Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported for the entire 20th century by the United Nations (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows in fact that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

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9 May, 2008

Antarctica still pesky for the modellers

The modellers have only now tweaked their models so that they agree with the Antarrctic facts but they still have NO confidence that the tweaked models have any predictive power. Note that the prophecies of disaster all depend on getting Antarctica right. It contains 91% of the planet's glacial ice so unless that melts, sea level rise will be minor by Al Gore standards. A joint press release from the American Geophysical Union and the National Center for Atmospheric Research follows: Refer Peter Weiss [pweiss@agu.org].

Computer analyses of global climate have consistently overstated warming in Antarctica, concludes a new study. The findings can help scientists improve computer models and determine if the southernmost continent will warm significantly this century, a major research question because of Antarctica's potential impact on global sea-level rise.

"We can now compare computer simulations with observations of actual climate trends in Antarctica," says Andrew Monaghan of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., lead author of the study. "This is showing us that, over the past century, most of Antarctica has not undergone the fairly dramatic warming that has affected the rest of the globe. The challenges of studying climate in this remote environment make it difficult to say what the future holds for Antarctica's climate."

The study marks the first time that scientists have been able to compare the past 50 to 100 years of Antarctic climate with simulations run on computer models. The models are a primary method for researchers to project future climate. Scientists have used atmospheric observations to confirm that computer models are accurately simulating climate for the other six continents.

Antarctica's climate is of worldwide interest, in part because of the enormous water locked up in its ice sheets. If those vast ice sheets were to begin to melt, sea level could rise across the globe and inundate low-lying coastal areas. Yet, whereas climate models accurately simulate the last century of warming for the rest of the world, they have unique challenges simulating Antarctic climate because of limited information about the continent's harsh weather patterns.

Monaghan and his colleagues at NCAR and Ohio State University, in Columbus, published their findings last month in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). The authors compared recently constructed temperature data sets from Antarctica, based on data from ice cores and ground weather stations, to twentieth century simulations from computer models used by scientists to simulate global climate. While the observed Antarctic temperatures rose by about [a minuscule] 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.4 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past century, the climate models simulated increases in Antarctic temperatures during the same period of 0.75 degrees C (1.4 degrees F). The error appeared to be caused by models overestimating the amount of water vapor in the Antarctic atmosphere, the new study concludes.

The models, however, have correctly captured trends in Antarctic snowfall, including increases in snowfall in the late twentieth century, prior to a decrease over the last decade.

Part of the reason that Antarctica has barely warmed has to do with the ozone hole over the continent. The lack of ozone is chilling the middle and upper atmosphere, altering wind patterns in a way that keeps comparatively warm air from reaching the surface. Unlike the rest of the continent, the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by several degrees, in part because the winds there are drawing in warmer air from the north.

The study delivered a mixed verdict on Antarctica's potential impact on sea-level rise. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which operates under the auspices of the United Nations, has estimated that sea-level rise could amount to 18 to 59 centimeters (7 to 23 inches) this century, in part because of melting glaciers worldwide. The new findings suggest that other effects of warming in Antarctica over the next century could reduce that by about 5 centimeter (2 inches) if the continent warms by 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F) as computer models have indicated. The reason is that the warmer air over Antarctica would hold more moisture and generate more snowfall, thereby locking up additional water in the continent's ice sheets.

But the authors caution that model projections of future Antarctic climate may be unreliable. "The research clearly shows that you can actually slow down sea-level rise when you increase temperatures over Antarctica because snowfall increases, but warmer temperatures also have the potential to speed up sea-level rise due to enhanced melting along the edges of Antarctica," says Monaghan, who did some of his research at Ohio State University before going to NCAR. "Over the next century, whether the ice sheet grows from increased snowfall or shrinks due to more melt will depend on how much temperatures increase in Antarctica, and potentially on erosion at the ice sheet edge by the warmer ocean and rising sea level."

"The current generation of climate models has improved over previous generations, but still leaves Antarctic surface temperature projections for the twenty-first century with a high degree of uncertainty," adds co-author and NCAR scientist David Schneider. "On a positive note, this study points out that water vapor appears to be the key cause of the problematic Antarctic temperature trends in the models, which will guide scientists as they work to improve the climate simulations."




"Skeptic" magazine finally prints something skeptical

Though obviously through gritted teeth. The author below, Dr. Patrick Frank, is a chemist with more than 50 peer-reviewed articles. Excerpts only below. See the original for graphics and references. Details of the magazine's usual frantic Warmism here

"He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." - John McCarthy

"The latest scientific data confirm that the earth's climate is rapidly changing. . The cause? A thickening layer of carbon dioxide pollution, mostly from power plants and automobiles, that traps heat in the atmosphere. .

[A]verage U.S. temperatures could rise another 3 to 9 degrees by the end of the century .

Sea levels will rise, [and h]eat waves will be more frequent and more intense. Droughts and wildfires will occur more often. Disease-carrying mosquitoes will expand their range. And species will be pushed to extinction."

So says the National Resources Defense Council, with agreement by the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, National Geographic, the US National Academy of Sciences, and the US Congressional House leadership. Concurrent views are widespread, as a visit to the internet or any good bookstore will verify.

Since at least the 1995 Second Assessment Report, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been making increasingly assured statements that human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2) is influencing the climate, and is the chief cause of the global warming trend in evidence since about 1900. The current level of atmospheric CO2 is about 390 parts per million by volume (ppmv), or 0.039% by volume of the atmosphere, and in 1900 was about 295 ppmv.

If the 20th century trend continues unabated, by about 2050 atmospheric CO2 will have doubled to about 600 ppmv. This is the basis for the usual "doubled CO2" scenario. Doubled CO2 is a bench-mark for climate scientists in evaluating greenhouse warming. Earth receives about 342 watts per square meter (W/m2) of incoming solar energy, and all of this energy eventually finds its way back out into space. However, CO2 and other greenhouse gasses, most notably water vapor, absorb some of the outgoing energy and warm the atmosphere. This is the greenhouse effect. Without it Earth's average surface temperature would be a frigid -19øC (-2.2 F). With it, the surface warms to about +14øC (57 F) overall, making Earth habitable. With more CO2, more outgoing radiant energy is absorbed, changing the thermal dynamics of the atmosphere. All the extra greenhouse gasses that have entered the atmosphere since 1900, including CO2, equate to an extra 2.7 W/m2 of energy absorption by the atmosphere. This is the worrisome greenhouse effect.

On February 2, 2007, the IPCC released the Working Group I (WGI) "Summary for Policymakers" (SPM) report on Earth climate, which is an executive summary of the science supporting the predictions quoted above. The full "Fourth Assessment Report" (4AR) came out in sections during 2007.....

No matter what, global temperatures are predicted to increase significantly during the 21st century. A little cloud of despair impinges with the realization that there is no way at all that atmospheric CO2 will be stabilized at its present level. The Year 2000 scenario is there only for contrast. The science is in order here, and we can look forward to a 21st century of human-made climate warming, with all its attendant dangers. Are you feeling guilty yet?

But maybe things aren't so cut-and-dried. In 2001, a paper published in the journal Climate Research candidly discussed uncertainties in the physics that informs the GCMs. This paper was very controversial and incited a debate. But for all that was controverted, the basic physical uncertainties were not disputed. It turns out that uncertainties in the energetic responses of Earth climate systems are more than 10 times larger than the entire energetic effect of increased CO2. If the uncertainty is larger than the effect, the effect itself becomes moot. If the effect itself is debatable, then what is the IPCC talking about? And from where comes the certainty of a large CO2 impact on climate?

With that in mind, look again at the IPCC Legend for Figure SPM-5. It reports that the "[s]hading denotes the plus/minus one standard deviation range of individual model annual averages." The lines on the Figure represent averages of the annual GCM projected temperatures. The Legend is saying that 68% of the time (one standard deviation), the projections of the models will fall within the shaded regions. It's not saying that the shaded regions display the physical reliability of the projections. The shaded regions aren't telling us anything about the physical uncertainty of temperature predictions. They're telling us about the numerical instability of climate models. The message of the Legend is that climate models won't produce exactly the same trend twice. They're just guaranteed to get within the shadings 68% of the time.

This point is so important that it bears a simple illustration to make it very clear. Suppose I had a computer model of common arithmetic that said 2+2=5ñ0.1. Every time I ran the model, there was a 68% chance that the result of 2+2 would be within 0.1 unit of 5. My shaded region would be ñ0.1 unit wide. If 40 research groups had 40 slightly different computer models of arithmetic that gave similar results, we could all congratulate ourselves on a consensus. Suppose that after much work, we improved our models so that they gave 2+2=5ñ0.01. We could then claim our models were 10 times better than before. But they'd all be exactly as wrong as before, too, because exact arithmetic proves that 2+2=4.

This example illustrates the critical difference between precision and accuracy. In Figure 1, the shaded regions are about the calculational imprecision of the computer models. They are not about the physical accuracy of the projections. They don't tell us anything about physical accuracy. But physical accuracy - reliability - is always what we're looking for in a prediction about future real-world events. It's on this point - the physical accuracy of General Circulation Models - that the rest of this article will dwell....

Since the satellite era especially, specific aspects of climate such as cloudiness or surface temperature have been monitored across the entire globe. GCM climate models can be tested by retrodiction - by making them reproduce the known past climate of Earth instead of the future climate. Physical error in GCMs can be quantified by comparing the retrodicted past with the real past.

Figure 3 shows the December-January-February cloudiness observed by satellite on Earth, averaged over the years 1983-1990. It also shows global average cloudiness as retrodicted over the similar 1979-1988 period by 10 revised GCMs. The GCMs had been used in one attempt to reproduce the observed cloudiness, and were then revised and re-tested. This study was published in 1999, but the fidelity between GCM retrodictions and observed cloudiness has hardly improved in the past nine years. Looking at Figure 3, the GCMs do a pretty good job getting the general W-shape of Earth cloudiness, but there are significant misses by all the models at all latitudes including the tropics where clouds can have a large impact on climate.

So, how wrong are the GCMs? One approach to determining error is to integrate the total cloudiness retrodicted by each model and compare that to the total cloudiness actually observed (SI Section 3). Calculating error this way is a little simplistic because positive error in one latitude can be cancelled by negative error in another. This exercise produced a standard average cloudiness error of ~10.1%, which is about half the officially assessed GCM cloud error.24 So let's call ~10.1% the minimal GCM cloud error. The average energy impact of clouds on Earth climate is worth about -27.6 W/m2. 27 That means ~10.1% error produces a ~2.8 W/m2 uncertainty in GCM climate projections. This uncertainty equals about ~100 % of the current excess forcing produced by all the human-generated greenhouse gasses presently in the atmosphere. Taking it into account will reflect a true, but incomplete, estimate of the physical reliability of a GCM temperature trend.

