Climate Science

Here are bits from an interesting essay by Hendrik Tennekes, retired Director of Research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute:

HERE in the Netherlands, many people have ranked me as a climate skeptic. It did not help much that I called myself a protestant recently. I protest against overwhelming pressure to adhere to the climate change dogma promoted by the adherents of IPCC. I was brought up in a fundamentalist protestant environment, and have become very sensitive to everything that smells like an orthodox belief system.

The advantages of accepting a dogma or paradigm are only too clear. One no longer has to query the foundations of one's convictions, one enjoys the many advantages of belonging to a group that enjoys political power, one can participate in the benefits that the group provides, and one can delegate questions of responsibility and accountability to the leadership. In brief, the moment one accepts a dogma, one stops being an independent scientist.

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Climate models are quasi-deterministic and have to simulate daily circulation patterns for tens of years on end before average values can be found. The much more challenging problem of producing a theory of climate forecast skill is left by the wayside. In IPCC-documents one finds phrases like "climate surprises", showing that the IPCC-staff is unaware of the ignorance it reveals by that choice of words, or unwilling to state forcefully that climate predictability research deserves much more attention than it has received so far.

This is no minor matter. A few years after launching my slogan on forecast skill I chanced upon a copy of Karl Popper’s Open Universe and discovered that Popper had anticipated the problems caused by the Lorenz paradigm. His claim that scientists should be held accountable for the accuracy of their predictions boils down to the requirement that they have to compute in advance the reliability of their computations. For complex models, Popper wrote, this demand leads to "infinite regress": computations of forecast skill are much harder than the forecasts themselves, and the next level, forecasting the skill of the skill forecast, is insurmountable when a complex system such as the climate is involved. Popper concluded that the positivist claims of science are in general unwarranted.

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I cannot bring myself to accept any type of prediction paradigm, and choose an adaptation paradigm instead. This brings me in the vicinity of Roger Pielke, Sr.'s emphasis on land-use changes and Ronald Brunner's modest bottom-up alternatives. It goes without saying that I abhor such dogmas as various claims to Manage The Planet or Greenpeace's belief in Saving the Earth. These ideologies presuppose that the intelligence of Homo sapiens is capable of such feats. However, I know of no evidence to support such claims.

Back to Lorenz. Complex deterministic systems suffer not only from sensitive dependence on initial conditions but also from possible sensitive dependence on the differences between Nature and the models employed in representing it. The apparent linear response of the current generation of climate models to radiative forcing is likely caused by inadvertent shortcomings in the parameterization schemes employed.

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As a staunch defender of the Lorenz paradigm, I add that the task of finding all nonlinear feedback mechanisms in the microstructure of the radiation balance probably is at least as daunting as the task of finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. The blind adherence to the harebrained idea that climate models can generate "realistic" simulations of climate is the principal reason why I remain a climate skeptic. From my background in turbulence I look forward with grim anticipation to the day that climate models will run with a horizontal resolution of less than a kilometer. The horrible predictability problems of turbulent flows then will descend on climate science with a vengeance.

One thing that most people have remarked on it that most of the climate skeptics are retired. It is careeer-killing to voice any dissent from the IPCC dogma. So only the very old or the very young have the guts to declare that the emperor has no clothes. This guy is a retired research director. So he is free to state his views.

By the way... here's an interesting post on the Watts Up With That? blog warning people to be prepared for a fresh onslaught of "weather is climate" as you get innundated with the fact that there is very little snow on Cypress Mountain at the Vancouver Olympic venue. This is completely understandable as a consequence of an El Nino year. But it will be sold as "evidence" of global warming. (Funny, when skeptics points out that things are colder than the climate models suggest, they are beaten up for confusing weather with climate since one event doesn't define a trend. But the true believers like to have their cake and eat it too, so the one Cypress Mountain missing snow event will be proof positive of global warming.)