July 2008 IssuE
Readers’ Forum
We welcome Readers’ Forum letters of interest to the professions. Send them to George Lee, glee@apega.ca. Letters represent the opinions and not necessarily the expertise of writers. The PEGG reserves the right to edit or reject any letter.
Here’s Some Summer Reading: Try the IPCC Reports
It’s time to start a real science-based debate on climate change. All APEGGA members should begin by reading the thousand or so pages from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and draw their own conclusions as to the extent and merit of science as used in the report.
The IPCC report begins sure-footed in science and presents two correlating charts — the increase in CO2 concentration and the increase in global mean temperature for a corresponding time period. There are other charts showing how these have varied in paleontological times but that the most recent trend is of gravest concern.
In 1896, Svante Arrhenius caused a sensation by telling the world that a 6 C rise in global surface temperature would occur for a doubling in atmospheric CO2 concentration. The IPCC contention and scientific conclusion is that a 1.85 C rise is predicted for a doubling in carbon dioxide and that this rise is calamitous for the Earth.
Arrhenius calculated his result. The IPCC bases its conclusion on extrapolation of measurements. Using a third-year heat transfer text, many engineers could calculate a rise of 3.4 C. In fact, many heat transfer texts contain this calculation as an exercise question for undergrads.
Scientific methodology requires additional steps and consideration prior to concluding that the rise will indeed be 1.85 C, that the effects are catastrophic and that no other influences need be considered. On the latter, a reasonable scientist would also consider the role of heat transfer mechanisms and thermodynamics laws in either mitigating or aggravating the outcome.
The First Law of Thermodynamics would cause a scientist to consider the effect of energy consumption on climate change. Energy consumption has doubled from 7.1 terawatts in 1972 to 15 TW in 2005.
A consumption level of 15 TW is equivalent to a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb being set off every six seconds on the planet. What if this energy release rate has greater influence than the CO2 accumulation rate? Are CO2 storage schemes and carbon trading schemes costing billions and trillions of dollars technically tenable when it’s really an issue of the First Law? Is the answer to climate change really a matter of global energy balance?
A First Law approach to solving climate change is beneficial in multiple aspects. It is real and costs a fraction of the schemes using a CO2 control-based approach.
J. Aumuller, P.Eng.
Edmonton
Hockey Stick Gives IPCC Its Out
When the Kyoto Protocol was signed in late 1997, the representation of global temperature included a cold period called the Little Ice Age. The world has been warming from this naturally at about 0.5 C per century, but in the last 150 years this has increased to 0.6 C per century. This additional warming of 0.1 C/century has been attributed to human CO2 emissions by assumption only, with no direct physical connection other than the correlation that both increased over the same time frame.
It is very difficult to promote the necessity of reducing fossil fuel consumption based on just 0.1 C/century, but the IPCC was able to avoid this by adopting a temperature proxy of one of their own lead authors, also known as the “hockey stick,” that effectively removed the Little Ice Age. This allowed the IPCC to claim in its 2001 report that the entire observed 0.6 C/century was “likely” from human sources, which the media took as “definitely.”
The IPCC incorporated this relationship in its climate models as a forcing parameter for CO2 and made predictions of a minimum of 3 C of warming from a doubling of CO2.
The Earth only radiates a limited amount of energy in the 13.5- to 15-micron band that CO2 can capture, and at least 85 per cent of this has been captured already. The maximum warming physically possible due directly to a doubling of CO2 to 770 p.p.m. by volume is less than 0.3 C.
The temperature proxy was officially discredited by the Wegman report in 2006 and the Little Ice Age was returned to the temperature profile.
The 2007 IPCC report reverts to the original temperature profile but makes absolutely no mention of changing from the erroneous temperature proxy all the IPCC models are based on.
The adoption of the temperature proxy and basing the verification of the anthropological global warming premise on this proxy, and then abandoning the proxy but maintaining the verification based on it, violates the science mandate under which the IPCC was formed. APEGGA is bound by the same scientific mandate and therefore cannot ascribe authority of scientific validation to a body that has violated this mandate.
