Professor Ray Bates: Irish Climate Expert Dies
Last weekend, on 6 January 2024, Professor Ray Bates died peacefully in the tender care of Blackrock Hospice in Dublin, Ireland, aged 83.
For many years, he spoke against unscientific climate alarmism. There is no justification for the level of fear that the general public has about climate change, Prof. Bates said.
“I think some of the climate activists are actually going too far. They’re not taking an objective view of the scientific picture – as it should be seen,” he said.
As someone who had worked in the field of research of meteorology all his life, Prof. Bates was well-qualified to give and have his opinion heard.
To pay tribute to him, we are sharing an interview conducted by the Irish independent media outlet Gript on 7 October 2021:
In 2015, Prof. Bates was involved in a debate on RTE Prime Time. “He was the sole voice of scientific reason against two politicians and a non-government organisation shill,” Climate Ireland wrote in the caption when sharing a video of the debate on Telegram.
At the time of the debate, Ray Bates was a Professor of Meteorology at the University College Dublin, a position which he held from 2004 until 2023. The other panellists were Kevin Humphries, who at the time was the Minister of State for Employment, Community and Social Support, Oisín Coghlan from Friends of the Earth and the Green Party’s Eamon Ryan who is now a Minister for the Environment, Climate, Communications and Transport.
You can watch the 2015 debate on RTE’s website HERE.
Prof. Bates was also a former Branch Head of the Laboratory for Atmospheres at the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (“NASA”), former deputy director at Met Éireann, the Irish National Meteorological Service, and Emeritus Professor of Meteorology at the University of Copenhagen.
“Despite his credentials, he was effectively shunned from any debate regarding climate since [the RTE television debate in 2015],” Climate Ireland said. However, this did not stop Prof. Bates from speaking out.
As reported by The Irish Times in 2018, Prof. Bates said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”) report ignored “important scientific evidence” gathered since 2013 “which reduces the sense of a looming emergency … “As a practising professional, I do not see the current scientific evidence as indicating we are in a state of planetary emergency.”
Existing science about climate change is “unsettled,” he said, adding that “reasonable precautionary measures to reduce emissions should be taken on the basis of risk, but it does not require that we seriously damage our economy or bring our traditional way of life to an end in the process.”
In October 2021, Prof. Bates appeared on Gript. “Perhaps the biggest misconception is that climate science is completely settled and there’s no uncertainty,” he said. “This is not the actual situation.”
In April 2021, Professor Steven Koonin published a book titled ‘Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters’. This book, Prof. Bates said, provides the best evidence that climate science is not settled.
“[Koonin] has written this book pointing out that climate science is not a settled science and there is a risk in the longer term, certainly, but he doesn’t go along with the view that we’re in a climate emergency. Nor do I,” he said.
Prof. Bates defines a climate emergency as “a situation where all conceivable actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions must be taken immediately regardless of cost.”
Whereas a long-term threat, he said, is “a situation where you could take vital national interests into account as well.”
“I would see the pointer as lying more in the direction of a long-term threat than a planetary emergency,” he said.
In August 2021, the IPCC released its Sixth Assessment Report (“AR6”) titled ‘Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis’. The media often speaks about this IPCC report using the phrase that it is the “red code for humanity,” quoting the phrase as if it had come from the IPCC or from scientists.
“Well, it didn’t come from the IPCC and it didn’t come from scientists. It was a political statement made by the secretary general of the UN, António Guterres, when he was introducing the report,” Prof. Bates said.
On 9 August 2021, Guterres released a press statement in which he said: “Today’s IPCC Working Group 1 report is a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable.”
“It was not a phrase that came from the IPCC report itself and it certainly didn’t come from any scientists,” Prof. Bates reiterated.
The reason why it matters whether there is a man-made climate emergency or not is because, for example, a Climate Bill was passed in the Irish Parliament (known as the Dáil Éireann or simply “the Dáil”) in May 2021. This Bill “commits Ireland to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by seven per cent a year for the next 10 years and going to zero by 2050,” Prof. Bates said.
“The costs of this Bill are not obvious to the man in the street,” he said. “But the International Monetary Fund recently placed a figure on the costs to Ireland of implementing the bill and the figure they give is 20 billion euro a year for the next 10 years.”
There should have been more complete debate before the Bill was introduced, Prof Bates said. “I would like to have taken part in the debate.” He was the climate expert on a panel of experts selected to advise the Republic of Ireland and so was an obvious choice to be involved in a debate about climate policies.
Given that he was a government advisor and considering his background, “I think I should have been given the opportunity to take part in the debate – but I wasn’t,” he said.
It was not the first time Prof. Bates had been left out of climate debates. In 2017 when a Citizen’s Assembly debate was being held on how to make Ireland a leader in tackling ‘climate change’, Prof. Bates applied to give an oral presentation, but they rejected his request.
So, he sent in a written submission, “but I wasn’t allowed to speak to any of the citizens. I was allowed to attend to sit at the back and not speak to any of the citizens,” he said. He feels he was restricted because they only wanted speakers who were going to make a presentation that agreed with the state’s narrative.
Prof. Bates was able to provide evidence that the claims made in the IPCC report are “demonstrably incorrect.” The IPCC claims that “there is no evidence that indicates the climate sensitivity below 1.5 degrees.” Climate sensitivity is how sensitive the climate to increasing carbon dioxide. “The value of climate sensitivity is unsettled,” Prof. Bates said.
