CSIRO and the Greenhouse Game:
Player Yes, Umpire No
Bob Foster
November 2002
1. A reputation worth protecting
A review by Paul Adam in The ANZAAS Mercury (September
2002, p 5) of Fields of Discovery: Australia's CSIRO by
Brad Collis begins:
The CSIRO is one of the jewels in Australia's crown. It is
an extraordinarily diverse and productive research organization,
and the national public face of science. In many countries public
statements from government scientists tend automatically to be
regarded with suspicion and scepticism. In Australia CSIRO is
a trusted umpire, and endorsement by the organization is a high
accolade.
It must take decades to earn a reputation like this.
2. CSIRO's temperature projections
for Australia
The CSIRO has told us (Herald Sun, 27 March 2000) 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
new (8 May 2001) projection is an even more remarkable 1.0-6.8
ºC---compared to 'only' 0.7-3.8 ºC in CSIRO's 1996 report.
I promise I am not making this up: CSIRO now has Darwin rising
from the present one December-February day per year over 35 ºC
on average, to a whopping 5-79 days by 2070. CSIRO could be right,
of course, but no-one today has any way of knowing. If it is
right---at the high end---Territorians might become the next environmental
refugees.
Unthinkable, I know; but we must ask: has CSIRO snowed us on
Australian warming?
3. Did the 'Greenhouse Effect'
cause 20th-Century warming?
In the 20th Century, 0.6 ºC of global-average surface
warming from all causes occurred in two episodes: two-thirds was
from the 1920s to the 1940s, and the balance from the 1970s 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 1920s largely predates the build
up of human-caused GHGs in the atmosphere. But is the renewed
warming from the 1970s 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 as before, some of this trapped
heat would return to the earth's surface---causing 'greenhouse
effect' warming. Concurrently, less heat than before should escape
to space.
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,
at least) more---not less---heat is leaving the top of the atmosphere
for Space. The simplest explanation for these findings is that
most of the measured surface temperature increase over the past
23 years is something other than 'greenhouse effect' warming.
Over this period, in fact, most warming in the lower troposphere
is north of 30 ºN; and indeed, south of 45 ºS it is
cooling. Therefore, whatever anthropogenic 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!
To me, at least, this sounds more like advocacy than umpiring.
4. Palaeoclimatology and the cause
of contemporary climate change
Let's look at the distant past for guidance. Global climate
is cyclic (that is, warmer/cooler) at many time-scales---although
CSIRO's modellers 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 had rebound in
the 1820s and further peaks in the 1870s, 1930s and 1990s.
These periods of extra warming, at 50/60-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 (here copied from a wall-panel at Museum of London)
wrote:
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 closely linked to solar
influences. The overprinted 50/60-year cycle 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 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
Australian warming in 2070? The reason is that it adopted, as
starting point for its regional modeling, the global averages
projected by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC). Between its Second (1996) and Third (2001) Assessment
Reports, IPCC increased the high-end of its warming range for
2100 from 3.5 to 5.8 ºC. Therefore, and apparently without
conducting any corroborating analysis, CSIRO increased its high-end
(global) rise for 2070 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 post-science changes [1]
appear to be:
First, the inclusion of an additional scenario (A1F1,
see below) which has an extremely high use of fossil fuels;
Second, the addition of 30% (ie 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 increasing
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 mainly
due to an assumption of lower sulphur dioxide emissions in the
future is a red herring of the first water.
6. 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 "marker" storyline (A1) assumes rapid growth
in economic activity, coupled with a fast rate of convergence
in per-capita wealth 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-average
temperature rise between 1990 and 2100. Hence, the plausibility
of CSIRO's projected warming for Australia in 2070 is crucially
dependent on the plausibility of the underpinning assumptions
for IPCC's economic models. This is social, rather than
natural, science.
Naively, as it turns out, CSIRO appears to have taken IPCC's
economic modelling entirely on trust---although not one of the
53 authors and 75 reviewers of its family of economic projections
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. He finds them all
unsound, including the low-end projection, but not equally so.
The most optimistic (A1) storyline implies (when correctly
calculated) an unimaginable 35-times growth in whole-world per-capita
wealth between 1990 and 2100. But this growth in wealth is not
evenly distributed; and A1 has an incredible 140-times growth
for developing Asia (excluding Japan, Iran, and the former Soviet
Union). Even for the rest of the developing world (Latin America,
Africa and Middle East) it is nearly 30 times. Whole-world per-capita
growth was only 5 times in the past century; and the Land of the
Rising Economy, Japan, failed to reach 20 times. Albeit in a warmer
world, there are very good days ahead.
Global CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel
use (plus industrial processes) were about 6.1 billion tonnes
in 1990, on a contained-carbon basis. The coal-intensive 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 at 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%.
At the lower end of IPCC's range, a higher-efficiency and hence
lower-emissions "marker" storyline (B1), while predicting
slower economic growth in the currently-wealthy nations (5 times),
still has per-capita wealth in developing Asia growing by an implausible
70 times between 1990 and 2100. IPCC does not provide balance
in its suite by allowing at least one realistic-looking---even
pedestrian---storyline. All those presented are unsound.
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 (compared to a pre-industrial 280
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 itself
been snowed by IPCC.
