Climate change: the next phase?

Whatever your view about its contents, or its authors, the recent US Department of Energy report on climate science represents a landmark in the climate debate, because it opens a discussion previously prevented by an enforced consensus.

US Energy secretary Chris Wright said in the foreword that he’s found that media coverage distorts the science, meaning that many walk away with a view of climate change that is exaggerated or incomplete. So he asked a team of independent experts; John Christy, Judy Curry, Steve Koonin, Ross McKitrick, and Roy Spencer to give an alternative view.

Oh the horror! ‘Climate contrarians all’ is perhaps the politest way they have been described in the past. But their time has come, and they have always represented what science is all about – debate and data.

It’s strange that many scientists – and not just in climate science – downplay data, regarding modelling as their highest ideal. Antarctic ice might be on the increase, sea-level might not be accelerating, the Arctic is not ice-free yet, but no matter, it’s the outputs of climate models that are important. They are important, it is argued, as they encapsulate all we know and point the way to the future, or so it is said.

This new report is part of a welcome trend away from that view. Of course climate models are important and are a valuable research tool, but their veil is falling from our eyes as we realise they are overstrained and inappropriate when used to formulate policy.

Modelling muddle

The signs have been there for years. The models developed to track and predict the direction of the Covid pandemic were initially lauded as state-of-the-science and policy descriptive. Subsequently we have begun to realise their bitter harvest. The media, which should have been looking at them in great detail, swallowed them unquestioningly and sidelined critics, deriding them as ‘dissenters’. It was no coincidence that many of the journalists who did this were repeating their climate playbook. We have learned that science can make models and they can grow complex beyond comprehension, demonstrating that no one has any real expertise in modelling large-scale dynamical systems.

So what do we do? As this new report indicates, stick to the data.

In the past this approach has been frustrating. It’s not so long ago that we were talking about a lack of warming seen in global surface temperatures – the ‘pause’, which lasted from 1998 to 2012. It’s now an acknowledged (though unexplained) phenomenon, but those who pointed out its presence in the data were lambasted as ‘contrarians’.

But, as I said, times are changing. Outputs of climate models no longer have the cachet they did a decade ago, especially when we are told again and again that they agree with the over-simplistic models proposed many decades ago. They are interesting, but we have mistaken them for reality, and they have been pushed relentlessly for political and advocacy reasons.

This point is made clearly the new report when it discusses climate attribution. We have also mistaken the statistical model of the earth without human climatic influence as some form of reality that would have occurred if things have been different.

The norms of science

Inevitably the report has and will draw criticism. One critic said it was ‘cherrypicking a viewpoint’ and looking for evidence to support that view. This is a bit rich when one considers the recent performance of climate science. Not all will agree with all of its contents, but then again neither do people agree with all that the IPCC produces. Another has said it’s ‘climate denial’, whilst yet another said it violates the norms of science. For all these criticisms substitute irritation.

Dialogue and debate have been in short supply, actively shut down in the name of consensus. This has been especially true when celebrity scientists have used the science as a tool in the game of power politics, more to do with their public status and social media presence, as well as the supportive consolidation of tribes, than it has with the advancement of science.

Will this new report and its dose of reality stimulate more debate about data? Will it foster a return to observations and a focus on the empirical, and not just reading the entrails of climate models? It might take a while, but science has a way of self-correcting.