While scientists continue to research what is really
driving climate change, a whole industry has grown up around this
issue. The size of the industry and its vocal support by mass media, political
and environmental organizations is a colossus of immense proportions.
It is, however, a colossus built on sand.
Note: Underlined phrases in the following piece
are active Web links.
Are
climate change investors living in a fool’s paradise?
Key science risks being ignored while
financial stakes rise higher and higher
By: Tom Harris
fool's par·a·dise: “a state of happiness
that is temporary and insubstantial because it is based on illusions or
unrealistic hopes” - Encarta® World English Dictionary [North American Edition] ©
& (P)2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Developed
for Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
I am struck by
the diversity of risk analyses being carried out by investors in today’s
climate change market place. Whether
it’s ‘carbon’* market conferences and publications,
‘ethical investments’, insurance company projects or the activities of
financial, legal and engineering institutions, it seems at first glance that
they have it all covered. Many
financial, political, procedural, legal and technical issues are
addressed. Anything that might
pose a risk to the market and the hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into one of the greatest enterprises in human
history – ‘fighting’ global climate change – appears to be examined.
It looks on the surface like an
investment and legislative dream come true, combining the public’s desire to
‘save the planet’ and compensate for recent stock market losses with helping
corporations fulfill their ‘corporate social responsibilities’. It even satisfies the natural desire of
politicians to be seen to be leading their nations to
safety and a supposedly green, prosperous future.
On closer examination however, one
notices something remarkable.
Practically without exception, all of these organizations, many of them
among the most successful and respected in the world, completely ignore the
risk that the very foundation of all of these activities might
be shown to be faulty. Like many
of those who were caught off guard by the subprime mortgage crisis, those involved in the rapidly expanding
climate change industry are not asking the most fundamental of questions:
·
What if the science that supposedly backs concerns over carbon
dioxide (CO2) emissions cannot be justified?
And, even more important to the investment,
legal and political community:
·
What
if the public at large come to believe that the whole thing is a gigantic scam? What if it
becomes common knowledge that we can’t stop climate
change and all of the great and glorious plans to restrict CO2 and
other greenhouse gas emissions are seen as a complete waste?
In these tough economic times, government
regulations such as cap and trade would then be dropped
like a hot potato. ‘Carbon’ credits, as
well as the massive investments into reducing CO2 emissions, would
quickly become worthless. Careers,
companies and investors would be ruined, governments
disgraced and the environmental movement set back decades as their primary
crusade over the last ten years is exposed as hopelessly misguided, or even
worse, an enormous fraud.
Sound improbable? I
wouldn’t bet on it.
Behind the
scenes in the climate science community, recent planetary cooling and the
continuing advance of this very new field has triggered a crucially important
development - the so-called ‘settled’ science of climate change has entered a
new phase referred to as ‘negative discovery’.
The more we learn, the more we come to realize how little we actually
understand about this, the most complex science ever tackled. What we thought we knew with confidence only
a few years ago is coming to be seen by many
scientists as completely wrong, or at best highly debatable. In virtually every area cited as evidence of human-caused global climate change
– temperatures and CO2 levels, ice caps, storm frequency, sea level
rise, even polar bear populations (which have been rising for decades) –
scientists are discovering strong evidence that what we are now experiencing is
mostly due to natural cycles. At the
same time, researchers are developing elegant and convincing new theories that
fit the observational data far better than the greenhouse gas-focused computer
models that have driven climate concerns to date. President-elect Barack
Obama may actually believe that “The science is beyond dispute and the facts
are clear”, as he told
delegates to the UN climate conference in Poland, but climate scientists know
that the whole field is in intense dispute and very few of the key parameters
driving climate are properly understood at all.
The impact of
clouds is a stunning example of this uncertainty. The calculated net impact of clouds has
changed over the past few years from an overall warming effect to a net cooling
influence, the magnitude of which is still under serious debate. It is not that clouds have suddenly changed
their behavior, of course; it is our understanding
of clouds that is evolving. For example,
see the scientific paper here where Professor Minghua
Zhang, Director of the Institute for Terrestrial and Planetary Atmospheres of Stony Brook
University, New York writes:
“Several satellite and surface measurement
programs were specifically established to narrow model uncertainties of cloud
feedbacks. After about 15 years of intensive research, however, this issue is
still evasive.”
And remember,
clouds have far more influence on climate than do human CO2
emissions.
Some scientists even maintain that
increasing CO2 levels may actually result in lower global temperatures.
