Perth Sunday Times Op-ed: Perth electrical engineer’s discovery will change climate change debate

[JohnyCanuck]

A MATHEMATICAL discovery by Perth-based electrical engineer Dr David Evans may change everything about the climate debate, on the eve of the UN climate change conference in Paris next month.

A former climate modeller for the Government’s Australian Greenhouse Office, with six degrees in applied mathematics, Dr Evans has unpacked the architecture of the basic climate model which underpins all climate science.

He has found that, while the underlying physics of the model is correct, it had been applied incorrectly.

He has fixed two errors and the new corrected model finds the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO2) is much lower than was thought.

More at: http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/opinion/miranda-devine-perth-electrical-engineers-discovery-will-change-climate-change-debate/story-fnhocuug-1227555674611

[Xipe Totec]

1. Does he also have six degrees of Kevin Bacon?

And why is he a former climate modeller? Who fired him and why?

[Xipe Totec]

2. He has been summarising his results in a series of blog posts on his wife Jo Nova’s blog

On his wife Jo Nova’s blog for climate sceptics....

He is about half way through his series, with blog post 8, “Applying the Stefan-Boltzmann Law to Earth”, published on Friday.

When it is completed his work will be published as two scientific papers. Both papers are undergoing peer review.

Translation:

Not peer reviewed.

[immoderate]

3. Sounds like a load of shit.

--imm

[deathrind]

4. What...??

"While climate scientists have been predicting since the 1990s that changes in temperature would follow changes in carbon dioxide, the records over the past half million years show that not to be the case."




Hmmm- the temp follows CO2 very closely so...

[GliderGuider]

6. A quick eyeball estimate

Even a quick eyeball estimate from that graph puts the long-term Earth System Sensitivity at over 10C per doubling of CO2, with a natural CO2 reabsorption rate of 1 ppm every 800 years or so.

Not good.

[OnlinePoker]

8. Actually, it's saying the CO2 is following the temperature.

The reason we're at 400 PPM CO2 is because the temperature has gone up by a degree or so in the last century. I think that's the gist of his arguement.

[Binkie The Clown]

5. Time will tell.

I wonder if his "corrected" model is like the "corrected" polls the Repubs used to show that Romney would win in a landslide.

You have to wonder about the lone wolf who is "correcting" the work of every other scientist in the world.

[Demeter]

7. Yeah, just like that heretic Gallileo

Who did he think he was, anyway, defying the Pope like that?

[JohnyCanuck]

9. Distinguished US physicist resigned from the American Physical Society over global warming issue

Back in 2010 Professor Emeritus of physics Hal Lewis of the University of California at Santa Barbara submitted a letter of resignation to the American Physical Society giving as a reason the refusal of the APS to honestly examine the global warming issue.

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

Continued here:
http://my.telegraph.co.uk/reasonmclucus/reasonmclucus/15835660/professor-emiritus-hal-lewis-resigns-from-american-physical-society/

From Physicsworld.com:

APS responds to climate-change accusations

The American Physical Society (APS) has issued a strongly worded statement in response to a published resignation letter from a prominent member of the society. The letter, written by Harold Lewis, emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara accused the society of benefiting financially from climate-change funding. Addressed to the APS president, Curtis Callan, the letter calls global warming a "scam" and says that "the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it...has carried APS before it like a rogue wave".

Lewis, 87, who has been an APS member for 67 years, has had a distinguished career that includes serving on the US defence science board, the advisory committee on reactor safeguards and the nuclear safety oversight committee. Lewis writes that climate change is "the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist," and that the APS has "accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it." He adds that Princeton University physics department, of which Callan is chair, "would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst."

snip

In response to Lewis's letter, the APS took the unusual step of issuing a public statement on Tuesday. The society says there is "no truth to Dr Lewis's assertion that APS policy statements are driven by financial gain," adding that the "specific charge that APS as an organization is benefiting financially from climate-change funding is equally false".

snip

Lewis does, however, have some support among physicists. "{Lewis} is on target with the big picture," says Princeton physicist Will Happer, a leader of last year's effort to change the APS statement on climate change.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2010/oct/14/aps-responds-to-climate-change-accusations

[NickB79]

14. So he subscribes to the "vast global conspiracy" theory on AGW

Lewis writes that climate change is "the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist," and that the APS has "accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it." He adds that Princeton University physics department, of which Callan is chair, "would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst."

He reminds me of James Watson, the distinguished biologist who helped discover DNA's double helix structure. Brilliant in his specific field, but able to be a complete fucking moron when he steps outside of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watson#Provocative_comments

[OKIsItJustMe]

10. A few quick observations

1. This is an "Op-Ed" not a news story.
2. It's an "op-ed" in the the Perth Sunday Times, owned by News UK, which is owned by News Corp. (i.e. it is a sibling to FOX News.)
3. It is an "op-ed" by Miranda Devine - "an American-born Australian columnist and writer noted for her conservative stance on a range of social and political issues."
4. Dr. David Evans - "is a prominent climate sceptic residing in Perth (see biography here). Evans has made a number of claims about the role of banking institutions throughout history and that climate change is merely a cover for a massive power play." There is nothing new about his climate change denial He's been doing it for a while.
5. There's nothing new to the observation that in the past warming has led CO₂. The theory of Milankovitch Cycles, proposes that the modest amount of warming and cooling caused by the Earth's motions in space are amplified by climate feedbacks. (Among them, the idea that warming leads to various natural releases of greenhouse gases.)

Currently, by Milankovitch theory, the Earth should be in a cooling sequence. Something seems to have overridden that, perhaps anthropogenic greenhouse gases...

[Duppers]

11. Thank you!

[OKIsItJustMe]

13. You’re welcome!

Just trying to inject a little sanity…

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. People who understand GCMs are not impressed

Most normal people would have been content to have produced one game-changing theory of climate but David Evans is not a normal person. No! He has squillions of degrees from Really Prestigious universities and has, on his own, invented entire new types of Fourier analysis. So it is with no surprise – rather, with a dull grey sense of the inevitable – that I note (thank you JM and ATTP) that his latest theory has thunked onto the doormat like junk mail. ATTP attempts to make some sense of DE’s confusion over partial derivatives – they’re the work of the devil I tell you – and I’ll try to point out the more obvious errors in New Science 7: Rerouting Feedback in Climate Models.
...
So to return to the first sentence, no the models don’t assume that CO2 warms the sky. The models implement some basic radiation physics that says that changing the atmospheric composition affects how it absorbs and emits radiation at different frequencies; but after that its left up to the implementation of the physics to determine warming or cooling. And as we all know, the stratosphere cools under GW, so the first quoted sentence is wrong even on its own wrong terms. The third quoted sentence from DE is more in not-even-wrong territory, and is clearly just junk.

http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2015/10/04/force-f-from-outer-space/

The cartoon illustration is 'Terry Fuckwit'. William Connolley does not think much of Evans.