A ‘wrongful conviction’ in the climate change case?

Written by Koen Vogel PhD on July 30, 2020. Posted in Current News

A large part of the population believes that science on climate change is settled, and that serious climate scientists are all in agreement:

“Nearly all actively publishing climate scientists (97–98%) support the consensus on anthropogenic climate change, and the remaining 3% of contrarian studies either cannot be replicated or contain errors.” [en.wikipedia.org]

A weak-sense consensus climate change view is probably supported by 97-98% of scientists (as well as this author):

• The Earth’s climate is (continually) changing
• One manifestation of such change was a global mean surface temperature (GMST) increase over the last 50 years
• The atmospheric proportion of many important greenhouse gasses – such as CO₂ – have increased over the same period
• An increase in atmospheric ‘greenhouse gasses’ will cause at least a small increase in the amount of energy retained by the Earth.

These bullets are scientifically supportable, as each of the above statements is falsifiable: any scientists contending that GMST has not increased can enter into a – likely fruitless – debate with NASA, whose high-quality data set has been extensively peer-reviewed.

The weak-sense view is distinctly different from the strong-sense climate change view supported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as many climate scientists, politicians and news outlets. A typical IPCC summary of this strong-sense view¹:

• “it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century”

A possible ambiguity between which version is supported by 97-98% of the scientists is clarified by the Wikipedia reference to a 2010 article claiming it is the strong-sense, IPCC view that is the consensus view. So apparently the case is closed, and the guilty party – CO₂ – tried and convicted, and the vast majority of climate scientists are nodding in agreement. This despite numerous senior scientists:

• debunking this claim ((see: principia-scientific.com)
• signing open letters, e.g. to the UN (www.aei.org )
• writing peer-reviewed articles claiming the role of greenhouse gasses in climate change has been greatly over-stated (just check the Publications tab at www.principia-scientific.org).

The Wikipedia page unfortunately remains unmodified, and continues to suggest that this consensus supports the idea that anthropogenic climate change has been proven to the accepted doctrine status achieved by such theories as Evolution, Continental Drift or Heliocentrism.

The “consensus” has in turn been seized upon by the news outlets and politicians, and has led to a huge dedication of resources to reduce or limit atmospheric CO₂: one cannot justify spending billions of dollars without the full backing of the scientific community.

A worrying by-product of the adoption of the strong-sense view by the non-scientific community has been a growing cancel culture in the climate sciences: authors not on-board the consensus train will not be published by many of the leading scientific journals in order to prolong the consensus myth.

This pressure to conform in turn leads to further strong-sense consensus, as non-conformist articles never reach the publication review stage, and non-conformist scientists often incur severe negative social and professional consequences.

It bears repeating that most progress in Science comes from challenging traditional wisdom, and that such challenge should be welcomed not shunned: it’s why conference presentations are followed by a Q&A session, and why articles suffer extensive peer-review.

If a well-posed question or a new data analysis can upset a scientific apple-cart then the apple-cart probably wasn’t very stable. Knowledge progress is evolutionary, with many theories such as Evolution, Continental Drift, K-T Meteorite Impact, etc. initially being openly mocked by “consensus” detractors, and only established as scientific doctrine after a long, arduous, peer-reviewed suite of ever-progressing evidence and analysis.

The null hypothesis and the concept of falsification has been central to this scientific progress (https://principia-scientific.com/psi-mission-statement/). For example, a falsifiable null hypothesis in the Evolution sciences might state “The Human genome does not resemble the Chimpanzee genome”.

Inferential statistics can be used to test whether this null hypothesis should be rejected, for example if the evaluated probability of the hypothesis being true is lower than a selected threshold (e.g. p<0.05 or 0.01).

If such a test fails to reject the hypothesis (p>0.05), then such a test does not confirm the null hypothesis – a null hypothesis is never accepted –  but implies that insufficient evidence supports the rejection of the hypothesis. In law terms: one can be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but one’s innocence can never be fully proven, as one cannot prove a negative.

The most recent, authoritative and comprehensive set of reports on climate change was published by the IPCC (https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/), who support a strong-sense anthropogenic climate change view. The IPCC recognize 4 main climate “forcings”, physical processes that potentially cause climate change: 2 Anthropogenic (Radiative Forcing due to GreenHouse Gasses (RFGHG) and Other Anthropogenic (OA)), and 2 Natural (Solar Irradiation Forcing and Volcanic Forcing).

The relative climate change contributions of the Natural and Anthropogenic forcings are determined using the Optimal Fingerprint methodology, whereby each forcing’s simulated contribution – its estimated trends according to the climate models – are compared to observed trends.

Climate models initially simulate the response to each forcing separately, after which the modeled responses are individually scaled, and then linearly combined – using new scaling factors – to calculate the overall model response. Note that the IPCC climate model outputs require scaling factors, as they – as a rule – do not generate physically accurate temperature or energy responses to the forcings.