For example, a scientific paper, "Greenhouse gases and greenhouse
effect", just published in the leading scientific journal Environmental Geology by University of
Southern California (Los Angeles) Professor George V. Chilingar
et al (read paper here),
concludes:
“rising
concentration of CO2 should result in the cooling of
climate.”
Furthermore, the basic premise that
worldwide CO2 levels are higher now than in pre-industrial times is
in dispute in responsible scientific circles (Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball
discusses these findings here).
No one knows whether or not such opinions
will ultimately prove to be correct, but of one thing there is no doubt – the
science of climate change is completely unsettled
once you get away from the glare of the spotlights at highly political UN,
governmental and climate activist meetings.
While most main stream media and
politicians have yet to awaken to this reality, many in the public have already
caught on and recent polls (see here, here and here, for example) show a dwindling enthusiasm
to make the sacrifices necessary to have any significant impact on the
emissions of so-called ‘global warming gases’.
Most climate campaigners hope the public don’t
notice that the science is changing dramatically and blame lessening public support for global
warming projects and policies on a poor economy or a lack of
understanding. These issues play a role,
but the fact that the vast majority of the investment and legal community are
completely ignoring the risk that the foundations of climate concerns come to
be seen as rapidly unraveling is an astonishing blindness that threatens to
catch many over exposed to what are in fact exceptionally risky ventures.
To give readers a taste of the sea state
change that is going on in the science, let’s take a quick look at just one of
the fundamental misunderstandings in the field – the allegedly unusual
temperature rise of the 20th century and the hypothesized connection
to CO2 levels.
Most people do not realize that Earthly temperatures have
been appreciably higher than today many times in the past, and also lower. As
recently as 6,000 years ago, it was as much as 3 degrees Celsius warmer than
now. Eleven thousand five hundred years ago, while the world was coming out of
the thousand-year-long "Younger Dryas" cold
episode, temperatures rose about 5° C in a single decade
– that is nearly 100
times faster than the 20th century's 0.6° C warming that climate
campaigners believe is a precursor to catastrophic global warming.
So what caused the supposed warming (the magnitude of which
remains in dispute) of the past century? It appears to have been due
mostly to changes in the output of the sun. Scientists are consistently
finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations in the
brightness of the sun and our planet’s climate. This is not unexpected. After
all, the sun and the stars are the ultimate source of all energy on Earth.
But climate campaigners and some scientists counter that the
variations in direct solar energy input to our planet is not sufficient to
account for the observed warming of the 20th century. That is correct, but as explained by ICSC
Chair Professor Tim Patterson, a leading paleoclimatolgist
at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, it is secondary solar effects that account for
most of the difference. Here he
describes one of these effects:
“In
a series of groundbreaking scientific papers starting in 2002, Veizer, Shaviv, Carslaw, and Svensmark have
collectively demonstrated that as the output of the sun varies, and with it,
our sun’s protective solar wind, varying amounts of galactic cosmic rays from
deep space are able to enter our solar system and penetrate Earth's atmosphere.
Cosmic rays cause cloud formation, which overall, has a cooling effect. When
the sun's energy output is greater the Earth warms slightly due to direct solar
heating. Additionally, the stronger solar wind generated during "high
sun" periods blocks many of the cosmic rays from entering our atmosphere.
Cloud cover decreases and Earth warms still more.
The
opposite occurs when the sun is less bright. More cosmic rays get through to
Earth's atmosphere, more clouds form, and the planet cools more than would
otherwise be the case due to direct solar effects alone. This is what happened
from the middle of the 17th century into the early 18th century, when the solar
energy input to our atmosphere was at a minimum and the planet was stuck in the
Little Ice Age.
These,
and other new findings, suggest that changes in the output of the sun have
caused most recent climate change. By comparison, variations in carbon dioxide,
the gas most targeted by national climate change campaigns, have shown poor
correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time
scales.”
Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting
into its weakest 11-year ‘Schwabe’ solar cycle of the
past two centuries, likely leading to cooler conditions on Earth. Beginning to
plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one that is projected to encompass
several Schwabe cycles, as did the Little Ice Age
between about 1400 and the mid-1800’s, should be a priority for governments. As
Dr. Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg, and
other scientists have been explaining for years, it is global cooling, not
warming, that is the major climate threat.
But what about the 2500 expert reviewers
of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who supposedly
agreed that human greenhouse gas emissions were responsible for most of the
warming of the past fifty years?
As explained here, the vast majority of these reviewers never even
assessed this, the most important conclusion of the whole IPCC report, before
it was published.