Figure 4 shows the A2 SRES projection as it might have looked had the IPCC opted to show the minimal ~10.1 % cloud error as a measure of the physical accuracy of their GCM-scenarioed 21st century temperature trend. The result is a little embarrassing. The physical uncertainty accumulates rapidly and is so large at 100 years that accommodating it has almost flattened the steep SRES A2 projection of Figure 1. The ~4.4øC uncertainty at year 4 already exceeds the entire 3.7øC temperature increase at 100 years. By 50 years, the uncertainty in projected temperature is ~55ø. At 100 years, the accumulated physical cloud uncertainty in temperature is ~111 degrees. Recall that this huge uncertainty stems from a minimal estimate of GCM physical cloud error.

In terms of the actual behavior of Earth climate, this uncertainty does not mean the GCMs are predicting that the climate may possibly be 100 degrees warmer or cooler by 2100. It means that the limits of resolution of the GCMs - their pixel size - is huge compared to what they are trying to project. In each new projection year of a century-scale calculation, the growing uncertainty in the climate impact of clouds alone makes the view of a GCM become progressively fuzzier.

It's as though a stronger and stronger distorting lens was placed in front of your eyes every time you turned around. First the flowers disappear, then the people, then the cars, the houses, and finally the large skyscrapers. Everything fuzzes out leaving indistinct blobs, and even large-scale motions can't be resolved. Claiming GCMs yield a reliable picture of future climate is like insisting that an indefinable blurry blob is really a house with a cat in the window....

The rapid growth of uncertainty means that GCMs cannot discern an ice age from a hothouse from 5 years away, much less 100 years away. So far as GCMs are concerned, Earth may be a winter wonderland by 2100 or a tropical paradise. No one knows.

Direct tests of climate models tell the same tale. In 2002, Matthew Collins of the UK Hadley Centre used the HadCM3 GCM to generate an artificial climate, and then tested how the HadCM3 fared predicting the very same climate it had generated. It fared poorly, even though it was the perfect model. The problem was that tiny uncertainties in the inputs - the starting conditions - rapidly expanded and quickly drove the GCM into incoherence. Even with a perfect model, Collins reported that, "[I]t appears that annual mean global mean temperatures are potentially predictable 1 year in advance and that longer time averages are also marginally predictable 5 and 10 years in advance." So with a perfect climate model and near-perfect inputs one might someday "potentially [predict]" and "marginally [predict]," but can not yet actually predict 1 year ahead. But with imperfect models, the IPCC predicts 100 years ahead.

Likewise, in a 2006 test of reliability, William Merryfield used 15 GCMs to predict future El Nino-Southern Oscillations (ENSO) in a greenhouse-warmed climate,29 and found that, "Under CO2 doubling, 8 of the 15 models exhibit ENSO amplitude changes that significantly (p<0.1) exceed centennial time scale variability within the respective control runs. However, in five of these models the amplitude decreases whereas in three it increases; hence there is no consensus as to the sign of change." So of 15 GCMs, seven predicted no significant change, 5 predicted a weaker ENSO, and 3 predicted a stronger ENSO. This result is exactly equivalent to `don't know.' The 15 GCMs tested by Merryfield were the same ones used by the IPCC to produce its Fourth Assessment Report.

In light of all this, why is the IPCC so certain that human-produced CO2 is responsible for recent warming? How can the US National Academy of Sciences say, in a recent brochure, that, " . Earth's warming in recent decades has been caused primarily by human activities that have increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere"? This brochure offers a very telling Figure 4 (SI Section 5), showing the inputs to 20th century global temperature from a GCM projection. Only when the effects of human greenhouse gasses are included with normal temperature variation, we are told, does the GCM projected temperature trend match the observed temperature trend.

But their Figure 4 has another trait that is almost ubiquitous in GCM temperature projections. It shows no physical uncertainty limits. We are given a projected temperature trend that is implicitly represented as perfectly accurate. NAS Figure 4 would be more truthful if the National Academy presented it complete with ~100 degree uncertainty limits. Then it would be obvious that the correspondence between the observations and the projection was no more than accidental. Or else that the GCM was artificially adjusted to make it fit. It would also be obvious that it is meaningless to claim an explanatory fit is impossible without added CO2, when in fact an explanatory fit is impossible, period.

It is well-known among climatologists that large swaths of the physics in GCMs are not well understood. Where the uncertainty is significant GCMs have "parameters," which are best judgments for how certain climate processes work. General Circulation Models have dozens of parameters and possibly a million variables, and all of them have some sort of error or uncertainty.

A proper assessment of their physical reliability would include propagating all the parameter uncertainties through the GCMs, and then reporting the total uncertainty. I have looked in vain for such a study. No one seems to ever have directly assessed the total physical reliability of a GCM by propagating the parameter uncertainties through it. In the usual physical sciences, an analysis like this is required practice. But not in GCM science, apparently, and so the same people who express alarm about future warming disregard their own profound ignorance.

So the bottom line is this: When it comes to future climate, no one knows what they're talking about. No one. Not the IPCC nor its scientists, not the US National Academy of Sciences, not the NRDC or National Geographic, not the US Congressional House leadership, not me, not you, and certainly not Mr. Albert Gore. Earth's climate is warming and no one knows exactly why. But there is no falsifiable scientific basis whatever to assert this warming is caused by human-produced greenhouse gasses because current physical theory is too grossly inadequate to establish any cause at all.

So, then, what about melting ice-sheets, rising sea levels, the extinction of polar bears, and more extreme weather events? What if unusually intense hurricane seasons really do cause widespread disaster? It is critical to keep a firm grip on reason and rationality, most especially when social invitations to frenzy are so pervasive. General Circulation Models are so terribly unreliable that there is no objectively falsifiable reason to suppose any of the current warming trend is due to human-produced CO2, or that this CO2 will detectably warm the climate at all. Therefore, even if extreme events do develop because of a warming climate, there is no scientifically valid reason to attribute the cause to human-produced CO2. In the chaos of Earth's climate, there may be no discernible cause for warming. Many excellent scientists have explained all this in powerful works written to defuse the CO2 panic, but the choir sings seductively and few righteous believers seem willing to entertain disproofs.

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OBAMA SUPPORTS UNILATERAL EMISSION CAPS, THREATENS POOR COUNTRIES WITH TRADE SANCTIONS

As executive director of the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan group of 20 energy experts created in 2002, Jason Grumet has come in for some flack from environmentalists. NCEP's influential 2004 energy report called for several measures anathema to greens, including a "safety valve" that would set an upper limit on the price of carbon and CO2 permit giveaways to coal utilities and other big polluters.

But Grumet's experience finessing the contentious differences between opposing camps in the energy world clearly attracted Mr. Unity himself, Barack Obama. Grumet has been advising the Obama campaign on climate and energy matters, and representing it in public venues. Suffice to say, what he's peddling now is considerably stronger than NCEP's effort. I spoke with Grumet by phone in late April. [...]

Q: McCain policy adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin said that McCain is unlikely to put in place mandatory caps on carbon in the U.S. before China and India do. Will Obama?

A: First of all, that's a dramatic policy shift from what I understood John McCain's voice on this issue to be for the last decade, which is rather discouraging.

To be unequivocally clear, Sen. Obama believes that the United States must and will act to put a mandatory limit on our domestic greenhouse-gas emissions. That is a predicate for us leading the world to enact a truly equitable and global program in which China and India and Brazil and all the major emitting countries also put legal limits on their emissions. The story of this country has not been waiting to be led by others to address global challenges.

Q: What would Obama say to the common objection that caps here, without caps there, would disadvantage our economy and send jobs and manufacturing overseas?

A: Sen. Obama recognizes that it is a profoundly unacceptable outcome if our program simply results in exporting jobs and importing carbon. It is our view that a well-designed program that provides a reasonable trajectory for technology to advance while we achieve the reductions necessary, and provides real incentives so we are reinventing and modernizing our economy along the way, is going to be economically sustainable and ultimately productive here at home.

Up until now, the developed world has been trying to lead largely absent the U.S. Our commitment is to rejoin the league of nations and work together, recognizing that China, India, and others may be a step behind us, but the global economy and global environment cannot tolerate them being more than one step behind us. So we've tried to put forward carrots and sticks to encourage those nations to see the benefit of advancing their own decarbonization through technology-sharing and other incentives.

Q: The carrot is technology-sharing. What's the stick? A carbon tariff?

A: Ultimately, the solution to global climate change is going to be mediated through the lens of global trade. Sen. Obama has been supportive of mechanisms that have the U.S. take a first step, and if after a period of years other nations are not acting in what is deemed to be a commensurate responsible manner, look to our trade laws to try to ensure that there's no inequity or competitive disadvantage imposed on U.S. businesses. The idea that was initiated by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, in which importers of energy-intensive products would be required to purchase permits for the carbon embedded in those products -- the details need to be fleshed out, but that seems to be a reasonable approach to level the playing field, if we get there.

But Sen. Obama also has faith in the intellect of others. While he believes the United States has a vital role to play in leading this discussion, he does not believe we are going to have to bludgeon other countries into appreciating their own self-interest. Climate change is a real problem. The Chinese and the Brazilians and the Mexican government and others recognize that the exacerbating cycles of flood and drought will be devastating for countries trying to support billions of people on smaller amounts of arable land, who don't have the same kind of water-handling and -treatment systems.

More here




CALIFORNIA'S POTEMKIN ENVIRONMENTALISM

A celebrated green economy produces pollution elsewhere, ongoing power shortages, and business-crippling costs

In January 2007, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stood before the California legislature in Sacramento and delivered his fourth State of the State address since his improbable 2003 election. It was a rhetorical tour de force that would win him widespread acclaim. "California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta," said Schwarzenegger. "Not only can we lead California into the future; we can show the nation and the world how to get there."

Schwarzenegger especially celebrated California for its leadership on energy and the environment. Just three months earlier, he had signed the Global Warming Solutions Act, committing California to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels-roughly 25 percent below today's-by 2020, and all but eliminating them by 2050. The Governator then lambasted the Bush administration for failing to tackle global warming: "It would not act, so California did. California has taken the leadership in moving the entire country beyond debate and denial to action." Such performances have helped establish Schwarzenegger as a national figure, even a statesman, on the environment. In April 2007, he posed for the cover of Newsweek, spinning a globe on his finger under the banner leadership & the environment, and in September, he even addressed the United Nations on climate change.

Schwarzenegger's reputation as an environmental trailblazer is in keeping with California's recent history and self-perception. California's political leaders, business titans, academics, and environmental activists proudly point to the fact that the state has infused its public policy over the last four decades with an environmental consciousness unmatched in the United States, while also maintaining a dynamic economy, arguably the eighth-largest on the planet, with a gross state product of more than $1.6 trillion. The widely shared assumption is that forward-looking Athenian wisdom has nourished awesome Spartan power.

