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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14 May, 2008

RE: "GROWING CONCERNS ABOUT COOLING EFFECT OF NATURE PAPER" (See leading post here on 11th)

The pesky behaviour of the Earth's temperature over the last 10 years is at last beginning to rattle the Warmist true believers. One result of that is that we skeptics are now sometimes being responded to rather than being simply ignored. The believers are on the defensive. One example of that is below, where a mainstream German scientist -- Lennart Bengtsson [lennart.bengtsson@zmaw.de], a Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg -- has submitted a comment to Benny Peiser's mailing list for skeptics. I reproduce the comment plus two replies to it. I then reproduce a remarkably lame rejoinder from the German scientist. His rejoinder is just an affirmation of faith, with no mention of facts or detailed reasoning. His claim that temperature trends can only be detected over century timescales is not unreasonable but where is the temperature graph showing such a warming trend? There is none. There is only the discredited Mann "hockeystick"

I am not surprised of the reaction to the paper by Keenlyside et al in Nature. The fact that the climate system has natural variations has been known for a considerable time and most climate models do reproduce them. Climate shows periods of warming and periods of cooling due to natural processes such as the El Nino phenomenon. Some of them can affect regional weather systems for several decades and are seen as the main causes for climate variations recorded over the last centuries. However, they are essentially unpredictable beyond a time scale of at most a few months. I am afraid that in this respect the Nature paper has been misunderstood, perhaps deliberately so, as it does in no way constitute a prediction but only a possible development of the climate system. So a couple of colder years cannot be ruled out. Similarly, it can equally well be warmer than the long term trend. We are simply not able to predict these fluctuations which such accuracies that they will be useful for the public and will probably never be able to do it.

It is important to note that this will not affect the long-term evolution of the climate which will continue to warm unless we are able to reduce the greenhouse gases. We are, as IPCC correctly has stated, now with high probability sure that the long term warming of the climate and corresponding increase in water vapour, are due to more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Any other explanation at our present understanding is simply not credible.

Two approaches are possible to counteract this. To produce energy from non-fossil fuel to a lower price and/or commence sequestration of CO2 on a large scale. The problem must be solved by technology and not by naive and unrealistic policies. They are bound to fail.

A comment on Bengtsson by F. James Cripwell [bf906@FreeNet.Carleton.CA]

It is with much trepidation that I write this letter. I read the letter from Lennart Bengtsson, Professor, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, and it made no sense. I have re-read it many times, and it still makes no sense to me. But I merely have a BA in Physics, so who am I to make a challenge.

The warmaholics have a hypothesis that increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere causes global temperature to rise. There is no experimental basis for this hypothesis. But in the latter part of the 20th century, CO2 levels rose, and global temperatures rose. Which was fine until we came into the 21st century, and global temperatures stopped rising. Future values of world temperatures are hanging like a Sword of Damocles over the warmaholics, and I was wondering what they would do.

Now we have two papers, Smith et al in Science and Keenlyside in Nature saying that there will be a pause in this rise for a number of years, but then the accumulated effects of AGW will come back with a vengence, and temperatures will reach the levels predicted by the IPCC.

The idea of AGW seems to be that a number of joules of heat fail to be radiated into space, and accumulate on earth; I call these "AGW joules". They are said to heat the earth's surface. However, if the earth is not heating up, and the AGW joules are accumulating, then they must be heating up something else; they have to "hide" somewhere. The only place that I can see that they can hide is in the deep oceans. For the warmaholics this seems to be enough; there is another hypothesis. But is this good enough for serious scientists?

Surely we need to be given the detailed physics of how these AGW joules can hide for 10, 15 or 20 years. Smith and Keenlyside have not addressed this problem; they just run computer models. My physics is not good enough to be able to prove that AGW joules hiding in the deep ocean (or wherever) is scientific nonsense, but I suggest that as scientists we are entitled to be told what this detailed physics is.

Or is this just the old business of "Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive".

A comment on Bengtsson by Lee Rodgers [sregdoreel@yahoo.com]

I am afraid that in this respect the Nature paper has been misunderstood, perhaps deliberately so, as it does in no way constitute a prediction but only a possible development of the climate system. So a couple of colder years cannot be ruled out.

I don't believe the Keenlyside has been deliberately misrepresented (although there are those industrial apologists who might find far more expansive opportunities at fully exculpating CO2). Even Andy Revkin at the New York Times "dot Earth" column took a similar understanding, that warming would resume in earnest by 2014. Either the press release from Keenlyside was too easily misinterpreted or there's a broader sentiment afoot that is leading people to question a protracted rate of 0.2 degrC/decade. A long, unanticipated lull in temperature increases might have something to do with it. Having Al Gore trying to cash in on anthropogenic climate change hasn't helped (at least here in the States).

We are, as IPCC correctly has stated, now with high probability sure that the long term warming of the climate and corresponding increase in water vapour, are due to more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Any other explanation at our present understanding is simply not credible.

This is where interested lay people like myself find ourselves in a quandary. We have your assertions of "high probability" in one hand, and the apparent, and apparently unexpected, falsification of long-trend warming-only climate model projections on the other hand. It's becoming such that almost any explanation would suffice.

Americans of my generation were drilled throughout our education to not tweak the data, to throw out the outlying data points, and to reject the hypothesis when it's found to be falsified by a particular piece of data. What I keep reading is that the NASA/GISS dataset is an outlier and that the IPCC projections (as recent as IPCC AR4) are now falling outside of statistical litmi. I can sustain a willingness to believe in the proclamations of a young science only so much. To convince me once again means I need a greater preponderance of evidence than before.

Nineteenth century evolutionary biology seemed just as unlikely as creationism. The fossil record (and now genetic analysis) serves up an empirical edifice that reifies theory into the realm of likelihood via the all-important litmus of evidence. It's a relative statement, if evolution seems unlikely, then creationism is nearly impossible. Frustrating as it may seem, this is the litmus test for credibility employed by skeptical laypersons: "Please show me."

What I, and I gather more and more well-read lay people like myself, want is a good, detailed and reasonable explanation, not desperate statements that we're deliberately misconstruing study findings. As recalcitrant as an old horse that is tired of being cajoled, the public is tiring of attempts to spur it into new taxes and bigger government with desperate pleas when the evidence doesn't seem overwhelming or conclusive.

It doesn't help that Al Gore is now deep into TWO big investment funds that derive profits from carbon credit trading. The climatology field might be comprised of earnest and honest researchers, but the scent of opportunism is wafting from the galleries of politicians and activists. Possibly out of naivete, scientists erred in oversimplifying the warming-only case with the hopes that either big perturbations wouldn't rear their ugly heads or the public would be more forgiving of perturbations in the outcome.

To also fail to equivocate about predictive power while also entrusting the dissemination of the science to those least qualified to adequately relay the concepts - the politicians and the media - seems to me rather incautious. I become ever more incredulous when the IPCC itself appears more of a mechanism intended to defend Kyoto than that of a clearinghouse to promote real climate science. I know how big bureaucracies work, and rarely does truth trickle out of the bottom (let alone I could enumerate any number of salient findings excluded from IPCC reports - replete with shenanigans).

What I getting at is this: If by 2015 - 2020 the temperature trend remains relatively stable and doesn't zoom upward to catch up with ever-accelerating CO2 levels, the standard by which climatology will have to be measured is sure to be set ever higher in the minds of the public. I think I'd be justified in concluding that a 15 year lull is more than just a mere perturbation due to natural variations. Frankly, I'd think that 7 years would be enough to cast deep doubts on the whole enterprise, but I'll grant a bit more forebearance yet. Just don't ask me to underwrite some very expensive remedies until then.

With that, I want to put my critique into perspective: I am a climate moderate. I believe that CO2 indeed causes some warming, but I've yet to see evidence of dangerous climate change. Were I only to judge this strictly on the basis of temperature trends, I'd say the current warming trend corroborates CO2's logarithmic warming curve of 1.2 degrC increase in temperature as CO2 levels trend from 280 - 560 ppm. That's a believable baseline and it's canonical in the field.

Trend lines, however aren't enough. When I read that the centennial boreal thaw has been ascribed largely to industrial soot deposition (C. Zender, et al) and is culpable for nearly 20 percent of all global warming, that tropospheric soot may contribute easily 35 percent to all global temperature anomalies (V. Ramanathan, et al), that the Argo autonomous submersibles have yet to locate the bulk of errant heat predicted by warming-only scenarios and the Aqua data is finding less-than-anticipated water vapor in the atmosphere and I find myself seriously tempted to conclude that the moderate warming scenario is far more credible in explaining this ongoing temperature plateau.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but then the sun is being reasonably forecast to be in the full throes of a solar grand minimum by 2020, with half-amplitude solar cycles for the rest of the century. Shindell, et al, of NASA/GISS modeled the results of solar grand minima in 2001 and found that SGM would indeed induce a moderate global cooling trend, with falling inland temperatures characteristic of the Little Ice Age.

I find all my statements to be perfectly reasonable and moderate qualifiers on the state of the art of climatology. Ramanathan himself clearly stated that his findings surprised not only him, but flew in the face of conventional thinking about aerosols. It seems reasonable then to subtract the warming caused by aerosols from the CO2 column. If it isn't reasonable to do so, then why not?

But do I hear mention of this or the other field data reversals from climatologists? No.

And yet these exceptions, these apparent nulls knocking on the side of the warming-only hypothesis, are tremendously salient to the discussion. It would seem then the neglect of their mention is a profession-wide sin of omission.

So where's the biggest credibility problem? With the industrial apologists who played their global cooling hand too early? They're not scientists! I know to already double check their speculations by verifying their sources. But when the media cites the warming-only scenarios to the exclusion of other important data, the field comes to resemble an agenda-driven crusade led by opportunists and activists, not sage and conservative empiricism. Climatology is suffering a crisis of confidence. Consider how it appears in the public eye as we're inundated on a daily basis that global warming causes just about everything, from increased flea bites to more-frequent shark attacks. When laypeople speculate about the thermal exchange capacity of the oceans and wonder if ENSO can offset more atmospheric heating than has been known, they're cast off as a deniers. But when scientists posit equally speculative statements about sharks and fleas, we're supposed to yield to their credentials? Really. Have some researchers no shame?

I think everyone wants to be sympathetic to calls against complacency, but the whole call to mobilize the world has acquired the hysterical tone of a poorly conceived children's crusade. It's time the climatology field did something to clean up its own back yard.

