Geoscientist Online

Dear Editor, I support the proposal by Dr D’Olier that the society should explore members’ views on climate change, but not through a petition with a particular agenda. Several dozen concerned scientists (the majority Fellows or ex-Fellows of this Society) wrote an open letter to the President on 1^st June 2018 requesting a review of the Society’s Position Statements on Climate Change. We still await a reply to that joint letter. Clearly, there is not a consensus amongst Fellows on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), so a survey of members’ views would seem more appropriate than a petition.

Mr Lack’s spur that the society should ‘Join the decarbonisation bandwagon’ (Geoscientist 29 (3), 9, April 2019) is his opinion, to which he is entitled. This may be the opinion of the current GSL board, but discussion of differences of opinion are central to the scientific method, which we understand the Society embraces. Name-calling (‘deniers’), false analogy between the oil and tobacco industries, and the assertion of personal opinion as ‘expert truth’ without evidence are a departure from the scientific method.

For example, Lack refers to the latest IPCC warning that we have 12 years left, but fails to note that the UN issued a similar warning in 1989, as did Al Gore in 2007. What is different now? Lack notes that CO₂ concentrations were much higher in the past, but fails to note that they have been declining steadily since at least the Cretaceous. He differentiates carbon emissions from climate change, when it is the IPCC’s central hypothesis that human CO₂ alone produces global warming/climate change.

Here are a few of the many observations about the climate that cry out for investigation and open scientific discussion:
•    The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and other multi-decadal effects, all of which have a significant effect on average global temperatures, have been accepted by the IPCC as not being caused by CO₂.
•    Although CO₂ continues to climb, global average temperatures have not increased since the beginning of this century, other than by ENSO-driven warming.
•    Half of the warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution began had already happened by 1943, long before the advent of significant CO₂ emissions, which only began around 1950.
•    Central to the IPCC hypothesis of AGW, is that the temperature of the upper tropical troposphere must increase, but it has not.

None of these issues implies that climate change is not real, for it is a permanent condition of the planet, or that human CO₂ emissions may have a role, but they surely suggest that all is not well with the IPCC hypothesis. We believe the Society needs to evaluate the risk implicit in each of these issues and that the Society should be very cautious of appearing to be following the advice in Lack’s soapbox article.

It seems the Society’s first job should be to define and summarise the evidence for natural fluctuations as portrayed in the geological record, and not mimic the IPCC’s restricted mandate to only consider evidence for the human contribution to Global Warming/Climate Change. The Society has a history of challenging orthodoxy, it would be a tragedy if that tradition were abandoned.