Things Warmists don't want to know

The more I study climate change economics, the more astounded I become at the chasm between reality and what has been sold to the American public. I give another example in my IER analysis of a recent book review by William Nordhaus. Here’s an excerpt:

What is fascinating is that if you go to the actual book review and read the full discussion, you will see that people like Weitzman and Nordhaus are discussing whether people should even be conducting cursory research into geoengineering options.

Why in the world would interventionists who think the fate of humanity hangs in the balance not want scientists to broaden the options at our grandchildren’s disposal? What they fear is that if the public realizes there are techniques “on the shelf” that could very quickly and cheaply bring down global temperatures, then it would be hard to get humanity whipped up into a frenzy in spending trillions of dollars to merely reduce the probability of a future unlikely “fat tail” catastrophe.

Remember, the cutting-edge case for aggressive intervention against emissions has stopped trying to claim that a high carbon tax will likely produce large net benefits….

So already the aggressive interventionists have to make the “fat tail” argument of Weitzman and others—they have to say a disaster might occur if humans keep pumping lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But then in that case, it becomes very relevant to know that one of the leading geoengineering proposals would cost $250 million total to limit Earth’s warming. That’s less than Al Gore’s foundation is spending to “raise awareness” on the issue of climate change.

In contrast, if governments around the world implemented Nordhaus’ suggested “optimal carbon tax,” then his own model (in the 2008 calibration which I study here) shows that it would impose economic costs on the world of $2.2 trillion (see Table 4 at the link) in present-value terms.

Does anyone like that deal? Spending $2.2 trillion (in the form of forfeited conventional economic growth) merely to reduce the probability of catastrophe—because after all, we still might have a disaster even with a carbon tax—rather than waiting a bit longer to get more information, knowing that we’ve got the ability to indefinitely postpone global warming for a total cost of $250 million?

SOURCE






Paper finds 'pronounced influence of solar activity on global climatic processes'

A paper published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology finds "a pronounced influence of solar activity on global climatic processes" including in "Asia, Europe, North and South America, Australia, and the Arctic and Antarctica."

The authors find evidence from spectral and wavelet analysis of influence of the de Vries (∼ 200-year) solar cycle on climate variation in Central Asia, and that:

"Analysis has shown that climate response to the long-term global solar forcing has a regional character. An appreciable delay in the climate response to the solar signal can occur (up to 150 years). In addition, the sign of the climate response can differ from the solar signal sign. The climate response to long-term solar activity variations (from 10s to 1000s years) manifests itself in different climatic parameters, such as temperature, precipitation and atmospheric and oceanic circulation. The climate response to the de Vries cycle has been found to occur not only during the last millennia but also in earlier epochs, up to hundreds of millions years ago."

The influence of the de Vries (∼ 200-year) solar cycle on climate variations: Results from the Central Asian Mountains and their global link

O.M. Raspopova et al.

Abstract

Long-term climatic changes related to solar forcing were examined using millennium-scale palaeoclimatic reconstructions from the Central Asian mountain region, i.e. summer temperature records for the Tien Shan mountains and precipitation records for the Tibetan Plateau. The reconstructions were based on juniper tree-ring width records, i.e. Juniperus turkestanica for the Tien Shan and Sabina przewalskii for the Tibetan Plateau. The data were processed using spectral and wavelet analysis and filtered in the frequency range related to major solar activity periodicities. The results obtained for various tree-ring chronologies indicate palaeoclimatic oscillations in the range of the de Vries (∼ 210-year) solar cycles through the last millennium.
The quasi-200-year variations revealed in the palaeoclimatic reconstructions correlate well (R2 = 0.58–0.94) with solar activity variations (Δ14C variations). The quasi-200-year climatic variations have also been detected in climate-linked processes in Asia, Europe, North and South America, Australia, and the Arctic and Antarctica. The results obtained point to a pronounced influence of solar activity on global climatic processes.
Analysis has shown that climate response to the long-term global solar forcing has a regional character. An appreciable delay in the climate response to the solar signal can occur (up to 150 years). In addition, the sign of the climate response can differ from the solar signal sign. The climate response to long-term solar activity variations (from 10s to 1000s years) manifests itself in different climatic parameters, such as temperature, precipitation and atmospheric and oceanic circulation. The climate response to the de Vries cycle has been found to occur not only during the last millennia but also in earlier epochs, up to hundreds of millions years ago.

