California Climate Litigation:
Public nuisance lawsuits
by San Francisco and Oakland
against oil companies
led to filing of amicus curiae
(friend of the court) briefs.
One was filed on behalf
of three distinguished physicists,
Professors William Happer,
Steven Koonin and Richard Lindzen.
Happer, Koonin and Lindzen
decided to accept the data used by the
UN Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC)
in its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5),
and the Climate Science
Special Report (CSSR) by the
US Global Change Research
Program (USGCRP).
They accept the evidence
presented in the reports,
but demonstrate the conclusions
in the reports are NOT established.
Accepting the reports
ignores the fact that
satellite temperature data
are superior to the
surface temperature data
used in the reports,
but doing that avoids
having to argue that
satellite data are superior.
“Our overview of climate science
is framed through four statements:
1. The climate is always changing;
changes like those of the past half-century
are common in the geologic record,
driven by powerful natural phenomena
2. Human influences on the climate
are a small (1%) perturbation
to natural energy flows
3. It is not possible to tell how much
of the modest recent warming
can be ascribed to human influences
4. There have been no detrimental changes
observed in the most salient
climate variables and today’s projections
of future changes are highly uncertain.”
The three Profs state
the common practice
in climate science
is to present graphs
without the uncertainty bars,
that would show
significant uncertainties.
They also include
the historic record
and mention
the last interglacial period
(the Eemian) ...
“when it was the 2C
warmer than today
and the sea level was
6 meters [20 feet] higher.”
They assert another major difficulty
in the climate model development,
which others have called
circular reasoning.
“A second major problem
is that there is no unique tuning
that reproduces
the historical climate data.
Since aerosol cooling
plays against GHG
(greenhouse gas) warming,
a model with low aerosol
nd GHG sensitivities
can reproduce the data
as well as a model
with high sensitivities.
As a result,
the GHG sensitivity
is today uncertain
by a factor of three
( actually true since 1979 ),
therefore enlarging
the uncertainty
in any projection
of future climates.”
“A third problem is that
the models must reproduce
the natural variabilities
of the climate system,
which we’ve seen
are comparable to the claimed
anthropogenic (man made) changes.
Climate data clearly show
coherent behaviors on multi-annual,
multi-decadal, and
multi-centennial timescales,
at least some of which are
due to changes in ocean currents
and the interaction between
the ocean and the atmosphere.
Not knowing the state of the ocean
decades or centuries ago
makes it difficult to correctly choose
the model’s starting point.
And even if that were possible,
there is no guarantee
that the model will show
the correct variability
at the correct times.
The claim that
the starting point
is the start of
the industrial revolution,
or the start of a network
of instrument measurement
(US in 1880)
is not sufficient."
The Three Profs
mention the low confidence
the IPCC assigns
to understanding
weather events since 1951
including floods, droughts,
severe weather events,
cyclones, etc.
They conclude with:
“To summarize this overview,
the historical and geological record
suggests recent changes
in the climate
over the past century
are within the bounds
of natural variability.
Human influences on the climate
(largely the accumulation of CO2
from fossil fuel combustion)
are a physically small (1%) effect
on a complex, chaotic,
multi-component
and multi-scale system.
Unfortunately, the data
and our understanding
are insufficient
to usefully quantify
the climate’s response
to human influences.
However,
even as human influences
have quadrupled since 1950,
severe weather phenomena
and sea level rise
show no significant trends
attributable to them.
Projections of future climate
and weather events
rely on models
demonstrably unfit
for the purpose.
As a result, rising levels of CO2
do not obviously pose an immediate,
let alone imminent, threat
to the earth’s climate.”