Climate Commentaries from Thailand

Posted on by John ShadeIn Uncategorized2 Minutes Read

I would like to draw our readers’ attention to a commentator and analyst of climate data, one who does not seem to be as widely known as he deserves to be.  He is Cha-am Jamal. His given name is Jamal, and I think he is a retired academic living in Thailand. His various posts are detailed, thoughtful, and well-worth searching from time to time in case he has one on a topic that has caught your attention – you may, if like me, be sure to learn from it.

As a taster, here is a post (with my italics) from what I take to be an earlier blog of his (,http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/ ), one no longer in use, in which he commented on items published in the Bangkok Post:

Reference: Green economy could save the planet, Bangkok Post, March 31, 2010

I have good news and bad news for those who believe that the earth is “overheated, under-resourced, and out of time”and that “reducing greenhouse gases” will “save the planet” (Green economy could save the planet, Bangkok Post, March 31, 2010). The bad news is that if the planet were in danger there is nothing we could do about it because humankind does not possess the ways and means to save it. “Reducing greenhouse gases” would not do it. The good news is that the planet is not overheated, under-resourced, or out of time and it does not need saving.

Here is an extract (my italics) from a recent post on his current blog which neatly summarises the descent of climate science from Guy Callendar to Greta Thunberg via James Hansen and the U.N.:

‘This is the path that would eventually lead to the transformation of climate science into fear based activism and its gradual escalation until it became necessary to recruit school children as protesters and of the incarnation of Greta Thunberg as their messiah. It is thus that what began with Callendar as relief from the horrors of the Little Ice Age and described as an effect of fossil fuel combustion of the industrial economy as a scientific curiosity without activism and without a call for reduction in emissions to prevent warming, became escalated into fear based activism after the dramatic claims of extreme weather and sea level rise of the Hansen testimony [LINK], derived mostly not from realities of the current interglacial but from what had happened naturally 120,000 years ago in the prior interglacial [LINK] , and yet claimed to be too extreme to be natural and that therefore they were the creation of human activity in terms of fossil fuel emissions of the industrial economy.’

https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/05/13/greta2/

That’s a mighty long sentence, but packed with good stuff – as I hope you will agree!

PS

Some more links re Jamal (Emeritus Professor Cha-am Jamal Munshi):

https://sonoma.academia.edu/JamalMunshi

https://antigreen.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-charm-of-chaamjamal-chaamjamal.html

https://motls.blogspot.com/2018/06/history-of-global-warming-scare-1980.html?m=1

So, I got his name wrong.  My apologies.  Last link provides a detailed history of the ‘global warming scare’

27 Comments

  1. Yes. It is thus, the descent of climate science from Guy Callendar via the UN path, whereas carbon is said to be the main actor in a fear-based drama, CO2, basis of life on Planet Earth, only 0.039 percent of our atmosphere but vital for plant growth, oxygen and us, has now gone rogue (?) or maybe demonized, likely the latter, for raisons d’etat. Also read Professor Richard Lindzen’s paper regarding politicks behind the climate-change science in which he traces conscious efforts to politicize Climate Science, the most impressive exploitation for political purposes being ‘creation of the International Panel on Climate Change by two United Nations bodies, the United Nations Environmental Panel and the World Meteorological Organization.‘ https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0809/0809.3762.pdf … Whereas Christiana Figueres adds another dimension, to the above; ‘it’s about creating a United Nations-managed New World Order.’ You bet.

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  3. Thank you for finding this.
    It is nice to find out that well educated rational people around the world are speaking out clearly and accurately.

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  4. We followed each other on Twitter for a couple of years. Very interesting person. However, I think he is a she! The antigreen blogspot author seems to think so too.

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  5. He pops up on various blogs, linking back to relevant posts of his own. Always worth reading and occasionally with a few “nuggets” that other bloggers, for whatever reason, have missed. On a 1-5 star rating I’d give him 4+ every time!

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  6. There is sometimes a picture of a young woman on the posts at Tambonthongchai (e.g.https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/02/24/popsci/ ) , and that supports the case for ‘she’.

    For the other side, the name Jamal is a male given name, and the ‘profile’ page here supports the case for ‘he’: https://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/ .

    Could we have two people, father and daughter perhaps, with a shared interest in climate? I wish I could have cleared this up before posting. Can others help us here?

    Liked by 1 person

  10. I have followed Professor Munshi for a while now and signed onto Academia and get notifications of anything new. I like his paper on circular reasoning, which destroys climate modelling as a basis for climate knowledge.

    “…given the flow uncertainties in the IPCC carbon cycle balance (Figure 7), it is not possible to determine the impact of fossil fuel emissions, particularly with respect to its effect on atmospheric CO2 (Munshi, 2017).

    The flow accounting presented in Figure 7 is the creation of circular reasoning. Further evidence against the IPCC flow account for the carbon cycle is presented in a correlation analysis that does not support the conclusion that changes in atmospheric CO2 are driven by emissions (Munshi, 2017). We conclude that the uncertain system of large natural flows is not sensitive to fossil fuel emissions and that the effect of such emissions on the carbon cycle assessed by climate science is a product of circular reasoning”

    By co-incidence, I happened to come across in my files, this paper from Segelstad:
    “Carbon cycle modelling and the residence time of natural and anthropogenic atmospheric CO2: on the construction of the “Greenhouse Effect Global Warming” dogma.”

    Tom V. Segalstad, Mineralogical-Geological Museum, University of Oslo

    He gives a lot of weight to Callendar: “Callendar (1938) revived the hypothesis of “Greenhouse Warming” due to Man’s activity, proposed by Arrhenius (1896). Callendar may truly be regarded as the father of the current dogma on man-induced global warming.”

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  12. I think Thongchai probably wrote the history of the climate scare John links to above. I liked this right at the end:

    “The Greta phenomenon in climate science is not a validation of its claimed scientific credentials but a validation of the absence of a scientific basis for activism against fossil fuel emissions.”

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  14. I check the web site often (https://tambonthongchai.com/) for new articles. I find them clear and easily
    understood even though I am not qualified check the math. The format with pertinent points denoted and explained and conclusions is very helpful. I have for some time been pointing to his work on the responsiveness of atmospheric CO2 to fossil fuel emissions (https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/12/19/co2responsiveness/) which supports Salby and Harde and was sited by Berry at (https://edberry.com/blog/climate-physics/agw-hypothesis/contradictions-to-ipccs-climate-change-theory/). The fact that atmospheric CO2 is hardly affected by our emissions negates all the policy hysteria to reduce emissions because no policy can change something we arn’t changing. This alone would have precluded the outcome on the endangerment finding.

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  15. Thank you Paul for getting this cleared up. I feel a bit of a clod-hopper for posting before I knew who was who. On the bright side, good to learn that a good few others are already familiar with the work of Chaam Jamal (Munshi) and Thongchai , and I hope the two of them are not much offended by my blundering. And thank you Jaime for bringing the question up.

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  16. David,
    With all due respect, there is probably one thing about this topic that is virtually certain, and that is that the rise atmospheric CO2 since the mid-1800s is almost entirely due to our emission of CO2 into the atmosphere. The arguments of Salby, Harde, and Berry are all nonsense. A group of us even published a response to Harde’s paper, and the editors of the journal also wrote a response.

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  17. Harde’s conclusion that less than 15% of the increase in CO2 concentration since the 19th century could be attributed to anthropogenic emissions was deemed unacceptable by gatekeepers of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) viewpoint. A critical reply to the paper was consequently published, but it included assumptive errors and misrepresentations of the original points. Harde’s exhaustive reply to the criticism has been refused publication, which has effectively silenced scientific debate on this salient topic.

    The rebuttal to ATTP and friends is here: https://notrickszone.com/2018/08/27/agw-gatekeepers-censor-the-co2-climate-debate-by-refusing-to-publish-authors-response-to-criticism/

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  18. Ron,
    The problem is that Harde’s paper was embarassing bad. It confused the residence of a molecule (years), with the adjustment time of enhancement of atmospheric CO2 (centuries). It also completely ignored fairly basic carbonate chemistry which indicates that there is a limit – set by what is called the Revelle factor – to how much can be taken up by the oceans.