SOURCE

The Greenie crookedness never stops

A US environmental group has written to Lancashire County Council urging it to refuse permission to allow test drilling for fracking.

The letter, signed by 850 elected officials in New York State, comes days before the council decides whether to approve test drilling at two locations….

Elected Officials to Protect New York – made up of current and former politicians – has written to Lancashire’s councillors asking them to note the findings of a two-year study by New York State Department of Public Health.

In fact, the letter was not signed by “850 elected officials”, but just 10, not all of whom are elected either.

Many are no more than what we would call parish councillors. For instance, Cooperstown boasts an impressive population of just 1852, yet offers us two trustees to sign.

They have written the letter on behalf of a ragtag bunch of anti fracking lobbyists, called “Elected Officials to Protect New York”. They claim to have 850 members, though the website offers no confirmation or list to back this up.

Apparently, the other 840, if they exist, could not be bothered to sign the letter.

New York state has a population of over 19 million, so a collection of even 850 town and parish councillors is barely scratching the surface.

There is also evidence that some of these are not quite the “non-partisan” grouping they claim to be.

For instance, we find that Susan Zimet was out protesting in an Occupy Rally in 2012.

The BBC, of course, would like you to believe that hundreds of top rank New York politicians from all parties feel it their duty to warn us of t

SOURCE





Professor Murry Salby: CO2, whether man-made or not, does not 'drive' the climate system

Author of the seminal book on climate: "Physics of the Atmosphere & Climate," Professor Murry Salby is without doubt one of the best Climate Scientists on the planet.  In a lecture in London on the 17th March, 2015, he reveals new work which shows that:

* The climate sensitivity is below 0.2c - confirmed by 3 independent methods.

* Most of the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 is not anthropogenic.

* CO2 movements and concentrations are largely determined by nature, not man; consequently, any cuts we make to our CO2 emissions will not have the desired effect, and are a costly waste of time.

* CO2, whether man-made or not, does not 'drive' the climate system.Professor Murry Salby has been vilified by enviro-alarmists and the left for his scientific results. Salby was disenfranchised and exiled from academia in Australia for daring to speak such “sacrilege.”

In a case similar to many others we have seen in Australia, and across the west, he was the subject of University hate and was finally sacked while he was on a lecture tour in Europe; his employer, Macquarie University of NSW, sacking him from his position as Professor of Climate Science. The University board cancelled his return ticket home, stranding him in Paris. All Salby's work was confiscated and has still not been returned to him.

The pursuit of genuine Science in the field of climate - and free speech -- are dead in most Western Universities

Other cases where top scientists were vilified and sacked or demoted by a University for the results of their science or for their views on the climate include: Bob Carter, Lennart Bengtsson, David Legates, George Taylor, Caleb Rossiter, Bjorn Lomborg, Henk Tennekes, Askel Winn-Nielsen, Alfonso Sutera, Anonio Speranza and scores of others.

SOURCE




Global warming attributed to CO2 emissions a hoax

Bill Sandt replies to Warmist believers in his local paper

Global warming is a hoax particularly when attributed to CO2 emissions and the goals of those advocating an anti-fossil fuel agenda are totally ineffective in reducing alleged global warming. If anything they are destructive of the environment and they most certainly hurt our economy! The president’s assertions on Earth Day of global warming and its effects are false and misleading! There has been no global warming in the last 17 years despite increases in CO2 concentrations and even the United Nations environmental experts had to admit that there was no relation between any global warming and severe weather occurrences.

I read with interest a recent article by Jim Crissman, leader of the Midland group of the Citizens Climate Lobby, in your Sunday, March 1, edition and some of the later letters published In your paper on global warming. Mr. Crissman asserts that there are 10,000 papers published every year supporting the concept of global warming as being caused by human activity, i.e., carbon dioxide emission. But what he fails to mention is that there have been an increasing number of statements by environmental scientists that either outright deny the existence of global warming or at least state it to be premature (climatedepot.com).

