SUN OF A GUN

Comment from Canada

A few weeks ago in a column I wrote about David Suzuki's rudeness and hypocrisy I admitted that similar to that green guru, I too love this planet and try to have as small a negative environmental impact as possible but unlike him, I don't believe that human-made CO2 is the main driver of global warming. I received hundreds of e-mails -- most recounting often hilarious stories of run-ins people had with Suzuki, finding out for themselves that his TV persona is a lot friendlier than his off-camera one.

But it was an e-mail from a fella named Gerald in the Niagara region, that indicates just how good a job the man-made global warming believers have been at selling their message. "If humans are not the cause of global warming ... who is?" Gerald wrote. My response was: "Gee, Gerald. Can you really not think of anything? Nothing at all?" Then I suggested he find the nearest child and ask them what makes the earth warm. The next day I got a reply. "Do you mean the sun?" he queried, in all sincerity. "Yes, Gerald. That big, burning yellow ball up in the sky is, not surprisingly, the main driver of global warming."

Yesterday, world renowned paleoclimatologist and geology professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Dr. Tim Patterson, was in Calgary to pass that basic message on. Though his message was rather technical. He brought reams of proof, scientific studies, graphs and the like to back up his claims. Indeed, one of the more interesting, if not alarming statements Patterson made before the Friends of Science luncheon is satellite data shows that by about the year 2020 the next solar cycle is going to be solar cycle 25 -- the weakest one since the Little Ice Age (that started in the 13th century and ended around 1860) a time when people living in London, England, used to walk on a frozen Thames River and food was scarcer.

"This should be a great strategic concern in Canada because nobody is farming north of us." In other words, Canada -- the great bread basket of the world -- just might not be able to grow grains in much of the prairies. After the Little Ice Age, "things warmed up precipitously with no help from carbon dioxide," pointed out Patterson, in a telephone interview.

Indeed, the world warmed up until about 1940 and then the temperatures started to fall until the late 1970s when scientists started predicting another ice age. "Post World War II, as the world started cooling, CO2 was going up like crazy. All the evidence shows that warming periods were all solar driven and that there is no correlation between CO2 and temperature."

But solar flaring on its own, says Patterson, does not account for most of the warming -- which is an increase of 0.8C since the end of the Little Ice Age. It's only when its coupled with evidence about galactic cosmic rays, do all the historic warming (and cooling) pieces fit together. Cosmic rays -- caused by the explosion of supernovas -- constantly bombard the Earth. The more cosmic rays, the more cloud cover and the cooler the earth. However, when the sun is flaring -- as it is now -- it essentially blows away the cosmic rays and the earth warms. That, however, is expected to come to an end in 2020.

As the saying goes, by then all of the billions of dollars wasted battling CO2 emissions, rather than pollutants, for instance, will be money pumped down the CO2 sink hole. In 2020 hindsight on the great global warming scare will be 20/20. It won't be a pretty picture.

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Bad Climate "Science"

The ideology goes in before the science goes on

Assume that human greenhouse-gas emissions are causing dangerous changes in the Earth's climate. What should we do about it? Public debate on climate change has focused almost solely on requiring large reductions in fossil-fuel energy consumption. Enter the journal Nature with a new feature article on another potential means of dealing with climate change.

Dubbed geoengineering, it involves purposely "engineering" the planet's climate in ways intended to offset warming from greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Although Nature's discussion of the various possibilities is fascinating on its own, the article is more interesting for its implicit insights into climate scientists' blinkered view of how to deal with greenhouse risks.

One geoengineering possibility involves injecting sunlight-reflecting sulfate particles into the stratosphere, intended to mimic what large volcanic eruptions already do every once in a while. In a more science-fiction-like vain, another proposal would place numerous small "sunshades" in orbit to prevent a small amount of sunlight from reaching the Earth's surface. For many climate scientists, however, the goal of studying geoengineering isn't to determine whether any particular proposal is practical or safe, but "to show, with authority, that all such paths are dead-end streets," and that the focus needs to be on requiring large reductions in people's fossil-fuel energy consumption.

