The Week That Was (To November 20, 2010)

Excerpt from Ken Haapala

This week the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment of the US House of Representatives held a hearing entitled: "A Rational Discussion of Climate Change: the Science, the Evidence, and the Response." We attended the first two panels of three panels of this almost 4 hour long hearing.

Since the new Congress does not convene until January, the hearing was held under a House controlled by the Democratic Party. The following are a few impressions of the proceedings.

Several members commented how unusual it was to have one dissenter on each panel. The usual practice has been one dissenter for the entire hearing. This change, no doubt, was in response to the elections. Chairman Brian Baird (D) of Washington chose not to run again in a contested district and Ranking Member Bob Inglis (R) of South Carolina lost his primary election to a tea party candidate. Both Baird and Inglis expressed great concern over ocean acidification from increased carbon dioxide.

Returning Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R) from Maryland advocates electricity from alternative sources. Among other reasons he believes in "peak oil" and that a Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) is needed to compete with China as well as for national security. Apparently, he is unaware that only 1% of electricity is generated from oil and RES will do virtually nothing to lessen dependence on foreign oil.

Also returning are Rep. Ralph Hall (R, Texas) and Rep Dana Rohrabacher (R, CA). Hall read into the record a statement questioning global warming claims and supporting industry. Rohrabacher stayed for much of the portion we attended, asking questions from the witnesses and submitting into the record President Eisenhower's farewell address to the nation in which he cautions the public of the dangers of a military-industrial complex and a scientific-technological elite controlling public policy.

On the first panel the advocates were represented by Ralph Cicerone, President of the National Academy of Sciences, Gerald Meehl of National Center for Atmospheric Research (NACR), and Heidi Cullen of Climate Central. The dissident was Richard Lindzen of MIT.

In the oral testimony and the Q & A Cicerone and Meehl were typical, both relying heavily on models and authority. Both asserted that warming causes changes in cloud cover (clouds are a feedback). Cicerone claimed sea level rise is increasing. Meehl asserted increases in climate extremes and temperature extremes in the past decade. He ignored the 1930s. Politely described, Heidi's comments are forgettable.

In the oral testimony and the Q & A, Lindzen was exceptional. He asserted that the wrong question is being asked - the key consideration is climate sensitivity. He outlined areas of general agreement, for example, that the calculated effect of a doubling of CO2 will likely result in an increase in temperatures of about 1 deg. C and observations indicate one half that. He pointed out that the different models use different values for aerosols [values which are not empirically determined] but are adjusted by the modelers. Lindzen asserted the influence of clouds is some 20 times the influence of CO2. When asked how much cooler would the earth be would be without CO2, Lindzen said about 2.5 deg. C. The others questioned this estimate but gave no meaningful rationale for their doubt.

The advocates on the second panel were Benjamin Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Richard Alley of Penn State, and Richard Feely of NOAA. The dissident was Patrick Michaels of Cato.

The Q & A during the second panel was quite interesting. Michaels held his own against Santer, who obviously believes that anyone who disagrees with him is absolutely, totally, undeniably wrong.

No doubt some of the committee members were disturbed by the testimony and comments by Richard Feely of NOAA. He claimed ocean acidification has increased 20% which is resulting in dire coral die off, and if it continues, millions of species will become extinct. Feely claimed sea organisms are already becoming smaller. During the Q & A he asserted that a pH of 7.7 [a base] will cause the Arctic and Antarctic oceans to become corrosive from top to bottom. No doubt under the current administration, "ocean acidification" is becoming a big push from NOAA as one of the scary consequences of increasing CO2.

[Fortunately, the website CO2 Science continues to compile the largest online database on ocean acidification. Craig Idso states: "for the degree of pH decline that is projected, we do not find the disaster that is promulgated by the alarmists." Populations of some organisms may decline, but populations of many others will likely grow. See here]

Evidently, Rep. Inglis is so taken by the term "ocean acidification" that he produced an egg in which the shell had been dissolved by a combination of water and vinegar, which is an acid. Apparently, he believes oceans will become an acid rather then become less alkaline.