Lennart Bengtsson [lennart.bengtsson@zmaw.de] replies to Lee Rodgers:

Climate is complex but sometimes I believe to communicate climate research to laymen is even more difficult. What I tried to explain was that climate variations or for that matter weather variations on time scales of up to several decades are virtually unpredictable. The long-term evolution of climate on the other hand - and here I mean on a time scale of a century or longer - is in all likelihood more robust. Climate is, as we have found, undergoing a slow warming which broadly is consistent with a combined forcing of greenhouse gases and aerosols including enhancement from increasing water vapor. The range of this secular trend is 2-5 degrees C calculated to the best of our ability. Assuming present and projected emissions this is, in my view, the most likely change. I take here the same view as when I take an insurance on my house and its content. I prepare for the worst and hope for the best. We cannot presently do climate projections better than so at present. Maybe, we will never be able to do it as the system is partially unpredictable. A warming of a few degrees is no main disaster for the world during the next fifty to hundred years or so but a serious problem and the most serious is the very long residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere. We must find ways to get rid of it or else we will have to face increasing difficulties with raising sea level further ahead.

However, an even more serious problem is lack of suitable energy for the world and this must be addressed in all urgency. To do nothing is simply too risky. In this respect the industrial world has not been able to provide leadership.




Global warming hysteria reaching new heights

New Scientist, which revealed last year that obesity causes global warming, now tells us that global warming will make days longer, which has been confirmed by NASA. So not only is at least one global warming hysteric worried that efforts to stop global warming may slow the rotation of the earth, but the hysterical New Scientist reports that global warming itself slows it:

Global warming will make days longer as well as hotter, say Belgian scientists. A team led by Olivier de Viron of the Royal Observatory of Belgium has calculated the impact of global warming from the build-up of greenhouse gases in the air on the angular momentum of the planet.

So we might at well get used to longer and longer days. Who needs Daylight Savings Time anymore?

Oops, days already are getting longer, and have been for billions of years before Bill Clinton ate his first Big Mac or scientists had too much time on their hands and too much tax money to spend.

The Left is beyond parody. NASA's next manned mission to the moon is further away than the first mission was when President Kennedy announced the goal of getting there and back within the decade. Iran is building an atomic bomb, North Korea has one, the Russians and Chinese are rapidly increasing the size of their militaries, Islamofascist fanatics are killing people over cartoons, and NASA is busy calculating that a hypothetical half meter increase in sea level brought on by global warming will increase the effective radius of the earth by one part in 20 million, thus slowing its rotation and lengthening the day.

What I find truly evil is not that Belgian scientists are frightening people into worrying that the world will stop rotating; after all, NASA is brave enough about it. No, what is truly evil is that Al Gore and his scientific prostitutes take advantage of people's ignorance. Al Gore must have said a thousand times that we must "stop climate change" on a planet that has had billions of years of climate change. We must preserve the composition of an atmosphere that has never had a stable composition.

Astronomy Today by Eric Chaisson and Steve McMillan says in a passage that too few students seem to have read or remembered that tidal effects are slowing down the rotation of the earth. A half billion years ago, days were only twenty-two hours long. If the rate of slowing in the preceding billion and a half years was the same as it has been in the last half a billion, then two billion years ago, days lasted only sixteen hours.

The rotation of the earth is slowing, the distance of the moon is increasing, the atmosphere of the earth and the radiation of the sun keep changing, continents drift together and break apart, volcanoes erupt unpredictably, asteroids crash intermittently, and Al Gore, the Nobel committee, three presidential candidates, and the United Nations tell us that we have to sacrifice one tenth of our economy to keep it from all happening.

Source.

Interesting though the examples given above are, an even weirder example has just emerged: A claim that global warming will poison your cornflakes. It is too much in an imaginary world of its own to be worth a detailed reply but one might note that even the newspaper site reporting the claim put it in its "weird" section




Kiwi Climatology

Global-warming alarmists tend to understate the true costs of cutting greenhouse gas emissions. So give credit to New Zealanders, who seem poised to give the rest of us a real-life illustration of those costs. This month, Wellington is debating a cap-and-trade scheme to meet its Kyoto Protocol targets. Because New Zealand is already a low carbon-dioxide emitter, the bulk of its emissions come from agricultural sources, such as, well, sheep. So the government is proposing to implement caps not only on carbon dioxide from industry but also on methane and nitrous oxide from farms. If passed, the Kiwi plan would be the broadest cap-and-trade program to date.

As in smaller schemes in the U.S. and European Union, the government would cap the country's emissions at a level allowable under Kyoto, and then distribute tradeable credits to businesses and farmers. Low emitters could sell excess credits, while high emitters could buy credits to cover their "extra" emissions. Under Kyoto, New Zealand committed to reduce its emissions to 1990 levels, in effect a 30% reduction from expected emissions in 2012.

Meeting those targets will be hard. New Zealand already uses a wide range of hydropower and renewable energy to cut carbon dioxide use. For the agricultural gases, new kinds of fertilizers might help, but only to a point. For the rest of the cuts, farmers will have to persuade cows and sheep to emit less - or have fewer cows and sheep.

The cost, for farmers and industry alike, is likely to be prohibitive. The New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, an independent consulting firm, recently estimated that the government's plan would result in 22,000 job losses by 2012, or 1% of today's employment. That translates into NZ$4.6 billion ($3.6 billion) annually in lost GDP, or a NZ$3,000 cut in each household's annual spending.

This analysis assumes that as greenhouse gas fees make Kiwi industry less competitive globally, businesses and jobs will move overseas. The government disputes this conclusion, mainly because its own analyses assume New Zealanders will be willing to take lower wages. That's debateable, to say the least. That aside, give the Kiwis credit for honesty. Having signed up for Kyoto, they're actually talking about shouldering the costs of meeting their commitments. Whether or not they end up regretting it, other countries will now have a chance to see what the anticarbon crusade does to an economy.

Source




Wind ($23.37) v. Gas (25 Cents)

Congress seems ready to spend billions on a new "Manhattan Project" for green energy, or at least the political class really, really likes talking about one. But maybe we should look at what our energy subsidy dollars are buying now.

Some clarity comes from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), an independent federal agency that tried to quantify government spending on energy production in 2007. The agency reports that the total taxpayer bill was $16.6 billion in direct subsidies, tax breaks, loan guarantees and the like. That's double in real dollars from eight years earlier, as you'd expect given all the money Congress is throwing at "renewables." Even more subsidies are set to pass this year.

An even better way to tell the story is by how much taxpayer money is dispensed per unit of energy, so the costs are standardized. For electricity generation, the EIA concludes that solar energy is subsidized to the tune of $24.34 per megawatt hour, wind $23.37 and "clean coal" $29.81. By contrast, normal coal receives 44 cents, natural gas a mere quarter, hydroelectric about 67 cents and nuclear power $1.59.

The wind and solar lobbies are currently moaning that they don't get their fair share of the subsidy pie. They also argue that subsidies per unit of energy are always higher at an early stage of development, before innovation makes large-scale production possible. But wind and solar have been on the subsidy take for years, and they still account for less than 1% of total net electricity generation. Would it make any difference if the federal subsidy for wind were $50 per megawatt hour, or even $100? Almost certainly not without a technological breakthrough.

By contrast, nuclear power provides 20% of U.S. base electricity production, yet it is subsidized about 15 times less than wind. We prefer an energy policy that lets markets determine which energy source dominates. But if you believe in subsidies, then nuclear power gets a lot more power for the buck than other "alternatives."

The same study also looked at federal subsidies for non-electrical energy production, such as for fuel. It found that ethanol and biofuels receive $5.72 per British thermal unit of energy produced. That compares to $2.82 for solar and $1.35 for refined coal, but only three cents per BTU for natural gas and other petroleum liquids.

All of this shows that there is a reason fossil fuels continue to dominate American energy production: They are extremely cost-effective. That's a reality to keep in mind the next time you hear a politician talk about creating millions of "green jobs." Those jobs won't come cheap, and you'll be paying for them.

Source




The glories of public transport in Australia's biggest city

Another reason why most people will stick to their cars

I heard him before I saw him - a young man with hands on his ears standing still amid the churning, lurching chaos that is platform one at Town Hall station. "Can you please just shut up. Christ. Just shut up." It turned out I was not the only one being driven mad by the lecturing, hectoring voice on the platform speakers, the latest horror to confront commuters.

Town Hall at peak hour is a dirty, dangerously overcrowded, stifling hot environment that looks and feels like an accident waiting to happen. But now, in what is presumably an effort to give the impression that something is being done, the captive commuters squashed on the platforms are lectured on safety, crowding, and train-travel etiquette by some insufferable Big Brother.

"Can that man sitting on the steps please move," the invisible voice booms. Then louder. "That man on the steps who is blocking the way. Please move." Then, infuriated: "You, that man in the brown overcoat, there's no reason to block the steps. You are holding up people who want to use the stairs." Finally, the tired commuter who has been held up to us all as the cause of our mutual subterranean unhappiness, realises he has been made the scapegoat. The woes of Town Hall station are all his fault. He slinks off to join the other miserable but upright commuters.

It does not stop there. "The all-stations train to Bankstown is now at Circular Quay . the train should be here in about two minutes. So just be patient," the voice booms. We know that. It says so on the board. "Can passengers please stay behind the yellow line while the train approaches." I would gladly do so if a three-person deep crowd was not exploding behind me.

"Those people crowding the train doors - you are a danger to yourselves as well as to others." No, the real danger here is that nothing has been done to upgrade this station to cater for today's crowds. But on it goes. The voice is relentless, monotonous and narky. "We all want to get home, and pushing and shoving won't make things happen more quickly."

We don't know what's good for us, is the message, and CityRail is going to make sure we understand. If there was any real concern about overcrowding at Town Hall station, built in 1916, then new exits would be created. It can take an eternity in peak hour just to get on the escalator from the bowels of the station. A fire down there would be . well, it's not worth thinking about.

If there was any concern about the risk of commuters falling from platforms the station would be redesigned so those waiting were not forced on top of one another. And if there was any thought at all about commuter comfort there would be more than just token seating (I, too, have had to sit on the stairs - when eight months' pregnant) and a real attempt to fix the stifling conditions.

In 2005, when RailCorp announced a multi-million-dollar plan to upgrade Town Hall, the tender package warned that the station was a serious danger to the public. Last month the Herald revealed that a report by Parsons Brinckerhoff found the station "cannot currently be fully evacuated in the morning and evening peaks within times stipulated by [the fire safety standard]".

RailCorp said a widening of the main concourse and ticket barrier expansion had improved access, but the projected commuter growth remained unaccounted for. Within eight years 168,000 people would pass through the station each day, up from about 140,000 now. By 2021 there will be 178,000.

For more than 10 years I have used the station to get to work, but it is only this year that have had to do so in peak hour. In that time I have had trouble breathing in sauna-like conditions; had to tiptoe around pools of blood and been caught on overcrowded trains where people were forced to travel to the next stop while jammed helplessly against the doors. Many times I have thought how easy it would be to fall off the narrow platforms, or to be accidentally pushed off. Just one person losing their footing would do it or - perhaps more likely - just one person losing their mind.

Source

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13 May, 2008

WILL LIFE BE WORTH LIVING IN 2000 AD?