As the IPCC notes: “Attribution does not require, and nor does it imply, that every aspect of the response to the causal factor in question is simulated correctly”².

Instead, the IPCC look for the “fingerprints” of the forcings in the trends of the data, e.g. an increasing trend in GMST since 1980 concurs with an increasing trend in CO₂ over the same period. The climate model output is scaled using whatever factor is necessary to mimic the observations.

Which means the IPCC comment “GHG attribution is based on the consistency of observed and modeled changes across the climate system”² is somewhat disingenuous, as the model output has been conditioned by scaling factors that were selected to ensure this match: models do not simulate the magnitude of Anthropogenic Forcing in a physically correct manner unless the Anthropogenic scaling factor is close to 1. In practice (Bindoff at al. ², Fig. 10.4; note scaling factors limited to the -2 and 2 interval) the Anthropogenic and Natural scaling factors show a worrying range of [-2,2] or larger:

• A scaling factor of 2 implies the climate model only predicts half the magnitude of the observed change.
• A scaling factor of 0 implies that the climate model simulates a change in the variable that is not observed
• A scaling factor of -2 implies that the climate model is off in both magnitude and direction, e.g. a small increase was forecast, but a big decrease observed.

The IPCC attribution studies extensively (although implicitly) evaluate two competing null hypotheses:

• A Natural null hypothesis, N₀: there is no relationship between observed data and the Natural Forcing
• An Anthropogenic null hypothesis, A₀: there is no relationship between observed data and the Anthropogenic Forcing

A lengthy and comprehensive IPCC evaluation of N₀ leads to the conclusion² that it cannot be rejected, i.e. numerous attribution studies fail to detect the Natural Forcing trends in the observed data trends.

This leads to such main conclusions as: “overall, we conclude that it is extremely unlikely that the contribution from solar forcing to the warming since 1950 was larger than that from GHGs.”

Simply put: since 1950, the Natural Forcing has remained relatively constant, GMST is increasing, therefore it must be RFGHG, the only forcing whose trends match the significant GMST increase in the time frame. Note that the A₀ null hypothesis is rejected by default, i.e. by comparing the relative contributions of the Natural and Anthropogenic forcings, and concluding that if climate change is not due to Natural Forcing then it must be due to Anthropogenic Forcing.

This forms the most important distinction between the IPCC attribution method and the traditional scientific method: the central (A₀) null hypothesis is not rejected based on the evidence, but largely rejected based on an extensive evaluation of a competing null hypothesis, i.e. by in essence accepting the N₀ null hypothesis.

In law terms: there are two possible suspects, IPCC extensively demonstrate that the evidence clears once of the suspects, therefore it must be the other suspect; IPCC have demonstrated the innocence of the Natural Forcing, and therefore want a guilty verdict for Anthropogenic Forcing.

Many of the recent articles disputing the role of greenhouse gasses in climate change focus on the “innocence” of CO₂ in effecting climate change: while building up a significant body of evidence that the role of CO₂ in the IPCC climate models is overstated, they essentially fall into the same trap of trying to “prove” innocence, i.e. the acceptance the A₀ null hypothesis.

Anyone who follows the trials and tribulations of the Innocence Project knows that the road to innocence – once a suspect is publicly convicted – is long and arduous. Police work can suffer from similar problems: detectives occasionally narrow their list of suspects too quickly, leading to an innocent suspect being convicted by circumstantial evidence that – while not a good fit – can be presented in a convincing manner to a jury.

Legal defense teams can opt for proving a null hypothesis – “There is no relationship between our client and the crime” – but as stated above it is very hard to prove a negative. Defense teams therefore often opt for a different approach, the SODDI defense: some other dude did it. A SODDI defense focuses on rejecting a null hypothesis stating

“There is no relationship between some other dude and the crime” by suggesting the evidence better fits the other dude. Returning to the climate change debate, the IPCC climate models often cannot reproduce observed data trends, i.e. the simulated Anthropogenic Forcing output often poorly fits the observations.

The IPCC generally acknowledge these mismatches: for example, they state that

“it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century”¹, but warn that their climate models show “differences between simulated and observed trends over periods as short as 10 to 15 years”¹.

Such mismatches between simulated and observed GMST and Global Upper Ocean Heat Content (GUOHC) trends provide clues to unrecognized – and therefore unmodeled – climate change forcings, i.e. the “fingerprints” of the true guilty perpetrator(s):

FP1): the late 1950’s GUOHC increase, the 1965-1968 GUOHC decrease, the 1969-1974 GUOHC increase, the 1900-1945 increase of GMST & GUOHC, the 1945-1970 decrease of GMST & GUOHC

FP2) An acceleration of ocean heating around 1980. & a sharp increase in GMST & GUOHC since the late 1990’s.

FP3): IPCC climate models over-predict atmospheric heating, and therefore the role of RFGHG in heating the oceans.

FP4): The Southern hemisphere is heating less than the Northern hemisphere.

