More on Global Warming and a riposte to sceptics.

 

This page is by the way of a trial - I am using the “Pages” word processor on my Mac to create this html document, rather than my usual “PageSpinner” program. So the formatting may be a bit different from usual.

 

Back to global warming. The recent release of the Summary for Policy Makers of the Fourth IPCC assessment report (AR4) has created headlines around the world, as it should. The science is now beyond any reasonable argument. People in the UK would certainly agree, even though today there has been something of a winter snowstorm, generally the winter has been preternaturally mild, confirming most UK residents concerns about climate change. But in New Zealand, until the last couple of weeks, we have had one of the coldest and most stormy springs and early summers for many years, so the impact of global warming seems rather more muted here, though our neighbours across the Tasman, in the grip of a severe drought, might not think so. This is a background to a press release from the so-called New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, a ginger group made up of climate change sceptics, though deniers would be a better word, in New Zealand. They include a chap by the name Augie Auer, a well known TV personality, for many years the TVNZ’s frontline weather man. He is a professional meteorologist, from the USA, who emigrated here some years ago, and was head for a time of the NZ Meteorological Service. He retired in 1998. He has since become well known for his contrarian position on global warming, and his professional credentials obviously give his opinion some force. However the NZ Meteorological Service have since publicly disowned his opinions. This January the NZCSC put out this press release . The basic premise was that, compared with 1998, all subsequent years have been colder worldwide, proving that global warming is not occurring. In addition they suggested that because New Zealand’s climate has been cooler recently, that this adds weight to their argument. I think the absurdity of claiming that the world’s weather somehow revolves around what happens in New Zealand wouldn’t escape most people reading this, except perhaps the most rabidly patriotic New Zealander who thinks everything revolves around NZ!

 

This press release intensely annoyed me, as the basic premise of the argument is so fundamentally flawed, yet perhaps not immediately obvious to many of the people reading their report in the papers in which it was published (this included of course the Dominion Post)

 

I wrote a letter to Dr Augie Auer, this follows.

 

 

 

Dr Augie Auer

The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition

 

 

Dear Augie,

 

Much as I admire your work as a meteorologist and as a TV and radio personality, I feel I must write about your media release (10/1/07) in regard to global warming, and your contention, as a member of the "Climate Science Coalition", that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is not occurring. I protest most strongly against your particular claim derived from the quoted satellite data, that because no year since 1998 has been warmer, this somehow supports the notion that the world is cooling, or is a scientifically valid  argument that AGW is not occurring.

 

One has to wonder why you have chosen 1998 as the particular base year for your comparison, because, as you will be perfectly aware, that particular year was by far the hottest on record. You will know this chart, I have copied it from the  Hadley Centre in the UK. The provisional figure for 2006 is shown in green, it is not as hot as 1998, surprise, but it continues to be hotter than any other annual temperature recorded in the twentieth century, and is the sixth highest ever. 

 

 

 

It is strange, is it not, that the only year that you could have chosen out of all the years graphed in the last 140 years, that might support your argument that the world is cooling, is this particular exceptional year. Disregarding 1998, there is not a single other base year that you could have chosen that would support your argument. Every year from 2001 has been warmer than any other year in the whole of the last century. 

 

Climate change sceptics, such as yourselves, often point out that it is not good science, or good logic for that matter, to use individual instances of extreme weather patterns, record high temperatures, hurricanes, droughts etc. to support the argument for AGW. You are right, it is wrong to do this. But this, unfortunately, is exactly what you and your colleagues are doing in regard to this present press release. You have been highly, and misleadingly, selective in you choice of a "base year" for your arguments, as I am sure you must know, and I consider it simply mischievous to present the arguments you have in the public forum, to pooh-pooh global warming science, and the thousands your science colleagues and researchers around the world who would fundamentally disagree with you, in this way.

