________________________________
To: [email protected]
Sent: Thu, January 21, 2010 4:30:24 AM
Subject: KONTROVERSI PEMANASAN GLOBAL PATUT DISIMAK TERUS
Dear all,
Serombongan kaum ilmuwan penyangkal pemanasan global (bukan ilmuwan cuaca top)
yang dekat dengan perusahaan2 multinasional dan menguasai panggung politik
dunia, berjasa-semu telah mengambangkan hasil summit Kopenhagen. Begitulah bila
pandangan kurang transparan dan digiring politik praktis-pragmatis, bahkan
ditimpa konspirasi ilmu diwarnai dogma ala agamis. Cupetlah akhirnya... Tetapi
waktu akan menjadi hakimnya.
Bangsa-bangsa negeri berkembang mesti makin waskita dan waspada. Para ilmuwan
sejati tak patut terjebak.
Salam.
20/01/10
Sceptical about Climate Change Sceptics
Scepticism is good, but the inability to see the whole is
what leads climate sceptics astray
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho and Prof. Peter
Saunders
Tragedy of the Copenhagen
summit & the climate sceptics
“Low targets, goals dropped, Copenhagen ends in failure” was
the headline verdict of UK’s Guardian newspaper [1]. The “Copenhagen accord”,
brokered by US
President Barack Obama and Chinese
Premier Wen Jiabao, “recognizes” the
scientific case for keeping temperature rise to no more than 2 ˚C, but contains
no commitments to reduce emissions to achieve that goal. Martin Khor, executive
director of the South Centre (a think tank
for developing countries), condemned the entire process as [2] a “tragedy” and
a “disaster”. The
three-page long Copenhagen accord,
drawn up after the UN conference, was not even accepted by the conference.
Just weeks before the Copenhagen climate summit, private e-mails were stolen
from the
servers of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the
UK and released on the web [3], fuelling a fresh round of attack on climate
change from the sceptics that may have helped to derail the Copenhagen summit.
The Copenhagen summitfailed because of other over-riding reasons as described
by Khor [2], and
predicted by our guest editor, Alan Simpson, UK member of Parliament [4]
(Announcing
Science in Society- Autumn 2009). Ultimately, it comes down to an inability of
the world nations to cooperate, to see the whole picture,
particularly in the longer term.
But it is a mistake to dismiss the climate sceptics, as they
will continue to influence the tough
negotiations ahead. And their voices are getting shriller, louder, and more
sophisticated in the political arena. A US Senate Minority
Report updated in March 2009 [5], claims more than700 international scientists
(note: not climate scientists) dissenting over global warming.
On the eve of the summit, Saudi Arabia and Republican members of the US
Congress used the e-mails incident to claim that the need for
urgent action to cut carbon emissions has been undermined [6]. UK Prime
Minister Gordon Brown, Environment
Secretary Ed Miliband, and Ed Markey, who co-authored the US climate change
bill, had to join forces to condemn the ‘flat-earth’
sceptics.
Meanwhile, sceptic
celebrities such as Professor Siegfried Frederick Singer and Lord Christopher
Monckton were out in force in Copenhagen at a sceptics conference [7],
expostulating to a rapt audience on ‘climategate’
- how scientists deliberately distort data to support the global warming
hypothesis - and thanking China for emitting CO2 that greatly
benefits agriculture.Singer, former
president of US National Academy of Sciences, has written a petition signed by
31 000 urging the US government against adopting a climate change treaty [8].
Monckton, a hereditary peer in the UK
and formerly policy advisor to Margaret
Thatcher, embarked on a tour of North America during the autumn of 2009 to
campaign against the Copenhagen summit, warning that the US president Obama
intended to sign a treaty at the conference that would “impose a communist
world government” on the globe [9].
