REID A BRYSON SAYS: RELAX: THE SKY ISN'T FALLING

I am pleased that Professor Reid A. Bryson of the University of Wisconsin has agreed to post the guest weblog below on Climate Science. He is a Global 500 Laureate Senior Scientist, and Center for Climatic Research and Emeritus Professor of Meteorology, of Geography, and of Environmental Studies. His vita (see also here) documents his many invaluable contributions to climate science, as well as to other sciences. His expertise is summarized on his vita as "Much of Bryson's work has dealt with climate in relation to human ecology, and this has led him into extensive travel, especially to Asia where he worked primarily on anthropogenic changes of climate and landscape in general. His best-known laboratory works are in the development of new approaches to climatology, such as airstream analysis and quantitative, objective methods of reconstructing past climates. Dr. Bryson is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Meteorological Society, and a charter member of the World Council for the Biosphere." He is eminently well qualified to present a weblog on Climate Science. The weblog post follows below.

GUEST WEBLOG: HISTORY!! (Getting Back To What It Sort Of Used To Be)

by Professor Reid A. Bryson

Remember Otzi, the Ice Man? The fellow that was found in the mountains between Austria and Italy a few years ago? He had been shot a little over 5000 years ago, and then covered with snow, and more snow, until a few years ago the snow melted back enough for Otzi to be found. Between his burial under snow and his exhumation by nature there was more snow and ice than before, or now. Are we just getting back to what the snow climate used to be?

When the Vikings settled part of Greenland circa 900 CE, they established a settlement that lasted longer than the United States has been around. There was a considerable amount of traffic between Greenland and Europe, by the standards of the time, so some skippers were making their first trip. The directions were, at first, to sail two and a half days west from Iceland to the shore of Greenland where there stood the landmark Blasark (black shirt) Mountain. Then sail down the coast to Eriksfjord, a beautiful broad straight passage across southern Greenland. Reaching the west coast they should turn right up the coast to the navigation marker on Herjolf's Ness. (About "Bluie West 3"in WW II.) Turning in to Tunugdliarfik Fjord Erik's homestead Brattahlid was only 75 miles at the end of the fjord (across from Bluie West 1, for you old timers).

After 1200 CE the directions changed. Sail one and a half days west from Iceland to the edge of the ice pack. If it is clear you might see the mountain Hvitsark to the west (snow covered now?), then go all the way down around hazardous Cap Farvel and up the other coast to Herjolf's Ness. Eriksfjord was no longer open, nor is it now. As of a decade or so ago there were two valley glaciers blocking it from the sides. Yes, I saw them. If Greenland ice diminishes some, will we be getting back to conditions like it used to be?

One of the well known climatic episodes (to well-educated climatologists) is the Little Ice Age. The hemispheric cooling started in the 1400s, really got going about 1570 (see Frobisher's journal) and was full-blown by mid-1600s. The Pilgrims picked a lousy time to come to America. After a little amelioration, things got worse culminating in the "Year Without a Summer".

Since then the hemispheric temperature has risen, and we even have thermometers to attest to it. Gee, getting back to what it used to be sure doesn't sound like the sky is falling and catastrophe looms. Besides, warmer weather reduces the Climatic Overhead and we get more income per unit of energy used.

Incidentally, this sequence can be modeled without even referring to anthropogenic carbon dioxide. The Northern Hemisphere temperature history as modeled using Milankovitch variations in solar radiation modulated by volcanic aerosols, using oceans and carbon dioxide only as minor dependent variables. (BP means before 1955 CE).

This figure captures very well, the "little ice age", the Medieval Warm Period, and other known variations of late BCE and early CE times. The drivers of this model are Milankovitch calculations (average for the entire Hemisphere) and the observed volcanic record described above. Carbon dioxide is treated as a very minor dependent variable. It is unlikely that a general circulation model which assumes a major role of carbon dioxide can duplicate this known climatic sequence.

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IPCC's Artful Bias

Every trial lawyer will tell you that the key to presenting a strong case lies in carefully omitting the evidence against you. This is not lying, it is artful bias. Advocacy is the heart of our adversarial judicial system. Each side presents its case in the strongest possible terms, as though the other side's case did not exist. The jury hears both sides, puts the whole story together, then decides.

Anyone who doubts that the new IPCC Summary for Policy Makers is an advocacy document is ineligible for duty on the jury of reason. So what ain't they saying? Unfortunately the other side does not seem to be represented. We have looked in vain for the minority report. You would think that for $18 million they could afford one, but that just measures the advocationality of the thing. One side fits all.

Here is just a graphic peek at the missing side to give you the flavor of the game. Figure 2 shows a bunch of bars. Each represents one of the factors that is thought to have influenced global temperature. We see at once that all but one of these bars is human. Most are pretty big, especially the really big red one labeled CO2. There is one tiny natural bar labeled Solar.

There it is. Case closed. The jury can go home, no need to hear from the other side, it will only confuse them. We did it. The prosecution rests, let the persecution begin. Well not really, as always in these proceedings. A big pile of contrary science is missing here. Good science, interesting science, being carried on by a whole lot of real scientists.

