Professor Ray Bates Urges Prudence on Climate Change
Ray Bates, once head of research at Met Eireann and a former senior scientist at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre, has urged the Government to pursue a prudent climate change mitigation strategy "consistent with safeguarding our economy" and has warned that "we could go seriously wrong if we continue with measures that may do incalculable damage to Ireland's economy and the well-being of its people". He has criticized the Citizen's Assembly body, whose primary recommendation is that climate change be placed at the centre of policy making in Ireland, for "lacking in scientific impartiality".
The Bill under discussion and the recommendation of the Citizen's Assembly are based on a view that we are indeed in a climate emergency . They will involve costly unilateral actions by Ireland going far beyond anything we are required to do under our EU obligations. Given this, it is astonishing that more public debate has not taken place regarding the underlying assumptions.
Having attended the Assembly as an observer he found "the scientific talks given, to varying degrees, to be lacking in scientific impartiality. Rather they appeared to me to be tailored to promote the political goal embodied in the wording of the Assembly's assigned topic. Some examples :"
• Global warming predictions from the climate models were presented without the appropriate caveats regarding the models' reliability and their tuning to give a climate sensitivity lying in an anticipated acceptable range.
• One researcher spoke of the dangers of increased flooding without making any reference to a 2017 article on which he himself was a co-author, which found that over the past 80 years, "the number of significant trends in major flood occurrence across North America and Europe was approximately the number expected due to chance alone. Changes over time in the occurance of major floods were dominated by multidecadal variability rather than by long term trends.
• Another researcher stated that El Nino causes a change of only 0.1C in global average temperature, thereby denying the fact that it was El Nino, not greenhouse gases, that caused the 0.5C spike in global warming peaking in February 2016.
He also believes that recent media headlines suggesting that climate change was the cause of more weather extremes was "misleading, but feeding into recent developments in climate politics."
While acknowledging that climate change is happening and that greenhouse gases do indeed have a warming effect, Bates makes the point that the available evidence does not indicate that a climate emergency is looming :
Does the observed record of global warming indicate a climate emergency ? The most important index to examine in this regard is the global sea surface temperature. Ocean temperatures are free from the effects of urbanisation and land use changes that limit the reliability of land temperatures. The increase in the global average sea surface temperature from it's temporary peak around the middle of the last century to its present value is quite small: the difference between the 1936-1950 average and the 2000-2014 average is only 0.36C.
Neither our recent unusual weather events nor the general progress of global warming provide sufficient evidence of a climate emergency to justify the costly unilateral climate measures that are now under way in this country.
The full article was published in the Sunday Business Post and can be found here.
One thing I have noticed with the Citizen's Assembly is that there is zero recognition of the fact that we have already installed 3,000MW of wind energy, roughly the equivalent of the capacity of seven or eight power stations, yet the Irish climate continues to be extreme i.e. wind energy has had zero impact on the climate yet they insist on more such measures to be introduced immediately rather than exercising prudence and basing policy on robust analysis as Professor Bates advocates.