The advocates repeated the slogan: multiple lines of evidence. What is meant by lines of evidence is not clear.

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November 20, 2010 marks the one-year anniversary of the appearance of the Climategate emails. Thus far, there are no official announcements of who did the deed - a leaker or a hacker. Over the year, the transformation is remarkable. A year ago it appeared likely that an international agreement would be reached whereby Western nations, at least, would permit an international organization to control the use of fossil fuels. Today it appears unlikely for many of these nations. A year ago the slogan was Climate Justice, which is rapidly disappearing. As importantly, after two decades of propaganda a monolithic belief has been cracked and in many circles open questioning of this belief is permitted.

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Of course there are some organizations in which the monolithic belief continues, including Science Magazine, which reviewed a defamation of character of those who questioned this belief as a serious work of history and refused to publish the rebuttal by the only surviving member of those defamed. [Now online here -- but behind paywall]

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The US EPA continues its march to impose highly restrictive regulations on a nation that is suffering from high unemployment. One new effort is the issuance of a Best Available Control Technology (BACT) policy guidance to state agencies for issuing permits power plants and other stationary sources of greenhouse gases.

By issuing vague guidance rather than clear rules, the EPA cleverly manipulates the system. First, the comment period is very short. Second, it allows the EPA arbitrary power to what complies with the guidelines and what does not. Third, it may allow-third party green industry groups to sue to develop friendly out-of-court settlements that ignore the affected parties. The last is common in environmental regulations such as "wetlands." It appears that Texas is refusing to go along.

More HERE





Radicals get rich while the truth suffers

THERE could hardly be a more pleasant discovery. It is when we find that our political preferences, professional interests and friendship networks all stand in perfect alignment, like an eclipse of the sun.

Out of this delightful conjunction of the planets we discover ourselves free to advance our career under the mask of political rectitude, even as we enforce our political prejudices on others under the description of scholarly research, all the while convincing ourselves that we are acting from the loftiest of motives.

Last week the journal Nature interviewed professor Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, the man whose email inbox was spread out across the internet a year ago like a patient etherised upon the operating table, revealing a decades-long pattern of professional misbehaviour.

Any journal that dared to publish a rival point of view was blacklisted; any paper for review which varied from his own view was rejected out of hand; any element of professional doubt demanded expulsion from the climate science garden, much as Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden for eating promiscuously from the tree of knowledge.

Needless to say, Jones is neither repentant nor self-critical. Rather, his tone is a curious blend of bewilderment, self-pity and ennui, leavened only by the occasional obscure consciousness of impropriety. Even today he apparently believes it to be professionally appropriate to respond to a request for information thus: "We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"

In truth Jones's dilemma is a nice one. Having built an entire scholarly career on a brief but influential 1990 study in Nature that purported to prove planetary warming on the basis of Russian weather-station data that has turned out to be less than robust, he has spent the past 20 years stubbornly defending his record and the future of the planet as if they were the same thing. As a consequence he has trashed his own career, while damaging the reputations of scrupulous climate scientists by association.

You can say many things for and against the older generation of political activists from the 1960s and 70s: they championed the underdog in their own countries, even as they legitimised terror and oppression across the globe under the banner of solidarity.

However, you do have to grant them this: what they did, for better and for worse, they did generally out of their own time, and at the expense of their career advancement and retirement income. They followed their lights, and will be less financially comfortable in old age as a result.

The problem with the modern planets-in-alignment school of professorial radicalism is that it too often rewards bad behaviour with an enhanced superannuation payout, even as it provides scholarly mechanisms for the elimination of heterodoxy and independence of spirit.

SOURCE






Climate Talks or Wealth Redistribution Talks?



Typically the largest wealth distribution program that occurs in Cancun, Mexico, is college students spending their parents' money. That could change at the upcoming United Nations climate summit if developing countries clamoring for money to cope with global warming get their wish. With each passing year, it's clear that international climate change talks are less about climate and more about wealth redistribution.

