Claude Allegre
Part of the A Rundown of the Skeptics & Deniers series
From Logical Science



        Claude Allegre is one of the most decorated French geophysicists.  He is a member of both the French and the United States National Academy of Sciences.  As a longtime friend of prime minister Lionel Jospin, Claude was able to secure a position as Minister of Education and Research in the former Socialist government of France and continues to play an active role within the Socialist party.   In the fall of 2006 Allegre wrote a four paragraph editorial on climate change in the French newspaper L'Express. (English translation here)  These four short paragraphs sent shock waves throughout the political world.  The world class scientist and influential politician Claude Allegre flip flopped from a 'climate change doomsayer' to a climate change critic.  His words were trumpeted in the National Post, Fox News, the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, on CNN's Larry King Live by Senator Inhofe, and many many other places.  Instantly Allegre had become a knight in shining armor for the fossil fuel industry and global warming critic crowd.  Taken at face value this seems like a powerful blow against the strong worldwide consensus on climate change.  However, if you analyze Allegre's very brief editorial and subsequent comments a little more closely you will realize that he managed to:
  1. Screw up the name of a scientific journal*
  2. Claimed the glacier melt over the last few decades was due to the movement of multi-million year old mountains.  An argument that Georg Hoffman calls an "obvious error" due to dramatically different time scales.
  3. Misrepresent the state of the science to such an extent that the French scientific community wrote an open letter in protest
  4. Misrepresent scientific literature to the point that even the authors of the very papers Allegre cited were crying foul.
  5. Claim climate models predict warming on the South Pole when in fact they do not.
  6. Leave clues about a possible political motive
Only Four Short Paragraphs and a Scandal

        So why all of the misrepresentations?  With such polished credentials one would think Claude Allegre would be a wealth of accurate information.  However, Claude Allegre has never published a single peer review paper directly related to climate change or global warming.  Basically, the only material he has printed with regard to climate change is a four paragraph opinion piece on climate change in the French newspaper L'Express. (English translation here)   In the past Claude Allegre used global warming to defend the nuclear industry from the anti-nuclear movement.  Despite strong statements about the need to fight global warming twenty years ago he's managed to perform a complete flip flop and is calling the global scientific community con-artists for holding a position he once had.  He's called them "prophets of doom" and even gone as far as saying "helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business".  So why all the strong emotions and personal attacks on people that he used to agree with?  Now that increasing carbon taxes are a real possibility, some feel that his flip flop on global warming is an attempt to protect the fossil fuel industry just like he protected the nuclear industry in the past.  But that is conjecture and the only thing we can analyze for sure is the science.  Now off to focus on Claude's four short paragraphs...

The 100 Year Old Mountain Range and a Melting Kilimanjaro

Kilimanjaro Glacier Feb 17,1993 Kilimanjaro Glacier Feb 21, 2000

Fig 2.1 Source: NASA Fig 2.2 Source: NASA

        Kilimanjaro (pictured above) is Africa's tallest mountain.  Fig 2.1 is a picture of Kilimanjaro taken in 1993.  It clearly shows that Kilimanjaro once had ample covering of snow and glaciers.  Fig 2.2 was taken only 7 years later and it shows a drastic decrease in snow and glacier covering.  Because of this drastic visual change Kilimanjaro has often been used as a poster child of climate change.  In L'Express. (English translation here) Claude Allegre mistakenly references a "la revue Nature" study (which was in fact published in Science) to describe the natural desertification of Africa.*  He then proclaimed that this natural desertification of Africa was what was melting Kilimanjaro.  For those that don't know, desertification is the transformation of arable or habitable land to desert.  This is typically driven by a change in climate or destructive land use.
        While the natural desertification of Africa is a very real phenomenon the driving forces of this desertification have not had any significant changes in the last 100 years.  We know this because the paper Allegre cites talks about how African mountain ranges change the direction the wind blows.  The mountain ranges in Africa are not 100 years old.  The mountain ranges in question started forming about 40 million years ago with the major uplifting of the mountains occurring 2-5 million years ago.  40 million years is a time scale that's 5.7 million times larger than the drastic melting of Kilimanjaro pictured above.  Clearly there is a major disconnect between these two time scales.
        Below is a topographic map of Africa (Fig 3.1) which shows a ridge of mountains along the eastern coast.  The Google map image/link on the right (Fig 3.2) shows the location of Kilimanjaro in relation to two important mountain ranges.

