Dunes, climate models don't match up with paleomagnetic records

Yet another peer-reviewed study challenging the "consensus" before the Bali meeting. It shows in fact that the consensus is inconsistent with the data. So much for consensus

For a quarter-century or more, the prevailing view among geoscientists has been that the portion of the ancient supercontinent of Pangea that is now the Colorado Plateau in southern Utah shifted more than 1,300 miles north during a 100-million year span that ended about 200 million years ago in the early Jurassic Period, when Pangea began to break up.

Paleomagnetic records are found in igneous rocks that permanently record the direction of the Earth's magnetic field at the time they solidified from the molten state. Paleomagnetism is an important tool for geoscientists in tracking the movement of Earth's tectonic plates over time and records in North America indicate that the Colorado Plateau moved from the equator to about 20 degrees north latitude from 300 million years ago to 200 million years ago.

But new research by geoscientists from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Michigan challenges that theory, based on extensive climate modeling studies and sedimentary records found from Wyoming into Utah and Arizona.

In the Nov. 23 issue of the journal Science, UNL geoscientists Clinton Rowe, David Loope and Robert Oglesby, former UNL graduate student Charles Broadwater, and Rob Van der Voo of the University of Michigan, report findings that indicate the area must have remained at the equator during the time in question. "It's a puzzle, a 'conundrum' is the word we like to use," Oglesby said. "And in the Science paper, we're not solving the conundrum, we're raising the conundrum."

The root of the conundrum is Loope's ongoing research in the Colorado Plateau that began when he was working on his doctorate at the University of Wyoming in the early 1980s. A sedimentologist and an expert on dune formation, he eventually saw that from central Wyoming into central Utah, ancient dunes preserved in the region's 200 million- to 300-hundred-million-year-old sandstone formations all faced southwest, meaning that the winds over that extensive area were almost constantly from the northeast. As his study progressed, he discovered that the direction of the dunes shifted to the southeast in what is now southern Utah, meaning the wind direction shifted to the northwest. What's more, those prevailing winds were consistent over the entire 100 million years in question and the shift in wind direction could only have occurred at the equator. "I thought that was very curious," Loope said. "It didn't seem to fit with what we think we know about where the continents were."

Loope is also a paleoclimatologist (who studies ancient climates), as are Rowe and Oglesby, who also have expertise in climate modeling. The three geoscientists began working together, trying to find a computerized climate model that would explain the discrepancy, but they couldn't find any that worked. "We ran the model in any different number of configurations just to see if we could make it do something different," Rowe said. "It didn't matter what we did to it, as long as you had some land, and it was distributed north and south of the equator, you would end up with this monsoonal flow that matched these records from the dunes. "The equator is the only place you could get this large-scale arc of winds that turn from the northeast to the northwest as they moved south. Nowhere else would you get that as part of the general circulation unless the physics of the world 200 million years ago was very different from what it is today. And we just don't think that's the case."

Puzzled by the discrepancy between their research and the paleomagnetic records, they turned to Van der Voo, an expert on paleomagnetism. "We brought Rob in to try to see if he could help us sort it out, and he's like, 'Gosh, guys, I don't know. This is a conundrum,'" Oglesby said. "It's important to note that we have not just a paleomag person as a co-author, but arguably the best-known paleomag person in the world -- and he's as confused as we are."

Van der Voo agreed that, for now, there's no clear answer to the conundrum. "The nicest thing would have been if we had a solution, but we don't," Van der Voo said. "All we can say is that we have this enigma, so perhaps our model of Pangea for the period in question is wrong or the wind direction didn't follow the common patterns that we recognize in the modern world. Neither seems likely, but we're bringing this inconsistency to the attention of the scientific community in hopes of stimulating further research."

And further research is exactly what's on the agenda, Oglesby said. "We'll come up with everything we can possibly think of," he said. "From the point of view of the climate model, the paleogeography, the vegetation, the topography, local-scale vs. large-scale, paleomag, going back and rethinking everything that the dunes tell us. We'll go back to square one in everything, trying to figure it out."