And almost none of these scientists were then involved in approving the
well-publicized ‘Summary for Policymakers’, the document cited by virtually all
media as representing the views of thousands of scientists. Sadly, the consensus claims of the IPCC are a
myth. And, of course, most of the tens
of thousands of other climate scientists in the world have nothing whatsoever
to do with the UN reports; indeed, many of them have expressly criticized what
they view as alarmist IPCC views.
But what about the national science
academies that have endorsed the catastrophic view of human-caused climate
change? That too is completely
misleading. Since none of these organizations
are known to have polled their members, and released the results of the polls,
the support of the academies is merely a political statement from their
executives. J.A.L. Robertson explained
in the April 28, 2006 edition of the National Post what happened in Canada, for
example:
“To claim that the IPCC-2001 assessment
was “supported by the Royal Society
of Canada” is stretching the truth.
Prior to last year’s Montreal conference, the president of
the Royal Society of
London, whose manner of promoting Kyoto has been
criticized, drafted a resolution in favour and
circulated it to other academies of science inviting
co-signing. The Canadian Academy of Science is one of three academies within the Royal Society of Canada
(the other are from the humanities). The president of the
RSC, not a member of the Academy of
Science, received the invitation. He considered it consistent with the position
of the great majority of
scientists, as repeatedly but erroneously claimed by Kyoto proponents, and so
signed it. The resolution was not referred to the Academy of
Science for comment, not even to its council or president (I learned this when,
as a member of the Academy of
Science, I inquired into the basis for the RSC supporting the resolution).”
A similar episode happened in the United
States and Russia concerning The Royal Society initiative. MIT’s Professor Richard
Lindzen, a past IPCC lead author, explained the
misunderstandings of a previous National Academy of
Sciences report here and
concluded: "there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about
long-term climate trends and what causes them."
To
meaningfully assert that there is a consensus in any field, we need to actually
have evidence. And the best way to
gather this evidence is to conduct unbiased, comprehensive worldwide
polls. Since this has never been done in
the climate science community, we simply do not know what, if any, consensus
exists among world climate scientists about the causes of climate change. There have been smaller polls, however. For example, in a 2003 poll
conducted by environmental researchers Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch of the Institute
for Coastal Research in Germany, about a quarter of more than 530
climate scientists from 27 countries surveyed did not believe that "the
current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a
reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases." About
half of those polled stated that the science of climate change was not
sufficiently settled to pass the issue over to policymakers.
Investment decisions often take into account
scientific risk, such as when there is a possibility of a product or service
being knocked off by an even better discovery or invention. Investors are also
concerned about, and so assess the risks of, for example, a publically
traded pharmaceutical company getting its science wrong, or an automobile
manufacturer making engineering mistakes that create a death trap. The assessment of the risk of ‘bad science’
leading to costly legal battles is part of any professional investment decision
in such cases. But, strangely, such due
diligence is not generally being
conducted with respect to the basic science underlying climate change
investment decisions. So science is a
looming iceberg with the potential to sink a whole industry while the
participants argue about the technical details of the marketplace.
If the science of the Kyoto Protocol is wrong, as it increasingly
appears to be, it is only a matter of time before this becomes common
knowledge. The recently-revealed colossal errors of judgement by the world’s
leading financial authorities makes it now far easier for the public to accept
that massive blunders have also occurred in ‘official’ climate
science. As
Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool all of the people some of the time. You can
fool some of the people all of the time. But you can't fool all of the people
all of the time.”
Instead of ignoring, or at times
denigrating ‘climate skeptics’, it has now become urgent that they are welcomed into the discussion and
regularly consulted about the evolving science, despite the political
incorrectness of their opinions. It is
only through a full appreciation of the relevant factors, including all
reputable opinions of the science, that another collapse on the scale of the
sub-prime mortgage fiasco can be avoided.
The International Climate Science
Coalition welcomes the opportunity to help the financial, legal and business
communities understand the immense risk they are taking by not considering the
demonstrable uncertainties in the science of global warming. Ethical and liability implications aside, the
only way investors can truly be afforded “early warning intelligence” about the
risks in the marketplace is if their advisors are well versed in the risks
themselves. As the market expands it
will attract the attention of an increasingly larger public who will start to
ask questions and hold analysts responsible for properly assessing and
explaining the science risks associated with their investments. At the very least, investment managers must
start to prepare for this inevitable, and undoubtedly intense, scrutiny.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Tom Harris is an Ottawa, Canada-based mechanical engineer and Executive Director of the International Climate Science Coalition, http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/.