I am not a physical scientist: my research training is in clinical epidemiology. And I see enough bad papers, have read enough skewed data from big pharma, to have a certain skepticsim about funding and money. Funding is not only the companies. It comes from governments. And… having worked with both, the governmental agencies are more controlling than the pharmaceutical compaines — or at least the ones I have worked with.

THough you have not lived until you have had to put in a three paragraph boilerplate because your project uses tools developed in Harvard unter World health auspices but funded by the US government and five big drug companies… in this case a paper I am the main author on [1].

But climate change.. with the IPCC meeting next year, is based on assumptions that can be challenged. But those who do, such as Curry, are shunned.

This debate will be conducted on the basis that there is a known, mechanistic relationship between the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and how world average temperatures will rise.

Unfortunately, as Curry has shown, there isn’t. Any such projection is meaningless, unless it accounts for natural variability and gives a value for ‘climate sensitivity’ —i.e., how much hotter the world will get if the level of CO2 doubles. Until 2007, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gave a ‘best estimate’ of 3°C. But in its latest, 2013 report, the IPCC abandoned this, because the uncertainties are so great. Its ‘likely’ range is now vast — 1.5°C to 4.5°C.

This isn’t all. According to Curry, the claims being made by policymakers suggest they are still making new policy from the old, now discarded assumptions. Recent research suggests the climate sensitivity is significantly less than 3?C. ‘There’s growing evidence that climate sensitivity is at the lower end of the spectrum, yet this has been totally ignored in the policy debate,’ Curry told me. ‘Even if the sensitivity is 2.5?C, not 3?C, that makes a substantial difference as to how fast we might get to a world that’s 2?C warmer. A sensitivity of 2.5?C makes it much less likely we will see 2?C warming during the 21st century. There are so many uncertainties, but the policy people say the target is fixed. And if you question this, you will be slagged off as a denier.’

Curry added that her own work, conducted with the British independent scientist Nic Lewis, suggests that the sensitivity value may still lower, in which case the date when the world would be 2?C warmer would be even further into the future. On the other hand, the inherent uncertainties of climate projection mean that values of 4?C cannot be ruled out — but if that turns out to be the case, then the measures discussed at Paris and all the previous 20 UN climate conferences would be futile. In any event, ‘the economists and policymakers seem unaware of the large uncertainties in climate sensitivity’, despite its enormous implications.

Meanwhile, the obsessive focus on CO2 as the driver of climate change means other research on natural climate variability is being neglected. For example, solar experts believe we could be heading towards a ‘grand solar minimum’ — a reduction in solar output (and, ergo, a period of global cooling) similar to that which once saw ice fairs on the Thames. ‘The work to establish the solar-climate connection is lagging.’

One of the men in my church is a geochemist. He analyzes ice cores from Antarctica. Joys of living in the Southernmost University town in the Anglosphere. This work costs significant money, and requires significant state resources. And this leads to bias, and can lead to corruption.

So I am cautious. I look at the pretty graphs (these are taken from Watt’s up with That). The author of this concludes:

Correlation is not causation, but many, if not all, of man’s worst times since the last glacial maximum occur during colder and dryer periods. Often these times were made worse by warfare as in the Greek Dark Ages, the sacking of Rome, the collapse of the Akkadian Empire, etc. The colder and more arid climate could have been part of the cause of the wars. We go to war when we are starving and thirsty. More importantly, I was unable to find evidence of a crisis that was due to warming.

Given that man-made Carbon Dioxide is a very recent phenomenon, the radical climatic changes before 200 years ago cannot be attributed to man’s influence. They must be natural. The recent warming of 0.85°C from 1880 to 2012 is pretty small compared to other temperature changes in the Holocene. It is clear from history that natural forces can cause significant climate changes. It is also clear that droughts are usually associated with colder periods, not warmer periods. Some climate changes are probably due to variations in the Earth’s orbit, but some might be due to variations in TSI (total solar irradiance) or other solar influences. How much is due to nature and how much is due to man is unknown.

Call me skeptical, but I would rather be warm than cold. I won’t buy a house below sea level in South Dunedin, regardless of sea level: the winter storms have been vicious, and the dunes are thinner. But I don’t think my decade in the south is a long enough time line to predict.
And I will not panic on the cues of the IPCC meeting. Our models here too prone to error. THere are enough real problems in the world. I will not worry about those things I cannot change. There is enough that I can do and should care about to worry about shadows and the fevered dreams of computers set up by skewed on purpose.

_______________-
1. Link is to pubmed. Paper is behind a paywall.