    The basic point, though, is that this is a trivial issue. There are so many lines of evidence indicating that the rise in atmospheric CO2 since the mid-1800s is due to our emissions, that it is essentially something that isn’t worth disputing. There are many aspects of climate science worth discussing. This – in my view – isn’t one of them.

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  19. Paul, thanks for pointing out that excellent response to Climate Change – the Facts. The screenshots plus unhinged commentary was an option I didn’t consider (in doing Climate Change – the Missing Facts) and it works very well.

    As an aside, I’m prepared to accept what ATTP says about our emissions being responsible for the increase in atmospheric CO2 since around 1850. Not that I’d stake my life on it – but for my part, there are much bigger holes in the alarmist story elsewhere. (And it’s interesting that ATTP never turns up to say ‘you make some fair points’ to a post like mine a month ago. I take some comfort from that.)

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  20. It does seem plausible that our emissions of CO2 could account for a large part of the increase in ambient levels. It certainly seems plausible to me.

    But questions remain, not least as Munshi has checked, the lack of strong evidence linking emission variation to CO2 variation at various lags from 1 to 5 years. (https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/12/19/co2responsiveness/ ).
    A large part of this problem is that the anthropogenic input each year is quite a small part of the estimated total, and that there are large uncertainties in this total. Munshi (loc.cit.) notes ‘It is shown in a related post, that in the context of large uncertainties in natural flows, it is not possible to detect the presence of fossil fuel emissions without the help of circular reasoning.’

    Lindzen (2015 testimony to Minnesota Public Utilities Commission) gives an example of this difficulty in plainer language: ‘For example, although data from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory shows that CO2 emission rates of increase roughly tripled between 1995 and 2002, the rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations remained essentially unchanged during that time. It appears that we are currently unable to relate atmospheric CO2 levels to emissions and even less to relate CO2 levels to temperature and still less to regional changes.’

    Now neither of these reports refutes the possibility of an appreciable contribution from our emissions, they merely show that it is not possible, so far at least, to demonstrate this from the data on emissions and ambient CO2 levels. One consequence will be that it will be hard to detect the impact of plausible reductions in emissions on ambient CO2 levels. Policymakers interested in a rational approach to policymaking ought to be aware of this. It also highlights our relatively weak knowledge of the carbon cycle – this recent post by Jo Nova illustrates this: http://joannenova.com.au/2019/06/new-finding-phytoplankton-are-much-bigger-players-in-co2-levels-than-realized/

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  21. Right on John. There are only two things in the carbon cycle that are measured with reasonable certainty: CO2 in the atmosphere and global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. (I could go into the complexities and uncertainties regarding calculating from FF inventory changes and assumptions about various combustion methods, but set that accounting problem aside for the moment).

    The alarmist view is that one of the two things we measure must be causing the other one. Meanwhile, the error ranges in estimates of the unmeasured natural CO2 sinks/sources (oceans, soils, biosphere, etc.) are several times the total emissions from FF.

    And isn’t it strange that even as FF emissions have risen, nature always seems to absorb half of the them, implying that the absorption rates must also be increasing. Just saying.

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  22. I do recommend those interested in this debate over the relationship of our emissions to atmospheric content read the article linked in Ron C’s post and watch Salby’s response to Kohler et al at (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4508&v=rohF6K2avtY).
    The efforts to hide the work of Salby, Harde, and Berry speak volumes about the political pressure to protect the consensus position.

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  23. Ron
    We were typing at the same time.
    “And isn’t it strange that even as FF emissions have risen, nature always seems to absorb half of the them, implying that the absorption rates must also be increasing. Just saying.”
    More than that, something knows how much of the emissions to absorb so that the part that is left in the atmosphere just makes the atmospheric content rise at a constant rate even though the emissions rate varies a lot. More than strange to my way of thinking. Once again watch the Salby presentation I referenced to see this explained clearly.

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  24. thank you all for your interest in our work – mostly that of my husband chaamjamal. I do most of the blogging now but my posts at tambonthongchai.com are derived mostly from his work.

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  27. Something that can be counted on is that if ATTP is pushing one side of an argument, it is probably best to take the other side if one is seeking the truth of an issue.

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