Articles by Andrew Dessler

Climate change myth debunked: scientists did not predict new ice age

Over on his blog, John Fleck dispatches one of the most ridiculous urban legends of climate change: that scientists in the 1970s were predicting that an ice age was impending.

John and his colleagues, Thomas Peterson and William Connolly, point out that, even in the 1970s, most scientists thought that global warming was the dominant problem.

It should also be pointed out that those worried about global cooling did not necessarily dispute the fact that carbon dioxide causes warming. Rather, the global cooling theory was based on the idea the dust and other stuff people were putting into the atmosphere would reduce sunlight by more than enough to overwhelm the heating from carbon dioxide. The net result would be cooling.

There is in fact no credible dissent to the argument that carbon dioxide warms the climate. Even the Dean of Skeptics, Dick Lindzen, admits that (although he predicts less warming than the IPCC).

So, two things to remember:

1. The consensus that an ice age was coming in the 1970s didn't actually exist.
2. The theory that an ice age was coming does not contradict the theory that carbon dioxide warms the climate.

What happens when a group’s position statement does not reflect its members accurately?

A while back, I blogged on the huge number of scientific organizations that had put out position statements supporting the mainstream theory of human-induced global warming.

Many commenters on my post and around the internet have suggested that one can't trust a statement put out by a professional organization. They argue that these statements are not voted on by the membership, but generally drafted by an ad hoc committee and adopted by the organization's leadership.

If this small clique of members turned out to be advocates, the hypothesis goes, then the resulting statement will not reflect the overall views of the organization.

It occurred to me, however, that this is a testable hypothesis. How do we test it, you ask? We have a professional organization try to put out a statement that its members don't agree with. What would happen?

The fourth IPCC report is still going strong a year later

I was at a meeting earlier this week and was talking to one of the coordinating lead authors of the recent IPCC working group 1 report on the physical science of climate change. He remarked that he was quite surprised that how little substantive criticism the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report had received since its release just about one year ago.

The reason, he thought, was that the skeptics were "in the room" with the writing team. What he meant was that the scientists writing the report knew that the denial machine would go over the report with a fine tooth comb looking for any "gotcha" mistakes to use to discredit the IPCC. Because of that, the IPCC report was extremely carefully worded so as to make virtually every statement in the report bulletproof.

In fact, it is quite amazing to me that essentially none of the IPCC documents produced over the last 18 years has been found to contain any substantive errors. The trolls, of course, will come out with their litany of "errors" that the IPCC contains (I suspect a few will appear in the comments to this post), but when you look closely, the trolls are almost always misrepresenting the IPCC's statements.

In fact, that's the most common attack on the IPCC: make the claim that the IPCC said something ridiculous (which it didn't actually say), then disprove that ridiculous statement, and then use that as evidence that the IPCC's reports cannot be trusted. "The IPCC says that 2 + 2 = 5, but that's just hogwash. We know that 2 + 2 = 4. Thus, climate change is a hoax." Yeah, right.

Revisiting the climate-science funding question

In the public climate change debate, one often hears the argument that scientists are making hysterical claims about climate change in order to get funding. I already blogged about how the argument fails the "common sense" test, but I think this issue deserves another post.

Kerry Emanual and Chris Landsea, two of the major players in the debate over the connection between climate change and hurricanes, have visited A&M in the last three weeks and both gave seminars in my department. It is clear from their two talks that there is a vigorous scientific debate going on about the connection. After seeing both of them present their case, it is clear that this is an incredibly difficult problem and that no firm conclusions can be drawn at the present time. I certainly expect future research will shed more light on this question.

So let's evaluate the hypothesis that the scientific community is fabricating hysterical and frightening results to bump up funding. If that were so, why is there an active debate about the climate change-hurricane connection? Shouldn't the hurricane community fabricate the result that hurricanes and climate change are related? According to the skeptics, this would result in increased funding.

Here is what I conclude about this: