AN OPEN LETTER TO THE ROYAL SOCIETY

From Aynsley Kellow [aynsley.kellow@utas.edu.au]

Dear Mr Ward,

I must say I was somewhat amazed at your letter to Nick Thomas of ExxonMobil of 4 September. That such an august institution as the Royal Society is attempting to suppress scientific argument is one thing, and that it relies upon notions of corporate influence that would flunk any reasonable examination in political science yet another.

I could write you a lengthy discourse on what is wrong with your line of reasoning, touching on the $1 billion Exxon is spending on its own corporate response to climate change, the amount it donates to Stanford University alone to research solutions (an order of magnitude larger than that your analysis indicates Exxon provided to organisations you consider 'misinformed' the public), and so on. I will save such an analysis for my own research on the politics of climate science, for which your letter will constitute an excellent example of attempts to suppress dissent.

Instead, let me address the basis of your claims about the IPCC - and here I write as an expert reviewer for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.

You take issue with Exxon's statement that the IPCC relies for its conclusions 'on expert judgment rather than objective, reproducible statistical methods.' You cite a conclusion to Ch12 of TAR stating that 'most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greeenhouse gas concentration.' You do not seem to appreciate that Working Group I adopted quite specific meanings, specified in the Summary for Policy Makers, where expressions such as 'likely' quite explicitly refer to the subjective level of confidence of the Chapter Lead Authors.

'Likely' quite specifically means that the Lead Authors believe there is a 66-90% chance that the science is true. The Exxon statement in its Corporate Citizenship Report that you cite is thus entirely consistent with the IPCC conclusion that you cite.

Sadly, we have now reached the point where the Royal Society is a less reliable source of scientific advice than Exxon Mobil. A sad day indeed.

I am copying this letter to Benny Peiser, who runs an excellent newsletter on such issues.

Yours,
Professor Aynsley Kellow
School of Government
University of Tasmania





THE NEW INQUISITION? ROYAL SOCIETY COMES UNDER FIERCE ATTACK FROM GREENPEACE CO-FOUNDER

Greenpeace co-founder asks Britain's Royal Society to stop playing political blame game on global warming

Greenpeace co-founder and former leader Dr. Patrick Moore said the United Kingdom's Royal Society should stop playing a political blame game on global warming and retract its recent letter that smacks of a repressive and anti-intellectual attitude. "It appears to be the policy of the Royal Society to stifle dissent and silence anyone who may have doubts about the connection between global warming and human activity," said Dr. Moore, Chairman and Chief Scientist of Vancouver, Canada-based Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. "That kind of repression seems more suited to the Inquisition than to a modern, respected scientific body," said Moore.

In a letter dated September 4 and published this week in a London newspaper, the Royal Society's Bob Ward accused ExxonMobil of misleading the public by daring to question the link between human activity and increases in global temperatures.

Dr. Moore responded today in an open letter sent to the Royal Society: "Certainly the Royal Society would agree there is no scientific proof of causation between the human-induced increase in atmospheric CO2 and the recent global warming trend, a trend that has been evident for about 500 years (sic), long before the human-induced increase in CO2 was evident. "While I may agree with certain statements made by the IPCC, surely you and the Royal Society would respect my right to disagree with other statements or at least to call them into question."

Dr. Moore writes further, "I am sure the Royal Society is aware of the difference between an hypothesis and a theory. It is clear the contention that human-induced CO2 emissions and rising CO2 levels in the global atmosphere are the cause of the present global warming trend is an hypothesis that has not yet been elevated to the level of a proven theory. Causation has not been demonstrated in any conclusive way.

Dr. Moore also notes in the letter that while the Royal Society likes to quote from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the IPCC itself admits its conclusions are uncertain. "The Royal Society needs to retract its anti-intellectual and heavy-handed letter to ExxonMobil, and allow reasoned scientific debate on this issue," said Dr. Moore. Dr. Moore said he is speaking out on this issue because "the last thing the world needs, in the midst of a warming trend, is for the Royal Society to cast a chill over science." Dr. Moore and his firm Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. have no links, financial or otherwise, to ExxonMobil.

Source.






SCIENTISTS AT ODDS OVER GLOBAL WARMING: DEBATE WILL ONLY STOP "WHEN SCEPTICS ARE DEAD"

The debate between scientists in Boulder and Fort Collins over global warming heated up. Colorado State University's William Gray, known for his hurricane predictions, said, "it's a big scam." Kevin Trenberth, lead climate analyst at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, is just as convinced it is a valid threat. "Bill Gray is completely unreasonable," Trenberth said. "He has a mind block on this," he told The Denver Post. "Some of this noise won't stop until some of these scientists are dead," said James Hansen, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City.

The dispute is no surprise. Scientists have argued over whether the world was flat and the earth the center of the university, evolution, and many other issues. Trenberth and other scientists at NCAR are predicting a world with temperatures increasing so much they produce more powerful storms, melting polar ice and higher seas.