In the same weeks, we were bombarded with messages urging us
to stop supporting the conventional
theory. A common thread running through climate scepticism is that human
activities have no impact on climate, least of all, the increase in CO2 from
human activities. The earth has warmed and cooled in the past, and natural
causes can account for all the warming that may have taken place since the
industrial revolution; andsceptics will jump at whichever natural cause that
appears plausible from time to time.
There are those who believe global warming itself is a fiction, and the
Copenhagen summit a UN plot to establish a
(communist) world government.
The scientific case of
climate scepticism
Peter
Taylor, author of Chill, A reassessment
of global warming theory [10], is convinced the earth is cooling, not
warming, based on scientific evidence reviewed in his book published in 2009. A
good friend sent us the scholarly-looking volume of more than 400 pages
complete with notes and references, strongly urging us to read
it.
Taylor is an environmental analyst and policy advisor with
impeccable credentials. He has worked as a consultant with the UK government
and various NGOs on environmental
pollution, nuclear waste hazards, and renewable energies. He doesn’t
approve of biofuels, nuclear power
stations, GMOs or big wind farms, for good reasons.
On climate change, one finds it strangely reassuring when he
says there isno ‘incontrovertible
signal’ for climate change and that the climate change ‘consensus’ does not
exist, even within the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
That’s just what one would
expect from real science, as opposed
to religious dogma. Even Taylor
himself admits that the “consensus” only exists in theIPCC summary for policy
makers, and not in the technical reports.
When Taylor reveals alternative theories largely ignored by
the establishment; that too, rings true. The scientific establishment is akin
to a religious order; the hacked e-mails incident [2] exposes, if anything, the
extent to which the ‘in-group’ can exclude the ‘dissenters’.
It is the same in every field, as we can confirm from personal experiences.
What makes us wary is when Taylor says he was “motivated to
critically review the evidence of climate change because the proposed cure is
likely to be worse than the disease.” His chief concern was the impact on the
UK countryside, especially from the push for biofuels as a renewable energy
strategy, which would mean using up
all the ‘set-aside’ land to grow ‘bioenergy’ crops, leaving no natural
ecosystems
in the magnificent landscape, no butterflies and bees, or any vestige of
natural biodiversity.
Was Taylor
unconsciously biased against the evidence for climate change because he did not
like the remedial policies
proposed? That’s the danger of allowing
politics to dominate science, as governments and vested interests do, all
too often. We would not be surprised if much of climate scepticism is
politically motivated and by far less benign
reasons.
We don’t like the climate change remedies on offer either;
which is why we have gone out of our way to formulate truly green and
sustainable energy policies
[11] (Green Energies - 100% Renewable by 2050) that are independent of whether
climate change
is occurring or not [12] (Power
to the People, 100 Percent Renewables by 2050). That frees us from
potential bias against the conventional theory, which we too, have found overly
simplistic.
Nevertheless, we cannot believe human activities have no influence
on climate. Humans have destroyed vast
swathes of forests and other natural ecosystems, decimating natural
biodiversity, turning huge areas into waste land and desert through
overexploitation of soil and water. We have literally changed the face of
the earth.
Taylordoes not waste time on the conventional theory. He simply
states categorically that there is no evidence anthropogenic (human-generated)
CO2 has any role in warming the planet, nor any other human
activities. It is all a fabrication. He singles out the computer modellers as
the
chief villains that have created the myth. Their models, which dominate the
IPCC, are ‘untransparent’, based on false assumptions, ignore natural cycles,
and do not take sufficient account of natural forces. All the work on
‘postdiction’ of how atmospheric CO2 correlates with temperature in the earth’s
ancient history, as measured in ice
cores is summarily dismissed.
The refutations
Actually, the evidence for CO2 and the greenhouse effect is very good indeed.
Research into the greenhouse effect began in the 19th century with Fourier,
Tyndall, Langley, and Arrhenius who first quantified the
relationship between changes in CO2 and climate [13]. In the1930s, burning
fossil fuels by human
beings began to be considered a cause of significant warming. The IPCC climate
models are based on fundamental physics
[14, 15]; and confirmed by direct
satellite measurements [16] (see [17] Getting Sceptical about Global
Warming Scepticism).