And it is easy to see why. Average global temperatures have been at about 0.5 to 0.60 C above the average global temperatures for the last century for at least the last seventeen years despite increasing concentrations of CO2. Most recent data indicate that the trend is continuing. In other words, there has been no significant global warming in this century. Whatever slight increases there have been have been no larger than average increases in temperatures over the last hundred years and are less than the experimental error inherent in such data. This trend has occurred despite increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. If you don’t believe me, just Google global temperature charts. When doing so disregard those generated by clearly biased organizations such as the EPA and rely more on those of scientific organizations such as NASA.

Attached is one that clearly shows the lack of global warming (Chart 1). Funny thing about most charts used by global warming advocates, i.e., warmists, is that they stop the charts at the year 2000 when it became obvious that the warming predictions were not holding true.

Most recently a hue and cry has been raised about the melting ice in West Antarctica as proof of global warming and the rise of the oceans as a result of that. But what is conveniently ignored is the record growth and size of sea ice in the rest of Antarctica, as measured by NASA, which exceeds by far the amount of ice melted. Warmists point to record high temperatures in various places but what about the record low temperatures we experienced this last winter? Clearly neither can be attributed to CO2.

The assertion by the president and others in his administration that increases in CO2 concentration are responsible for increased severe weather disturbances, such as tornadoes, can similarly be shown to be false. Even one of the greatest apostles of global warming, the UN, had to admit that weather disasters could not be attributed to changes in CO2 concentrations. ( 2012 Report on Extreme Weather Events by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

I wonder how many of the thousands of scientists alleged to support global warming are beholden to governments having ulterior motives in pushing global warming, none probably as extreme as our own federal government, which threatens to withhold FEMA funds to governors who do not agree with global warming. This is not surprising considering we have a president who blames global warming, i.e. CO2 emissions, for the asthma of his daughter.

I wonder how many of these thousands of the global warming scientists developed and/or supported the warming model published in 1995 by the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading agency for global warming, that predicted a rise of 2.780 C for the century and a rise of 0.70 C for the decade. This has been demonstrated to be absolutely wrong (see attached Chart 2) even though CO2 concentrations have continued to increase. Even the IPCC had to admit that they were wrong and modified its model in 2005 to show a significantly lower 10-year temperature rise of 0.170 C for the decade and a 1.670 C rise for the century.

Guess what? Even that modified model is way off base! The actual temperature rise has been 0.030 C or less in the last 10 years amounting at most to a 0.750 C rise for the century. So much for the reliability of the publications of 10,000 global warming scientists.

Not surprisingly, the president and his favorite agency, the EPA, continue to base their policies on the original erroneous predictions of these models. Thus Instead of being thankful to the fossil fuel technology and industry which now allows him to boast of accomplishing the current economic recovery, he is trying to throttle that industry. The most recent attempt by the Obama administration has been to force the NOAA to do something about the ever increasing evidence of lack of global warming. So after acknowledging the absence of global warming in the last 17 years but explaining it as a pause, the NOAA has “recalculated” its data and lo and behold discovered that there was global warming throughout that period. Critics claim that this was done by fudging and disregarding valid data.

Most recently, the president pledged arbitrarily and unilaterally to commit this country to a reduction in CO2 emissions of more than 25 percent by 2025 and more than 80 percent by 2050 without specific details on how this is to be accomplished. It is clear, however, given his anti-fossil fuel policies that he will in large measure force the utility industry to provide that reduction in CO2 emissions. The result will be tremendous cost increases in energy generation, unreliable energy supplies and energy rationing, all of which will be passed long to the consumer, you and me.

What is most upsetting is that essentially nothing will be accomplished by this program in so far as asserted global warming is concerned. In testimony before Congress, climate scientist Judith Curry stated that the president’s pledge is estimated to result in a reduction of about 0.030 C, hardly a drop in the bucket. Also administration officials in testimony before Congress indicated that the president’s clean power plan would reduce any sea level increase by less than half the thickness of a dime. The plan advocated to compensate the public for the increased cost in energy as a result of the anti-fossil fuel policies of the administration is a carbon tax on the use of fossil fuels which undoubtedly will be passed on to the consumer through increased prices in energy, however with subsidies for the “poor.” The president probably loves the idea since it is nothing more than another entitlement program where those who work for a living subsidize those who do not.

