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This bout of media sensationalism probably didn't surprise the still
small but growing segment of the public that is skeptical about the
legitimacy of global warming hysteria. After all, there are still
many who, against the tide, are unprepared to accept that
governments should be involved in trying to change the world's
climate. And despite the fact that I am not a scientist or climate
specialist of any kind, I am nonetheless entitled to question
whether there is not something to this skepticism, and whether tax
money is being spent prudently.
Canada ratified the Kyoto
Protocol on December 17, 2002 under the then Liberal government.
This program comes with a multi-billion dollar price tag, and
compliance with it would actually reduce future warming by,
according to some, a fraction of one-tenth of a degree Celsius.(1)
The current Conservative government is under heavy pressure to follow suit. One Bloc
Québécois MP even dismissed the government’s last pledge towards new
ecological technologies, arguing that what we want to know is to
what extent greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced for each
dollar spent. Is there really no other way to address the issue?
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Background |
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"I personally cannot in good faith continue
to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated
by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound." –Dr.
Christopher Landsea, on resigning from the IPCC |
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established
by the United Nations in 1988. Its stated aims are to assess
scientific information relevant to 1) human-induced (or
anthropogenic) climate change, 2) the impacts of human-induced
climate change, and 3) options for adaptation and mitigation.(2) Already, if there is no bias against natural causes of climate
change here, a part of the story is missing.
The IPCC has produced so
far three reports (1990, 1995, and 2001). These reports are quite
long (hundreds of pages) and highly technical, thus only experts
read them. Therefore, the UN's IPCC communicates with the public,
policymakers and the press through politically-approved summaries ("Summary
for Policymakers," or "SPM"). My understanding is that SPMs
reflect less emphasis on communicating the basis for uncertainty and
a stronger emphasis on areas of major concern associated with human-induced
climate change.
Dr. Chris de Freitas,
from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, is particularly
critical of this process: "It may seem a paradox but the IPCC
process requires that all the hundreds of participating governments’
representatives agree to the text of IPCC summary reports. A
statement is rejected from SPMs if only one government objects to it.
This results in final reports that are not true representation of
the science as a whole. Most participating governments (e.g. all Annex III countries) have pecuniary interest in supporting the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
objectives (i.e. The 1992 “Rio Treaty”), and the inevitable result
is biased Summary reports."(3)
Dr. Richard Lindzen, an
atmospheric physicist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT), also lead author of a part of the main 2001
IPCC scientific report, commented that “The full IPCC report is an
admirable description of research activities in climate science, but
it is not specifically directed at policy. The 'Summary for Policymakers' is, but it is also a very different document. It
represents a consensus of government representatives (many of whom
are also their nations’ Kyoto representatives), rather than of
scientists. The resulting document has a strong tendency to disguise
uncertainty, and conjures up some scary scenarios for which there is
no evidence.”(4)
Dr. Lindzen gives us an
example of this serious issue: “The summary began with
a zinger – that greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's
atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air
temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise, etc., before
following with the necessary qualifications. For example, the full
text noted that 20 years was too short a period for estimating long-term
trends, but the summary forgot to mention this.”
The House of Lords’
Committee on Economic Affairs also stated in its July 5, 2005 Second
Report titled “The Economics of Climate Change”(5) that “we can see
no justification for this procedure. Indeed, it strikes us as
opening the way for climate science and economics to be determined,
at least in part, by political requirements rather than by the
evidence. Sound science cannot emerge from an unsound process.”(6)
It is this report which issued substantial uncertainties about the
science of climate change that brought Tony Blair’s government to
order the now famous Stern Review, which made headlines worldwide,
while the Lords’ report remained largely unread.
Of course, the
aforementioned scientists may be biased by their own opinions or
personal experiences. But from what we know of politics, which works
on consensus and party lines, we must admit that the possibility
that some serious objections against the theory of human-induced
global warming are being “filtered” is perhaps not as remote as some
would like us to think.
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The Science of Climatology… Alchemy of Our
Time? |
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"Perhaps of even greater significance is the
continuous and profound distrust of science and technology that
the environmental movement displays. The environmental movement
maintains that science and technology cannot be relied upon to
build a safe atomic power plant, to produce a pesticide that is
safe, or even to bake a loaf of bread that is safe, if that loaf
of bread contains chemical preservatives. When it comes to
global warming, however, it turns out that there is one area in
which the environmental movement displays the most breathtaking
confidence in the reliability of science and technology, an area
in which, until recently, no one – not even the staunchest
supporters of science and technology – had ever thought to
assert very much confidence at all. The one thing, the
environmental movement holds, that science and technology can do
so well that we are entitled to have unlimited confidence in
them is forecast the weather – for the next one hundred years!"(7) –Dr. George Reisman, Professor Emeritus of Economics,
Pepperdine University |
Climatology is the study of climate, which is defined as the weather
conditions averaged over a long period of time. It is from this
science that the global warming scenarios that we know of are
produced and disseminated to politicians, the media and the public.
By studying the past and computing relevant data into computerized
complex climate models that mostly rely on computer science,
advanced mathematics and statistical analysis, climatology claims to
have the ability to predict future weather conditions. At this
point, it must be understood that the accuracy of climatology
predictions is necessarily proportionate to the accuracy of the
models used to make the predictions and the data put into them.
Yet, climatology is, by
its very nature, far from being a simple research field. In
opposition to most traditional sciences, it does not stand as a
science by itself and instead encompasses many fields of research;
phenomena of climatological interest which climate models must
integrate include the atmospheric boundary layer, circulation
patterns, heat transfer (radiative, convective and latent),
interactions between the atmosphere and the oceans and land surface
(particularly vegetation, land use and topography), and the chemical
and physical composition of the atmosphere. Related disciplines
include astrophysics, chemistry, ecology, geology, geophysics,
glaciology, hydrology, oceanography, and volcanology(8), not to
mention quantitative methods and relevant computer sciences.
It has been suggested
that the actual climate models are not really exhaustive and cannot
take appropriate account of a few important climate parameters, such
as the Sun’s varying intensity or cloud physics. And to say the very
least, the extent to which climatology can take into account future
technological advances remains questionable.
Nevertheless, the very
nature of climatology leads to another concern: no person on Earth
can claim to be a perfect climatologist, who could have a specialist-level
knowledge of all the relevant disciplines and necessary fields of
research. While this should raise doubts for some, others will note
that it makes climatology findings almost irrefutable. But to paraphrase
Karl Popper, “it began to dawn on me that this apparent strength was
in fact their weakness.”
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Epistemology and the Limits of Science |
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"The more we learn about the world, and the
deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and
articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our
knowledge of our ignorance."(9) –Sir Karl Popper |
While most people hardly ever take the time to reflect about this,
science can not produce absolute and indisputable truth. It rather
provides theories, which remain valid as long as they are not
falsified. In a few cases, such as gravity, a theory may leave the
realm of science and become fact, but global warming scenarios do
not share the same appeasing certainty provided by gravity.
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