Caleb Rossiter: Politiek dóór en dóór correct en tóch bestrijder van klimaathysterie

Een aanhanger van radicaal links deserteert.

Eerder schreef ik over Caleb Rossiter, een wiskundige en statisticus, die werd geëxcommuniceerd door zijn voormalige geestverwanten van de linkse denktank, 'Institute for Policy Studies', omdat hij kritiek had op hun geloof in de opwarmingsorthodoxie en hun streven om Afrika dure en inefficiënte, duurzame energie op te dringen.

In mijn stukje werd een overzicht gegeven van de reacties op deze affaire van een aantal internationaal bekende klimaatsceptici. Maar de inhoudelijke opvattingen van Rossiter bleven buiten beeld. Vandaar onderstaande aanvulling.

Rossiter was politiek correct tot op het bot:

“I’ve spent my life on the foreign-policy left. I opposed the Vietnam War, U.S. intervention in Central America in the 1980s and our invasion of Iraq. I have headed a group trying to block U.S. arms and training for “friendly” dictators, and I have written books about how U.S. policy in the developing world is neocolonial ...”

Maar ten aanzien van de klimaatorthodoxie neemt hij een kritisch standpunt in.

Onder de titel, 'Fired for ‘Diverging’ on Climate: Progressive Professor’s fellowship ‘terminated’ after WSJ OpEd calling global warming ‘unproved science’, publiceerde de 'The Hockey Schtick' een drietal van zijn OpEd's. Ze geven een goed beeld van de klimaatdiscussie en de politisering daarvan en zijn bijzonder toegankelijk geschreven.

Ik pik er een aantal passages uit.

The Debate is finally over on “Global Warming” – Because Nobody will Debate

I am deserting from the Climate War. I will never write another climate article or give another climate talk, and I’ll bite my tongue and say oooooooooooom when I hear or see the sort of exaggerations and certainties about the dangers of heat-trapping gasses that tend to make my blood boil at their absurdity. For a decade I’ve been a busy soldier for the scientific method, and hence a “skeptic” to climate alarmism. I’ve said all I think and know about this repetitive, unresolveable topic. I’ll save hundreds of hours a year for other pursuits! ...

The believers in human–induced catastrophic climate change, strongly represented among the liberal and radical left of American and international politics, have won the mainstream media and government battle for the conventional wisdom, but lost the war for policy change. None of the governmental and few of the institutional and individual actors who claim to fear climate change will take real steps to reduce their use of energy, choosing instead to put on phony shows of “green-ness” and carbon-trading shell games. So it’s over, on both fronts. ...

I never expected to be in the Climate War. I have enough wars to fight as an anti-imperialist and an activist supporting development and democracy in Africa against a U.S. policy of backing dictators and American corporations. Only by chance did I get drafted for climate duty.  About 10 years ago, when a graduate student in my class on international research statistics wrote a required analysis of any peer-reviewed study in the field, she chose a journal article on some aspect of climate science.  Her paper reported data and conclusions about human-induced global warming that were so weak and illogical in their own terms that I gave her a poor grade, noting: “You can’t have read this study carefully.” She protested, and brought me the article, and indeed I saw that one of the most respected names in climate science and climate policy was writing flights of fancy and getting them published in refereed journals. I raised her grade, of course, but not all the way to an A, because she had been so smitten with the credibility of the author and the journal that she forgot to check his logic. ...

When the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) butchers basic statistical concepts in its findings and its charts; when students call on their universities to divest from energy companies and their presidents argue financial impact but proffer the assumption that greenhouse gasses are a threat to survival; when advocates of African development call for the World Bank to block energy projects; or when the Nation magazine publishes a call to lower the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 400 parts per million to 300, which would require an end to all world industry for 100 years, and has a picture of the globe on its cover with the caption, “It’s not warming, it’s dying,” I become a man on the verge of doing something I’ll certainly regret. ...

I don’t want go raving around, making absurd statements like President Obama, UN Secretary General Ban, or World Bank President Kim. Obama has long been delusional on this issue, speaking of a coming catastrophe and seeing himself as King Canute, stopping the rise in sea-level.  But he really went off the chain in his state of the union address this year. “For the sake of our children and our future” he issued an appeal to authority with no authority behind it:

We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science and act before it's too late.

There is no judgment of science, overwhelming or other, that human-induced warming has led to any of the events cited. In fact, there is little conclusive science on the causes of these extreme events at all, except to say that like their predecessors at earlier times in recorded history, they require rare coincidences in many weather building blocks and are unpredictable.

Ban, in a speech on the “Threat of Climate Catastrophe,” recently warned that “if we continue along the current path, we are close to a 6 degree increase. You all know the potential consequences:  a downward global spiral of extreme weather and disaster; reversals in development gains; increases in displacement; aggravated tensions over water and land; fragile States tipping into chaos.”  Actually, the IPCC’s models, which are fundamentally mathematical data-fitting exercises with little real-life scientific basis, predict a 4 degree rise at most over 100 years, but actual temperatures have been running at about one-third of that rate in the 30 years since the models first made that prediction. 

