Ian Berry IT Blog

I come from a different background than most, growing up on a dairy farm and managing the business for the last 15 years, being very aware of each years weather patterns; drought, normal years, high rainfall years, seasonal weather patterns (and seemly unseasonal weather patterns / cycles) with water, fodder and grain shortages & surpluses – all significantly impact the business bottom line. We have migrated to a seasonal calving pattern (calving mid-July to end October) and Ive managed through seasons where our season ends in November – it simply stops raining and we have 9 months of dry low rainfall weather to seasons like this year (19/20) where its rained all the way to March (and hopefully onwards). I’ve seen no Autumn breaks, where it doesn’t rain from January to June, and great Autumn breaks (like this year, 19/20) where it doesn’t stop raining.  Ive seen a lot of different weather patterns, floods and bushfires (including putting out spot-fires on our property during Black Saturday of 2009) and everything in between and you pay close attention when your livelihood depends on it.

This is a genuine post to understand and document my knowledge of the anthropogenic climate change issue, a debate which seems to have two polarising extremes often ending in tense emotional exchanges. I’m on a learning journey and have been a critical thinker & skeptic for most of my life, not always accepting things at face value, this post attempts to explain my current views on the anthropogenic climate change debate which appears to be much more than science, often religious & ideological in nature with extremist & alarmists on both sides (climate deniers, climate alarmists etc), with very little middle ground, acceptance of alternative views or inclination to holistically explore all sides of the climate debate; could both sides of the debate have valid views and points?

I suggest there is wide acceptance amongst scientists and commentators that human activity has had an impact on the Earths climate, that carbon levels have been increasing (in part due to human emissions) and recently worldwide temperature has been rising. I believe the questions boils down to how much impact is anthropogenic climate change having, are we in a crisis / emergency situation, should we wait and see, or should we accept human activity has minimal impact within Earths natural climate cycles?

If we look at the climate change as an equation it would balance out like:

• anthropogenic climate change + natural climate variability = total climate change

If either side of the equation is incorrect or unbalanced,  we misattribute the causes of climate change and potentially make very large, costly and socially impacting policy changes or under act and let a climate catastrophe unfold. If we took some time to step away from the issue, we probably all agree humans are destroying our planet and I think we should focus on absolute sustainability, measured on an individual, community and national level (i.e. sustainability index). We’re causing significant harm to the planet through some of the below human activities:

• Deforestation, expanding farming and human habitats; reducing natural habitat
• Consuming and depleting non-renewable resources such as oil, gas, coal, minerals & metals
• Over harvesting renewable resources such as game, fishing, forests, fresh water, oxygen, soil & impacting biodiversity etc.
• Polluting our environment with plastics and rubbish, including our oceans, land and atmosphere impacting life
• Many of Earths species are going extinct (some naturally through evolution, some unnaturally through human activity)

Thoughts on Climate Change:

• Earths climate has been changing since creation and will continue to do so; the only certainty is change. There seems to be a consistent climate cycle over thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of years.
• A 100 years of human measured data is likely not enough to make any confident assertions. Recent temperature increases (i.e. 15-20 years period) probably shouldn’t be used to project future temperature; this is dangerous and could be considered a symptom of the “recency effect”.
• The science behind man made (anthropogenic) climate change and its impacts don’t appear to be settled, there is little empirical evidence (i.e. hypothesis and proof at statistical significance, repeatable, with extraneous & confounding variables controlled, run in an open complex system (i.e impossible)) or longitudinal research that I’m currently aware of  to suggest it will have significant impact on the Earths climate.
• The claim that 97% of scientists agree that humans are the main cause of global warming has been historically analysed and debunked by Dr John Robson who described in this video:
  • There are no disputes from scientists that:
    • Nearly all scientists agree carbon is a green house gas and has some warming effect
    • The Earth has been slightly warming since the 1800’s
    • Humans have changed the environment of our planet, including releasing carbon, changing the landscape, polluting etc
  • Limited survey data on scientists views, including whether we are facing a climate emergency, severe issues with survey designs and misattribution / incorrect expansion of responses. He found 97% consensus was amongst 2% of climate expert respondents to this survey.
  • Australian researcher John Cook who examined 12,000 scientific papers related to climate change found 97% of studies found green houses gases were partly responsible for global warming, however 66% of the studies expressed no views on the consensus, and extraordinarily only 0.3% of studies suggested most of the warming was attributed to human activity.
  • Economist Richard Tol later identified that two thirds of the 12K papers which endorsed weak man-made consensus actually said nothing at all about anthropogenic climate change.
• Earths climate is incredible complex, even the IPCC admits their inability to accurately predict future climate and limitations with climate models (see IPCC IPCC AR3 Report Annex section on climate prediction and climate projection) – “Climate projections are distinguished from climate
  predictions in order to emphasize that climate projections” …. …. …. “, and are therefore subject to substantial uncertainty.”
• The IPCC climate models are based on hundreds of parameters and haven’t been shown to be anywhere near accurate; misleading at best, completely wrong at worst. Most predictions to date have been wrong, see Climate Model reviews since 1975, peer review of 17 climate models here and a Dr Roy Spencer review of CMIP5 models to observations of atmospheric warming (noting even small model errors, when projected over a long future period can be significantly misleading).
• Have climate models included all variables (like solar activity, solar forcing, clouds creating an umbrella effect etc) as identified in this recent study?
• Most of the carbon experiments and impacts on temperature have been conducted as closed-systems experiments and then extrapolated to predict the impact to Earths climate (a complex open system with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of variables)
• Abrupt climate change has occurred in Earths past as documented here.
• Earths climate has changed significantly from ice ages to warm periods (mini ice age & medieval warm periods) and continues to do so in long cycles – see geologic temperate record.
• Carbon levels in our atmosphere have been much higher in the past (see here) and are beneficial for life on earth and agriculture:- more carbon === more life.
• 31,486+ American scientists, including engineers in relevant disciplines, signed the Global Warming Petition requesting more evidence and proof of anthropogenic climate change and said impacts to the Earths climate:
  • Did 30,000+ thousand scientists sign a global warming faux petition?
  •  http://www.petitionproject.org/
• Climate hysteria has been a norm within our human existence from the very beginning, through crop failures, famines, fires, floods, diseases, cyclones, tsunamis, earthquakes etc and always blamed something; the gods, religion, enemies, luck/misfortune, numerology, astrology superstition, scientists, greenies etc, there have been hundreds of newspaper articles (over the last hundred+ years, see this article for 41 recent claims) suggesting our climate was doomed, our ice caps would melt, we’re about to enter an ice age and everything in between.
• We’ve always had fires, floods, droughts and plagues in Australia, a cycle of life on this continent.

