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November 23, 2009, 17:45:00 | NP Editor
Rising uncertainty over science existed long before the CRU emails surfaced
By Terence Corcoran

In the run-up to next month's increasingly shaky Copenhagen global warming policy negotiations, the
official advice from the world's climatists is that the politicians and the rest of us should just
pay no attention to the science of climate change. It is settled, they say, and all we have to do -
as the Financial Times editorialized recently - is "follow the science" and get on with the
business of reconstruction and redistributing world economic production. We must, in the words of
Elizabeth Kolbert, the New Yorker's resident climatist, maintain our "faith in science."

Among true believers, holding on to that deep faith in the scientific process must be something of
a strain, not unlike holding on to the conviction that Moses actually did part the Red Sea. That's
some trick! Before this past weekend, doubts about the foundations of climate science were already
being seriously raised by climate observers who noted, among other anomalies, that average global
temperatures are no higher than they were in 1998 and may get cooler in coming years? If the world
is getting hotter, how come it's not getting hotter?

Other observations are also feeding public skepticism of the idea that man-made global warming is a
risk to planetary ecosystems and the future of human life on Earth. One could fill pages with
evidence either of global warming's manifest absence from our lives or its failure to show up on
schedule or as expected. Where are the hurricanes, the sea level increases, the floods in Europe,
the steady signs of warming? Fewer people believe the hype, one of the main reasons politicians
heading to the Copenhagen are shying away from major commitments.

If, as expected, Copenhagen fails to rewrite the rules of the world economy to meet climate
objectives, the next step in the process will be the slow collapse of the science. It will not
happen overnight - billions of dollars and man-hours have already been invested in the science. It
will take time to unwind.

Already fraying at the edges, the science unravelled a little more over the past weekend. Fresh
reason for skepticism emerged with the release - via hackers or internal leaks - of a massive cache
of emails collected in the computer systems at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of
East Anglia in Britain. The CRU is the prime source of global temperature data, and the emails
raise serious issues about some of the methods and practices of the leading figures in the official
science of global warming.

Climate skeptics have swarmed the email cache and are trying to turn it into evidence of science
skulduggery. There is evidence, they say, of science fraud that should serve to discredit the work
of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Defenders of the establishment
claim the emails are much ado about not much, beyond revealing routine inside-science debates and
conflicts. A few of the key emails from the massive collection are reproduced elsewhere on this
page, cherry-picked from more than 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents that are now readily available
to the curious in the Internet.

Clearly climate science is not Louis Pasteur in his lab or Alexander Fleming searching for
antibiotics and discovering penicillin. Providing the proof for man-made global warming is big
business and big politics, backed by hundreds of billions of dollar and deep ideological
convictions. Have the convictions overtaken the search for scientific proof? The CRU emails, while
no smoking gun of fraud and malfeasance, can only add to the already mounting scientific and
popular skepticism.

The coming end of certainty over man-made warming was already a possibility before the CRU events.
The idea that the science is not settled, or that it is incomplete and uncertain, shows up in many
places, even among the true believers.

One of the CRU emails is from Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the U.S.
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado and a leading member of the IPCC
science team. Last month, in a letter to Michael Mann, the inventor of the "hockey stick" graph, he
asked: "Where the heck is global warming?" It's freezing in Colorado, he said, and "the fact is
that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."

It could be more than a travesty if, over the next few years, global warming doesn't make a major
appearance in the world's climate. If world temperatures - which are now no hotter than they were
in 1998 - stay low for the next five to 10 years, it suggests a major gap in climate models that
support global warming theory. The BBC's science-based climate blogger recently summarized the
looming dilemma. Under long-range climate model simulations of man-made global warming, it is
supposedly impossible for there to be no warming over a 15-year period. Since 10 years have passed,
the next five are crucial. If temperatures rise to above 1998 levels, the BBC's Paul Hudson writes,
"then climate skeptics will have nowhere to hide." But if in the next few years temperatures "do
not exceed 1998 temperature levels, then this could cause big questions to be asked."

Such big questions are already being asked at the highest scientific levels. The official UN
science community is currently totally at a loss to understand, let alone explain, much of anything
beyond their 100-year prediction of rising temperatures brought on by increases in carbon
emissions. They have the big picture, but they have none of the little pictures of what will happen
in five years or 10 years or even three or four decades. Mojib Latif, of the Leibniz Institute of
Marine Sciences, Kiel University, outlined the gaps in decadal prediction at a conference in
September.

Two or three decades of "cooling" may well happen, said Prof. Latif, referring to a chart that
shows temperatures below current levels as late as 2030. He also showed that hurricanes have not
increased in frequency, there is no evidence so far of rising sea levels, key rainfall measures
show no trend linked to global warming, and climate models can be off by as much as 10 degrees
locally.

Another new paper by NCAR's James Hurrell and others in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological
Society reviews the "profound gaps," "compromises," "errors" and general failures and inadequacies
in existing climate models. He calls for massive increases in computer power to resolve the issues.
How much power? Scientists at the World Climate Conference in September, where the science gaps
were explored, endorsed an earlier recommendation. "There is a compelling need for dedicated
computational facilities that are 1,000 times to 10,000 times more powerful than available today."

With public suspicion already high and current climate science already in some doubt if not
disrepute, and with politicians not quite willing to sacrifice economy growth over computer
modelled climate, that chances that scientists will get that computer power seem to be diminishing.