A reader is triggered by my coverage of the Skeptical Inquirer interview with climatologist Michael Mann:
There is a lot of data out there including faked data….there is information like this about global warming:
https://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?id=3
“COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING
MYTH 1: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate.
FACT: The HadCRUT3 surface temperature index, produced by the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office and the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, shows warming to 1878, cooling to 1911, warming to 1941, cooling to 1964, warming to 1998 and cooling through 2011. The warming rate from 1964 to 1998 was the same as the previous warming from 1911 to 1941. Satellites, weather balloons and ground stations all show cooling since 2001. The mild warming of 0.6 to 0.8 C over the 20th century is well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium. The ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas (“heat islands”), which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas (“land use effects”). Two science teams have shown that correcting the surface temperature record for the effects of urban development would reduce the reported warming trend over land from 1980 by half. See here.
There are a couple of points to address here.
- Concerns about fake data are very important, but claims of same must be backed up by evidence, and there is none produced here. As a non-climatologist, I have to depend on the scientists involved to detect any fraud, either through directly checking the measurements, or by the failure of predictions dependent on that faked data not cropping up. As it happens, measurements of increased greenhouse gases appear, to my untrained eye, to be correlating with increasing world-wide temperatures. But to just wave the flag out there without the most serious, sober evidence of same is intellectually unjustifiable; it’s simply waving a red flag to distract from telling problems in their own defenses.
- We’re all aware of the rules of the Internet era – know your sources. Mine are from the science arena, where the entire purpose is to study the nature of reality. My reader cites an organization named Friends of Science. This is from their About Us section:
Our Goal:
To educate the public about climate science and through them bring pressure to bear on governments to engage in public debates on the scientific merits of the hypothesis of human induced global warming and the various policies that intend to address the issue.
Our Opinion:It is our opinion that the Sun is the main direct and indirect driver of climate change.
Friends of Science is a non-profit organization run by dedicated volunteers comprised mainly of active and retired earth and atmospheric scientists, engineers, and other professionals. We have assembled a Scientific Advisory Board of esteemed climate scientists from around the world to offer a critical mass of current science on global climate and climate change to policy makers, as well as any other interested parties. We also do extensive literature research on these scientific subjects. Concerned about the abuse of science displayed in the politically inspired Kyoto protocol, we offer critical evidence that challenges the premises of Kyoto and present alternative causes of climate change.
Of course, there’s their critics. The Deep Climate blog of Canada (Friends of Science is located near Calgary) dug into Friends of Science back in 2009:
Of course, the rest is history, although perhaps not as well known as it should be. Friends of Science went on to become a well-oiled propaganda machine, so to speak, with major projects run by Harris and Morten Paulsen (ex-Fleishman-Hillard). And after a hiatus brought about by closure of Barry Cooper’s “research” conduit at the University of Calgary, Friends of Science has returned with a vengeance. The run up to Copenhagen has seen a cross-Canada tour from contrarian Lord Chrisopher Monckton, as well as a deceptive national radio ad campaign.
Wikipedia, with all the usual caveats about publicly editable material, but also keeping in mind the citations lend it some authority, has this to say:
Friends of Science (FoS) is a Canadian non-profit advocacy organization based in Calgary, Alberta. The organization takes a position that humans are largely not responsible for the currently observed global warming, contrary to the established scientific position on the subject. Rather, they propose that “the Sun is the main direct and indirect driver of climate change,” not human activity. They argued against the Kyoto Protocol.[1] The society was founded in 2002 and launched its website in October of that year.[2][3] They are considered by many to promote climate change denial. They are largely funded by the fossil fuel industry.
[Latter bold mine.] This brings to mind two points. A) Definitive sourcing can be a difficult challenge; if, in fact, the definitive sourcing is all one cares about, then the most sensible approach would be to permit the fossil fuel industry to continue to function, burning more and more fuels that release, and see what happens; and, B) there is taste reminiscent of the tobacco lobby’s defense of the tobacco industry through obfuscation in my mouth. We now know the fundamental dishonesty that took place in order to defend the profits of Big Tobacco, and all of its employees (which is an important point, since we’re really all in this together). That lesson in how entire industries will evade responsibility and engage in dishonesty because of the money involved is always something to keep in mind when evaluating sources and their assertions. However, it does put any industry or company in a bit of a quandary – how can it defend its turf in a responsible manner?
That’s one of the functions of a disinterested observer. In theory, government can fulfill that role, but in practice, agencies responsible for such evaluations are often subject to ‘capture’.
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Source: NASA Global Climate Change
So FoS then makes a series of assertions concerning the accuracy of data. Am I going to rebut these claims? No, I’m a software engineer, and this is deep muck. I did contact a climate scientist of my acquaintance, hoping for some help, but he’s both retired and in the middle of moving his household to a new home, and so he only provided some resources on global temperature. First up is NASA‘s Global Climate Change page, which clearly shows a growth in world temperatures. It also has a spectacular time series from 1884 to 2015, showing temperature changes around the globe. Then there’s NASA‘s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which appears to have quite a few resources.
Finally, for a historical view of climate change, he suggests the American Institute of Physics perspective on the history of climate change. I’ll quote an introductory paragraph.
Tracking the world’s average temperature from the late 19th century, people in the 1930s realized there had been a pronounced warming trend. During the 1960s, weather experts found that over the past couple of decades the trend had shifted to cooling. With a new awareness that climate could change in serious ways, in the early 1970s some scientists predicted a continued gradual cooling, perhaps a phase of a long natural cycle or perhaps caused by human pollution of the atmosphere with smog and dust. Others insisted that the effects of such pollution were temporary, and humanity’s emission of greenhouse gases would bring warming over the long run. All of them agreed that their knowledge was primitive and any prediction was guesswork. But understanding of the climate system was advancing swiftly. The view that warming must dominate won out in the late 1970s as it became clear that the cooling spell (mainly a Northern Hemisphere effect) had indeed been a temporary distraction. When the rise continued into the 21st century, penetrating even into the ocean depths, scientists recognized that it signaled a profound change in the climate system. Nothing like it had been seen for centuries, and probably not for millennia. The specific pattern of changes, revealed in objects ranging from ship logs to ice caps to tree rings, closely matched the predicted effects of greenhouse gas emissions.
No doubt, some are legitimately wondering how long this gentleman has been a member of the Democratic Party. He is a card-carrying, lifelong Republican.
Here’s the real point. Science is a community devoted to the study of reality, where one makes a name for themselves not by going with the flow, but by looking for something out of place, explaining the inconsistencies. Suspicion of some vast conspiracy is nonsensical. It would be found out, if not by people defecting from it, then eventually by simple measurements and failure of predictions. But the measurements, independent of each other, all line up, from the commonly accepted temperature changes to CO2 measurements. Some of the predictions have been confirmed, such as the thinning of the ice cap of Greenland, while the prediction of hurricanes assaulting the American eastern seaboard may still have a ways to go. Given the mixed record and the rising temperatures, I’d put that down to prediction being a hard nut to crack.
So I really have a hard time accepting assertions that the science community is wrong on such an important subject. The “skeptics” don’t operate with the best possible practices; they have motivations ranging from the religious to the financial to disbelieve; and they don’t seem to appreciate that the world changes as time passes, and if we’re disturbing it in some way, then those changes may be traceable to us. It appears that the scientific objections have been robustly rejected, and this is how I expect science to work: assertions made, problems found, adjustments made, more objections, those overcome, and an eventual convergence to a general agreement. That’s what I see.
My congratulations on those who made it to the end of this post 🙂