Topographic Map of Africa Google Map of Key Mountains
Fig 3.1 Source: NASA Fig 3.2 Source: NASA

        As winds blow across the ocean they will pick up moisture.  When these winds travel across land they will often deposit this moisture as either rain or snow.  The scientific paper Allegre cites is a computer simulation describing how these moisture rich ocean wind currents are changed by the east African mountain ranges.  The result of the computer model suggest that the Ethiopian mountain range (shown in blue in Fig 3.2) deflect monsoon winds southward during the winter (Fig 4A).  The important mountains have been highlighted in fluorescent green and the deflected winds are highlighted with a yellow arrow.  This deflection deprives central Africa of a lot of water.  In the summer the Kenyan mountain range deflects moisture rich ocean winds northward (Fig 4B).  The computer model also predicts that once the mountains are removed the moisture rich ocean air will penetrate much further into Africa.  If these mountains were removed then Africa would likely turn into a lush forest.
How Mountains Change Wind Currents
Winter Winds Deflected by the Ethiopian Mountains Summer Winds Deflected by the Kenyan Mountains
The fluorescent green dots were added to the original diagram.  They highlight the important mountains that are deflecting the seasonal winds.  The yellow arrow was also added.  Red coloring means westerly winds and blue means easterly winds.
Fig 4.  Source: Science, Sepulchre, et. al 2006

        Clearly these mountain ranges did not pop up over the last 100 years let alone the last 7 years that Kilimanjaro has shown drastic melting.  You can decide whether or not a man as accomplished as Claude Allegre made an honest mistake or is taking advantage of those that are not familiar with the subject matter.
        As a side note Kilimanjaro is not a very good poster child of global warming.  A paper published in Geophysical Research Letters concludes that "glaciers on Kilimanjaro are merely remnants of a past climate rather than sensitive indicators of 20th century climate change".  In an American Scientist article two climatologists claimed there is "strong evidence" of a link connecting the temperature of the Indian Ocean's surface and snowfall that can "feed or starve the ice on Kilimanjaro."  Dr Mote, a co-author of that article, says that natural explanations for Kilimanjaro does "not preclude a human influence on other glaciers, nor indeed on the Indian ocean mode itself."  
        Climate change is more complex than just rising temperatures and melting glaciers.  Global warming can not only melt glaciers directly with hot air but it can literally evaporate the glaciers with very dry air.  A glacier without fresh snow can lose it's ice even if it's at freezing temperatures due to something called sublimation.  Sublimation is when ice jumps directly from solid to vapor.  It skips the water phase completely.  This occurs when the air is very dry.  It's almost as if the very dry air is acting like a thirsty sponge soaking up the water from the ice. This process is what is responsible for "freezer burn".  While man driven climate change may not be melting Kilimanjaro in the traditional sense we may be affecting the surface temperature and mode of the Indian Ocean which is currently starving the glacier of moist air.  Ironically Allegre missed a much more plausible scapegoat.  Instead of blaming supernaturally fast moving mountains he should have looked toward the ocean.  But Kilimanjaro is just one glacier and what happens to any single glacier is mostly irrelevant.  What is more important is what all of the glaciers are doing.  When measuring the health of the planet it's important not to cherry pick any single mountain, river, or glacier.  If you look at Fig 5.2 you will see that glaciers are retreating worldwide.  For more information on glaciers realclimate.org has numerous posts on worldwide glacier retreat.  For the raw unfiltered data the Swiss and the World Glacier Monitoring Service are excellent resources.

Penitentes on Kilimanjaro Global Glacier Mass Balance (Volume Change)
Warm air melts and smooths a glacier much like how an ice cube melts.  The above picture was taken on Kilimanjaro.  These finger like projections are a sure sign that the glacier is melting by sublimation or "freezer burn" driven by dry air. Fig 5.1 Image source: Mote 2007 Fig 5.2 Source: National Snow and Ice Data Center




Bad Antarctica Stats, Misrepresenting Models, Misunderstanding Polar Amplification, and the Wrong Paper

In the first paragraph Claude says:
and we have immediately heard the same old story about global warming and read in Science magazine an important paper co-authored by several distinguished glaciologists which showed that glacier mass balance in Antarctica has not changed during the past thirty years[1]. There is a general consensus among specialists on one point: if widespread global warming occurs, it will be experienced more intensely near the poles than at the equator. Yet, these authors explain that we can observe a massive retreat of glacial ice in some places on the Antarctic continent while there is also a thickening of ice sheets in other places.
Yes it is true that global warming is expected to occur more intensely at the poles.  This phenomenon is called polar amplification.  However, for the next hundred years or so the models predict polar amplification to occur mostly on the North Pole and not on the South Pole.  And if you look at the pictures below this is exactly what we get.  The figure on the left (Fig 6.1) shows the global temperature anomaly.  The parts in yellow to red are heating up.  The darkest red symbolizes the greatest warming.  These parts are mostly at the North Pole and not at the South Pole.