The latest case in point comes from United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) official Ottmar Edenhofer. In a recent interview with Germany's NZZ Online, Edenhofer lays out just what the climate talks are all about:

NZZ: The new thing about your proposal for a Global Deal is the stress on the importance of development policy for climate policy. Until now, many think of aid when they hear development policies.

Edenhofer: That will change immediately if global emission rights are distributed. If this happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there. This will have enormous implications for development policy. And it will raise the question if these countries can deal responsibly with so much money at all.

NZZ: That does not sound anymore like the climate policy that we know.

Edenhofer: Basically it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War. Why? Because we have 11,000 gigatons of carbon in the coal reserves in the soil under our feet-and we must emit only 400 gigatons in the atmosphere if we want to keep the 2-degree target. 11 000 to 400-there is no getting around the fact that most of the fossil reserves must remain in the soil.

NZZ: De facto, this means an expropriation of the countries with natural resources. This leads to a very different development from that which has been triggered by development policy.

Edenhofer: First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.

This shouldn't be all too surprising. The Copenhagen conference last year quickly devolved from a discussion on how to cost-effectively curtail greenhouse gas emissions-the primary culprit behind global warming, according to the U.N.-into a browbeating session designed to get developed countries to accept massive economic costs arising from carbon dioxide cuts and to provide billions of dollars in wealth transfers (up to $100 billion annually was discussed in Copenhagen last year) to help developing nations cope with the projected consequences of a changing climate. Meanwhile, developing countries (even the large developing country emitters like India and China) were being exempted from emissions restrictions even though that would undermine any possibility of meeting emissions targets.

Last year in Copenhagen, Janos Pasztor, the director of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's Climate Change Support Team, admitted: "This is not a climate-change negotiation. . It's about something much more fundamental. It's about economic strength." The nations at the negotiation, he added, "just have to slug it out."

It goes to show how ill-suited the United Nations is at handling a climate treaty. The competing interests of U.N. member states make it extremely difficult to for the negotiations not to get sidetracked.

In the end, there is a reason why these conferences are often held in exotic locales. But instead of college kids spending their parents' money on spring break, it's international diplomats spending our taxpayer dollars on conferences focused on how to they can spend even more down the road.

SOURCE





Climate change no longer scary in Europe

Hans Labohm

Bjorn Lomborg's ongoing publicity campaign for his new film makes it obvious that the fight against the delusion of dangerous man-made global warming remains an uphill struggle.

For decades the climate debate has been obfuscated by cherry-picking, spin-doctoring and scare-mongering by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other climate alarmists, including the environmental movement and mainstream media. Their massive effort to overstate the threat of man-made warming has left its imprint on public opinion.

But the tide seems to be turning. The Climate Conference fiasco in Copenhagen, Climategate scandal and stabilization of worldwide temperatures since 1995 have given rise to growing doubts about the putative threat of "dangerous global warming" or "global climate disruption." Indeed, even Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit and one of the main players in Climategate, now acknowledges that there has been no measurable warming since 1995, despite steadily rising atmospheric carbon dioxide.

People are paying attention, and opinion polls in many countries show a dramatic fall in the ranking of climate change among people's major concerns. They are also beginning to understand that major rain and snow storms, hurricanes and other weather extremes are caused by solar-driven changes in global jet streams and warm-cold fronts, not by CO2, and that claims about recent years being the "warmest ever" are based on false or falsified temperature data.

In various parts of the world, the climate debate displays different features. The US and other parts of the non-European Anglo-Saxon world feature highly polarized and politicized debates along the left/right divide. In Europe, all major political parties are still toeing the "official" IPCC line. In both arenas, with a few notable exceptions, skeptical views - even from well-known scientists with impeccable credentials - tend to be ignored and/or actively suppressed by governments, academia and the media.

However, skepticism about manmade climate disasters is gradually gaining ground nevertheless. In my own country, The Netherlands, for instance, it has even received some official recognition, thus dissolving the information monopoly of climate alarmists. The Standing Committee on Environment of the Lower House even organized a one-day hearing, where both climate chaos adherents and disaster skeptics could freely discuss their different views before key parliamentarians who decide climate policy.

