Good Tidings: A Book for Your Neighbour on Climate

The debate on climate change is widening as scientists disagree on weather measurements and coral bleaching. Earlier this year, Jennifer Marohasy challenged the CSIRO’s weather and temperature measuring methods and forced a review. Her edited collection Climate Change – The Facts was published in 2017. Dr Jennifer Marohasy is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, with recent publications in the international climate science journals Atmospheric Research and Advances in Atmospheric Research, as well as Wetlands Ecology and Management, Human and Ecological Risk Assessment, Public Law Review, and Environmental Law and Management. More recently Professor Peter Ridd has upset his employer James Cook University over his critique of research into coral bleaching. Professor Peter Ridd is Professor of Physics at James Cook University (Townsville) with particular interests in coastal oceanography, including human impacts on coral reefs. He has published over 100 papers in international science journals. On Wednesday 29 November, at The Sydney Institute, Jennifer Marohasy and Peter Ridd discussed climate science and the challenges facing all scientific disciplines.

GOOD TIDINGS: A BOOK FOR YOUR NEIGHBOUR ON CLIMATE

JENNIFER MAROHASY

Sydney is known for its Opera House – built on a platform jutting into the harbour, with vertical concrete walls extending down into the water.   I’ve looked across at the Opera House and the concrete wall from so many different vantage points – especially on New Year’s eves when it is all lit up with fireworks.

It should be easy to observe the sea level rise up those walls over the years.  Assuming we have catastrophic human-caused climate change.  As I speak tonight, not far from the Opera House, sea levels are in fact falling. That is correct. Falling. The tide is falling from a high of 1.46 metres at 5.25pm (an hour or so ago), to a low of 0.42 metres – forecast for midnight.  I know this from the “Tide Times” as published by the Bureau of Meteorology.

So, in the next few hours, sea levels in Sydney harbour will fall over one metre.

But of course, it is the longer-term trend – not the daily rise and fall of more than one metre – that the political class are more concerned about.  So, what does the longer-term record indicate?  A rise of 0.65 millimetres per year between 1885 and 2010: that is the official rate of sea level rise at Fort Denison (just across from the Opera House) as reported by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

You heard me correctly if you heard 0.65 millimetres per year – less than 1 millimetre per year. Of course, compounded, this could add up to 6.5 centimetres after 100 years.  But, of course, neither sea levels, nor temperatures, rise in a monotonic way – what I mean is, that they don’t just keep increasing.

Rather they cycle.  There is the daily cycle, the monthly cycle, the cycle associated with El Nino and La Nina events, and then there are the longer cycles including the cycles associated with ice ages and interglacial warm periods.  For example, at the end of the last proper ice age, which was about 16,000 years ago, sea levels rose vertically about 100 metres. That is correct, over 100 metres – before that it was possible to walk across to Tasmania.

We are now about 10,000 years into this relatively warm period known as the Holocene.  During a period known as the mid-Holocene highstand, which was about 6,000 years ago, sea levels were about 2 metres higher than they are now.  They didn’t fall very much until about 2,000 years ago.

None of what I have just told you about sea level change in Sydney Harbour is in any way controversial:

1. The Bureau’s “Tide Times” forecast a fall of over 1 metre by midnight,
2. NOAA indicates that there has been a rise over the last 100 years of just 0.065 metres (6.5 centimetres), and
3. The peer-reviewed scientific literature indicates sea levels have fallen about 2 metres over the last 2,000 years.

In summary, those with some numerical literacy might conclude the more significant longer-term trend is one of falling.

But this is all denied by the political class, who rule over us – particularly facilitated by bias and agenda at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).   (I mean have you ever heard Tony Jones make reference to the mid-Holocene highstand?)

Furthermore, if you were, for example, to just blurt out: “Sea levels are falling.”  You would likely be labelled a “deplorable” –  meaning you are “bad”, “wretched”, and “a subject for censure or reproach”.

As I wrote in the introduction to this book, Climate Change: The Facts 2017, that we are celebrating this evening: “There are certain things best not discussed with neighbours over the fence, at barbeques and at gatherings of the extended family; these topics used to include sex and politics, but more recently climate change has become a sensitive issue…”  So, rather than discuss the issue of climate change with your neighbour, why not just buy Climate Change: The Facts 2017 and simply hand it over the fence.

Each of the essays in this book has been written by a sceptic: someone who dares to doubt.  To be clear, none of the authors of any one of the 22 chapters in this book denies that climate change is real. Instead, we point out how extremely complex the topic of Earth’s climate is. This is not a book with just one message, except perhaps that there is a need for more scrutiny of the data, and of your neighbour’s prejudices.

