Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
5 The scientific context
Robert M. Carter
The science of global warming is at the same time relatively simple and very complex.
1
Thesimplicity existsintheelemental sciencethatistaughtinintroductoryearthscienceand
meteorology courses at universities around the globe. The complexity lies in the integration
of the many and diverse processes involved in climate change, some of which are poorly
understood or even remain unknown, thus necessitating the use of speculative computer
models to attempt to achieve further understanding.
Those scientists who support the alarmist agenda of human-caused global warming tend
to stress the intricacies of climate change, an approach that implies the need for 'experts'
and highly complex computer models to adjudicate on the matter. In contrast, independent
scientists tend to stress the importance of the broader facts that provide the context against
which the threat of a dangerous human influence on climate should be judged.
In this chapter, four basic scientific facts are described that provide an essential context
for intelligent discussion of the global warming issue. Thereafter, there is an explanation of
thereasonsforthedifferingadvicetogovernmentsthatisprovidedbytheIntergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate
Change(NIPCC).Fullerdiscussionoftheseandrelatedissuesisprovidedinmy2010 topic,
Climate: the Counter Consensus
.
2
The context of contemporary climate change
Context 1—error bounds on reconstructing the global average temperature from
thermometer data
ThemainrecordusedbytheIPCCforanalysingcontemporary'climatechange'iscompiled
by averaging individual temperature records of varying quality and length from around the
globe. This, the 'HadCRUT' record—the name being a combination of the data sets of two
organisations namely the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office and the Climatic Research
Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia—has a number of known deficiencies. These
include that it is far too short to be treated as a serious climate record (being equivalent to
just five
climate
data points), is probably inadequately corrected for the urban heat island
effect, and is subject to other large errors.
For example, amongst the papers released in the 2009
Climategate
scandal was a
previously unpublished 2005 CRU contractual report by Philip Brohan et al. which