On Feb. 2, 2007, the IPCC released the Summary for Policy Makers of the Fourth Assessment Report (which was released about three months later). This summary report is not bound by the same protocol as the science report and stated that it was “unequivocal” that warming “is” continuing at an alarming rate, and that the IPCC was 90 per cent certain it’s from human sources.
On the date this was published, the globe had cooled from the previous year and this cooling trend went back to at least 2002, indicating that the IPCC misrepresented the temperature trend in this summary. On the same date the global CO2 emissions were over 31,000 megatonnes a year up from 30,576 megatonnes of the previous year and the 29,856 megatonnes of the year before that, indicating that the IPCC misrepresented the relationship of CO2 and global temperature in this summary as well.
The government programs on climate change, including CO2 sequestration, are based solely on the dictates of the IPCC. Yet this body reported that the globe was warming when in fact it was cooling, and stated a 90 per cent certainty of human cause when in fact there is none.
Public opinion has been directed to believe that sequestration of CO2 is a good idea, even if it is just a small step in the right direction; scientific fact states the opposite.
The process of sequestering five megatonnes of CO2 as is currently proposed requires that this CO2 be compressed to 30 atmospheres of pressure. This will require the equivalent energy of 25,722 barrels of oil, which will add 13 tonnes of additional CO2 to the atmosphere. More importantly, it will add 3.75 times 1,010 kilocalories of heat energy to the atmosphere.
The IPCC states that global warming from the 31,000 megatonnes of global human emissions causes 0.006 C of warming each year, so by its estimate the sequestration of five megatonnes would reduce warming by 5/31,000 times 0.006 which equals 0.000000968 C per year.
Physics dictates that the possible warming from CO2 emissions is less than a tenth of what the IPCC models predict, and the actual IPCC prediction should be based on 0.1C/century, not the 0.6 C prediction based on the temperature proxy.
The five megatonnes of sequestered CO2 should therefore be based on a 5/31,000 times 0.0001 C/year of cooling or just 0.000000016 C per year. Does this justify the $2 billion expense or the 25,722 barrels of oil equivalent expended to complete this process?
Furthermore, the 3.75 times 1,010 kcal of heat energy transferred to the atmosphere will warm the 10 kilometres of the lower troposphere by 0.000000009 C, cutting the net benefit of the sequestration to just 0.000000007 C/year.
Our small step will take 142,857,143 years to reduce warming by just one degree — and by that time the Earth will have likely gone through several ice ages without our help in cooling it.
The money would be better spent supporting food banks — to compensate for the rise in food prices resulting from the biofuel initiatives of the Kyoto Protocol. Food crops are competing with biofuel crops, causing a world food crisis.
Norm Kalmanovitch, P.Geoph.
Calgary
Informed Debate
Must Include Those ‘Others’
Re: Which Climate Change Debate Should APEGGA Support? By J. Edward Mathison, P.Geol., Readers’ Forum, The PEGG, May 2008.
Mr. Mathison noted a strong support for an informed debate on climate change — which I heartedly endorse. However, he then goes on to qualify his support by telling us there are really two debates: one that would allow presentations from the scientific establishment while the “other” from sources which apparently he would exclude.
He doesn’t define the “other” sources, but presumably it would be those he disagrees with. Sounds like censorship to me.
It becomes clear that Mr. Mathison wants the debate confined to the reports of the IPCC. While the IPCC Working Groups do provide excellent scientific contributions, the organization also contains some warts — dubious publishing activities and less than creditable scientific publications — the hockey stick graph comes to mind.
As well, the IPCC, particularly its Summary for Policymakers, has a propensity to issue scary catastrophic climate related warnings. Some refer to it — not incorrectly — as the Summary OF Policymakers.
It is important to recognize that the IPCC is not a research or scientific organization; rather, it is a body of government-appointed representatives that has absolute control on what is published. The IPCC movement found expression from two famous reports: The Brandt Report of 1980 and the Bruntland Report of 1987, the latter including a section on the dangers from anthropogenic global warming described as “a threat to life-support systems.”
The public and all scientists should be aware of the background of the IPCC and its current activities. As the late Dr. Roger Pocklington, a respected scientist from the Bedford Institute and a reviewer for the IPCC, said: “The IPCC was established with the objective of associating climate change with fossil fuel emissions. That fossil fuels might have no significant effect on climate change was effectively discounted from the very beginning of the IPCC mandate.”