An amusing look at a 1961 attempt at prophecy. The prophecies were said to be based on "science fact" but they were 99% wrong

What sort of life will you be living 39 years from now? Scientists have looked into the future and they can tell you. It looks as if everything will be so easy that people will probably die from sheer boredom. You will be whisked around in monorail vehicles at 200 miles an hour and you will think nothing of taking a fortnight's holiday in outer space. Your house will probably have air walls, and a floating roof, adjustable to the angle of the sun. Doors will open automatically, and clothing will be put away by remote control. The heating and cooling systems will be built into the furniture and rugs.

You'll have a home control room - an electronics centre, where messages will be recorded when you're away from home. This will play back when you return, and also give you up-to-the minute world news, and transcribe your latest mail. You'll have wall-to-wall global TV, an indoor swimming pool, TV-telephones and room-to-room TV. Press a button and you can change the decor of a room.

The status symbol of the year 2000 will be the home computer help, which will help mother tend the children, cook the meals and issue reminders of appointments. Cooking will be in solar ovens with microwave controls. Garbage will be refrigerated, and pressed into fertiliser pellets.

Food won't be very different from 1961, but there will be a few new dishes - instant bread, sugar made from sawdust, foodless foods (minus nutritional properties), juice powders and synthetic tea and cocoa. Energy will come in tablet form.

At work, Dad will operate on a 24 hour week. The office will be air-conditioned with stimulating scents and extra oxygen - to give a physical and psychological lift. Mail and newspapers will be reproduced instantly anywhere in the world by facsimile. There will be machines doing the work of clerks, shorthand writers and translators. Machines will "talk" to each other.

It will be the age of press-button transportation. Rocket belts will increase a man's stride to 30 feet, and bus-type helicopters will travel along crowded air skyways. There will be moving plastic-covered pavements, individual hoppicopters, and 200 m.p.h. monorail trains operating in all large cities.

The family car will be soundless, vibrationless and self-propelled thermostatically. The engine will be smaller than a typewriter. Cars will travel overland on an 18 inch air cushion. Railways will have one central dispatcher, who will control a whole nation's traffic. Jet trains will be guided by electronic brains.

In commercial transportation, there will be travel at 1000 m.p.h. at a penny a mile. Hypersonic passenger planes, using solid fuels, will reach any part of the world in an hour. By the year 2020, five per cent of the world's population will have emigrated into space. Many will have visited the moon and beyond.

Our children will learn from TV, recorders and teaching machines. They will get pills to make them learn faster. We shall be healthier, too. There will be no common colds, cancer, tooth decay or mental illness. Medically induced growth of amputated limbs will be possible. Rejuvenation will be in the middle stages of research, and people will live, healthily, to 85 or 100.

There's a lot more besides to make H.G. Wells and George Orwell sound like they're getting left behind. And this isn't science fiction. It's science fact - futuristic ideas, conceived by imaginative young men, whose crazy-sounding schemes have got the nod from the scientists. It's the way they think the world will live in the next century - if there's any world left!

Source




Cold Water Thrown on Antarctic Global-Warming Predictions

Antarctica hasn't warmed as much over the last century as climate models had originally predicted, a new study finds. Climate change's effects on Antarctica are of particular interest because of the substantial amount of water locked up in its ice sheets. Should that water begin to melt, sea levels around the globe could rise and inundate low-lying coastal areas.

The new study, detailed in the April 5 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, marks the first time that researchers have been able to give a progress report on Antarctic climate model projections by comparing climate records to model simulations. (These comparisons have already been done for the other six continents.)

Information about Antarctica's harsh weather patterns has traditionally been limited, but temperature records from ice cores and ground weather stations have recently been constructed, giving scientists the missing information they needed. "This is a really important exercise for these climate models," said study leader Andrew Monaghan of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Co.

Monaghan and his team found that while climate models projected temperature increases of 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.75 degrees Celsius) over the past century, temperatures were observed to have risen by only 0.4 F (0.2 C). "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," Monaghan said.

The gap between prediction and reality seemed to be caused by the models overestimating the amount of water vapor in the Antarctic atmosphere. The cold air over the southernmost continent handles moisture differently than the atmosphere over warmer regions. The models did, however, correctly capture the increases in snowfall over Antarctica in the late 20th century, followed by a decrease in the last decade.

One reason that Antarctica hasn't warmed as much as other parts of the globe is the existence of the man-made ozone hole overhead: It alters wind patterns, creating a swirling belt of winds around the landmass that keeps comparatively warm air from seeping in, preserving the continent's frigid temperatures. One important exception to this rule is the Antarctic Peninsula, which has warmed by several degrees, in part because winds there draw in warmer air from the north.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that sea levels could rise by 7 to 23 inches (18 to 59 centimeters) globally this century, in part due to ice melt at both poles and from mountain glaciers. The new study, funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, suggests that warming in Antarctica could offset this amount by about 2 inches (5 centimeters) if the continent warms by 5.4 F (3 C), as warmer air would hold more moisture and generate more snowfall, which contributes to the growth of the ice sheets, locking up any additional water in the these large masses of ice. That would mean a rise of only 5 to 21 inches (13 to 54 centimeters).

But these projections are by no means certain - if melt from Antarctic ice sheets outweighed the snowfall that contributes to their growth, sea level rise could be higher. "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," Monaghan said. "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 findings of the study don't call into question model projections for other parts of the globe, Monaghan said. "The models are really doing quite a good job at simulating the 20th-century changes [Wise after the event] over the six inhabited continents," he told LiveScience.

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Greens Going for the Green

Even with the human tragedy of Cyclone Nargis still unfolding in Burma, environmentalists aren't wasting any time linking the disaster to global warming. Or at least one isn't: Al Gore. Citing the deadly Burmese storm and recent storms in China and Bangladesh, he declared on National Public Radio: "We're seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming."

There's just one problem -- it's not clear there's any link between climate change and hurricane numbers or intensity. The number of big storms has been falling, not rising. As for intensity, researchers led by Christopher Landsea of the National Hurricane Center have found that earlier generations of hurricane-watchers using inferior satellite imagery incorrectly classified many storms as weaker than they actually were. After correcting for this mismeasurement, the "increase" in storm intensity since the 1970s nearly disappears.

But Mr. Gore is perhaps too busy these days to follow the science closely. In April, a London-based company he chairs began selling shares in its so-called Global Sustainability Fund to small investors in New Zealand, following a similar offer to investors in Australia (interestingly, out of sight of the U.S. press). He was also a conspicuously invoked presence when the Silicon Valley firm Kleiner Perkins this month announced a new $500 million "green growth" fund in partnership with Mr. Gore's London firm. Asked by the San Jose Mercury News if Mr. Gore had been helpful in raising money, co-manager John Denniston replied: "That's not been his primary responsibility."

Uh huh. Mr. Gore's primary responsibility, from the looks of it, is to spread alarm about global warming and create the political conditions (subsidies, mandates) without which Kleiner's "green" energy ventures are unlikely to flourish. Expect the payoff to come next year as a new Congress and President debate global warming policy.

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BIOFOOLS: GREEN CRAZE HITS BRITISH FAMILIES TOO

Millions of families are having to spend almost 1,000 pounds a year extra on food after more punishing price rises. The annual increase in the price of a basket of essentials surged to 19.1 per cent in May, according to the Daily Mail Cost of Living Index. The rate has jumped alarmingly from 15.5 per cent in April - a 3.6 per cent rise - and there is no sign of the pressure easing. There is now a worldwide crisis over supplies of key crops such as corn, wheat and rice. It has triggered food riots in some countries. And in the UK it has brought the biggest rises in bills in a generation.

A family which spent 100 pounds a week on food last year now has to find another 19.10 for the same products, equivalent to 993 a year. Once "must-pay" bills for petrol, mortgages, power and council tax are added, the extra cost is more like 2,200 pounds. Yet the official inflation rate is just 2.6per cent.

Experts say a worldwide drive to produce biofuels - made from corn, wheat and soya as an alternative to oil - is a major factor. Farmers have switched from food production to biofuel crops. Last month, the EU agreed the biofuel content of all petrol and diesel should be 2.5 per cent. This is set to rise to 10 per cent by 2020.

But the Government's two most senior scientists, Professor John Beddington and Professor Robert Watson, have called for a rethink on the rush to biofuels. Professor Beddington said: "It's very hard to imagine the world growing enough crops to produce renewable energy and at the same time meet the enormous demand for food." Gordon Brown is understood to be preparing to call on the EU to scrap the plan.

More here




MUST WE SUFFER GLOBAL FAMINE AGAIN?

Do today's soaring food prices and Third World food riots mean we're headed for global famine? Not any time soon-if we suspend the biofuels mandates quickly. Unfortunately, if we keep burning corn, wheat, and palm oil in our vehicles, there's no limit to the hunger, malnutrition, wildlife extinction and political disruption we can cause.

The problem is simple: Food demand is inelastic. People need about the same number of calories whether they're expensive or cheap. But the demand for biofuels is almost without limit. An acre of corn produces only 50 gallons worth of gasoline per acre, while humans worldwide burn more than a trillion gallons of gasoline per year. Biofuels could absorb the whole world's crop production without bringing down gasoline prices-because we're banning coal and refusing to drill for oil. If we want to keep on eating, we'll have to scrap the false "fuel security" of the biofuels.

Even giving up biofuels won't stave off the world's hunger for long, because we'll need more than twice as much food and feed per year by 2050. The number of humans is likely to peak at about 8 billion, up from today's 6.4 billion, and at least 7 billion of them are likely to be affluent enough to eat meat and ice cream. They'll have fewer children-but more pets, few of them vegetarian.

If the world plans to have forests, wildlands, and wildlife species in the 22nd century, then we'll need to triple the crop yields on the land we already farm-just for food and feed. Except for a chunk of western Brazil, there isn't much high-quality cropland left in the world for cropland expansion, and none of it "extra" for biofuels.

But the same people who don't want us to burn coal are telling us not to raise high-yield crops either. Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund tell us not to use nitrogen fertilizer taken from the air. They demand organic-only nitrogen from cattle manure or green manure crops-but such low-yield systems produce only half as much food per acre.

We're locked into the same "don't use it" debate on food as on energy. Is the Greens' information on high yield crops any better than their "advice" on global warming-which tells us to stop burning fossil fuels though the world has cooled over the last ten years?

The funding for farm science has declined sharply since Dr. Norman Borlaug led the Green Revolution and saved a billion people from starving. America's land-grant universities are now researching how to farm organically, though such "research" has never produced a yield breakthrough. The high-yield studies are being done mainly by agribusiness-and by Bill Gates who has vowed to rekindle a Green Revolution for Africa whether the Greens like it or not.

Now, a big new report from the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) has been cited as evidence that industrialized food production is screwing up the planet. This report was supposed to be the "big tent" laying out the consensus path for future agricultural research. The land-grant agriculture schools, Greenpeace, agribusiness, FAO, all were included. But, by the time the report was issued, only Greenpeace seemed to be at the drafting table.

