from Tom Quirk's related work (see below).





The higher levels of CO2 in recent decades appear to be mostly due to natural sources. He presented this research at the IUGG conference in Melbourne recently, causing great discussion and shocking a few people. Word reached the Sydney Institute, which rushed to arrange for him to speak, given the importance of this work in the current Australian political climate.

The ratio of C13 to C12 (two isotopes of carbon) in our atmosphere has been declining, which is usually viewed as a signature of man-made CO2 emissions. C12 makes up 99% of carbon in the atmosphere (nearly all atmospheric carbon is in the form of CO2). C13 is much rarer — about 1%. Plants don’t like the rarer C13 type as much; photosynthesis works best on the C12 -type -of-CO2 and not the C13-type when absorbing CO2 from the air.

Prof Salby points out that while fossil fuels are richer in C12 than the atmosphere, so too is plant life on Earth, and there isn’t a lot of difference (just 2.6%) in the ratios of C13 to C12 in plants versus fossil fuels. (Fossil fuels are, after all, made in theory from plants, so it’s not surprising that it’s hard to tell their “signatures” apart). So if the C13 to C12 ratio is falling (as more C12 rich carbon is put into the air by burning fossil fuels) then we can’t know if it’s due to man-made CO2 or natural CO2 from plants.

Essentially we can measure man-made emissions reasonably well, but we can’t measure the natural emissions and sequestrations of CO2 at all precisely — the error bars are huge. Humans emits 5Gt or so per annum, but the oceans emit about 90Gt and the land-plants about 60Gt, for a total of maybe 150Gt. Many scientists have assumed that the net flows of carbon to and from natural sinks and sources of CO2 cancel each other out, but there is no real data to confirm this and it’s just a convenient assumption. The problem is that even small fractional changes in natural emissions or sequestrations swamp the human emissions.



“It is often asserted that we can measure the human contribution of CO2 to the air by looking at the ratio of C12 to C13. The theory is that plants absorb more C12 than C13 (by about 2%, not a big signature), so we can look at the air and know which came from plants and which came from volcanos and which came from fossil fuels, via us. Plants are ‘deficient’ in C13, and so, then, ought to be our fossil fuel derived CO2.

The implication is that since coal and oil were from plants, that “plant signature” means “human via fossil fuels”. But it just isn’t that simple. Take a look at the above chart. We are 5.5 and plants are putting 121.6 into the air each year (not counting ocean plants). There is a lot of carbon slopping back and forth between sinks and sources. Exactly how closely do we know the rate of soil evolution of CO2, for example?”

Chiefio also found some interesting quotes pointing out that corn (a C4 plant) absorbs more C13, and our mass fields of corn might just muck up the stats… (it’s a good post).
The sources of CO2 don’t seem to be industrialized areas

Suspiciously, when satellites record atmospheric CO2 levels around the globe they find that the sources don’t appear to be concentrated in the places we’d expect — industry or population concentrations like western Europe, the Ohio Valley, or China. Instead the sources appear to be in places like the Amazon Basin, southeast Asia, and tropical Africa — not so much the places with large human emissions of CO2!

But CO2 is a well mixed gas so it’s not possible to definitively sort out the sources or sinks with CO2 measurements around the globe. The differences are only of the order of 5%.

Instead the way to unravel the puzzle is to look at the one long recording we have (at Mauna Loa, in Hawaii, going back to 1959) and graph the changes in CO2 and in C13 from year to year. Some years from January to January there may be a rise of 0 ppmv (ie no change), some years up to 3 ppmv. If those changes were due to man-made CO2 then we should see more of those rapid increases in recent times as man-made emissions increased faster.
What Salby found though, was nothing like what was expected

The largest increases year-to-year occurred when the world warmed fastest due to El Nino conditions. The smallest increases correlated with volcanoes which pump dust up into the atmosphere and keep the world cooler for a while. In other words, temperature controls CO2 levels on a yearly time-scale, and according to Salby, man-made emissions have little effect.

The climate models assume that most of the rise in CO2 (from 280 ppmv in1780 to 392 ppmv today) was due to industrialization and fossil fuel use. But the globe has been warming during that period (in fact since the depths of the Little Ice Age around 1680), so warmer conditions could be the reason that CO2 has been rising.