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The Phenomenological Approach to Estimating the Effect of Total Solar Irradiance on Climate

I've mentioned before that the flawed `hockey stick' temperature reconstruction is used to reduce the role of the sun in climate change. Little pre-industrial temperature variability would help support the claim that 20th century warming is mainly anthropogenic in origin. Scafetta and West have recently published a continuation of their phenomenological approach to estimating the role of total solar irradiance (TSI) in climate change, which compares TSI reconstructions with temperature reconstructions.

Interestingly, Scafetta and West conclude that: "if we assume that the latest temperature and TSI secular reconstructions, WANG2005 and MOBERG05, are accurate, we are forced to conclude that solar changes significantly alter climate, and that the climate system responds relatively slowly to such changes with a time constant between 6 and 12 years. This would suggest that the large-scale computer models of climate could be significantly improved by adding additional Sun-climate coupling mechanisms."

I should point out that solar irradiance is only one potential solar effect on climate and the IPCC rate the `level of scientific understanding' (LOSU) of `solar irradiance' as `low.' Even the contrived Lockwood and Frohlich (2007) paper pointed to the possibility of an unknown `solar amplifier' and the expected fall in future solar activity. Furthermore, it is possible that equivalent solar forcing is `different' to greenhouse gas forcing.

Anyway, the JGR paper entitled: `Phenomenological reconstructions of the solar signature in the Northern Hemisphere surface temperature records since 1600' by N. Scafetta and B. J. West can be found here. It's a good read, so enjoy!

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The study referred to above appears in the Nov. 3, 2007 issue of JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH. Direct link to study here. From Conclusion:

"In conclusion, if we assume that the latest temperature and TSI secular reconstructions, WANG2005 and D24S03 SCAFETTA AND WEST: SOLAR CONTRIBUTION TO CLIMATE CHANGE 8 of 10 D24S03 MOBERG05, are accurate, we are forced to conclude that solar changes significantly alter climate, and that the climate system responds relatively slowly to such changes with a time constant between 6 and 12 a. This would suggest that the large-scale computer models of climate could be significantly improved by adding additional Sun-climate coupling mechanisms."




Ethanol madness

Anything rather than drill for oil in American waters or in Alaska

Ethanol mania is one of the primary reasons that the price of corn has doubled over the past 15 months, in turn driving up prices for basic foods from milk to bread. (Skyrocketing demand for feedstock grain to raise meat for India, China and Latin America's burgeoning middle-class is the other major underlying cause.)

This year, 93 million acres of corn were planted in the U.S, the most since 1944 and 20% more than in 2006. Rising prices mean even more cropland is likely to be turned over to corn. The U.S. government's renewable fuels standard, which went into effect on Sept. 1, calls for 7.5 billion gallons of corn ethanol to be blended into gasoline by 2012. Follow-up legislation now wending its way through Congress raises that number to 15 billion gallons by 2022.

Fifteen billion gallons is about 10% of America's current annual gasoline consumption. An acre of corn yields barely 300 gallons of ethanol. To make that much ethanol a full 40% of American cropland would need to be dedicated to corn, sending food prices through the roof.

Scads of tax dollars are being thrown at agribusinesses to achieve this insanity. Total government support for biofuels in the U.S. was $7 billion accounting for about half the global total. According to projections, Uncle Sam will shell out $13 billion next year and $16 billion a year by 2014. In all, the government is on track to spend a total of $92 billion on ethanol subsidies by 2012.

A new report from the International Institute of Sustainable Development, a pro-free trade group based in Geneva, makes a case that the American taxpayer is paying more in subsidies to produce each and every gallon of corn-based ethanol than it would cost to buy oil that produced the equivalent amount of energy. That's just nuts.