Several investigations including one of Prof. Bates’ papers, provide evidence for climate sensitivity below 1.5. “My paper says about 1 degree for a doubling carbon dioxide. That’s not a personal opinion. In no way can it be described as a personal opinion. It’s the result of a scientific investigation using satellite data and a mathematical model,” he said. You can read Prof. Bates’ paper published on 17 April 2016 in the scientific journal Earth and Space Science HERE and find a list of all his published papers HERE.
Prof. Bates’ research that resulted in climate sensitivity of about 1 degree is a valid line of evidence that should have been included in the IPCC’s assessment. In 2016, his paper was among the most downloaded papers in the journal’s recent publication history yet it hasn’t been cited in the IPCC report even though Prof. Bates’ paper is based on the favoured official narrative that “global warming is due to carbon dioxide.”
But, the extent of the global warming effect that Prof. Bates got from his model is less than the extent that’s estimated by the IPCC.
It’s not the only scientific research to be ignored. “There are a number of other scientists who have also come up with low climate sensitivity estimates and their papers also have not been cited in the IPCC report, Prof. Bates said. “The question is, why didn’t the IPCC report on [these] studies.”
Prof. Bates considered a 2011 paper published by Lindzen and Choi as the most important paper published in climate science in decades. “It was cited and dismissed in the last IPCC report and it was not cited in the current IPCC report,” Prof. Bates said.
Because climate science has huge political and economic implications, it is difficult to have an open debate about it. Those who speak out suffer backlash for doing so. Steven Koonin has suffered greatly for publishing his book, Prof. Bates said.
To indicate how huge political and economic implications have been interwoven into the IPCC’s process, Prof. Bates explained the makeup of the IPCC’s governing bodies.
The governing bodies of the IPCC are two UN specialised agencies called the World Meteorological Organisation (”WMO”) and the United Nations Environment Programme (“UNEP”).
The membership of these two governing bodies is mainly developing countries, Prof. Bates said, and they have the biggest percentage of the vote in electing the secretary general of WMO and the director of UNEP. So, the IPCC ultimately is governed by those who hope to benefit from the UN’s Green Climate Fund.
“The Green Climate Fund consists of 100 billion US dollars a year to be transferred from the developed world to compensate for the damage that’s been done to the climate of the developing world, basically,” Prof. Bates explained.
“If [climate science] didn’t have economic implications like it does, it would be much easier to take a different scientific position. But anybody who steps outside the standard narrative has to be prepared for vilification … perhaps threats.”
Prof. Bates gave the example of Professor John Christy who had rifle shots fired through his office window because of his position on ‘climate change’. Prof. Bates himself was verbally threatened.
The discussion then moved on to the role that media plays and why before moving on to extreme events. “The question of extreme events is an extremely central one nowadays,” Prof Bates said. Previously, the IPCC had been fairly cautious about attributing extreme events to ‘climate change’, to the global warming that’s taking place, he added.
But its most recent report is not so cautious about linking extreme events to ‘climate change’.
“I don’t work in this area as my area of specialisation but there are many people who do and they’re not all in agreement that there has been any change in the occurrence or extremity of extreme events,” he said.
The best authority on the heatwave in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, for example, is Professor Clifford Mass at the University of Washington. “He has looked at the heat wave in detail and his conclusion is that it’s not due to climate change, ” Prof. Bates said. “His conclusions are that it was a circulation anomaly.”
“Desert air was being drawn up over the cascades mountains and it was compressed when it came down to sea level; so, the air from the desert was even warmer when it got down to sea level than it had started at when it was in the desert.”
Giving another example of extreme events that are not related to climate change as claimed Prof. Bates highlighted a 2017 study on flooding over 60 years or so in North America and Europe conducted by G.A. Hodgkins et al. “They find no trend, other than natural variability, in increased flooding over that period in North America or Europe,” Prof. Bates said.
By far the most extreme event in living memory in Ireland is the winter of 1947 when snow covered the ground for six weeks between January and March. “So, this whole issue of trends in extreme events is very very uncertain,” Prof. Bates said.
There is no justification for the level of fear that the general public has about ‘climate change’, Prof. Bates said. “I’m very concerned about the level at which teenagers are suffering from eco-anxiety and many teenagers feel the end of the world is nigh. I think this is not justified by the science.”
“One of the things that’s been used most often in recent decades to convey the impression that we’re facing an emergency is about the arctic sea ice disappearing.
“I’ve studied the Arctic sea ice … the Arctic sea ice decreased quite a bit between about 2000 and 2012 … [Al Gore in 2007] referred to studies saying the Arctic sea ice will be gone by 2016. Now 2016 is long in the past the Arctic sea ice hasn’t really decreased very much in the past 15 years … It’s still going down a little, the trend in the past 15 years is slightly downward but it would take 200 years for it to reach zero at the current rate of decrease.
“The models had been projecting the Antarctic sea ice would also decrease as a result of global warming but the opposite has happened. Since satellite observations came in 1979, the average trend of sea ice in the Antarctic is slightly upwards and this year’s [2021] is looking completely consistent with that.
“I think some of the climate activists are actually going too far. They’re not taking an objective view of the scientific picture – as it should be seen.”
See more here expose-news.com
Bold emphasis added
Header image: Climate-Science.press
Editor’s note: Professor Bates’ comments about climate sensitivity and the need to reduce emissions means while on the surface he is a skeptic, he believes CO2 does drive temperature, and is therefore in reality an alarmist.
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.