Salby does not dispute that some of the rise in CO2 levels is due to man-made emissions, but found that temperature alone explains about 80% of the variation in CO2 levels.

The up and coming paper with all the graphs will be released in about six weeks. It has passed peer review, and sounds like it has been a long time coming. Salby says he sat on the results for six months wondering if there was any other interpretation he could arrive at, and then, when he invited scientists he trusted and admired to comment on the paper, they also sat on it for half a year. His speech created waves at the IUGG conference, and word is spreading.

A book will be released later this year: Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate.
Roy Spencer wrote along similar lines last year

“Could the Ocean, Rather Than Mankind, Be the Reason?” and Part II
“]





...In Fig. 5 we see that the yearly-average CO2 increase at Mauna Loa ends up being anywhere from 0% of the human source, to 130%. It seems to me that this is proof that natural net flux imbalances are at least as big as the human source. [Roy Spencer

“… the human source represents only 3% (or less) the size of the natural fluxes in and out of the surface. This means that we would need to know the natural upward and downward fluxes to much better than 3% to say that humans are responsible for the current upward trend in atmospheric CO2. Are measurements of the global carbon fluxes much better than 3% in accuracy?? I doubt it.”

Roy Spencer

Tom Quirk in Australia has been asking these questions for years

Tom Quirk showed that while most man-made CO2 is released in the Northern Hemisphere, and the southern Hemisphere stations ought to take months to record the rises, instead there did not appear to be any lag… (ie. the major source of the CO2 is global rather than from human activity).

Over 95% of [man-made emissions of] CO2 has been released in the Northern Hemisphere…

“A tracer for CO2 transport from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern Hemisphere was provided by 14C created by nuclear weapons testing in the 1950’s and 1960’s.The analysis of 14C in atmospheric CO2 showed that it took some years for exchanges of CO2 between the hemispheres before the 14C was uniformly distributed…

“If 75% of CO2 from fossil fuel is emitted north of latitude 30 then some time lag might be expected due to the sharp year-to-year variations in the estimated amounts left in the atmosphere. A simple model, following the example of the 14Cdata with a one year mixing time, would suggest a delay of 6 months for CO2 changes in concentration in the Northern Hemisphere to appear in the Southern Hemisphere.

“A correlation plot of …year on year differences of monthly measurements at Mauna Loa against those at the South Pole [shows]… the time difference is positive when the South Pole data leads the Mauna Loa data. Any negative bias (asymmetry in the plot) would indicate a delayed arrival of CO2 in the Southern Hemisphere.

“There does not appear to be any time difference between the hemispheres. This suggests that the annual increases [in atmospheric carbon dioxide] may be coming from a global or equatorial source.”

Tom has done a lot of work on this:

The constancy of seasonal variations in CO2 and the lack of time delays between the hemispheres suggest that fossil fuel derived CO2 is almost totally absorbed locally in the year it is emitted. This implies that natural variability of the climate is the prime cause of increasing CO2, not the emissions of CO2 from the use of fossil fuels.

‘Sources and Sinks of Carbon Dioxide’, by Tom Quirk, Energy and Environment, Volume 20, pages 103-119. http://www.multi-science.co.uk/ee.htm

More info from Tom Quirk: SOURCES AND SINKS OF CARBON DIOXIDE [17 page PDF]
But what about the ice cores?

The Vostok ice core record suggests CO2 levels have not been this high in the last 800,000 years, but if Salby is right, and temperature controls CO2, then CO2 levels ought to have been higher say, 130,000 years ago when the world was 2 – 4 degrees warmer than it is now.

Salby questions the ice core proxy and points out that in the ice cores, as temperature rises, C13 falls, much as it has been in the last 50 years. If it was also responding that way hundreds of thousands of years ago, then the C13 to C12 ratio can hardly be called a fingerprint of human emissions.
On the nature of science

According to Salby, science is about discourse and questioning. He emphasized the importance of debate: “Excluding discourse is not science”. He felt that it was not his position to comment on policy, saying the scientists that do are more activist than scientist.

