A professor of telecommunications at the Université du Québec's Institut national de la recheche scientifique/Energy, Materials and Telecommunications Centre.
As is typical of media reports on climate, columnist Albert Nerenberg ("The legacy we leave should be interesting," Friday Voice, Nov. 4) makes interpretations that do not stand up as he joins the chorus to DO SOMETHING about climate change.
Nerenberg says that "in 50 or 100 years from now it's very possible that climate change will be at a whole new level." Climate activists tend to use the words "possible" and "may" when describing negative views of the future, but then assume such "possibilities" will come true.
As a professor who has taught stochastic signal processing for more than 30 years, I can reliably state that many people misunderstand probability and computer models. (Witness a Lotto 6/49 player who, having lost 10 times, figures his odds of winning are thus higher.)
I have read much physical evidence, including reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (set up by the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization). I favour reducing pollution, but not spending to combat "climate change."
People are arrogant to think they can control climate. Humans pollute their environment and render species extinct, but evidence of climate impact is marginal. Temperatures have risen for years, but links between temperature rise and carbon dioxide emissions are tenuous.
Climate publicity rarely cites any evidence of those links besides talk of a "greenhouse" effect. Greenhouses limit the circulation of air - something that is not true of our complex atmosphere. Carbon dioxide does not form a barrier up there, trapping heat. Atmospheric experiments on how carbon dioxide may affect heat transfer are impossible, which leads to uncertainty in the models.
I am open (as all scientists should be) to evidence from proper experiments. So far, the evidence is not convincing. As has been reported elsewhere, the IPCC process has been badly distorted and political from its inception. Its reports present much science, but have highly political interpretations, saying what their funders want to see.
I love the scientific method; it is always open to new data. Science is never "settled." Physics Today recently compared climate-change theory to heliocentrism and relativity, two theories widely criticized in their day. But the sun as the centre of the solar system has vast supporting evidence, while climate-change theory is based on unreliable computer models.
Post-hoc models often suggest human impact on climate, because the model-makers seek to find such links. Scientists need to make a living too. They see much governmental funding to explore (and find) climate change. Early researchers saw that finding no carbon dioxide-climate link led to little funding. Funders, as well as researchers, are affected by politics. (I know the system quite well, my research having been supported in Canada for 33 years now; I have been on several Ottawa and Quebec funding panels.) One always has an infinite range of possible experiments to do, but it is human nature to examine those likely to give pleasing results.
My career has focused on the development and use of computer models - not in the area of climate, but IPCC models are very similar to ones I know. One starts a model from basic scientific principles, but then one tweaks the system to "fit the data," as all models are simplifications and researchers rarely understand all phenomena they are examining. Climate models "predict" past data well, in hindsight, by manual adjustment of the models' parameters. The true challenge is to predict future occurrences, and here recent climate models fail badly. Despite carbon-dioxide emissions continuing to rise, temperature has not risen in the last decade or so. Few, if any, models in the 1990s predicted this. Much work remains to be done to achieve good models. We should not rush to spend vast sums of money based on such inadequate models.
Nerenberg says, "New parts of the planet could be turning to desert, the weather will be volatile, and food and land shortages will be precipitating terrible - human conflicts." This has been happening for centuries. There is no clear link with carbon dioxide; and we cannot really do anything about it anyway. Alarmists present no practical scenario in which people will agree to forfeit major parts of their lifestyle for vague possibilities of cutting temperature increase.
Science is not settled by majority vote, but by valid experimentation. Most "climate scientists" may well support the alarmists, but just as many meteorologists and geologists do not. Just as it is too important to leave decisions about war to the military, our Earth is too important to be left to those whose careers have been largely funded supporting a popular hypothesis to the exclusion of alternatives.
Climate has always been changing. Why are we now blaming carbon dioxide? The glaciers in the Canadian Rockies have been receding since 1850, the end of the Little Ice Age. There are many factors involved in climate. Carbon dioxide is a minor one.
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