In truth, however, the Golden State's energy leadership is a mirage. California's environmental policies have made it heavily dependent on other states for power; generated some of the highest, business-crippling energy costs in the country; and left it vulnerable to periodic electricity shortages. Its economic growth has occurred not because of, but despite, those policies, which would be disastrous if extended to the rest of the country.

More here




The climate change deniers

When heralded Canadian environmentalist Lawrence Solomon first set out two years ago - on a bet, no less - to find credible dissenters to the well-entrenched climate change dogma, he thought he might perhaps unearth enough material for a few National Post columns. Instead, like Alice passing through the looking glass, Mr. Solomon entered a world wherein it soon became clear the much-ballyhooed idea of a "scientific consensus" was as nonsensical as "Jabberwocky."

"I had picked several of the most essential and/or most widely publicized 'building blocks' of the case for catastrophic global warming," Mr. Solomon writes. "In each case, not only was I able to find a truly eminent, world-renowned leader in the field who disputed the point in question, but in each case the denier had more authority, sometimes far more authority, than those who put forward the building block in the first place."

The debate over anthropogenic - that is, human induced - climate change, is, in other words, just a bit more complicated than Al Gore suggested on "Oprah." Few books have captured this cognitive dissonance as well as "The Deniers," Mr. Solomon's essential, engrossing travelogue through the world of climate-change dissent.

In "The Deniers"' deniers are not the usual suspects paraded out by a media eager for Scopes Monkey Trial II: Flat Earthers' Revenge. They aren't blustery, ill-informed television pundits or slash-and-burn polemicists.

Rather, Mr. Solomon introduces us to legendary scientists with impeccable resumes and prestigious appointments at major universities and mainstream research institutes; thoughtful, serious professionals who, at their own professional peril, looked at one or another of the shibboleths of global warming alarmism - from the debunked "hockey stick" graphic and misread ice core samples to the amateurish or incorrect computer models and fear-mongering - and bravely refused to join the herd, profitable as that may be these days.

Likewise, Mr. Solomon's own position as founder and executive director of the well-regarded international environmental group Energy Probe makes it considerably more difficult for opponents to shellac him as a right-wing reactionary moonlighting as an oil company stooge - though, of course, no slander has been proven entirely off limits for demagogues who believe they are the Jack Bauers incarnate in a special environmental doomsday season of 24. ("There's no time for debate, Chloe, we've got to regulate now!") Witness "60 Minutes" reporter Scott Pelly's answer when queried as to why his reports featured no global warming skeptics: "If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?"

So who, exactly, has convened the conspiracy of silence Mr. Solomon is now attempting to shatter with "The Deniers?" Well, it's ... complicated. As the author would learn, many highly-qualified scientists who question even some small aspect of the global warming orthodoxy "don't want to be found at all and try very hard not to appear as dissenters. They have no wish to be called names in the press, or to lose their jobs, or to have their funding cut off as many deniers have."

Beyond the disturbing issue of self-censorship, however, stand those for whom the sexy business of saving the world is much too gratifying to bother with any credible contrarianism. Who wants to just live on an ever-changing planet when one could be a mini-Zeus lording over all the elements? Thus, even a balanced scientific report can end up resembling a lost quatrain from the Book of Revelation in the hands of regulation-happy politicians and reporters with small paychecks and large hero complexes.

Never mind that, as Mr. Solomon demonstrates to great effect in the closing pages of "The Deniers," the practical effect of popular climate change regulation schemes will likely be old-growth forests in Third World countries felled to make way for profitable "carbon intensive plantations." ("Every time we buy carbon offsets to salve our consciences at flying in a jet," Mr. Solomon writes, "we are helping to dispossess someone, somewhere, by boosting the carbon credit value of their land.") Forget that bio-fuel fads are pricing the world's poor out of sustenance. Ignore the myriad other environmental problems that could be addressed with the resources eaten up to solve a problem that very well may not exist.

"The Deniers" is a timely, necessary antidote to a political and scientific discussion poisoned by hubristic groupthink and the kind of scorched earth (mis)behavior that inevitably arises when a movement becomes so uncritically wedded to the commandments of a pseudo-religion its adherents would rather destroy their adversaries than risk debating them.

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Wishful Thinking on Cellulosic Ethanol

Supporters of ethanol, stung by the backlash over its unintended but foreseeable consequences (see, e.g., here and here), namely, increasing hunger due to a run-up in global food prices and increased threats to biodiversity, now tell us that cellulosic ethanol will come to the rescue. The theory is that cellulosic ethanol, which is still in the research and development phase, would be produced from non-edible plant material, e.g., switchgrasses, crop residue and other biomass that is not currently grown or used as edible crops. Thus, it is implied, it would have no effect on food prices.

But this is wishful thinking. If cellulosic ethanol is indeed proven to be viable (with or without subsidies), what do people think farmers will do? Farmers will do what they've always done: they'll produce the necessary biomass that would be converted to ethanol more efficiently. In fact, they'll start cultivating the cellulose as a crop (or crops). They have had 10,000 years of practice perfecting their techniques. They'll use their usual bag of tricks to enhance the yields of the biomass in question: they'll divert land and water to grow these brand new crops. They'll fertilize with nitrogen and use pesticides.

The Monsantos of the world - or their competitors, the start-ups - will develop new and genetically modified but improved seeds that will increase the farmer's productivity and profits. And if cellulosic ethanol proves to be as profitable as its backers hope, farmers will divert even more land and water to producing the cellulose instead of food. All this means we'll be more or less back to where we were. Food will once again be competing with fuel. And land and water will be diverted from the rest of nature to meet the human demand for fuel.

Does this mean that biomass - and farmers - should play no role in helping us meet our energy needs? Not necessarily. If farmers can profitably grow fuel rather than food through their own efforts, so be it. But we shouldn't favor growing one over the other either through subsidies or indirectly through government mandates for so-called renewable fuels. And if anything should be subsidized or mandated, it shouldn't be growing fuels. That would inevitably compete with food.

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8 May, 2008

Global Warming and Cooling - The Reality

Stephen Wilde has been a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society since 1968. The first two articles from Mr Wilde were received with a great deal of interest throughout the CO2 Sceptic community. In Stephen Wilde's third and exclusive article below, he explores the mechanics and mechanisms involved in the Earth's warming and cooling. Needless to say, CO2 variations are unimportant

It's all very well doing what alarmists do which is to say that CO2 is rising and temperatures are rising so in the absence of any other known cause it must be man made CO2 that is warming the planet. That approach ignores both the differing scale of the possible influencing factors and the clear historical relationship between cooler climates and periods of a less active sun. The presence of the sun must be a much bigger influence on global temperatures than the greenhouse characteristics of CO2 on it's own.

At most the greenhouse effect can only be marginal though some have tried to talk it up by asserting that the planet would be very much colder without a greenhouse effect, which is correct, but avoids the issue of the rather small proportion of the overall greenhouse effect provided by CO2 and the even smaller proportion provided by man. It also begs the question as to whether the oceans are slowly releasing CO2 as a result of natural warming. If the oceans warm for any reason they will release CO2 into the atmosphere because water holds less CO2 at higher temperatures.

The greenhouse effect, as a whole, may smooth out rises and falls in temperature from other causes but is not itself the determining factor for global temperature. If the heat from the sun declines the global temperature will fall with or without any greenhouse effect and if the heat from the sun increases the global temperature will, of course, rise. The greenhouse effect does not create new heat. All it does is increase the residence time of heat in the atmosphere.

In the ice core record, CO2 increase has always lagged behind temperature rises and the lag involved is estimated to be 400 to 800 years. There has never been a period when a CO2 rise has preceded global warming. I have seen it argued that the past 30 years has been so exceptional that it MUST, for the first time in the history of the globe, be CO2 driving the warming trend. That is an assertion of such low probability that it should require very powerful evidence to support it. I have seen no such evidence. Indeed, on a cursory inspection the slow but steady increase in atmospheric CO2 is clearly not coming through in a slow but steady rise in global temperatures. Instead we see rises and falls in global temperatures that bear no obvious relationship to the steady rise in CO2 unless one puts the cart before the horse and announces that there is no other possible reason and the trend period adopted is carefully chosen to suit the proposition.

All it needs to cast doubt on the CO2 theory is an alternative possibility to explain a rising global temperature trend over the past 500 years and there is one. Everyone will have heard of the Little Ice Age and the global temperature would appear to have been recovering from it ever since. On a balance of probability is that not the more likely explanation of an overall warming trend ever since? Why introduce manmade CO2 at all except for politically motivated reasons? By all means exclude a recovery from the Little Ice Age as the reason if one can but the burden of proof is heavy and probably impossible to discharge with current knowledge. There was also a Mediaeval Warm Period (MWP) that preceded it. It has been asserted by some that the MWP was not as warm as the planet is now but there is evidence to the contrary such as Viking settlements in Greenland at the time. It has also been asserted that the MWP was not worldwide but some recent indications have been found in South America that it was warm there at about the same time. In any event it is unlikely that such a warm period affecting Greenland and Western Europe would not be worldwide. The heavy burden of proof is on those who would seek to deny it.

Be that as it may, there is a probability rather than a possibility that the warming trend since the lowest point of the Little Ice Age is continuing to this day and is the real cause of recent observed warming with only a minimal contribution, if any, from man made CO2 emissions.

Then there is the matter of scale. The greenhouse effect is mainly a phenomenon of the land surface and the atmosphere because more of the incoming heat is absorbed by water as compared to land and a lower proportion is reflected to participate in the greenhouse effect. However the surface of Earth is 70 % water. Water has a hugely greater heat carrying capacity than the land or the atmosphere above it. Land loses most of the heat it receives during the day via overnight radiation and the atmosphere loses heat rapidly via convection, rainfall and radiation to space despite the greenhouse effect. The true heat store that we need to consider, dwarfing by far any atmospheric greenhouse effect is all that water. I describe the implications of that below.

It seems so complex but the global heat balance only comes down to three parameters that swamp all others.

Heat from the sun.

The fact that 70% of the planet is water covered.

Heat, radiating out to a very cold Space.

Extra heat is constantly being generated within the Earth by convection and movement caused by external gravitational forces from the sun and other planets but that only seems to disrupt the basic scenario intermittently.

The heat from the sun varies over a number of interlinked and overlapping cycles but the main one is the cycle of 11 years or so. That solar cycle can last from about 9.5 years to about 13.6 years and appears to be linked to the gravitational effects of the planets of the solar system combining to affect the sun's magnetic field which seems then to influence the amount of heat generated and incidentally affects the number of sunspots. For present purposes I will concentrate on the past 1000 years during which the 11year cycle has been the main factor linked to observed temperature changes. For pre thermometer numbers we have to rely on less reliable indicators of past temperature.

It is clear that temperatures have varied so much over the past 1000 years that there have been substantial effects on human societies so disruption caused by weather and climate is by no means unusual. Many civilisations have fallen as a result of entirely natural changes in climate. Interestingly, they often blamed themselves for offending the Gods, nature or the planet (that sounds familiar!).

It is necessary to note that those disruptive changes have occurred quite quickly. A decade or two is quite enough to see changes that result in considerable hardship.

Because 70% of the planet is covered by water most heat from the sun is accepted by water. The seas take a long time to warm up or cool in comparison to land. Heat reaching the land by day is soon radiated back out to Space at night. Water has a much greater lag both in warming and cooling which also means that as a store of total heat the oceans are hugely effective. The strongest sunlight reaching the Earth is around the Equator that is primarily oceanic. The equatorial sun puts heat into the system year in year out whereas loss of heat is primarily via the poles with each alternating as the main heat loser depending on time of year.

The Earth therefore accumulates or loses heat to and from, primarily, the oceans. The land and the atmosphere are largely an irrelevance. That heat then has to find it's way out into Space over time. Before it can be radiated out into Space heat has to pass through the atmosphere.

The planet cannot maintain and does not maintain a constant temperature. It is not even possible to identify a specific current temperature for the whole planet and for present purposes there is no need to do so.

All I need to assert at this point is that whatever the Earth's temperature is at any given moment it will always be in the process of warming or cooling and, of course, the rate of that warming or cooling is highly variable.

Because the Earth is always either warming or cooling the point of balance could well be very fine so to attribute `blame' to any particular factor we have to ascertain the scale and degree of sensitivity of each factor we wish to consider.

The point I need to make here is that on the basis of historical evidence from weather and solar cycle records the largest single factor influencing global temperature, whatever it might be at any time, is variations in the input of heat from the sun.

It is clear from the historical record that warmer weather accompanies short solar cycles and cooler weather accompanies longer solar cycles. Although I refer to weather the fact is that weather over time constitutes climate so for present purposes they are the same. During the recent warming the cycle lengths were less than 10 years so that meant we were getting more heat from the sun whatever the alarmists say about Total Solar Irradiance (a flawed and incomplete concept).

So far, the current solar cycle (number 23) is into the 12th year in length and may go to the full 13.6 years for known astronomical reasons. The very fact that it is longer than the previous two cycles suggests we are getting less solar energy already and, surprise, surprise, it is now being accepted by alarmists that warming has stalled and the planet may be cooling for the next 10 years at least. All they can do now is bleat that the underlying man made warming signal is still there but they cannot prove that to be the case nor can they demonstrate the scale of it in relation to natural causes.

As far as I can see nobody seems to be able to say why the observed changes in weather that accompany changes in solar activity actually happen. They seem to be disproportionate to the changes in heat coming from the sun. This is where I feel the need to make a suggestion.

The ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) Cycle has been heavily investigated for many years but seems to be looked at as a freestanding phenomenon that just redistributes heat around the globe, sometimes warming and sometimes cooling.

I think that is wrong. I believe that ENSO switches from warming to cooling mode depending on whether the sun is having a net warming or net cooling effect on the Earth. Thus the sun directly drives the ENSO cycle and the ENSO cycle directly drives global temperature changes. Indeed, the effect appears to be much more rapid than anyone has previously believed with a measurable response occurring within a few years of a change in solar energy input. Indeed I see some evidence for the proposition that for various reasons cooling occurs faster than warming but I will save that for another time.

It was no coincidence that during the years from 1975 to 2000 we had a strong emphasis on El Nino with warming-also known as a period of positive Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), and now, with an emphasis on La Nina we have cooling or at least a stall in the warming (a period of negative PDO).

As regards the Pacific Decadal Oscillation that is simply a periodical change in the predominance either of El Nino (positive mode) or of La Nina (negative mode). El Nino events can occur in a positive PDO mode and vice versa.

I believe that both ENSO and PDO are manifestations of the same process and are directly driven by shifts in the balance of heat output from the sun as it switches to or from net warming and to or from net cooling effects on the Earth.

It was no coincidence that the change from one ENSO mode to the other was approximately contemporaneous with the extension of solar cycle 23 to a period longer than the preceding two solar cycles and at about the same time the PDO switched from positive to negative.

Although there are similar periodic oscillations in other oceans such as the Atlantic and the Arctic I believe that they follow the lead of ENSO and PDO. In effect they simply continue the distribution of the initial warming or cooling state around the globe and of course there are varying degrees of lag so that from time to time the other lesser oceanic oscillations can operate contrary to the primary Pacific oscillations until the lag is worked through.

I believe that this is a clear and simple theory of solar driven global climate change which should now be tested empirically.

Just looking at the activity levels of the past few solar cycles and the temperature and ENSO changes that occurred at about the same time would have revealed the truth if those who should have known better were not trying to implicate man generally and western nations in particular. Refer to my two earlier articles for fuller detail.

The fact is that the Earth could well be a highly sensitive water based thermometer as far as solar input is concerned. The balance between overall warming and overall cooling is probably finely linked to the energy received or not received from the sun over decadal time periods or possibly even less.

Advances have been made in predicting the likely activity levels of the sun so it should be possible to make general predictions as regards the onset of warming or cooling trends on Earth from solar observations and astronomical measurements of planetary influences on solar cycles.

Finally, one should consider whether other warming or cooling influences might have any significance to humanity and the environment.

The fact is that the solar effect is huge and overwhelming. Other influences can only ever delay or bring forward what would have happened anyway because of the time scales involved with solar changes that tend to develop and intensify over centuries. One must also remember that, the warmer the Earth gets, the faster the radiation of heat to Space because of an enhanced temperature differential so it would be false to propose an ever increasing positive differential as a result of adding any warming effect of man made CO2 to the effect of solar changes.

The length and intensity of a solar cool down would strip out the human portion of any extra CO2 quite ruthlessly because the cooler temperatures would increase the amount of CO2 absorbed by the oceans and oceanic life would flourish to lock it away in the carbon cycle again in the form of organic calcium carbonate from a multitude of tiny sea creatures (which generally prefer cooler waters) falling to the sea bed.

In effect, all life on Earth has the benefit of an oceanic and atmospheric air conditioning system that clears out excess CO2 as well as well as dust, other particulates and noxious substances created by either the planet itself or the life forms on it from time to time.

Of course a single organism can upset the balance of it's own environment for a time but the planet always renews itself and repopulates with new life forms if necessary. The solution is always a new balance between numbers and lifestyle for any particular organism and that includes us.

That is why, despite hugely different environmental conditions in the past, including far higher CO2 levels, there has never been a `tipping' point that changed the pattern of glaciations and interglacials that have occurred with clockwork precision based on astronomical movements throughout the historical record.

Nor need we fear any man made addition to solar warming because the proportion of the warming which we would be responsible for would be insignificant against the scale of the solar induced portion. In any event, since cooling is worse than warming for humanity and most life on the planet, our production of CO2, however large in our puny terms, would be wholly beneficial for life on Earth. CO2 is the least of our problems so our attention and resources should be better directed to a more general concept of sustainability

Source




Environmentalists Still Can't Get It Right

By WALTER E. WILLIAMS

Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let's look at some environmentalist predictions they would prefer we forget. At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind." C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, "The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed."

In 1968, professor Paul Ehrlich, former Vice President Al Gore's hero and mentor, predicted that there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and "in the 1970s . . . hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ehrlich forecast that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and that by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich's predictions about England were gloomier: "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."

In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome warning that the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum, copper, lead and natural gas by 1992. Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book "The Doomsday Book," said Americans were using 50% of the world's resources and "by 2000 they (Americans) will, if permitted, be using all of them."

In 1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, "The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000." Harvard biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, "Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." That was the same year that Sen. Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look magazine, that by 1995 "somewhere between 75% and 85% of all the species of living animals will be extinct."

It's not just latter-day doomsayers who have been wrong; doomsayers have always been wrong. In 1885, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that there was "little or no chance" of oil being discovered in California, and a few years later they said the same about Kansas and Texas.

In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior said American oil supplies would last only another 13 years. In 1949, the secretary of the interior said the end of U.S. oil supplies was in sight. Having learned nothing from its earlier erroneous claims, in 1974 the U.S. Geological Survey advised us that the U.S. had only a 10-year supply of natural gas. The fact of the matter, according to the American Gas Association: There's a 1,000- to 2,500- year supply.

Here are my questions:

In 1970, when environmentalists were making predictions of man-made global cooling and the threat of an ice age and millions of Americans starving to death, what kind of government policy should we have undertaken to prevent such a calamity?

When Ehrlich predicted that England would not exist in the year 2000, what steps should the British Parliament have taken in 1970 to prevent such a dire outcome?

In 1939, when the Department of the Interior warned that we only had oil supplies for another 13 years, what actions should President Roosevelt have taken?

Finally, what makes us think that environmental alarmism is any more correct now that they have switched their tune to man-made global warming?

Here are a few facts:

More than 95% of the greenhouse effect is the result of water vapor in Earth's atmosphere. Without the greenhouse effect, Earth's average temperature would be zero degrees Fahrenheit.

Most climate change is a result of the orbital eccentricities of Earth and variations in the sun's output. On top of that, natural wetlands produce more greenhouse-gas contributions annually than all human sources combined.

Source




Hansen refuted: East Siberian Arctic Temperatures of the Last Interglacial

Earth's temps were 'much warmer than they are today at various times over the past million years'

Discussing: Kienast, F., Tarasov, P., Schirrmeister, L., Grosse, G. and Andreev, A.A. 2008. Continental climate in the East Siberian Arctic during the last interglacial: Implications from palaeobotanical records. Global and Planetary Change 60: 535-562.

Background

In an attempt to portray earth's current temperature as being extremely high and, therefore, extremely dangerous (as well as CO2-induced), Hansen et al. (2006) have claimed the earth "is approximately as warm now as at the Holocene maximum and within ~1øC of the maximum temperature of the past million years.

What was done

In a study that provides evidence that is pertinent to this claim, Kienast et al. studied plant macrofossils found in permafrost deposits on Bol'shoy Lyakhovsky Island (73øN, 141ø30'E) of the New Siberian Archipelago on the coast of the Dimitrii Laptev Strait, from which they reconstructed climatic conditions that prevailed during the prior or Eemian Interglacial.

What was learned

In the words of the five researchers, "macrofossils of warmth-demanding shrubs and aquatic plants, occurring farther south today, indicate that local mean temperatures of the warmest month were at least 12.5øC, thus c. 10øC higher than today at that time," when maximum atmospheric CO2 levels were on the order of 290 ppm, or about 100 ppm less than they are today.

What it means

This finding is just one of many that indicate that various places on the planet have been much warmer than they are today at various times over the past million years, and when the air's CO2 content was also much lower than it is today. For more such examples, see our Major Report Carbon Dioxide and Global Change: Separating Scientific Fact from Personal Opinion, which also presents evidence refuting many of Hansen's other outlandish claims.

