Deltoid

The Lavoisier group is an Australian astroturf operation. John Quiggin observed that:

This body is devoted to the proposition that basic principles of physics, discovered by among others, the famous French scientist Antoine Lavoisier, cease to apply when they come into conflict with the interests of the Australian coal industry.

Melissa Fyfe has an interesting profile in The Age on the Lavoisier group. Some extracts:

At 401 Collins Street on Monday night, 50 men gathered in a room of plush green carpet, pottery and antique lights to launch a book about the science of climate change. Some of them were scientists. But many were engineers and retired captains of industry. Presiding was Hugh Morgan, president of the Business Council of Australia and former Western Mining boss. The master of ceremonies was retired Labor politician Peter Walsh.

Climate change is about science, but not just about science. It’s about business and politics and wielding influence. The men—there was just one woman present—were all climate change sceptics, members of an organisation called the Lavoisier Group that argues global warming is nothing to worry about.

The book they launched—the latest weapon in the tussle for hearts and minds over global warming—was by Melbourne climate change sceptic William Kininmonth, former head of the National Climate Centre, part of the Bureau of Meteorology. He argues that global warming is natural and not caused by humans burning fossil fuels.

The book, Climate Change: A Natural Hazard, blasts the models used by climate scientists to predict and simulate what is happening. They are flawed, he says. “Climate change is naturally variable and it poses serious hazards for human kind,” he writes. Focusing on man-made global warming is “self-delusion on a grand scale”.

The only problem for the sceptics is that the vast majority of scientists think they are the ones that are deluded. “There’s a better scientific consensus on this than on any issue I know—except maybe Newton’s second law of dynamics”, Dr James Baker, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US, has said. …

While William Kininmonth is respected by his former colleagues at the Bureau of Meteorology and they agree about the climate’s natural variability, they disagree that recent warming is natural. In a review to be published in March in the Australian Meteorological Magazine, University of Melbourne associate professor of meteorology Kevin Walsh will argue that Kininmonth has failed to present the case for natural warming. “Some of his detailed arguments are a little bit curious,” Dr Walsh told The Age. “Some of his statements actually contradict well-accepted work.”

But strangely enough, the Lavoisier Group heard that message on Monday night. In what seemed like a coup, Hugh Morgan had secured the respected John Zillman, former head of the Bureau of Meteorology, to launch the book. Dr Zillman agreed, but made it clear that there were significant parts of the book that he disagreed with. Dr Zillman, who is known to be quite conservative about climate science, said he was concerned about appearing at a Lavoisier Group book launch, but did so in the interests of debate.

He says he is not aware of any sceptic argument that has invalidated the mainstream science, and is now convinced—although would not have been 10 years ago—that it is mostly humans changing the world’s climate. “I won’t be expecting to be invited back as a regular,” he said.

From Zillman’s speech:

I believe that Bill goes much too far and, for whatever reason, misinterprets and/or misrepresents some important aspects of the science of climate change that are now pretty well understood. At least thirty times in the book he asserts, albeit in slightly different language in each place, that what he refers to as the one-dimensional IPCC construct of radiative forcing of climate change is fundamentally flawed. He makes much of the well known three-dimensional structure of atmospheric processes and energy flows in the climate system and implies that these have been overlooked by the IPCC. I offer two specific comments on Bill’s characterisation of the IPCC:

• The IPCC is not, as Bill implies and many appear to have been lead to believe, some ideologically committed group of scientists with a particular position or perspective on the science which they seek to promote. Rather it is a highly transparent process, supervised by governments, which enables the contemporary state of knowledge of climate change as it emerges from the peer-reviewed published literature to be summarised and assessed by a representative group of the internationally acknowledged experts in the field with their summary assessment subject to one of the most exhaustive processes of peer review and revision that I believe has ever occurred in the international scientific community. The IPCC doesn’t have a construct, a model, an ideology or a pre-determined position. It is simply an inter-governmentally coordinated scientific assessment mechanism for producing in summary form, for use by policymakers, a synthesis of the state of the science as it appears in the literature with particular attention to the identification of points on which there is a high level of scientific agreement in the literature and those on which there is little agreement or little confidence in what is agreed.
• Bill is wrong to assert or imply that the model results on which the IPCC assessments are based don’t take account of all the various three dimensional energy transfer processes that he argues are so important. He is seriously misleading in his belittling as ‘one-dimensional’ of the IPCC’s use of globally averaged versions of the energy budget (which, have the tremendous advantage of making it possible to focus in on only those considerations that capture the essential physics of global warming—the enhanced greenhouse effect) as a pedagological device for helping non-experts to understand the basic mechanisms of global change.

Also of interest is Kinninmonth’s speech at the book launch and this handy chart contrasting the positions of the sceptics with those of mainstream science.