Are Americans at least getting reductions in net emissions of greenhouse gases for their money? Yes, but nothing like those elsewhere. Brazilians use sugarcane to make ethanol and Europeans wheat and sugar beet. Of the four crops, corn has the least impact on emission levels--spewing only 18% less pollution than conventional gasoline.

That is a benefit, but not a compellingly cost-efficient one. The Institute of Sustainable Development reckons that eliminating a ton of carbon dioxide through biofuels could cost anywhere between $150 and $10,000. But even if it costs just $150, that is still far more expensive that many other ways of reducing carbon emissions, such as making vehicles more efficient. The open market values a ton of carbon dioxide emissions at far less that $150. For that price you can buy credits to offset 40 tons of carbon dioxide on the Chicago Climate Exchange.

Yes, there are social reasons, legitimately chosen, that explain why countries subsidize their farmers, ranging from food security to a desire to protect traditional rural ways of life. To their defenders in Japan, no more so than those in America or France, farm subsidies are as much about national identity as economics.

But biofuel subsidies aren't really about the largely mythical Midwestern family farm. In the U.S., 80% of farm subsides go to massive agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland, General Mills and Cargill. Biofuel subsidies give politicians the rare opportunity feed the maw of the agribusiness lobby while at the same time painting themselves "green" for the environmentally concerned voter. Perversely, biofuel subsidies harm both the environment and the hungry in poor nations. The sooner we stop this madness, the better off we all will be.

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Why the public shrugs at global warming

The secretary-general of the United Nations, upon issuing yet another global-warming report a couple of weeks ago, announced that "we are on the verge of a catastrophe." Kevin Rudd, Australia's just-elected prime minister, has said that fighting global warming will be his "number one" priority. And Al Gore, propelled by his Nobel Prize, still travels the world to warn of doom. His latest stop was the Caribbean, where earlier this month he told a gathering of the region's environmental officials that rising seas, the result of melting polar icecaps, would threaten their island paradise.

And yet the public does not seem to feel all that heatedly about the warming of the planet. In survey after survey, American voters say that they care about global warming, but the subject ranks quite low when compared with other concerns (e.g., the economy, health care, the war on terror). Even when Mr. Gore's Oscar-winning film, "An Inconvenient Truth," was at the height of its popularity, it did not increase the importance of global warming in the public mind or mobilize greater support for Mr. Gore's favored remedies--e.g., reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by government fiat. Mr. Gore may seek to make environmental protection civilization's "central organizing principle," as he puts it, but there is no constituency for such a regime. Hence even the Democratic Party's presidential candidates, in their debates, give global warming only cursory treatment, with lofty rhetoric and vague policy proposals.

There is a reason for this political freeze-up. In "Break Through," Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger argue that Mr. Gore and the broader environmental movement--in which Mr. Gore plays an almost messianic part--remain wedded to an outmoded vision, seeing global warming as "a problem of pollution to be fixed by a politics of limits." Such a vision may have worked in the early days of environmentalism, when the first clear-air and clean-water regulations were pushed through Congress, but today it cannot mobilize enough public support for dramatic political change.

What is to be done? Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger want to replace the pollution paradigm with a progressive one. They broached this idea in "The Death of Environmentalism," a controversial 2004 monograph that ricocheted around the Internet. "Break Through" gives the idea a fuller exposition and even greater urgency. The authors contend that the environmental movement must throw out its "unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts, and exhausted strategies" in favor of something "imaginative, aspirational, and future-oriented."

Let it be said that Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger are anything but nature-scoffing know-nothings. They have worked for environmental organizations for years. Thus there is a certain poignancy to their view that "doomsday discourse" has made the green movement just another liberal interest group. They want environmentalism to have a broader appeal--enough to address major ecological concerns, including global warming. But no one, they contend, is going to demand draconian emission limits--the kind that would actually slow the warming trend--if they bring down the standard of living and interrupt the progress of the economy.