Much of the climate community still views [geoengineering] with deep suspicion or outright hostility. Geoengineering, many say, is a way to feed society's addiction to fossil fuels. `It's like a junkie figuring out new ways of stealing from his children,' says Meinrat Andreae, an atmospheric scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.

In fact, as Nature reports, Andreae urged Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen not to publish a recent article on climate geoengineering, fearing it would distract policymakers from what Andreae sees as the urgent need to cut fossil fuel use. Every scientist who expressed an opinion in the article thinks reducing fossil fuel use is the policy of choice for mitigating human-caused greenhouse warming.

What is so striking is how these scientists, who rightly highlight the need for careful scientific analysis in characterizing the climate effects of GHG emissions, unwittingly forsake science when thinking about how to mitigate climate change. Instead, they jump right from "burning fossil fuels causes dangerous climate change" to "therefore the best way to stop climate change is reducing fossil fuel use."

The question of what the world's people will have to give up if they drastically reduce their use of fossil-fuel energy remains unasked. Indeed, none of the scientists profiled in the Nature article show any awareness that the relatively inexpensive and abundant energy from fossil fuels could be anything but harmful to humankind. This myopia appears again and again:

no one thinks that, in the short term, a world cooled by engineering would be preferable to one cooled by a reduction in carbon dioxide levels. And no one thinks that, as yet, we know enough to embark on any sort of large-scale engineering. Models of geoengineering's benefits need to be a lot more accurate than models of the harm that will be done in its absence. As [climate scientist Ken] Caldeira puts it, if you can be no more precise about the chances of harm under the status quo than to give them as 50%, that's still something to worry about. But if a proposed intervention has a 50-50 chance of doing good or harm, that's something to avoid.

In other words, we should worry about the risks of climate change; we should worry about the risks of geoengineering; and we should apply our most meticulous and careful scientific thought to characterizing these risks. But we should not consider - indeed we should remain utterly unaware of - the risks of forcing wealthier people to stop using, and preventing poorer people from starting to use, the fossil-fuel energy that played a leading and essential role in the vast improvements in human health, prosperity, and life expectancy during the last hundred years.

When it comes to thinking about mitigating climate change, scientists such as Andreae, Caldeira, and many others are checking their scientific faculties at the door and unwittingly smuggling in their ideological policy preferences under the guise of dispassionate scientific analysis and authority.

To the extent that human greenhouse-gas emissions are causing dangerous changes in the Earth's climate, the best ways to mitigate those changes can only be determined by the same relentless application of science as we demand for the understanding of climate change itself. That means transparently defining measures of human welfare - the values side of the policy equation - and then carefully assessing not only the risks to human welfare of burning fossil fuels but also the benefits - as well the risks and benefits of geoengineering and of restricting people's access to fossil-fuel energy.

Even taking it as given that greenhouse-gas emissions are altering the climate in potentially dangerous ways, still, we must ask whether there are negative health and mortality effects from higher energy prices; whether restrictions on fossil-fuel energy would make us poorer; and whether a poorer-but-cooler world is better for humankind than a richer-but-warmer world. Likewise, could some geoengineering technique mitigate human-caused climate change without the need to give up the benefits of fossil-fuel energy; or buy us a few more decades to find new ways to produce abundant energy as or more cheaply, but without undesirable climate changes? Most climate scientists jump over these questions or assume the answer without any apparent awareness that they've failed to subject their preferences to scientific scrutiny.

This blind spot for the human-welfare effects of climate-mitigation policies also shows up in assessing the risks of geoengineering. Scientists rightly note that geoengineering could itself have unintended and undesirable spinoff effects. For example, the Nature article highlights work by Alan Robock of Rutgers, which concluded that sulfate from the 1783 Laki volcanic eruption in Iceland weakened the Indian monsoon and also reduced rainfall in Africa's Sahel. Nature goes on to note:

it is easily argued that betting the monsoon on the ability of [climate] models to accurately capture such subtleties [i.e., geoengineering's potential for unintended consequences] would require a foolhardy level of trust, a remarkable lack of concern for hundreds of millions of livelihoods or a startling desperation in the face of the alternative.