 

Here is a chart,  which you may have seen, which is published on the Goddard Space Institute site . It illustrates the global warming in three different latitude bands. What is interesting, and of course has been entirely predicted by climate scientists, is that global warming will be more noticeable in the northern hemisphere. The huge body of oceanic water that constitutes our southerly latitudes, is bound to act as a more effective sink for heat, than in northern regions. These graphs illustrate this effect very well. It is very convenient for your particular argument that we are living in New Zealand, using (abusing really) our recent particular climate experience as some sort of surrogate for global warming science; you would be laughed out of court if you tried to use the recent climatological experience of the UK in the same way.

 

 

 

 

The article I read on the Scoop website kindly provided an  html link to download the figures which you used for your press release, recording lower tropospheric temperatures since 1978, as compared with the mean for 1979 to 1998. At the bottom of the page are three figures, labelled decadal trend, in order, 0.142, 0.212, 0.072, carefully worked out from the measurements provided. The first figure is the increase of global temperatures over this time per ten years, in the world as a whole it was 0.142 deg C, in the northern hemisphere it was 0.212 deg C and in the southern hemisphere 0.072 deg C. Augie, are you trying to pull everyone's legs? Is this some sort of rarified atmospheric academic joke? The very figures by which you set such store ( you say: NSSTC data comes from highly accurate measurements by satellites, correct to one tenths of a degree C ), prove that global warming is real, at 0.142 degrees C each decade, the very opposite of what you are claiming. Even the southern hemisphere has a positive trend. Augie, did your browser cut off the bottom figures? What sort of nonsense are you perpetuating, do you think that your fellow New Zealanders can't read? 

 

 

In other words, your entire press release is a farrago of nonsense, not even backed up by the very organisation to which you have turned for your figures. In addition you are entirely disregarding, and denigrating, the other august bodies that are trying their hardest to make sense of what is happening in the world, including the Goddard Space Centre and the Hadley Climate Centre, and the many highly qualified scientists who work for them.

 

I trust we will see a public retraction of your inaccurate and misleading press release - I look forward to seeing it soon, and I am sending a copy of this letter to the Scoop web site where I found your press release, I am a little bit surprised that they have published your travesty of scientific process. 

 

On a much more personal note, Augie, I am aware that one of your associates in the NZ Climate Change Coalition is Owen McShane. I am happy to tell you this in all sincerity, that any person associating himself with this miserable specimen of humanity is not likely to be taken very seriously by me. It was Owen McShane who stated publicly, in an article in the Dominion Post, " I don't think we should care a stuff about future generations. They can take care of themselves. It's immoral to care for someone who hasn't been born yet. " This breathtakingly arrogant and amoral view of his, and our place, in our world, has no place in any ethical world that I wish to belong to. Augie, what is the point of us doing anything in this world, anything at all, if we don't have some concern for those that come after us?

 

Yours faithfully,

 

Dr John K Monro

67 Waipapa Road

Hataitai,

Wellington

04 3862441

 

Children playing, Days Bay, Port Nicholson

 

 

 

 

The Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC

 

 

I can’t let the opportunity slip to comment on the the recently released Summary for Policy Makers of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). My favourite science-based site, Real Climate, has a review of the AR4 report here . There doesn’t seem to be anything revolutionary about this report, but as compared with the previous assessment report, the science is much stronger. The evidence for observed climate change being due to anthropogenic global warming is now greater than 90% certain. Similar confidence in the so-called hockey-stick reconstruction of the climate over the last one thousand years is also much higher. In regard to sea-level rises, the IPCC remains quite conservative, with predictions of between 18 to 59 cms, depending on the emissions scenario used, the upper limit is in fact slightly lower than that predicted in the AR3. The reason for this is that the IPCC have been reluctant to make predictions of how much melting in the Greenland and and Antarctic ice caps there will be, even though they acknowledge this as a distinct possibility. However, this conservatism has been commented on quite extensively since the publication of the AR4, and there are quite a number of climate scientists who can see much  higher rates of sea-level rises. For instance, this Harvard University news item , reports the Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography, James McCarthy, as criticising the IPPC AR4 for its underestimate of sea level rises; he points out estimates of rises of between 50 to 140 cms if glacier and ice cap melts are taken into account.