And guess who's in charge of this new "pattern for farming's future"? Robert Watson, a British-born chemist who served as chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from 1997-2002. What are the chances that the Greens' farm science is any more honest than the IPCC's global warming "science"?

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Climate warming would BOOST farm output in Australia (and elsewhere)

A bit of logic for a change. That CO2 is a potent plant fertiliser and that a warmer climate would mean more rain overall are basic facts that Greenies never mention. And a dry continent like Australia could certainly make good use of more rain!

AUSTRALIAN agricultural output will double over the next 40 years, with climate change predicted to increase, rather than hinder, the level of production.

A recent spate of reports forecasting the decline of Australian agriculture because of climate change have greatly exaggerated, and even completely misreported the threat of global warming, according to senior rural industry figures. In a report published by the Australian Farm Institute, executive director Mick Keogh says agricultural output is projected to improve strongly through to 2050, with a growing global population and increased economic wealth boosting demand for Australian produce. If the sector adapts even modestly, production would increase rather than decrease as a result of climate change, the report says.

Predictions of a 20 per cent drop in farm production by mid-century were cited by Kevin Rudd and Agriculture Minister Tony Burke as justification for Australia's signing of the Kyoto Protocol. In fact, Mr Keogh says, if global warming does occur, some areas such as southeast Queensland will receive more rain, and as a result will greatly benefit. Recent research has shown increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lifts plant production by up to 30 per cent in a phenomenon known as carbon fertilisation.

Mr Keogh, a well-respected industry figure, said much of the media reporting on the recent ABARE report Climate Change: Impacts On Australian Agriculture, was so misleading it risked eroding industry confidence in public research agencies. "The reporting claimed that agriculture would be absolutely devastated, when that is not what the research showed at all," he said. "For a start the media consistently misreported the research results as a future reduction in agricultural output, rather than a slowing of future rates of growth in output."

He said the ABARE report chose a series of highly unlikely worst-case climate change scenarios and then projected them over a long period of time. ABARE also used the assumption that climate change would slow economic growth globally, thereby decreasing the demand for food. "With increasing world population this is highly unlikely," Mr Keogh said.

Also unlikely was the assumption that farmers would not adapt. "In many situations it appears as if an increase in temperature, certainly over the next few decades, will increase rather than decrease productivity," he said. "As well, open field studies are returning increases in plant productivity of about 15 per cent with increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Levels up to 30 per cent have been returned in laboratory studies."

Charles Burke, a fourth-generation cattle farmer at Lake Somerset, north of Brisbane, said most farmers were sceptical of the claims surrounding climate change and believed they were instead dealing with climate variability. After the recent dry, he hoped the Australian Farm Institute was right in its predictions southeast Queensland would benefit from more rainfall. "No one has their head in their sand, but farmers want to move forward armed with the right information," he said. "The experts can't agree. Many farmers aren't convinced. We have to have the right information and the right tools. We need to make sure the information is correct."

Chief executive for the National Farmers Federation Ben Fargher said his members too had been concerned about the negative reporting of the industry's future. "We are very well placed to grow businesses into the future," he said.

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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12 May, 2008

Polar bears OK without our help

Says the Boston Herald:

Thursday is the deadline set by a federal judge in Alaska for the Fish and Wildlife Service to decide whether the polar bear is a threatened or endangered species. All the evidence shows the polar bear doesn't need his help. Environmental groups petitioned for such a listing and sued when a decision was not forthcoming by the deadline. They claimed that global warming had already diminished polar ice, would continue to do so and doom the estimated 23,000 or so bears to extinction by perhaps 2050.

If the bears were listed, the service would be obliged to designate "critical habitat." The Endangered Species Act provides that each federal agency would have to `insure that any action authorized, funded or carried out by such agency is not likely to jeopardize any endangered species or threatened species or result in the destruction or adverse modification (our italics) of (critical) habitat of such species."

The environmentalists, if not the service, could claim that any activity that emitted carbon dioxide, the chief gas causing the supposed warming, could not be authorized, financed or done by a federal agency. The agencies would have to bring the modern world to a crash as no fossil fuels could be burned in power plants, no highways built and so forth throughout the economy.

The plaintiffs' claims are highly dubious. Polar ice is shrinking, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in October that it was caused not by warming but a shift in wind patterns that pushed more ice out of the Arctic. Another report in January said surface warming in the Arctic was caused by unexplained atmospheric heat transfer from the tropics.

Polar bears have been around for 100,000 years, surviving much warmer temperatures before the last ice age. Population estimates are subject to huge and unknowable uncertainties. Native groups say there are more than there were several decades ago. Environmentalists are pursuing another petition to list a seal species as endangered - one eaten by bears, it seems. If there weren't so many bears, there'd be more seals. Canada, on whose territory about two-thirds of the bears live, has refused to classify them as threatened or endangered. The United States should follow suit.

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More unscientific polar bear nonsense

A new study has claimed that the research done by the US Department of the Interior to determine if global warming threatens the polar bear population is so flawed that it cannot be used to justify listing the polar bear as an endangered species.

The research came about when on April 30, US District Judge Claudia Wilken ordered the Interior Department to decide by May 15 whether polar bears should be listed under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act. But, after professor J. Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School and colleagues undertook an audit at the request of the state of Alaska , they found the Interior Department report to be flawed.

As part of the subsequent study, the authors examined nine US Geological Survey Administrative Reports. Professor Armstrong and his colleagues concluded that the most relevant study, properly applied only 15% of relevant forecasting principles and that the second study only 10%, while 46% were clearly contravened and 23% were apparently contravened. Further, according to them, the Geologic Survey reports do not adequately substantiate the authors' assumptions about changes to sea ice and polar bears' ability to adapt that are key to the recommendations.

Therefore, the authors write, a key feature of the US Geological Survey reports is not scientifically supported. The consequence, they maintain, is significant: The Interior Department cannot use the series of reports as a sound scientific basis for a decision about listing the polar bear as an endangered species.

According to Armstrong, to list a species that is currently in good health as an endangered species requires valid forecasts that its population would decline to levels that threaten its viability. In fact, the polar bear populations have been increasing rapidly in recent decades due to hunting restrictions. Assuming these restrictions remain, the most appropriate forecast is to assume that the upward trend would continue for a few years, then level off.

"These studies are meant to inform the US Fish and Wildlife Service about listing the polar bear as endangered," said Armstrong. "After careful examination, my co-authors and I were unable to find any references to works providing evidence that the forecasting methods used in the reports had been previously validated. In essence, they give no scientific basis for deciding one way or the other about the polar bear," he added.

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Cold slows planting, crop progress in Idaho

Temperatures average 4 degrees below normal in Boise area

Cold temperatures have delayed planting and slowed crop growth across much of Idaho this spring. Temperatures in Boise during April averaged 4 degrees below normal, according to the National Weather Service. This month has gotten off to a cold start too, with low temperatures on May 1 dipping to 27 degrees in the Jerome area, covering sprinkler irrigation lines in ice.

Despite the cold temperatures, reported crop damage has been minor and mostly limited to orchards in Western Idaho. Planting of corn and small grain crops has lagged considerably behind last year's pace, according to a crop progress report released May 4 by National Agricultural Statistics Service's Idaho field office. Statewide, planting of field corn was only 19 percent completed at the end of last week, compared with 39 percent last year, the agency reported. Spring wheat and barley planting also lagged considerably behind last year's pace in some areas of the state....

"Our planting progress has been slower than most years," said Leonard Kerbs, agriculture manager for Amalgamated Sugar Company's Twin Falls district. Delayed beet planting is only partly because of the cold weather. Growers purposely held off planting beets early because they knew there might be a problem getting replacement seed in the event of frost damage, Kerbs said. This year for the first time nearly all of the Idaho sugar beet crop will be in Roundup Ready varieties.

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The Cost and Futility of Trading Hot Air

The "Environmental Defence Fund" (EDF) has circulated a "Report " that says the cost of controlling the "pollution that causes `global warming'" is "only pennies a day . almost too small to measure." The conclusions, summarized by EDF, are -

* "We cannot afford to wait. Further delay will greatly increase the costs of making necessary emissions cuts and will risk locking in irreversible climate change." The "Report" says: "The scientific consensus is clear: Global `warming' is real, and it is already happening. While nobody can be certain about the exact timing or location of its consequences, the possible severity of those consequences is becoming increasingly clear. Allowing greenhouse gas emissions to increase unchecked is an invitation to catastrophe. The potential consequences of warming include widespread famine, triggered by extreme drought in the major grain-producing areas of the world; the wholesale disappearance of the world's coral reefs; and sea levels rising by several meters over the course of a few centuries." The "Report" concludes that we must act now to avoid "catastrophic climate change".

* "We can afford an aggressive cap-and-trade policy to tackle `global warming'. The cost to the economy will be minimal -- less than one percent of U.S. gross domestic product in 2030. The "Report" says that the US economy will grow to "$26 trillion by 2030, but, with a cap on the greenhouse gas emissions that cause `global warming', the economy will reach the same level two to seven months later. It adds that job losses would be minimal; the new carbon market would create new jobs; that the manufacturing sector will lose a few jobs; that household consumption will fall by only one percent at worst; that increases in energy costs would be modest; and that overall costs would be small enough to permit expansion of programs to offset the burden for low-income households. The "Report" says that strict limits on `global warming' pollution can harness the power and creativity of capital markets, and that cap-and-trade would work by "turning market failure into market success". It assumes that if fossil-fueled energy were artificially made more expensive other technologies would emerge to replace it.

The "Report" is based not on theoretical demonstration nor on empirical observation but on computer models - an expensive and unreliable form of guesswork. It claims to be the first of its kind, but there have been one or two others like it, such as the now universally-discredited Stern Report , which used the same unscientific rhetoric of "market failure" together with overstatements of the imagined consequences of anthropogenic "global warming" as a substitute for rigorous economic analysis. The conclusions of the "Report" are unsound, and computer models can be - and have been - deployed to demonstrate results diametrically opposite to those which the "Report" advances.

"We cannot afford to wait, or `catastrophic climate change' will occur"

Late in 2006 the "Institute for Public Policy Research", a grandly-titled and extravagantly-funded pressure group in the UK, first proposed that the international Left should from then on declare that the science of "global warming" was settled. This proposal was accepted with alacrity by bodies worldwide such as the "Natural Resources Defense Fund" and the "Environmental Defense Fund". Not a single scientific authority or reference is cited in the "Report" for any of the supposed catastrophes arising from "global warming" that it mentions. However, peer-reviewed papers throughout the scientific journals refute such conclusions:

Catastrophe? What catastrophe?

