Three facts about climate change

With all the headline-grabbing alarmism, how can one form a view on the myriad alleged threats posed by climate change? By taking a moment to reflect on just three facts.

Fact one:The climate – average weather over a 30-year period – has been in a state of change ever since the planet acquired an atmosphere. Change is what the climate does.

As Victor Frankenstein said while climbing the Montanvert glacier in 1818: "We are but clouds that veil the midnight moon, nought may endure but Mutability".

Frankie got it in one. But a deep anthropocentric yearning for climate 'stability' still persists today, a reluctance to acknowledge its changing and unpredictable character.

Yet we no longer live in the Garden of Eden. We live on a dynamic planet. Terra firma is actually a wobbling and spinning sphere with a liquid outer core moving through space at a combined speed of 113, 277 kilometres an hour (for a person sitting in a chair on the equator); and travelling 940 million kilometres in its annual orbit of the Sun.

Changes in the Earth's orbit contributed to the accumulation of two-plus kilometres of ice over much of North America and Siberia 12,000 years ago, mammoths in Mexico and so on.

Today's biggest problems, however, are not with the laws of astrophysics, but with the lawlessness of climate theory - and our political class.

It is too keen onthe Goldilocks principle - one of the great cons of pseudo-science - the notion that a climate future just right for everyone everywhere is somehow achievable, if only we could control the planet's thermostat.

Climatologists like her too. They have, according to blogger Max Anacker,

adopted the Goldilocks "just right" principle for our climate, with the premise that it was "just right" before we started to interfere with it. It is already no longer "just right" and getting less so following an accelerated trend, due to human greenhouse gas emissions. Some suggest that the Goldilocks "just right" level of atmospheric CO2 was between 280 and 300 ppmv (19th century level) with anything over 450 ppmv (0.045% of the earth's atmosphere, currently 0.04%) - or even 350 ppmv - no longer "just right" – but downright "dangerous".Fairy tales are nice, aren't they?'

Wondering about all the smiles on the road to Paris Climat 2015, unlike the gloomy mood at Copenhagen 2009? It is not just because facts no longer matter. That girl is strutting her stuff again, this time on another catwalk.

Activists and media gurus have twigged that dire news on climate change apparently provokes 'dissonance-driven' resistance, aka scepticism. (Mr Alvin Stone, media and communications manager at UNSW's ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, previously media communicator with WWF- Australia, is not one of them – as we shall see.)

Their Goldilocks-strategy is one that "conveys neither too much alarm nor too little but instead evokes just the right mix of fear and hope to coax the democratic process into rational engagement with the facts."

So be wary of this blonde bombshell. As Dan Kahan warns here: "her appearance -- the need to engage in ad hoc "fine tuning" to fit a theory to seemingly disparate observations -- is usually a sign that someone doesn't actually have a valid theory."

Fact two: Computer simulations are what-if projections, not what-will predictions based on established and verifiable laws of climate change.

The truth – tweet it far and wide - is that models cannot predict the Earth's climate, nor accurately simulate known patterns of natural variability. They have no genuine predictive power.

In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – before a bout of collective amnesia - actually acknowledged that given the climate is a 'coupled non-linear chaotic system', 'long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.' (Third Assessment Report, p774)

NASA and others, however, still push the 'predictive' narrative here, claiming scientists have 'some confidence in a climate model's ability to predict the future.'

And if there is a 'year or years where Earth's average temperature is steady or even falls'? Its scientists, bless them, still expect – 'with some confidence' – the overall trend to be…UP.

Richard Lindzen, MIT Professor of Atmospheric Physics for three decades, had this to say about the global warming argument:

When it comes to unusual climate (which always occurs some place), most claims of evidence for global warming are guilty of the 'prosecutor's fallacy.' For example this confuses the near certainty that if A shoots B, there will be evidence of gunpowder on A's hand - with the assertion that if C has evidence of gunpowder on his hands then C shot B.

With global warming the line of argument is even sillier. It generally amounts to something like if A kicked up some dirt, leaving an indentation in the ground into which a rock fell and B tripped on this rock and bumped into C who was carrying a carton of eggs which fell and broke, then if some broken eggs were found it showed that A had kicked up some dirt. (2009 PP, slide 31):

Yet such issues have not discouraged modellers, governments and eco-activists eager to re-engineer the global economy and redistribute wealth. Even when climate scientists – like Zurich-based Reno Knutti below – publicly admit model flaws and uncertainties (aka 'challenges') it makes no difference to disciples of the alarmist paradigm.