Source




North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperatures of the Past 150 Years

"Considering the totality of their findings, the UK and Australian researchers concluded, in the broadest of terms, that "current 'warm era conditions' do not eclipse prior 'warm' conditions during the instrumental record"

Discussing: Hobson, V.J., McMahon, C.R., Richardson, A. and Hays, G.C. 2008. Ocean surface warming: The North Atlantic remains within the envelope of previous recorded conditions. Deep-Sea Research I 55: 155-162.

What was done

The authors used International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set sea-surface temperature data to calculate, in annual time steps, the mean August-September positions of the 12, 15 and 18øC isotherms in the North Atlantic Ocean from 1854 to 2005 at 2-degree longitudinal intervals.

What was learned

This effort revealed, in the words of Hobson et al., that (1) the three isotherms "have tended to move northwards during two distinct periods: in the 1930s-1940s and then again at the end of the 20th century," that (2) "the chances of this occurring randomly are negligible," that (3) the 15øC isotherm "reached a maximum latitude of 52.0øN in 1932, and a latitude of 51.7øN in 2005, a difference of approximately 33 km," and that (4) "of the 10 most extreme years, 4 have occurred in the 1992-2005 warm era and 3 have occurred in the 1926-1939 era."

What it means

Considering the totality of their findings, the UK and Australian researchers concluded, in the broadest of terms, that "current 'warm era conditions' do not eclipse prior 'warm' conditions during the instrumental record," which sounds an awful lot like what we have concluded, over and over, in our U.S. Temperature Record of the Week feature, i.e., that during the period of most significant greenhouse gas buildup over the past century (1930 and onward) there has been little to no net increase in mean near-surface air temperature throughout the United States. Now the same appears to also have been true throughout a large sector of the North Atlantic Ocean.

Source




WARMING VULTURES DESCEND ON BURMA

By Andrew Bolt

The world has not warmed in a decade. Moreover, there is little evidence that tropical cyclones have got worse. And any link between hurricanes and warming is highly disputed. Yet Al Gore is already feeding on Burma's dead:

Using tragedy to advance an agenda has been a strategy for many global warming activists, and it was just a matter of time before someone found a way to tie the recent Myanmar cyclone to global warming. Former Vice President Al Gore in an interview on NPR's May 6 "Fresh Air" broadcast did just that...

"And as we're talking today, Terry, the death count in Myanmar from the cyclone that hit there yesterday has been rising from 15,000 to way on up there to much higher numbers now being speculated," Gore said. "And last year a catastrophic storm from last fall hit Bangladesh. The year before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China - and we're seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming."

Of course, a British judge has already rapped Gore for linking hurricanes to global warming. And the leading proponent of the warming=hurricanes claim [Kerry Emanuel] has backed off.

Source

Note an additional problem for Gore: Here is a list of the 20 Deadliest Tropical Cyclones in World History. Note that all but one or two occurred before so called "global warming".




Blessed are the sceptics

Comment from Australia



In 1633 Galileo Galilei was hauled before the religious authorities of his day, the Inquisition, for daring to concur with Copernicus that the Earth was not the centre of the universe and also that it orbited the sun rather than the other way around. For his pains, he was placed under house arrest and forced to recant. Giordano Bruno failed to recant and suffered a crueller fate.

Today we are faced with a newer religion known as environmental activism which has insinuated itself into some aspects of science. It shares some of the intolerance to new or challenging ideas with the old. Immolation at the stake is no longer fashionable but it has been replaced by pillory in the media. The new faith makes it apostasy to question the proposition that our river systems are dying and that nothing like this has ever happened before. And it is the blackest heresy to suggest that the beatification of StAl and the Goronites may be a little premature.

The symbols and practices of the new and the old faiths are remarkably similar. The crucifix has been replaced by the wind turbine; where before there was the hair shirt and self-flagellation, mortification of the flesh now consists of switching off your airconditioner when it's hot and your patio heater when it's cold.

The head of the University of Tasmania's school of government, Aynsley Kellow, has pointed out the close similarity between medieval papal indulgences and carbon offsets. However, these things matter less than the corruption of science by faith and the failure to recognise the contingent nature of scientific concepts. Concepts are only valid until such time as they are demolished by the scientific methods of observation, measurement, experimentation and analysis. Phrases such as "the argument is over, the science is settled" are so much fatuous nonsense and should almost never be used in the scientific community.

Throughout history dissenters, sceptics, contrarians and innovators have suffered criticism, abuse and even persecution, but it is these people who have driven progress. To quote Thomas Huxley, "scepticism is the highest of duties, blind faith the one unpardonable sin". Where would we be without the Galileos, Newtons, Darwins and Pasteurs? I would like to think that some time in the future we could add the names of our scholars to that list.

So what is this partnership between the Institute of Public Affairs and the University of Queensland to support environmental research about? What are we doing it for? There are two main reasons. First, to provide a haven for our scholars without ideological or commercial interference and with no prescription as to the end point of their inquiries. If they challenge orthodoxies and assumptions, particularly mine, then that's good. If they find that conventional wisdom is correct, then that's good, too. The only criterion is to seek empirical evidence.

Second, it is important that any research that our scholars undertake is made available to aid the development of better, more rational public policy. Good public policy means applying our resources more efficiently to achieve the outcomes we desire, such as lifting the poor out of their poverty, feeding the hungry, healing the sick and, in our case, managing our environment sensibly and productively.

I would like to think that what we have launched today is just the first step in something much bigger. I envisage that, in the future, to environmental lawyers and scientists we will add other disciplines: biologists, economists, statisticians, even philosophers. What we need to do is shine the hard light of reason and critical thinking on our environmental problems, aided by multiple skills and points of view. As they say, from tiny acorns do mighty oak trees grow; or, to make the metaphor more geographically relevant, from tiny gumnuts do mighty river red gums grow.

That's all I have to say but I would like to leave you with one thought. For those of you have a feeling of despair about the direction that some aspects of environmental science is taking, remember that most people now believe that Galileo was right.

The above is an edited version of a speech by Perth philanthropist Bryant Macfie, who is funding a research partnership between the Institute of Public Affairs and the University of Queensland.

Source

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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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7 May, 2008

IPCC PROJECTIONS CONTINUE TO FALSIFY

An email from Lee Rodgers [sregdoreel@yahoo.com]:

There are certain statistical analysis methods that let a researcher know when they might be lying to themselves with misapplied statistical analysis. Lucia over at rankexploits.com has been reviewing IPCC projections using advanced statistical methods. Lucia is a fastidious statistician who opens up all her methodologies to scrutiny. See here.

It may come as little surprise that Lucia finds the IPCC's long-range warming-only forecasts continue to be falsified, and become increasingly unlikely as the ongoing temperature plateau continues. See here

We've had almost nine years of stable global temperatures - another seven really puts the odds against the 2 degrC/century forecasts being likely. Maybe fifteen years of stable temperatures shall be Mother Nature's funny way of letting us know that the sky isn't falling.




JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY WILL LEAD NASA PROBE OF THE SUN

Mounting public concern about global warming has forced NASA to fund a new probe of our heat source -- the Sun. The May 1 news release from Johns Hopkins University reports that Andrew Dantzler of the JHU Applied Physic Laboratory was selected to manage the $750 million Solar Probe, scheduled for launch in 2015. See here




GERMAN TAXPAYERS FACE 120 BILLION EURO BILL FOR SOLAR SUBSIDIES

Germany's ruling political party, the CDU, has proposed to amend the law on renewable energy by calling for a reduction of subsidies for solar energy. In a separate report, Handelsblatt said leading German research institute Rheinisch-Westfaelischse Institut fuer Wirtschaftsforschung is proposing a slash in subsidies for solar energy by 30 percent.

The newspaper cited an obtained report for the Federal Ministry of Economy. If the current subsidy regulation remains in place, state subsidies would amount to 120 billion euros by 2035, the paper said. See here




DARK AGE COMING?

Below is a Letter to the Editor published in the "Canberra Times" on 5th. -- by Malcolm Miller [stellar2@grapevine.com.au]

I used to think that I lived in a world of scientific and social progress, where invention, innovation, and clever development of new ideas and techniques ensured that we would all live better, and our children in turn, better than we did.

Now I have lost that na‹ve optimism. Sometimes I feel we have regressed to the Middle Ages. There are crazy religions proscribing normal human behaviours. There are warlords galore with fanatical followers prepared to kill anyone they decide is their enemy. There are growing shortages of basic foods that we thought had been overcome for all time by a green revolution. There are people who want us to throw away all our advanced technology and abolish our energy sources, the very ones that have extended many life expectancies and opened up a world of travel freedom.

It goes on and on. It is frightening, because it seems to be leading to a new and unpleasant world of shortages, of restrictions, of governments taking new and arbitrary power over citizens and businesses by taxing out of existence the very energy sources such as coal and oil and the very raw materials such as steel and aluminium that require energy to produce. It is a a picture of reversal, of retreat from the very successes that have made life better for so many, to a world of shortages, of power rationing, of higher taxes, of restrictions.

So far our world looks superficially OK. The engine hums, the tanks have fuel, all systems are working. But there are people who are trying to bring our world down, for spurious reasons of their own. If they win we can look forward to a new Dark Age.

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GOD, CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE EU

Does the European Union have God on its side? Yes. When it comes to fighting climate change, the EU's next big thing, Brussels has the blessing of all the Faiths.

The Gods Squad, various clerics, imams, vicars, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, Grand Muftis (is there a collective noun for them?) and rabbis, all trooped into the European Commission's Berlaymont HQ on Monday to fight the good fight against us "greedy" consumers and our nasty CO2 emissions.

It is perhaps fitting that an out of touch, unpopular and referendum-phobic EU should look for divine help. After all both the eurocrats and theocrats have plenty in common. Both are a pretty preachy bunch and like nothing more than to lay on the guilt trips. Most importantly, both derive their authority from a higher source than the public.

Climate change has become the new orthodoxy for our times. It is the moral fable that justifies new limits and restrictions for our shiny 21st century. It provides, in a post-tradition world, a new internalised framework for individuals to govern their behaviour in the name of reducing their carbon footprint.

The new moral edicts of the climate change brigade - Don't go on holidays abroad! End cheap flights! Ban SUVs! Recycle! Switch off that light! - are all the more pervasive (certainly more than the nostrums of organised religion) because society is suffused with the anti-humanist sentiments that lie behind them.

Janez Jansa, the Slovenian PM and current holder of the EU presidency, speaking alongside the representatives of Europe's combined clergy, put it well. Climate change, he said, is about "changes in habits, philosophy and world outlook", getting rid of "things we do not really need", like overseas holidays, cheap flights, SUVs etc.