There is no scientific "consensus" in the peer-reviewed literature to the effect that "global warming" is an actual or potential "catastrophe", still less that "allowing greenhouse-gas emissions to increase unchecked is an invitation to catastrophe". A recently-published peer-reviewed paper (Schulte , 2008) that surveyed 539 papers in the scientific journals containing the words "global climate change" and published between January 2004 and mid-February 2007 found that not a single paper provided any evidence whatsoever that "global warming" might be even potentially "catastrophic". Only one of the 539 papers reviewed even mentioned the possibility of "catastrophe", but without offering any evidence.

"Climate Change Is Real." What reality?

Next, the "Report" says, "`Global warming is real". This point was well and bluntly addressed in the spring of 2006 in a letter from 61 leading scientists in climate and related fields to the Canadian Prime Minister : "`Climate change is real' is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural `noise.'"

Warming? What warming?

The "Report's" assertion that the "possible severity" of the consequences of "global warming" is becoming "increasingly clear" is not and cannot be based on any scientific view. "Global warming" began at the end of the Maunder Minimum in 1700 and continued at a near-uniform rate of 0.5-0.7 degrees C (0.9-1.2 F) per century until 1998, when it paused. There has been no statistically-significant increase in mean global surface temperature since 1998. In the past six and a half years global temperatures have been falling at an impressive rate equivalent to 0.4 degrees C (0.7 F) per decade:

Unpredicted trend: Since late 2001, the trend of global surface temperatures has been downward. "Global warming" paused in 1998; and, though it may resume in future years, the rate of warming is less than that which the models relied upon by the IPCC had projected. Source: Hadley Centre for Forecasting / Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia.

Carbon dioxide causes some warming: therefore, the upward trend in temperatures over the past 300 years, for which steadily-increasing solar activity was chiefly but not solely responsible, may well resume in future. However, the rate at which foreseeable increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration will cause further warming is by no means "settled science"; and, as the above graph indicates, it is becoming increasingly clear with each passing year that the very high official estimates of climate sensitivity to anthropogenic CO2 enrichment are proving to be exaggerations.

For instance, Lindzen (2008) says that the failure of computer models accurately to predict the behavior of the tropical upper troposphere, a problem identified and quantified in Douglass et al. (2004, 2006, 2007), requires all of the IPCC's estimates of climate sensitivity to be divided by at least three. If Professor Lindzen is right, then there is no "climate crisis": a small, harmless, and beneficial warming rate will continue, and that is all. For a short account of the combined magnitude of this and other errors in the IPCC's official calculations of climate sensitivity, see the Technical Appendix.

Drought? What drought?

The "Report" says widespread famine may be caused by droughts arising from "global warming". However, the Clausius-Clapeyron relation mandates that, as the climate warms, the space occupied by the atmosphere is capable of carrying near-exponentially more water vapor. Therefore, in general, there will be fewer droughts. This effect has already been observed and reported. For instance, the Sahara has shrunk by 300,000 km2 in the past quarter of a century (Nicholson, 1998, 2001).

The shrinking Sahara: Throughout the period of strong "global warming", the Sahara's extent shrank by 300,000 km2. Source: Nicholson (1998, 2001). Nomadic tribes have been able to move back to areas of the Sahara that have not been settled within living memory. This is the very reverse of the pattern of "widespread drought" predicted by the "Report". Indeed, the fact that the carrying-capacity of the atmosphere for water vapor becomes greater as the climate warms has been cited by health authorities such as the World Health Organization and the Department of Health in the United Kingdom as a (false) pretext for statements that warmer and hence wetter weather will increase the world's standing water and will hence encourage the malaria mosquito to breed (though there is no scientific basis for this conclusion either).

Though the pattern of drought and flood has fluctuated in the past and will do so again in the future, there is no sound scientific reason to suppose that warmer weather will mean more droughts. The computerized guesswork of the models relied upon by the UN failed to predict the shrinking of the Sahara, and it provides no basis for concluding that drought will spread. There are fewer droughts in many parts of the world today than there was in the first half of the 20th century, when John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath, in which he graphically described the severe droughts of that era in the Great Plains - droughts that have not occurred in the warmer weather since.

Threat to corals? What threat?

The "Report's" assertion that all the world's coral reefs are imminently threatened by "global warming" is also without scientific foundation . Coral reefs are not threatened by warmer oceans : most of them prefer warmer water. Corals first came into existence by algal symbiosis some 175 million years ago, in the Triassic era, and some say they date back 500 million years. For most of that period, global temperatures are thought to have been 7 degrees Celsius (12.5 F) warmer than the present. The corals not merely survived but throve. To the extent that they are threatened at all, the threat is from pollution, and from dynamiting in aid of fishing.

The coral bleaching that was observed in 1998 was the consequence of the exceptional and sudden El Nino Southern Oscillation of that year, whose intensity had only two precedents in the previous 300 years. Both of the previous intense El Ninos also produced coral bleaching, and the corals readily survived it (Hendy et al., 2004). Going back further, Precht and Aronson (2004) concluded that between 10,000 to 6,000 years ago extratropical North Atlantic sea surface temperatures were 2-3 degrees C (3.5-5.5 F) warmer than at present and coral reefs flourished. They reported that the fossil record clearly demonstrates the ability of corals to expand their ranges poleward in response to global warming and to "reconstitute reef communities in the face of rapid environmental change." They also report that corals are expanding their territories: "There is mounting evidence that coral species are responding to recent patterns of increased SSTs by expanding their latitudinal ranges."

Sea-level rise? What sea-level rise?

Finally, the "Report" mentions the possibility of "sea levels rising by several meters over the course of a few centuries". This is true, but the implication that it arises chiefly from manmade "global warming" is entirely false. In the 10,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age, sea level has risen by 130 meters (400 feet): an average of 1.3 m (4 ft) per century. However, most of the world's land-based ice has long since melted, and nine-tenths of what remains - on the high plateaux of Greenland and Antarctica - is not at risk unless temperatures are sustained at least 2 degrees C (3.5 F) above today's for several millennia (IPCC, 2007). Indeed, in each of the past four interglacial periods neither Greenland nor Antarctica lost their ice sheets. Greenland, but not Antarctica, lost its ice sheet in the interglacial period 850,000 years ago: but temperatures in each of the interglacials of the past million years were at least 5 degrees C (9 F) higher than today's, entirely through natural causes.

There is, therefore, no scientific basis for the oft-repeated suggestion that "global warming" will melt so much ice that sea levels will imminently rise by Al Gore's imagined 20 ft. The IPCC has now reduced its estimate of the maximum sea-level rise to the year 2100 by one-third, from 0.88 m (3ft) to 0.59 m (<2ft), and nearly all of this projected increase, if it arises, will come not from melting ice but from thermosteric expansion - if the oceans continue to warm.

However, recent detailed surveys, such as Lyman et al (2006, revised 2007) show no statistically-significant warming at all. The oceans are 1100 times denser than the surface atmosphere, and they are as deep in some places as the troposphere is high: their thermal inertia, therefore, is immense. Moerner (2004), who has studied sea level throughout his distinguished, 30-year professional career and is recognized as the world's foremost expert, says there is no basis even for the UN's best estimate of a 0.43 m (17 in) rise in sea level to 2100. His own best estimate is that there will be little increase above that which was observed in the 20th century - just 8 inches.

The published literature - all of the papers cited above are peer-reviewed except the documents of the IPCC - demonstrates that there is no scientific basis for any of the alarmist propositions in the cited paragraph of the "Report" to the effect that there is a danger of imminent "catastrophe" arising from man-made "global warming".

There is no long-term danger of catastrophe either: on the evidence of past interglacial records, inferred from temperature proxies derived from ratios of oxygen isotopes in samples of air trapped in Antarctic ice-cores (Petit et al., 1999), the world is already overdue for the next Ice Age, so that after several further millennia, if not sooner, it is global cooling, not "global warming", that will be the primary concern of humankind.

In short, none of the imagined disasters is at all likely to occur before the onset of the next Ice Age, even by natural causes - still less as a result of humankind's activities. "Global warming" is not a global crisis. It requires no economic intervention by national governments, still less by supranational entities. Cap-and-trade is, therefore, unnecessary.

More here




Corn on the Cob, NOT Corn on the Car

So, here is the rub, you think you're saving the planet and, therefore the human race, by proposing that we grow our gasoline in our corn crops instead of using those eeeevil fossil fuel, right? You say let's make ethanol from our corn and all will be in balance? You feel really, really good about yourself - after all "feelings" are what counts, not results.

But, the next thing you know, they are starving in Haiti and rioting over the 40% rise in basic food costs because of you and your neato ethanol idea. Now how do you feel? Are you saving people now?

Well Representatives Jeff Flake (R, Arizona James Sensenbrenner (R, Wisconsin) have introduced HR 5911, the Remove Incentives to Produce Ethanol Act of 2008 (RIPE Act) to curb this foolish over indulgence in ethanol production. Flake laments the unintended consequences that the do-gooders in the envirowacko extreme caused with this absurd emphasis on ethanol production.

"This is a classic case of the law of unintended consequences. Congress surely did not intend to raise food prices by incentivizing ethanol, but that's precisely what's happened. A jump in food prices is the last thing our economy needs right now."

And Sensenbrenner reminds us that all the supposed benefits of ethanol were never really proved out in reality.

"I have always been opposed to reformulated gasoline (RFG) because it doesn't reduce the pollution it was supposed to, and in fact, increases other kinds of pollution," said Sensenbrenner.

"Fuel mixed with ethanol is less efficient, and results in fewer miles per gallon for consumers," Sensenbrenner continued. "Moreover, it's extremely expensive, even in the Midwest, where although corn is abundant, the cost of converting it to ethanol, and the difficulties associated with transporting it, has made it more expensive than traditional gasoline. As a result, we are seeing dramatic price increases in corn, which is hitting families hard considering the prevalence of corn in food production and in animal feed."

"The fact is, the ethanol industry has been subsidized for twenty-seven years and claims to still need the subsidies to survive," Sensenbrenner added. "If an industry cannot survive without government support after twenty-seven years, there are more serious problems in place."

With 25% of our corn crop suddenly going to ethanol production, the cost of foodstuff has seen a big inflation in costs, not just here in the US but all across the world. After all, if corn is to be subsidized by the government, farmers will gravitate to the crop that pays them the most. And since the US really does feed the world, less (corn) is not more (food) in this case.

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There's no such thing as a happy Greenie

Imagine a concept for the perfect "green", safe, sustainable, zero-emissions, invisible (literally) energy technology with potential for limitless power. Radical environmentalists will still object!

