Climate of fear

From AJS.COM

Climate of fear was the title of an April 12, 2006 opinion piece by Richard Lindzen in the Wall Street Journal about the suppression of the research of those who did not accept the theory of anthropogenic (that is to say, man-made) global climate change.

I've been interested in this area for some years, since a friend of mine told me that his research funding had been cut because his organization had been branded an "enemy of the planet" for suggesting that there was a strong correlation between solar activity and global temperature change, and so Lindzen's article struck home with me.

To clarify my own position on this, and to hopefully answer the questions of those who feel that this is dangerous thinking, here are a few points that you might want to consider:

• The scientific method demands that we assail all theory equally
• Since researchers are often unable to gain funding for research that challenges global warming as a man-made phenomenon, they have three choices. They can:
  • support the established theories to get funding, or
  • leave the field and focus on less controversial topics, or
  • gain funding from biased sources, and thus render their results suspect.
• Because of the financial pressure to support current theory, frequently heard claims of "consensus" amongst the scientific community must be viewed with heavy skepticism.

Climate change is an important phenomenon, and one which the human race cannot afford to ignore. However, it is also an area in which our fears have pushed us to bias our research and politicize science. Hopefully we can continue to do important research while backing off on the politics. Fund the people who wish to disprove current theory, not because you think they are correct, but because that is how science works best.

Global Warming vs. Climate Change

A republican strategist in the U.S. suggested the term "climate change" as a way to cool the debate (no pun intended) around global warming. It's since gained momentum even among groups that don't agree with him. Why? Mostly because the larger issue is that of climate change, and not warming. The Earth will plunge into a catastrophically cold ice age at some point, for example. When studying climate change we must be on the lookout for all sorts of dangerous changes in our environment, and warming is only one of them. The theory of global warming, which was introduced to explain Venus's inhospitable environment in 1970s, is now well established, and while specifics are still argued, almost no one disagrees with the fundamental process any more. The debate is truly about climate change.

Still, I try to say "global warming," when I mean the political debate over the earth getting hotter, and "climate change" when I'm talking about the science of large-scale changes to the climate.

What doesn't get covered?

There are a few topics that I don't think get covered very well at all in the press about climate change. Mostly, these relate to agriculture.

For example, we've been irrigating fields and creating massive ground-cover water vapor that's unassociated with clouds in a permanent and rapidly accelerating pattern for centuries. Given that water is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, why is it that we don't hear about models that take this into account? Clouds are mostly discounted as a static reservoir of water vapor, which is fairly accurate, but ground-cover water vapor is rarely analyzed.

Other agricultural effects include changes to soil composition (and thus heat absorbency), and general changes to the albedo of the Earth.

Further reading

Healthy skepticism (not rabid, and pre-judged anti-global warming) starts with an analysis of what other skeptics have to say:

• Freeman Dyson's Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society — Dyson asserts, "all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. [Computer] models [used to predict climate change] do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in."
• Ronald Bailey's Two Sides to Global Warming — Bailey does an excellent job (circa 2004, so some of this is out of date) of summing up the controversy.
• Willie Soon — His Lessons and Limits of Climate History: Was 20th Century Climate Unusual? (pdf) has a number of interesting observations about the temperature record and its use in discussing current trends. He's also a proponent of the idea that solar effects are largely responsible for warming of the Earth.
• Richard S. Lindzen, Global Warming: The Origin and Nature of the Alleged Scientific Consensus — No review of global warming skepticism would be complete without this article. Lindzen is one of the most widely quoted skeptics in the world. Read what he has to say.

Now that you have some grounding, peruse what the proponents say:

• Real Climate — I don't personally care for the zeal with which this site attacks those who are honestly skeptical about global warming fears. However, they do often shed light on recent research that people are using out-of-context, so their site is worth knowing about.
  • Just be aware of this sort of reporting: "A paper by Stephen Schwartz [...] argues for a CO2-doubling climate sensitivity [...] markedly lower than just about any other published estimate, well below the low end of the range cited by recent scientific assessments (e.g. the IPCC AR4 report) and inconsistent with any number of other estimates. Why are Schwartz's calculations wrong?" Notice that the first question is why this model is wrong, not why it differs from other estimates.
• The current U.S. administration's pressure to produce results favorable to them — As I've said, my primary concern is political pressure being applied to the science. When that pressure is in the direction that I happen to agree with, it doesn't make it any less repugnant.