Yet More Smoke and Mirrors in the Climate Science Game

[Part 2 of a 6 part series examining the so-called “consensus” in the climate science community, the scientists who dare dissent from political correctness and a new, less partisan way to promote rational climate policy]

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In part 1 of this series, it was shown that the November 2009 open letter to the Government of Canada from the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society [CMOS], the Canadian Geophysical Union [CGU], the Canadian Association of Physicists, the Canadian Society of Soil Science and the Canadian Society of Zoologists may not have had much in the way of member support at all. In this part, we try to determine the level of membership support to a CMOS climate science statement that came out in the past month and also investigate membership support behind the open letters of two prominent international organizations. We are told on the CMOS Web site that “Following the [CMOS/CGU] Congress, several delegates met to discuss the presentations they heard. Many of the presentations focused on climate change and these delegates agreed on the following statement.” That statement, linked from a prominent entry on the CMOS “What’s New” Web page (see here), includes unrealistically confident assertions that it is difficult to believe the majority of CMOS members would ever support, even if they had been asked by these “several delegates”. Here is the first:

“Current warming will continue and get worse. Human-made warming, occurring due to increases in carbon dioxide concentration, will likely be irreversible for more than 1,000 years after emissions stop.”

This absolute claim is clearly irresponsible, especially coming from what are supposedly professional scientists. Also, the following statement is odd:

“Water supplies in the Prairies are dwindling and will continue to do so. The Canadian Prairies are susceptible to droughts, which are among the most costly natural disasters in Canada in terms of socio-economic impact.

Yet, ICSC science advisor, Dr. Madhav Khandekar, a CMOS member, former Environment Canada research scientist and extreme weather expert reports, “Prairies are suffering from floods this year, and there was flooding in 2005. Southern Alberta had floods in 2002.” Fellow ICSC science advisor, Dr. Tim Ball, former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg explains further, "The Prairies go through wet and dry cycles; right now they are in a wet cycle. From the end of one drought to the beginning of the next is approximately 17 years on average so add that to the end of the last drought in 2001-2002 and you get the next drought occurring in approximately 2018-2019." So who endorsed this “Statement of Concern by Scientists”? Just “We, the undersigned, …“, with no one at all “undersigned.” All we know is that it was some delegates to the Congress who “feel that an urgent message must be brought to the attention of all Canadians.” Checking the document’s properties reveals its author as being “Gordon McBean”, the Chair of the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Science Board of Trustees and, although it is dated June 4, right after the Congress, the document properties actually list it as being created on June 15. If the “several delegates” who are said to have agreed to this statement highlighted prominently on the CMOS Web site are not identified more specifically than that, then how can the public have confidence that CMOS, a Registered Charity (see Canada Revenue Agency listing here), is not experiencing dominance by a special interest lobby causing organizational ‘mission creep’ into increasingly political lobby efforts? The problem of national and international science bodies, or even small subsets of those groups, endorsing the CO2/dangerous global warming theory without the known support of a majority of their membership, appears to be common. For example, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) and a leading Canadian energy expert, “Archie” Robinson of Deep River, Ontario, explains what happened with a Royal Society (the world's oldest scientific organisation) climate initiative supporting the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report: “the president of the Royal Society of London … drafted a resolution in favour and circulated it to other academies of science inviting co-signing. … The president of the RSC, not a member of the [RSC’s] Academy of Science, received the invitation. He considered it consistent with the position of the great majority of scientists, as repeatedly but erroneously claimed by Kyoto proponents, and so signed it. The resolution was not referred to the Academy of Science for comment, not even to its council or president.” A similar episode happened in the United States and Russia concerning the Royal Society effort and a survey of pronouncements from other science bodies reveals that they are usually just the opinions of the groups’ executives or committees specifically appointed by the executive. The rank and file scientist members are rarely consulted at all. But what about the supposedly authoritarian United Nations IPCC report that constitutes the foundation of most official climate concerns today? Media and politicians tell us that 2,500 official “expert reviewers” who worked with the UN body on its most recent (2007, the fourth) “Assessment Report” (called “AR4”) agreed with its conclusions. Perhaps most importantly, in Chapter 9 of the IPCC Working Group I report (“The Physical Science Basis”, reporting on the extent and possible causes of past climate change as well as future ‘projections’) appears the following assertion: “Greenhouse gas forcing has very likely caused most of the observed global warming over the last 50 years.” Determining how many of the “2500 scientists” are known to actually agree with this statement is difficult, but we do know how many commented on anything in Chapter 9. Sixty-two is the number (see this analysis). The vast majority of the expert reviewers are not known to have examined this or related statements. Instead they would have focused on a page or two in the AR4 report that most related to their specialties, usually having little or nothing to do with greenhouse gases (CO2 or otherwise). And, of those 62 experts who did comment this chapter, the vast majority were not independent or impartial since most were employees of governments that had already decided before the report was written (indeed, as MIT Professor Richard Lindzen, a past IPCC lead author, explains, before much of the research had even begun) that human CO2 emissions are driving us to climate catastrophe. When one eliminates reviewers with clear vested interest, we end up with a grand total of “just seven who may have been independent and impartial”, according to Australian climate data analyst, John McLean (see his report). And, two of those are known to vehemently disagree with the statement. Prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider Dr. Mike Hulme even admits that “only a few dozen experts in the specific field of detection and attribution studies”, not thousands as is commonly asserted by the IPCC and others, “reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate” (p. 10, 11 of Hulme’s April 12, 2010 paper in “Progress in Physical Geography”). To meaningfully assert that there is a consensus in any field, we need to actually have convincing evidence. And the best way to gather this evidence is to conduct unbiased, comprehensive worldwide polls. Since this has never been done in the vast community of scientists who research the causes of global climate change, we simply do not know what, if any, consensus exists among these experts. Lindzen concludes: “there is no [known] consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them.” To date, only one prominent scientific organization that issued statements in support of the CO2/climate crisis hypothesis is known to be taking a more intellectually meaningful path. At the bi-annual congress of the Geological Society of Australia in Canberra this week, a challenge was reported from the membership regarding the accuracy and representativeness of the Society's previously published statement on the global warming issue. Accordingly, and under a new President, the Society now intends to (i) withdraw its previous (alarmist) statement on global warming, and (ii) conduct a poll of its membership of the issue prior to considering reposting the same, an altered or no statement at all on the issue. CMOS, CGU, the RSC and all the rest must do the same or their statements should not be taken seriously. [Coming in Part 3: Examining the contents of open letters from scientific societies about climate change – do they really say what media tell us they say?]