In this battle, science and religion have united behind the same orthodoxy to lower our expectations (one with a secular, environmentalist but deeply anti-humanist pedigree). "It is important to have a coordinated approach between science and the different types of religion," said Mr Jansa. "The joint approach is needed to lead to changes in habits... The role of religion is a big one... We have to overcome deep rooted ideas in public opinion."

For EU officials, old-time religion has the purely instrumental appeal of helping to legitimise policy, in this case climate change proposals, some of them, like the biofuels target, are getting a bit tarnished as we get to know more about them.

For clerics, the global warming agenda seems to provide them with a new source of moral authority in a relativistic world which no longer looks to organised religion for guidance on what is right or wrong.

It is not really about belief for either group. It is an unholy alliance of convenience to give their respective illegitimate forms of authority a gloss of relevance. Moreover, religious leaders jumping on the green bandwagon in a scramble for contemporary relevance are doing their faith no favours. While the god-fearing can unite with environmentalists in terms of a shared conformist credulity towards doom-mongering clap trap and junk science, the wider agenda is a problem.

Most modern religions still have man, for good or ill, at the heart of the moral universe. Environmentalists tend to view man as a harmful pathogen and elevate nature's blind nihilism over man's purpose or civilisation. In fact, in the case of climate change ideology, man's activity and human history itself is seen as the source of the problem.

At least, religion (and I say this as an atheist), accords man a soul, with humanising possibilities of redemption and transcendence. We may have to be meek (really bad advice, by the way) but we shall inherit the earth.

Not so with the environmentalists. For them we are fleshy gene machines, mere equals amongst others in the animal kingdom, with the misguided hubris to believe our civilisation, our soul, is beyond nature. Climate change is a sharp slap to put us back in our place.

The clerics want us to get on our knees and humble ourselves before God (an old story). More recently, the greens, and many of our rulers, want us to abase ourselves before their bureaucratic requirements in the name of a totally impersonal force, nature.

Source




WE REALLY DO KNOW FAR LESS THAN WE THINK WE DO

Let's call it Apocalypse Postponed. At least temporarily. German climate scientists have just published a study in the respected science journal Nature suggesting global warming has stopped and will not resume until at least 2015. In other words (my words, not theirs) contrary to the received wisdom of Al Gore's simplistic and propagandistic "An Inconvenient Truth," global temperatures aren't moving in lockstep with rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the science isn't settled and we don't know everything we need to know.

Based on new, computer-generated climate models that factor in natural ocean currents, the researchers conclude: "Our results suggest that global surface temperatures may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic (man-made) warming."

Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences said if their calculations are correct, the 0.3 degree Celsius global temperature rise predicted by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change over the next decade won't happen. "We believe that ocean currents and systems could, in the short term, change global warming patterns, and even mean temperatures," he told National Geographic News.

Since there has actually been no global warming since 1998, that means there would be an almost two-decade span where concentrations of GHG emissions, most notably carbon dioxide, continued to intensify in the atmosphere, without global temperatures following suit.

These researchers aren't climate "deniers." They say their findings - based on cutting-edge computer modelling techniques still in their infancy - are a refinement of existing climate models. They also calculate that after 2015, global warming will resume, as the warming caused by man-made GHG emissions is no longer masked by the cooling effect of ocean currents. They aren't suggesting man-made global warming has permanently stopped.

And that's all fair enough. But let's not kid the troops. Prior to this study, anyone impertinent enough to point out, contrary to the Al Gore Nation, there hasn't been any global warming for a decade was apt to have their head shot off by climate hysterics.

As astrophysicist and award-winning former BBC science correspondent David Whitehouse - who made exactly that point in the British magazine New Statesman last Dec. 19 in an essay titled "Has Global Warming Stopped?" observed in the wake of this new research:

"Not long ago, anyone who looked at the global annual temperature data and disrespectfully pointed out that it might actually be significant that the world hasn't become warmer since 1998, was dismissed as foolish and accused of seeing what they wanted to see . . . Then, if they had the effrontery to point out that even the U.K.'s MET (British Meteorological Office) agreed that the annual data between 2001-7 was an impeccable flat line, they were told they were completely wrong as such things were obviously only year-on-year variability (as an unscientific environmental activist' damned my speculations in the New Statesman about the same topic, whilst at the same time implying I was lying)."

Indeed, Whitehouse got hit from all sides, including a brutal follow-up essay in New Statesman by its "environmental correspondent" who wrote: "I'll be blunt. Whitehouse got it wrong - completely wrong . . . readers of my column will know that I give contrarians, or skeptics or deniers (call them what you will) short shrift . . . So a mistaken article reached a flawed conclusion. Intentionally, or not, readers were misled, and the good name of the New Statesman has been used all over the Internet by climate contrarians seeking to support their entrenched positions."

There's only one problem. Whitehouse isn't a denier. As he wrote in his original essay, "Certainly the working hypotheses of CO2-induced global warming is a good one that stands on good physical principles, but let us not pretend our understanding extends too far, or that the working hypotheses is a sufficient explanation for what is going on ... we are fools if we think we have a sufficient understanding of such a complicated system as the Earth's atmosphere's interaction with sunlight ... We know far less than many think we do, or would like you to think we do." Indeed.

Source

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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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6 May, 2008

No past, present or future anthropogenic global warming

Excerpt from an email from Dr. Miklos Zagoni, physicist, Budapest, Hungary [miklos.zagoni@gmail.com]

I stated at the New York Conference on Climate Change that it is the Miskolczi theory which is able to serve the proper scientific background for the lack of past, present and future anthropogenic global warming. In the meantime we continued checking the theory over and over and could not recognize any flaw in it. I have excerpts, shorter and longer written summaries and explanations too, digging into different depth of the physics behind the theory. I am ready to deliver it in detail for any expert or layman audiences, at workshops, hearings, public lectures, as far as science and not politics is concerned. Again, the original paper's link is at the official web site of the Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Service. [PDF -- in English]

I think the proper understanding of the new theory needs some further explanation, so I try to provide it in short: To put it in a language that IPCC will understand:

"Extra CO2 does not result extra 'radiative forcing' in the final account, as the energy constraint rules it back to its equilibrium value. Nature's regulatory instrument is water vapor: more carbon dioxide leads to less moisture in the air, keeping the overall GHG content in accord with the necessary balance conditions. So, contrary to the common wisdom, there is no positive H2O-temperature feedback on global scale: in Earth-type atmospheres uncontrolled runaway warming is not possible. This new theory seems to be only a little step forward in the two-hundred years old greenhouse science, but its consequences are revolutionary: actually it stops the possibility of man-made global warming."

I hope you start to feel how deep this work of Dr Miskolczi is. You may understand also why the mainstream does not want to learn it, and why I must help to distribute it in all possible ways.




Southern Hemisphere Sea Ice Reaches "Unprecedented" Levels

Four of the past 5 months are "all-time" records for Southern Hemisphere sea ice anomalies, "unprecedented" since the data set began in 1979 as shown below:



On a global basis, world sea ice in April 2008 reached levels that were "unprecedented" for the month of April in over 25 years. Levels are the third highest (for April) since the commencement of records in 1979, exceeded only by levels in 1979 and 1982. This continues a pattern established earlier in 2008, as global sea ice in March 2008 was also the third highest March on record, while January 2008 sea ice was the second highest January on record. It was also the second highest single month in the past 20 years (second only to Sept 1996).

The graph below shows the monthly anomaly (aggregating NH and SH), collating information from sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135.



As suggested by a reader, here's the same information with each monthly series plotted as a separate line (April-solid; January - dotted.) The surge in anomaly area in 2008 is not limited to a single month, but is consistent for all 4 months to date (and for the YTD average).



At Cryosphere Today, they provide the following "scientific" description of recent sea ice changes:

You've heard Al Gore comment that the "Earth has a fever"? It may also have major tooth decay.

They provide an animation showing declining sea ice to 2007 lows, but not the subsequent recovery in 2008:

Peruse an archive of map displays of the atmospheric and radiative climatic conditions leading up to the record setting Northern Hemisphere sea ice minimum of 2007: sea ice autopsy

Instead of perhaps celebrating the dramatic recent increase in sea ice, they complain that there has been a loss of "multiyear sea ice". I've uploaded my collation of the NOAA data to www.climateaudit.org/data/ice/seaice.dat .

Source




Shock: Time Mag. does a fair and balanced global warming polar bear article!

Could it be? Time Mag. does journalistically fair and balanced article on global warming and polar bears? Perhaps some people at Time Mag. are feeling the heat from disintegrating man-made global warming fear campaign. Also see EPW Polar Bear Reports here

The cuddly polar bear has become global warming's favorite mascot. It's also become a political flash point: on one side, conservation groups say global warming threatens the bear by permanently damaging its Arctic habitat. On the other, conservative groups say the so-called plight of the polar bear is a gambit to intensify climate change hysteria. The battle flared up again last Monday, when a California federal district court judge ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the Interior Department agency that evaluates endangered species, to decide on the polar bear by May 15 (a four-month extension of the original due date of Jan. 9). If FWS lists the bear as endangered, it would be the first mammal to face extinction due to global warming.

The question is whether the polar bear is actually in enough danger to warrant official government protection. Last year, a survey by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) concluded that two-thirds of the world's polar bears could disappear in the next 50 years if Arctic sea ice continues to evaporate at its current rate - sea ice is essential for polar bears, serving as the platforms from which they hunt. Similar discussion is ongoing in Canada, where two-thirds of the world's estimated 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears reside. Last week, a Canadian scientific committee ruled that the bears should be considered a "special concern species," meaning there's reason for concern but not panic.

Pete Ewins, director of species conservation at World Wildlife Fund-Canada, says there's a general consensus in the scientific community that global warming inaction will result in reduced polar bear numbers, but admits that the data isn't entirely conclusive. "The problem comes when people start asking if we know everything we need to know about polar bears everywhere," he says. "The answer is, no. But a lack of scientific certainty hasn't been taken by the majority of polar ecologists as a reason to assume everything is O.K."

But those who oppose listing the polar bear, including several western senators, say that the species does in fact appear to be O.K. Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, calls sea ice studies such as the one run by USGS a "classic case of reality versus unproven computer models." In fact, he says, the number of polar bears has increased over the past half-century as a result of initiatives like the 1973 Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears, which sharply curtailed bear hunting; he thinks declaring the animal endangered would be a purely political move, a way to achieve global warming policy that eschews the legislative process. It's a classic bait-and-switch maneuver, he says, that would effectively turn the Endangered Species Act into a climate change law.

"The implications of such a policy would lead to drastic increases in litigation and eager lawyers ready to find ways to shut down energy production," says Inhofe, who has held two hearings this year for which he rounded up a retinue of doubtful experts. "These special interest groups believe no oil and gas leases should be allowed until the bear is listed, its critical habitat designated and a recovery plan put in place. That could be a very long time."

