Reflections of a Climate Skeptic by Henk Tennekes

[sunsettommy]

From the weblog of the Roger A. Pielke Sr. Research Group.

Climate Science (http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/)


Excerpt:

January 6, 2006

Reflections of a Climate Skeptic by Henk Tennekes (http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/2006/01/06/guest-weblog-reflections-of-a-climate-skeptic-henk-tennekes/)

Filed under: Guest Weblogs (http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/category/guest-editor-weblogs/) — guest @ 6:30 am
The Climate Science weblog has occasionally included invited contributions from research collaborators. Today, we have an invited contribution from a scientist, Hendrik Tennekes, retired Director of Research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, who I learned from decades ago when he was a Professor at the Pennsylvania State University. He was among the best all-time instructors I ever had, as he was very effective at distilling complex concepts in turbulence theory to their basis foundations. “A First Course in Turbulence” by H. Tennekes and J. L. Lumley published in 1972 by MIT Press is a classic. On the website Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Tennekes&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Search), it has a very impressive 1216 citations.
He published another book also by MIT Press in 1997 entitled, “The Simple Science of Flight”. (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262201054/102-8793358-6011308?st=%2A&v=glance&n=283155)
Phylis and Philip Morrison’s review was published in Scientific American (http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/files/firstcomesthunder.pdf)and the reviews on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0262700654/ref=dp_proddesc_0/002-5971660-1989631?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=283155) are also worth reading! In addition, the following reviews are also excellent: Steven Vogel in American Scientist, January 1997 (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00097KDBA/computertalka-20/ref=nosim/002-2960447-7064018), Mick Hamer in New Scientist, June 1996, Roddam Narasimha in J. Indian Inst. Sci., July/August 1997, and Ruth Lowe Sitler in Ohio J. of Science, March 1997.


Following is Dr. Tennekes’s views on the climate issue.

Here in the Netherlands, many people have ranked me as a climate skeptic. It did not help much that I called myself a protestant recently. I protest against overwhelming pressure to adhere to the climate change dogma promoted by the adherents of IPCC. I was brought up in a fundamentalist protestant environment, and have become very sensitive to everything that smells like an orthodox belief system.

The advantages of accepting a dogma or paradigm are only too clear. One no longer has to query the foundations of one’s convictions, one enjoys the many advantages of belonging to a group that enjoys political power, one can participate in the benefits that the group provides, and one can delegate questions of responsibility and accountability to the leadership. In brief, the moment one accepts a dogma, one stops being an independent scientist.

A skeptic, on the other hand, accepts both the burdens and the pleasures of standing on his own feet. One of the disadvantages a skeptic has to cope with is the problem of finding adequate research support. The other side of that coin is that an independent scientist has a great opportunity to think better and delve deeper than most of his or her colleagues. Let me take an example in which I have been involved for thirty years, the problem of a finite prediction horizon for complex deterministic systems. This, the very problem first defined by Edward Lorenz, still is not properly accounted for by the majority of climate scientists. In a meeting at ECMWF in 1986, I gave a speech entitled “No Forecast Is Complete Without A Forecast of Forecast Skill.” This slogan gave impetus to the now common procedure of Ensemble Forecasting, which in fact is a poor man’s version of producing a guess at the probability density function of a deterministic forecast. The ever-expanding powers of supercomputers permit such simplistic research strategies.

Since then, ensemble forecasting and multi-model forecasting have become common in climate research, too. But fundamental questions concerning the prediction horizon are being avoided like the plague. There exists no sound theoretical framework for climate predictability studies. As a turbulence specialist, I am aware that such a framework would require the development of a statistical-dynamic theory of the general circulation, a theory that deals with eddy fluxes and the like. But the very thought is anathema to the mainstream of dynamical meteorology.

Climate models are quasi-deterministic and have to simulate daily circulation patterns for tens of years on end before average values can be found. The much more challenging problem of producing a theory of climate forecast skill is left by the wayside. In IPCC-documents one finds phrases like “climate surprises”, showing that the IPCC-staff is unaware of the ignorance it reveals by that choice of words, or unwilling to state forcefully that climate predictability research deserves much more attention than it has received so far.

A lot more here,

http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/2006/01/06/guest-weblog-reflections-of-a-climate-skeptic-henk-tennekes/

[Merlin]

Climate change exists and has done so for billions of years. Climate change is virtually impossible to predict as the exact mechanisms of it are not fully understood yet. Further research is still required and that is why the federal government has given funds to scientists to facilitate this. Without trying to sound like a Bush sycophant I`m pleased by our President`s cautious but open minded approach to this contraversial issue. It may well be that human activity is affecting the climate but we don`t know for sure.

[sunsettommy]

Climate change exists and has done so for billions of years. Climate change is virtually impossible to predict as the exact mechanisms of it are not fully understood yet. Further research is still required and that is why the federal government has given funds to scientists to facilitate this. Without trying to sound like a Bush sycophant I`m pleased by our President`s cautious but open minded approach to this contraversial issue. It may well be that human activity is affecting the climate but we don`t know for sure.

Yes "climate change" has existed as long as there was a climate on Earth.

The author says:


Since then, ensemble forecasting and multi-model forecasting have become common in climate research, too. But fundamental questions concerning the prediction horizon are being avoided like the plague. There exists no sound theoretical framework for climate predictability studies. As a turbulence specialist, I am aware that such a framework would require the development of a statistical-dynamic theory of the general circulation, a theory that deals with eddy fluxes and the like. But the very thought is anathema to the mainstream of dynamical meteorology.



He also says:

Climate models are quasi-deterministic and have to simulate daily circulation patterns for tens of years on end before average values can be found. The much more challenging problem of producing a theory of climate forecast skill is left by the wayside. In IPCC-documents one finds phrases like “climate surprises”, showing that the IPCC-staff is unaware of the ignorance it reveals by that choice of words, or unwilling to state forcefully that climate predictability research deserves much more attention than it has received so far.

From the link he goes on to say:


This is no minor matter. A few years after launching my slogan on forecast skill I chanced upon a copy of Karl Popper’s “Open Universe” and discovered that Popper had anticipated the problems caused by the Lorenz paradigm. His claim that scientists should be held accountable for the accuracy of their predictions boils down to the requirement that they have to compute in advance the reliability of their computations. For complex models, Popper wrote, this demand leads to “infinite regress”: computations of forecast skill are much harder than the forecasts themselves, and the next level, forecasting the skill of the skill forecast, is insurmountable when a complex system such as the climate is involved. Popper concluded that the positivist claims of science are in general unwarranted. In 1992 I wrote an essay for Weather to explain the issue in detail.



See why those thousands of climate models that have been published are not reliable? Why so have many models if they really think they are very usefull?

How can you have confidence in models that PREDICT the future and call it testable science? Some are a hundred years ahead! Do they really think such modeling predictions produce sound scientific results?

The Hockey Stick model that covered the PAST climatic record was still junk.It failed the test quickly when a couple of Canadian men gave it a check up.They found a lot of errors and also they showed that the Hockey Stick can be created with different inputs of data.It was amazing that Nature and the IPCC failed to see the flaws.

[Naturalized-Texan]

Climate models are not proof and never can be. Those who claim that climate models prove that global warming is caused by human activities are lying to promote a left-wing political agenda.