FP5): The (Northern) Atlantic Ocean is heating more than the Pacific during the 1900-1945 and the 1970-2020 periods of global warming.

FP6): Regional GUOHC anomalies spatially coincide with major ocean currents

A full detailing of these and other fingerprints can be found in the the companion PROM paper here. 

A series of inferences limits possible alternative forcing suspects

1. The 6 fingerprints are caused by the same process. The IPCC have thoroughly investigated a number of alternative processes that might cause these mismatches but have come up empty. While it remains possible that all 6 were caused by separate, unrecognized-by-IPCC physical processes, such is extremely unlikely. An alternative process that causes most or all of the fingerprints should clearly be a favorite.
2. The energy from this process is Earth-internal. The amount of external, solar energy that reaches the earth has been extensively measured and documented. Solar forcing has been ruled out by the IPCC attribution work: the N₀ null hypothesis cannot be rejected.
3. The alternative process is not Anthropogenic. A large GUOHC decrease occurred³ between 1958-1968 – mainly between 1965-1968 – when globally the upper 700 m layer of the oceans apparently lost almost 42 ZJ; 57 ZJ was regained between 1968-1977. Given that the global world energy consumption is estimated to be 0.567 ZJ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption), it is unlikely that humankind is directly responsible for these energy fluctuations.
4. The alternative process is relatively omnipresent, constant and unremarkable. If an alternative candidate had been obvious then one of the numerous climate scientists would have hit upon it by now. In this regard the alternative process is to climate change what butlers are to mystery writers: butlers are ideal suspects as they go everywhere, but are never noticed by the protagonists when the carry out their mundane work.

There is significant evidence that the alternative process  (https://principia-scientific.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/vogel-prom-paper.pdf) is the induction heating of the world’s oceans by the Earth’s varying geomagnetic field; sceptics are encouraged to read the full PROM article. Some parting considerations:

1. The Earth’s magnetic field is its butler. It is omnipresent but carries out significant tasks – such as protecting the Earth from the solar wind (en.wikipedia.org) – without most people being aware of or directly impacted by its workings.
2. The IPCC estimate³ that the 1971-2010 heat gain translates to roughly 0.55 W/m² across the global ocean surface area (3.60 × 1014 m²). The PROM article demonstrates that this value is roughly equivalent to an average induced electromotive force requirement on the order of 2.3 mV, a surprisingly small induction heating requirement far below the detection limit of most home voltmeters.
3. The Earth’s magnetic field (en.wikipedia.org) is constantly changing, e.g. its axial dipole strength has been decreasing since the mid-17^th Where is this energy going? It cannot be lost to space, so the most logical conclusion is that geomagnetic energy is being converted to heat/electricity via induction. And even then, the Earth is composed of fairly unconducive materials, such as most naturally occurring solids and gasses, which therefore cannot effectively convert magnetic energy to heat. The salty sea water in the oceans forms a main exception.

Lastly, it would be remiss not to revisit the scientific method and the null hypothesis.  The PROM article proposes rejection of the G₀ null hypothesis “There is no relationship between climate change and the geomagnetic field variability”. The article demonstrates a strong, statistically-significant relationship exists between the “Yearly Distance Travelled by the North Pole” – a proxy for geomagnetic field variability – and the Global Upper Ocean Heat Content.

The G₀ null hypothesis can be firmly rejected (p<0.001), signifying that any explanation of climate change needs to take a geomagnetic forcing into account, and that the A₀ rejection-by-default can no longer hold. And that – to the strong-sense consensus climate change supporters – is a really inconvenient scientific truth.

References:

[1] IPCC, 2013: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Stocker,T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley (eds.)].

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.

[2]  Bindoff, N.L., P.A. Stott, K.M. AchutaRao, M.R. Allen, N. Gillett, D. Gutzler, K. Hansingo, G. Hegerl, Y. Hu, S. Jain, I.I. Mokhov, J. Overland, J. Perlwitz, R. Sebbari and X. Zhang, 2013: Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Stocker, T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.

[3] Rhein, M., S.R. Rintoul, S. Aoki, E. Campos, D. Chambers, R.A. Feely, S. Gulev, G.C. Johnson, S.A. Josey, A. Kostianoy, C. Mauritzen, D. Roemmich, L.D. Talley and F. Wang, 2013: Observations: Ocean. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Stocker, T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA

About the author: Koen Vogel PhD received his PhD in Geology from The Pennsylvania State University, worked in the Petroleum Industry for 25 years in a variety of technical and managerial roles, and since his retirement has been engaged in pursuing his intellectual interests. Such interests include reviewing the IPCC reports, authoring a book on Geostatistics (currently in review), and editing technical proposals for start-ups. His latest paper, ‘The Role of Geomagnetic Induction Heating in Climate Change’ is available for open peer review on Principia Scientific International (please submit comments below on Koen Vogel’s new paper).

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