by Bob Foster¹

16 October, 2002

1. Clifford's Dictum²
It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.

2. CSIRO's temperature projections for Australia
Has CSIRO snowed us on global warming? Its website www.dar.csiro.au/impacts/future tells us that: By 2070, annual average temperatures are increased by 1.0 to 6.0 ^OC over most of Australia ... because of human-caused greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. For the "inland", the range projected is an even more remarkable 1.0-6.8 ^OC - compared to 'only' 0.7-3.8 ^OC in CSIRO's previous (1996) report. There will be much warming in the century ahead.

3. Was 'Greenhouse Effect' the cause of 20th Century warming?
But what of the immediate past? In the 20th Century, 0.6 ^OC of global-average surface warming from all causes occurred in two roughly-equal episodes from the 1920s to the 40s, and from the 70s onward, with a return to slightly cooler conditions in the interim.

The Great Pacific Climate Shift of 1976/77 marked the start of renewed warming. This Shift was the most prominent climatic event of the century and, although directly related to an abrupt reduction in the upwelling of cold water in the eastern Pacific, its impact extended far beyond the Pacific Basin.

Clearly, the warming from the 20s largely predates the build up human-caused GHGs in the atmosphere. But is the renewed warming from the 70s a case of greenhouse effect warming?

The human-caused 'greenhouse effect' is a phenomenon of the atmosphere. GHG emissions, of which carbon dioxide (CO₂) - from fossil fuels, particularly coal - is by far the most influential constituent, are supposed to trap extra heat in the lower troposphere. Instead of escaping to Space, some of this trapped heat is now returned instead to the earth's surface - causing 'greenhouse effect' warming. Concurrently, less heat escapes to space than before.

We now have 23 years of satellite-derived observations, and there are two surprising findings. The lower troposphere is only warming a quarter as fast as is the surface, and (in the tropics) more - not less - heat is now leaving the top of the atmosphere for Space. The simplest explanation for these findings is that most of the measured surface temperature increase, at least over the past 23 years, is something other than 'greenhouse effect' warming.
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1. Phone (61.3) 9525 6335, fax 6345, email fosbob@bigpond.com Bob is a director of the Lavoisier Group www.lavoisier.com.au which is putting a contrarian view on climate change. Like-minded Australian sites are www.webace.com.au/~wsh and the comprehensive www.john-daly.com.
2. This useful dictum is quoted in "Beyond Physics" by W. Wayt Gibbs, in the 'Science and Religion' section of Scientific American (August 1998, p 10.)
In fact, most warming in the lower troposphere is north of 30 ^ON; and indeed, south of 45 ^OS it is cooling. Therefore, whatever greenhouse warming there may be, appears largely confined to the extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere. And yet, CSIRO is claiming that Australia could warm ten times as much by 2070, from the greenhouse effect alone, as the global average warming from all causes over the last 100 years!

4. Palaeoclimatology and the likely cause of climate change
Let's look at the distant past for further guidance. Global climate is cyclic (ie warmer/cooler) at many time-scales - although IPCC's climate models admit only to further warming. Since the final cold snap of the Little Ice Age from 1800 (the last of the Great Frost Fairs on the Thames was in 1813/14), we have seen peaks of warming in the 1820s, 1870s, 1930s and 1990s.

These periods of extra warming, at about 60-year intervals, are overprinted on a longer warming trend which goes back to the nadir of the Little Ice Age at about 1650-1700. During the Great Winter of 1683/4, when 11 inches of ice formed on the river Thames, diarist John Evelyn wrote (here copied from a wall-panel at Museum of London):
Streetes of Boothes were set up upon the Thames, which were like a Citty or Continental faire, all sorts of Trades and shops furnished, and full of Commodities, even to a Printing presse …

The long-running 1500-year cold/warm cycle, of which the Roman Empire Warm Period, Dark Ages, Mediaeval Warm Period and Little Ice Age are the latest manifestations, is linked closely to solar influences. The overprinted (50/60-year) cyclicity of global temperatures is related in the first instance to inertial factors, as evidenced by cyclic changes in length-of-day which display a strikingly similar period; and the same period applies to the cycle of change in the movement of atmospheric and oceanic mass - and hence in heat transportation. Again, the Sun could well be involved, although we don't yet know how - but there is no 'greenhouse effect' signature in evidence.