In other words, it did not really set out to investigate the cause of climate change.
Two excellent refereed sources on the IPCC are
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David Henderson, 2007, Governments and Climate Change Issues, 2007, World Economics, Vol. 8, No 2, 183-228
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David Holland, 2007, Bias and Concealment in the IPCC Process: The “hockey stick” affair and its implications, Energy and the Environment, Vol. 18, No 7+8, 950-983
Frederick Seitz, former president of the National Academy of Sciences, revealed that the 1995 IPCC report “is not what was approved by the contributing scientists,” according to the Wall Street Journal, June 12, 1996. “In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community . . . I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this report.”
What led to his anger was this: “Few of the changes were merely cosmetic: nearly all worked to remove hints of the skepticism with which many scientists regard claims that human activities are having a major impact on climate in general and global warming in particular.”
Then there is the infamous IPCC hockey stick graph, which was shown (many times) in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers 2001 Third Annual Report. The graph originated from the work of Mann, Bradley and Hughes in 1999, and purportedly shows little temperature change from 1000 to 1900 AD and then rising steeply in the 20th century.
The conclusion intended to be drawn was that the cause of increasing temperatures starting in 1900 was manmade emissions of carbon dioxide. This graph allowed the IPCC to eliminate an inconvenient earlier graph showing the Medieval Warm Period — a time when manmade emissions could not have been the cause of that warming.
The hockey stick graph was the icon of the third annual report and appeared everywhere possible in media and other presentations. However, a major problem with the stick became evident when two diligent Canadian scientists, McIntyre and McKitrick, uncovered errors in the data and in the mathematics used to construct the graph.
After investigation by U.S. agencies, the falsity of the graph was confirmed by Wegman et. al. 2006, in an ad hoc committee report on the hockey stick commissioned by the U.S. Congress. Wegman’s conclusions are unambiguous and highly critical of Mann et al. as a few of his quotes show:
“-our committee believes that Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and 1998 the hottest year … cannot be supported by his analysis … there is no overarching consensus on (the temperature proxy used) … there is a tightly knit group of individuals … our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback … and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.”
It is common to hear that the IPCC represents a consensus of scientists that human emissions are causing climate change, with statements often buttressed by comments such as “2,500 scientists agree.” The credibility of this claim has been examined in detail by McLean, at www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org.
It becomes obvious that the 2,500 is a gross exaggeration. In fact many of the reviewers are known to be in disagreement with the IPCC.
McLean states: “The IPCC implies that the majority of hundreds of reviewers endorsed the claim that humans had very likely been responsible for the majority of the warming in the last 50 years. This analysis of Chapter 9, the key chapter to . . . the entire Fourth Assessment Report, reveals that implication to be entirely false.”
Mr. Mathison makes reference to the Royal Society of Canada, the Royal Society in the U.K. and to the National Academy of Science in the U.S. as accepted sources to him in the debate. The National Academy of Science is accepted as a useful science source. I’ve referenced it above with respect to Wegman’s report and to Seitz’s comments.
Another highly regarded scientist, Lindzen of MIT, served on the academy. When asked by the U.S. government for an evaluation of its third annual report, he was highly critical of the IPCC.
The Royal Society of Canada, while it carries out admirable work in specific areas and problems, has not been involved in climate science since 1997 when it transferred its activities to the University of Victoria. A casual reading of both Royal Societies leaves one with the impression that they are clones of the IPCC when it comes to climate science.
Now, who are these “others” that Mr. Mathison believes should be restrained from participating in the debate on climate science? We have just noted Lindzen, Seitz and Wegman, but there are many, many other reputable scientists worldwide that continue to make important contributions to the “other” climate science.
Timothy Patterson of Carleton has published an outstanding paper, Sedimentary Geology 172, that brings together environment, climate change and geology. Mention of others would include but not be limited to Veizer (Ottawa), Spencer (NASA), Carter (Australia), Shaviv (Israel), Jaworowski (Poland), Segalstad (Norway). de Freitas (New Zealand), Svensmark and Friis Christesen (Denmark).
Many more highly qualified and reputable climate scientists could be added.
David Barss, P.Geol.
Calgary