 

The Real Climate site will continue to post observations on the AR4 over the coming weeks, so interested persons reading this should keep an eye on the real climate site.

 

In regard to the political ramifications of the AR4, things proceed as per usual. In Australia, John Howard has made it perfectly clear that coal exports will proceed as usual, the Howardian logic of this being is that it is vitally important for Australia to continue to earn money and gain employment from a resource, even if is going to severely adversely affect the country’s agriculture and water supplies over the coming years . But in compensation, John Howard has announced a large funding package for an intensive investigation of human physiology, that will allow future residents of Australia to thrive on eating and drinking money.

 

In the US, Energy Secretary Sam Boardman on behalf of the Bush administration played down the significance of the IPCC findings “We are a small contributor when you look at the rest of the world” he said. Which is quite touching really. All us non-US types look at that country with awe and respect, and are familiar with the pride that American’s feel in the size and wealth of the US, so to find a patriotic US citizen downplaying this aspect of American influence is something of a refreshing change. And of course he is right, American only contributes about one quarter of all the world’s global emissions of CO2, but Sam Boardman shouldn’t be so diffident of admitting that America does this with only about one twentieth of the world’s population, it’s something that the rest of the planet truly wonders over.

 

And in the European Union, which is often praised for its efforts in increasing energy efficiency and use of public transport and renewable energy resources, some major players in the car industry there are somewhat blotting the continent’s copy book. The EU have been trying to agree a directive to reduce car CO2 emissions by about 25% over the next six years, from an average of about 160 g/Km to 120 gKm. French and Italian manufacturers have made great strides in reducing their average emissions over the years, but German manufacturers, with their larger and more performance orientated vehicles are bridling at this, and the figure was relaxed to 130g/Km. Even then the European Automobile Manufacturers Association says this 130g/Km is still to high (strict) and it wasn’t the most cost-effective way of reducing CO2 emissions and it would lead to a loss of jobs and manufacturing industry. How or why this is so was not elaborated. The German government are backing their manufacturers so the regulations stipulate different emissions targets for different sizes of vehicles, which of course is seen as unfair to manufacturers of smaller vehicles. At least we will be able to sit for a while in our Mercedes car, with the the air conditioning on, insulated from increasing warmth around us. It will be a luxurious, but constricted,  life-style.

 

And in New Zealand, clean, green New Zealand? An outline energy strategy has just been released, supposedly in order for us to make a start in addressing energy issues and climate change. One would think that this being so, there would at least be some target suggested for cutting CO2 emissions, including possibly a graph of our increasing emissions in the last few years, or some statistics related to our greenhouse gases, but you’d be wrong, no such detail is given. I will comment on this document later, as I intend to make a submission, and I will post it on my website, but it reads as if this country has been in a state of suspended animation for the last thirty years, for instance Denmark had more specific measures and aims in energy efficiency and conservation in the 1970s than New Zealand does now. In addition, the government is bending over backwards to encourage renewed exploration of the seas around this country for oil and gas drilling. If the government and our society were truly committed to dealing with global warming, then the last thing we should be doing is drilling for more oil and gas, the logic is utterly inescapable, but the logic is utterly unacceptable.

 

That 25% cut in CO2 emissions is not going to be anything like adequate to deal with the situation we now face, in fact all advanced countries, if they are going to allow development in the poorer countries, will need to reduce their total emissions by about 90% - this includes power generation, transport, concrete manufacture and air travel. A tall order, but if you read George Monbiot’s book Heat , nothing less than this is really going to save the planet, and the sooner we cut down substantially on our emissions the easier the problem becomes, the longer the delay, the greater and the steeper cuts required. (I will review Heat shortly.)

 

These four examples of cowardly inaction, and this is basically what it is, prove just how difficult it is going to be for the world to take decisive action on global warming. I would like to believe it is possible that we will, eventually, in the nick of time, and by the skin of our teeth, deal with this matter, but my understanding of history and of human nature and politics and business leads me to suggest that we won’t, that our course is with a destiny that is undoubtedly of our making, but certainly not of our choosing.

Tuvalu today, Auckland tomorrow.