5. All the way with IPCC
Why then did CSIRO raise its high-end projection of human-caused warming in 2070? The primary reason is that it adopted as its starting point the global average calculated by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Between its Second (1966) and Third (2001) Assessment Report, IPCC increased its high-end warming for 2100 from 3.5 to 5.8 ^OC. Therefore, and apparently without conducting any corroborating analysis, CSIRO increased global average temperature for its 2070 starting point, on a pro-rata basis, from 2.1 to 4.0 ^OC.

Misleadingly, CSIRO tells us that:
This faster rate of warming was mainly due to changes in the emissions of sulphate aerosols between the two sets of scenarios. Emissions of sulphate aerosols, which have a cooling effect on climate, were projected to increase strongly in the (IPCC 1996) scenarios, but these increases were much reduced in the (IPCC 2001) scenarios.

This explanation is highly implausible. The first draft of IPCC's new Report (Climate Change 2001: the scientific basis), released in 1999, already included the changed assumptions for cooling aerosols, and the high-end projection for 2100 rose then only from 3.5 to 4.0 ^OC. In any case, the aerosol explanation is rendered moot by the observed pattern of warming. Roughly 90% of these short-lived 'cooling' aerosols are emitted in the Northern Hemisphere - where most of the fossil fuels are burned. But the warming is in the same hemisphere.
The 5.8 ^OC number did not surface until the final draft of October 2000 - subsequent to government review. The key changes appear to be:
First, a stated 60% increase in projected world per-capita income (but actually much higher, because of an unrecognized technical error in IPCC's economic modeling);
Second, the addition of 30% (about 300 ppm) to the high-end projection of atmospheric CO₂ concentration to cover 'uncertainties'; and
Third, the substitution of the single climate model (incorporating IPCC's 'best- estimate' sensitivity to CO₂ concentration) by a suite of models having various sensitivities - including one with a particularly high sensitivity.

The assertion that the jump from 3.5 to 5.8 ^OC is due primarily to an assumption of lower sulphur dioxide emissions is a red herring of the first water.

6. Implicit reliance on IPCC's economics
IPCC's climatic outcomes are based on six 'storylines' containing demographic and economic projections, leading on to 35 "equally sound" 'scenarios' for human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, and thence to 245 temperature 'projections' from runs in seven numerical models.

One storyline (A1) assumes rapid growth in economic activity, coupled with a fast rate of convergence in per-capita income between the world's regions. One scenario (A1F1) has this growth powered to an extreme extent by energy derived from coal. This scenario, applied to the most sensitive climate model, yields the projection of 5.8 ^OC global temperature rise between 1990 and 2100.

Hence, the plausibility of CSIRO's projected warming for most of Australia in 2070 is directly and crucially dependent on the plausibility of IPCC underpinning assumptions in the field of social, rather than natural, sciences.

Naively, at least in hindsight, CSIRO appears to have taken IPCC's social science entirely on trust - although not one of IPCC's 53 authors and 75 reviewers of its crucial economic study, is based in Australia.

7. Economic analysis by Ian Castles
Ian Castles (Visiting Fellow at the ANU National Centre for Development Studies, and former Australian Statistician) has dissected IPCC’s “equally sound” storylines , and finds them all unsound (including the low-end projection) but not equally so.

The most optimistic (A1) storyline implies an unimaginable 35-times growth in whole-world per-capita wealth between 1990 and 2100.  But this growth in wealth is not evenly distributed.  A1 implies for developing Asia (here excluding Japan, Iran, and the Former Soviet Union) an incredible 140-times growth.  Even the poorest nations in 2100 will be far richer than the rich nations are now.  Whole-world per-capita growth was only 5 times in the past century, remember; and even in the Land of the Rising Economy, Japan, it failed to reach 20 times.  Albeit warmer, there are very good times ahead.

One of IPCC’s higher-efficiency, and hence lower-emissions, storylines (B1), while predicting only slow economic growth in the currently-wealthy nations, still has per-capita wealth in developing Asia growing by an implausible 70 times between 1990 and 2100.  Why are there no obviously-plausible - even pedestrian - scenarios?

Global CO₂ emissions from fossil-fuel use (and industrial processes) were about 6.1 billion tonnes in 1990, on a contained-carbon basis.  A1F1 has them rising steeply to 24 BT in 2050, and 30 BT in 2100.  On a per-capita basis, historical carbon emissions peaked at 1.23 tonnes in 1979, and were down to 1.11 tonnes by 1999.  A1F1 has them increasing to 4 tonnes by 2100; and this scenario assumes cumulative coal use by 2100 far beyond the exhaustion of currently-known reserves.  The writing is already on the wall for A1F1.  It had coal consumption growing 31% between 1990 and 2000; and in reality, it grew only 1%.