After speaking in carefully selected phrases, he finished his presentation saying that “anyone who thinks the science is settled on this topic, is in fantasia”.

Salby was once an IPCC reviewer, and comments, damningly, that if these results had been available in 2007, “the IPCC could not have drawn the conclusion that it did.” I guess he’s also giving them an out.

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Prof Murry Salby has worked at leading research institutions, including the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, Princeton University, and the University of Colorado, and is the author of Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics, and Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate, due out in 2011.

Rupert Murdoch and the political influence of his newspapers

No one should doubt Rupert Murdoch's ability to make or break political parties at election time. The following article comes from The Economist of August 13, 1994, wherein Murdoch claims credit for having helped Paul Keating win the 1993 federal election. The ability of an unelected owner of numerous media outlets to actively and deliberately try to influence people during election campaigns about who should be their next government frightened me in 1994 and it still worries me today, especially in light of the grubby News of the World involvement in phone hacking.

In the following article, I've added emphasis to certain sections to highlight what I consider to be the real attitude of Murdoch and some of his staff about their role in national politics.


RUPERT'S BEAR-HUG

ON THE morning of polling day in the 1992 general election, a senior editor at The Times took a call from Kelvin MacKenzie, then the kick-'em-in-the-goolies editor of The Times's Murdochian stablemate, the Sun.
“What's your polling showing?”
“Same as last night, Kelv; Tories and Labour level-pegging.”
“Well, they can't have seen our front page yet.”

The Sun front page in question showed a picture of Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader, inside an unlit electric bulb. "If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights" said the headline. In the event, the Tories won the election with an overall majority of 21. Labour leaders grumbled that the Sun had cost them 20 seats. "It's the Sun Wot Won It", said the paper's immodest post-election headline.

Against this background, Mr Murdoch's recent remarks to Der Smegel, a German news magazine, must have tipped John Major from his holiday chaise-longue. “Only last year we helped the Labour government in Canberra," said the Antipodean, when charged with always backing conservatives. "I could even imagine supporting the British Labour leader, Tony Blair.

What did he mean? According to The Times and the Sun, neither of whom reported his remarks at the time, nothing. According to News International, his company, not much. These were, it says, off-the-cuff remarks. Mr Murdoch's editors make up their own mind on the political line to follow.

Phooey. Mr Murdoch did not get where he is today by making half-baked remarks about governments and opposition parties. As for Mr Murdoch's editors, The Times's Peter Stothard is an independent-minded Tory. John Witherow, acting editor of the Sunday Times, is not very political. But one is reminded of the line attributed to Charles Wilson, a Murdoch editor of The Times, in conversation with a reporter: "When I want your opinion, laddie, I'll give it to you." And reminded, more seriously, of the remark made by the late Peter Jenkins when he moved his renowned political column from the Sunday Times. He had seen, he said, "how good newspapers, and once independent spirits, withered in [Murdoch's] presence—or at 3,000 miles removed."

A more plausible assessment comes from Labour itself. Whereas the old Labour leadership of Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley demonised Mr Murdoch, the new Labour leadership discerns a pragmatic businessman. As such Mr Murdoch knows Labour to be reconsidering policies which could threaten the British outpost of his empire.

The most recent Labour manifesto promised to refer “concentration of media ownership” - for which read Mr Murdoch - to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. That has been quietly dropped. Under Mo Mowlam, its media spokesman, Labour now takes a more sophisticated attitude. It recognises that technology makes it impractical to ban cross-ownership between newspapers, television and telecommunications. It still rejects Mr Murdoch's argument that technology transfers power from media proprietors to consumers. The proprietors, it points out, will continue to decide the menus from which consumers can choose—and, if Mr Murdoch's track record is anything to go by, the fare on offer will be more Happy Eater than Le Gavroche. But the Labour Party is "consulting widely" on its policy, making this a good time for Mr Murdoch to woo it with warm words.

