Wheels about to fall off the APS bus?...

We reported earlier on a development in which a journal of the American Physical Society, Forum on Physics & Society, decided to

"... kick off a debate concerning one of the main conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body which, together with Al Gore, recently won the Nobel Prize for its work concerning climate change research. There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution....

The debate was opened by an invited paper by Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, challenging the conclusions of the UN IPCC report on climate change that is at the root of much of the discourse over global warming. Subsequent to the publication of Viscount Monckton's report, a representative of the Council of the American Physical Society decided that it was necessary for the APS to back-pedal from Monckton's position of plausible deniability of global warming, and it prefaced his article with the following bit of fluff:

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions.

Nevermind that the stated purpose of Monckton's article was to form a base point in the journal to advance a dialogue about the topic, a process that the members of the council of the APS could have participated in in a manner which befits a scientific discourse. Rather, the Council has taken a somewhat arcane19th century position common to scientific societies of old in which the Society, like many of its predecessors, has declared a bit of science settled, and attempts, through intimidation and plain puffery, to silence the debate.

Upon noticing this addendum to his article, Viscount Monckton, in a strongly worded email to the president of the Society, Arthur Bienenstock, challenges the statement directly:

"...This seems discourteous. I had been invited to submit the paper; I had submitted it; an eminent Professor of Physics had then scientifically reviewed it in meticulous detail; I had revised it at all points requested, and in the manner requested; the editors had accepted and published the reviewed and revised draft (some 3000 words longer than the original) and I had expended considerable labor, without having been offered or having requested any honorarium.

Please either remove the offending red-flag text at once or let me have the name and qualifications of the member of the Council or advisor to it who considered my paper before the Council ordered the offending text to be posted above my paper; a copy of this rapporteur's findings and ratio decidendi; the date of the Council meeting at which the findings were presented; a copy of the minutes of the discussion; and a copy of the text of the Council's decision, together with the names of those present at the meeting. If the Council has not scientifically evaluated or formally considered my paper, may I ask with what credible scientific justification, and on whose authority, the offending text asserts primo, that the paper had not been scientifically reviewed when it had; secundo, that its conclusions disagree with what is said (on no evidence) to be the "overwhelming opinion of the world scientific
community"; and, tertio, that "The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions"? Which of my conclusions does the Council disagree with, and on what scientific grounds (if any)?

Having regard to the circumstances, surely the Council owes me an apology?"

That the American Physical Society should even have a position, seeing as it is a constituent organization of scientists, which by the nature of science, will hold widely contrary views on a wide variety of subjects, is in and of itself revealing, but to float out a ridiculously inane statement like "...Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community", speaks both to the credibility of the APS Council, and to the extent that the global warming debate has left the realm of science and become metaphysical. Such a statement is unknowable - "deniers" have been threatened, castigated, fired, and deprived of funding, and of consequence, will be less then sanguine about their true position on the topic. Further, as the addendum to Moncton's article clearly indicates, deniers are in for a rough ride if they offer contrary analysis.

If the science is as settled as the Council of the American Physical Society seems to believe, what are they afraid of? Surely, as scientists, it should be self-evident to them, that if the science is valid, reasoned dialogue on the Forum on Physics & Society will flow only in one direction: overwhelming support for their position.

The Council meddling in the Forum is bizarre and not a bit self-righteous. The Council needs to do more than apologize to Viscount Monckton. It needs to butt out of the debate, and let its membership duke it out in the appropriate scientific fashion.

[h/t SDA]

Update: There are some very interesting leads to follow in the comment section of SDA's blog entry on this. It would behoove those with a real interest in this debate to both spend some time reading Viscount Monckton's paper, the fallout, and some of the other position papers similar to Monckton's. AGW is hardly "settled" science, and since draconian tax and market schemes are (too) rapidly being established, everyone ultimately has a vested interest in the real truth of AGW.

Update II: The following is the discussion and conclusion section of Viscount Monckton's paper. Readers should go back and review his complete paper. As the foregoing illustrates, his perspective is not universally shared (Tim Lambert objects to his math). For clarity, I have broken out the paragraphs of his conclusion so that his presentation style stands out.

Discussion

"We have set out and then critically examined a detailed account of the IPCC’s method of evaluating climate sensitivity. We have made explicit the identities, interrelations, and values of the key variables, many of which the IPCC does not explicitly describe or quantify. The IPCC’s method does not provide a secure basis for policy-relevant conclusions. We now summarize some of its defects.

The IPCC’s methodology relies unduly – indeed, almost exclusively – upon numerical analysis, even where the outputs of the models upon which it so heavily relies are manifestly and significantly at variance with theory or observation or both. Modeled projections such as those upon which the IPCC’s entire case rests have long been proven impossible when applied to mathematically-chaotic objects, such as the climate, whose initial state can never be determined to a sufficient precision. For a similar reason, those of the IPCC’s conclusions that are founded on probability distributions in the chaotic climate object are unsafe.