To Gray and Roger Pielke Sr., also a CSU climate professor emeritus, the data used to justify this theory is questionable. Pielke said there are too many things that can affect the readings generated by thermometers to trust them. Gray recalls past projections of doom that never came to pass. He said in the mid-70s some predicted a new ice age. NCAR researcher Warren Washington applauds them for speaking their minds. "Science needs skeptics."

But Washington, who is 70 and a pioneer in climate modeling, adds that scientists have many more tools to monitor climate now. Chris Folland, a researcher at Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction, said the data points in one direction. "We've shown that the climate change is a true thing," he said. "We've done that with global averages, since that was easiest." "The American government might not agree," Folland said. "Most American scientists do."

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CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE DEMOGRAPHIC SHIFT

A great deal of ink and electrons have been wasted in trying to explain what it is or is not that we should do to try and reduce emissions of CO2 in the United States. One fascinating paper just published provides perhaps the simplest answer of all: just wait for the Baby Boomers to get old.

Given that, past a certain age, virility now comes in blue pills rather than by racing muscle cars, that shuffleboard uses rather less gas than water skiing and the general environmental impact of a generation hobbling towards death is rather less than that same group in vigorous youth, the authors, led by Michael Dalton, seem to think that (along with a few other assumptions), the simple passage of time will reduce CO2 emissions in the US by as much as 40%.

Now of course, one single paper isn't quite enough for us to simply go "Phew!" and declare the issue closed but this is, I hope, the beginning of the next stage of research into the whole area of climate change.

Just to reiterate (before the usual trolls arrive) I am largely Lomborgian in my view of climate change. It's happening, we're at least partly to do with it and the important questions are all to do with what we do about it. In common with Bjorn Lomborg my worries about the science of the issue are nothing at all to do with computer models, satellite measurements or anything of that nature. They are about the economic models (in the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, or SRES) which provide the data which is then plugged into those models.

One area that has always puzzled me deeply about those SRES models is that population was treated as endogenous to the models. In plainer speech, what the population level was going to be was simply a given, not something that came about from the interactions within the model itself. Which, as I say, is puzzling, for the interactions of population size and the economic wealth of that population are the very things which determine the level of emissions (as moderated by the technology used, of course). Further, some of the population estimates for the SRES were especially commissioned from experts in endogenous estimates (that is, ones that do come from the interactions within the models) but they were not asked for such endogenous ones, but for exogenous ones.

Ok, sorry, I'll stop using $10 words for a bit. Why this is important is because we think we know a few things about what drives shifts in population size. At the heart of it is wealth (as defined broadly, not in purely monetary terms). As increasing wealth leads to better sanitation and medicine, as it has over the past century and more, there is a huge fall in the death rate, most especially amongst children and the women giving birth to them. This leads to a surge in the population and along with the increased life spans in general gives us the "demographic shift". What we think moderates this over time (and why we don't end up with ever accelerating population growth, unlike what Paul Ehrlich has been preaching for decades) is that the very wealth that allows this to happen changes people's behavior.

If, as Darwinian theory would have it (if you prefer Genesis "go forth and multiply" is subject to the same constraints), the aim and purpose of life is to have grandchildren who then go on to have more of the same themselves, then when most children die before they reach maturity then you'd better have a lot of them to ensure your lineage. If almost all will survive to breed themselves, as is true now (more accurately, survive to be capable of breeding, if they should so wish) then you need to have far fewer: the opportunity cost of having few children has fallen. Further, our new found wealth offers (women especially) many more choices than just pumping out the next generation. The opportunity costs of having many children have risen, as a large family inevitably chokes off some of those other opportunities.

It might be worth noting here that it is not just the invention of modern contraception that has led to these smaller family sizes. Not only were effective contraceptives known long before the pill (effective if inconvenient) all the surveys done have shown that it is desired family size that has fallen. It is attitudes that have changed, the new technology most certainly helping in reaching the desired goals, but it isn't the contraceptive pills and salves that have changed that desired family size.

So if we, as we think we do, have a direct relationship between the wealth of a society and the growth or shrinkage of the size of the population, if we were trying to find out what the world was going to be like in a century's time, we'd rather like our models to include that relationship, would we not? Which, as noted above, the SRES models do not.

This is why I very much welcome this paper in Energy Economics. It isn't directly to do with the impact of wealth upon population, rather, the impact of an ageing population upon energy demand. The inclusion of demography into our models of the future, something wholly to be desired. As the abstract states:

"Changes in the age composition of U.S. households over the next several decades could affect energy use and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the most important greenhouse gas. This article incorporates population age structure into an energy-economic growth model with multiple dynasties of heterogeneous households. The model is used to estimate and compare effects of population aging and technical change on baseline paths of U.S. energy use, and CO2 emissions. Results show that population aging reduces long-term emissions, by almost 40% in a low population scenario, and effects of aging on emissions can be as large, or larger than, effects of technical change in some cases."

You will, if you read around the internet and the newspapers, see repeated protestations that the debate over climate change is now over, that the science is settled. I'm afraid that I don't think that's actually true: I agree that the climate models are getting better, that previously noted anomalies are being resolved, but not that science is either over or stopped. Rather, that we now need more such science as this paper, to refine the numbers we feed into those computer models.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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