Those oil and gas-drilling leases include the $2 billion February sale of rights to 30 million acres of the Chukchi Sea off Alaska's northwest coast, home to about a fifth of the world's remaining polar bears. Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity and the author of the initial petition to list the polar bear takes the opposite view; she figures the FWS decision was delayed to allow the sale to go through in the first place. Not surprising coming from an administration Siegel calls rabidly "anti-wildlife." The scarcity of animals that have been listed endangered during the Bush years is undeniable: 59 in seven years. Bill Clinton added 521 during his two terms and George H.W. Bush listed 231 during his four years. Siegel's group has filed petitions on behalf of a number of other species, including the ribbon seal and a dozen different types of penguins. She's willing to file more lawsuits and ready to fight for her charges. Sort of like an angry polar bear.

Source




Why Let The Facts Get in The Way of a Good Story?

Poor silly "science writer" Sharon Begley shows her ignorance of even the basics again



In the May 5, 2008 edition of Newsweek, there is an article by science writer Sharon Begley trying to convince us that "global warming isn't good for crops after all". Her first example is that a glacier in the Himalayas called the Gangotri glacier. She writes that over the last 25 years the glacier has shrunk about half a mile, "a rate three times the historical norm". The implication is, of course, that this was caused by increasing atmospheric CO2 produced by human activities. Since this glacier supplies 70% of the flow to India's Ganges River during the dry season, loss of the glacier would cause great harm to India's crop irrigation. However, this article in the Times of India, contains the following quote:

According to Geological Survey of India data, between 1935 and 1996, Gangotri glacier receded at an average 18.80 metres per year. Studies by other institutions show that yearly recession dropped to 17.5 metres during 1971-2004 and further to 12.10 metres in 2004-05.

The river flow may be falling and the glacier retreating, but is it really three times the historical norm? The Indian government calls it a "natural phenomena" that may have been exacerbated by the building of four dams.

Her second example is that in a human induced greenhouse world there would be more heat waves. She then lists many agricultural problems caused by the European heat wave of 2003 but she is apparently unfamiliar with this study by Roger Pielke Sr. and others stating that:

It therefore appears that the heat wave 2003 in south-central Europe was the unfortunate consequence of a combination of largely unrelated climate drivers, superimposed on an underlying warming trend, rather than as a direct result of lower tropospheric global warming.

Her next example is that of a diminishing snowpack in the United States, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. Was she out of the country this winter? Take a look at these snow depth comparisons from the Northwest Weather and Avalanche Center in Seattle, Washington.You can see that this year's snow pack in the Northwest was between 133% and 330% above normal. In many locations in the central Rockies, the midwest and northern New England, the highest snowfall amounts of any year were recorded. Of course, one year does not make a trend, but since the Pacific Decadal Oscillation has gone negative, this may indeed be the beginning of a trend.

In this last example, she quotes a Linda Mearns from the National Center for Atmospheric Research who says in reference to climate zones moving north that "the sun will not move with the climate". That is true, but she then says "the Dakotas will always have less daylight than Kansas." How can anyone who knows anything about climate make that statement? During the growing season, which is what she is talking about, the Dakotas do indeed have more daylight than Kansas. Between the spring equinox and the fall equinox, there is more daylight the farther north you go. Assuming you could find the correct temperatures, you could never grow apples at the Equator because there are only 12 hours of daylight in that location. At the Summer Solstice, Bismarck, North Dakota has almost 16 hours of daylight, which is over an hour more than Wichita, Kansas. You can easily find the sunrise/sunset times for any city at this web site, but why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

Source




Global Warming? Northeast Skies Through a Snowy Season

Amid increasing concerns about the warming of the planet, ski resorts across the Northeast are reporting some of the best snowfall levels in recorded history. Waterville Valley in New Hampshire had a top-five year in terms of snow accumulation, with 192 inches having fallen to the slopes so far, the mountain's director of marketing, Deborah Moore, said. A recent snowstorm on Mt. Mansfield, the home of Stowe Mountain Resort in Vermont, boosted the season snow total to 367 inches, making this ski season the snowiest in the last 10 years. "We're still expecting at least one more dump of snow," the communications director at Stowe, Jeff Wise, said.

For those who reject the popular consensus that the world is on the brink of a global warming crisis, the mass snowfall provides a form of validation. "The reports of global warming have been extremely overblown. It shouldn't be any surprise that we're going to have years with temperatures lower than average and snowfall higher than average," a senior fellow for environmental policy at the Heartland Institute, James Taylor, said.

While a majority of the Northeast has witnessed higher than average snowfalls this year, some areas in New Hampshire are on the brink of recording unprecedented numbers. In Concord, N.H., one more snowstorm could depose of a 134-year-old record. So far this winter, 115.8 inches of snow have hit the sidewalks of the city, the second greatest amount of snowfall ever recorded - and just a few inches short of the record of 122 inches recorded in the winter of 1873-74, a local meteorologist with the National Weather Service, James Hayes, said.

More here




No true consensus on global warming

By CLAUDETTE A. AZAR-KENYON -- A genuine Massachusetts Greenie sees the light

Responding to John Bullard's April 24 view, although I am not the president of a Sea Education Association, I am indeed an environmental conservationist. My automobile (endorsed by the Sierra Club) and my home stand as my evidence. My trash consists of one small bag weekly, often bi-weekly, but my recycling bins are always full. While this doesn't make me a scientist, it does show I care for our environment.

Not being a scientist and caring for our environment doesn't preclude an average person from being able to think or know when they are being deceived. As stated previously, I believe we should take care of the environment because it's the right thing to do.

I believe that climate change science is driven by ideology and not the study of long-term cycles. Mr. Bullard repeated my claim that global warming is based on 20 years of data and that warming and cooling is cyclical, but he omitted my "due to human action," which is an important clarifier. The question about global warming is if human-created carbons are at fault. Mr. Bullard says, "Mauna Loa records of CO2 concentrations go back over 50 years; ice cores go back about a million." If his claim is true, then what caused the cyclical behavior he admits is evident in the ice cores over the past million years - humans?

The global warming (due to the human-created carbons) issue and "scientific censorship" is claimed by many global authorities. To comply with Mr. Bullard's request for evidence, I put it forth here, albeit there are far too many to note them all.

As to the ice cores going back a million years, they may go back even further. However, it's important to note that the ice cores are not the vital factor, rather the records for measuring ice core lengths and the conclusions drawn on those samples are what is important, and these records are fairly recent. Various ice cores of varying depths have been drilled only since 1956, and the first ice core to reach bedrock was drilled in 1966.

Many respected scientists around the globe claim that until 1985, published CO2 readings were published correctly, but after 1985 certain readings disappeared from publication. That's 23 years of censorship and skewed study.

In fact, Dr. Roy W. Spencer, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, formerly a senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, says, "For those scientists who value their scientific reputations, I would advise that they distance themselves from politically motivated claims of a 'scientific consensus' on the causes of global warming. ... Don't let five Norwegians on the Nobel Prize committee be the arbiters of what is good science." Good science is exactly what I am promoting!

Likewise, Zbigniew Jaworowski, Ph.D., chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Poland, who spoke to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation in 2004 said, "Attempts to support the global warming thesis with analyses of the carbon dioxide content in glacial ice samples are based on fudged data and ignorance of the physical processes of glacial ice formation."

The point here is that there are too many reliable scientific sources claiming censorship in climate science for us to say with any confidence that humans are responsible. In fact, even those scientists who claim global warming as fact have admitted the data isn't challenged in peer-reviewed scientific literature. I have a problem with that, and you should too.

If we are living in a climate that is unprecedented in all of human history and, as Mr. Bullard says, "the wonderful thing about science is the more we expand knowledge, the greater the area between the known and unknown," then shouldn't the debate include all the data so we are not acting on conclusions that are based on ideology and politics?

Mr. Bullard says "prudent people wouldn't delay acting," and on this we can agree. Prudent people should indeed act responsibly by demanding fair and full consideration of all the facts, using a healthy measure of scientific skepticism, and not reacting on fears created by a false scientific consensus.

Source

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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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5 May, 2008

SUN STILL SLUGGISH

How coincidental that the last 12 months have been so cold!

Either SC24 is the weakest ever solar cycle in a long time or I'm cursed. I look on Anthony Watts' excellent weblog and see that someone has sighted an SC24 spot in the Southern Hemisphere. And here's the magnetogram showing that it is indeed an SC24 phenomenon:

If you care to look at the last SC24 spot to appear in the Northern Hemisphere, then this does appear to be an SC24 spot, (the magnetic polarities being reversed between the hemispheres). So I snap into action, going to SolarCycle24.com and...

...is that it? Or is it a dead pixel in the camera? Let's check the magnetogram:

...and its gone!

Another SC24 "Tiny Tim" and I missed it.

Clearly spotting sunspots is more difficult than I thought. There cannot be more than a few hours between Anthony's post and mine, and yet the SC24 spot and magnetic signature had both disappeared. And on a sad note, it appears not to have been given a number by NASA. Maybe the person responsible went for coffee at just the wrong time.

Solar Science, 4 May 2008. (See the original for graphics)




If you want to be green - kill a cow

Some wisdom from the new Mayor of London below



Stop, stop. I can feel the guilt building up already. I can feel the self-loathing welling in my skull, the horror at my appallingly affluent consumerist lifestyle. In just a few short months, I will be taking the whole family off on holiday again, and once again our plane will contribute to the cat's cradle of CO2 that is swaddling the globe. Out of the nozzles of the Rolls-Royce turbo jets the lethal vapours will spew into the defenceless stratosphere, and, far beneath us, a startled look will pass over the features of another poor polar bear as he plops through the deliquescing floes.

I must atone! I must make a sacrifice! I must offset my emissions and appease the great irascible Sun-god as he prepares to griddle us all. I had heard somewhere that you could be "carbon-neutral" by planting trees before you fly. That's right. Shove in a few poplars, I was told, and bingo, you can feel all good about your skiing holiday or your winter break in Tunisia.

So I dialled up the eco-websites and - what's this? It turns out they have got it all wrong! Guilt-stricken Western holidaymakers and others have so far paid œ300 million to have trees planted in their name by carbon offset companies, and the whole thing turns out to be a complete nonsense. It now appears the scientists think the trees just make things worse. Far from soaking up your share of CO2, most trees in non-tropical areas are thought to trap heat and thereby increase global warming.

Aaaargh! Bad trees! Killer trees! But what can I do to exculpate my sin? Here I am, a caring, modern, green politician, proposing some time before the end of this year to take about six people in a plane for no better purpose than simple recreation. Like Tony Blair, I must deal with the hate and rage of the new green puritans; and also, it goes without saying, I genuinely want to make amends for any damage I am doing.

So I have done my homework, and I have come up with a far more effective solution. As ever, I have consulted the ancient texts, and have been reminded that the Greeks and Romans were also convinced of the importance of making a sacrifice before any tricky voyage. You will recall that the Greek task force for Troy actually killed Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon, in the hope of guaranteeing good sailing weather - with bad consequences for Agamemnon's conjugal relations.