A progressive approach, the authors say, would acknowledge that economic growth and prosperity do not, in themselves, pose an environmental threat. To the contrary, they inspire ecological concern; the environment, Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger say, is a "post-material" need that people demand only after their material needs are met. To make normal, productive human activity the enemy of nature, as environmentalists implicitly do, is to adopt policies that "constrain human ambition, aspiration and power" instead of finding ways to "unleash and direct them."

Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger want "an explicitly pro-growth agenda," on the theory that investment, innovation and imagination may ultimately do more to improve the environment than punitive regulation and finger-wagging rhetoric. To stabilize atmospheric carbon levels will take more--much more--than regulation; it will require "unleashing human power, creating a new economy."

It is not that the authors are opposed to the government playing a role in this "new economy." They would like to see federal programs offset the harm of regulation, for instance, acknowledging the trade-offs of environmentalist policies. If auto workers lose their livelihood because of a new fuel-economy rule, they may need to be compensated, perhaps by a health-care subsidy. The authors' most detailed proposal is for a government-funded "Apollo Project" to spur the development of low-carbon energy technologies. Regulatory-centered approaches to climate change, they say, are "economically insufficient to accelerate the transition to clean energy." An "investment centered" approach is better.

Such a shift in focus would be welcome, of course, but it is hard to see why their centralized subsidy plan would produce commercially profitable--that is, "pro-growth"--technologies better than the multiple efforts of private investors. In short: Why would an "Apollo" plan succeed where the Synthetic Fuels Corp. failed? Having accepted the platitude that "human governance is what makes markets possible," the authors embrace the fatal conceit that markets can somehow be planned or manipulated to achieve a grand and worthy purpose.

Still, "Break Through" does bust up big parts of the old paradigm, not least by challenging environmentalists to rethink their "politics of limits." In an odd way, the doomsaying of the global warmists has had a tonic effect, revealing, nearly 40 years since the first Earth Day, that environmentalism is stuck in a midlife crisis. Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger want desperately to get it unstuck. If heeded, their call for an optimistic outlook--embracing economic dynamism and creative potential--will surely do more for the environment than any U.N. report or Nobel Prize.

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Civil Society Report Rejects "Kyoto 2"; says climate policy should focus on removing barriers to adaptation

A new Report* produced by a coalition of over 40 prominent civil society organisations from 33 countries says that governments should reject calls for a post-Kyoto treaty ("Kyoto 2") with binding limits on carbon emissions. The report says a better strategy would be to focus on removing barriers to adaptation, such as subsidies, taxes and regulations that hinder technological innovation and economic growth.

From 3-14 December, government officials will be in Bali, Indonesia, for climate talks. They are set to discuss the establishment of a new treaty, dubbed "Kyoto 2", which would require all countries to limit emissions of greenhouse gases.

The Civil Society Report on Climate Change concludes that such emissions caps would be counterproductive: they would undermine economic development, harm the poor, and would be unlikely to address the problem of climate change in a meaningful way.

"Kyoto 2 is the wrong solution. Such a treaty would harm billions of poor people, making energy and energy-dependent technologies, such as clean water, more expensive, and would perpetuate poverty by retarding growth", said Kendra Okonski, Environment Programme Director of International Policy Network, one of the 41 organisations who published the report. "Given that nations are having trouble complying with the relatively small emissions cuts required under Kyoto, the economic and social consequences of a Kyoto 2 Treaty could be devastating", added Ms Okonski. The Civil Society Report argues that adaptation is the best way to enable people to deal with a changing climate. That means:

* enabling people to utilise technologies capable of reducing the incidence of disease, such as clean water, sanitation, and medicines;

* deploying technologies - e.g. flood defences, roads, sturdier houses, and early warning systems - that reduce the risk of death from weather-related disasters;

* removing barriers to the use of modern agricultural technologies, which would better enable people to adapt to changing conditions;

* eliminating subsidies, taxes, and regulations that undermine economic growth - thereby enabling people better to address current and future problems.

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