The Politics of Climate Change vs The Truth

[Rorschach]

Global climate has warmed, but scientists divided on why that is so
By Michael Asten
October 30, 2018


The anti-Liberal swing in Wentworth is prompting soul-searching on whether the federal government’s climate-change policy was a major factor.

Kerryn Phelps thinks it was, as do commentators Paul Kelly and Alan Kohler. Kohler wrote: “Now the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report … places unprecedented demands on our moral resources, and on our politics.” Yes, but for reasons different from those he espouses.

Joining the chorus of demands, the directors of corporate Australia last week nominated climate change as the No 1 issue for the government to address.

Yet most Australians do not appreciate the level of doubt about IPCC science in the science community. We agree the global climate has warmed in the past century and CO2 is contributing to it. What is in doubt is the relative contribution of natural variations and anthropogenic CO2.

The American Meteorological Society, in 2014, addressed these questions with a considered questionnaire to members. It found 52 per cent of the 1821 respondents believed global warming to be “mostly human” in origin.

The views of the rest ranged from natural causes being an equal or dominant contributor while others thought there was insufficient evidence for a conclusion. It is a tragedy of modern science politics that the views of that minority are not accepted as valid concerns by the nation’s scientific leadership or by most politicians.

A major driver against that acceptance is funding and the politics that goes with it, and how that affects our peak scientific societies, academies and advisory bodies.

Garth Paltridge, former CSIRO chief scientist, director of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Oceans Studies, in Tasmania, and fellow of the prestigious Australian Academy of Sciences, recalls the academy being contracted by the federal government to produce a booklet on climate change to help educate the public.

He suggested the document greatly understated the uncertainties associated with the global- warming thesis, and the then president of the academy chastised him — expert comment contrary to government policy was apparently unwelcome. As it is now. At seminars this year, I have met colleagues working in association with the CSIRO who are aware of differing views within that organisation. They tell me management “discourages” challenges to the IPCC consensus. So, do such views not reach the Science Minister as he helps shape our national response?

The government is under pressure from the IPCC to join in the decarbonisation efforts it recommends, supposedly to restrict the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C by 2100. I will leave to others the debate over the cost to Australia of abiding by the Paris Agreement — the potential loss of jobs, energy prices and the loss of energy-intensive industries.

But external costs also will be large; the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has a goal for its Green Climate Fund to spend $US100 billion annually from 2020, with Australia having been “assessed” as responsible for 4.25 per cent of this cost. (Our share of global CO2 emissions is about 1.4 per cent, but the UNFCCC formula requires industrialised countries to fund above their proportion of emissions.) If we accept this obligation from the UNFCCC, we are saddling our children and grandchildren with an obligation for $A60bn across a decade.

Faced with this hefty burden, and international pressure to make these commitments, it makes sense that the government listens to all the arguments. And corporate Australia, while rightly concerned at the lack of clear long-term policy on national energy supplies, also should be demanding clear statements on risk and uncertainties.

With billions of dollars of national wealth and thousands of jobs at stake, the duty of disclosure requires that we should have the best minds working on both sides of the scientific issue.

John Christy, Alabama climatologist and a regular witness before US congressional com­mittees, has called for a “red team/blue team” approach to climate science, with the teams taking responsibility to present one or the other side of the debate.

In Australia, perhaps this role can be performed by teams headed by our two scientific academies: the Australian Academy of Sci­ences, and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences. Each includes experts on both sides of the climate debate.

To make an impact, both teams (which, ideally, would include scientists seconded from academe, industry and government bodies such as Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO) would need to be funded over, say, five years so scientists could join up as a useful career step, knowing their work would be welcomed, supported and scrutinised through the normal scientific processes, and without fear of political sanctions.

One scientific example clearly illustrates the controversy within the science.

The global temperature record supplied by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia for the years 1850 to 2010, can be compared against climate models accepted by the IPCC; the fit, as noted in IPCC assessment reports, is good enough to satisfy the IPCC and validate its modelling.

However, Nicola Scafetta, of the University of Naples, who has studied natural cycles of climate change in multiple peer-reviewed papers, has taken a closer look at that data and found natural cycles of change embedded in it. After building those natural variations into a set of the same-climate models, he obtains a statistically better fit between observed data and modelling.

In particular, the temperature slowdown, or “pause”, post-2000 fits Scafetta’s models. They are fascinating since they forecast future global warming to be about half of that used by the IPCC in its demands for urgent action to avoid climate disaster.

It’s troubling that Scafetta’s work is not part of the latest IPCC report; the failure to provide a balanced assessment of alternative scientific interpretations leaves our company directors and politicians poorly informed as they allocate shareholders’ millions and taxpayers’ billions.

Michael Asten is a retired professor of geophysics and adjunct senior fellow at Monash University