Skeptic’s discordant note at Morgan book launch

20 May 2009 FOR SCOOP

*Climate skeptic’s discordant note at Gareth Morgan book launch*

A discordant note was sounded at the launch in Parliament Tuesday evening of Gareth Morgan’s book on climate change, Poles Apart, by Bryan Leyland, energy consultant and chairman of the economics panel of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition. He had been invited to speak at the function by the publishers, Random House. Here is the text of Mr Leyland’s short address:

First, a word about conflict of interest. As part owner and operator of a small hydropower scheme that would see huge windfall profits in the event of a carbon tax, my stand against the man-made global warming hypothesis and the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) that it spawned is, for sure, in serious conflict with my financial interests. I wonder how many people in this room are in a similar position?

I was fortunate to be able to listen to the debates between Gareth Morgan and Ian Wishart on Leighton Smith’s NewstalkZB programme this morning. I would particularly endorse Gareth’s statements that, the ETS is a joke, that Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is a serious distortion of climate science -- would our Education Department, Ministry for the Environment and Greenpeace and many others please note -- and that he has no doubt that Michael Mann's ‘hockey stick’ graph is based on scientific fraud. My friend Steve McIntyre, who exposed that fraud, will be delighted to hear he is in such auspicious company! What it demonstrates is that that peer review cannot be relied upon.

My interest in man-made global warming arose from my lifelong interest in keeping the lights on in New Zealand. When I realised that, if true, man-made global warming was a threat to power supplies in New Zealand -- because our largest energy resource is coal -- I thought I should investigate the possibility further. Up until then, I had assumed that if people said that man-made global warming was real and dangerous, then it was probably so.

I soon realised that all the predictions of dangerous man-made global warming rely almost entirely on computer models. As I have often used computer models to predict whether or not a power system will survive a major disturbance. I was well aware of the fact that, when modelling a complex system it was vitally important that the models have been validated, that they must be an accurate representation of the system itself and that the input data was extremely accurate. A small error in any of these can lead to predictions that the system will crash rather than survive a disturbance. No climate model is an accurate model of system -- because we have only vague idea of how the climate works. If they did know how it worked, their models would predict El Niño's, La Nina's and, maybe the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

I also realised that it was impossible to get accurate input data because, quite simply we can’t take a snapshot of a climate at any one time to feed into the computer model. But most of all, I realised that none of the climate models has demonstrated that it can predict future climate. They all failed to predict that the world would be cooler than it was in 1998 and there has been a definite cooling trend since about 2002. Several years ago, Dr David Wratt, of NIWA, told me that climate models could not expected to be right within a 10-year time horizon. Dr Wratt, I have news for you: the 10 years is up and the climate is still doing what it always does -- change naturally and unpredictably.

The fact is that no credibility whatsoever should be placed on the “projections” of climate models. And if you believe that their ability to emulate past temperatures proves that they can predict the future, you know very little about "fiddle factors" – aerosols being a prime example.

But enough of that. As far as New Zealand is concerned, -- and here I agree with Gareth Morgan - risk management is all important. The financial crisis has its roots in the fact that the bankers and fund managers failed to exercise proper risk management. If they had, they would have shunned subprime mortgages rather than taking their cut and passing them on as good investments.

So let us look at the risks. To me, the biggest risk is the one that Gareth has identified: what if climate change is natural and man-made greenhouse gases have only a small influence on it. The IPCC Summary for Policymakers is a bit more than 90% confident that most of the warming is man-made. Put it another way: there is something like a 10% probability that man-made global warming is a myth. As Gareth discovered, the real probability is much higher – the current sunspot cycle is unusually long and history tells us that this is usually followed by a cooling climate; Antarctic ice is at a record extent; Arctic ice is back to normal and thicker than predicted; Ships traversed the Northwest Passage early last century and in the 1940’s, polar bear populations have exploded since hunting was banned – and so on. But you read none of this in the press! All this tells us that there is a high probability that, as it always has, the climate changes naturally.

So there is a risk of warming and a risk of cooling. If we choose to ignore the risk of cooling and, instead decide to spend a vast amount of money and effort fighting climate change the cost will be enormous. For those who believe, the climate models predict a tiny change in climate. Carbon trading is an open invitation to massive fraud and it is happening already. Fighting climate change is all pain and no gain! A huge expense and no measurable rewards. On the other hand, from past history we do know that, for sure, warming is good and cooling is bad. In the modern world, severe cooling is likely to lead to massive population shifts from colder regions and massive loss of agricultural land. A repeat of the Little Ice Age would be disastrous to millions and millions of people in this world. That is the real risk!

So in the words of Gareth Morgan whattawedo, whattawedo?

I think the answer is obvious. We keep studying the whole range of the science, we stop vilifying the people who point out the possibility of cooling and we set up a monitoring system -- based on GeoNet, which is one of the best natural disaster monitoring systems in the world -- to monitor climate change -- be it warming or cooling!

For sure the science is NOT settled. Let us abandon the ETS, ignore the people – like Al Gore - who stand to make huge amounts of money from carbon trading and subsidized renewable energy, and get on with monitoring our changing climate so that, no matter what happens, we will be glad we did.

ENDS

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