Fundamental to the climate sceptic’s perspective on climate change is the fact that there are natural climate cycles – including cycles of sea level rise and fall – and that even the most extreme portrayals of late-twentieth-century warming fall within what we might expect from a natural warming cycle at the end of the Holocene.

For example, in Chapter 3, Nicola Scafetta, from the Meteorological Observatory at the University of Naples, discusses these natural cycles and explains how variations in solar luminosity – caused by the gravitational and electromagnetic oscillations of the heliosphere due to the revolution of the planets around the Sun – can drive oscillations in climate. But, those from geography departments at other Universities will argue: it is the impact of changes in the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere that are having much more impact on temperature – and sea level.

It was way back in 1896 that Svante Arrhenius, a chemist, theorised that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 could lead to a 5 to 6 degree Celcius increase in global temperatures. His calculations were speculative, and undertaken before modern high-resolution spectroscopy, which has enabled the measurement of the absorption and emission of infrared radiation by CO2. This is explained in Chapter 19 by chemist John Abbot and physicist John Nicol.  Indeed, measurements from spectroscopy, conveniently ignored by the IPCC’s geographers and meteorologists, suggests that the sensitivity of the climate to increasing concentrations of CO2 was grossly overestimated by Professor Arrhenius, and that these overestimations persist in the computer – simulation models that underpin the work of the IPCC to this day.

The content of the chapters is diverse – and while the focus is generally on science, there are also chapters on economics. Matt Ridley, for example, begins Chapter 14 with the claim that global warming is actually doing more economic good than harm – particularly through greening the planet.  In Chapter 15, Bjørn Lomborg explains the economics of the Paris Accord; he claims that adhering to the Accord is going to be very expensive while hardly affecting the global climate at all. Which is perhaps why so many are increasingly investing so much in attempting to close down open and honest debate.

My colleague at the IPA, Simon Breheny, explains in Chapter 17 that some in academia are leading the charge for extending the criminal law to the punishment of climate heresy on the basis it is moral negligence and ought to extend to all activities that seek to undermine the public’s understanding of the “scientific consensus”. Of course, the notion of a “consensus” is fundamental to modern politics, but is generally alien to traditional science – at least Enlightenment science as practised by true sceptics.

In reality, and to paraphrase Willie Soon from Harvard University, who wrote Chapter 11 with Sallie Baliunas, there is – as yet – no coherent theory of climate. Rather, as Pat Michaels, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, explains in Chapter 18, the mainstream climate-science community is wasting much time cherry-picking data from weather balloons and satellites, all in an attempt to make the temperature data consistent with a particular, and somewhat broken, paradigm that places too much emphasis on CO2.

There are many chapters in this book about “homogenisation” of the surface temperature record: chapters 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 by Anthony Watts, Tony Heller, Tom Quirk, Jo Nova and me, respectively. Homogenisation, in essence, involves the remodelling of data, and is now a technique integral to the development of key official national and global measures of climate change – including those endorsed by the IPCC. To explain this technique, I would have to show you some of the beautiful charts in this book, and then I would require more time to properly explain them. So, I am going to just suggest you buy the book and read the chapters – beginning perhaps with my chapter about the homogenisation of Rutherglen, which is Chapter 9.

The satellite data – a very valuable resource for understanding global and regional temperature change – is the subject of Chapter 12, written by Roy Spencer.  Dr Spencer is the Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer on the NASA Aqua satellite.

In the final chapter, my favourite poet Clive James effectively places the current obsession with catastrophic climate change – and the imminent demise of the Great Barrier Reef – in a broader cultural context.  He writes that the current obsession with human-caused climate change will “die hard”.  But that there is “no need to entertain visions of a vast, old-style army of disoccupied experts retreating through the snow, eating first their horses and finally each other.  But there could be quite a lot of previously well-subsidised people left standing around while they vaguely wonder why nobody is listening to them anymore.”

I don’t listen to our ABC anymore.  I recommend that over Christmas you also turn them off.  Instead read – Climate Change: The Facts 2017 – and other good books.

In Chapter 4 of this book you can even read about the moon.  The moon, of course, has a dominant influence on the sea tides that affect sea levels: that are often highest in Sydney harbour on a full moon – in early January.   And tonight, if you go to bed before midnight, you can do so in the knowledge that sea levels are falling in Sydney Harbour – as they have been for about 2,000 years, considering the longer-term trend.