Sir, I write in response to the letters of J G Gahan (21. 8. 13) and C Summerhayes' response (24. 9. 13). I wish to add my voice to that of J G Gahan: the Society and the IPCC do not reflect the views of all members of the Society or of all, or even a majority, of meteorologists, climatologists and physicists. I also found parts of Summerhayes’ letter to be condescending: those who disagree with the IPCC and its supporters do not use textbooks to learn about the current status of scientific research because we are fully aware of the biased and unreliable nature of such sources. Instead we use original scientific reports, albeit different ones from those used and quoted by Summerhayes and his colleagues. A central presupposition of Summerhayes' letter, and that of the GSL statement on climate change, that CO2 concentrations are a direct cause of temperature change has not been proved by any of the statements in this or any other of his letters or IPCC reports, or by any research data. It may be true that "we can see from the past that the climate warms when CO2 goes up", but it is equally valid to state that "as temperatures rise, so too do CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere". Correlation is not the same as cause.
I therefore ask that Prof Summerhayes consider and respond to the following criticisms with hard data rather than opinion disguised as fact.
Why has the IPCC in its latest report:
- failed to explain its twenty three year long track record of proven inability to accurately predict climate change?
- not publicly and fully disclosed inherent flaws in its methodology that have been repeatedly pointe out by its critics?
- kept silent on other climate theories and models that are far superior to those used by the UN-IPCC?
In addition he needs to explain why all global temperature indices from the primary US government and UN sources of global temperature data and trends show that there has been no effective growth in the Earth’s temperatures for sixteen years. (Ad hoc arguments about thermal transfer from the ocean surface to the depths (again unsupported by any substantial data), will not do). Two global climate parameters, atmospheric and oceanic temperatures, have been in steep decline for seven and ten years, respectively, yet Summerhayes does not mention this anywhere. The criticism do not stop there. The AR5 Summary (of the most recent IPCC report) fails to account for the fact that this Summary and all previous UN- IPCC reports and associated global climate models (GCM) have failed by a wide margin to accurately predict climate change.
Why is this so if the underlying assumptions of CO2 levels forcing climate change are true? In a recent report by the Space and Science Research Corporation (an independent body which has no links with any political bodies), 19 claims or climate predictions in the IPCC Summary were evaluated. Five of these claims were found to be misleading and 14 were found to be false or highly unlikely. None were found to be accurate. These are serious and extremely worrying observations which call into question the integrity of the science which is being used to justify the claims of the IPCC and its supporters, and the statement of the GSL on climate change, and these cannot be ignored, yet they continue to be so. Many meteorologists and climatologists have therefore come to the very reasonable conclusion that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere may be a response to, and not a cause of, temperature change, and have anyway long since recognised that simplistic, linear, single causes of complex processes are a product of a naive and outmoded approach to scientific problems.
I am very aware that this subject has long since moved from being one where contrary opinions can be held and debated in relatively balanced manner and that it has become politicised to such a degree that it is now almost impossible to hold a reasoned debate. Instead we are being presented with spurious statements about "95% probabilities" of certainty which deliberately ignore contrary data and the considered opinions of many well informed individuals from a wide variety of relevant disciplines. Science is not a democracy - we do not vote on the data, nor is an idea correct just because an influential group supports it. It is a method whereby we try to better understand our material world and how it works, and this inevitably means that contrary opinions will be held and need to be assessed against all of the relevant data. Only when contrary opinions are respected and refuted with relevant data can we hope to return to a sensible debate and perhaps gain a better understanding of the complexity of the Earth's climate.
In the meantime the wider public are being deceived by a series of pseudoscientific reports largely driven by the politics of academic science. The very real danger here is that science in general, and this Society in particular, will suffer from a collapse of confidence by the general public when the political machinations that lie behind the alarmist and unrealistic claims and predictions of the IPCC and its supporters are revealed as the Earth's climate cools over the next decades. Those who cry wolf need to consider the longer term consequences of their foolhardiness and think more carefully about how they present their case.