This hearing was followed by a special seminar organized by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, using the same format but focusing on scientific topics. The Academy will soon publish a report about this seminar.

Europe often brags about its emission trading scheme (ETS), regarding itself as the vanguard of an international climate policy. In the European view, the Copenhagen climate summit should have produced a worldwide extension and sharpening of its ETS. But the vast majority of countries in the world refused to follow Europe's example, so the meeting turned into a fiasco. Its follow-up in Cancun at year's end will surely produce a similar result. And for good reason.

Contrary to official claims, Europe's experience with ETS is dismally bad. The system is expensive and prone to massive fraud. More importantly, it serves no useful purpose.

The European Environmental Agency tracks Europe's performance regarding the reduction of CO2 emissions. Its latest report states: "The European Union's greenhouse gas inventory report . shows that emissions have not only continued their downward trend in 2008, but have also picked up pace. The EU-27's emissions stood 11.3% below their 1990 levels, while EU-15 achieved a reduction of 6.9% compared to Kyoto base-year levels."

On the face of it, the scheme seems to be pretty successful. However, much of the downward trend was due to the global economic recession, not to the ETS. Moreover, both climate chaos proponents and climate disaster skeptics agree that the scheme will have no detectable impact whatsoever on worldwide temperatures - perhaps 0.1 degrees - though this crucial piece of information has been carefully and deliberately shielded from the public eye.

What about renewable energy as an alternative? Consider these EU costs for various sources of electricity in cents per kilowatt-hour: nuclear 4, coal 4, natural gas 5, onshore wind 13, biomass 16 . solar 56!

Obviously, the price tag for renewables is extremely high, compared to hydrocarbons. The additional costs can be justified either by imminent fossil fuel scarcity (the "oil peak"), which would send petroleum and coal prices through the roof, or by the threat of man-made global warming. But on closer inspection neither argument is tenable.

The authoritative International Energy Agency does not foresee any substantial scarcity of oil and gas in the near to medium future, and coal reserves remain sufficient for centuries to come. As to global warming, the absence of a statistically significant increase in average worldwide temperatures since 1995 obliterates that assertion.

Meanwhile, recent peer-reviewed studies indicate that increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere (natural or man-made) have minimal effects on climate change - while others demonstrate that, on balance, this plant-fertilizing gas is beneficial, rather than harmful, for mankind and the biosphere.

All this argues for a closer look at the cost/benefit relationship of investing in renewable energy projects, to prevent a massive waste of financial and natural resources on unreliable and thus uncompetitive forms of energy. Since every cloud has a silver lining, the ongoing economic crisis might give extra impetus toward that end.

SOURCE



The Global Warming Court Battle

By S. Fred Singer

Kenneth Cuccinelli II, elected as the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Virginia in November 2009, has demanded from the University of Virginia (my university) the e-mails and other information of Dr. Michael Mann, who was an assistant professor of environmental sciences there from 1995 to 2005.

From the e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the so-called Climategate affair, we know that Professor Phil Jones was at the center of a conspiracy to manipulate temperature data. His American analogue was Michael Mann. Even though Jones recommended deletion of all e-mails, it is possible that many e-mails will still be found on the UVA server and furnish the "smoking gun" that can tell us just how the temperature data had been manipulated.

The UEA e-mails tell us of attempts to "hide the decline" (of temperature) using "Mike [Mann]'s Nature trick." It is important now to discover the truth, either from e-mail evidence or by direct testimony. Unfortunately, none of the investigations so far have delved into this matter, but instead have produced what amounts to a series of whitewashes.

The University of Virginia is fighting the demand for the data using outside lawyers and claiming "academic freedom" among other such excuses. I cannot comment on the legal implications of the AG's investigation. It should be noted, however, that UVA was quite willing to deliver up the e-mails of Professor Pat Michaels when Greenpeace asked for them in December 2009. It makes the UVA protestations sound rather hypocritical.

