I’ve developed a particular interest in the climate change “debate” due to my current position supporting the activities of a number of climate scientists who use the TPAC supercomputing facilities to simulate the earth’s climate.
Chris Samuel (Deputy Systems Manager at VPAC) provided a link to recent research debunking the claims of the controversial BBC documentary “The Great Climate Change Swindle”, which was shown on ABC last night.
I didn’t bother watching it myself, but I’ve heard on radio that one of the claims in this program was that the “climate scientists” had completely ignored the effects of the sun when coming up with their theories about carbon dioxide contributions toward global warming. Anyone who cares to can verify for themselves that this claim is false simply by reading the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers on the Physical Basis of Climate Change.
It’s only 18 pages long, and condenses the investigations of the IPCC into a number of statements about what’s happening with global climate change and the science behind it. Of particular interest are graphs like this:
This graph (from page 11 of the summary) shows the temperature changes predicted by computer simulations of the earth’s climate, and divides the simulations into those which include anthropogenic forcings (human influences, on the pink line) compared with those which don’t (on the blue line). Up until about 1960-ish the two groups of models have about the same accuracy, but after that point you can see that only the simulations which include human effects on climate change are able to match the observed changes (the black line).
I think it’s likely that there’s a lot of politics in play from both sides of the debate, even in producing a report such as this. However, working with some of the scientists involved in the field of climate science (including one of the lead authors of this summary) all I’ve seen is a bunch of smart people working to understand the scientific facts of how our climate works. Like all scientists, the only thing required to get them to change their minds is hard evidence. Given that, I’m confident that there’s no global conspiracy supporting climate change theories which fly in the face of scientific evidence.
Or at least, if there were such a conspiracy, the people behind the “swindle” documentary would be the perpetrators rather than the victims.
Technorati Tags: climate change, global warming, swindle, climate simulation, IPCC, TPAC
