We place our lives in the hands of experts. Experts look after our health, educate our children, maintain our car, tell us about newsworthy events in the wider world, entertain us. As a result we live in a far more comfortable world than a mediaeval peasant or an off-grid hippie.
In return we expect experts to act “with integrity”, i.e. to practice within the guidelines of the mission of a chosen profession. Many professions have professional associations which keep an eye on the integrity of their members, the Australian Medical Association for instance.
The mission of science is to discover and understand the physical world. This discovery and understanding can then be used by other experts, medical practioners, engineers, inventors and so on.
It also provides the lay person with a view of the natural world untempered by religious considerations. “Sir, I have no need for that hypothesis” is a famous quote by Pierre-Simon Laplace in response to Napoleon Bonaparte’s surprise at not seeing God mentioned in Laplace’s manuscript.
With this in mind, it is worth looking at the Charter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:
PRINCIPLES GOVERNING IPCC WORK
INTRODUCTION
1. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (hereinafter referred to as the IPCC or, synonymously, the Panel) shall concentrate its activities on the tasks allotted to it by the relevant WMO Executive Council and UNEP Governing Council resolutions and decisions as well as on actions in
support of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change process].
which commences as follows
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
The ultimate objective of the Convention is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations “at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic (human induced) interference with the climate system.” It states that “such a level should be achieved within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened, and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.”
This is not science.
This is not about discovery and understanding. Clearly those who framed these documents are already well aware that greenhouse gases will cause climate change. There is no scope here for further research. This subject is properly called Engineering because the intention is to use established scientific principles to bring about a desired result.
This is Engineering – Environmental Engineering.
But just how “well established” is The Science? The conclusion seems to have been based entirely on numerical fluid dynamic models with very little empirical testing (if any). I first heard of climate change (or global warming as it was then known) forty years ago when I was working on a numerical fluid dynamic model of the North West Shelf of Western Australia. Such models are extremely complex, fundamentally unstable and need to be thoroughly tested against current meter observations. The idea that someone could actually believe the results predicted by a numerical ocean/atmosphere model of the entire planet for decades into the future appeared to me at the time to be, well, outrageous. It still does.
For my own satisfaction I developed statistical methods for testing models against observational data. My attempts to publish this work were unsuccessful. A couple of results are worth mentioning here:
- Global average temperature is indeed correlated with the logarithm of atmospheric CO2 concentration. The model-derived global sensitivity of about 2 deg C for doubling of CO2 is about right.
- The sensitivity is much greater in polar regions, i.e. in Northwestern Canada, Northern Siberia and Antarctica.
- There is lack of good temperature data in these regions of most interest.
Result #2 above explains recent bushfires in Canada and there is a genuine concern that the melting of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica could lead to rising sea levels, although this is complicated by volcanic warming underneath that glacier.
This raises another issue, volcanic warming of the ocean. Hydrothermal vents, HTVs, occuring along mid-ocean ridges have ben known since the 1960s. They are the oceanic equivalent of hot springs on land but take the form of plumes of hot water containing black metallic sulphides which rise above the seafloor vents like smoke from a chimney on a frosty night. Hence their name, “black smokers”.
The temperature of the plumes can be as high as 400 deg C where it exits theocean floor but boiling does not occur because of the high pressure. They are rapidly cooled by entrainment of surrounding cold water and generally reach a height of several hundred metres above the sea floor. Plume height is related to the thermal power of the HTV.
Sea floor eruptions of volcanoes are many orders of magnitude more powerful than HTVs and generally rise to the top of the ocean where they heat the mixed layer. The total number of submarine volcanoes is estimated to be over one million (most are now extinct). Only 119 submarine volcanoes in Earth’s oceans and seas are known to have erupted during the last 11,700 years . This surprising small number is no doubt because we may well be unaware of such eruptions when they do occur.
One possible signature of a majore ocean floor eruption is a sudden increase in SST on a basin-wide scale. Such sudden changes in sea surface temperature (SST)are observed. One occurred, for example, in the North Atlantic in 2023 and was discussed here on Blackjay.