Dr Christopher Essex On Climate Science
By Paul Homewood
A though provoking piece today in Breitbart by Dr Christopher Essex.
Members of the Scientific Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) recently criticized the Royal Society’s positions on climate.
Their clear, authoritative scientific objections to the Royal Society’s positions reveal the weak scientific foundation on which the great climate fervor has been based. The public must either become conversant enough to grasp this or step back and get out of the way of those who have. Scientists don’t need to be paid to oppose the ideas of climate orthodoxy, because those ideas are just so damn bad.
To the Bitter End
Accusing scientists of venal motives when they raise questions about climate has come to be what passes for scientific debate. Unlike the GWPF critique, this is not science at all. Al Gore recently renewed calls for climate deniers (as they are pejoratively called by the dogmatists) to be punished. This follows brazen political-style attacks on scientists because of their views on climate. In particular there has been an aggressive assault questioning our ethics, morality, competence, and even sanity. It has been amazingly coordinated, coming simultaneously from a number of fronts: activists, Congress, Hollywood, and even some psychologists.
This entire assault could not be more anti-scientific. The protagonists are political interlopers in science who do not understand or respect the nature of scientific truths and how they are discovered, let alone how they are justified. One of the greatest lessons from the history of science is that humans don’t only get things wrong, but they stubbornly hang on to the stupidest of ideas to the bitter end. I do not absolve myself from this; it is my legacy as much as yours.
The Field That Never Was
Climate, as the scientific field we know today, is very young. It was cobbled together from pieces of a number of established fields and elevated into the limelight only very recently as science goes. It was particularly vulnerable to antirational inroads because there was no core body of scientific knowledge, like say physics or chemistry have. Before the great climate fervor, the term “climate science” was virtually unheard of. Instead, climatology was a tranquil, narrow, and descriptive area, with little funding and few practitioners. Today’s version, climate science, is driven as much by trumped up public fears as traditional scientific objectives. I have heard many times that what we scientists should work on “depends on what policymakers want.”
The fields and methodologies of climate science are a disjointed collection that few have anything approaching a universal command of, let alone a universal command from which to form a knowledgable consensus. Is climate research the gathering and description of data? Is it statistical time series analysis? Is it meteorology extended by supercomputers? Is it molecular spectroscopy? Is it oceanography, glaciology, geology, thermodynamics, physics, orbital mechanics, computer science, survey research, economics, biology, dynamical systems theory, solar physics, or much more? It is easy to say “all of the above,” but specialists in these subfields often wonder privately what the other specialties are actually there for. For example, “do we really need complex models when greenhouses are so simple?” Or, “We modelers can help paleontologists more than they can help us.” There are many such examples.
The shared vision of this collection of fields, as they stand, has simply not been academic for the most part. Its identity is inextricably bound to the climate fervor itself, which is created and fanned by politicians and media through relentless promotion, torrents of funding, and the punishing of nonconforming scientists. It is unclear what defines climate science as a whole academically, let alone what climate is in and of itself. No, we don’t even have a coherent, physically based, definition for climate, let alone climate change. That is not because we can’t recognize change, but we do not know what parts of the endless, ongoing ubiquitous change actually count. This is as deep a problem as there is in modern science. All we have are ad hoc definitions guarded from scientific criticism by ignorant followers of Eris. Those followers call this settled science.
Hollow Victories
The dogmatists and followers of Eris have destroyed the collegial atmosphere among scientists, and they push for scientists on the wrong side of their dogma to be treated as enemies of the state, as we have all recently witnessed. Science, as a whole, has been damaged by them. Because of them, climate science remains frozen and deeply flawed with no way to grow up, despite avalanches of funding thrown at it. Money is not enough. Academic freedom sometimes seems like a gratuitous anachronism, but climate science is the very thing it was made for. Fortunately, some academic organizations, such as the American Meteorological Society and the University of Delaware, have taken a principled position on this. But others seem to have wilted. Modern universities and academic institutions are not as independent as we would like to believe. They live on grants and government funding.