Polar Amplification Satellite Picture of the Globe
Fig 6.1 Source: NASA Fig 6.2 Source: NASA

        If you feel up to it you can check the facts yourself.  The Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) has a public database of all of the climate models.  With a little homework you won't have to guess whether Claude is correct about the models or not.  The concept of polar amplification is a bit technical but realclimate.org has a nice write-up on it.  The South Pole doesn't heat up because of something called the circumpolar currents.  The ocean is very large and takes a long time to heat up.  The circumpolar currents act like a buffer that prevents warm water from the tropics from transporting heat to the South Pole.  This buffer does not exist in the north which is why the north heats up more.  And if you look at this PDF you will see that the peninsula which sticks out shows warming. The rest of Antarctica is relatively stable.   Another mechanism predicted by the models is a slight increase in snowfall which can offset a slight increase in temperature.  Claude references a paper discussing a somewhat stable Antarctic snowfall (Monaghan et al, 2006, discussed here) as somehow contradicting the models when in reality it does not.  Well, not any climate model in this public database.  And that database contains all of the major climate models.  Ironically if the models are wrong it's not because they predicted melting but it's because they didn't predict enough.  A pair of satellites called GRACE are specifically designed to measure the ice sheets mass.  These satellites are showing "significant ice mass loss" according to NASA.  However, NASA's Gavin Schmidt cautions that it's too early to tell if this is a short term or long term trend.

Circumpolar Current
Source: BYRD POLAR RESEARCH CENTER 


A Cause Unknown

        Paragraphs 3 and 4 were of little scientific content.  The only science related statement he made was:  "The cause of this climate change is unknown. Is it man? Is it nature?"  Well the sun and cosmic rays have been ruled out.  In 1988 James Hansen presented his climate model in front of congress.  That model successfully predicted temperatures trends and half a dozen other climactic events 20 years into the future.  Hansen's models are based off of the hypothesis that man made CO2 is changing the climate.  Since his models that are based off of this hypothesis have correctly made about half a dozen predictions then that gives that much more credibility to the strong worldwide consensus that man made CO2 is warming the warmth.



The Political Connection and a Flip Flop

Twenty years ago Allègre wrote in “Clés pour la géologie", (éd. Belin/France Culture):
"By burning fossil fuels man enhanced the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century”.
But at that time he used this argument to defend nuclear power companies from the anti-nuclear movement.  Now he's flip flopped his stance on global warming and defending coal companies from carbon regulations.  

Second Thoughts in the National Post

    Lawrence Solomon wrote a paper in the National Post called "Allegre's second thoughts".  The only extra information contained in this article is the following paragraph:
The world would be better off, Dr. Allegre believes, if these "denouncers" became less political and more practical, by proposing practical solutions to head off the dangers they see, such as developing technologies to sequester C02. His dream, he says, is to see "ecology become the engine of economic development and not an artificial obstacle that creates fear."
    Again, this is a very pro-energy political position which is consistent with his protection of nuclear energy in the past.  The Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley was also very pro-energy.  But while Allegre rejected the scientific consensus Richard Smalley used climate change as one argument of nearly a dozen to support the call for the development of cheap and clean energy for everyone on this planet.  Smalley's solution for the energy problem was an Apollo style energy program that could be funded with a simple 5 cent gasoline tax.  Perhaps Allegre and Smalley are using vastly different means to reach the somewhat similar end.  Given Allegre's deep involvement in politics this is certainly a real possibility.  After all, reporting to the Prime Minister of France is the French equivalent of reporting to the President of the United States.  Surely he made some friends while in office.



End Notes:
*The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works fixed Allegre's mistake in their translation but the mistake still exists in L'Express.  Go to the second paragraph and translate the sentence "La disparition progressive des neiges du Kilimandjaro est souvent attribuée à des phénomènes locaux, et au premier chef à la désertification de l'Afrique de l'Est. Récemment, dans la revue Nature" with babelfish.  The actual paper in question was published in Science and not Nature.

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