What is astonishing is climate scientists' obliviousness that the exact same concerns apply to policies to ration, tax or otherwise restrict access to fossil-fuel energy.

What accounts for scientists' policy blinkers? It's hard to know for sure, since we're talking about what goes on inside people's heads. I suspect part of the answer lies in an implicit assumption, even by many scientists, that alternatives to fossil-fuel energy are just as cheap and convenient, but that dark corporate and government forces have prevented them from being disseminated. Never mind the countervailing evidence such as the fact that decades of $5 and $6 per gallon gasoline in Europe has failed to create economically viable alternatives to gasoline- or diesel-powered automobiles.

Another potential contributor is a wooly-minded romantic environmentalism that seems to have infected scientists as much as anyone else. This also comes through in Nature's profile:

Hans Feichter, a climate modeller at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, speaks for the vast majority of his colleagues when he says `the role of a geoscientist is to understand nature, not to change it.' Climate scientists have proved themselves happy to advocate massive changes aimed at shifting the climate. But they are massive changes in technology, in geopolitics, in social norms...Not changes in the workings of the stratosphere. Not changes in the natural.

Where does one start in unwinding all the fallacious assumptions implicit in this confused line of thinking? Why should the goal of climate policy be to make the world more "natural"? And why should anyone think "natural" is better than "artificial"? Why is it okay to force "massive changes" in how people live their lives without even a nod to the possibility that this could cause "massive" harm of its own?

In fact, it is exactly because we have made our environment less "natural" that we have improved the lot of humankind. "Natural" means horrifying percentages of our children dying of infectious diseases and mothers dying in childbirth; lifespans of only 30 or 40 years for those who survive these earlier tribulations - years lived in backbreaking toil merely to avoid starvation; and constant nagging pain from injuries and infections.

Climate scientists' ignorance of the factors that contribute to long, safe, healthy, and prosperous lives for the world's people is what makes them so dangerous in the debate over what to do about climate change. Their scientific credentials give them great authority on the world policy stage. Yet like the boyfriend who is in fact "high maintenance" while unwittingly believing himself to be "low maintenance," climate scientists believe their policy recommendations to be based on science, rather than on unexamined prejudices that are yet to be subjected to scientific scrutiny. Only at our peril do we continue to dance to their tune.

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GREEN CREDIBILITY HIT: EU AGREES MULTI-BILLION SUBSIDIES FOR COAL



The European Commission is upholding its system of billions-worth of state subsidies for coal mining. In a report on the subsidies for the sector, the Brussels authority on Monday concluded that there is "no need for changes". The environmental protection organization Greenpeace criticized the commission for failing to wind down coal production. If Europe is serious about climate protection, tax payers money should be plugged into technologies for renewable energies instead of subsidising dirty coal, Greenpeace demanded. In 2005, the EU provided some 4.1 billion euro in state aid to eight European Union countries, corresponding to 11 million euro per day....

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ANOTHER GLOBAL WARMING SCARE BITES THE DUST

German scientists re-examining projected melting of Arctic permafrost from global warming say massive releases of methane are unlikely this century. Scientists say as the Earth's climate warms, permafrost will continue melting and methane bound in frozen sediments could escape into the atmosphere. Because methane is a greenhouse gas, that would exacerbate global warming.

One permafrost model, presented in late 2005, indicated near-surface Arctic permafrost would completely degrade during the 21st century. But Georg Delisle and colleagues at the Federal Institution for Geosciences and Natural Resources in Hanover offer an alternative model designed to have a more complete mathematical formulation of the physical processes in permafrost.

The German researchers note that ice-core analyses previously made by other scientists indicate minimal release of methane during warm periods occurring during the last 9,000 years. Based on the new model and the ice-core findings, Delisle concluded that scenarios calling for massive releases of methane in the near future from degrading permafrost are questionable. The research is detailed in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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TWO SITES WORTH VISITING

In Ponder the Maunder we find a 15-year-old High School student speaking more sense about global warming than you will read in most newspapers.

In Apocaholics Anonymous you will find an amusing catalogue of all the prophecies of doom that have got major media attention in the last 50 years or thereabouts. There were an amazing number of such false prophecies.

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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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH 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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