For simplicity let's divide this mountain of contrary science into three high heaps. The first heap has to do with this little bitty solar bar. This bar is based on the relatively small amount of variable, direct radiant energy coming from the sun. What is omitted is a huge amount of research going on into indirect and amplified solar mechanisms. The reason for this research is the close correlation between solar variation and global temperature, seen over a lot of time scales. Something is going on but we don't know what and there are a lot of theories. Google Scholar lists over 500,000 scientific papers on solar variability. The IPCC omits this research because it does not help their case.

The second heap includes little things like the ocean, earth wobbles, etc., that are also thought to heavily influence climate. They get no bar at all, because we can't measure their influence either, even though we know it is there.

The third heap is ugly but very real. It is research into natural climate variability per se, something that has received a lot of attention. We now know that climate varies all the time, for reasons we do not understand. It has varied quite naturally a lot more than the little bit we are fussing with today. So today's warming may well be simply the emergence of mother earth from the famous Little Ice Age. But you can't put a bar on the LIA because we don't know what causes it. Looking at the IPCC bar chart you would never know there was a LIA, just a lot of human stuff and a bitty bit of sun. That is the truly artful part of their bias, simply ignore what we don't understand, like it did not exist.

In short, it is easy to argue that humans control climate, if you omit nature. That is just what the IPCC does, and it is very good advocacy. It's just not good science.

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Gore's Bad Science



Al Gore's grasp of Earth science was dreadful in college and has gotten steadily worse, according to the embarrassing facts exposed in the "Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming," a book that declares: "Catastrophic Manmade global warming is not catastrophic, manmade, or global." It reveals that Gore's college grades were not anything to write home about:

NATURAL SCIENCES 6 (MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE): D
NATURAL SCIENCES 118: C+

Gore's favorite crusade of recent months, that global warming caused Katrina, is summarily dismissed in the book by the nation's top hurricane expert. "The degree to which you believe global warming is causing major hurricanes is inversely proportional to your knowledge about these storms," said Dr. William Gray, the leading Hurricane expert in the U.S.

"The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming" dismantles Gore's faulty science with hard facts ignored by the mainstream media:

* Gore's favorite animal, the polar bear, is thriving. Ten out of 12 polar bear populations are thriving, although the White House has recently said they are going extinct.

* Man is responsible for only 3% of all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

* Methane is a naturally occurring greenhouse gas that comes from decaying plants, seeps from swamps, bogs, rice paddies, and leaks out the front and back ends of masticating animals.

* The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker and the South Pole is getting colder. The Southern hemisphere on the whole shows no appreciable rise in temperatures.

* Gore points out that the "snows of Kilimanjaro" are melting, but leaves out the fact that the temperature there is dropping.

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GREENIES SHAFT BRITISH DRIVERS

We no longer build new roads in the UK. But we are world-leaders in constructing endless debates about roads - arguments that seem to go round and round in circles getting nowhere, like a long afternoon on the M25. The fewer miles we actually add to the road network, it seems, the more mileage there is in engineering big political controversies out of mundane roads-related matters. We could surely do with a u-turn in priorities here.

After years of pootling around the political backstreets, for example, road pricing - a system of charging motorists for the mileage they do - has been driven to the top of the agenda. Last year the government-initiated Eddington Report declared the need for a national system of road-charging to be an unarguable necessity - or an `economic no brainer' as former British Airways chief Rod Eddington put it.

Since then, no fewer than one-and-a-quarter million people - all of them presumably lacking a brain in the Treasury's view - have signed an online protest against the plans for road-pricing on the government's own petitions website. The idea that road-users are rising up against the authorities, over not only road-pricing but also congestion charges, speed cameras and the many other minor discomforts of driving, has reached the point where an unknown `disgruntled motorist' was made the prime suspect for the recent spate of little letter-bomb attacks, with some even implying that the government was to blame for `driving him to it'.

These rows are a sign that politics is currently on the road to nowhere. There is a crying need for investment in major new roads in the UK, an advanced economy with a sub-European road network that, in the past 10 years, has built barely 150 miles of new motorway to support traffic growth of more than 30 per cent. Yet the demand for substantial new roads is not even on the table in the `great congestion debate'. Instead we are left with an argument over how motorists should be made to make do and mend with what exists, which is about as productive as two motorists yelling at one another through a fug of exhaust fumes.

The Eddington Report was the latest example of how the authorities now routinely deploy green politics as the language of eco-austerity. In the spirit of other New Labour reports, it effectively sought to redefine the aim of government transport policy as making Britain less mobile, by using financial penalties to drive people off the roads (at least the busy ones they want to use, at the times they most want to use them) rather than expanding capacity to meet demand. It is another testament to the triumph of the miserly politics of lowering people's expectations.