The anti-fossil fuel agenda proposed by warmists is also disastrous to the environment and human health as well. In particular using ethanol as an automotive fuel reduces little, if anything, in CO2 emissions, when considered from an overall production, and removes acreage that could be used for the production of edible crops to alleviate hunger and starvation. In Brazil, the use of ethanol is decimating the Amazon jungle, an environmental disaster. Preventing cheap fossil fuels to be used in Africa will force the continued use of wood fires for cooking in the simple homes prevalent there, that lack ventilation and cause continued disease and death as a result of smoke inhalation. Obviously the use of such wood will cause further deforestation.

What is most disturbing in this issue of climate change is the intolerance of those who believe in it against those who do not agree, not unlike religious extremism. Warming activists will not enter into any meaningful debate on the subject but try suppress the efforts of any scientist disagreeing with global warming. They maintain that debate is over and they have been saying this since about 2000 when they realized that they could no longer support their claim of global warming from CO2. They have gone so far as to lobby governments to stop funding such scientists, to prevent the publication of any paper contrary to their warming beliefs and ostracize them at meetings. (See climatedepot.com) If I am wrong on these points I raised I suggest we have a televised debate on these issues involving both scientists who believe in global warming as a result of CO2 emissions and those who do not.

One of the worst recent decisions of the Supreme Court has been to define CO2 as a pollutant. The fact is that life could not exist without it. Its called a greenhouse gas because it is used in greenhouses to grow bigger, healthier plants faster. Clearly higher CO2 concentrations are beneficial in agriculture to result in better and bigger crops thus alleviating hunger and starvation. If the Supreme Court knew its basic biology for a minimum they should have required the government to define the point at which CO2 turns from a life giving substance into a pollutant.

Stop following the pied piper of global warming, his tune is false and he will lead us into an economic abyss.

SOURCE





Papal Nonsense

Pope Francis’ much ballyhooed encyclical on the environment is, unfortunately, riddled with error, unsound science and unwarranted visions of an imminent apocalypse generated to a large extent by free market economics. Like so much information spread by radical environmentalists, the encyclical makes numerous assertions that are either false or dubious, at best. Let’s examine some of the more egregious flaws in the encyclical:

1) The encyclical states, “A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system.” It’s true that there’s a consensus that the earth warmed about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century or so, but whether this is “disturbing” – or even unusual – is a matter of great uncertainty, even among participants in the UN’s alarmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In April, Philip Lloyd, who has served as an IPCC Lead Author, published a peer-reviewed paper that found that over the past 8,000 years temperature has varied an average of 1.7°F.

2) Moreover, most global warming scientists, even avid believers, now agree that global warming has stalled since about 1988. Even the IPCC admitted in its latest report the existence of what it called a “hiatus in GMST [global mean surface temperature] trend during the past 15 years” – although it buried this admission on page 769 of the report. Climate scientist Hans von Storch, Director of the Institute for Coastal Research at Germany’s Helmholtz Research Centre, agrees. He said in 2013, “according to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45°F) over the past 10 years. That hasn’t happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11°F) — a value very close to zero.” (Emphasis added)

3) Despite what the encyclical says, the best information that science has to offer today reveals that the earth has actually warmed far less than the models used by alarmists to predict catastrophe. For example, James Hansen of NASA, a leading propagandist for the climate change enthusiasts, kicked off the global warming scare in 1988 with scary testimony before Congress and an even scarier climate model that forecast temperature by 2014 a scary 2.34°F warmer than the 1951-1980 average. Now we know, thanks to NASA itself, that the actual temperature increased only about half as much as Hansen’s model projected – even though CO2 emissions were actually higher than in his projection. Observations suggest that the a doubling of atmospheric CO2 might lead to a relatively mild warming closer to the original 3.6°F projected by Manabe and Weatherald in 1967 than to Hansen’s frightening 1988 prediction of up to 9°F.

4) Despite the Pope’s suggestion that recent decades have seen “an increase of extreme weather events” and “melting in the polar ice caps,” the U.S., where records are good, has seen no significant increase whatsoever, for instance, in hurricanes or tornadoes, nor has the world seen any significant decrease in global sea ice. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concludes “there has been little trend in the frequency of the stronger tornadoes over the past 55 years.” Similarly, NOAA data record that during 1911-1960, the U.S. averaged 7.8 major hurricanes per decade, declining to 5.2 major hurricanes per decade during 1961-2010.  Likewise, NASA satellite data show global sea ice today at about the same level as when satellites started monitoring it in 1979.