This is what I learned when I perused the website of Florida Atlantic University's (FAU) Center of Excellence for Ocean Energy Technology, which is pursuing R&D on innovative technology to anchor buoys 500 meters deep in the gulf stream equipped with turbines to harness the slow but powerful, steady, ocean-current for generation of electricity. At the depth proposed, the turbines will be insulated from damaging surface waves and storms; they will also be deeper than almost all marine life, except whales. As a practicing engineer, I personally think that the idea has tremendous potential. My own assessment is that the most difficult problem to overcome will be protection of the moving parts and high-voltage power transmission cables from the notoriously corrosive effects of salt-water. Nonetheless, here are the practical and green attributes of this proposed concept:

Sustainable -- no fuel whatsoever

Zero emissions

Invisible (literally submerged far off-shore) so it overcomes "not in my back yard" ((NIMBY)

Safe - no radiation or spent fuel rods to store for millennia

An environmentalist's dream right? Wrong! Check out the comments from this environmental website in an article that reports on FAU's project, where they compete with each other to devise objections, such as:

- I'm glad they're investigating the impact on sea life. I strongly suspect they'll find this doesn't work out with the creatures who were there first.

- In my humble opinion it looks like that the installation of these underwater turbine will create an ecological disaster! Based on the 3D rendering above it looks like one would have to destroy the ocean floor to build and erect these monstrosities.

- Actually, the Army Corp of Engineers studied this in the 50s and 60s and found that if you slow down the gulf stream, you not only disturb marine life but the entire climate! The gulf stream brings warmer weather all the way to Europe. Sorry guys, this is not our solution for energy

And my favorite:

- If we adopt too many of these systems to supply our electricity, won't we eventually stop the Earth from rotating?

How about the "NIMBY" benefit? Wrong again:

- One final point, when we hide the means of production of energy, we allow ourselves the luxury of ignoring its impact. Since we cannot, as a species, trust ourselves to act in the best interests of the planet upon which we depend, we should be designing systems that are absolutely "in our faces", NOT hidden away. Perhaps, then, we would resort to the ultimate (albeit non-"design") solution: drastically reducing consumption of power, and limiting our own numbers.

Now it may be unfair to judge a website by its commenters -- and in truth there were also many very positive comments, as well as corrections to the inanities in the comments reproduced above -- but I believe that the sheer ignorance revealed about the enormous expanse of the ocean, the miniscule effect that any man-made activity can have on the gulf-stream -- never mind the earth's rotation -- is very indicative of eco-activists in general. They betray their radical urban roots in this regard with little knowledge of the outdoors, the ocean, the atmosphere, the solar system and science in general. Yet they have no fear of pronouncing on and denouncing subjects that are beyond their ken. Rather than seek meaningful solutions, they always resort to "object! object! object!" to whatever is proposed even on the flimsiest of grounds, even if it contradicts their previous objections. Keep this in mind the next time radical environmentalists protest an industrial project in your region.

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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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11 May, 2008

ALARMED CLIMATE ALARMISTS: GROWING CONCERNS ABOUT COOLING EFFECT OF NATURE PAPER

The econuts are hanging on to their models even though their models have shown no skill at predicting anything. If the model predictions for the last 10 years predicted nothing of what actually happened without ad hoc (i.e. "wise after the event") adjustments, why on earth would anyone place any faith in their predictions for the future? The modellers just don't want to admit the obvious: That at our present stage of knowledge we CANNOT model earth's climate

A new study suggesting a possible lull in manmade global warming has raised fears of a reduced urgency to battle climate change. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of hundreds of scientists, last year said global warming was "unequivocal" and that manmade greenhouse gas emissions were "very likely" part of the problem. And while the study published in the journal Nature last week did not dispute manmade global warming, it did predict a cooling from recent average temperatures through 2015, as a result of a natural and temporary shift in ocean currents. The IPCC predicted global temperature increases this century of 1.8 to 4 degrees Celsius.

So the Nature paper has sparked worries that briefly cooler temperatures may take the heat out of action to fight the threat of more droughts and floods, while a debate about the article's findings has also underlined uncertainty about such forecasting.

Most scientists oppose the minority that has used the present lull in warming to cast doubt on the size of threat from manmade global temperature rises. "Let's say there wasn't much of a warming for the next 10 years, how will the public and politicians play this out?" said Bob Watson, former IPCC head and current chief scientific adviser to Britain's environment ministry. He said it was important to explain that fluctuations were an expected part of a general, manmade warming trend. "We need a group of scientists very carefully to evaluate that paper, do they agree, to what degree is there uncertainty, and then explain to the public and politicians what it means," he said.

Climate scientists agree that natural climate shifts, as the world's oceans suck up or spew out heat, could temporarily mask mankind's stoking of warming though year-on-year increases in greenhouse gas emissions. In Bali in December, governments launched two-year climate talks to try to clinch a tougher successor to the existing Kyoto Protocol on global warming. But worries about the impact on competitiveness by slowing carbon emissions -- by curbing the use of fossil fuels -- are already fraying those efforts. Russia said last week it would not dampen its economic growth.

DOUBT

The reaction to the Nature paper has underlined uncertainty about climate forecasting, as well as the fact that a minority of global warming doubters has not gone away. Britain's Met Office Hadley Centre is sticking to its forecasts made last year that half of the five years after 2009 would "quite likely" be the hottest on record, partly due to manmade warming.

Meanwhile six climate scientists offered on Thursday to bet 5,000 euros ($7,730) that the Nature article's forecast of cooling or no warming globally from 2000-2015 was wrong. "We think not -- and we are prepared to bet serious money on this," say the scientists, led by Stefan Rahmstorf, professor of physics of the oceans at Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, in a comment posted at realclimate.org/

The original Nature article's lead author, Leibniz Institute's Noel Keenlyside, acknowledged on Friday that recent data showed much more warming that he had forecast through 2007, but stood by a "stabilisation" of temperatures from 2005-2015. He blamed shifts in ocean currents and temperatures, thought also to be the cause of the plateau in temperatures since 1998.

Gary Yohe, climate scientist at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, said that opponents of tougher action on global warming in the United States had seized on the Nature report as a sign that climate change was slowing down.

Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist", said a slowdown in warming might help governments focus on smarter, long-term solutions rather than being panicked into action.

Source




BLACK DAYS FOR BRITISH GREENS: NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE ANYMORE

An amusing cry of woe from an ecofascist below. The Fascists versus the people and the people look like having the last say

Gordon Brown, Ken Livingstone and 300 Labour councillors were not the only casualties of the local and London elections. No one seems to have noticed, but the other big losers were those people who care about the environment. We might just look back on May Day 2008 as the moment when the power of green politics peaked and went into reverse. I hope I'm wrong, but I doubt it. The reaction of the two main parties to the elections was instructive. Desperate to prop up his own position after Labour's rout, Mr Brown needed to toss a few bones to the voters and jittery Labour backbenchers. So it suddenly emerged that he was about to dump the so-called "bin tax" - allowing councils to charge householders who do not recycle their rubbish. Downing Street didn't confirm it, and five token pilot schemes will go ahead, but it's clear the bin tax has been binned.

Brown allies also floated the idea that the 2p rise in fuel duty might be shelved again. No doubt this was an attempt to placate motorists. As well as being anti-green, it was a surprise, since the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, will need all the revenue he can get when he delivers his pre-Budget report in the autumn - not least to compensate the losers from the abolition of the 10p tax rate.

Mr Brown was not alone in relegating the environment to the back burner. David Cameron, the wind in his sails after the elections, held a prime ministerial press conference in which he set out his priorities for government. Significantly, the words "environment" and "climate change" did not appear in his 1,200-word statement.

Was this the same man who fought the local elections on the campaign slogan "vote blue, go green"? And was the leader who hugged huskies to convince us his party had changed addressing new issues and no longer preaching to the Tory converted? Green issues have gone out of fashion for Mr Cameron; they have served their purpose.

Naturally, the Tory leader denied it. "We have made quite good progress," he insisted. "I'm not saying the job is done. There is still a huge amount that we want to see changed." But whatever happened to the impressive tome of green policies produced last year by the Tory policy review headed by John Gummer and Zac Goldsmith, who seems to have disappeared off the planet he was trying to save? When asked, Mr Cameron banged on about the fuel price pressures facing motorists and hauliers. Officially, the Tories remain committed to raising green taxes in order to cut taxes for families. But they don't talk about it much. After a brief detour, they seem to have arrived at the same point as Mr Brown: that the public needs "carrots" as well as "sticks" to go green; that they suspect green taxes are stealth taxes.

Another reason why the elections have set back the environmental cause is the election of Boris Johnson as Mayor of London. He will dump Mr Livingstone's plan to charge drivers of gas-guzzlers 25 pounds to enter the capital's congestion charge zone, and review its recent expansion into west London. In Manchester, the councillor behind plans for a 5 pound congestion charge lost his seat to a community party which opposed it.

Labour and the Tories will doubtless argue that the Manchester experience shows they are right to be cautious on green issues. Similarly, Labour MPs say the bin tax was an issue on the doorsteps in the local elections. As The Independent reported eight days ago, a new opinion poll found that more than seven out of 10 people are not prepared to pay higher taxes to fund projects to tackle climate change.

It's hardly surprising that people downgrade soft issues such as the environment when economic times are hard. Yet politicians surely have a duty to lead rather than follow public opinion. Despite that, the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs quietly shelved plans to bring in annual personal carbon allowances this week, saying the idea was "ahead of its time".

The two main parties will continue to pay lip service to green issues in the run-up to the general election. But something has changed in the past week. Both parties will put saving seats before saving the planet.

Source




Good intentions leading to economic ruin

The road to Hell, the old adage goes, is paved with good intentions. So is the road to economic ruin. In the name of saving the environment and stemming global warming, a steady stream of disinformation has been fed into the public psyche. Aided and abetted by both radical environmentalists - who view humanity as a cancer in the natural order rather than an intrinsic part of it - and the political leftists who needed a new home once their Marxist utopia, the Soviet Union, collapsed, a new public policy has emerged, a policy which seems determined to undermine the republican principles upon which the United States was established.

The disinformation campaign has resulted in some unintended consequences, not the least of which has been a surprising public outcry over the growing economic disaster that is overtaking the country. Where politicians once descried the low cost of fuel, particularly gasoline, in the United States, pointing to the costs in Europe that were four and five times higher, they are now scrambling to find ways to decrease that cost. Where politicians once called for innovative new fuel sources like ethanol and other biofuels, they are now finding those heavily subsidized programs not only inadequate, but having a decidedly adverse effect on food supplies.

The American public, it seems, is not about quietly follow the lead of those who would impose a new totalitarianism.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the entire ethanol program is becoming a fiasco. There is presently a mandate that the U.S. produce 36 billion gallons of biofuel by 2022, ostensibly to alleviate dependence on foreign oil. The problem is that biofuels, particularly ethanol, doesn't work. Ethanol is 20 percent less efficient than gasoline, and that one gallon of ethanol requires more than one gallon of conventional fuel to produce. The production of ethanol, subsidized to the tune of $1.05-$1.38 per gallon by the government, is also taking increasingly greater amounts of corn off the food market, thus giving lie to the promises that were made more than a decade ago.

