For some time now I’ve been pondering the problems we’re having in communicating our sceptism (or denial if you like) of climate change. Judging by the number of seminars on “Communicating the Science” attended by our climate science community they clearly believe we’ve not understood them. Moreover they never invite sceptics/deniers to these seminars (as far as I know), so they flounder around without any clear idea of what “winning” would look like to them. My sense is that is because they have a different definition of “communicate” than is normal and see it as a didactic process. Hence our apparent refusal to agree with their teachings and prognostications is regarded as a “failure of communication” because we clearly haven’t understood what they’re saying. But what if we have understood them and just plain don’t agree? And indeed have cogent reasons why we don’t agree.

Of course we, from time to time, have contact with Richard Betts, Rob Wilson, Doug McNeall and Ed Hawkins, the Fab Four of climate science with their very own Cilla in Tamsin Edwards, but none of them have “communicated” in the sense that they wanted to hear other views as far as I’m aware. I think their real message was “Love Me Do”, or it could have been “Julia”.

I thought what I’d try to do is to have them answer some questions I have about climate change – you know a kind of real communication where both parties get to talk - and invite comments (although I appear to be something of a persona non-grata for some reason so don’t hold your breath).

I would, of course, liked to have had this discussion in a two day seminar is somewhere like the Lygon Arms, but I’m afraid funds don’t run to it, and indeed as many on this blog are retired it is highly probable they won’t have the time to stay two days away from their retirement.

So here they are:

Theory 1. Increases in CO2 will cause an increase in atmospheric temperatures.
Can anyone explain to me why when we have evidence of a rise in temperature between 1910 and 1940 without a significant rise in CO2, a rise of 8% in CO2 from 1998 to the present with no temperature rise and no indication in the past records that they are related, except for the rise of CO2 after a temperature increase. Why doesn’t this falsify the theory? What would falsify this theory? The very least it indicates is that if CO2 is driving temperature it’s only a small time player, who had investigated that and what was the result? (No models please)

Theory 2. A doubling of CO2 will cause a rise of 1.2C which will trigger positive feedbacks to push the temperatures up by a further 1.5C to 4.5C with a most likely figure of 3C.

These were the numbers in the Charney report of 1979 and haven’t changed since. They were cobbled together from two models one which gave a sensitivity of 2C and one (Jim Hansen’s, naturally) gave a sensitivity of 4C. So Charney added 0.5C to the top end, and subtracted 0.5C to the bottom end to get the range and likely rise in temperature. Would anyone from the climate science community care to comment on the probability of the outputs of two computers with less power than today’s scientific calculators and Charney’s guess at the +/- 0.5C have withstood 35years and billions of dollars of research on the subject?

The models have consistently overestimated the temperature increases – could it be that it’s because this sensitivity “guess” is incorrect?

Theory 3. The models can do accurate projections of the future climate.

Forecasting the future has traditionally been the work of charlatans and mountebanks, while I’m sure that climate scientists (well most of them) are neither, can someone explain why the climate science community are giving the impression that they can tell us what the climate, and hence the average weather, is going to be in 50 or 100 years time?

It’s not possible to get an accurate projection, or predictions as they’re more commonly understood, for a chaotic system. So why haven’t you told the politicians?

Theory 4. The missing heat is hidden in the deep oceans?

This presupposes the energy budgets are accurate and there MUST be heat retained in the ecosphere. Isn’t what this really means is that the energy budgets are falsified?

My final question is, do the climate scientists realise the enormity of what they’re doing? Basically they, or rather their science, (or maybe both given the increasingly political messages from Dame Slingo being quoted out of context) are being used to increase the price of energy worldwide and real people, alive today in both the developed and the developing worlds, will suffer the sort of hardships they’re forecasting in their SPMs for future generations. But what if they’re wrong? What if their inability to see beyond models to the physical world is going to cause massive hardship to no avail? Do they care? Or are they being swept along on a wave of hubris enjoying the funding and prestige that comes from being climate scientists in the 21st century, a without thought for the consequence for poor people if they’re wrong? That’s the sort of “communication” I had in mind.

What would other BHers like to communicate about?

Rhoda, Mrs Geronimo and I are about to go cruising on the River Po next week so I'll read the book then. For my own part I tend not to take anything at face value, which is probably the psychological aftershock of being told there was no Father Christmas, a scar that has never healed. I spent my school years in the hands of Notre Dame nuns and De La Salle brothers respectively, but was an agnostic at around 12 or 13 because it all sounded Father Chrismassy to me. I used to sit down on Friday nights to my weekly portion of fish and would periodically ask my Mam if she really believed that the omniscient supreme ruler of the universe would really condemn us to eternal damnation for eating a bacon butty on Fridays. I was always tut-tutted away and realised later on that the use of the word "omniscient" probably weakened the thrust of my argument as she probably didn't know what I meant. Later I became an atheist, but I would still take the last rites if I knew I was dying. After all I could be wrong. Mrs. geronimo, herself a devout Catholic, tells me I give knew depths to the meaning of the word "shallow".

Which brings me to my views on global warming/climate change/climate disruption/very bad weather. As you have so often said there is no experimental proof that CO2 will cause warming, and never will be, it is only in the models that such "proof" can be found. I don't know whether it does, or not, but suspect, because there are no paleoclimate records of the disasters our interlocutors are forecasting. I had this discussion with Richard shortly before I became persona non grata, and he didn't grasp my point that temperatures could have varied naturally by 1C in the Minoan, Roman and Medieval warm periods but there was no sign in the records of runaway global warming after these events. He didn't get my point maybe because it was stupid and he's a too much of a gentleman to point it out to me.

There seems to me to be three glaring unknowns in the CAGW theory. To what extend CO2 causes warming is an unknown. If it was known we'd have a nice little equation that would forecast, with reasonable accuracy the climate change per delta of CO2 and we haven't. The second one is the "positive feedback" meme, again outside of the minutiae the scientists prefer is the fact that this comes from water vapour, but they can't, and will probably never be able to, model clouds. And the third is the complete ignorance of how other chaotic systems like society, economics and technologies will interact with a warming world, should there be one. Three massive unknowns all being sold as done and dusted. I just want to "communicate" around those three issues before committing to a view on global warming and the possible solutions.

"On paywalling, I'd add that, so far as I remember, I have *never* received a copy of a climate science paper in reponse to a polite request to its leading author..."

They probably assume you're "only trying to find something wrong with it."