Dr. Bruce West talks about Global Warming

Dr. Bruce J. West is the chief scientist in the mathematical and information science directorate for the US Army Research Office and he doesn't buy into the Al Gore version of the cause of global warming.

I prepped for talking to Dr. West by doing as much research on the subject of global warming as I could from his point of view. West believes that the sun is doing more to increase or decrease the Earth's temperature than anything else. I know this because I read the paper he co-wrote with Dr. Nicola Scafetta for the March 2008 edition of Physics Today entitled "Is climate sensitive to solar variability?". Now, ask me how much I understand of what was written in the paper? That's right, very little.

I am not a climate scientist... or any kind of scientist, for that matter... but Scafetta and West did a marvelous job of putting at least most of their findings into language I could understand. (Okay, I also watched several episodes of CBS's The Big Bang Theory, one of my new favorite shows, to prep.)

Before I get into what Dr. West had to say, I do want to ensure that everybody knows the Army's current stance on global warming as told to us by host Lindy Dinklage from Army Public Affairs (emphasis mine):

"The Army does not have an official policy stance on global warming. As you can imagine, we do research on a number of topics. We have Army researchers, scientists and mathematicians working in thousands of areas right now across the globe doing a wide variety of research.

One of the primary purposes for having these Blogger's Roundtables specifically to highlight Army science and technology is to let the American public know that's going on."

Jack Holt of the Department of Defense echoed Lindy's remarks, making sure that we knew that the DOD has also not formed and official policy toward global warming.

Please bear with me as I am going to give you Dr. West's opening statement word-for-word as it contains many scientific principles and I don't want to paraphrase and get them wrong.

"Let me begin by saying that I appreciate the opportunity to discuss my research on the causes of climate change in this forum and I look forward to answering your questions.

"The Army research office encourages its chief scientists to pursue their research interests as part of their job description, but it is not often that we have the chance to discuss the work outside of scientific study.

[...]

"What I believe is of interest to all of you is the fact that our research has suggested an alternative to the apparently universally accepted cause of global warming. Many contend that the controversy over the causes of global warming have been resolved with the scientific community concurring that humanity has caused the increase in the Earth's average surface temperature. While Dr. Scafetta and I disagree with this representation of scientific opinion, that opinion is, in the end, irrelevant to the science. Science has never been a matter of consensus building. Science proceeds by what might be characterized as controversy and disagreement which is ultimately resolved by the interplay between experiment and theory and not by committee.

"The average temperature of the Earth's surface has increased by approximately 0.8 degrees centigrade over the last century, coincident with the growth of industry. The background for this temperature increase is recorded in the United Nations Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2007 report. After detailed discussion of the phenomenology, this report concludes that the Earth's temperature increase is due solely to anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. This conclusion is presented as the majority opinion of scientists and is based on analysis using a mix of large-scale computational global circulation models and energy balance models that incorporate into the calculations all identified physical and chemical mechanisms.

"Finally, they deduce from those models that the contribution of solar variability to global warming is negligible to a 95 percent certainty. Our own analysis of the total solar irradiance and the modeling of the Earth's climate response to changes in that irradiance lead us to conclude that the Earth's average surface temperature is directly linked to two distinctly different aspects of the sun's dynamics in marked contrast to the findings in the United Nations report.

[...]

"You might say that this is merely a situation where our model results contradict their model results... I would agree with the characterization. It is a scientific debate, not a political debate."

In short, Dr. West and Dr. Scafetta found that the conclusions in the IPCC report were, in essence, wrong. They found that the sun, which the IPCC dismissed as a fixed number instead of the variable which it is, accounts for anywhere from 30 - 69 percent of all global warming, depending on which Total Solar Irradiance (TSI)reconstruction is used. The IPCC claims that the sun has no effect on global warming whatsoever.



But what about Al Gore's fancy charts and graphs? Well, Dr. West has a chart, too. The chart on the left is reprinted from Physics Today and shows the sun's activity versus the rise in global temperatures since 1950.

But the computer models used by the IPCC said very plainly that humans are the sole cause of global warming. I asked Dr. West if he could explain, in layman's terms, what the problems are and were with the computer models used by the IPCC in order to get their results.

"Okay, let me give you a brief synopsis of how the science of this would work, whether you're talking about global warming or any other observational science," Dr. West said.

"The thing to note is that you don't have a laboratory, so you can't do a controlled experiment. What you have are observations. And now what you want to do is you want to try to understand what it is you're observing. You take measurements over time and you get a time series and that tells you, for example, what the average temperature of the Earth is over a period of time.