The problem goes far beyond IPCC's deeply flawed economic modelling,
and the implausible projections for CO2
emission growth which stem from it. Equally implausible is IPCC's
fixation with human-caused greenhouse gas emissions as the main
driver of climate change. This leads on to IPCC's narrowly-focussed,
and perversely unidirectional, climate modelling---which CSIRO
adopts uncritically to designate its 2070 global-average warming,
and which it then elaborates in order to achieve its spurious
regional projections.
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, in a report by Peter Trott, The West Australian
(8 October 2002) 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 per cent of the total temperature change
since the last ice age. The significance of greenhouse gases,
which were expected to drive up temperatures 1.4 ºC to 5.8
ºC by 2100, meant the energy used to supply water would
in future have to come from reusable sources.
10. Should CSIRO come clean?
In fairness to IPCC, it warns explicitly against the misuse
of its projections 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, and of Ian Castles'
recent exposé of the flawed social-science underpinnings
to IPCC's scientific projections, now is the time for CSIRO to
warn both policymakers and public that its widely-disseminated
2070 regional temperature projections for Australia should be
permitted no role whatever in policy-making.
This is a big ask, I concede. But retreating into denial will
not cut the mustard in this case, because preparing and publicizing
CSIRO's fatally-flawed projections involved expenditure of taxpayers'
money. Besides, CSIRO has a reputation to protect.
11. Hands-on control of
global climate
Renouncing the search for "Policy Options for Stabilizing
Global Climate" (the title of the 1989 Report to Congress
by the United States Environmental Protection Agency) might be
an even-bigger ask. As you will recall, CSIRO (see Section 9,
above) is reported as saying:
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.
By implication, there has to be another side to this coin.
What would it say? It might go something like this:
If it were not for human-caused greenhouse gases emitted since
the Industrial Revolution, the warming trend seen in the 20th
Century could never have happened---and Londoners would still
be enjoying Frost Fairs on the Thames in winter.
But there is a vast array of earth-science-based observational/deductive
evidence contradicting any such concept---whose only substantial
support derives from IPCC and the atmospheric-science-based numerical
models it invokes. Admittedly, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said
in Mozambique (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 (not just modelling) evidence.
CSIRO would do us all a service if it could now admit to all Australians
that no amount of 'doing the right thing' about GHG emissions
will stabilize global climate.
Whether held by the US EPA, Australia's CSIRO, or the British
PM, sincere belief in the feasibility of hands-on control of climate---no
matter how vehemently held---is not enough. 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.
12. Conclusion: Australia needs
an umpire---but it isn't CSIRO
Contrarians might arouse scepticism among the convinced by
saying that:
Atmospheric CO2 is a not a pollutant,
but a vital plant food (hence the addition of CO2
to commercial greenhouses). Furthermore, as an important extra
benefit, increasing concentration enables plants to use available
water more efficiently.
and
A thousand years ago, Norse colonies thrived in Greenland---only
to be extinguished by the onset of the Little Ice Age from about
1300AD. Human-caused emissions can explain neither the Mediaeval
Warm Period, nor the warming-trend since the depths of the LIA
at 1650-1700AD. Similarly, the 20th-Century warming from the
1920s to the 1940s, and the abrupt renewal of warming from 1976--77,
are largely not human-caused. In fact, from 1979 onward, the
satellite record provides strong support for this conclusion.
Are Australians just as alert when hearing from those on the
side of the Angels? Consider the following example of hyperbole
writ large. Can it be a rational and disinterested statement?
Global warming is the greatest crisis ever faced collectively
by humankind. Climate changes of geological proportions are occurring
over timespans as short as a single lifetime, and this may threaten
the very survival of civilization.
This quote is the first paragraph of the Summary Statement
from the International Conference on "Global warming and
climate change: perspectives from developing countries",
held in New Delhi on 21-23 February, 1989. The Conference was
the first one of its kind to be held in a developing country,
and it was organized by the Tata Energy Research Institute. At
that time, the Director of the Institute was Dr Rajendra K. Pachauri---who
has recently succeeded Dr Robert Watson as Chairman of the United
Nations IPCC.
There is no escaping the conclusion that CSIRO is a fervent
and uncritical advocate of the UN's line. From statements over
a decade and more, I choose just one (ABC Sci-Tech-31/05/02):
The CSIRO says the evidence is overwhelming that global
warming is the result of human activity, and will continue to
accelerate if nothing is done.
Climatologist John Church has told a conference on renewable
energy at Coffs Harbour, that the 1990s was the hottest decade
of the warmest century in 1,000 years.
However, he says the increases are small compared to what
could happen in the next 100 years.
and
He says there is little evidence to justify the view that
the jury is still out on global warming.
"There are very few credible sceptics out there,"
Dr Church said.
Is this our "trusted umpire" speaking? If not, who
will prioritize for Australians the dubious threat of future human-caused
warming against (for instance) the real-life, here-and-now, threat
to biodiversity posed by continued clearing on a vast scale in
our region: Sumatra, Kalimantan, New Guinea and the lesser Melanesian
islands---and Queensland?
Footnote
1.
See pp 79-81 in Gray, Vincent 2002, "The Greenhouse Delusion:
A Critique of Climate Change 2001", Multi-Science
Publishing Co Ltd, 95p.
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