Climate Change

The mainstream view on climate change holds that the world is warming up, sea levels are rising, polar ice caps are melting, and all life on Earth is doomed. The cause of global warming is human induced carbon dioxide emissions; this phenomenon is called Anthropogenic Global Warming or AGW. Everyone knows that the oil companies have either paid or duped anyone who denies this thesis.

The idea of Global Temperature

This attitude is unfortunate because, in truth, climate scientists do not have a clue what global temperature is, nor is the idea even remotely coherent. First, no single number exists that can stand for global temperature; clearly the temperature is hotter at the equator than the poles, hotter in summer than winter, hotter at midday than midnight and so on. Is ‘global temperature’ an average of some kind? The most common average is the ‘mean’ where one adds up a series of numbers and divides the result by the number of numbers. For example, finding the average height of a set of persons in this way is easy. Temperature however is not like height; temperature is an ‘intensive’ property of matter. We cannot add intensive properties together in any simple way because they are not quantities like height. Intensive simply means not related to the quantity of matter. Temperature is similar to a percentage.

For example, some mixture may contain various constituents of different sizes, and some substance S may be present in the various constituents in varying percentages. We cannot find the 'global' percentage of S in the total mixture by simply adding the percentages of S in the constituents. To be an accurate measure of the ‘global’ percentage, we must weight each percentage by the relative size of its respective constituent. Temperatures, like percentages, are not additive. Globally, then, if scientists have to weight temperatures in order for them to be significant, what are the weights? Do they weight the Indian ‘temperature’ by the share of India in the global land mass, surface area or what? And if so, how do they arrive at an ‘Indian temperature’ to start with; presumably by carrying out the above procedure at ever smaller scales.

In practice, we do nothing of the kind. Virtually ignoring two thirds of the Earth’s surface area – the oceans – some scientists simply add the adjusted temperatures gleaned from about 4000 stations mostly in North America and Europe and calculate the resulting mean to be the measure of global warming. This measure is a meaningless statistic. No derived statistic can represent the infinity of numbers that make up the Earth's multi-dimensional temperature field. And climate change, if affected by temperature at all, is always local. For example, glaciers melt for many reasons; one of them may be changes in their local temperature field. However, wherever scientists measure local temperature fields around melting glaciers there have been no discernible changes in the field.

So what is climate change? What is the link to weather? Scientists have known for some time that predicting even short term (two or three days) weather is a risky business. They even know why – weather models have chaotic properties. Small changes in initial values can quickly accumulate into large differences in the final values - the so-called butterfly effect. These differences quickly grow to be so large such that sensible weather predictions are difficult if not impossible.

Climate is not weather, although obviously linked to weather. If a region has a dry climate, then one can safely infer that, on a day-to-day weather basis, it does not rain much. If weather is fractal, then data derived from fractal series is also fractal. We cannot predict climate using any data series based on fractal weather series.

Climate models

Many climate models do not even attempt to do this since meteorological weather data has only been around for a few years. Instead, they rely on tree ring or ice core data going back thousands of years. Modellers process this data using a sophisticated statistical technique called principal components analysis to derive the ‘hidden’ causes of variation in the data. The hidden cause in this case is global temperature.

The idea is similar to that used in IQ testing where statisticians give batteries of verbal and non-verbal reasoning tests to people, especially kids and job interviewees. They then subject the results to a principal components analysis and the outcome measures an alleged hidden variable called intelligence. This was the basis of the old UK 11+ education system where the government sorted kids according to their test results, at age 11, into grammar school streams and secondary modern streams. Grammar school kids went on to university and secondary modern kids went into the factories and the infantry. The government abolished this system because Cyril Burt, whose advice underpinned the system, had faked his analysis of sets of twins. Burt claimed dishonestly that nature was stronger than nurture.

Talking of faked data, when unknown sources leaked the climate change emails from East Anglia a few years ago, it emerged that several climate scientists had attempted to subvert the peer review process, to ‘doctor’ the data sets, and to questionably modify the statistical techniques underlying the Mann climate model. This model had become famous from the publicity around Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Gore’s graphic featured the time trend of the Mann model in the shape of a 'hockey stick' with the handle horizontally covering the last one thousand years; finally reaching the blade which turns up sharply in the 20th century. Gore’s hockey stick graphic quickly became the icon of the AGW movement. This affair was remarkable because the hockey stick showed no signs of the medieval ice-age. Until then, climate scientists had generally accepted the presence of a well recorded medieval ice-age.

Climate modellers fiercely opposed the release of their publicly funded data, and for good reason, redoing the correlations without the questionable series and statistical procedures caused the hockey stick to disappear, and the medieval ice-age to reappear. For a full account of this extraordinary tale see: 'The Hockey Stick Illusion - Climategate and the corruption of Science', Montford, A. W. 2010. It turns out that the sharp upturn of the blade of the hockey stick was simply an artefact of the unconventional statistical procedure used; random data could cause the same effect. Climate scientists quietly buried the hockey stick.

Unpredictable data and fudged statistical techniques lower confidence in the results. So too do the actual models used. Weather and climate are complex systems involving multiple interacting feedbacks - positive and negative. Positive feedback causes the value of one or several variables in the system to grow without bound, whereas negative feedbacks cause one or several variables in the system to diminish up to the point where they disappear. An example of a positive feedback: warmer climate caused by carbon dioxide causes the oceans to warm thereby releasing the carbon dioxide dissolved in them causing greater global warming. An example of negative feedback: warmer climate caused by carbon dioxide causes greater evaporation from the land and the oceans which cause more cloud cover. More cloud cover lightens the Earth’s albedo and thereby reflects solar radiation back into space leading to global cooling. The critical point is that none of the climate models currently in use model the effect of water vapour or clouds on global temperatures.

The Earth is not self-regulating

The reference to interacting feedbacks may have given the impression that the Earth is homeostatic like the Gaia hypothesis asserts. But the Earth is not self-regulating, and nor can it be with tectonic plates moving about randomly all over the place in geographic time. Incidentally, the AGW hypothesis so excites James Lovelock, author of the Gaia Hypothesis, that he sees nuclear energy as "... a wondrous gift of pollution free energy." The Revenge of Gaia, Lovelock, J. page 119, 2007. Those who would go down this road are treading a dangerous path indeed especially in the light of the recent Japanese nuclear meltdown at Fukishima.

As the tectonic plates move around, the relative composition of land and sea surface area slowly but continuously changes. Consequently, the albedo and therefore the climate of the Earth continuously changes as well. Indeed, in the Earth's 4.5 billion year history there have been several snowball earth super ice ages lasting millions of years when global temperatures have been so low that ice and snow up to a kilometre thick at the equator covered the entire planet. We recovered only because of shifting tectonic plates and greenhouse gases emitted from erupting volcanoes.

In short, no matter what we think, the Earth will continue to do what it has been doing for billions of years utterly oblivious to the existence of humanity or anything else for that matter. The really sad thing is that global warming has hijacked the environmental movement. Climate change has subsumed all the great struggles to protect the forests, to protect public amenity and to get the corporations to clean up their own mess. The only major policy ‘victory’, pyrrhic to say the least, occurred when the government introduced a carbon tax. Within a few years, the government will turn the tax into a market-based cap and trading system. But such market systems while useless at reducing emissions, are brilliant at providing escape hatches for the big polluters. Enron, by the way, is responsible for the idea of carbon as a tradable commodity. They sold it to the world at Kyoto. A few years later, the same corrupt management drove Enron into bankruptcy and collapse.