We live in an Orwellian world where myth and propaganda have replaced science and reason, even at the highest levels of discourse. In May 2010, Science ran a letter signed by 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences attacking Cuccinelli. The letter contained numerous spurious assertions as if they were scientific fact. Lacking expertise and ignorant of the actual data, the signers simply accepted a story that matched their ideological convictions.

Then, on May 13, Nature ran an editorial ("Science subpoenaed") attacking Cuccinelli, and in the process labeled those who dared question Mann's science as "climate-change deniers." That term would seem to include all of us who recognize that for the past two million years, the climate has been changing, dominated by ice ages, interrupted only by brief warm periods; that for the past ten thousand years, the earth has been both warmer and colder than today; and that there was a Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and a Little Ice Age (LIA). Who indeed can deny that climate changes?

The Nature editorial refers to Michael Mann as "internationally respected." I would use more neutral language, like "prominently mentioned in the UEA e-mails, aka Climategate." The editorial states states, correctly, that "no evidence was given of wrongdoing [by Mann]." But isn't that the purpose of the AG's investigation? Certainly, the references in the e-mails to "Mike's Nature trick" in order to "hide the decline" might lead one to think that there has been some skullduggery.

The editorial then identifies Mann with the infamous hockey stick graph (published first in Nature, 1998), which did away with the Medieval Warm Period and also the Little Ice Age from which the global climate is just now recovering. It may have escaped notice that Mann has now discovered the existence of the MWP and LIA (PNAS 2008), which has bent the shaft of the hockey stick all out of shape. Well, who says that the age of miracles has passed?

Fortunately for climate alarmists, the upturned "blade" of the hockey stick is still there, showing rapidly rising temperatures over the past thirty years -- thanks to the valiant efforts of Prof. Phil Jones. We are breathlessly waiting for expert scrutiny of his methods of selecting data from thousands of weather stations to arrive at a single number for "global temperature." Perhaps Jones will reveal the algorithms he devised to "adjust and correct" the raw data. But unfortunately, he did not save the original temperature records; as the saying goes, "The dog ate them."

The editorial then states that the UEA e-mails were "stolen." Perhaps they were; but until one has evidence, one may be accusing an unknown whistle-blower who resented what was being done to the climate data and to science. I won't even mention what the resulting climate scares are doing to the economies of nations and the living standards of their populations.

I was wondering just how long it would take the Nature editorial to suggest a parallel between climate skepticism and the tobacco lobby. Well done! It's too bad that global warming cannot be shown to cause lung cancer -- not yet, at any rate. But more research money may yet uncover such a connection. There's still hope.

The Washington Post weighed in with an editorial on October 6, 2010 ("Cuccinelli seems determined to embarrass Virginia"). Among many misstatements of fact, it cites a 2006 inquiry from the National Academy of Sciences on reconstructing historical temperature data and then claims that Mann's "basic conclusions appear sound." But the NAS inquiry into Prof. Mann's "hockey stick" did not support his basic conclusion -- that the 20th century was the warmest in the past thousand years.

Beyond this, the "Climategate" e-mails released in November 2009 put Mann at the center of an international conspiracy to manipulate the temperature data that form the basis of worldwide political action (including by the U.S. Congress) to "combat climate change." We also learned that the same group of scientists actively urged the deletion of any e-mails that might implicate them in this conspiracy to "hide the decline" of temperatures that were supposed to be rising. Unfortunately, the Post editorial ignores these relevant facts.

As if by pre-arrangement, on October 8, the Post carried an op-ed by Mann which attacked preemptively Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the potential chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who will likely launch an investigation of Climategate. Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) may do the same if he takes over a Committee on Climate Change and Energy Security. Mann asks, What could Issa, Sensenbrenner, and Cuccinelli possibly think they might uncover now, a year after the e-mails were published? He claims that he has been fully exonerated by several internal investigations of Penn State (his present employer), UEA, and the EPA and again appeals to the failed science of the IPCC (which, however, no longer gives any credence to his hockey stick result).