Questions To Climate Opponents & Proponents:

• What evidence do you have to support anthropogenic climate change which has been completed in an open system / environment and therefore could be used to genuinely predict carbon based climate change?
• How do you explain the natural / variable changes in Earths climate history through ice-core samples, sediment analysis, tree rings, geologic measures etc?
• What part do you think solar activity, the sun and sunspots cycles, solar winds, electromagnetic fields/waves, cosmic rays, ultraviolet and x-ray radiation &  polar shifts play in Earths climate activity?
• What about the Sun’s grand solar minimum and sun spot cycles – what impact do they play on Earths climate?
• Is our climate weather changing outside outside a normal distribution / extremes?
• Are our droughts / fires getting worse outside a normal distribution / extremes?
• With regards to climate models; what happens when you use a model or formula which contains a small error (even if only 0.1-0.3%), and then forecast out 10, 20, 50 years based on this model/formula?
  How does the compounding error effect of the model/formula error impact the result?
• Are we facing a climate catastrophe, causing irreversible damage, partly having an impact on climate, or are human carbon emissions negligible in the grand scheme?
• Who benefits from the anthropogenic climate change agenda?
• Who is funding both sides of the debate (coal / mining / oil, conservatives, Murdoch on one side, and climate change research funding, Greens, Soros on other etc), why are we not able to reach a middle ground or consensus?

What We Should Do As a Society:

• Reduce materialism, recycle, re-use, review impact on environment on each new purchase (make visible on each label / fact sheet)
• Remove food and temporary ‘convenience’ plastics and create a plastic-tax on these items
• Produce all food locally, consume only whats in season. Minimise transportation of food across continents (ie limit global trade for items which can be produced or sourced locally).
• Protect our natural habitats and non-human species
• Create a massive world wide movement (led by World Governments) to clean up our pollution to date including economic incentives to do so
• Create an individual, community and national level sustainability index to measure our impact on Earth. Make this each countries economic target (rather than GDP)
• Ensure all citizens of the earth have basic access to clean water, basic housing, electricity, communications & internet
• Ensure we support free market principles for business and universal socialised services such as healthcare, education, policing, firefighting, ambulance, dentists, environmental protection & prosperity etc.
• Measure all resources sustainability levels to ensure a balanced and thriving Earth.

My current belief is we simply don’t understand or can predict climate change with accuracy and there is a lot of speculation treated as facts; ideological and religious. Most climate models and parameters are at best misleading, at worst completely wrong, however we probably agree humans are slowly destroying the planet and we should focus on sustainability (rather than climate religion). Should we humans try to control all things?
We simply can’t and shouldn’t be expected too, some things will be outside human influence and we should accept and deal with them the best we can to minimise impact. I hope as a species we can work together (from all sides, including the extremes) to agree on a plan to leave Earth in a better place than when we arrived.

Can we work together?

Do both sides have solid views and both be correct?

Does the debate have to be so extreme?

What can we do as a group to be sustainable?

I love to learn and continue to evolve my views, id be very happy to critically explore any points you have to raise, please leave your comments below!