The atmospheric concentration of CO₂ has been growing at 1.5 ppm per year, for the past two decades and more.  It is now 370 ppm, and there is no sign of acceleration.  A1F1 has it at 960 ppm by 2100, plus 300 ppm for uncertainties, to yield the extremely implausible 1260 ppm on which the high-end number relies.

Concentration of methane, the second most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas, has grown at a decreasing rate for more than a decade; and in 2000, the concentration fell.  It is now about 1750 ppb; but A1F1 envisages 3400 ppb by 2100.

8. CSIRO was itself an innocent victim
No, CSIRO has not deliberately snowed us; instead, it has been thoroughly snowed itself by IPCC.

The problem goes far beyond IPCC's deeply flawed economic analysis, and the implausible projections for CO₂ emission growth which stem from it. Equally pervasive, although not here discussed in detail, is IPCC's fixation with human-caused greenhouse gas emissions as the driver of climate change (see Section 10, below). This leads on to IPCC's narrowly-focussed, and perversely unidirectional, climate modelling - which CSIRO uses uncritically to designate 2070 global-average warming, and which it then has elaborated in order to achieve its projections of regional warming.

9. Policy-making in the West
There is a good chance that CSIRO's dodgy projections are being used right now as guidance by unsuspecting policy-makers; for instance, the West Australian in a report by Peter Trott (October 8, 2002 p 10) said:
Clamps on greenhouse gas emissions proposed in the Kyoto Protocol would not prevent a grim scenario of lower rainfall and higher temperatures across southern Australia, a leading CSIRO scientist told the State Water Symposium yesterday.
CSIRO atmospheric science division head Graeme Pearman said Kyoto emission limits would be insignificant in averting global warming.
A 50 per cent cut in greenhouse gas would be needed to reverse the trend which had seen a one-degree rise in the past century.
This represented 10 percent of the total temperature change since the last ice age. The significance of greenhouse gases, which were expected to drive up temperatures 1.4C to 5.8^OC by 2100, meant the energy used to supply water would in future have to come from reusable sources.
Dr Pearman said the latest generation of climate models were accurate and as soon as the mechanism driving the pressure oscillation between the Southern Ocean and WA's South-West was discovered it would be possible to predict WA's weather accurately.
Seven of nine atmospheric models showed declines in rainfall and increases in temperature in southern Australia.

10. Should CSIRO come clean?
In fairness to IPCC, we must acknowledge that it warns explicitly against the misuse of its projections by others for the purpose of policy-making. Sagely, it cautions:
No judgment is offered … as to the preference for any of the scenarios and they are not assigned probabilities of occurrence, neither must they be interpreted as policy recommendations.

In view of both this pre-existing stricture from IPCC, and of Ian Castles' new exposé of the flawed social-science underpinnings to IPCC's scientific projections, now is the time for CSIRO to tell policymakers and public that its widely-disseminated 2070 temperature projections for Australia should be permitted no role whatever in policy-making.

This is a big ask, I concede. But simply retreating into denial will not cut the mustard; because we are talking here of the expenditure of taxpayer's money.

11. Hands-on control of global climate
Renouncing the objective of climate control might be an even-bigger ask.

By implication, there has to be another side to CSIRO's coin (see Section 8, above):
A 50 per cent cut in greenhouse gas would be needed to reverse the trend which had seen a one-degree rise in the past century.

What would it say? It might go something like this:
If it were not for the human-caused greenhouse gases emitted since the Industrial Revolution, the warming trend seen in the 20th Century would never have happened and we would be still enjoying Frost Fairs on the Thames.

But there is a vast array of observational/deductive earth-science-based evidence contradicting any such statement - whose only substantial support appears to derive from IPCC and its atmospheric-science-based numerical models.

Admittedly, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said in Mozambique (on 1 September 2002): We can defeat climate change if we want to. But that comforting belief is implausible now, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

CSIRO has scientific carriage of this fundamental issue on behalf of Australians; and it needs to rethink its position in the light of the accumulating (physical, rather than just model-based) evidence. It would do us all a service if CSIRO would now assure Australians that no amount of "doing the right thing" about GHG emissions can stabilize global climate.

Whether it is held by CSIRO, or by the Prime Minister of Britain, genuine belief in the feasibility of hands-on control of climate - no matter how strongly-held - is not enough. We are talking science here, not faith. This is just the sort of situation in which to invoke Clifford's Dictum.

In conclusion, we humans can't control climate; and mitigating the impact of both climate change and extreme weather events is the only practical course currently open to us. I look forward to CSIRO taking the intellectual lead in Australia on this issue - by saying just that.