In 1994, the U.S. Senate was involved in a debate which would have prevented the Environmental Protection Agency mandate of the use of ethanol in reformulated gasoline. Ultimately, the vote which would have stopped the mandate failed thanks to Vice President Al Gore, who broke the 50-50 tie with his vote in favor of the mandate. Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), in his support of the mandate, famously claimed, "The price of corn flakes isn't going to go up by one penny." To some degree, Simon was right. The price of corn flakes hasn't gone up by one penny. It's gone up by dollars.

Since February 2006, the price of corn, wheat and soybeans has increased 240 percent. According to Department of Agriculture figures, grocery bills are up, on average, $70 a month from last year. For the present, those costs can be absorbed, albeit somewhat uncomfortably, by the U.S. economy, but the ripple effect of decreased food production is having a major impact elsewhere. It takes 450 pounds of corn to produce ethanol to fill the average gas tank of an American automobile. The same amount of corn can feed one person for an entire year. As more crop land is devoted to the production of corn for fuel, less will be available for food, thus constantly driving up the cost of everything associated with corn, ranging from cereal to meat products.

There is now an on-going debate among the presidential candidates and others over whether or not to institute a federal "gas tax" holiday for the summer driving season, and, if instituted, how to "pay" for it. By ending ethanol subsidies, the government would save millions. By beginning to drill for oil in the United States, whether in ANWAR, in North Dakota, off the Gulf Coast, off the Pacific Coast, and anywhere else it may be feasible to find, not only would the price of crude immediately begin to drop, so, too, would the necessity of importing foreign oil (now 60 percent, up from 40 percent in 1990) drop. At the same time, employment opportunities, and economic growth, would rise.

Despite what radical environmentalists claim, and despite the rhetoric of political leftists who pander to those environmentalists in attempting to establish a new Marxist regime, the reality that is constantly overlooked is that concerns about the environment - maintaining clean air and clean water, protecting species or protecting forests - can only be addressed in a society in which there is abundant freedom. When the needs for basic survival, sufficient food, sufficient shelter, sufficient safety, become a paramount concern, concerns about the environment cease to exist.

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AL GORE AND CLIMATE KA-CHING

Al Gore blames the Burma tragedy on global warming despite growing evidence to the contrary. Could the hype be related to his financial interests? Gore's reaction to the death and destruction caused by a cyclone ravaging Burma was to utter an emphatic "I told you so" Tuesday on National Public Radio. In an interview on NPR's "Fresh Air" broadcast, the jolly green giant made the charge while talking about the paperback release of his ironically named book, "The Assault on Reason."

Ignoring the fact that the rising death toll is due in part to an incompetent, isolationist and authoritarian government that allows most of its people to live in shanty towns of tin and bamboo, Gore claimed that "we're seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming." In other words, people die in Rangoon because of an SUV in Richmond, Va.

There's a "trend toward more Category 5 storms," Gore claimed, and this trend "appears to be linked to global warming and specifically to the impact of global warming on higher ocean temperatures in the top couple of hundred feet in the ocean, which drives convection energy and moisture into these storms and makes them more powerful."

Except, as we recently noted, the trend in the world's oceans - as shown by measurements taken by a fleet of 3,000 high-tech ocean buoys first deployed in 2003 - is toward cooling. As Dr. Josh Willis, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, noted in a separate interview with National Public Radio, "there has been a very slight cooling" over the buoys' five years of observation.

As Joseph D'Aleo, the Weather Channel's first director of meteorology, told National Review Online's Deroy Murdock that the slight warming trend "peaked in 1998, and the temperature trend the last decade has been flat, even as CO2 has increased 5.5%. Cooling began in 2002." He added: "Ocean buoys have echoed that slight cooling since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration deployed them in 2003."

In fact, Ryan Maue of Florida State University's Center for Ocean-Atmosphere Prediction Studies says 2007 "will rank as a historically inactive tropical cyclone year for the Northern Hemisphere as a whole." In the past 30 years, Maue adds, only 1977 had less hurricane activity from January through October. Last September had the lowest activity since 1977 while the Octobers of 2006 and 2007 had the lowest activity since 1976 and 1977, respectively.

So why the hype? Well, global warming is a growth industry designed to keep Earth and some bank accounts green. Gore himself joined the venture capital group, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers just last September. On May 1, the firm announced a $500 million investment in maturing green technology firms called the Green Growth Fund.

The group announced another $700 million to be invested over the next three years in green-tech startup firms. But if the green technology business, uh, cools down, there will be no return on that investment. There would be no need for such investments if global warming wasn't a threat. So Gore just launched, among other things, a $300 million on an ad campaign to convince us it is so.

Speaking at a conference in Monterey, Calif., on March 1, the former vice president admitted to having "a stake" in a number of green investments into which he recommended attendees put money rather than "subprime carbon assets" such as tar sands and shale oil. He also is co-founder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, which sells carbon offsets that allow rich polluters to continue polluting with a clear conscience.

We have a prediction all our own - that disastrous global warming will not occur. Then the greenies will take credit for preventing it and ask us if we're glad we spent trillions in fighting it. Al Gore will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Source




All in a Good Cause: Framing Science for Public Policy'

By Aynsley Kellow, Professor and Head of the School of Government at the University of Tasmania

The history of science is replete with error and fraud. Environmental science is no exception. Indeed, this area of science provides a hyperabundance of examples, thanks to the presence of two factors: a good cause and extensive reliance upon modelling, especially that involving sophisticated computer models.

The good cause - one that most of us support - can all too readily corrupt the conduct of science, especially science informing public policy, because we prefer answers that support our political preferences, and find science that challenges them less comfortable.

We would all wish to preserve the spiralled-horned ox, Pseudonovibos spiralis, because it is on the Red List of endangered species. Problem is, is doesn't seem to have existed in the first place.

And we might not have minded the apparent planting by US Federal Fish and Wildlife Department officers of fur from endangered Canadian lynx in Wenatchee and Gifford Pinchot National Forests in the Pacific Northwest in 2002. When found out, the officials claimed that they were merely trying to test the reliability of testing methods, by covertly seeing whether the testing laboratories could identify real lynx fur if not told in advance. Critics suspected the samples had been planted in an effort to protect the national forests from logging, mining and recreation. The Executive Director of the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics termed this response `a witch hunt in search of a false conspiracy'.

This Executive Director, Andy Stahl, had what is known in policing circles as `form'. In the 1980s, during the controversy over the logging in the Pacific Northwest, Stahl was involved in sponsoring the production of peer-reviewed science to support the Spotted Owl campaign to reduce old-growth logging. Stahl put mathematical modelling entymologist Russell Lande in touch with scholars who supplied the data, and then helped find reviewers to produce a peer-reviewed publication. This was necessary because the only `science' then available on the spotted owl was an incomplete doctoral dissertation.

The Lande paper was created to suit the political campaign and was used together with the notion of precaution to win the day. Whereas it assumed an owl population of 2,500 and further assumed that logging old-growth forest would cause its extinction, subsequent research showed the species was far more numerous and, if anything, preferred regrowth forest. Regrowth forest provided more prey and more conducive hunting conditions than old-growth forest.

Remarkably, the leading journal Nature editorialised in support of those who had faked the Canadian Lynx evidence - which tells us something about scientific journals.

The combination of the precautionary principle with endangered species legislation is a particularly seductive one, but it is the use of models into which value-laden assumptions can be smuggled that is particularly pernicious - as a recent Australian example shows. A case involving the Orange-Bellied Parrot in 2006 saw the merest hint of a parrot, together with some mathematical modelling (and the precautionary principle) used by the then Australian Commonwealth Environment Minister to disallow the construction of a wind farm that was environmentalists' preferred response to climate change, but was opposed by residents in a marginal Coalition government constituency.

Modelling for the Bald Hills wind farm on the Orange-bellied Parrot assumed the birds spent time at most of the sites of wind farms in Victoria, despite the fact that the birds had not been recorded at 20 of the 23 sites along the coast of Victoria, and despite active searches having been conducted. Only one or two sightings had been made at the other three sites.

The authors then assumed that the birds would remain present within a single wind farm location for six months-the longest possible period the migratory species could remain at a winter site, and longer than any bird had been recorded at any site. They also assumed the parrot would make two passes through the Bald Hills site. They did all this to err on the side of caution.

So, while no parrot had been sighted within 50 kilometres of the proposed site, the minister then acted in accordance with the precautionary principle (and an election promise) to block Bald Hills on the basis of cumulative impact-compounding the precaution already embedded in the assumptions underlying the modeling. I have proposed in what I call Kellow's Law that sightings of endangered species are clustered around the sites of proposed developments. This reflects not just the cynical uses of endangered species for political purposes, but partly also the fact that research for environmental assessments frequently finds species because the site has never previously been surveyed.

This `noble cause' corruption of science - named for the `framing' by police of suspects `known' to be guilty is helped not just by the virtuous cause, but by the virtual nature of both the science and the context within which it occurs. Both conservation biology and climate science rely on virtual science. The former has seen people in check shirts counting deer scat give way to physicists and mathematicians, while the latter (unlike more traditional meteorology) has always involved more computing than fieldwork. James Hansen, of NASA's Goddard Institute, for example, wrote his doctoral thesis on the climate of Venus, and - contrary to what some of his critics might think - it's clear he has never visited another planet.

Computer models fed by scenarios based on economic models are the norm in climate science, and when we are dealing with climate impacts on biodiversity, we are often dealing with species-area modelling fed by the modelled results of the impact of climate models on vegetation.

It is important to understand the way in which the revolution in information technology has transformed the conduct of science. Its impact has come not just in the ability to model complex phenomena of which scientists a decade or so ago could only dream - though that is part of the problem. Computer models are always subject to the Garbage In - Garbage Out problem and they can never be a substitute for hypotheses tested against the cold, hard light of observational data.

Many of the scientists working with models appear to have forgotten that science is about testing predictions against data. They seem to have fallen victim to the trap long-recognised at IBM, where it used to be said that simulation was like self-stimulation: if one practised it too often, one began to confuse it for the real thing.

One problem with observational data in areas like climate science is that they themselves are subject to substantial massaging by computers before they are of any use. Even data collection, therefore, provides opportunities for subjective assumptions to intrude into the adjustments made to data to make them useful. This highlights the importance of quality assurance processes, and there are no greater guarantors of quality assurance in science than contestation and transparency - full disclosure of data properly archived and of methods, including computer code.

Society deems this fundamentally important when we are dealing with science such as drug trials, which are conducted under fully transparent conditions, ideally with separate teams making up doses, administering them, diagnosing effects and analysing data. We insist on regulatory guidelines, and we audit laboratories. We know that even when researchers are fastidious in pursuing impartiality, subjective assumptions can find their way into what become `data'.

There are similar requirements imposed by stock exchanges for data such as core samples relating to mineral resources. Standards govern the collection, archiving and analysis of data . In Australia, these are laid down as standards by JORC - the Joint Ore Reserves Committee. Even then, mistakes occur and there are consequences: shareholder value is destroyed or created.