The Australian has published a piece by William Kinimonth arguing that global warming is a natural phenomenon. His argument in his book was that the models used by the IPCC were one dimensional and didn’t account for the flow of energy from the tropics to the poles. This is, of course, wildly incorrect as anyone can find out in minutes on the net. So he’s dropped that argument, but that means that all he has left is this:

IPCC has made much of the apparent ability of computer models to simulate the climate system; computer models that have been tuned to reproduce the main statistical characteristics of the global climate notwithstanding the uncertainty of representing many of the climate processes. The computer models are claimed to be able to respond correctly as one or more of the boundary conditions are changed but this has not been demonstrated.

Colour me old-fashioned, but if someone wants to argue that the current warming is natural, I’d like to see their model and data showing this. Complaints that the models currently in use are wrong in same vague unspecified way just don’t do much for me.

Oh, great. After getting his bogus claims about climate models into the Australian, Kininmonth now has them in the Age:

The IPCC radiative forcing hypothesis ignores the atmospheric and ocean circulations that transport surplus solar energy from the tropics to polar regions. Nowhere are local temperatures due solely to radiation processes, a fact that goes to underscore the fallacy of the hypothesis.

It takes about two minutes with Google for anyone to find out that global climate models do include atmospheric and ocean circulations. What’s disappointing about this is that back in November the Age had a story about Kininmonth in the Science section which had comments from scientists about Kininmonth’s arguments were no good. But now he gets an article in the Business section. What is going on?

Tim Flannery has a new book The Weather Makers on climate change. You can read an extract here.

Naturally this has prompted the usual pieces on how global warming totally isn’t happening. First we have William Kininmonth, who writes:

The science linking human activities to climate change is simplistic and his arguments are assisted by the fact we are in a period of apparent warming. … The focus on carbon dioxide as a driver of climate change overlooks the importance of water vapour as a greenhouse gas and the hydrological cycle’s role in regulating the temperatures of our climate system. Water vapour is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and the formation and dissipation of clouds has a bigger impact on the climate.

This is more than a little misleading since it implies that the “simplistic” science ignores the role of water vapour even though it does not.

Second, Bob Carter who claims that one of the symptoms of the “disease” of Hansensim is:

endless repetition of inaccuracies, or facts out of context;

And repeats, yet again, a wildly inaccurate claim:

The Earth’s comfortable (for us) average temperature of about 15C is maintained that way by the atmosphere. The presence of small amounts of water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide - the “greenhouse gases” which absorb Earth’s outgoing heat radiation and re-emit some of it downwards - causes warming. Most of the total warming of 33 degrees is caused by water vapour (more than 30 degrees), carbon dioxide contributing only about 1.2 degrees worth. And of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, just 3 per cent comes from human sources, which equates to a warming effect of about four-hundredths of a degree.

His calculation is out by a factor of twenty. Carbon dioxide contributes about 3 degrees towards the natural greenhouse effect. And over 25% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes from human sources. 25% of 3 degrees is 3/4 of a degree Celsius, not four-hundredths as Carter claims. But he keeps repeating this false claim.

Next up is Andrew Bolt, who in this column claimed to have found many serious errors in Flannery’s work, and here complained that Flannery had not corrected the alleged errors. Not surprisingly, Bolt’s bias and ignorance of science has led him astray and Flannery sets him straight in this column.

The “errors” that Bolt supposedly discovers in my work, extracted in The Age, are in fact howlers on his part. Indeed, so egregious are some that it’s hard to believe that Bolt has not set out to mislead his readers. Let’s look at five of the biggest whoppers.

You should read Flannery’s article to find out what the five whoppers are, but fortunately for me there are plenty more misleading statements in Bolt’s column for me to chew on. Bolt writes:

Says Philip Stott, London University professor emeritus of bio-geography: “During the Medieval Warm Period, the world was warmer even than today.” It was nice.

OK, Stott says that, but he has no qualifications as a climate scientist. So what was the basis for his claim? It turns out that it was the infamous Soon and Baliunas paper,
which was so badly flawed that six editors resigned from the journal that published it because they felt that it should not have been published.

Bolt also claims:

Flannery says: By late 2004, my interest had turned to anxiety. The world’s leading science journals were full of reports that glaciers were melting 10 times faster than previously thought . . .

Fact: More booga-booga to scare you into believing. But as glacier researcher Roger Braithwaite noted in Progress in Physical Geography, some glaciers are growing and “there is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years”.

However, Braithwaite’s paper, makes it clear that he is only talking about glacier melt up to 1995. Looking at more up to date information (as Flannery did), shows a dramatic increase in melting.

I’ve saved the worst for last: Christopher Pearson who spends most of his column in a dishonest attempt to paint Flannery as some kind of weird mystic because he uses the Gaia hypothesis to help focus on “the complex system that makes life possible”. But the funniest part of Pearson’s column is this:

Flannery doesn’t feel any personal need to defend himself in the public arena. Nor does he feel, as a museum director, that the prestige of the scientific institution he heads obliges him to do so.

Unfortunately for Pearson, his column came out the same day as Flannery’s demolition of Bolt’s criticism. Oops.