Royal Society in Free Fall

The Royal Society has by a group of Fellows been forced to issue a new guide to the science of climate change:

• The guide summarises the current scientific evidence on climate change and its drivers, highlighting the areas where the science is well established, where there is still some debate, and where substantial uncertainties remain.
  

So what do we then find in the new guide? Is it different from the old guide? We read:

• There is strong evidence that the warming of the Earth over the last half-century has been caused largely by human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use, including agriculture and deforestation.
• The size of future temperature increases and other aspects of climate change, especially at the regional scale, are still subject to uncertainty.
• Nevertheless, the risks associated with some of these changes are substantial.

What is then the strong evidence? Yes, of course the greenhouse effect:

• The surface is thus kept warmer than it otherwise would be because, in addition to the energy it receives from the Sun, it also receives infrared energy emitted by the atmosphere. The warming that results from this infrared energy is known as the greenhouse effect.

So there we have it! Take a close look at this amazing statement produced by the combined brains of RS:

• The surface receives IR energy emitted by the atmosphere!

The cold atmosphere thus heats the warm surface, by IR energy! Once this is understood the strong evidence is completed by making CO2 equal to clouds and water vapor:

• in addition to clouds, the two gases making the largest contribution to the greenhouse effect are water vapour followed by carbon dioxide (CO2).
  

This is a stunning collapse of science:

• incorrect description of the effect of clouds and water vapor
• incorrect attribution to CO2 of the same effect as clouds and water vapor.

Neverthless, armed with this amazing power of thinking RS concludes:

• There is strong evidence that changes in greenhouse gas concentrations due to human activity are the dominant cause of the global warming that has taken place over the last half century.
• However, the potential impacts of climate change are sufficiently serious that important decisions will need to be made.
• Climate science – including the substantial body of knowledge that is already well established, and the results of future research – is the essential basis for future climate projections and planning, and must be a vital component of public reasoning in this complex and challenging area.
  

What decisions? Why not a big heap of money to (well established) climate science?

The message of the new guide is the same as in the old guide, just a little more of convincing comforting uncertainty. What was wrong with the old?

PS Note the clever use of the term well established science. This is not science which has been shown to be correct, but populistic science selling "truths" which serve a certain political agenda. There are many contradictory well established truths in different political circles,

which are not truths at all, and in science the truth cannot be contradictory. DS