Rep Joe Barton (R-TX), in a letter to the Post (October 12) reminds that his public hearings in 2006 "made it clear that Mr. Mann's global warming projections were rooted in fundamental errors of methodology that had been cemented in place as 'consensus' by a closed network of friends."

In responding to Barton's letter of October 12, the chairman of the National Academy panel Prof. Gerald North (Letter, October 17) then claims that "we have not found any evidence that his [Mann's] results were incorrect or even out of line with other works published since his original papers." North's statement is factually incorrect: There are numerous papers, published in peer-reviewed journals, which show clearly that the 20th century was not the warmest in the past thousand years (as claimed by Mann). Medieval temperatures were substantially greater -- and so were temperatures during the earlier Roman Warm Period. All of this is in addition to the valid criticism of Mann's statistical methodology. Tellingly, Canadian Prof. Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick (M&M) showed that even random data fed into the Mann algorithm would always yield a warmest 20th century.

Some final thoughts: Being charitable, I will assume that Mann made honest statistical and other errors in his 1998 and 1999 papers. But after these errors were published widely by M&M, Mann's behavior has been unethical to say the least. He has not replied to the critiques, nor even referenced them. He has just ignored them and tried to muddle the situation. (The National Academy report did the same.)

Is Mann guilty of fraud? I don't know; much depends on what Cuccinelli uncovers. But I am of the opinion that Mann should formally withdraw his flawed papers and no longer refer to them in his bibliography or in grant applications without at least a footnote. Formal withdrawal could create a storm, however, since the 2001 IPCC report built its case for man-made global warming on the validity of the hockey stick. There may be interesting times ahead.

SOURCE





Kracked Up Over Krakatoa: Only unrealistic models gave the desired Warmist conclusions

It was all the rage a few years back to claim that long ago volcanic eruptions—for instance Krakatoa in 1883—were still acting to mask a large fraction of the oceanic warming that should have occurred because of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. The epitome of this argument was published in Nature magazine, by an all-star cast of scientists ever-eager to suggest that it is all our fault and then some. The authors included Tom Wigley, Ben Santer, Karl Taylor, Krishna AchutaRao, Jonathan Gregory, and lead author Peter Gleckler.

The accompanying Editors’ Summary of the 2006 Nature article by Gleckler et al. provides the gist:

"The 1883 eruption of the volcano Krakatoa in Indonesia has echoed down the centuries in art and in legend. Now an analysis of a suite of 12 climate models shows that Krakatoa also made its presence felt well into the twentieth century in the form of reduced ocean warming and sea-level rise. The changes lasted much longer than was previously suspected and were sufficient to offset much of the ocean warming and sea-level rise caused by more recent human activities".

The IPCC incorporated this finding into their Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) to show that models better match the observed history of the increase in oceanic heat content and sea level rise from thermal expansion when modern (since 1880) volcanic eruptions were included along with anthropogenic forcings. The implication was two-fold; 1) the climate models were now able to closely match reality (so they should be considered reliable), and 2) the cooling from volcanoes was offsetting a large fraction of the influence of anthropogenic global warming (i.e. our influence was even worse than we thought).

Now, a new study comes along, performed by one of the et al.’s of the Gleckler study, that basically shows that the conclusions of that original paper were quite likely incorrect, because the climate models examined had been equilibrated to an improper set of “background” conditions—conditions unnaturally free of any and all volcanic eruptions.

Had the climate models been equilibrated to more realistic conditions—after all, big climatologically important volcanic eruption are a fairly common part of the earth’s natural environment and not just a phenomenon of the pat 120 years—Krakatoa and subsequent volcanoes would not have induced a large, long-term warming-offsetting cooling tendency. And in that case, the apparent match between climate models and reality would fall apart as models would be warming their oceans far more rapidly than observations show the real oceans are (i.e., the models don’t work so well after all).

Jonathan Gregory writing in Geophysical Research Letters put it this way: "This artefact [the model response to improper equilibration] could be misleading in comparisons and attribution of observed and simulated changes in ocean heat content".

No kidding.

More HERE

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