“Bombshell Claim: Scientists Find ‘Man-made Climate Change Doesn’t Exist in Practice’.” That was the headline on an article at ZeroHedge.com sent to me a few days ago by a friend.
Naturally I was intrigued. I read the article, then clicked through to the paper on which it reported: “No Experimental Evidence for the Significant Anthropogenic Climate Change,” by Finnish authors J. Kauippinen and P. Malmi, both of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Turku.
Its abstract read:
In this paper we will prove that GCM-models used in IPCC report AR5 fail to calculate the influences of the low cloud cover changes on the global temperature. That is why those models give a very small natural temperature change leaving a very large change for the contribution of the green house gases in the observed temperature. This is the reason why IPCC has to use a very large sensitivity to compensate a too small natural component. Further they have to leave out the strong negative feedback due to the clouds in order to magnify the sensitivity. In addition, this paper proves that the changes in the low cloud cover fraction practically control the global temperature.
Sounds like a serious challenge to the (alleged but not real) “consensus” view that human emissions of carbon dioxide have been the primary driver of global warming for about the last 60 years, and that catastrophe awaits around the corner if we don’t curb them. The gist: low cloud cover, driven by cosmic rays modulated by solar magnetic wind, determine global temperature anomalies.
But I’m not a physicist, or a climate scientist. I couldn’t evaluate the argument to my satisfaction. And the last thing I want to do is put Cornwall Alliance’s credibility in jeopardy by embracing a study that makes some fundamental errors that I fail to detect.
So I did what I often do: I asked one of the world’s leading climate scientists, Dr. Roy W. Spencer, a Cornwall Alliance Senior Fellow and a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, what he thought of it.
His response:
… basically they assumed that the decrease in global cloud cover from the ISCCP dataset was the cause of recent warming. This is the cause-and-effect issue I’ve been harping on for years, with a few papers published and the main theme of by book The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists.
They would have never gotten it published in a peer-reviewed journal because they didn’t even entertain the possibility that the change in clouds was even partly feedback (in this case, positive feedback), that is, the result of the temperature change.
The IPCC assumes cloud changes are ALL (or nearly all) feedback. This paper does a fairly crude job of assuming the change is all forcing. I say it’s some combination of both, and it takes a modeling study that replicates the time-lagged behavior of temperature and cloud changes to determine how much of each (and even then the result is uncertain).
So now, as I’ve done many times, I say a big “Thank you!” to Roy for helping me avoid a pitfall.
And, if I may toot our own horn for just a moment, this is one reason why you can trust the Cornwall Alliance. We don’t embrace some new claim just because it supports our own view. We try to be equally skeptical of information that supports and opposes our view, applying the Apostle Paul’s instruction to “test all things, hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21)—which has about as good a claim as any to being my “life verse.”
Featured image by Łukasz Łada on Unsplash
Mike Toreno says
Where do you get money from?
E. Calvin Beisner says
How is your question relevant to the factual premises or the logical inferences of the article?
I ask that not because I don’t wish to reveal the sources of our money (the vast majority of our donations come from private individuals, and a very few from private nonprofit foundation grants, none from large for-profit corporations), but to call attention to the irrelevance of your question to the content and persuasiveness of the article. Your question is an example of the fallacy of argumentum ad hominem circumstantial. Irving M. Copi, in his Introduction to Logic (1914 edition), writes:
You can learn more about argumentum ad hominem circumstantial at http://www.sciencechatforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=264118.
Larrd says
Wow