I just returned from attending and participating in the International Conference on Climate Change put on by our friends over at the Heartland Institute.  The conference was held in New York City from March 2-4 and was clearly the largest gathering of global warming dissidents ever held. The conference had over 500 attendees with sessions on climatology, paleo-climatology, economics, and politics, featuring many scientists, economists, political experts, and journalists. There were probably eight keynote speakers but the most memorable was the President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus who grew up under communism and recognizes that the push for radical societal change and expansion of government power being proposed in the name of fighting global warming represents a massive new threat to liberty. Ron Bailey summarizes Klaus’ talk in a report on the conference for Reason Magazine:

“A point Klaus makes crystal clear in his just published book, Blue Planet in Green Chains – What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? ‘My answer is clear and resolute: ‘it is our freedom.’ I may also add ‘and our prosperity,’ declared Klaus.

Klaus noted that ideological environmentalism appeals to the same sort of people who have always been attracted to collectivist ideas. He warned that environmentalism at its worst is just the latest dogma to claim that a looming ‘crisis’ requires people to sacrifice their prosperity and their freedoms for the greater good. Let me quote Klaus at length.

‘Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will, nevertheless, be identical?the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality,’ warned Klaus. “What I have in mind [is], of course, environmentalism and its currently strongest version, climate alarmism.”

Bailey also reports on some key scientific findings that were presented by several of the many climate scientists giving talks at the conference. One of the most important comes from University of Alabama at Huntsville climatologist Roy Spencer in a paper he recently had published in the <em>Geophysical Research Letter</em>. Here’s Bailey’s summary:

“So how do we find out how sensitive climate is to CO2?…Roy Spencer described how two of his new studies are attempting to answer that question. In 2001, Massachusetts Institute of Technology climatologist Richard Lindzen hypothesized that there might be what he called an ‘adaptive infrared iris’ over the tropics through which tropical storms dissipate excess heat. But other researchers looked and found no strong evidence for such a mechanism.

Now Spencer and his colleagues using satellite data noticed big temperature fluctuations in the tropics in which strong warming was followed by rapid cooling. So Spencer looked at 15 strong intraseasonal oscillations in the tropics to see how clouds evolve. What was known is that tropical storms produce high cirrus clouds. Cirrus clouds are global warming culprits that retain heat and warm the planet. In the climate models, cirrus clouds tend to remain aloft for a long time. However, Spencer’s satellite observations found that they in fact dissipate rapidly, allowing heat to escape back into space and thus cooling the planet.

‘To give an idea of how strong this enhanced cooling mechanism is, if it was operating on global warming, it would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent,’ Spencer noted when the study was published in Geophysical Research Letters. ‘The big question that no one can answer right now is whether this enhanced cooling mechanism applies to global warming.’ Clouds constitute the biggest uncertainty in climate models and Spencer is hoping the modelers will include this effect in future runs to see how it would affect climate projections.

Next, Spencer discussed new research (accepted but not yet published) that he said strongly suggests that climate sensitivity is much lower than the climate models find. As I understood Spencer (and I could be garbling this), in the climate models a feedback is by definition a result of surface temperature change.

As Spencer explained his preliminary thinking at the website Climate Science, “For instance, low cloud cover decreasing with surface warming would be a positive feedback on the temperature change by letting more shortwave solar radiation in. But what never seems to be addressed is the question: What caused the temperature change in the first place? How do we know that the low cloud cover decreased as a response to the surface warming, rather than the other way around?”

In fact, using satellite data combined with a small model, Spencer finds that changes in cloudiness appear to drive changes in temperature. If this is so, Spencer suggests, this means that models have fundamentally mixed up cause and effect. He reported that his study had been peer-reviewed by the two of the climatologists on whose work the IPCC relied for estimating climate sensitivity. ‘Both came back and said ‘you’re right,’ claimed Spencer.

If Spencer’s results are confirmed?and this is a huge if?it would mean that the climate is far less sensitive to perturbation by carbon dioxide than the models suggest. Spencer says that if he is right about climate sensitivity that would imply that the average temperature of the planet might rise by +0.5 degrees centigrade by the end of this century due to the effects of rising carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere.”

What is interesting is that know-nothings are quick to suggest that there are no articles in the refereed scientific literature taking issue with the claims of the climate alarmists. I believe that this was claimed recently on one of North Carolina’s left wing blogs. In this short quote alone there were three articles in major journals cited. One by Richard Lindzen (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society) and two by Spencer (The Geophysical Research Letter), one published and one accepted but not yet published. The people who make this claim cite a long since discredited study that was published several years ago in Science, where the author claimed that she did an exhaustive search of the literature and could not find any articles disagreeing with “the consensus,” between 1993 and 2003. Well first of all see Lindzen’s article above which appeared during that time period, but here’s a smattering of others that take issue with one aspect or another of the alarmist story. (Since 2003 there have been dozens more).

“On the scientific basis for global warming scenarios”
Author:  Richard S. Lindzen
Environmental Pollution, 1994

“Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years”
Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas
Climate Research 2003

“Do deep ocean temperature records verify models?”
Richard Lindzen
Geophysical Research Letter–2002

“Modeling climatic effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions:  unknowns and uncertainties”
Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, Sherwood B. Idso, Kirill Ya. Kondratyev, Eric S. Posmentier
Climate Research 2001

“Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series”
Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick
Climate Research, 2001

“Environmental effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide”
Willie Soon, Sallie L. Baliunas, Arthur B. Robinson, Zachary W. Robinson
Climate Research, 1999

Climate Change in Perspective
H. von Storch
Nature, 2000

“Global Warming:  An Insignificant Trend?”
S. Fred Singer, Donald Kennedy and James D. Johnston
Science, 2001

Balling, Michaels, and Knappenberger, “Analysis of sinter and summer warming rates in gridded temperature time series,”
Cimate Research, 1998

Michaels ad Knappenberger, “Human Effect on Global Climate?”, Nature 1996.

In addition to the Spencer articles cited above here’s a couple more, post 2003.

George C. Reid, “Solar Forcing of Global Climate Change Since The Mid-17th Century”
Climate Change 2004

R.A. Pielke Jr., C. Landsea, M. Mayfield, J. Laver, and R. Pasch, “Hurricanes and Global Warming” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 2005

Flanner, Zender, Randerson, et. al. “Present day carbon forcing and response from black carbon in snow,” Journal of Geophysical Research, 2007.

Christy, Norris, Redmond, et. al. “Methodology and results of calculating central California surface temperatures: Evidence of human induced climate change?” Journal of Climate, 2006

Scarfetta and West, “Phenomenological solar contribution to the 1900-2000 global surface sarming,” Geophysical Research Letter, 2006.