Now we are only taking a family holiday, and I don't think Zeus or Jupiter would desire anything so extreme. A single cow would be about right. If I were an ancient Roman setting out on a family holiday, I would get some old milker and do her up as if for a party. She'd have her hair washed and combed and cut, and there would be ribbons and purple woollen fillets about her horns.

Then my chums and I would decently cover our heads and we'd drone loads of stuff in Latin and chuck some sacred meal about the place; and then one of us would hold a handful of food under the poor old girl's nose, and as she bent her head to snuffle it up we would take this - praise be! - as a sign that she had assented to her death, and at that auspicious moment she would be whopped hard on the side of the head and her throat would be cut; and then Jupiter would nod, and Olympus would tremble, and the whole family would be able to go off on holidays with a clear conscience.

And the funny thing is that, if we wanted to pay our debt to the great green earth-goddess Gaia, and neutralise the ill-effects of going up in a plane, then, as far as I can see, killing a cow is still exactly the right thing to do, two thousand years later. I mean it. There are 1.3 billion cows on this planet, and every year each cow produces about 90kg of methane, and as greenhouse gases go, methane is about 24 times worse than CO2 in sealing the heat in the air. According to a recent report by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, agriculture produces 18 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases, as measured in CO2 equivalent - and that, my friends, is more than is produced by the entire human transport industry. Think of it: for every cow you killed, you would be ridding the world of 90kg of methane a year - easily enough, surely, to justify an Easyjet flight.

Now it may be that you are repelled by the idea of killing a cow, and you may think that the poor farmers will only be driven to breed a new one to replace it. But there are still plenty of other things you could do that would make more sense than planting trees with these carbon offset companies. You could make sure that your house was properly insulated. You could turn down the central heating and wear more sweaters; and if you really wanted to tackle global CO2 emissions, you would campaign for nuclear energy, since power production is responsible for 24 per cent of global emissions. Or better still you could help do something to stop Third World countries from burning the forests, which produces 18 per cent of CO2.

But, of course, people aren't interested in these kinds of facts. They want the religion. They want the sweet moralistic feeling of telling someone to stop doing something. They want to be able to rage about Chelsea Tractors and Tony Blair's flights, and they want to give vent to their feelings of disgust at the whole triumph of Western consumerist capitalism; and what worries me is that, in the end, the moralising mumbo-jumbo becomes more important than the scientific reality.

We face huge decisions, such as whether or not to allow scientists to use human genetic material in animal cells; and I want those decisions taken on the basis of whether or not the advance can help cure disease, not on the basis of "Frankenbunny" headlines.

We should cease our pagan yammering for sacrifice, and look at what the science really demands. It is a sign of our terrifying ignorance that so many would still prefer to plant a heat-producing tree than see the wisdom of the ancients, and kill a flatulent cow.

Source




BRITISH PM TO SCRAP GREEN TAXES IN BID TO CALM VOTER FURY

Gordon Brown is poised to scrap a series of unpopular tax rises as part of sweeping changes to stave off a dangerous revolt over the rising cost of living which last week dealt Labour its worst electoral hammering in 40 years. Today the Prime Minister will respond to a growing suburban uprising by signalling moves to help motorists and other consumers. His intervention comes amid a fresh assault over the 10p tax rate change, which backbenchers warn could destroy his premiership.

Frank Field, the renegade ex-minister who forced Brown into offering compensation for the abolition of the 10p rate, said dismal local election results had shown poor families did not trust the Prime Minister to deliver on what Field described as an 'Alice in Wonderland' scheme to give them their money back.

The question of the Prime Minister's leadership was also raised openly for the first time since the vote; Labour backbencher Graham Stringer said ministers were privately discussing whether there should be a challenge to Brown. The Manchester Blackley MP told Sky News: 'I think Gordon is going to be the leader of the Labour party. There is no real tradition of regicide. But it would not be true to say that these conversations aren't going on between ministers and Labour backbenchers about whether there should be a challenge. There is a public display of loyalty and there is private despair.'

Last night Downing Street sources hinted the 2 per cent rise in fuel duty due in the autumn may not go ahead, in a concession to tight household budgets. Asked if it would be scrapped, a senior source said: 'We could do that, although it would not have any effect until October. We will reserve judgement until later this year.'

Brown is also expected today to highlight the role of the Competition Commission investigation into supermarkets in protecting families from high prices, promising that ministers will ensure stores do not keep prices artificially high. Ministers also want Brown to rethink green taxes - including motoring charges and proposed 'pay as you throw' schemes for household rubbish - and to sideline his passion for Africa and the climate to focus on domestic worries.

Internal polling in London found Ken Livingstone's green policies, such as new charges for gas-guzzling cars, alienated older voters, while the environment was at best a low priority for others, suggesting that, as families' budgets shrink, so does their willingness to pay to save the planet. 'My colleagues will say Labour has got to be brave on green issues, but the public are really feeling the pinch,' said one senior minister. Downing Street sources hinted last night that trials of household-rubbish taxes may never be widespread, adding that Brown was 'fairly sceptical' about the idea.

More here




HILLARY GAINING ON OBAMA AS VOTERS FEARING PAUPERIZATION DEMAND LOWER GAS PRICES

Back to basics. White House hopeful Hillary Clinton is gaining on her Democratic rival, Barack Obama, in Indiana and North Carolina because of her clear-eyed energy policy, according to anecdotal reports from the two states with key upcoming primary contests.

Obama's opposition to suspending the federal gasoline tax--a measure supported by both Clinton and the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, John McCain--and emphasis on pie-in-the-sky alternative energy schemes (and scams) are factors that appear to be hurting him, our on-location stringers report.

For the first time in years, voters seem skeptical that solar, wind, ocean waves and currents, biofuels and other so-called renewable sources of energy can replace gasoline, petroleum-based diesel, home heating oil, natural gas, and propane to any significant degree in the foreseeable future. The water-gulping, energy-intensive biofuel, or agrofuel, ethanol, which Obama touts as a "transitional solution," is increasingly unpopular as it contributes to food inflation by driving up the price of corn oil and animal feed. Motorists also complain that ethanol added to gasoline results in poorer performance and mileage; and some scientists say ethanol actually makes the air dirtier.

Among ordinary middle class, working class and poor voters, global warming appears to be a non-issue. More and more hard-pressed people are more afraid of pauperization than the manmade greenhouse gases that supposedly cause climate change.

Our reports indicate, in short, that the brainy, aloof and elitist Obama is out of touch and out of date when it comes to the energy crisis. Returning to her lunch-bucket, bread-and-butter roots, Hillary at last seems to be playing Presidential politics in a winning zone.

Source




Watch the web for climate change truths

Writing in the Daily Telegraph (reproduced below), Christopher Booker gives a lucid summary of recent pesky findings

A notable story of recent months should have been the evidence pouring in from all sides to cast doubts on the idea that the world is inexorably heating up. The proponents of man-made global warming have become so rattled by how the forecasts of their computer models are being contradicted by the data that some are rushing to modify the thesis

So a German study, published by Nature last week, claimed that, while the world is definitely warming, it may cool down until 2015 "while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions".

A little vignette of the media's one-sided view was given by recent events on Snowdon, the highest mountain in southern Britain. Each year between 2003 and 2007, the retreat of its winter snow cover inspired reports citing this as evidence of global warming. In 2004 scientists from the University of Bangor made headlines with the prediction that Snowdon might lose its snowcap altogether by 2020. In 2007 a Welsh MP, Lembit Opik, was saying "it is shocking to think that in just 14 years snow on this mountain could be nothing but a distant memory". Last November, viewing photographs of a snowless Snowdon at an exhibition in Cardiff, the Welsh environment minister, Jane Davidson, said "we must act now to reduce the greenhouse gases that cause climate change"

Yet virtually no coverage has been given to the abnormally deep spring snow which prevented the completion of a new building on Snowdon's summit for more than a month, and nearly made it miss the deadline for œ4.2 million of EU funding. (Brussels eventually extended the deadline to next autumn.)

Two weeks ago, as North America emerged from its coldest and snowiest winter for decades, the US National Climate Data Center, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a statement that snow cover in January on the Eurasian land mass had been the most extensive ever recorded, and that in the US March had been only the 63rd warmest since records began in 1895.

While global warming enthusiasts might take cheer from the NOAA's claim that "average global land temperature" in March was "the warmest on record", this was in striking contrast to a graph published last week on the Climate Audit website by Steve McIntyre. Tracking satellite data for the tropical troposphere, it showed March temperatures plunging to one of their lowest points in 30 years.

Mr McIntyre is the computer expert who exposed the infamous "hockey stick" graph - that icon of warmist orthodoxy which showed global temperatures soaring recently to their highest level for 1,000 years. He showed that the computer model that produced this graph had been so designed that it would have conjured even random numbers from a telephone directory into the shape of a hockey stick).

On April 24 the World Wildife Fund (WWF), another body keen to keep the warmist flag flying, published a study warning that Arctic sea ice was melting so fast that it may soon reach a "tipping point" where "irreversible change" takes place. This was based on last September's data, showing ice cover having shrunk over six months from 13 million square kilometres to just 3 million. What the WWF omitted to mention was that by March the ice had recovered to 14 million sq km (see the website Cryosphere Today), and that ice-cover around the Bering Strait and Alaska that month was at its highest level ever recorded. (At the same time Antarctic sea ice-cover was also at its highest-ever level, 30 per cent above normal).

The most dramatic evidence, however, emerged last week with an announcement by Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that an immense slow-cycling movement of water in the Pacific, known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), had unexpectedly shifted into its cool phase, something which only happens every 30 years or so, ultimately affecting climate all over the globe. Discussion of this on the invaluable Watts Up With That website, run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts, shows how the alternations of the PDO between warm and cool coincided with each of the major temperature shifts of the 20th century - warming after 1905, cooling after 1946, warming again after 1977 - and how the new shift to a cool phase could have repercussions for decades to come.

It is notable that the German computer predictions published last week by Nature forecast a decade of cooling due to deep-ocean movements in the Atlantic, without taking account of how this may now be reinforced by a similar, even greater movement in the Pacific.

Mr Watts points out that the West coast of the USA might already be experiencing these effects in the recent freezing temperatures that have devastated orchards and vineyards in California, prompting an appeal for disaster relief for growers who fear they may have lost this year's crops. Mr Watts's readers are amused by the explanation from one warmist apologist that "these natural climate phenomena can sometimes hide global warming caused by human activities - or they can have the opposite effect of accentuating it".

It is striking, in view of the colossal implications of the current response to "the greatest challenge confronting mankind" - as our politicians love to call it - how this hugely important debate is almost entirely overlooked by the media, and is instead condu