5) The encyclical’s claim of a “very solid scientific consensus” that recent warming is “disturbing” is also false. While there is broad agreement that we have seen warming, and that some portion of this warming is attributable to human activities, there is great uncertainty regarding the size of this proportion, and how great a risk it poses.

Following the 1995 Kyoto Conference, some 80 scientists, including Frederick Seitz, former President of U.S. National Academy of Sciences and several who participated in the IPCC process, signed the Leipzig Declaration, stating in part, “We believe that the dire predictions of a future warming have not been validated by the historic climate record, which appears to be dominated by natural fluctuations, showing both warming and cooling. These predictions are based on nothing more than theoretical models and cannot be relied on to construct far-reaching policies.” (Emphasis added)

In the wake of that conference, more than 9,000 PhDs, among them Edward Teller, “father of the hydrogen bomb,” signed the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine’s Global Warming Petition, which reads in part, “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

6) More than 1,000 skeptical scientists are identified in a 2010 report by former Senate Committee on Public Works staffer Marc Morano. Many are former alarmists. Among those cited are:

-Richard Keen, climatologist, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Colorado. (Global warming ranges from “minor inconvenience that’s overblown” to “nothing – it doesn’t exist” or “a good thing.” “Earth has cooled since 1998 … in defiance of the predictions by the UN-IPCC.” Observing that the most Antarctic sea ice on record was recorded in 2007, Keen asked, “Did you see [that fact] reported in the news?” “U.S. carbon emission growth rate has slowed to 0.2 % per year since 2000,” Keen wrote.

-Douglas V. Hoyt, solar physicist and climatologist, formerly of NOAA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research; coauthor, The Role of the Sun in Climate Change (“Starting in 1997, we created a scorecard to see how climate model predictions were matching observations. The picture is not pretty with most of the predictions being wrong in magnitude and often in sign.”)

-John T. Everett, former IPCC Lead Author, ocean researcher, former senior manager, NOAA (“It is time for a reality check … Warming is not a big deal and is not a bad thing…. The one degree F rise since about 1860, indeed since the year 1000, has brought the global average temperature from 56.5 to 57.5 degrees. . . .The NOAA PaleoClimate Program shows us that when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, the earth was much warmer, the CO2 levels were 2 to 4 times higher, and coral reefs were much more expansive.”)

7. Prominent among former alarmists is Green guru James Lovelock, best known for the “Gaia hypothesis.” In 2006, Lovelock wrote that “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”

Lovelock was immediately feted as a sage and a prophet: from the Washington Post, to Time magazine, to Rolling Stone, the media could not praise him enough. The UK Geological Society even awarded him its prestigious Wollaston Medal. But in 2012, Lovelock reversed himself, according to MSNBC:

“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said…

“We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.

“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added.

8) Perhaps most noteworthy among the skeptics is Freeman Dyson, emeritus professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he worked with Albert Einstein. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London.

Dyson is a member of “Jason, a small government-financed group of the country’s finest scientists, whose members gather each summer near San Diego to work on (often) classified (usually) scientific dilemmas of (frequently) military interest to the government.” According to the New York Times:

Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen … an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet….”

9) The Pope’s call for the “gradual framing and acceptance of binding commitments” has been read as reproaching the U.S. for not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. But Canada did ratify the protocol in 1997; a decade later, 60 scientists signed a letter urging withdrawal from Kyoto, arguing, “Significant [scientific] advances have been made since the protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases.” One signatory, Chris de Freitas, a climate scientist at the University of Auckland, N.Z., and a former supporter of Kyoto, wrote:

At first I accepted that increases in human-caused additions of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere would … lead to dangerous ‘global warming,’ but with … the results of research, I formed the view that … it is unlikely that the man-made changes are drivers of significant climate variation….

… the billions of dollars committed to GW research and lobbying … could be better spent on uncontroversial and very real environmental problems (such as air pollution, poor sanitation, provision of clean water and improved health services) that we know affect tens of millions of people.

10) Even before the Pope embraced current scientific orthodoxy, defenders of this new faith were demanding that “heretics” be arrested, prosecuted, and punished. But as another heretic who challenged the scientific orthodoxy of his day put it, “in questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” It took 350 years for the Vatican to admit Galileo was right. What will our descendants think of today’s orthodoxy 350 years from now?

SOURCE

***************************************

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

*****************************************