Eristic methods have proven most effective politically. But the political victories of those employing them are hollow. They cannot ultimately defeat the scientists opposed to their dogma because those scientists have never been playing a political game, no matter how much dogmatists rant and flail otherwise. They easily push us out of political and popular discourse, but Nature is the final judge. On that, they are way over their heads. No eristically-charged hyper-politics can ever trump Nature. If it is not already obvious to you that the dogmatists have egg on their faces because of this, hold on, Nature has more coming. Eventually stonewalling with, “What egg on my face?” will only leave the wider public laughing at them even more than they already are.
There is no justification for acting like vicious badgers toward scientists. The response of some GWPF scientists to the climate orthodoxy shows that scientists do not need to be paid to have reason to question the climate orthodoxy. Its positions are scientifically very weak, not strong, and it is the dogmatists that are responsible for that weakness. If they want to employ the credibility of science to support their agendas, they must learn to treat scientists holding contrary views in a credible manner. Such scientists have an important and respected role to play in advancing science. Dogmatists, of course, don’t easily change, so this stalemate may well continue until intelligent laymen have had enough and push them off the stage. Meanwhile, we are still here, and we are not going anywhere.
Dr. Christopher Essex is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario. He is a former director of its Theoretical Physics Program.
The points he makes about how climate science does not really exist as a discipline back up something I have long argued. What is called “climate science” is really no more than a collection of other disciplines that have been brought together to tackle what has been deemed politically to be a problem.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Reblogged this on JunkScience.com.
It sometimes feels like we are just peasants throwing firebrands at the stonework of a castle inhabited by the very arrogant. This behemoth just seems to trundle on and on while anybody with half a brain can see the AGW position is quite ridiculous as shouted by celebrities, politicians and pseudo intellectual hobgoblins.
I constantly scan all of the media hoping to come across that killer discovery that totally trounces the AGW hysteria but sadly it only comes in little bits and pieces. I despair for my children having to make their way in a world built on deception and lies but “science” has been hijacked by the political class of the left and extreme left and is being used to destroy the very world that has brought mankind so far.
But, as Churchill famously said, never give and never give up because they have only won when you surrender. Thanks to people like Paul here and many others who fight back everyday and in every way we can stop this. I do my little bit by educating people about the contradictions and uncertainties in the AGW narrative. The Eris bunch always try and tangle us up in stupid bits of minutiae like the Lilliputians did with Gulliver but we see their stupid debating tricks for what they are and beat them to death at their own game now.
Onward and upward men, victory is certain and logic will once again prevail.
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Yes just cos our replies are polite, considered, not snarky, sweary, not threatening direct action, that does not mean that our anger with Greebblob is not massive.
As many millions and millions of people freeze, global warming fades.
Boston, which is very liberal, has been hammered this year. The liberal belief we are roasting to death continues despite this but this is just Year 2 of global cooling. It is going to be much colder in the future due to a drop in solar activity.
“I constantly scan all of the media hoping to come across that killer discovery that totally trounces the AGW hysteria”
There are plenty of quotes out there that could and should do the trick – most of them just simple common sense, but I fear that is beyond the comprehension of those pushing the hysteria. Then there are those that may even know they are pushing lies and don’t care because they’re in it for the money – i.e., if the hysteria stopped, what would happen to the wind turbine, solar, and carbon capture industries?
The uneducated working for the media seem to think that you can have an “election” among scientists about man made climate change. Unfortunately the reality of science is that you need only one man to get it right….
Reblogged this on the WeatherAction News Blog and commented:
A good read. Thanks for sharing Paul.
There are politicians who could do a lot of damage to the advancement of climate science.
In particular, the recent attack on NASA by a leading Republican was unfortunate.
I offer for your consideration a paper by Stephens et al (2012).
In 2012 an update was published in Nature Geoscience on the subject of uncertainties in the observations of solar and terrestrial energy flows (radiative flux). The authors stated:
Quote:
The net energy balance is the sum of individual fluxes. The current uncertainty in this net surface energy balance is large, and amounts to approximately 17 Wm–2. This uncertainty is an order of magnitude larger than the changes to the net surface fluxes associated with increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (Fig. 2b). The uncertainty is also approximately an order of magnitude larger than the current estimates of the net surface energy imbalance of 0.6 ±0.4 Wm–2 inferred from the rise in OHC. The uncertainty in the TOA net energy fluxes, although smaller, is also much larger than the imbalance inferred from OHC.