In areas such as climate science we have made no similar demands. Data are routinely gathered, manipulated and modelled by the same research teams and the discipline has not insisted on anything like full transparency. Many of the people engaging in this science are then acting as advocates for particular policy responses. James Hansen is perhaps the most notable example in this regard, but there are numerous others, such as Stephen Schneider at Stanford. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change then allows the same people to act as lead authors, sitting in judgment on their own work and that of those who might differ with them. This corrupts the scientific process.

The work of former mining industry analyst Steve McIntyre in exposing the debacle of the Hockey Stick controversy in climate science and in finding that Hansen's computer generation of mean temperatures for the US had a Y2K problem (that meant that the hottest year shifted conveniently from the 1930s to the 1990s) are good examples of what is needed. But it is significant that these necessary correctives came from outside the climate science community.

The shift of the `warmest year' in the US was in itself a small change in the totality of climate science. But most of the mistakes tend to be in one direction, and that is in a politically convenient one. This underscores my point about the need for openness, transparency and sceptical challenging of science, especially where data collection, data preparation, data adjustment, modelling and interpretation all take place in the one institution.

Again, it is noteworthy that an amateur scientist, Anthony Watts, is responsible for a web-based audit of sites that generate data for that record, and he and his `citizen auditers' have found many sites that are likely to have produced a recent warming trend through poor siting or site maintenance. It is worth reporting that Watts visited NOAA recently, and not only was he given a warm reception, but he found that the walls of the offices of those responsible for maintaining temperature records were covered with photographs of the stations he and his supporters have photographed. NOAA is grateful for the work they have done (at no cost to it), and the result is likely to be better data in the future. But its surface records continue to be based on flawed instrumentation that is subject to adjustment and compilation.

I would suggest that the need for sceptical auditing is even greater when the senior spokesman for the institution concerned is also a vociferous advocate for a particular policy position. James Hansen claims to have been muzzled by the Bush administration - though Republicans were unkind enough to point to the 1400 or so media interviews he seems to have managed, and he managed to throw off the muzzle for long enough to endorse John Kerry in 2004.

The point about all this is that, while Michael Crichton once famously observed that `data is not Democrat or Republican, it's just data', we need to ensure we have institutions that prevent data from acquiring partisan characteristics.

Steve McIntyre was aware of the case of Bre-X, where gold assays were fabricated and now applies his considerable skills to auditing climate science-to our enormous collective benefit. The proposition with climate change policy is that we are being asked to make substantial social investments in an enterprise that does not have the standards of transparency and accountability stock exchanges insist upon to prevent Bre-X situations, nor situations where subjective beliefs have intruded into analyses.

But to return to the impact of IT on all of this, we must recognise how the IT revolution has also revolutionised both the conduct of science and the way in which it is interpreted - the way in which it enters politics and the policy process. One of the impacts has been on peer review, the cornerstone of quality assurance in science. Publication after anonymous peer review in quality journals does not guarantee that the science is accurate, but it helps guard against inaccuracy.

Some journals in which key pieces of climate science are published do not maintain the standards of strict double blind refereeing that we take for granted in the social sciences. Geoscientists I raised this with thought that this would inhibit debate between authors and reviewers that might lead to fresh insights. Perhaps - but if society is to take such science seriously, such conversations have to be secondary to quality assurance. We are well past Victorian gentlemen discussing interesting fossils they have found.

That problem aside, the internet has made it much more likely that the identity of an author can be tracked down, breaking down the anonymity that focuses reviewers on the quality of the reason and evidence presented in the paper. Indeed, the internet has made possible increased international collaboration among scientists, while the increasing specialisation of knowledge has narrowed the circle of likely referees. Not only does the internet (and cheap air travel) increase the likelihood that authors are known to potential referees, it increases the likelihood that they have worked together. The IPCC has assisted this process, by engaging many of them on a common task and producing that enemy of all good science, a consensus.

Edward Wegman performed a social network analysis of those working on multiproxy reconstructions of climate when examining the Hockey Stick controversy and found that there was a clear network of co-authorship between the Hockey Stick authors and almost all others working in the field, including those most likely to have been selected as a referee by an editor. There was neither true independent verification of results nor peer review, and the possibilities for (at the very least) what we call `groupthink' were great. When Professor David Deming reported receiving an e-mail some years earlier from a senior climate scientist stating that there was a need to do something about the inconvenient truth presented by a Medieval Warm Period warmer than the present, the need for scepticism is obvious.

Scepticism can guard against such results, but unfortunately leading scientific journals seem to have lost their sceptical zeal and become, at least on occasions, boosters for good causes. Let me give you two examples from what many regard as the best journals of all: Nature and Science.

A 2004 paper in Nature using the species-area model to predict species distribution in response to modelled climate change (in turn based upon emissions scenarios) concluded its abstract with a call to action: `These estimates show the importance of rapid implementation of technologies to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and strategies for carbon sequestration.' The paper itself presented neither reason nor evidence for such conclusions.

The problem is confined to neither climate science nor modelling. Science, for example, not only published the fraudulent research on cloning of Dr Woo Suk Hwang, but rushed it into print after short review so that it appeared in an electronic version, accompanied by a press release that ensured media coverage, on the eve of a key vote in the US Congress to overturn an administrative order of the Bush Administration prohibiting the use of federal funds for cloning research. Not only did it seem such research was more promising than was the case at that time, but South Korea was seemingly passing the US by.

Not only have leading science journals yielded to the temptation of the need for `relevance', but the ramparts of the prevailing paradigms are now defended using information technology to marshal the troops. `Swarming' is not confined to partying adolescents in yellow sunglasses, enjoying their 15 megabytes of fame, but is to be seen whenever ideas emerge to challenge the consensus. The white cells of the immune system of the dominant paradigm are despatched electronically, dealing with the infectious ideas with all means at their disposal, including (but by no means limited to) typically anonymous posters to internet discussions.

One of the means commonly employed is the use of the term `denier', a rhetorically powerful signifier quite deliberately first used (as far as I can tell) by a couple of defenders of the faith reviewing Bjorn Lomborg's The Sceptical Environmentalist for Nature. It was used quite deliberately by Jeff Harvey and Stuart Pimm to liken Lomborg to a holocaust denier for daring to question the highly questionable estimates of the number of species extinctions that supposedly occur every year.

The computer-based estimates of species extinction range all the way from a few tens of thousands to 50-100,000 (if you can believe Greenpeace). The actual documented number accepted by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature is around 800 over the 500 years for which we have records. While I'm prepared to accept we have missed more than a few, and I'm a passionate advocate for the conservation of charismatic megafauna (such as tigers and orangutans), I think the use of the term `denier' tells us more about the person using it than about the target. I think the use of it amounts to an example of Godwins's Law of Internet Discussions, which holds that eventually someone will liken someone else to Hitler, at which point rational debate is over. (Implicitly, the person using it loses). Unfortunately, the use of the term is rife in debates over climate change, where those on one side seem finally to have cottoned on to the point that scepticism in science is actually a good thing, and it was even used last year by the now minister responsible.

If it has served any purpose, this use of illiberal name calling serves to remind us of what is needed to ensure that noble cause corruption does not afflict the science informing public policy. Those of us who see value in both social democracy and liberal democracy - who are committed to humanist ideals but are open to evidence-based reasoning rather than ideology in determining how we are to advance them - must acknowledge that it is from liberal views of the celebration of different points of view, and the battle of contending ideas, that good science derives.

The philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend, warned that scientists might engage in all manner of devices - from the rhetorical to the reprehensible - to have their points of view prevail. It seems to me that the only protection against any kind of corruption in science is to celebrate the liberalism inherent in Karl Popper's philosophy of science, regardless of whether we share his political liberalism - though separating the two might be difficult in practice. Feyerabend's prescription was a kind of anarchism and a rejection of any kind of marriage between science and the state.

As I said at the beginning of this lecture, the history of science is replete with error and fraud. In science, the best kind of quality assurance is to celebrate sceptical dissent and to reject any attempt to tell us that we should bow to a consensus, that `the science is settled' on principle - not just even, but especially when it supports our preferences. Because as Carl Sagan once put it, `Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.'"

Source

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10 May, 2008

Alarmists lament growing skepticism! "The deniers are winning"

An amusing little rant by Joseph Romm below. Note his very vague usage: "The science". He means "The models" but that does not sound nearly as good. And it does not do much for his image as an intellectual that he cannot spell "colossal".



The science is clear about the reality of global warming and the fact that humans are the dominant cause (see "Absolute MUST Read IPCC Report: Debate over, further delay fatal, action not costly"). But, sadly, that isn't clear to most Republicans.

Anybody who thinks the public debate is over - anybody who thinks the Big Lie doesn't work - should look at the latest poll results from the Pew Research Center (here):The proportion of Americans who say that the earth is getting warmer has decreased modestly since January 2007, mostly because of a decline among Republicans. Only 49% of Republican now even believe that the earth is warming! Thank you so much deniers, delayers, and mainstream media (see "Media enable denier spin 1: A (sort of) cold January doesn't mean climate stopped warming" and other links at the end).

Even more worrisome is just how many people don't believe humans are the cause of warming: Roughly half of Americans (47%) say the earth is warming because of human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels [and only 27% of Republicans]. But nearly as many people (45%) say that rising global temperatures are either mostly caused by natural environmental patterns (18%), say they do not know the cause of warming (6%), or say that no solid evidence of warming exists (21%).

I'd like to thank the media, especially NBC news, for contributing to this core talking point of the disinformers (See Dateline NBC: "Whatever the cause . global warming is a reality").

BIG LIE

According to the United States Office of Strategic Services, Hitler's strategy was based on the view:. people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it. In fact, Hitler himself defined the term "Big Lie," in his autobiography Mein Kempf, as a lie so "collosal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."

I don't think this useful term should be a banned from public use just because Hitler defined it first. I certainly apologize to anybody who is upset by the analogy - I'm not trying to compare deniers with Nazis - there is no such comparison possible - nor does it apply to all of the people who advocate one of the 5 myths below. No, the "Big Lie" refers mostly to the strategy of the professional class of those who spread disinformation for a living. I do think the term gets to a fundamental reason why global warming denial is so effective.

The science makes unequivocally clear that the health and well-being of billions of people (and most species) are at grave risk from continued unrestricted human emissions of greenhouse gases (See "Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 0: The alternative is humanity's self-destruction" and "Must Read Bali Climate Declaration by Scientists").

But who could possibly believe that so many credible-sounding people, including major public leaders in the conservative movement, would so strongly argue that 1. The earth is not warming and/or 2. Humans are not a major cause of whatever warming is occurring and/or 3. The problem is not an urgent one because the impacts are distant and tolerable and/or 4. The solution is painful if not impossible with existing technologies anyway and/or 5. Adaptation is a better strategy than mitigation