Taylor subscribes to the theory favoured by climate sceptics: solar activity
can account for most if not all the warming that has taken place in the latter
part of the past
century. He devotes most of the book describing and defending the theory,
especially as revived by researchers at the
Danish National Space Center in the late 1990s [18]. The theory claims a strong
correlation between solar activity and global climate, which can be explained
by an influence of solar activity on the abundance of cosmic rays.
Solar activity goes through cycles that average 11 years
long. When the solar magnetic field is strong during periods of maximum sunspot
activity, cosmic rays are excluded
from the solar system, and as the sun’s activity diminishes, cosmic rays become
more abundant. The theory is that
cosmic rays promote the formation of clouds by generating plenty of ions in the
atmosphere that can form cloud condensation nuclei upon which water vapour
condense to form droplets that
coalesce into clouds. More clouds shade the earth from the sun and cool the
earth. Conversely, a lack of clouds allows more solar radiation to
strike the earth and warms it. The Danish group published a series of papers
that attempted to establish links between cosmic
rays and in succession, total cloud cover and low cloud cover, and between
the solar cycle lengths and Northern Hemisphere land temperatures. But Peter
Laut at the Technical University
of Denmark analysed the published
graphs [19], and showed that the apparent strong correlations displayed on the
graphs have been obtained by “an incorrect
handling of the physical data” and cautioned against “drawing any
conclusions” based on them. In other words, the data have been manipulated in
unjustified and
unexplained ways to produce the correlations that do not actually exist.
This lack of correlation between solar activity and earth temperature was amply
confirmed by other researchers [17] including experts in solar physics [20-22].
Far from ignoring the cosmic ray hypothesis, as Taylor
complained, climate scientists have
seriously followed it up with the latest satellite data; and the evidence has
all gone against the theory. One of
the proposals for saving the hypothesis is to invoke sudden decreases in cosmic
ray - Forbush events - that occur within a solar activity cycle, as
having special significance in influencing cloud
formation. But investigations from the space-borne MODIS instrument, which
has been operating since 2000, failed to find such correlation [23]. Similarly,
little correlation could be found
between cosmic ray flux and the
formation of new particles that
could serve as cloud condensation nuclei [24].
Yet, based on this tenuous and widely discredited evidence, Taylor is
predicting a global chill because the flux of cosmic rays
has been rising since 2004. The regional cooling across Eurasia, England and
parts of North America through December 2009
and early January 2010 might seem to fit his prediction. But much of the planet
is in fact
experiencing warmer temperatures than usual, including North-east America,
Canada, North Africa, the Mediterranean, and south-west Asia [17]. This is an
apt illustration of what’s wrong with climate scepticism: the inability to see
the global
picture while focussing on their tiny areas of interest.
Scepticism is healthy, especially when the political stakes are high in
something
like climate change; but it must be
accompanied by a passionate commitment to the coherent whole. Contrary to the
claims of Taylor and other climate
sceptics, scepticism has stimulated good research on cloud formation, for
example, which has long been identified as a
major area of uncertainty by top climate
scientists [15, 25]. Similarly, the importance of natural cycles [10], the slow
response/feedback times of greenhouse gases [26] (350ppm CO2 the Target), the
role of black
carbon in warming the earth [27] (Black Carbon Warms the Planet Second
Only to CO2) and the rapid depletion
of oxygen [28, 29] (O2 Dropping Faster than CO2 Rising, Warming
Oceans Starved of Oxygen) must all be taken into consideration.
One thing we are completely convinced of: human actionis effective in
exacerbating or mitigating climate change. The choice and responsible are both
ours. We need an open and transparent science to help us
make the right choice and implement the appropriate solutions.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
