Manmade Global Warming - New Extremes, page-74

Observant readers will have noted the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences last week awarded their annual prize in Physics to scientists who made groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems.

one half of sciences pre-eminent prize of recognition jointly went to Syukuro Manabe of Princeton University and Klaus Hasselmann of the Maxx Planck Institute for Meteorology “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”.

the value of climate models has been the subject of sustained attack for decades by deniers of manmade global warming.

operating without the burden of personal honesty, an ethical base, scientific background and critical thought processes, deniers have sought to smear climate models anyway they can. Hoping if they throw enough mud some will stick.

this ill directed barrage is addressed in Hot Air by climate scientist Peter Stott, in which he lays out the battle by scientists against climate change denial.

it is “a personal account of one climate scientist’s struggle to promote facts in the face of contrarian prejudice,” according to a review by Philip Ball published in Saturday’s Guardian online.

The start of Ball’s review follows. It aids in the understanding that the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics is hugely important recognition for the scientists and marks an important milestone in an ongoing journey.

Start of BALL’s Book Review:

”How on earth did we get here? How did we arrive in a world where temperatures in British Columbia can come within a whisker of 50C, where a ring of fire made Athens look apocalyptic, massive floods ripped apart towns in Belgium and Germany – yet still there is no international plan for how to keep the world habitable by the end of the century, and those protesting about that are labelled extremists?

”Hot Air, by the leading climate scientist Peter Stott, offers an explanation. On the one hand it details the four-decade journey taken by him and his peers, especially in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to determine whether the world is genuinely heating at a dangerous rate, and if human activities are the primary cause. (It is, and they are.) On the other hand, it exposes the sustained efforts of a coalition of business lobbies, politicians, maverick scientists and contrarian attention-seekers to discredit and undermine that enterprise – efforts that continue even now, as the world literally burns.

”We are approaching a point where those denialist efforts are more than cynical, irresponsible and self-interested: they are starting to look like crimes against humanity. But they alone do not explain why there has been such a lack of effective action against climate change. A few loudmouthed pundits and wrongheaded scientists do not wield such power. Their actions, and the lobbying of multinationals, would count for far less if they were not so eagerly embraced by politicians who, for short-term electoral gain, have shied away from taking difficult decisions. It remains unclear whether they will behave any differently at the Cop26 meeting in Glasgow this November, which some regard as pretty much our last hope of averting disaster.

“The biggest value of Stott’s account is in giving the lie to the denialists’ accusation that climate scientists are (for reasons they never make clear) conjuring alarmist narratives from error-prone computer models and shoddy data. In contrast, he shows – sometimes in a little too much detail – how slowly and carefully the scientists have edged towards the current consensus since the 1980s, comparing temperature records from many sources, testing their models’ ability to reproduce past climate patterns, exploring their sensitivity to different assumptions, and looking for the distinctive “fingerprints” in climate data that can distinguish human-made from natural effects.”