It is common that more research uncovers a picture that is more complicated; thus, uncertainty can grow with time…..Judging the potential success of such a project is speculative, and it may simply take a long time to succeed. However, if the past is a guide to the future then uncertainties in climate change are unlikely to decrease quickly, and may even grow temporarily….It is likely that impact-relevant predictions, for example of extreme weather events, may be even harder to improve. (Knutti, 2012, page 5)

Professor Andrew Pitman, Director of the UNSW ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, knows all about Knutti's dilemma. He was a lead author on the IPCC 3rd and 4th assessment reports and a review editor of the 5^th report (AR5).

When presenting the UWA Joseph Gentilli Memorial Lecture two years ago, Pitman admitted that researchers face some "truly scary" challenges.

What are the problems ahead?(37.20min.) Cimate science has three problems. The first problem is everything we do is extraordinarily computationally expensive. Not as expensive as the astronomers. We are not as bad as the astronomers yet, but we are working really hard [to get there] (laughter).

Just as a guide, if you divide the globe into one degree-by- one degree cells – about 65,000 cells – and you run it out for 100 years, it means 40,000,000,000,000,000 calculations. If I want to do probability density functions, I have to do this simulation a thousand times and you can do the math.

But what happens if there is a glitch, or if a few of the 65,000 cells have dodgy data or dummy variables.

Practitioners of the black art of climate simulation prefer to keep their views about such matters to themselves, especially after Climategate (here and here).

Exhibit A: A UNSW Newsroom media release of 15 October 2015 on a recent study - 'The multi-millennial Antarctic commitment to future sea-level rise' - warned that "2 degree Celsius warming locks in sea level rise for thousands of years."

It also stated that the study: "predicts how the Antarctic ice-sheet will respond to future atmospheric warming."

But do the ice sheet/shelf computer model simulations used in the above study have predictive power? Can their outcomes be described as genuine predictions?

On the NZ TV Newsworthy program of 15 October, "Professor Tim Naish talks Antarctic Ice Melt", Professor Naish said that:

If global warming is more than 2C, then our study shows that the Antarctic ice sheet will result in a significant amount of sea-level rise (4.27min). Those ice shelves we talked about? It just so happens that 2C is their stability threshold. If we warm the planet to more than 2C then we commit ourselves to many metres of sea-level rise –up to ten metres – if we continue on the business-as-usual scenario.

How did Professor Naish and his team deduce that 2C is the 'stability threshold' of the Antarctic ice shelves? What empirical scientific evidence do they have to support their analogy that ice shelves act like the 'cork-in-the-bottle preventing the Antarctic ice sheet from sliding into the ocean and melting'? How would this analogy work in nature, given that ice sheets and valley glaciers flow by plastic creep – not 'sliding' – and apparently some of the Antarctic ice sheet occupies basins that are below sea level?

Alarmism is easy. Discussing goat-entrails (aka assumptions) in public clearly less so.

Just a few months ago, 20 climate scientists met in San Francisco as part of the SCAR AntClim21 Research Programme. During a discussion of Antarctic and Southern Ocean climate modelling, they noted that:

Evaluating the overall response of the ice sheet under changing climatic conditions is a major challenge….Whilst progress has been made in ice sheet modelling, significant uncertainties in 21^st century projections remain due to potential non-linear feedbacks.

So perhaps the UNSW media release over-egged the alarmist pudding. After all, it appears that more (and more) research is still required 'to gain a better understanding of plausible future trajectories of regional Antarctic climate'.

Fact three: There are only two infallible laws of climate science: (i) the squeaky wheel gets the oil; and (ii) the level of high-anxiety over (allegedly) 'dangerous' anthropogenic climate change increases exponentially with the decline in temporal proximity to the next UN climate conference, ceteris paribus.

Prediction: even if ice flows appear in the Seine later this month, it will be spun as 'consistent with a warming world' to the 50,000 delegates at Folies Climat 2015.

As Copernicus, Galileo and others discovered, dislodging a powerful paradigm is not easy. Especially an apocalyptic one entrenched in the public mind by a frenetic media, a complicit Academy, and a lot of folk dazzled by the loot now accumulating in the UN Green Climate Fund.

Playing atmospheric charades for two decades has been a lot of fun. So has the partying in one exotic location after another – and the endless squabbling about 'climate reparations'. Time now to prepare for the end-game. Will our political class agree to a transfer of wealth unparalleled in history – and underwrite a tsunami of 'climate refugees'?