by Judith Curry
From an article in the New Scientist by Fred Pearce, written in Sept 2009:
One of the world’s top climate modellers said Thursday we could be about to enter one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.
“I am not one of the sceptics,” insisted Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany. “However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it.”
Some additional excerpts from the article:
Latif predicted that in the next few years a natural cooling trend would dominate over warming caused by humans. The cooling would be down to cyclical changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the North Atlantic, a feature known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).
Breaking with climate-change orthodoxy, he said NAO cycles were probably responsible for some of the strong global warming seen in the past three decades. “But how much? The jury is still out,” he told the conference. The NAO is now moving into a colder phase.
Latif said NAO cycles also explained the recent recovery of the Sahel region of Africa from the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. James Murphy, head of climate prediction at the Met Office, agreed and linked the NAO to Indian monsoons, Atlantic hurricanes and sea ice in the Arctic. “The oceans are key to decadal natural variability,” he said.
Another favourite climate nostrum was upturned when Pope warned that the dramatic Arctic ice loss in recent summers was partly a product of natural cycles rather than global warming.
This statement by Latif was widely discussed in the blogosphere. Thingsbreak has a good article describing the controversy.
A comment on one of the recent threads reminded me of this article, and I was struck by several things.
First, Latif is correct IMO in his statements about natural climate variability. These are words that are not often enough heard in venues such as the UN Climate conference. Kudos to Latif.
Second, the UN Climate Conference was in Sept 2009, about two months before the Climategate emails. It is interesting to speculate whether Latif would have made these same statements say in Jan 2010. In Jan 2010, what Latif really ‘thinks’ is explained to us by Joe Romm in this article, since Latif’s statements were given new life post Climategate.
The main point of this post, however, is to explore the following statement:
“I am not one of the sceptics,” insisted Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany. “However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it.”
IMO this statement is enormously telling in terms of the debate surrounding climate science:
- Asking questions is at the heart of the scientific method, and science has been characterized as ‘organized scepticism.’
- The questions are referred to as ‘nasty’, since presumably they are inconvenient for the audience (the UN).
- Not wanting to be identified as a ‘sceptic,’ in spite of the fact that the perspective that he presents is consistent with with what many sceptics say.
- There is a ‘we’ versus ‘other people’ , in terms of who is acceptable in terms of asking questions. If this doesn’t define climate tribalism, I don’t know what does.
On issues of climate projection for the next few decades and late 20th century attribution, I suspect that there is little that Latif and I would disagree on. The big difference is that Latif has maintained his status in the climate community that identifies itself with UN programmes (e.g. IPCC, WCRP) by insisting that he is not a sceptic. Whereas people are increasingly labeling me as a ‘denier’ because I engage with sceptical individuals from outside the UN climate community.
Tempterrain sums it up perfectly in this comment on the PBS Ombudsman thread:
| Judith,I’m not saying that you actually are a scientific denier, in fact I’d say you obviously aren’t if you scientific publications are a true guide, but rather that you “come across” or givethe impression , as you admit happened on the PBS show, that you are siding with them. |
Hmmmm. . . . I can’t resist making a comment about tribalism here. The tribalism is alive and well amongst the enviros, as per the reaction to the PBS show. The issue was not so much with Watts said, but the fact that someone from the other ‘side’ was allowed any air time at all. Joshua is always complaining that I don’t talk about tribalism on the sceptic side. The defining characteristic of tribalism is to keep people out. The sceptics are trying to get ‘in’ in terms of getting their ideas accepted by the main stream and their papers published in refereed journals.
Latif’s comments were made prior to Climategate. I think that Climategate was a watershed event for climate science in the sense that the UN tribe of climate scientists started to realize that ‘other people’ were important in the public debate about climate change. And that some of the questions being asked were important questions. Some climate scientists are starting to engage with ‘other people’ in the blogosphere. And some institutions, notably the UK Met Office, have been actively engaging with the ‘other people.’
So just when I thought some progress was being made here, we see the outrage of Watt’s airtime on PBS. I suspect that the bigger significance of Watts statements on PBS is that people will start to realize that sceptics are asking legitimate questions about climate science and their methods.
And Latif is correct in that there is no getting around those nasty questions, no matter who asks them.