Kim tells us: “If we do not act to curb climate change immediately we will leave our children and grandchildren an unrecognizable planet.” That’s sort of like the CRU’s David Viner saying in 2000, a decade before two winters of dramatic snowfall on England’s green and pleasant land: “Children just aren't going to know what snow is.” ...

“The debate is over on Global Warming.” That statement has been popular for 25 years with a group I call the catastrophists. During this period they have held true to their claim, consistently refusing to engage in debate, as opposed to polemics.  As a result, the catastrophists have perversely made it true for all of us, as not just public discourse but scientific inquiry, not just interpretive models and statistical studies but the basic data itself, about human influence on global climate have all been hopelessly politicized in a scurry for money, loyalty, and reputation. Finally, the catastrophists are right: the debate is over, because the fundamental elements of a useful debate are lacking. ...

Catastrophists have taken over the workings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body comprised not of scientists, but of governments. The IPCC was formed in 1988 not to test the assumption that emissions were driving heat and heat was driving dangerous “climate change,” but to broadcast it. The IPCC was supposed to be the gold standard for climate claims, but as it become a politicized forum, pushing out scientists who were frustrated by the way careful discussions of findings and theories in its working papers were distilled into political alarms in the summary materials used by politicians and the press. 

The IPCC uses tricks that scientists and statisticians rage about, almost like a mimicking of the classic text, How to Lie with Statistics. For example, the IPCC claims “90 percent certainty” in its attribution of most of the warming of the past 50 years to human causes. All scientists know that using this phrase implies that a statistical test has been performed on random data, leaving only a ten percent chance that the conclusion is incorrect. But there is no testing, and there are no statistics, involved in the IPCC’s statement -- just a number pulled from thin air. 

The IPCC also featured a misleading trend line chart in its latest report, in which convenient starting points and different time periods were used to show a constantly “accelerating” change in temperature when there was no true acceleration. The chart was eventually pulled, but the IPCC’s favorite physicist, catastrophist guru James Hansen, continues to use similar tricks in showing temperature and shifts in number of hot days, comparing different time periods of different lengths. 

The IPCC's tricks show that it is too politicized to trust.In addition to its repeated claims about the recent number of “hottest years on record” it has reversed its earlier judgment that proxy data like tree rings showed that global average temperature was much higher just a few hundred years ago, during the Medieval Warming period. In either case, the proxy data is so rough that nothing conclusive or meaningful can be said about past temperatures at anywhere near the scale of accuracy we use today, but the reversal was politically significant. 

The reversal resulted from a concerted campaign by catastrophists who saw that the Medieval warming might imply that the cooling afterwards was an oscillation, caused by nothing but the natural regression to a long-term mean. That, in turn, might imply that the recent warming is just another natural counter to that, without the need for SUV’s to explain it. The reversal was fraudulent in two ways: technical, by using data manipulation and ignoring error margins to create a “hockey stick” that shows a recent spike up in temperature (the stick’s blade) after a thousand year flat-line (its handle), and theoretical, by arguing that logically the recent increase from a flat-line, even if true, is somehow evidence of human cause.

Finally, the IPCC is flat out wrong about the computer models of the atmosphere that sit at the core of its claim that the recent correlation of carbon dioxide levels and temperatures is a causal relationship. (Note that the models say nothing useful about the effects of temperature on weather events, which is the holy grail of catastrophists.  Those claims are made from statistical studies of the frequency of rare events, are handicapped by poor data for the past, and are generally inconclusive even in their own terms.) ...

As a statistician who teaches about the fundamental uncertainties of global climate models and the difficulty of finding data series that are good enough and long enough to find a recent trend in extreme weather and sea levels, I have for years scoffed at claims that “the debate is over.” The climate system is so complex and chaotic, and its many interactions so poorly understood on so many time scales, that I more think that there is little useful information with which to begin, let alone end, a debate. 

“Anti-intellectual, and anti-science,” I would complain, as the catastrophists dominated mainstream debate, turning the noble scientific title of “skeptic” into the horrific libel of being a “denier” of a coming Holocaust.  At least I could be thankful that the domination of mainstream and leftist debate did not translate into domination of policy.  Both rich and poor countries continue to talk down fossil fuels while using them every chance they get, because these low-cost forms of energy have been the source of the economic growth and longer life expectancy the world has experienced in two dramatic waves: the industrialization of Europe, the United States and Japan in the 19th century and the industrialization of Korea, China, India, and others in Asia and to a lesser extent in Latin America and Africa in the 20th century. 

Lees verder hier.

En zo gaat Caleb Rossiter nog lang door. Zijn OpEd's zijn zeer de moeite waard voor klimatofielen van alle gezindten. Hij geeft ook klimaatsceptici vegen uit de pan - m.i. ten onrechte. Zij zijn bovendien goed toegankelijk voor niet–ingewijden, die in kort bestek willen weten waar het in de klimaatdiscussie om draait.

Voor mijn eerdere DDS–bijdragen zie hier.