As a pragmatic businessman, however, Mr Murdoch would have to hesitate before shifting the political posture of his papers. Were he entirely devoid of political views, each of his papers might well take the position it now does. The Times is engaged in a no-holds-barred price war with Conrad Black's Daily Telegraph. It needs to be broadly Conservative to pick up "Torygraph" readers. Today, by contrast, is trying to establish a smallish middle-market niche against two rabid-right papers, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. Hence its pinkish politics. The Sun's position is potentially moveable. Its constituency is the brasher populist end of what used to be called the working class, which was traditionally Labour. Even in 1992, only 38% of its readers voted Tory. Its rival, the Daily Mirror, is strongly Labour. If Mr Major goes on being unpopular, the Sun would be risking a great deal if it backed him too firmly.

Such calculations will be at least as important as ideology in influencing the stance of the Murdoch papers. But before Mr Major and Mr Blair waste more time trying to double-guess them, they should ask a prior question: does it make a blind bit of difference?

"Labour's Last Chance", the most thorough academic study of the 1992 general election, contains a chapter by John Curtice and Holli Semetko on the role of the newspapers. Here are its conclusions. "Neither the Sun nor any of the other pro-Conservative tabloid newspapers were responsible for John Major's unexpected victory in 1992. There is no evidence in our panel that there was any relationship between vote-switching during the election campaign and the partisanship of a voter's newspaper. And, while we have found evidence that over the longer term (between 1987 and 1992) newspapers did have a little influence over their readers, this appears to have had no effect on the size of the Conservatives' lead over Labour." Or, as Mr MacKenzie might more succinctly put it, It Wozn't the Sun Wot Won It. Mr Blair's best response to Rupert's half-proffered bear-hug would be amused indifference. For Labour needs to worry, as the Curtice-Semetko chapter concludes, "not so much about what the papers say as about whether it has something to say that the electorate wishes to hear."

The Economist, August 13th, 1994

CLIMATE CHANGE - there are things we can and should agree upon

In May, 2010, I submitted the following letter to the editor of Science, published by the American Society for the Advancement of Science. For reasons best known to themselves, they failed to acknowledge its receipt nor did they print the article.


Yet again, scientists have shown their lack of understanding on how to influence the non-scientific world about climate change. In his editorial on 7 May 2010, Brooks Hanson rightly lambasts some US legislators for their views about this issue, but he fails to acknowledge the mistakes, errors and exaggerations made by reputable scientists on key climate change issues such as Himalayan glacier melting rates and ‘climategate’. You don’t win friends and influence people by ridiculing the very people you’re trying to convert to your cause while ignoring the elephants in the room.

The letter from Gleick et al lists five ‘fundamental conclusions about climate change’. However, three of these conclusions (most heat-trapping gases derive from human activities; a warming planet results in many other climatic changes; climate changes pose threats to human societies and to nature) are unarguable facts that most climate change deniers accept. Most disputation centres around the remaining two conclusions: that our planet is warming because of higher levels of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere; and human-induced climate changes are overwhelming natural changes.

As most negotiators know, when trying to reach agreement with an opponent, success is often achieved when the parties begin by agreeing on what is not in dispute. In addition to the above three conclusions, protagonists in the climate change debate should be able to agree on many points, for example:
1. That China’s electricity consumption per dollar of GDP as measured in kilowatt hours is more than double that of India and almost four times that of the USA (ref: 1)
2. That motor vehicle fuel efficiency in the USA is roughly half that of European vehicles (ref: 2)

If both sides of the debate could agree on just these two points, then governments could start addressing the required technical, economic and political solutions to China’s wastage of electricity and the USA’s wastage of motor fuels.

Another example of a mutually agreed issue is the finite amount of non-renewable fossil fuels occurring on our planet. While the date when the readily extractable resources will begin to run out is contentious, agreeing that this will happen at some undefined point in the future should convince even the staunchest climate change denier to accept that energy conservation measures implemented now will provide benefits to future generations. In turn, such energy conservation will also lessen the rate of increase in heat-trapping gases emitted to the atmosphere.

The editorial and letter in your 7 May 2010 edition show that scientists have an essential role in investigating and reporting on scientific issues but they should be prepared to call in economic and political experts when non-scientific resolutions are required.

1. Lights and action: Electricity and development in China. The Economist, May 1st, 2010
2. U.S. ‘stuck in reverse’ on fuel economy. Roland Jones, Business news editor, msnbc.com, February 28, 2007.