"Now, the climatologists and the meteorologists understand the physics of what's going on... at least part of the physics of what's going on... so they build up this computer model that has different mechanisms in it; how temperature is transferred to the atmosphere, how the atmosphere flows as a fluid, how one region of the Earth is connected to another region of the Earth, and on and on. All these different mechanisms, they tried to put all of that into one model and from that model, they then have an input. The input is the solar irradiation, the energy that's being put into the Earth from the sun.

"The first assumption they make is that that's a constant. Alright? And that's question number one that we can underline.

"So you put that input in and now you adjust these various mechanisms... how strong they are, how weak they are, how energy is transferred or moved around on the surface of the Earth... and try and reproduce these erratic observations that you've made of what the temperature of the Earth is doing. Alright? People have been doing this in a serious, systematic way for 30, 40 years for these large-scale computer models, the general circulation models.

"So you're now able to reproduce what the temperature on the Earth is doing with your model. If you were doing a laboratory experiment, you would have one set of data on which you would adjust the parameters of your model, and then you would have another set of data on which you'd make a prediction and see how good your model is. The problem is we only have one Earth, we only have one observation of what is happening with the temperature, so we have the situation in which the model characterizes what's happening with the temperature so you have self-consistency. Yes, the model does describe what's happening with the temperature, but you have no independent verification of the model that you would have in a laboratory experiment.

"That was part of the reason that motivated us to go back and look at things in a somewhat different way from the way the modelers were looking at it that were all recorded in this United Nations report and one of the things we changed was the recognition that the total solar irradiance, the amount of energy that comes to the Earth from the sun, is not constant but changes and we have satellite data that tells how it changes. Using that data, we were able to show that you could reproduce both the short-scale statistical fluctuations and these longer-scale variations associated with the solar cycles to reproduce what's in the data.

"What it shows is that the certainty of the results... this 95 percent certainty that was quoted in the United Nations report that the solar variability had no influence... is an over-statement of what they could conclude. And the reason I brought up the 30 percent of the 0.8 degrees or the 69 percent of the 0.8 degrees is because those are the two data sets we have for the solar irradiation. If you use one, you get one result, if you use the other, you get the other result and it becomes 'well, how do they differ?' That's a scientific dialogue about data and satellites and calibration and all of that which is continually under-going.

"So it's not that I'm saying that the cause of the global warming is not greenhouse gases, certainly greenhouse gases contribute, it's a matter of how much and what is the balance between naturally occurring influences, which is the variability in the sun, versus man's contribution which are these anthropogenic greenhouse gas effects."

Dr. West made it clear that he is not a politician, nor does he make Army or DOD policy toward global warming. He is a scientist. When pressed to provide his own personal opinion concerning global warming, he refused to give one. He told us that he would not provide a personal opinion because he was there to discuss science with us and his opinion was irrelevant next to the scientific research and evidence. I respect this man a great deal for that.

What about the future? Is it as bleak as the IPCC and environmental groups would have us believe? Not according to the Physics Today article. The Sun, just like the Earth, goes through cycles.

Thus the average global temperature record presents secular patterns of 22- and 11-year cycles and a short timescale fluctuation signature (with apparent inverse power-law statistics), both of which appear to be induced by solar dynamics. The same patterns are poorly reproduced by present-day GCMs and are dismissively interpreted as internal variability (noise) of climate. The nonequilibrium thermodynamic models we used suggest that the Sun is influencing climate significantly more than the IPCC report claims. If climate is as sensitive to solar changes as the above phenomenological findings suggest, the current anthropogenic contribution to global warming is significantly overestimated. We estimate that the Sun could account for as much as 69% of the increase in Earth’s average temperature, depending on the TSI reconstruction used.5 Furthermore, if the Sun does cool off, as some solar forecasts predict will happen over the next few decades, that cooling could stabilize Earth’s climate and avoid the catastrophic consequences predicted in the IPCC report.

This is and will be an ongoing argument for a very long time, unfortunately. The IPCC and their supporters, to include panic-monger Gore, will continue to press forward with the line that we humans are killing ourselves and claim that the argument is over.

Those who actually do research, like Drs. West and Scafetta, will continue to find major problems with the research and modeling done by the IPCC and point out their errors. Of course, the Sun hypothesis doesn't cause anywhere near as much panic among the general populace or make as much money for agencies created to take your money and give you nothing solid in return such as carbon credit companies.

If the Sun does go through a cooling trend over the next few decades, it will be a double-edged sword. Scientists who agree with West will continue the research and be able to point to hard facts to back up their hypothesis. The media will yawn and pay no attention to them.

But the Gore-ites will point to the drop in temperature and claim that the changes they made have saved the day, no matter how many times they said that the world would continue heating up until it literally exploded on itself. They're just like psychics, you have to overlook their 'misses' and only remember their 'hits'.

The science is sound here. Listen to the science.

You may listen to the entire Blogger's call here in mp3 format.