End of quote
Take note that these authors state that the net energy imbalance is 0.17% of downwelling solar energy (340 W m-2). Also, the uncertainty is 28 times greater than the net energy imbalance.
Then work out for yourself: What would be the temperature rise if the net energy imbalance is 0.5 +/-0.4 W-2? (This figure takes account of all aerosols and water vapor and feedbacks.)
Since the 0.5 W m-2 is entirely LW radiation, the net energy imbalance is equivalent to a perturbation at the surface of 0.5 W m-2
This compares with IPCC AR5 best future estimate where 3.7 W m-2 for a doubling of CO2 translates to 3.2 C increase. Thus 0.5 W-2 translates to 0.43 C increase. Lowest AR5 estimate 3.7 W m-2 increase translates to 2.1 C and for 0.5 W m-2 translates to 0.28 C.
Comparing with the past rise in CO2 from 1850 to 2014 (400/285) 40%, we have 1.7 W m-2 and 0.8 C increases.
*** If present net imbalance is 0.5 W -2 we should get a decline in temperature of 0.24 C which may account for the hiatus.***
You can get this from NASA and JPL etc. but you won’t get anything like it from the modelers or from the IPCC.
As it stands at the moment until Mr Obama’s disciplinary committee mobilizes, NASA and its sister scientific organizations are our best source of climate data and analysis.
If NASA were to withdraw from climate science or if NASA and other government scientists are muzzled by this new committee established by the President, we would be at the mercy of any scientist who wishes to decide upon his conclusion and then work backwards to fudge the data.
We should be rallying to the defense of NASA and so should the senator who told NASA they should get out of climate studies and stick to space exploration.
The irony is that only NASA can tell us if the hiatus is due to increased cloudiness related to increased penetration into the atmosphere of galactic cosmic rays resulting from the reduced activity of the Sun. Even more ironic is the fact that NASA’s Voyager spacecraft discovered the properties of the local interstellar cloud (LIC) through which the solar system is passing. The cloud is composed of cosmic rays, actually particles, not rays. The muons are the energetic particles that provide cloud condensation nuclei especially over areas of the ocean where the air becomes supersaturated but there is a dearth of condensation nuclei.
Let us praise and support NASA.
Disclaimer: As an M.S. student the author received free LANDSAT and ASTER imagery acquired by NASA satellites. Neither the author or any member of his family has ever been employed by NASA or received grants for research from NASA
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References with many authors associated with NASA or JPL and similar.
Graeme L. Stephens et al, An update on Earth’s energy balance in light of the latest global observations. Nature Geoscience Vol. 5 October 2012
Click to access 2012_EBupdate_stephens_ngeo1580.pdf
Note 1: OHC = Ocean Heat Content; TOA = top of the atmosphere (troposphere)
An update was published later by Loeb et al. adjusting net energy imbalance to 0.5 W-2.
Quote:
Norman G. Loeb, John M. Lyman, Gregory C. Johnson, Richard P. Allan, David R. Doelling,Takmeng Wong, Brian J. Soden and Graeme L. Stephens.
Observed changes in top-of-the-atmosphere radiation and upper-ocean heating consistent within uncertainty. (Nature Geoscience Vol 5 February 2012)
URL: http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/~sgs02rpa/PAPERS/Loeb12NG.pdf
Even James Hansen was involved in reducing the estimated net energy imbalance.
Hansen et al. (2011) Earth’s energy imbalance and implications, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 11, 13421-13449, 2011). URL:
Click to access acp-11-13421-2011.pdf
NASA has cooked the books, changing the warmer past of the 1930’s into colder weather via computer tricks. So it appears like we are hotter and hotter when this is most certainly is not happening.
HAHAHA…I like the sentence in the above article: ‘Climate science is frozen…’
Reblogged this on 4timesayear's Blog.
In the seventies, as a research climatologist I and others were all convinced of the imminent ice age. Of course we had no real evidence. But we probably had more evidence than the present prime ministers advisers.