Eddington suggests it is a no-brainer that we must have a national system of road-pricing, since the shock-horror alternative would be actually to invest in big new roads. He argues that smaller projects which fiddle with the existing system are best, and warns the government not to be seduced by `grand projects' (he is preaching to the converted there), before driving his point home by concluding that `ambitions and dreams of extensive new networks.should be put aside.. Some of the best projects are small-scale, such as walking and cycling.' That should get Britain moving!

As Austin Williams of the Future Cities Project has noted, what Eddington did was to reduce the planning of our future transport infrastructure to simple fiscal considerations, a crude cost-benefit analysis assuming the need for demand management (1). The wider needs of a modern, mobile society are discounted, any vision of a more free-travelling future dismissed as `dreams'. So at the same time as something as everyday as roads can be blown up into the stuff of political controversy, the issue can simultaneously be reduced to another of Gordon Brown's mean-spirited bean-counting exercises. And in another sign of the miserabilist times, Eddington makes clear that motorists must be punished if they insist on driving about doing their business - or in New Labour-speak, they must be made to `feel the consequences of their decisions'.

A few months on from the publication of the Eddington Report, however, it would appear that the government's attempt to start the road-pricing bandwagon has backfired. New Labour no doubt hoped that farming it out to `independent' experts (even if they were handpicked by the Treasury) would allow it to remain aloof. But fuelled by scaremongering headlines about how much it might cost mothers to take their kids to school or do the shopping etc, public opposition to the government has quickly blown up around the online petition.

Comparisons with the anti-poll tax protests that helped to bring down Margaret Thatcher have been overstated. But as they are popularly understood, the road-pricing proposals would appear to have one similar effect to the hated poll tax - making people pay more for less. You do not have to be an economist to grasp that the government already takes around œ45billion a year in taxes from road-users, and spends no more than œ7billion of it on the roads. The apparent prospect of paying more tax, with no promise of new investment, could hardly have been better designed to disgruntle middle-class motorists as well as white van man.

It looks like a classic New Labour cock-up. Deeply worried about its isolation from the electorate, the government sets up this website for public petitions, presumably on the basis that for a self-proclaimed `listening government', even having your policies complained about is better than being entirely ignored. Inevitably, however, given the breadth of cynicism about politics and government today, a big two-fingered protest soon emerges on the site - and perhaps equally inevitably, it is about the mundane stuff that seems to touch people's lives rather than Iraq.

And if the anti-road pricing petition confirms the isolation of the political class from the public, the government's response to it has made clear the deepening insecurity in Whitehall. No sooner had the million-signature petition started making headlines than ministers started suggesting there had been a misunderstanding and they wouldn't be bringing in any system of road-pricing that the public does not support.

Remember, the Tory poll tax had been in force for some time before the protests and a major riot in central London caused a government crisis in 1990. Nowadays all it takes to unnerve the authorities is a `virtual barricade' of an ephemeral online petition, at least five years before road-pricing could actually take effect. It appears that, in the last days of Tony Blair, New Labour has become even more shaky and bereft of a political sat-nav to guide it than when Mrs Thatcher's Conservative regime was in its final throes in the Downing Street bunker.

Yet at root this is another phoney war that New Labour and its opponents are fighting. One thing that is very unlikely to result is any fundamental change of policy as regards those seductive `grand projects' that Old Mother Eddington warned ministers about. The no-more-roads prejudice draws its authority from the green consensus that now extends pretty much across the mainstream political spectrum.

Although the likes of Tory leader David Cameron are now a prominent part of that consensus, it owes much of its strength to the old left. It was the rump of the left that helped to organise and support the anti-roads protests of the past 20 years, depicting motoring as an unnecessary evil and roads as a blot on the landscape. This attitude laid the foundations for today's narrow `debate' about how to restrict car travel; see for example the origins of London mayor Ken Livingstone's ever-expanding congestion charge in his statement, almost 20 years ago, that he hated cars and would like to `ban the lot'.

The left's enthusiastic embrace of the small-minded anti-road building lobby symbolised its political degeneration, its abandonment of the social - the progressive attempt to transform society through human action - in favour of the natural: the reactionary attempt to defend the environment against humanity.

In The Communist Manifesto, more than a century-and-a-half ago, Marx and Engels talked about the `wonders' of industrial capitalism. Now those wonders are condemned as evils. An understanding that capitalism had both a dynamic and a destructive aspect was always fundamental to a radical left view. More recently, however, what remains of the left has come to see them as the same thing, and to attack such modern achievements as flying or mass mobility as crimes against the environment. Throw in an unhealthy dose of antagonism towards the `greedy' cheap-flying, car-driving masses, and it becomes clear that while the left itself might have largely disappeared from the political roadmap, its misanthropic prejudices have done much to help consolidate the consensus against new road-building.

The fact remains, however, that our motorway-malnourished society needs bigger and better road networks, alongside a properly funded public transport system. We need far less effort to be put into constructing fuming rows about roads, and rather more into quietly building them. In the current phoney war over road-pricing, New Labour might think itself well-advised to follow the old advice: when in a hole, stop digging. But the authorities would do us all a favour if they also took heed of some alternative advice. When in a jam, start digging - more motorways.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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