Poles Apart – wrong process, right conclusion?

A new climate change assessment book, Poles Apart by Gareth Morgan and John McCrystal, was launched at Parliament on Tuesday. The audience contained representatives of both sides of this debate. The main speaker was Dr Nick Smith, Minister for Climate Change Issues.

This is a somewhat unusual contribution to discussion on this issue. It is not, itself, produced by climate scientists. Nor does it come from well reconginsed sceptics of climate change – although the authors admit to seeing the IPCC reports as “alarmist.”

Morgan, a well known New Zealand financial advisor, and his co-authoir set out to find their own answers. He paid around $500,000 to hire two teams of scientists – the climate change “Alarmists” and “Sceptics”, to put their arguments to him as he sought to make sense of the debate surrounding global warming and its causes.

Apprehension

The climate change science case was presented Dr Dave Lowe, Dr Lionel Carter, Dr Andy Reisinger and Dr Peter Barrett – all from the Antarctic Research Centre at Victoria University Given the declared “agnostic” attitudes of Morgan and McCrystal, the climate scientists were “apprehensive abnd knew there was a risk in taking part in this project.” However, the project was clearly going ahead and the authoirs had been briefed by  climate change “sceptics.” As Peter Barrett says:

“We knew that your average Kiwi bloke reads Gareth Morgan and trusts his opinion,. We figured that if we could convince him of the robustness of modern climate change science he would send a powerful message to New Zealanders in this book.”

And:

“Quite a few mainstream scientists aren’t happy about the book and the way the authors rip into the IPCC process, and Dave has had a few harsh comments for his participation in the book research process.  Basically some of our scientific colleagues didn’t think that an economist could make sense of a complex subject like the science of climate change.  We disagree. Not perfect sense, of course, but sufficient sense to come to his own conclusions that are in the end not very different from those of climate scientists.”

I’m hoping to get a review copy of this book so will be able to pass on my own judgement soon.

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See also:
Poles Apart website: for information on the book and the epxert reports used
Dr Reisinger: Wrong process, right conclusion in Morgan book
Gareth Morgan’s “alarmists”: Poles Apart was worth the effort

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