Not one of the key variables necessary to any reliable evaluation of climate sensitivity can be measured empirically. The IPCC’s presentation of its principal conclusions as though they were near-certain is accordingly unjustifiable. We cannot even measure mean global surface temperature anomalies to within a factor of 2; and the IPCC’s reliance upon mean global temperatures, even if they could be correctly evaluated, itself introduces substantial errors in its evaluation of climate sensitivity.

The IPCC overstates the radiative forcing caused by increased CO2 concentration at least threefold because the models upon which it relies have been programmed fundamentally to misunderstand the difference between tropical and extra-tropical climates, and to apply global averages that lead to error.

The IPCC overstates the value of the base climate sensitivity parameter for a similar reason. Indeed, its methodology would in effect repeal the fundamental equation of radiative transfer (Eqn. 18), yielding the impossible result that at every level of the atmosphere ever-smaller forcings would induce ever-greater temperature increases, even in the absence of any temperature feedbacks.

The IPCC overstates temperature feedbacks to such an extent that the sum of the high-end values that it has now, for the first time, quantified would cross the instability threshold in the Bode feedback equation and induce a runaway greenhouse effect that has not occurred even in geological times despite CO2 concentrations almost 20 times today’s, and temperatures up to 7 ºC higher than today’s.

The Bode equation, furthermore, is of questionable utility because it was not designed to model feedbacks in non-linear objects such as the climate. The IPCC’s quantification of temperature feedbacks is, accordingly, inherently unreliable. It may even be that, as Lindzen (2001) and Spencer (2007) have argued, feedbacks are net-negative, though a more cautious assumption has been made in this paper.

It is of no little significance that the IPCC’s value for the coefficient in the CO2 forcing equation depends on only one paper in the literature; that its values for the feedbacks that it believes account for two-thirds of humankind’s effect on global temperatures are likewise taken from only one paper; and that its implicit value of the crucial parameter κ depends upon only two papers, one of which had been written by a lead author of the chapter in question, and neither of which provides any theoretical or empirical justification for a value as high as that which the IPCC adopted.

The IPCC has not drawn on thousands of published, peer-reviewed papers to support its central estimates for the variables from which climate sensitivity is calculated, but on a handful.

On this brief analysis, it seems that no great reliance can be placed upon the IPCC’s central estimates of climate sensitivity, still less on its high-end estimates. The IPCC’s assessments, in their current state, cannot be said to be “policy-relevant”. They provide no justification for taking the very costly and drastic actions advocated in some circles to mitigate “global warming”, which Eqn. (30) suggests will be small (<1 °C at CO2 doubling), harmless, and beneficial.

Conclusion

Even if temperature had risen above natural variability, the recent solar Grand Maximum may have been chiefly responsible.

Even if the sun were not chiefly to blame for the past half-century’s warming, the IPCC has not demonstrated that, since CO2 occupies only one-ten-thousandth part more of the atmosphere that it did in 1750, it has contributed more than a small fraction of the warming.

Even if carbon dioxide were chiefly responsible for the warming that ceased in 1998 and may not resume until 2015, the distinctive, projected fingerprint of anthropogenic “greenhouse-gas” warming is entirely absent from the observed record.

Even if the fingerprint were present, computer models are long proven to be inherently incapable of providing projections of the future state of the climate that are sound enough for policymaking.

Even if per impossibile the models could ever become reliable, the present paper demonstrates that it is not at all likely that the world will warm as much as the IPCC imagines.

Even if the world were to warm that much, the overwhelming majority of the scientific, peer-reviewed literature does not predict that catastrophe would ensue.

Even if catastrophe might ensue, even the most drastic proposals to mitigate future climate change by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide would make very little difference to the climate.

Even if mitigation were likely to be effective, it would do more harm than good: already millions face starvation as the dash for biofuels takes agricultural land out of essential food production: a warning that taking precautions, “just in case”, can do untold harm unless there is a sound, scientific basis for them.

Finally, even if mitigation might do more good than harm, adaptation as (and if) necessary would be far more cost-effective and less likely to be harmful.

In short, we must get the science right, or we shall get the policy wrong. If the concluding equation in this analysis (Eqn. 30) is correct, the IPCC’s estimates of climate sensitivity must have been very much exaggerated. There may, therefore, be a good reason why, contrary to the projections of the models on which the IPCC relies, temperatures have not risen for a decade and have been falling since the phase-transition in global temperature trends that occurred in late 2001. Perhaps real-world climate sensitivity is very much below the IPCC’s estimates. Perhaps, therefore, there is no “climate crisis” at all. At present, then, in policy terms there is no case for doing anything. The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing."