Is the Earth cooling itself? Cloud level has fallen by 1% a year over last decade
Amusing that Warmists say it might be a feedback that reduces a warming effect. They are postulating a lot of such feedbacks now that all their prophecies of warming have failed. Their whole theory, however, relies on feedbacks that INCREASE global warming. How odd that all the feedbacks seem to be going the other way!
Ever feel the sky is closing in on you - well, you're right, it is. Earth's clouds got a little lower by around one per cent a year on average during the first decade of this century. That's the finding by a new NASA-funded university study based on satellite data. The results have potential implications for future global climate.
Scientists at the University of Auckland in New Zealand analysed the first 10 years of global cloud-top height measurements (from March 2000 to February 2010) from the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft.
The study, published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, revealed an overall trend of decreasing cloud height. Global average cloud height declined by around one percent over the decade, or by around 100 to 130 feet.
Lead researcher Roger Davies said that while the record is too short to be definitive, it provides a hint that something quite important might be going on. Longer-term monitoring will be required to determine the significance of the observation for global temperatures.
A consistent reduction in cloud height would allow Earth to cool more efficiently, reducing the surface temperature of the planet and potentially slowing the effects of global warming.
This may represent a ‘negative feedback’ mechanism - a change caused by global warming that works to counteract it.
‘We don't know exactly what causes the cloud heights to lower,’ says Davies. ‘But it must be due to a change in the circulation patterns that give rise to cloud formation at high altitude.’
NASA's Terra spacecraft is scheduled to continue gathering data through the remainder of this decade. Scientists will continue to monitor the MISR data closely to see if this trend continues.
SOURCE
'Most Dangerous Man' reveals 'Greatest Hoax'
Just who is pulling the strings and who is pocketing the cash? Jim Inhofe tells
The fight against climate-change alarmism is just one part of Sen. James Inhofe’s lifelong struggle for liberty. But what a fight there is over dire predictions of global calamities because people drive SUVs and are allowed unharnessed access to home heating and the like.
Now the Oklahoma Republican, in his new book, “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future,” reveals the ever-shifting rationalizations, fabricated evidence and corrupt profiteering of so-called climate change activists.
Inhofe confides that the battle is just the latest chapter of a saga that began when he first ran for office in Oklahoma against anti-business policies that were destroying the lives of hardworking Americans.
His “mentor,” he documents, a small oilman in Oklahoma, was broken by his own government and abandoned his livelihood in despair. Inhofe ran for office in order to change an environment where productive Americans are seemingly warred upon by those in power.
However, in Washington, he discovered that it was even worse. Many congressmen and senators were conspiring against their own constituents with the slogan “vote liberal and press release conservative.” “Never once did I hear vote conservative and press release liberal,” he says.
Even more shocking, the Speaker of the House from Texas, Democrat John Nance Garter, deliberately set up a system to allow liberal representatives in conservative districts to secretly vote for left-wing legislation and then deny it. Anyone who exposed liberals taking advantage of this system was threatened with expulsion from the House.
But Inhofe defied this left-wing intimidation and won his first victory in holding those in power accountable to the people by destroying this system. He fundamentally reshaped how the House does business and forced congressmen to answer to the people who elected them.
When climate change alarmism arose, he saw the stakes were higher.
Inhofe realized early on that the hysteria about “global warming” was not about the environment, but about power. Regulating carbon emissions and imposing draconian standards on businesses and personal behavior gives the federal government and global elites almost unlimited power.
In the words of MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen, “Controlling carbon is a bureaucrat’s dream. If you control carbon, you control life.”
For that reason, Inhofe, almost single-handedly, spoke out against the push by the United Nations and left-wing extremists for a regulatory regime that would have almost unlimited power to radically change the American way of life.
In 2003, he labeled global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”
The response from those who may have had their hands out, expecting to benefit from global warming, was to greet him at a United Nations conference with “Wanted” posters calling him, “The most dangerous man on the planet.”
The driving force internationally was the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which claimed a “consensus” on global warming.
But Inhofe systematically dismantles the scientifically flawed and deliberately deceptive studies that the IPCC used to push its plan. From dismissing global cooling between 1940 to 1975, burying admissions that even the IPCC couldn’t link climate change to man-made activity, and inserting incendiary language demanding action, the IPCC was a political, rather than a scientific, body from the beginning, he explains.
Providing the publicity for the so-called “science” was a team of elites and Hollywood celebrities, he writes.
Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” featured the so-called “hockey stick” graph showing a dramatic surge in global temperature in recent years. Gore was hailed by the likes of Howard Fineman, Katie Couric and Oprah Winfrey, as a “climate prophet,” a “secular saint” and the “Noah” of our time.
Left out of such praise was the fact that Gore stood to benefit personally from environmental policies that would push funds to the businesses in which his money was invested, the book reveals.
Meanwhile, celebrity activists such as Laurie David, Will Ferrell and Leonardo DiCaprio tried to brainwash children with propaganda telling them that Earth would become like Venus and inhabitable. This was coupled with a campaign to silence and destroy the careers of climate skeptics by boycotting publications that published their work.
All of this collapsed following the “Climategate” revelations of 2009, which are republished in this book. From so-called scientists trying to “hide the decline” of global temperatures, praising “tricks” to reach conclusions determined in advance, and trying to “balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same,” Climategate showed left-wing activists masquerading as experts.
Incredibly, even though the IPCC, Al Gore, and their “hockey sticks” all have been utterly discredited, the push for global regulation continues under different names. Democrats, occasionally joined by Republicans such as Lindsey Graham, continue to push cap-and-trade legislation.
Dire warnings about the end of human existence have been replaced with arguments about “green jobs” supposedly needed to help the economy.
Frank admissions that the price of energy needs to be raised and Americans need to radically change their way of life have been transformed into claims that cap-and-trade really is about, as John Kerry said, “the creation of jobs and the security of the country.”
Barack Obama even has tried to reframe the debate as “our generation’s Sputnik moment.”
But Inhofe provides an insider’s view of the shifting alliances and collapsing rationalizations of the regulators as they scramble to impose the ruinous regime on the American economy. Like the Walking Dead, cap-and-trade and the attempt to set up a global regulatory apparatus continue to march on, even though the arguments have been discredited, he writes.
As Inhofe reveals, the arguments may change but the rationale is always the same. It is about global control over the United States, government control over business, and ultimately, state power over how people live their lives. From the zoning struggles in Tulsa, Okla., to fraud at the United Nations, Inhofe reveals what is really at stake and how alarmists operate.
Beyond just environmental policy, Inhofe’s personal testament, a global warming exposé and dire warning for the future of liberty, is something that no friend of freedom can afford to ignore.
SOURCE
Electric cars die without careful attention
DON'T leave your electric car parked for too long - by the time you get back it could have turned into a $200,000 brick.
Electric car maker Tesla is defending claims its cars become immobilised if the battery ever becomes completely discharged. This results in a battery replacement cost of about one-fifth the car's $206,000 sticker price.
Tesla owners in the US who have parked their vehicles with low battery power remaining - for as little as a week - have found their cars had become "bricks" that could not be re-charged.
Tesla Australia national sales and marketing manager Jay McCormack said the battery maintenance was explained as part of the company's customer handover and the car emitted a number of warnings about requiring recharging.
"We explain through our customer ownership experience the recommendations for maintaining the battery," he said.
"Like all cars, they require some level of care - for us, electric vehicles should be plugged in and charging when not in use, that's for maximum performance and all batteries are subject damage when at low levels for a long period of time, anything longer than a week for a charge to be kept at zero."
Nissan's Leaf electric vehicle has a clause within its US warranty that details what is not covered - damage or failures resulting from "leaving your vehicle for over 14 days where the lithium-ion battery reaches a zero or near-zero state of charge."
In the US Tesla has countered that "all automobiles require some level of owner care."
The all-electric car company also said its cars had low-charge (below five per cent) warnings but that electric vehicles should be plugged in and charging when not in use for maximum performance. "Tesla batteries can remain unplugged for weeks (even months), without reaching zero state of charge," the company said in a statement.
More HERE
Lent for climate change?
Peter Kurti comments from Australia
The season of Lent began this week. Some Christians will mark the six-week period of preparation for Easter with prayer and fasting. Others will take this opportunity to renew their commitment to what they consider important moral causes.
One moral cause spruiked this year has been the call by leaders of Christian churches in the United Kingdom for repentance and a ‘change of direction’ to fight the dangers of climate change.
The campaign has been organised by the Christian environmental lobby group Operation Noah, which was founded in 2001 to promote ‘the urgent need to address climate change.’
The group recently launched a declaration called ‘Climate Change and the purposes of God – a call to the Church.’ Predictably, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is one of the signatories.
Operation Noah’s convenor, Anglican bishop David Atkinson, has even gone so far as to describe climate change as ‘the most significant moral question facing us today.’
Australians absorbed by the implosion of the federal government will remember a similarly extravagant claim made by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd who said climate change was ‘the greatest moral challenge of our time.’
Rudd blinked when the political cost of attempting to meet that ‘moral challenge’ became apparent. It eventually cost him his job.
Now Bishop Atkinson has out-Rudded Rudd by declaring that the theory of man-made carbon dioxide-induced climate change ‘is not mostly about science. It is about something deeper – how we see ourselves in relation to God, to others, to the whole of creation.’
He may well be right. But by moving the terms of the debate from the realm of science to the apparently higher ground of moral theology, Atkinson has displayed a disordered sense of priority.
Those looking for great and greater moral challenges in the contemporary world don’t need to look too hard. The Syrian government is slaughtering dissidents and foreign journalists. Iranians are threatening to immolate the ‘Zionist entity’ in the Middle East. And criminally corrupt governments in Africa are starving their people.
Faced with moral challenges such as these, Atkinson’s claim may be audacious. But, then again, it might just be plain ludicrous.
SOURCE
USGS releases report on Fukushima fallout
Fallout from the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan was detected in minimal amounts in precipitation in the United States, a study released Wednesday said.
The study by the U.S. Geological Survey found levels similar to those measured made by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the days and weeks immediately following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster, and determined to be well below any level of public health concern, a USGS release said.
The study was conducted as part of the National Atmospheric Deposition Program, with many NADP sites located away from major urban areas so that they are more representative of the U.S. landscape as a whole, the USGS said.
"Japan's unfortunate nuclear nightmare provides a rare opportunity for U.S. scientists to test an infrequently needed national capability for detecting and monitoring nuclear fallout over a wide network," USGS Director Marcia McNutt said. "Had this been a national incident, NADP would have revealed the spatial and temporal patterns of radioactive contamination in order to help protect people and the environment."
Precipitation was collected at monitoring sites within the extensive NADP network and USGS scientists detected Iodine-131, Cesium-134 and Cesium-137, the primary radioactive products released during an incident such as the Fukushima incident, but at levels far below any threat to human health, officials said.
This is the second time samples from the NADP network have been used to measure radioactive fallout, the USGS said. The first time was after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
SOURCE
BOOK REVIEW: The Climate Caper by Garth W Paltridge, Published by Connor Court, Australia, 2009
Below is part of a very large and informative review. Reading the whole thing definitely recommended
The Climate Caper is a “must read” for the insights it provides into the way the prospect of mild global warming has been beaten up to become “the greatest moral challenge of our times” by a recent Prime Minister of Australia. It provides some extra dots to add to the pattern explained by John Grover’s book The Struggle for Power on the worldwide political campaign against the peaceful use of nuclear power.
Grover’s book could have been called “the anti-nuclear caper”. It describes the worldwide campaign by a network of radical leftwing groups, operating initially under cover of the peace movement and then in the environmental movement. Their greatest institutional achievement came under administration of President Carter when representatives of the movement occupied many senior positions and embarked on the program of massive regulation which now prejudices the economic recovery of the US. In Australia the movement delayed the mining of uranium and prohibits the lucrative industry of storing the nuclear waste of the world and also the prospect of nuclear power.
There is a very major difference between the two campaigns and Paltridge’s book is especially helpful on that topic (though he does not refer to the previous caper at all). The anti-nuclear caper drew no support from reputable scientists, unless you count a handful of outright cranks and some ideologues from non-relevant disciplines. The incredible triumph of that no-growth campaign was to marginalise the entire scientific community. This time around the scientific community is on board and the scientists on the more realistic side of the debate have been marginalised. Paltridge provides a great start on answering the $64K question “how did this happen?”
The book has many striking features, starting with the qualifications of the author.
Emeritus Professor Garth Paltridge is an atmospheric physicist and was a Chief Research Scientist with the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research before taking up positions in Tasmania as Director of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies and CEO of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre. He retired in 2002 and remains an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Tasmania, a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.
He provides historical perspective because he was involved in climate science from the beginning of interest in warming, up to and beyond the point where it became inflated and politicised.
He was close to the epicentre of the explosion in the IPCC and he explains how the scientific committees of that body became subservient to the political committee.
On the science of warming he provides a luminously clear explanation of the problems with the models that provide the core of the case for drastic action.
In the Australian policy-making process he was very close to the action when the chief advisor to the Government encouraged a committee from the Academy of Science to water down some potentially damning criticisms of the model he was using as the basis of the proposals that have been taken up by the Administration.
He understands enough of the sociology of science to understand the significance of the rise of Big Science, almost entirely government-funded, and the parallel proliferation of Kuhnian “normal scientists”.
In the same way that John Stone can document the decline of professionalism and quality in the Commonwealth public service because he was there as it happened, Paltridge saw the decline of independence and the spirit of criticism in the scientific community during his career (much due to the same influences described by Stone).
All of this adds up to a compelling case to stop the rush to drastic action to address a so-called problem, namely the prospect of a degree or two of warming over the next century, which will have positives as well as negatives (if it makes any noticeable difference at all).
As a bonus the book is short and very clearly written with a light and humorous touch.
Much more HERE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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Thursday, February 23, 2012
Dammed if you do and dammed if you don't
Renewables, Natural Gas Won’t Halt Warming until End-Century -- Says Stanford
A dramatic switch away from coal-fired power to lower-carbon-emitting technologies such as wind, solar, hydroelectric and natural gas “may not yield a reduction in global warming until the latter part of this century,” according to a new study by Stanford University researchers.
What’s more, “technologies that offer only modest reductions in greenhouse gases, such as the use of natural gas and perhaps carbon capture and storage, cannot substantially reduce climate risk in the next 100 years,” according to an Institute of Physics summary of the study.
Ironically, “the rapid deployment of low-greenhouse-gas-emitting technologies (LGEs) will initially increase emissions as they will require a large amount of energy to construct and install,” according to the study summary.
“These cumulative emissions will remain in the atmosphere for extended periods due to the long lifetime of CO2 (carbon dioxide), meaning that global mean surface temperatures will increase to a level greater than if we continued to use conventional coal-fired plants.
“Delaying the rollout of the technologies is not an option however; the risks of environmental harm will be much greater in the second half of the century and beyond if we continue to rely on coal-based technologies,” according to the study.
The Stanford researchers, joined by researchers at Intellectual Ventures, “arrived at their conclusions through a set of simple mathematical models that calculated the effect of switching energy technologies on the concentration of greenhouse gases, radiative forcing (the balance between absorbed and radiated energy from the sun) and global mean temperature.
“Coal-based power plants were used as the basis for comparison because they generate the most greenhouse gases per unit of electricity produced,” and so “replacing plants of this kind will have the greatest benefits on the climate,” according to the summary.
“These power plants were compared to wind power, nuclear power, hydroelectric power, carbon capture and storage, and natural gas. Solar photovoltaics (harnessing the sun for electricity) and solar thermal (harnessing the sun for heat) were also compared.
“Achieving substantial reductions in temperatures relative to the coal-based system will take the better part of a century, and will depend on rapid and massive deployment of some mix of conservation, wind, solar, and nuclear, and possibly carbon capture and storage,” the researchers conclude.
SOURCE
Fakegate Illustrates Global Warming Alarmists' Deceit and Desperation
"People with sound science on their side do not need to forge documents to validate their arguments or make the other side look bad"
James Taylor
There never was a “leaker” in the shameful Fakegate scandal. In the end, there was only a forger, a fraudster and a thief. Alarmist scientist Peter Gleick has admitted that the latter two were one and the same person – himself. I suspect we will soon learn the identity of the forger, as well.
With the weight of damning evidence closing in on him, Gleick has admitted in his Huffington Post blog that he was the alleged “Heartland Insider” who committed fraud and identity theft, lying and stealing his way into possession of Heartland Institute internal personnel documents and then sending those private documents to global warming activist groups and left-leaning media. Gleick sent to the press an additional document, a fake “2012 Climate Strategy,” that he claims he did not write.
In short, Gleick set up an email account designed to mimic the email account of a Heartland Institute board member. Gleick then sent an email from that account to a Heartland Institute staffer, in which Gleick explicitly claimed to be the Heartland Institute board member. Gleick asked the staffer to email him internal documents relating to a recent board meeting. Soon thereafter, Gleick, while claiming to be a “Heartland Insider,” sent those Heartland Institute documents plus the forged “2012 Climate Strategy” document to sympathetic media and global warming activists.
While the legitimate Heartland Institute documents revealed personal, confidential and private information about Heartland Institute personnel, donors and programs, there was nothing scandalous in the documents. The documents merely showed the inner workings of an influential public policy organization operating on a budget that was quite small compared to environmental activist groups such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense. Indeed, the internal documents refuted the false, yet often repeated assertions that the Heartland Institute’s powerful climate realism message is largely funded by Big Oil, Big Coal or Big Whatever.
The only thing that would seem to undermine the Heartland Institute’s credibility was the wording of the fake “2012 Climate Strategy” document. Computer forensics experts quickly discovered the climate strategy document was created by a different computer program and at a different time than the legitimate documents. The climate strategy document was also written in much different language, style, format and font than the legitimate documents. And long before Gleick confessed to being the fraudster and thief at the heart of the stolen documents, analysts noted a striking similarity between the language and style of the forged document and the language and style of Gleick’s public writings.
The real story in this Fakegate scandal is how the global warming movement is desperate, delusional and collapsing as global warming fails to live up to alarmist predictions. People with sound science on their side do not need to forge documents to validate their arguments or make the other side look bad. Also, people who are so desperate as to forge documents in an attempt to frame their rivals are clearly not above forging scientific data, studies and facts to similarly further their cause.
It is both striking and telling how global warming activists have failed to condemn the acts of forgery in the Fakegate scandal. For global warming activists, the ends justify the means – any means necessary to sell their alarmist message, even if they must sink to forgery and fakery.
It is also worth noting that Gleick repeatedly claims in his confession that his misconduct was motivated by a desire to create a rational public debate on global warming and that he was trying to fight back against the people he claims are seeking to prevent such a debate. Yet in January 2012 the Heartland Institute cordially invited Gleick to publicly debate me at our 2012 annual benefit dinner. All Gleick would had to have done is defeat me in that debate and he could have accomplished his twin goals of promoting public debate and embarrassing the Heartland Institute. Yet Gleick declined to participate in such a fair and open debate, and then on the very next day committed his acts of fraud and theft against the Heartland Institute.
Beyond our invitation to Gleick, the Heartland Institute has cordially invited dozens of scientists who believe humans are creating a global warming crisis to give presentations and to debate skeptics at our annual global warming conferences. Only one such scientist has ever accepted our offer.
If Gleick is indeed concerned about people preventing a public debate on global warming, he perhaps should have targeted his global warming activist colleagues rather than the Heartland Institute.
SOURCE
The High Priests of Eco-Destruction
Michelle Malkin
Rick Santorum is right. Pushing back against Democrats' attempts to frame him as a religious menace, the GOP presidential candidate forcefully turned the tables on the White House: "When it comes to the management of the Earth, they are the anti-science ones."
Scrutiny of the White House anti-science brigade couldn't come at a better time (which is why Santorum's detractors prefer to froth at the mouth about comments he made four years ago on the existence of Satan). It's not just big-ticket scandals like the stimulus-subsidized Solyndra bankruptcy or the Keystone pipeline debacle bedeviling America. In every corner of the Obama administration, the radical green machinery is hard at work -- destroying jobs, shredding truth and sacrificing our economic well-being at the altar of environmentalism.
--Take Obama's head of the National Park Service, please. While serving as the Pacific West regional director of the NPS, Jon Jarvis was accused of at least 21 instances of scientific misconduct by Dr. Corey Goodman, a high-ranking member of the National Academy of Sciences. Extensive information about Jarvis' alleged role in cooking data about a California oyster farm's impact on harbor seals at Point Reyes was withheld during the 2009 nomination process. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has ignored complaints and follow-up from both Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Republican Sens. James Inhofe and David Vitter.
The National Research Council determined that the NPS had "selectively" slanted its report on the oyster farm. The federal Marine Mammal Commission found that "the data and analyses are not sufficient to demonstrate a causal relationship" between the farm's operations and harbor seal health. In a letter blasting the NPS for bullying the small oyster farm, Feinstein -- normally a reliable eco-ally -- concluded earlier this month that the "crux of the problem is that the Park Service manipulated science while building a case that the business should be shuttered."
Given Salazar's own role in manipulating science while building his case for the White House offshore drilling moratorium -- actions for which several federal judges spanked Salazar in the past two years -- it's no wonder he's looking the other way. Remember: Two years ago, Salazar and former Obama eco-czar Carol Browner falsely rewrote the White House drilling ban report to wholly manipulate the Obama-appointed panel's own overwhelming scientific objections to the job-killing edict. Despite repeated judicial slaps for their "determined disregard" for the law, the Obama administration continues to suppress documents related to that junk science scandal. Last month, House Republicans threatened to subpoena the Interior Department for information. Call it a greenwash.
--Water wars and the Delta smelt. The infamous, endangered three-inch fish and its environmental protectors continue to jeopardize the water supply of more than 25 million Californians. Federal restrictions have cut off some 81 billion gallons of water to farmers and consumers in Central and Southern California. Previous courts have ruled that the federal biological opinions used to justify the water cutoff were invalid and illegal. Last September, the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of California admonished two federal scientists for acting in "bad faith." The judge's blistering rebuke of the Obama administration scientists concluded that their slanted testimony about the delta smelt was "an attempt to mislead and to deceive the Court into accepting what is not only not the best science, it's not science."
GOP Rep. Devin Nunes, who represents the hard-hit San Joaquin Valley area, noted that Salazar recently "doubled down on the illegal policies of the Department of Interior and attacked critics as narrow minded and politically motivated. Ironically, these were the same basic criticisms levied against his department by the federal court."
While Salazar manufactures a new biological opinion on the matter to get the courts off his back, unemployment and drought plague the Central Valley. And the White House stands by its "scientists."
--Dams in distress. In Siskiyou County, Ore., local officials and residents announced last week that it intends to sue Salazar and Team Obama over their potential removal of dams on the Klamath River. Once again, the administration's systematic disregard for sound science and the rule of law is in the spotlight.
Salazar is expected to make a decision by the end of March on environmentalists' demands that four private hydroelectric dams be demolished to protect salmon habitats and "create" demolition and habitat restoration jobs. Opponents say Salazar has already predetermined the outcome. Green activists blithely ignore the massive taxpayer costs (an estimated half-billion dollars) and downplay the environmental destruction the dam removals would impose. GOP Rep. Tom McClintock put it most charitably: "To tear down four perfectly good hydroelectric dams at enormous cost is insane."
People of faith aren't what's bedeviling America. Blame the high voodoo priests of eco-destruction in Washington who have imposed a green theocracy on us all. Science be damned.
SOURCE
Aren't High Gas Prices What Democrats Want?
David Harsanyi
Gas prices are spiking. That's great news, right? We have to wean ourselves off the stuff. At least that's what we've been hearing for years. Oil is dirty. We import it from nations that hate our guts (like Canada!). And moreover, we're running out. Oil is "finite." Finite much in the way water is finite.
So why aren't Democrats making the case that the spike in prices is a good thing? Isn't this basically our energy policy these days? How we "win the future"? If high energy prices were to damage President Barack Obama's re-election prospects, it would be ironic, considering the left has been telling us to set aside our "dependency" -- or, as our most recent Republican president put it, "addiction" -- for a long time.
If Democrats had their way, after all, we would be enjoying the economic results of cap-and-trade policy these days -- a program designed to increase the cost of energy by creating false demand in a fabricated market. As the theory goes, if you inflate the price of fossil fuels, the barbarians might finally start putting thought into how peat moss might be able to power a toaster.
In 2008, Steven Chu, Obama's (and, sadly, our own) future secretary of energy (sic) lamented, "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe." The president, when asked whether he thought $4-a-gallon gas prices were good for the American economy, said, "I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment."
How gradual? Like, what, four years? Or is it eight?
Part of "figuring it out" surely had something to do with the recent decision by Obama to nix the Canadian Keystone XL pipeline project that would have pumped 700,000 barrels of oil per day into the United States. More oil just means more excessive, immoral, ugly energy use.
Well, get used to it. You can't take three steps without stepping over some potential 10-billion barrel reserve of dead organisms.
According to the Institute for Energy Research, there is enough natural gas in the U.S. to meet electricity demand for 575 years at current fuel demand, enough to fuel homes heated by natural gas for 857 years and more gas in the U.S. than there is in Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and some place called Turkmenistan combined. Oil? The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the United States could soon overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world's top oil producer. There are tens of billions of easily accessible barrels of offshore oil here at home -- and much more oil around the world.
Yes, gas prices have spiked an average of 14 cents a gallon in the past month and about 30 cents a gallon since last November, according to AAA. Oil prices jumped to a nine-month high -- more than $105 a barrel -- after the Iranians shut down their own energy exports to Britain and France so they could start a much-needed nuclear program, which is, no doubt, for wholly peaceful purposes.
Given the fundability of commodities and the track record of civilization in the Middle East, we'll likely always have to deal with occasionally painful fluctuations in the price of energy, regardless of what we do at home -- drilling and new pipelines included. Still, fluctuations have a lot better track record than price controls.
Subsidizing quixotic green companies or creating carbon credits won't stop the rules of basic economics. If the gas crunch starts hitting the economy, it's doubtless that we will get an earful of populist hand-wringing and that we'll hear the administration once again blame wealthy speculators and nasty oil companies.
Yet in the end, high gas prices are part of the plan. This is what the administration wants.
SOURCE
British Public to get new rights to block 'eyesore' windfarm plans
A subtle way of stopping most of them. A classic British "fudge", backing down without appearing to back down
Resident's will win new powers to block the eyesore of onshore windfarms in an overhaul of planning laws, David Cameron announced last night.
The Prime Minister said the Government would act to ensure that only those windfarms which win local approval are given the go-ahead.
He hinted that the Coalition is preparing to beef up its National Planning Policy Strategy – due to be published next month – in order to let those living nearby have power of veto over the location of the turbines, which are widely regarded as unsightly.
Mr Cameron insisted that some onshore wind energy will form part of the mix of energy supply in future but, he added, ‘if, and only if, local people have a proper say in planning decisions’.
The Prime Minister made the declaration in a letter to 101 Tory MPs who called for the Government to ditch generous subsidies to build windfarms.
His intervention is a hint that the Government is looking favourably at a series of amendments to the planning strategy that were tabled by Tory MP Chris Heaton-Harris. He wrote to Downing Street calling for a cut in the subsidy for windfarms and a rethink on planning laws.
Mr Cameron responded: ‘Planning works best when communities themselves have the opportunity to influence the decisions that make a difference in their lives.
That must include local communities having their full say on onshore wind farm planning decisions.
Our planning reforms will put local communities in the driving seat by giving new powers to neighbourhoods to write their own plans. ‘Top-down regional targets will not trump local concerns and aspirations of local residents when local plans are made.’
The Prime Minister also said local communities would collectively win financial benefits from new wind turbines. At present only landowners see a profit. ‘We are committed to ensuring local communities capture the full economic benefit from hosting renewable energy projects, including retention of all the business rates they pay,’ he added.
At least 4,500 more turbines are expected to be constructed as the Government attempts to meet legally binding targets for cutting carbon emissions.
Critics say wind farms are inefficient because the wind cannot be guaranteed to blow when there is the greatest need for energy.
Equally, several wind farm operators were paid to actually shut down last year when it was too windy – because they produced more energy than the National Grid could handle.
The Prime Minister did not back down entirely. He refused to budge on the MPs’ concern that the Government should slash the subsidy for windfarms by more than the 10 per cent already announced. The subsidy is blamed for driving up energy bills.
He said: ‘Onshore wind plays a role in a balanced UK electricity mix, alongside gas, nuclear, cleaner coal and other forms of renewable energy.
‘A portfolio of different supplies enhances energy security and prevents the UK from becoming over-reliant on gas imports.’
He also said the Government should promote green jobs.
Mr Heaton-Harris said he would lead a delegation to Downing Street to discuss the issue further. He told the Daily Mail: ‘I’m hopeful given what he says about planning and how that is being addressed. This is the opening of a conversation.’
Bernard Jenkin, MP for Harwich and North Essex, said: ‘I’m quite encouraged by this. I’ve got one of these windfarms in my constituency. 'Everyone objected locally but it was imposed by a government official anyway.
'Apart from the farmer whose land it is on, no one sees any benefit from it at all. Everyone else suffers because their houses fall in value.’
SOURCE
No good deed goes unpunished: The high cost of solar
Residents of Hawaii were dismayed to see this recent front-page headline: “Hawaii Solar Savings Spark Higher Electric Bills.”
Since so many consumers have sought electrical savings from installing solar panels, the state-monopoly electric utility is losing revenue and now needs to make it up in higher rates.
At least Hawaii’s perennially sunny weather will likely mean that the return on investing in solar panels will still pay off for residents, as they mostly only need to buy electricity at night.
The calculus is far different in the cold and dark northern climes of Germany. A recent article in Der Spiegel, “Solar Subsidy Sinkhole: Re-Evaluating Germany’s Blind Faith in the Sun,” points out that the German government has invested more than €100 billion ($132 billion) in solar subsidies over the past 11 years, yet,
German citizens get dinged a “green energy surcharge”—an additional €200 ($265) a year for the average family—over and above the cost of their actual electricity use, for which they already pay the second-highest rates in all of Europe. Because German policy is so solar-dependent, when the sun doesn’t shine (a/k/a “winter”), Germany has to import its power from nuclear-power generators in France and the Czech Republic, and even resorted to powering-up an old oil-fired plant in Austria. Not exactly “green.”
As Der Spiegel concludes: "Solar energy has the potential to become the most expensive mistake in German environmental policy."
Not surprisingly, the decision to pursue this policy was based on calculations assuming “conditions that hardly ever exist outside a laboratory.”
A not-unusual situation when it comes to projections for proposed government “investments.”
Ignoring such experience, and apparently neither learning from the fed’s big losses in “renewable” energy, New York State passed the “Power New York Act of 2011,” calling for increased reliance on solar energy. As most of us are aware, New York also habitually suffers from “winter”. Also bad and overcast weather. Yet the cost-benefit analysis commissioned by the very legislators who set these solar energy goals concluded that solar energy is a great option for New York State.
This despite the study’s actual findings. As distilled by the New York Times:
Needless to say, cost-benefit calculations and investments in solar can and should be made only at the individual level, divorced from subsidies, “rebates,” and other schemes passing costs along to others. Solar can certainly make good economic sense, especially for those of us in sunny locations. If combined with the repeal of state utility monopolies, solar holds even more promise, with the benefits of competition and innovation, such as customers being able to connect to two-way grids allowing them to sell excess energy generated back to their utility provider.
Indeed, if one thinks only of the incredible innovations in telecommunications since the repeal of Ma Bell’s government-protected monopoly, the possibilities may be virtually endless.
But if continued along the line of current centrally-planned “renewable energy” schemes, no one should be surprised to see shortages and higher costs in yet another realm of government’s expanded heavy hand.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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Renewables, Natural Gas Won’t Halt Warming until End-Century -- Says Stanford
A dramatic switch away from coal-fired power to lower-carbon-emitting technologies such as wind, solar, hydroelectric and natural gas “may not yield a reduction in global warming until the latter part of this century,” according to a new study by Stanford University researchers.
What’s more, “technologies that offer only modest reductions in greenhouse gases, such as the use of natural gas and perhaps carbon capture and storage, cannot substantially reduce climate risk in the next 100 years,” according to an Institute of Physics summary of the study.
Ironically, “the rapid deployment of low-greenhouse-gas-emitting technologies (LGEs) will initially increase emissions as they will require a large amount of energy to construct and install,” according to the study summary.
“These cumulative emissions will remain in the atmosphere for extended periods due to the long lifetime of CO2 (carbon dioxide), meaning that global mean surface temperatures will increase to a level greater than if we continued to use conventional coal-fired plants.
“Delaying the rollout of the technologies is not an option however; the risks of environmental harm will be much greater in the second half of the century and beyond if we continue to rely on coal-based technologies,” according to the study.
The Stanford researchers, joined by researchers at Intellectual Ventures, “arrived at their conclusions through a set of simple mathematical models that calculated the effect of switching energy technologies on the concentration of greenhouse gases, radiative forcing (the balance between absorbed and radiated energy from the sun) and global mean temperature.
“Coal-based power plants were used as the basis for comparison because they generate the most greenhouse gases per unit of electricity produced,” and so “replacing plants of this kind will have the greatest benefits on the climate,” according to the summary.
“These power plants were compared to wind power, nuclear power, hydroelectric power, carbon capture and storage, and natural gas. Solar photovoltaics (harnessing the sun for electricity) and solar thermal (harnessing the sun for heat) were also compared.
“Achieving substantial reductions in temperatures relative to the coal-based system will take the better part of a century, and will depend on rapid and massive deployment of some mix of conservation, wind, solar, and nuclear, and possibly carbon capture and storage,” the researchers conclude.
SOURCE
Fakegate Illustrates Global Warming Alarmists' Deceit and Desperation
"People with sound science on their side do not need to forge documents to validate their arguments or make the other side look bad"
James Taylor
There never was a “leaker” in the shameful Fakegate scandal. In the end, there was only a forger, a fraudster and a thief. Alarmist scientist Peter Gleick has admitted that the latter two were one and the same person – himself. I suspect we will soon learn the identity of the forger, as well.
With the weight of damning evidence closing in on him, Gleick has admitted in his Huffington Post blog that he was the alleged “Heartland Insider” who committed fraud and identity theft, lying and stealing his way into possession of Heartland Institute internal personnel documents and then sending those private documents to global warming activist groups and left-leaning media. Gleick sent to the press an additional document, a fake “2012 Climate Strategy,” that he claims he did not write.
In short, Gleick set up an email account designed to mimic the email account of a Heartland Institute board member. Gleick then sent an email from that account to a Heartland Institute staffer, in which Gleick explicitly claimed to be the Heartland Institute board member. Gleick asked the staffer to email him internal documents relating to a recent board meeting. Soon thereafter, Gleick, while claiming to be a “Heartland Insider,” sent those Heartland Institute documents plus the forged “2012 Climate Strategy” document to sympathetic media and global warming activists.
While the legitimate Heartland Institute documents revealed personal, confidential and private information about Heartland Institute personnel, donors and programs, there was nothing scandalous in the documents. The documents merely showed the inner workings of an influential public policy organization operating on a budget that was quite small compared to environmental activist groups such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense. Indeed, the internal documents refuted the false, yet often repeated assertions that the Heartland Institute’s powerful climate realism message is largely funded by Big Oil, Big Coal or Big Whatever.
The only thing that would seem to undermine the Heartland Institute’s credibility was the wording of the fake “2012 Climate Strategy” document. Computer forensics experts quickly discovered the climate strategy document was created by a different computer program and at a different time than the legitimate documents. The climate strategy document was also written in much different language, style, format and font than the legitimate documents. And long before Gleick confessed to being the fraudster and thief at the heart of the stolen documents, analysts noted a striking similarity between the language and style of the forged document and the language and style of Gleick’s public writings.
The real story in this Fakegate scandal is how the global warming movement is desperate, delusional and collapsing as global warming fails to live up to alarmist predictions. People with sound science on their side do not need to forge documents to validate their arguments or make the other side look bad. Also, people who are so desperate as to forge documents in an attempt to frame their rivals are clearly not above forging scientific data, studies and facts to similarly further their cause.
It is both striking and telling how global warming activists have failed to condemn the acts of forgery in the Fakegate scandal. For global warming activists, the ends justify the means – any means necessary to sell their alarmist message, even if they must sink to forgery and fakery.
It is also worth noting that Gleick repeatedly claims in his confession that his misconduct was motivated by a desire to create a rational public debate on global warming and that he was trying to fight back against the people he claims are seeking to prevent such a debate. Yet in January 2012 the Heartland Institute cordially invited Gleick to publicly debate me at our 2012 annual benefit dinner. All Gleick would had to have done is defeat me in that debate and he could have accomplished his twin goals of promoting public debate and embarrassing the Heartland Institute. Yet Gleick declined to participate in such a fair and open debate, and then on the very next day committed his acts of fraud and theft against the Heartland Institute.
Beyond our invitation to Gleick, the Heartland Institute has cordially invited dozens of scientists who believe humans are creating a global warming crisis to give presentations and to debate skeptics at our annual global warming conferences. Only one such scientist has ever accepted our offer.
If Gleick is indeed concerned about people preventing a public debate on global warming, he perhaps should have targeted his global warming activist colleagues rather than the Heartland Institute.
SOURCE
The High Priests of Eco-Destruction
Michelle Malkin
Rick Santorum is right. Pushing back against Democrats' attempts to frame him as a religious menace, the GOP presidential candidate forcefully turned the tables on the White House: "When it comes to the management of the Earth, they are the anti-science ones."
Scrutiny of the White House anti-science brigade couldn't come at a better time (which is why Santorum's detractors prefer to froth at the mouth about comments he made four years ago on the existence of Satan). It's not just big-ticket scandals like the stimulus-subsidized Solyndra bankruptcy or the Keystone pipeline debacle bedeviling America. In every corner of the Obama administration, the radical green machinery is hard at work -- destroying jobs, shredding truth and sacrificing our economic well-being at the altar of environmentalism.
--Take Obama's head of the National Park Service, please. While serving as the Pacific West regional director of the NPS, Jon Jarvis was accused of at least 21 instances of scientific misconduct by Dr. Corey Goodman, a high-ranking member of the National Academy of Sciences. Extensive information about Jarvis' alleged role in cooking data about a California oyster farm's impact on harbor seals at Point Reyes was withheld during the 2009 nomination process. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has ignored complaints and follow-up from both Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Republican Sens. James Inhofe and David Vitter.
The National Research Council determined that the NPS had "selectively" slanted its report on the oyster farm. The federal Marine Mammal Commission found that "the data and analyses are not sufficient to demonstrate a causal relationship" between the farm's operations and harbor seal health. In a letter blasting the NPS for bullying the small oyster farm, Feinstein -- normally a reliable eco-ally -- concluded earlier this month that the "crux of the problem is that the Park Service manipulated science while building a case that the business should be shuttered."
Given Salazar's own role in manipulating science while building his case for the White House offshore drilling moratorium -- actions for which several federal judges spanked Salazar in the past two years -- it's no wonder he's looking the other way. Remember: Two years ago, Salazar and former Obama eco-czar Carol Browner falsely rewrote the White House drilling ban report to wholly manipulate the Obama-appointed panel's own overwhelming scientific objections to the job-killing edict. Despite repeated judicial slaps for their "determined disregard" for the law, the Obama administration continues to suppress documents related to that junk science scandal. Last month, House Republicans threatened to subpoena the Interior Department for information. Call it a greenwash.
--Water wars and the Delta smelt. The infamous, endangered three-inch fish and its environmental protectors continue to jeopardize the water supply of more than 25 million Californians. Federal restrictions have cut off some 81 billion gallons of water to farmers and consumers in Central and Southern California. Previous courts have ruled that the federal biological opinions used to justify the water cutoff were invalid and illegal. Last September, the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of California admonished two federal scientists for acting in "bad faith." The judge's blistering rebuke of the Obama administration scientists concluded that their slanted testimony about the delta smelt was "an attempt to mislead and to deceive the Court into accepting what is not only not the best science, it's not science."
GOP Rep. Devin Nunes, who represents the hard-hit San Joaquin Valley area, noted that Salazar recently "doubled down on the illegal policies of the Department of Interior and attacked critics as narrow minded and politically motivated. Ironically, these were the same basic criticisms levied against his department by the federal court."
While Salazar manufactures a new biological opinion on the matter to get the courts off his back, unemployment and drought plague the Central Valley. And the White House stands by its "scientists."
--Dams in distress. In Siskiyou County, Ore., local officials and residents announced last week that it intends to sue Salazar and Team Obama over their potential removal of dams on the Klamath River. Once again, the administration's systematic disregard for sound science and the rule of law is in the spotlight.
Salazar is expected to make a decision by the end of March on environmentalists' demands that four private hydroelectric dams be demolished to protect salmon habitats and "create" demolition and habitat restoration jobs. Opponents say Salazar has already predetermined the outcome. Green activists blithely ignore the massive taxpayer costs (an estimated half-billion dollars) and downplay the environmental destruction the dam removals would impose. GOP Rep. Tom McClintock put it most charitably: "To tear down four perfectly good hydroelectric dams at enormous cost is insane."
People of faith aren't what's bedeviling America. Blame the high voodoo priests of eco-destruction in Washington who have imposed a green theocracy on us all. Science be damned.
SOURCE
Aren't High Gas Prices What Democrats Want?
David Harsanyi
Gas prices are spiking. That's great news, right? We have to wean ourselves off the stuff. At least that's what we've been hearing for years. Oil is dirty. We import it from nations that hate our guts (like Canada!). And moreover, we're running out. Oil is "finite." Finite much in the way water is finite.
So why aren't Democrats making the case that the spike in prices is a good thing? Isn't this basically our energy policy these days? How we "win the future"? If high energy prices were to damage President Barack Obama's re-election prospects, it would be ironic, considering the left has been telling us to set aside our "dependency" -- or, as our most recent Republican president put it, "addiction" -- for a long time.
If Democrats had their way, after all, we would be enjoying the economic results of cap-and-trade policy these days -- a program designed to increase the cost of energy by creating false demand in a fabricated market. As the theory goes, if you inflate the price of fossil fuels, the barbarians might finally start putting thought into how peat moss might be able to power a toaster.
In 2008, Steven Chu, Obama's (and, sadly, our own) future secretary of energy (sic) lamented, "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe." The president, when asked whether he thought $4-a-gallon gas prices were good for the American economy, said, "I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment."
How gradual? Like, what, four years? Or is it eight?
Part of "figuring it out" surely had something to do with the recent decision by Obama to nix the Canadian Keystone XL pipeline project that would have pumped 700,000 barrels of oil per day into the United States. More oil just means more excessive, immoral, ugly energy use.
Well, get used to it. You can't take three steps without stepping over some potential 10-billion barrel reserve of dead organisms.
According to the Institute for Energy Research, there is enough natural gas in the U.S. to meet electricity demand for 575 years at current fuel demand, enough to fuel homes heated by natural gas for 857 years and more gas in the U.S. than there is in Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and some place called Turkmenistan combined. Oil? The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the United States could soon overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world's top oil producer. There are tens of billions of easily accessible barrels of offshore oil here at home -- and much more oil around the world.
Yes, gas prices have spiked an average of 14 cents a gallon in the past month and about 30 cents a gallon since last November, according to AAA. Oil prices jumped to a nine-month high -- more than $105 a barrel -- after the Iranians shut down their own energy exports to Britain and France so they could start a much-needed nuclear program, which is, no doubt, for wholly peaceful purposes.
Given the fundability of commodities and the track record of civilization in the Middle East, we'll likely always have to deal with occasionally painful fluctuations in the price of energy, regardless of what we do at home -- drilling and new pipelines included. Still, fluctuations have a lot better track record than price controls.
Subsidizing quixotic green companies or creating carbon credits won't stop the rules of basic economics. If the gas crunch starts hitting the economy, it's doubtless that we will get an earful of populist hand-wringing and that we'll hear the administration once again blame wealthy speculators and nasty oil companies.
Yet in the end, high gas prices are part of the plan. This is what the administration wants.
SOURCE
British Public to get new rights to block 'eyesore' windfarm plans
A subtle way of stopping most of them. A classic British "fudge", backing down without appearing to back down
Resident's will win new powers to block the eyesore of onshore windfarms in an overhaul of planning laws, David Cameron announced last night.
The Prime Minister said the Government would act to ensure that only those windfarms which win local approval are given the go-ahead.
He hinted that the Coalition is preparing to beef up its National Planning Policy Strategy – due to be published next month – in order to let those living nearby have power of veto over the location of the turbines, which are widely regarded as unsightly.
Mr Cameron insisted that some onshore wind energy will form part of the mix of energy supply in future but, he added, ‘if, and only if, local people have a proper say in planning decisions’.
The Prime Minister made the declaration in a letter to 101 Tory MPs who called for the Government to ditch generous subsidies to build windfarms.
His intervention is a hint that the Government is looking favourably at a series of amendments to the planning strategy that were tabled by Tory MP Chris Heaton-Harris. He wrote to Downing Street calling for a cut in the subsidy for windfarms and a rethink on planning laws.
Mr Cameron responded: ‘Planning works best when communities themselves have the opportunity to influence the decisions that make a difference in their lives.
That must include local communities having their full say on onshore wind farm planning decisions.
Our planning reforms will put local communities in the driving seat by giving new powers to neighbourhoods to write their own plans. ‘Top-down regional targets will not trump local concerns and aspirations of local residents when local plans are made.’
The Prime Minister also said local communities would collectively win financial benefits from new wind turbines. At present only landowners see a profit. ‘We are committed to ensuring local communities capture the full economic benefit from hosting renewable energy projects, including retention of all the business rates they pay,’ he added.
At least 4,500 more turbines are expected to be constructed as the Government attempts to meet legally binding targets for cutting carbon emissions.
Critics say wind farms are inefficient because the wind cannot be guaranteed to blow when there is the greatest need for energy.
Equally, several wind farm operators were paid to actually shut down last year when it was too windy – because they produced more energy than the National Grid could handle.
The Prime Minister did not back down entirely. He refused to budge on the MPs’ concern that the Government should slash the subsidy for windfarms by more than the 10 per cent already announced. The subsidy is blamed for driving up energy bills.
He said: ‘Onshore wind plays a role in a balanced UK electricity mix, alongside gas, nuclear, cleaner coal and other forms of renewable energy.
‘A portfolio of different supplies enhances energy security and prevents the UK from becoming over-reliant on gas imports.’
He also said the Government should promote green jobs.
Mr Heaton-Harris said he would lead a delegation to Downing Street to discuss the issue further. He told the Daily Mail: ‘I’m hopeful given what he says about planning and how that is being addressed. This is the opening of a conversation.’
Bernard Jenkin, MP for Harwich and North Essex, said: ‘I’m quite encouraged by this. I’ve got one of these windfarms in my constituency. 'Everyone objected locally but it was imposed by a government official anyway.
'Apart from the farmer whose land it is on, no one sees any benefit from it at all. Everyone else suffers because their houses fall in value.’
SOURCE
No good deed goes unpunished: The high cost of solar
Residents of Hawaii were dismayed to see this recent front-page headline: “Hawaii Solar Savings Spark Higher Electric Bills.”
Since so many consumers have sought electrical savings from installing solar panels, the state-monopoly electric utility is losing revenue and now needs to make it up in higher rates.
At least Hawaii’s perennially sunny weather will likely mean that the return on investing in solar panels will still pay off for residents, as they mostly only need to buy electricity at night.
The calculus is far different in the cold and dark northern climes of Germany. A recent article in Der Spiegel, “Solar Subsidy Sinkhole: Re-Evaluating Germany’s Blind Faith in the Sun,” points out that the German government has invested more than €100 billion ($132 billion) in solar subsidies over the past 11 years, yet,
For weeks now, the 1.1 million solar power systems in Germany have generated almost no electricity. The days are short, the weather is bad and the sky is overcast.
German citizens get dinged a “green energy surcharge”—an additional €200 ($265) a year for the average family—over and above the cost of their actual electricity use, for which they already pay the second-highest rates in all of Europe. Because German policy is so solar-dependent, when the sun doesn’t shine (a/k/a “winter”), Germany has to import its power from nuclear-power generators in France and the Czech Republic, and even resorted to powering-up an old oil-fired plant in Austria. Not exactly “green.”
As Der Spiegel concludes: "Solar energy has the potential to become the most expensive mistake in German environmental policy."
Not surprisingly, the decision to pursue this policy was based on calculations assuming “conditions that hardly ever exist outside a laboratory.”
A not-unusual situation when it comes to projections for proposed government “investments.”
Ignoring such experience, and apparently neither learning from the fed’s big losses in “renewable” energy, New York State passed the “Power New York Act of 2011,” calling for increased reliance on solar energy. As most of us are aware, New York also habitually suffers from “winter”. Also bad and overcast weather. Yet the cost-benefit analysis commissioned by the very legislators who set these solar energy goals concluded that solar energy is a great option for New York State.
This despite the study’s actual findings. As distilled by the New York Times:
The financial scenarios vary widely. It could cost New York State ratepayers anywhere from $300 million to $9 billion to install solar power between 2013 and 2049. The report said that under the most likely conditions, the cost would be about $3 billion and the installations would increase electric bills by up to 3 percent in any given year. In other words, the costs exceed the benefits.
Needless to say, cost-benefit calculations and investments in solar can and should be made only at the individual level, divorced from subsidies, “rebates,” and other schemes passing costs along to others. Solar can certainly make good economic sense, especially for those of us in sunny locations. If combined with the repeal of state utility monopolies, solar holds even more promise, with the benefits of competition and innovation, such as customers being able to connect to two-way grids allowing them to sell excess energy generated back to their utility provider.
Indeed, if one thinks only of the incredible innovations in telecommunications since the repeal of Ma Bell’s government-protected monopoly, the possibilities may be virtually endless.
But if continued along the line of current centrally-planned “renewable energy” schemes, no one should be surprised to see shortages and higher costs in yet another realm of government’s expanded heavy hand.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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Wednesday, February 22, 2012
AGU has a bet each way on the Russian heatwave of 2010
It was within the range of natural variation but still caused by global warming, apparently. I guess it is a sign of the times that they admit to ANY natural causation. The CO2 "contribution" was detectable only in their "models", of course, models that have never been shown to model anything real
The heat wave that struck western Russia in summer 2010, killing 55,000 people, broke July temperatures records and caused $15 billion in damage. Searching for a culprit for the soaring temperatures, research teams have identified either natural or manmade causes. But a new study concludes the devastating heat wave had both. Soaring temperatures were within the natural range for a Russian summer, the researchers found, but due to human-induced climate change, the chance of such an extreme heat wave has tripled over the past several decades.
“Natural variability could lead to such a heat wave,” said Friederike Otto of the Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University, lead author of the paper. “However due to the global warming trend, the frequency of occurrence of such a heat wave has increased.”
Otto and her colleagues used a climate model that was able to run thousands of simulations. The model was part of the weatherathome.net project, which uses volunteers’ idle computers in order to increase the computing power and answer complex questions – like the role of climate change in a particular extreme event.
The researchers ran two sets of simulations. One set looked at heat waves that would be expected using 1960s climate conditions including temperature, sea ice thickness and extent, and greenhouse gas forcing. The second set examined heat waves under those conditions for the 2000s. Under the earlier set of conditions, the simulated July temperatures for western Russia did reach the recent heat wave’s actual maximum, which topped 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) and had a comparable pattern of daily above-average temperatures that peaked at about 12 degrees Celsius (22 degrees Fahrenheit) beyond the mean. So the magnitude of the heat wave could be due to natural factors, the researchers concluded.
However when the researchers ran their computer simulations, 2010 temperatures were only reached every 99 years or so under the pre-global warming conditions. Under the current, warmer, climate of the 2000s, those extreme temperatures popped up in the model every 33 years – a three-fold increase over just four decades.
'These results show that the same weather event can be both "mostly natural" in terms of magnitude and "mostly human-induced" in terms of probability,' explained Neil Massey of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Oxford University, who was also an author of the study. 'Thinking in these terms makes it possible to calculate, for instance, how much human-induced climate change cost the Russian economy in the summer of 2010.'
The research will be published in an upcoming Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union.
This new way of approaching the problem reconciles apparently contradictory results from two separate 2011 studies, Otto said. In the first of those studies, by Randall Dole of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) in Boulder, Colo, and his colleagues, researchers focused on why the heat wave was as large as it was – coming up with a natural explanation. The second, by Stefan Rahmstorf and Dim Coumou with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam, Germany, asked the question of how frequently such heat waves will occur, finding a manmade acceleration.
The new study stresses the need to examine both the magnitude and frequency of extreme events, Otto said. “It’s necessary to analyse both, to really judge the role of global warming,” she said.
And the results will vary with respect to the event. In a separate study, when the researchers looked at flood risk in the United Kingdom, they found that the risk for fall floods increased under warmer climate conditions, but decreased for spring floods.
Given the cost of extreme weather events, determining how the risks are changing allows scientists to better quantify the events and possibly to help build resilience in society’s responses to them, said Myles Allen, a professor in the School of Geography and Environment, Oxford University, co-author of the GRL paper and the principal investigator of the weatherathome.net and climateprediction.net projects.
“People deserve to know how much climate change is affecting them,” Allen said, “and we have the methods to answer the question: How is human influence loading the weather dice?”
SOURCE
Warmist Megan McArdle comments on the Gleick/Heartland affair
Among other things, she gently accuses him of forging the most notorious of the documents, something he has not so far admitted
This is . . . just . . . words fail me . . . I mean, seriously . . . um . . . well, what the hey?!?!
The very, very best thing that one can say about this is that this would be an absolutely astonishing lapse of judgement for someone in their mid-twenties, and is truly flabbergasting coming from a research institute head in his mid-fifties. Let's walk through the thought process:
You receive an anonymous memo in the mail purporting to be the secret climate strategy of the Heartland Institute. It is not printed on Heartland Institute letterhead, has no information identifying the supposed author or audience, contains weird locutions more typical of Heartland's opponents than of climate skeptics, and appears to have been written in a somewhat slapdash fashion. Do you:
A. Throw it in the trash
B. Reach out to like-minded friends to see how you might go about confirming its provenance
C. Tell no one, but risk a wire-fraud conviction, the destruction of your career, and a serious PR blow to your movement by impersonating a Heartland board member in order to obtain confidential documents.
As a journalist, I am in fact the semi-frequent recipient of documents promising amazing scoops, and depending on the circumstances, my answer is always "A" or "B", never "C".
It's a gross violation of journalistic ethics, though perhaps Gleick would argue that he's not a journalist--and in truth, it's hard to feel too sorry for Heartland, given how gleefully they embraced the ClimateGate leaks. So leave ethics aside: wasn't he worried that impersonating board members in order to obtain confidential material might be, I don't know, illegal? Forget about the morality of it: the risk is all out of proportion to the possible reward.
Some of the climate bloggers are praising Gleick for coming forward, and complaining that this is distracting from the real story. And I agree that it's a pity that this is distracting from the important question about how fast the climate is warming, and what we should do about it.
But that is not the fault of Heartland, or the people who are writing about it. When a respected public figure says that a couple of intriguing pieces of paper mailed to him by a stranger somehow induced him to assume someone else's identity and flirt with wire fraud . . . well, that's a little distracting.
Gleick has done enormous damage to his cause and his own reputation, and it's no good to say that people shouldn't be focusing on it. If his judgement is this bad, how is his judgement on matters of science? For that matter, what about the judgement of all the others in the movement who apparently see nothing worth dwelling on in his actions?
When skeptics complain that global warming activists are apparently willing to go to any lengths--including lying--to advance their worldview, I'd say one of the movement's top priorities should be not proving them right. And if one rogue member of the community does something crazy that provides such proof, I'd say it is crucial that the other members of the community say "Oh, how horrible, this is so far beyond the pale that I cannot imagine how this ever could have happened!" and not, "Well, he's apologized and I really think it's pretty crude and opportunistic to make a fuss about something that's so unimportant in the grand scheme of things."
After you have convinced people that you fervently believe your cause to be more important than telling the truth, you've lost the power to convince them of anything else.
The other thing one must note is that his story is a little puzzling. We know two things about the memo:
1. It must have been written by someone who had access to the information in the leaked documents, because it uses precise figures and frequent paraphrases.
2. It was probably not written by anyone who had intimate familiarity with Heartland's operations, because it made clear errors about the Koch donations--the amount, and the implied purpose. It also hashed the figures for a sizable program, and may have made other errors that I haven't identified.
Did someone else gain access to the documents, write up a fake memo, and then snail mail that memo to Dr. Gleick? Why didn't they just send him everything?
If an insider was the source of the memo, as some have speculated, why did it get basic facts wrong? (I have heard a few suggestions that this was an incredibly elaborate sting by Heartland. If so, they deserve a prominent place in the supervillain Hall of Fame.)
Why did the initial email to the climate bloggers claim that Heartland was the source of all the documents, when he couldn't possibly have known for sure that this was where the climate strategy memo came from?
Why was this mailed only to Gleick? Others were mentioned in the memo, but none of them seem to have been contacted--I assume that after a week of feeding frenzy, anyone else who was mailed a copy would have said something by now.
How did his anonymous correspondent know that Gleick would go to heroic lengths to obtain confidential material which confirmed the contents, and then distribute the entire package to the climate blogs?
How did the anonymous correspondent get hold of the information in the memo?
I'm sure crazier things have happened, and as someone who has had an unbelievable encounter or two in her life, I always err on the side of believing people. But I would like more details on this story. When did Gleick receive the memo? Was there a cover letter? From where was it postmarked? Presumably he has saved the envelope and the original letter, so will he turn them over to a neutral party for investigation? I'm sure Heartland can come up donors for some forensics.
More HERE
Dutch Scientist Says IPCC Draft Report Exemplifies “Worst Features of Science” – Calls For A Critical Review!
Dutch scientist and chemical engineer Dr. Arthur Rörsch has distributed a working paper to Dutch officials in his country to request a comprehensive review of the results and recommendations of the IPCC, especially its upcoming 5th assessment report.
In his paper Rörsch, former vice-president of the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Research, writes that the IPCC has “deviated from the traditional scientific principles”. On man-made warming from CO2, he writes “that no indisputable scientific proof, or even strong empirical evidence, has been provided for such an effect, which therefore remains a matter of speculation.”
He adds: "These reviews would best be undertaken by senior and established scientists whose reputation rests in the traditional enabling disciplines that underpin climate science, specifically physics, chemistry, geology and meteorology.”
The draft volume for WG1 AR5 is a summary and compilation of papers published in scientific journals up to 2011. Rörsch makes two observations:
- The prevailing hypothesis of the assessment report is that Dangerous Anthropogenic Global Warming (DAGW) is occurring; this hypothesis has been under challenge for many years by numerous independent scientists. These scientists were not invited to participate in the preparation of the AR5 report.
- The scientific literature cited in the draft AR5 is selective towards papers that support the DAGW hypothesis, and even the papers that are included are then selectively analysed towards the same ends. These two underlying biases set the tone of the message that the authors of the AR5 report want to transmit.
Rörsch particularly criticizes the following points:
1. The IPCC assumes that atmospheric CO2 is a dominant forcing agent for global temperature without providing evidence.
2. The report authors are instructed to express their conclusions in terms of a qualitative (i.e. opinion-based) probability scale.
3. The IPCC’s use of “self-appointed experts”.
4. There’s arrogance and intolerance for alternative views displayed by the self-appointed climate experts. These experts should be treated with extreme suspicion.
5. The style of the draft AR5 report marks it as a political rather than a scientific document, for it has been fashioned within the framework of a particular cultural paradigm.
Here’s what Dr. Rörsch concludes: "The IPCC’s draft AR5 report shows insufficient objectivity, and lacks the ‘traditional’ scientific balance necessary for it to be used as the basis for policy making. Regrettably, the report exemplifies some of the worst features of the ‘post-modern’ approach to science…”
SOURCE
Reply to a reply
The authors of the Jan. 27 Wall Street Journal op-ed, 'No Need to Panic about Global Warming,' respond to their critics
This letter responds to criticisms of the op-ed made by Kevin Trenberth and 37 others in a letter published Feb. 1, and by Robert Byer of the American Physical Society in a letter published Feb. 6.
The interest generated by our Wall Street Journal op-ed of Jan. 27, "No Need to Panic about Global Warming," is gratifying but so extensive that we will limit our response to the letter to the editor the Journal published on Feb. 1, 2012 by Kevin Trenberth and 37 other signatories, and to the Feb. 6 letter by Robert Byer, President of the American Physical Society. (We, of course, thank the writers of supportive letters.)
We agree with Mr. Trenberth et al. that expertise is important in medical care, as it is in any matter of importance to humans or our environment. Consider then that by eliminating fossil fuels, the recipient of medical care (all of us) is being asked to submit to what amounts to an economic heart transplant. According to most patient bills of rights, the patient has a strong say in the treatment decision. Natural questions from the patient are whether a heart transplant is really needed, and how successful the diagnostic team has been in the past.
In this respect, an important gauge of scientific expertise is the ability to make successful predictions. When predictions fail, we say the theory is "falsified" and we should look for the reasons for the failure. Shown in the nearby graph is the measured annual temperature of the earth since 1989, just before the first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Also shown are the projections of the likely increase of temperature, as published in the Summaries of each of the four IPCC reports, the first in the year 1990 and the last in the year 2007.
These projections were based on IPCC computer models of how increased atmospheric CO2 should warm the earth. Some of the models predict higher or lower rates of warming, but the projections shown in the graph and their extensions into the distant future are the basis of most studies of environmental effects and mitigation policy options. Year-to-year fluctuations and discrepancies are unimportant; longer-term trends are significant.
From the graph it appears that the projections exaggerate, substantially, the response of the earth's temperature to CO2 which increased by about 11% from 1989 through 2011. Furthermore, when one examines the historical temperature record throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, the data strongly suggest a much lower CO2 effect than almost all models calculate.
The Trenberth letter tells us that "computer models have recently shown that during periods when there is a smaller increase of surface temperatures, warming is occurring elsewhere in the climate system, typically in the deep ocean."
The ARGO system of diving buoys is providing increasingly reliable data on the temperature of the upper layers of the ocean, where much of any heat from global warming must reside. But much like the surface temperature shown in the graph, the heat content of the upper layers of the world's oceans is not increasing nearly as fast as IPCC models predict, perhaps not increasing at all. Why should we now believe exaggerating IPCC models that tell us of "missing heat" hiding in the one place where it cannot yet be reliably measured—the deep ocean?
Given this dubious track record of prediction, it is entirely reasonable to ask for a second opinion. We have offered ours. With apologies for any immodesty, we all have enjoyed distinguished careers in climate science or in key science and engineering disciplines (such as physics, aeronautics, geology, biology, forecasting) on which climate science is based.
Trenberth et al. tell us that the managements of major national academies of science have said that "the science is clear, the world is heating up and humans are primarily responsible." Apparently every generation of humanity needs to relearn that Mother Nature tells us what the science is, not authoritarian academy bureaucrats or computer models.
One reason to be on guard, as we explained in our original op-ed, is that motives other than objective science are at work in much of the scientific establishment. All of us are members of major academies and scientific societies, but we urge Journal readers not to depend on pompous academy pronouncements—on what we say—but to follow the motto of the Royal Society of Great Britain, one of the oldest learned societies in the world: nullius in verba—take nobody's word for it. As we said in our op-ed, everyone should look at certain stubborn facts that don't fit the theory espoused in the Trenberth letter, for example—the graph of surface temperature above, and similar data for the temperature of the lower atmosphere and the upper oceans.
What are we to make of the letter's claim: "Climate experts know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade. In fact, it was the warmest decade on record." We don't see any warming trend after the year 2000 in the graph. It is true that the years 2000-2010 were perhaps 0.2 C warmer than the preceding 10 years. But the record indicates that long before CO2 concentrations of the atmosphere began to increase, the earth began to warm in fits and starts at the end of the Little Ice Age—hundreds of years ago. This long term-trend is quite likely to produce several warm years in a row. The question is how much of the warming comes from CO2 and how much is due to other, both natural and anthropogenic, factors?
There have been many times in the past when there were warmer decades. It may have been warmer in medieval times, when the Vikings settled Greenland, and when wine was exported from England. Many proxy indicators show that the Medieval Warming was global in extent. And there were even warmer periods a few thousand years ago during the Holocene Climate Optimum. The fact is that there are very powerful influences on the earth's climate that have nothing to do with human-generated CO2. The graph strongly suggests that the IPCC has greatly underestimated the natural sources of warming (and cooling) and has greatly exaggerated the warming from CO2.
The Trenberth letter states: "Research shows that more than 97% of scientists actively publishing in the field agree that climate change is real and human caused." However, the claim of 97% support is deceptive. The surveys contained trivial polling questions that even we would agree with. Thus, these surveys find that large majorities agree that temperatures have increased since 1800 and that human activities have some impact.
But what is being disputed is the size and nature of the human contribution to global warming. To claim, as the Trenberth letter apparently does, that disputing this constitutes "extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert" is peculiar indeed.
One might infer from the Trenberth letter that scientific facts are determined by majority vote. Some postmodern philosophers have made such claims. But scientific facts come from observations, experiments and careful analysis, not from the near-unanimous vote of some group of people.
The continued efforts of the climate establishment to eliminate "extreme views" can acquire a seriously threatening nature when efforts are directed at silencing scientific opposition. In our op-ed we mentioned the campaign circa 2003 to have Dr. Chris de Freitas removed not only from his position as editor of the journal Climate Research, but from his university job as well. Much of that campaign is documented in Climategate emails, where one of the signatories of the Trenberth et al. letter writes: "I believe that a boycott against publishing, reviewing for, or even citing articles from Climate Research [then edited by Dr. de Freitas] is certainly warranted, but perhaps the minimum action that should be taken."
Or consider the resignation last year of Wolfgang Wagner, editor-in-chief of the journal Remote Sensing. In a fulsome resignation editorial eerily reminiscent of past recantations by political and religious heretics, Mr. Wagner confessed to his "sin" of publishing a properly peer-reviewed paper by University of Alabama scientists Roy Spencer and William Braswell containing the finding that IPCC models exaggerate the warming caused by increasing CO2.
The Trenberth letter tells us that decarbonization of the world's economy would "drive decades of economic growth." This is not a scientific statement nor is there evidence it is true. A premature global-scale transition from hydrocarbon fuels would require massive government intervention to support the deployment of more expensive energy technology. If there were economic advantages to investing in technology that depends on taxpayer support, companies like Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, Solar Millenium, SpectraWatt, Solyndra, Ener1 and the Renewable Energy Development Corporation would be prospering instead of filing for bankruptcy in only the past few months.
The European experience with green technologies has also been discouraging. A study found that every new "green job" in Spain destroyed more than two existing jobs and diverted capital that would have created new jobs elsewhere in the economy. More recently, European governments have been cutting subsidies for expensive CO2-emissionless energy technologies, not what one would expect if such subsidies were stimulating otherwise languid economies. And as we pointed out in our op-ed, it is unlikely that there will be any environmental benefit from the reduced CO2 emissions associated with green technologies, which are based on the demonization of CO2.
Turning to the letter of the president of the American Physical Society (APS), Robert Byer, we read, "The statement [on climate] does not declare, as the signatories of the letter [our op-ed] suggest, that the human contribution to climate change is incontrovertible." This seems to suggest that APS does not in fact consider the science on this key question to be settled.
Yet here is the critical paragraph from the statement that caused the resignation of Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever and many other long-time members of the APS: "The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now." No reasonable person can read this and avoid the conclusion that APS is declaring the human impact "incontrovertible." Otherwise there would be no logical link from "global warming" to the shrill call for mitigation.
The APS response to the concerns of its membership was better than that of any other scientific society, but it was not democratic. The management of APS took months to review the statement quoted above, and it eventually declared that not a word needed to be changed, though some 750 words were added to try to explain what the original 157 words really meant. APS members were permitted to send in comments but the comments were never made public.
In spite of the obstinacy of some in APS management, APS members of good will are supporting the establishment of a politics-free, climate physics study group within the Society. If successful, it will facilitate much needed discussion, debate, and independent research in the physics of climate.
In summary, science progresses by testing predictions against real world data obtained from direct observations and rigorous experiments. The stakes in the global-warming debate are much too high to ignore this observational evidence and declare the science settled. Though there are many more scientists who are extremely well qualified and have reached the same conclusions we have, we stress again that science is not a democratic exercise and our conclusions must be based on observational evidence.
The computer-model predictions of alarming global warming have seriously exaggerated the warming by CO2 and have underestimated other causes. Since CO2 is not a pollutant but a substantial benefit to agriculture, and since its warming potential has been greatly exaggerated, it is time for the world to rethink its frenzied pursuit of decarbonization at any cost.
SOURCE
Citigroup Says Peak Oil Is Dead
Citigroup announced to the world Thursday that peak oil is dead. The controversial idea that world crude oil production is almost at its peak and will soon begin an irrevocable long-term decline has been laid to rest in the highly productive shale oil formations of North Dakota, with potentially big consequences for oil prices, the bank said.
However, despite this reading of last rites, the data suggest it would be premature to pronounce this patient dead.
Changes in oil markets in the past decade have given significant traction to the argument that world oil production is close to peaking. Despite the huge incentive of a near-threefold increase in the price of benchmark Brent crude from 2000 to 2010, the world barely managed to eke out a 10% increase in crude oil production, according to BP data.
Many have argued that this proves the physical limit on global crude oil production is near, or may already have been passed.
“The belief that global oil production has peaked, or is on the cusp of doing so, has helped to fuel oil’s more than decade-long rally,” Citigroup said in a note to clients. “This is now all changing because of what is happening in North Dakota,” where new technology has led to a large and unexpected surge in oil production from shale rock.
After decades of decline, “U.S. oil production is now on the rise, entirely because of shale oil production,” said Citigroup. Shale oil could add almost 3.5 million barrels a day to US oil production between 2010 and 2022 and has already slashed 1 million barrels a day from U.S. oil imports. One day it may allow the U.S. and Canada to be self-sufficient in oil, it said.
There are other parts of the world with similar promise, the bank said. Argentina has already discovered significant shale oil deposits. Australia may have shale reserves. The prospects for Europe may not be so good, given that one of the more prospective areas is in the Paris basin of France, where shale gas drilling has already been banned.
“The surge in U.S. production clearly indicates that human ingenuity is rising to the challenge issued by long-time oil bulls,” and peak oilers, said Citigroup.
SOURCE
Facts don't bother Warmists
The Himalayan glaciers aren’t melting, at least for the moment, says a recently study published in Nature. Between 2003 and 2010 the effective change in the size of glaciers in the high mountains of Asia was “not significantly different from zero,” said a British scientist not involved with the study, who added, “I believe this data is the most reliable estimate of global glacier mass balance that has been produced to date.” Low-lying glaciers were indeed melting, but ice added at higher altitudes made up the difference.
Astoundingly, the scientists don’t seem to have realized the significance of their own findings. “People should be just as worried about the melting of the world’s ice as they were before,” said one of the researchers. In other words, we should be just as worried as we were when the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was scaring us with the news that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 (or was it 2350?). It turns out, too, that the polar bear population in the Arctic is much more stable than previous estimates suggested.
The science is never settled.
SOURCE
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It was within the range of natural variation but still caused by global warming, apparently. I guess it is a sign of the times that they admit to ANY natural causation. The CO2 "contribution" was detectable only in their "models", of course, models that have never been shown to model anything real
The heat wave that struck western Russia in summer 2010, killing 55,000 people, broke July temperatures records and caused $15 billion in damage. Searching for a culprit for the soaring temperatures, research teams have identified either natural or manmade causes. But a new study concludes the devastating heat wave had both. Soaring temperatures were within the natural range for a Russian summer, the researchers found, but due to human-induced climate change, the chance of such an extreme heat wave has tripled over the past several decades.
“Natural variability could lead to such a heat wave,” said Friederike Otto of the Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University, lead author of the paper. “However due to the global warming trend, the frequency of occurrence of such a heat wave has increased.”
Otto and her colleagues used a climate model that was able to run thousands of simulations. The model was part of the weatherathome.net project, which uses volunteers’ idle computers in order to increase the computing power and answer complex questions – like the role of climate change in a particular extreme event.
The researchers ran two sets of simulations. One set looked at heat waves that would be expected using 1960s climate conditions including temperature, sea ice thickness and extent, and greenhouse gas forcing. The second set examined heat waves under those conditions for the 2000s. Under the earlier set of conditions, the simulated July temperatures for western Russia did reach the recent heat wave’s actual maximum, which topped 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) and had a comparable pattern of daily above-average temperatures that peaked at about 12 degrees Celsius (22 degrees Fahrenheit) beyond the mean. So the magnitude of the heat wave could be due to natural factors, the researchers concluded.
However when the researchers ran their computer simulations, 2010 temperatures were only reached every 99 years or so under the pre-global warming conditions. Under the current, warmer, climate of the 2000s, those extreme temperatures popped up in the model every 33 years – a three-fold increase over just four decades.
'These results show that the same weather event can be both "mostly natural" in terms of magnitude and "mostly human-induced" in terms of probability,' explained Neil Massey of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Oxford University, who was also an author of the study. 'Thinking in these terms makes it possible to calculate, for instance, how much human-induced climate change cost the Russian economy in the summer of 2010.'
The research will be published in an upcoming Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union.
This new way of approaching the problem reconciles apparently contradictory results from two separate 2011 studies, Otto said. In the first of those studies, by Randall Dole of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) in Boulder, Colo, and his colleagues, researchers focused on why the heat wave was as large as it was – coming up with a natural explanation. The second, by Stefan Rahmstorf and Dim Coumou with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam, Germany, asked the question of how frequently such heat waves will occur, finding a manmade acceleration.
The new study stresses the need to examine both the magnitude and frequency of extreme events, Otto said. “It’s necessary to analyse both, to really judge the role of global warming,” she said.
And the results will vary with respect to the event. In a separate study, when the researchers looked at flood risk in the United Kingdom, they found that the risk for fall floods increased under warmer climate conditions, but decreased for spring floods.
Given the cost of extreme weather events, determining how the risks are changing allows scientists to better quantify the events and possibly to help build resilience in society’s responses to them, said Myles Allen, a professor in the School of Geography and Environment, Oxford University, co-author of the GRL paper and the principal investigator of the weatherathome.net and climateprediction.net projects.
“People deserve to know how much climate change is affecting them,” Allen said, “and we have the methods to answer the question: How is human influence loading the weather dice?”
SOURCE
Warmist Megan McArdle comments on the Gleick/Heartland affair
Among other things, she gently accuses him of forging the most notorious of the documents, something he has not so far admitted
This is . . . just . . . words fail me . . . I mean, seriously . . . um . . . well, what the hey?!?!
The very, very best thing that one can say about this is that this would be an absolutely astonishing lapse of judgement for someone in their mid-twenties, and is truly flabbergasting coming from a research institute head in his mid-fifties. Let's walk through the thought process:
You receive an anonymous memo in the mail purporting to be the secret climate strategy of the Heartland Institute. It is not printed on Heartland Institute letterhead, has no information identifying the supposed author or audience, contains weird locutions more typical of Heartland's opponents than of climate skeptics, and appears to have been written in a somewhat slapdash fashion. Do you:
A. Throw it in the trash
B. Reach out to like-minded friends to see how you might go about confirming its provenance
C. Tell no one, but risk a wire-fraud conviction, the destruction of your career, and a serious PR blow to your movement by impersonating a Heartland board member in order to obtain confidential documents.
As a journalist, I am in fact the semi-frequent recipient of documents promising amazing scoops, and depending on the circumstances, my answer is always "A" or "B", never "C".
It's a gross violation of journalistic ethics, though perhaps Gleick would argue that he's not a journalist--and in truth, it's hard to feel too sorry for Heartland, given how gleefully they embraced the ClimateGate leaks. So leave ethics aside: wasn't he worried that impersonating board members in order to obtain confidential material might be, I don't know, illegal? Forget about the morality of it: the risk is all out of proportion to the possible reward.
Some of the climate bloggers are praising Gleick for coming forward, and complaining that this is distracting from the real story. And I agree that it's a pity that this is distracting from the important question about how fast the climate is warming, and what we should do about it.
But that is not the fault of Heartland, or the people who are writing about it. When a respected public figure says that a couple of intriguing pieces of paper mailed to him by a stranger somehow induced him to assume someone else's identity and flirt with wire fraud . . . well, that's a little distracting.
Gleick has done enormous damage to his cause and his own reputation, and it's no good to say that people shouldn't be focusing on it. If his judgement is this bad, how is his judgement on matters of science? For that matter, what about the judgement of all the others in the movement who apparently see nothing worth dwelling on in his actions?
When skeptics complain that global warming activists are apparently willing to go to any lengths--including lying--to advance their worldview, I'd say one of the movement's top priorities should be not proving them right. And if one rogue member of the community does something crazy that provides such proof, I'd say it is crucial that the other members of the community say "Oh, how horrible, this is so far beyond the pale that I cannot imagine how this ever could have happened!" and not, "Well, he's apologized and I really think it's pretty crude and opportunistic to make a fuss about something that's so unimportant in the grand scheme of things."
After you have convinced people that you fervently believe your cause to be more important than telling the truth, you've lost the power to convince them of anything else.
The other thing one must note is that his story is a little puzzling. We know two things about the memo:
1. It must have been written by someone who had access to the information in the leaked documents, because it uses precise figures and frequent paraphrases.
2. It was probably not written by anyone who had intimate familiarity with Heartland's operations, because it made clear errors about the Koch donations--the amount, and the implied purpose. It also hashed the figures for a sizable program, and may have made other errors that I haven't identified.
Did someone else gain access to the documents, write up a fake memo, and then snail mail that memo to Dr. Gleick? Why didn't they just send him everything?
If an insider was the source of the memo, as some have speculated, why did it get basic facts wrong? (I have heard a few suggestions that this was an incredibly elaborate sting by Heartland. If so, they deserve a prominent place in the supervillain Hall of Fame.)
Why did the initial email to the climate bloggers claim that Heartland was the source of all the documents, when he couldn't possibly have known for sure that this was where the climate strategy memo came from?
Why was this mailed only to Gleick? Others were mentioned in the memo, but none of them seem to have been contacted--I assume that after a week of feeding frenzy, anyone else who was mailed a copy would have said something by now.
How did his anonymous correspondent know that Gleick would go to heroic lengths to obtain confidential material which confirmed the contents, and then distribute the entire package to the climate blogs?
How did the anonymous correspondent get hold of the information in the memo?
I'm sure crazier things have happened, and as someone who has had an unbelievable encounter or two in her life, I always err on the side of believing people. But I would like more details on this story. When did Gleick receive the memo? Was there a cover letter? From where was it postmarked? Presumably he has saved the envelope and the original letter, so will he turn them over to a neutral party for investigation? I'm sure Heartland can come up donors for some forensics.
More HERE
Dutch Scientist Says IPCC Draft Report Exemplifies “Worst Features of Science” – Calls For A Critical Review!
Dutch scientist and chemical engineer Dr. Arthur Rörsch has distributed a working paper to Dutch officials in his country to request a comprehensive review of the results and recommendations of the IPCC, especially its upcoming 5th assessment report.
In his paper Rörsch, former vice-president of the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Research, writes that the IPCC has “deviated from the traditional scientific principles”. On man-made warming from CO2, he writes “that no indisputable scientific proof, or even strong empirical evidence, has been provided for such an effect, which therefore remains a matter of speculation.”
He adds: "These reviews would best be undertaken by senior and established scientists whose reputation rests in the traditional enabling disciplines that underpin climate science, specifically physics, chemistry, geology and meteorology.”
The draft volume for WG1 AR5 is a summary and compilation of papers published in scientific journals up to 2011. Rörsch makes two observations:
- The prevailing hypothesis of the assessment report is that Dangerous Anthropogenic Global Warming (DAGW) is occurring; this hypothesis has been under challenge for many years by numerous independent scientists. These scientists were not invited to participate in the preparation of the AR5 report.
- The scientific literature cited in the draft AR5 is selective towards papers that support the DAGW hypothesis, and even the papers that are included are then selectively analysed towards the same ends. These two underlying biases set the tone of the message that the authors of the AR5 report want to transmit.
Rörsch particularly criticizes the following points:
1. The IPCC assumes that atmospheric CO2 is a dominant forcing agent for global temperature without providing evidence.
2. The report authors are instructed to express their conclusions in terms of a qualitative (i.e. opinion-based) probability scale.
3. The IPCC’s use of “self-appointed experts”.
4. There’s arrogance and intolerance for alternative views displayed by the self-appointed climate experts. These experts should be treated with extreme suspicion.
5. The style of the draft AR5 report marks it as a political rather than a scientific document, for it has been fashioned within the framework of a particular cultural paradigm.
Here’s what Dr. Rörsch concludes: "The IPCC’s draft AR5 report shows insufficient objectivity, and lacks the ‘traditional’ scientific balance necessary for it to be used as the basis for policy making. Regrettably, the report exemplifies some of the worst features of the ‘post-modern’ approach to science…”
SOURCE
Reply to a reply
The authors of the Jan. 27 Wall Street Journal op-ed, 'No Need to Panic about Global Warming,' respond to their critics
This letter responds to criticisms of the op-ed made by Kevin Trenberth and 37 others in a letter published Feb. 1, and by Robert Byer of the American Physical Society in a letter published Feb. 6.
The interest generated by our Wall Street Journal op-ed of Jan. 27, "No Need to Panic about Global Warming," is gratifying but so extensive that we will limit our response to the letter to the editor the Journal published on Feb. 1, 2012 by Kevin Trenberth and 37 other signatories, and to the Feb. 6 letter by Robert Byer, President of the American Physical Society. (We, of course, thank the writers of supportive letters.)
We agree with Mr. Trenberth et al. that expertise is important in medical care, as it is in any matter of importance to humans or our environment. Consider then that by eliminating fossil fuels, the recipient of medical care (all of us) is being asked to submit to what amounts to an economic heart transplant. According to most patient bills of rights, the patient has a strong say in the treatment decision. Natural questions from the patient are whether a heart transplant is really needed, and how successful the diagnostic team has been in the past.
In this respect, an important gauge of scientific expertise is the ability to make successful predictions. When predictions fail, we say the theory is "falsified" and we should look for the reasons for the failure. Shown in the nearby graph is the measured annual temperature of the earth since 1989, just before the first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Also shown are the projections of the likely increase of temperature, as published in the Summaries of each of the four IPCC reports, the first in the year 1990 and the last in the year 2007.
These projections were based on IPCC computer models of how increased atmospheric CO2 should warm the earth. Some of the models predict higher or lower rates of warming, but the projections shown in the graph and their extensions into the distant future are the basis of most studies of environmental effects and mitigation policy options. Year-to-year fluctuations and discrepancies are unimportant; longer-term trends are significant.
From the graph it appears that the projections exaggerate, substantially, the response of the earth's temperature to CO2 which increased by about 11% from 1989 through 2011. Furthermore, when one examines the historical temperature record throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, the data strongly suggest a much lower CO2 effect than almost all models calculate.
The Trenberth letter tells us that "computer models have recently shown that during periods when there is a smaller increase of surface temperatures, warming is occurring elsewhere in the climate system, typically in the deep ocean."
The ARGO system of diving buoys is providing increasingly reliable data on the temperature of the upper layers of the ocean, where much of any heat from global warming must reside. But much like the surface temperature shown in the graph, the heat content of the upper layers of the world's oceans is not increasing nearly as fast as IPCC models predict, perhaps not increasing at all. Why should we now believe exaggerating IPCC models that tell us of "missing heat" hiding in the one place where it cannot yet be reliably measured—the deep ocean?
Given this dubious track record of prediction, it is entirely reasonable to ask for a second opinion. We have offered ours. With apologies for any immodesty, we all have enjoyed distinguished careers in climate science or in key science and engineering disciplines (such as physics, aeronautics, geology, biology, forecasting) on which climate science is based.
Trenberth et al. tell us that the managements of major national academies of science have said that "the science is clear, the world is heating up and humans are primarily responsible." Apparently every generation of humanity needs to relearn that Mother Nature tells us what the science is, not authoritarian academy bureaucrats or computer models.
One reason to be on guard, as we explained in our original op-ed, is that motives other than objective science are at work in much of the scientific establishment. All of us are members of major academies and scientific societies, but we urge Journal readers not to depend on pompous academy pronouncements—on what we say—but to follow the motto of the Royal Society of Great Britain, one of the oldest learned societies in the world: nullius in verba—take nobody's word for it. As we said in our op-ed, everyone should look at certain stubborn facts that don't fit the theory espoused in the Trenberth letter, for example—the graph of surface temperature above, and similar data for the temperature of the lower atmosphere and the upper oceans.
What are we to make of the letter's claim: "Climate experts know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade. In fact, it was the warmest decade on record." We don't see any warming trend after the year 2000 in the graph. It is true that the years 2000-2010 were perhaps 0.2 C warmer than the preceding 10 years. But the record indicates that long before CO2 concentrations of the atmosphere began to increase, the earth began to warm in fits and starts at the end of the Little Ice Age—hundreds of years ago. This long term-trend is quite likely to produce several warm years in a row. The question is how much of the warming comes from CO2 and how much is due to other, both natural and anthropogenic, factors?
There have been many times in the past when there were warmer decades. It may have been warmer in medieval times, when the Vikings settled Greenland, and when wine was exported from England. Many proxy indicators show that the Medieval Warming was global in extent. And there were even warmer periods a few thousand years ago during the Holocene Climate Optimum. The fact is that there are very powerful influences on the earth's climate that have nothing to do with human-generated CO2. The graph strongly suggests that the IPCC has greatly underestimated the natural sources of warming (and cooling) and has greatly exaggerated the warming from CO2.
The Trenberth letter states: "Research shows that more than 97% of scientists actively publishing in the field agree that climate change is real and human caused." However, the claim of 97% support is deceptive. The surveys contained trivial polling questions that even we would agree with. Thus, these surveys find that large majorities agree that temperatures have increased since 1800 and that human activities have some impact.
But what is being disputed is the size and nature of the human contribution to global warming. To claim, as the Trenberth letter apparently does, that disputing this constitutes "extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert" is peculiar indeed.
One might infer from the Trenberth letter that scientific facts are determined by majority vote. Some postmodern philosophers have made such claims. But scientific facts come from observations, experiments and careful analysis, not from the near-unanimous vote of some group of people.
The continued efforts of the climate establishment to eliminate "extreme views" can acquire a seriously threatening nature when efforts are directed at silencing scientific opposition. In our op-ed we mentioned the campaign circa 2003 to have Dr. Chris de Freitas removed not only from his position as editor of the journal Climate Research, but from his university job as well. Much of that campaign is documented in Climategate emails, where one of the signatories of the Trenberth et al. letter writes: "I believe that a boycott against publishing, reviewing for, or even citing articles from Climate Research [then edited by Dr. de Freitas] is certainly warranted, but perhaps the minimum action that should be taken."
Or consider the resignation last year of Wolfgang Wagner, editor-in-chief of the journal Remote Sensing. In a fulsome resignation editorial eerily reminiscent of past recantations by political and religious heretics, Mr. Wagner confessed to his "sin" of publishing a properly peer-reviewed paper by University of Alabama scientists Roy Spencer and William Braswell containing the finding that IPCC models exaggerate the warming caused by increasing CO2.
The Trenberth letter tells us that decarbonization of the world's economy would "drive decades of economic growth." This is not a scientific statement nor is there evidence it is true. A premature global-scale transition from hydrocarbon fuels would require massive government intervention to support the deployment of more expensive energy technology. If there were economic advantages to investing in technology that depends on taxpayer support, companies like Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, Solar Millenium, SpectraWatt, Solyndra, Ener1 and the Renewable Energy Development Corporation would be prospering instead of filing for bankruptcy in only the past few months.
The European experience with green technologies has also been discouraging. A study found that every new "green job" in Spain destroyed more than two existing jobs and diverted capital that would have created new jobs elsewhere in the economy. More recently, European governments have been cutting subsidies for expensive CO2-emissionless energy technologies, not what one would expect if such subsidies were stimulating otherwise languid economies. And as we pointed out in our op-ed, it is unlikely that there will be any environmental benefit from the reduced CO2 emissions associated with green technologies, which are based on the demonization of CO2.
Turning to the letter of the president of the American Physical Society (APS), Robert Byer, we read, "The statement [on climate] does not declare, as the signatories of the letter [our op-ed] suggest, that the human contribution to climate change is incontrovertible." This seems to suggest that APS does not in fact consider the science on this key question to be settled.
Yet here is the critical paragraph from the statement that caused the resignation of Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever and many other long-time members of the APS: "The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now." No reasonable person can read this and avoid the conclusion that APS is declaring the human impact "incontrovertible." Otherwise there would be no logical link from "global warming" to the shrill call for mitigation.
The APS response to the concerns of its membership was better than that of any other scientific society, but it was not democratic. The management of APS took months to review the statement quoted above, and it eventually declared that not a word needed to be changed, though some 750 words were added to try to explain what the original 157 words really meant. APS members were permitted to send in comments but the comments were never made public.
In spite of the obstinacy of some in APS management, APS members of good will are supporting the establishment of a politics-free, climate physics study group within the Society. If successful, it will facilitate much needed discussion, debate, and independent research in the physics of climate.
In summary, science progresses by testing predictions against real world data obtained from direct observations and rigorous experiments. The stakes in the global-warming debate are much too high to ignore this observational evidence and declare the science settled. Though there are many more scientists who are extremely well qualified and have reached the same conclusions we have, we stress again that science is not a democratic exercise and our conclusions must be based on observational evidence.
The computer-model predictions of alarming global warming have seriously exaggerated the warming by CO2 and have underestimated other causes. Since CO2 is not a pollutant but a substantial benefit to agriculture, and since its warming potential has been greatly exaggerated, it is time for the world to rethink its frenzied pursuit of decarbonization at any cost.
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Citigroup Says Peak Oil Is Dead
Citigroup announced to the world Thursday that peak oil is dead. The controversial idea that world crude oil production is almost at its peak and will soon begin an irrevocable long-term decline has been laid to rest in the highly productive shale oil formations of North Dakota, with potentially big consequences for oil prices, the bank said.
However, despite this reading of last rites, the data suggest it would be premature to pronounce this patient dead.
Changes in oil markets in the past decade have given significant traction to the argument that world oil production is close to peaking. Despite the huge incentive of a near-threefold increase in the price of benchmark Brent crude from 2000 to 2010, the world barely managed to eke out a 10% increase in crude oil production, according to BP data.
Many have argued that this proves the physical limit on global crude oil production is near, or may already have been passed.
“The belief that global oil production has peaked, or is on the cusp of doing so, has helped to fuel oil’s more than decade-long rally,” Citigroup said in a note to clients. “This is now all changing because of what is happening in North Dakota,” where new technology has led to a large and unexpected surge in oil production from shale rock.
After decades of decline, “U.S. oil production is now on the rise, entirely because of shale oil production,” said Citigroup. Shale oil could add almost 3.5 million barrels a day to US oil production between 2010 and 2022 and has already slashed 1 million barrels a day from U.S. oil imports. One day it may allow the U.S. and Canada to be self-sufficient in oil, it said.
There are other parts of the world with similar promise, the bank said. Argentina has already discovered significant shale oil deposits. Australia may have shale reserves. The prospects for Europe may not be so good, given that one of the more prospective areas is in the Paris basin of France, where shale gas drilling has already been banned.
“The surge in U.S. production clearly indicates that human ingenuity is rising to the challenge issued by long-time oil bulls,” and peak oilers, said Citigroup.
SOURCE
Facts don't bother Warmists
The Himalayan glaciers aren’t melting, at least for the moment, says a recently study published in Nature. Between 2003 and 2010 the effective change in the size of glaciers in the high mountains of Asia was “not significantly different from zero,” said a British scientist not involved with the study, who added, “I believe this data is the most reliable estimate of global glacier mass balance that has been produced to date.” Low-lying glaciers were indeed melting, but ice added at higher altitudes made up the difference.
Astoundingly, the scientists don’t seem to have realized the significance of their own findings. “People should be just as worried about the melting of the world’s ice as they were before,” said one of the researchers. In other words, we should be just as worried as we were when the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was scaring us with the news that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 (or was it 2350?). It turns out, too, that the polar bear population in the Arctic is much more stable than previous estimates suggested.
The science is never settled.
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Peter Gleick Admits to Deception in Obtaining Heartland Climate Files
Even Revkin, below, does not like Warmists to be OBVIOUS crooks
Peter H. Gleick, a water and climate analyst who has been studying aspects of global warming for more than two decades, in recent years became an aggressive critic of organizations and individuals casting doubt on the seriousness of greenhouse-driven climate change. He used blogs, congressional testimony, group letters and other means to make his case.
Now, Gleick has admitted to an act that leaves his reputation in ruins and threatens to undercut the cause he spent so much time pursuing. His summary, just published on his blog at Huffington Post, speaks for itself. You can read his short statement below with a couple of thoughts from me:
The Heartland Institute had already signaled that it plans to seek charges and civil action against the person who extracted its documents under a false identity. Foreshadowing today’s events, on Friday, Ross Kaminsky, a senior fellow and former board member at Heartland, posted a piece on the American Spectator site naming Gleick as an “obvious suspect.” Now they have their man.
I won’t speculate on how the legal aspects of this story might play out.
Another question, of course, is who wrote the climate strategy document that Gleick now says was mailed to him. His admitted acts of deception in acquiring the cache of authentic Heartland documents surely will sustain suspicion that he created the summary, which Heartland’s leadership insists is fake.
One way or the other, Gleick’s use of deception in pursuit of his cause after years of calling out climate deception has destroyed his credibility and harmed others. (Some of the released documents contain information about Heartland employees that has no bearing on the climate fight.) That is his personal tragedy and shame (and I’m sure devastating for his colleagues, friends and family).
The broader tragedy is that his decision to go to such extremes in his fight with Heartland has greatly set back any prospects of the country having the “rational public debate” that he wrote — correctly — is so desperately needed.
SOURCE
Warmist desperation ratchets up a notch further
Rather amusing, actually. In their desperation to attack Heartland (a libertarian organization to whom Nazism is anathema), the LA Times cites ‘Mein Kampf’ as an authority! Will they next be saying: "Widerstaende sind nicht da, dass man vor ihnen kapituliert, sondern dass man sie bricht"? Given their obvious interest in Hitler's thoughts, I would not be surprised
The Los Angeles Times editorializes:
SOURCE (See the original for links)
Climate change science is junk science
Martin Hertzberg, Ph.D, wrote the following in response to an article by an alleged physicist who was taken in by "ad hominem" arguments :
The following commentary is submitted for your consideration in response to today’s guest commentary in the SDN by Dave Yost.
It is tragic that what should have been a respectful and objective evaluation of the available data on weather and climate by qualified, independent scientists, has instead degenerated into a partisan diatribe among journalists, environmentalists, historians and politicians: none of whom is qualified in either meteorology or climatology. Weather and climate are controlled by natural laws on a scale that is enormous compared to the scale of human activity. Those natural laws engender forces and motions in the Earth's atmosphere, its oceans, and its surface that are beyond human control. Weather and climate existed long before humans appeared on Earth, and they will continue to exist in the same way long after we are gone, either individually or collectively as the human race.
Those forces and motions are driven by the following phenomena. First, there is the motion of the Earth relative to the Sun: the periodic changes in its elliptical orbit, the rotation of the Earth about its axis, the periodic changes in the tilt of that axis, and the periodic precession of that axis. Second, there is the variation in solar activity, which causes changes in the amount of radiant energy that reaches the Earth and also causes variations in the cosmic ray input into its atmosphere, which affects the Earth's cloudiness. Third, there is the distribution of land and water on the Earth's surface, which controls the temperature distribution of the atmosphere, the availability of moisture, monsoon effects and the paths and intensities of hurricanes, typhoons and other storms. Fourth, there is the topography of the Earth's land mass, which causes copious precipitation on the windward side of mountains and aridity on the leeward side. Fifth, there are the motions within the Earth's oceans that determine moisture availability and its surface temperature distribution (El Nino and La Nina cycles).
The determinant of weather is mainly water in all of its forms: as vapor in the atmosphere; in its heat transport by evaporation and condensation, as the enormous circulating mass of liquid ocean whose heat capacity and mass/energy transport dominate the motions of our atmosphere and the precipitation from it, and finally as cloud, snow, and ice cover which influence the radiative balance between the Sun, the Earth, and free space. In comparison, the human emission of CO2 is totally insignificant for the Earth's weather and climate and there is not one iota of reliable evidence that proves otherwise.
Most of this was learned by me when I served as a research and forecasting meteorologist while on active duty in the U. S. Navy. That was long before the ersatz field now called “Climate Science” was fabricated out of thin air for the main purpose of promoting the theory that human emission of CO2 was causing “global warming/climate change/extreme weather phenomena.” Note that since it stopped warming about a decade ago, “global warming” morphed into “climate change,” but since climate has always changed, it morphed into “extreme weather phenomena.” Although the theory has become a moving target over the last decade, it is still relatively easy to track it and to shoot it down on the basis of the real data that is available.
Dave Yost's column claims that “it is now warmer than it has ever been.” That claim is false. Climatologists have long known that the Medieval Warm Period and dozens of other periods in the Earth's history were much warmer than today because of the factors enumerated above and long before any significant human emission of CO2. The data (see www.climate4you.com) show significant cooling in the Earth's average temperature over the last decade, no significant change in Arctic ice area coverage, and a significant decline in sea level over the last two years.
While I disagree strongly with most of the political positions of the Heartland Institute, they deserve considerable credit for sponsoring a series of conferences of the world's leading meteorologists and climatologists whose papers show clearly that the theory that human emission is causing “global warming/climate change/extreme weather phenomena” is without merit. The attempt in Orestes and Conway's “Merchants of Doubt” to defame and to cast doubt on the integrity of those distinguished scientists, is a disservice to both science and history. For the record, I have not received one cent of financial support from either the CATO or the Heartland Institutes, and I think they are wrong in most of their other political positions.
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Greener Than Thou
By Alan Caruba
The most obnoxious and hypocritical people are those who are always preaching a “greener” way of life, insisting that anything that constitutes our modern lifestyles are destroying the Earth and depleting its natural resources. Never mind that we depend upon oil, natural gas, coal, and a host of minerals and chemicals for that lifestyle, the absence of which caused people in earlier eras to live shorter, far more unpleasant lives.
Oil, other than ust an energy source is also a component in countless products, starting with plastic, and is so vital to modern life that its value goes far beyond just being able to drive our cars to visit grandma.
Greener than thou has replaced holier than thou ever since Rachel Carson penned her pernicious and seriously flawed attack on DDT and other chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides in 1962. The result has been the needless deaths of millions from malaria in Africa and subtropical nations after the U.S. banned DDT and other nations followed suit. If there was a comparable pesticide available today, the U.S. would not be suffering a biblical plague of bed bugs.
A bone fide environmentalist, David Owen, has written a book that quite literally filets environmentalism, “The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse.” ($14.00, Riverhead Press, softcover).
Owen, who has authored 14 previous books, examines the way environmentalism frequently makes no sense at all. This is not to be confused with conservation, the earlier movement that led to the preservation of some of the nation’s natural wonders.
To live an environmentally acceptable way of life is the same as striving to be a saint, avoiding “sin” in order to secure a place in heaven. It is not only virtually impossible, but to be human is to consume what Nature provides. If you think about, all of Earth's creatures are consumers, depending on where they are on the food chain.
For example, when environmentalists convinced Congress to reduce the amount of water in toilet tanks, the only thing they accomplished was to require that the newer, smaller tanks had be flushed twice to rid he toilet of feces and urine, i.e., more use of water, not less. The EPA has just issued a ruling they claim is necessary to reduce mercury emissions despite the fact that your average volcanic eruption puts more into the atmosphere than any human imposed restrictions could ever achieve. Congress, however, passed a law banning 100-watt incandescent light bulbs, thus requiring people to purchase mercury-filled ones that, if broken, require a hazmat team to clean up after.
Environmentalism is essentially irrational.
It believes that humans actually have anything to do with “saving the Earth” when the natural forces of the Earth are so far beyond any “control” that it routinely reminds us of this fact. We have zero impact on the climate and, as for carbon dioxide, the villain of all “global warming” claims, humans exhale about six pounds of it every day. And there are seven billion of us. Even so, it constitutes barely 0.033 percent of the atmosphere.
Owen begins by posing the question, “How do we truly begin to think about less—less fossil fuel, less carbon, less water, less waste, less habitat destruction, less population stress—when our sense of economic, cultural, and personal well-being is based on more?”
The real question at the heart of all environmentalism is what do we do when there are seven billion humans using the resources of the Earth and the real answer for environmentalists is how do we reduce the Earth’s population and how do they grow rich in the process? That is what lies at the heart of all the “solutions” put forth by the United Nations environmental program; an enemy of the human race if there ever was one.
What environmentalists want is “a vast, unprecedented transformation of human behavior in our relationship with energy and consumption.” The next time you hear anyone call for a “transformation” know also that they are a charlatan seeking control over your life.
The environmental assumption is that the Earth is running out of the sources of energy and that consumption is bad. Both are equally wrong because the Earth is not running out of the sources of energy and consumption is what humans and all other species on Earth do every day.
Owen believes that humans are “the world’s main emitter of manmade greenhouse gases” and this is utterly false. The so-called greenhouse gases are the ones in the atmosphere that not only keep the Sun from turning the Earth into a desiccated version of Mars or the Moon, but in the case of carbon dioxide, it is responsible for every single element of vegetation upon which all life depends.
Owen and many environmentalists would prefer that all of humanity live packed side-by-side in crowded cities, using mass transit or bicycling to work to save the Earth, but anyone who gives two thoughts to the amount of energy consumed to maintain a city knows this too is yet another idiotic environmental conceit.
Indeed, Owen notes that “There are many downsides to density, including the fact that squeezing people and their destinations close together makes diseases, wars, and natural disasters more efficient, too.”
That, says Owen, is a conundrum. Indeed, his book is filled with environmental conundrums that he tries to resolve while overtly and inadvertently exposing the idiocy of environmentalism.
Simply put, farmers are the world’s natural environmentalists, relying on the weather—which they cannot control—and the stewardship of their land to feed themselves and others. They must, however, have a means to move their crops to places where other humans can acquire them and that requires a massive system of transportation which, in turn, requires the affordable use of energy.
Environmentalism’s goals, clean air and water, are laudable, but a massive governmental bureaucracy to require that people use less energy and consume less is not.
Time and time again we see examples of environmentalism that only manage to kill people, whether it is the banning of beneficial chemicals or the use of the least efficient forms of electrical power, wind and solar energy.
The least reported story out of Europe these days is the extreme cold that is literally killing people because it puts the lie to all the environmental “solutions” advanced since the 1960s. Environmentalism has been decried as a religion and, for those who want to deny a greater power, Nature or God, it remains their holy grail.
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Fatal Error: Believing the Vacuum of Space has a Temperature
by John O'Sullivan
Astrophysicists will tell you that the vast emptiness of outer space has no temperature. Space is empty, thus it is temperature-less. But ask a climatologist and you’ll be told space is 'cold.' Such fallacy spawned the fatal error in the junk science known as 'greenhouse gas theory,' also called the 'greenhouse effect' (GHE).
Alberto Miatello has now published his own stunning debunk of Dr. Roy Spencer’s‘Yes, Virginia, Cooler Objects Can Make Warmer Objects Even Warmer Still’ (July 23, 2010) dissecting how the fallacy of 'cold' outer space allowed climatologists to believe Earths’ atmosphere acted like a ‘blanket’ to help keep our planet ‘warmer than it otherwise would be.’
Miatello’s paper adroitly affirms a prior compelling evisceration of Spencer’s errors by Dr. Pierre R. Latour in Latour’s masterful, 'No, Virginia, Cooler Objects Cannot Make Warmer Objects Even Warmer Still.'
The Miatello and Latour papers utterly vindicate the groundbreaking analysis of the ‘Slaying the Sky Dragon’ book - the world’s first full-volume refutation of the greenhouse gas hypothesis - a publication that some critics have tried and failed to discredit. Miatello’s exposure of the 'cold' space fallacy is further compelling affirmation that fudged numbers were fed into the bogus ‘greenhouse gas theory’ equations.
Miatello’s new paper, ‘Roy Spencer and the Vacuum Bottle Flask’ (February, 2012), not only refutes Spencer’s errors but also once again affirms the damning analysis of savvy climatologist, Dr. Tim Ball who points out, “Climatology is a generalist discipline in a world of specialization.”
Generalists, we find, often need specialist help. We can forgive principled experts such as doctors Roy Spencer and Richard Lindzen because they are not specialists. As Miatello points out,
“The vacuum space is neither cold nor hot, being void of all molecules/atoms (or almost void) and as such has no temperature. Then, you can clearly see the aftermath of Spencer's wrong idea of ‘cold’ vacuum outer space.”
What did the 'Cold Space' Fallacy do for Greenhouse Gas Believers?
Anyone who reads Roy Spencer’s ‘Yes, Virginia...’ can adduce that Spencer truly believes that vacuum space is cold, because unlike Pierre Latour’s ‘No, Virginia…’ debunk, Spencer did not feel the need to add quotation marks on the word ‘cold.’
Miatello observes, “I saw that Pierre understood that the cosmic vacuum is not cold, and so did not devote much attention to the point. However, I saw that it was important to identify Spencer’s error that vacuum space is NOT cold.”
But how significant is this?
“IF the vacuum of space were cold - then it would be true what Spencer (and many GHE supporters) maintain, namely: the colder body reduces the rate of the heat loss by the hotter body, etc.”
But because we know that vacuum space is neither cold nor hot (being almost void of matter and thus having no temperature) we can clearly see the aftermath of Spencer's wrong idea of a 'cold' vacuum of outer space.
No ‘Heat Loss Blanket Effect’ because Vacuum Space is ‘Neutral’ not ‘Cold’
This then has a fatal knock on effect for GHE calculations. We can better understand the root of the big mistake by GHE promoters because they actually believe that our 'colder' atmosphere is reducing the rate of heat loss, as a blanket with our body, just because (in my opinion) they believe that vacuum space is ‘cold.’
Of course, they would be right if the vacuum of outer space were truly ‘cold.’
But unfortunately for them, vacuum space is neutral (neither cold nor hot), and so the rate of heat loss by our 'hotter body' (earth's surface at +15° C), surrounded by a colder body (atmosphere at - 18°C) is much larger than what they believe!
There is no greenhouse effect, our atmosphere is not surrounded by a ‘colder’ vacuum space and thus our atmosphere is not a blanket reducing the rate of heat loss. On the contrary, our gaseous and 'wet' atmosphere is acting to cool our planet's surface by convection and conduction while constrained within the energy neutral zone of the 'thermos flask' of vacuum space.
Such reasoning is faultless and demands the immediate cessation of all further reliance on spurious GHE numbers. It’s now all exposed as pure GIGO: ‘garbage in - garbage out.’
Paging James Hansen: NASA’s Errant Evangelist of Climate Fraud
The crass notion of ‘cold’ outer space is but one of several gross misunderstandings built into the calculations of the increasingly discredited ‘theory’ that is the cornerstone of the $100 billion man-made global warming industry.
Although we can justly forgive Spencer for his errors, we cannot forgive the ultimate instigator of the GHE fraud: NASA’s Dr. James Hansen. Hansen has stubbornly refused to listen to fellow NASA veterans like Dr. Pierre Latour and others - experts who actually put Neil Armstrong on the moon.
And Hansen is not alone within NASA for sustaining this fraud. Since the glory days of the Apollo Mission, the once great U.S. space agency has lost its way. It abandoned its place at the cutting-edge of space science to descend into political advocacy; recently being caught out faking sea level rises and surface temperature records.
In 1969 when Armstrong took his ‘giant leap’ to walk on the moon no one at Mission Control was confused about whether space was 'cold’ or not. Everyone understood that in the airless void outside Earth there was neither ‘hot’ nor ‘cold’ - just emptiness. The reason: Back then, NASA applied the traditional scientific method rather than post-normal science.
One of the greatest dangers to the astronauts was not freezing in their suits but getting the excess body heat away from their skin. This is because in a vacuum, with the absence of any molecules, the free exchange of temperature is virtually impossible.
NASA Literature Contradictory and Confused on “Cold” Outer Space
After pulling out of the ‘space race’ a politicized NASA applied a self-contradictory double-speak to maintain the illusion that space is ‘cold’ when describing the need for huge radiators on the International Space Station (ISS). NASA spin doctors now crassly state: "MLI insulation does a double-duty job: keeping solar radiation out, and keeping the bitter cold of space from penetrating the Station's metal skin."
NASA then admits, in its ‘Staying Cool in Space’ web page that the "ISS needs huge radiators to get rid of its excess heat." So much for the ‘cold’ of space!
So deadly is the risk of astronauts being cooked alive in the ‘cold’ tin can of the ISS that the vehicle requires 14 honeycombed aluminum panels each measuring 6 by 10 feet (1.8 by 3 meters), for a total of 1680 square feet (156 square meters) of ammonia-tubing-filled heat exchange area just to stay cool.
Our Planet: the Air Conditioning Chiller
Firmly shoulder-to-shoulder with the ‘Slayers’ is yet another compelling voice in a growing cacophony of specialist voices demonstrating that the time has come for a full re-examination, then abandonment of the false GHE paradigm.
For too long highly educated scientists have imagined our atmosphere as a ‘blanket,’ instead of a ‘refrigerator,’ or at least an ‘air conditioning chiller’ surrounding our planet, as it is in reality.
With the myth that space is ‘cold’ now firmly debunked Miatello calls on Spencer and other principled climatologists to work with us to promote a new ‘Copernican revolution’ throughout the blogosphere.
Once climate scientists understand that the concept of a ‘blanket’ trapping effect is false then they will grasp the fact that the very foundation of the greenhouse gas effect itself is also proven to be false. As such, the necessary scientific proof is now in hand to bring a swift end to the needless and grossly expensive restriction on human emissions of the benign trace gas, carbon dioxide.
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What if They are Wrong?
by Mike Stopa
Because the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) depends on a feedback mechanism between an increase in CO2 and an increase in atmospheric water – a mechanism about which there is considerable, scientifically justified doubt – it is possible that CO2 has effectively no influence on global climate.
There is now considerable data collected, and being collected, that gives a fairly accurate view of the global temperature, insofar as such a thing can be defined. And the temperature record shows reasonably clearly that a heating took place from around the beginning of the industrial age in the early 20th century until around 1940, followed by 30-40 years of cooling, followed again by 20 years of warming until ~1998. In an interesting admission the (British) Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit have now admitted that the global temperature has ceased rising for the last 15 years. Don Surber has done a nice little riff on this report here.
The main point is that there are other potential mechanism to account for the warming trend of 1980-1998 than CO2. Notably, ocean climates and interactions between solar wind and cosmic rays relating to earth’s cloud formation are scientifically established mechanisms for the change.
Here I ask this. Suppose it turns out that CO2 has essentially nothing to do with the earth’s climate. How will the history of this colossal mistake be written?
They will say that a mechanism called the “greenhouse effect,” was postulated long ago (~1824 by Joseph Fourier) and gained adherents in the late 20th century. They will say that the theory was seemingly invalidated by the decrease in global temperatures from 1940-1975, but that the adherents patched this up by explaining the cooling with pollution, specifically sulfur, from industry
They will say that the theory was challenged by the noted vast gap between the amount of CO2 produced by civilization and the substantially smaller increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, but that the theory was patched up by examining the increased CO2 uptake by the hydrosphere and the biosphere.
They will say the theory was seemingly invalidated by the evidence that the atmosphere was already nearly opaque in the wavelengths that are absorbed by CO2 and so the additional CO2 could have, on its own, little effect, but that the theory was patched up by positing a feedback mechanism between the small temperature increases directly due to CO2 and the production of water vapor which is the main greenhouse gas.
They will note that the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) proceeded much like any scientific theory (cf. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) in that it was modified and patched up and adjusted to fit empirical challenges until it finally collapsed altogether under the weight of incontrovertible evidence. But, the scientific historians will have a new phenomenon to consider, and that is the social and political context of this particular scientific theory.
Kuhn describes very well the build-up of evidence that ultimately leads to the over-turning of accepted orthodoxy within the scientific community, of some particular theory. But AGW is intrinsically wrapped up with political ideology and, increasingly, with economics and government (cf. “Solyndra”). The only apt comparison I can think of is Lysenkoism, the anti-genetics theory of Trofim Lysenko that was bought wholesale by Stalin and ultimately hobbled the entire Soviet biological establishment for generations (to say nothing of its role in leading to the starvation of people who followed its tenets in regard to things like agriculture).
Scientific revolutions are difficult and traumatic enough without the added inertia of government sponsorship. To put it more bluntly, scientists have difficulty enough admitting that they have egg on their faces. Throw in the Solyndras of the world and the United Nations and the entire anti-capitalist Global Left and the backing out of this theory will be nothing short of a fiasco.
If someone were, for instance, to come up with indisputable evidence tomorrow that CO2 has essentially no impact on earth’s climate, could the world accept it? With the development of frakking and the concomitant extension of carbon based energy resources hundreds of years into the future, what would they do with all the windmills?
Well, the truth of this issue should be apparent within about 15 years…at which point we may be allowed to buy incandescent light bulbs again.
Update:
My recent post, “What if They Are Wrong,” explored the possibility that human-generated CO2 will be determined, after all is said and done, to have no appreciable affect on climate. The post generated a lot of discussion. I want to follow up on some of that discussion with this brief post.
CO2 is, after all, a trace gas and humanity has added to it a trace amount. An essential requirement that it have a major influence on our climate is a set of feedback mechanisms that magnify its effect. Most notably, for CO2 increase to have any seriously dangerous ramifications for human life it is necessary that a positive and significant feedback exist between the CO2 abundance in the atmosphere and the water abundance. This feedback loop, its sign and its magnitude, are seriously in question.
To take one example, it is well-established that water vapor in the upper troposhpere and lower stratosphere (the region known as the “tropopause”) has been decreasing for the last ten years. This was not only not predicted by climatological computer models, it has not yet been explained by those models. Speculations as to the origin of this drying out include an unexpectedly large rise from the 1998 El Nino (which is only now drying out) to a decrease in the atmospheric content of methane, another greenhouse gas, over the past decade or more. Alas, the decrease of the methane is also not explained.
A short but well-presented description of this discrepancy was given almost exactly two years ago in Scientific American (hardly a global warming skeptic publication!). Sci. Am. quotes one of the authors of the original (Science Magazine) study thusly:
Note that the researchers in this publication are by no means heretics in the scientific establishment. They make genuine efforts to explain these findings. But the results are still a mystery.
And, as noted above, the authors considered the influence of methane on the atmospheric water:
As a producer of greenhouse heating, methane is typically considered to be about twenty times as effective, molecule-for-molecule, as CO2.
The main issue I am raising is not that the scientists who are at the front line of this research are blind or bellicose – not that they are unscrupulous or fraudulent. Most of the scientists working in the field are not trying to push an ideological position but are genuinely trying to get at the truth. If they can be accused of any moral failing, it is simply the tendencey to go with the flow when it comes to writing grant proposals and alluding to the possibility of global warming as a justification for supporting their research. Nothing horrible about that.
That does not say that there are not a few at the top and at the edges who are true believers – who think that behaving as deceivers is ethically the right thing to do given the gravity of the threat (that they perceive) and the ignorance of the masses to that threat (as they perceive).
Sound science will, unimpeded by the hysterics, lead to sensible public policy. It is my belief that the final conclusion will be that CO2 produced by humanity will be found to be of only minor importance for global climate and that it will be heavily outweighed by exchange of heat with oceans of evolving temperature and other factors such as solar-determined cloud formation. But I am open to evidence and, alas, a lot of global warming hysterics in the scientific community (and especially in the non-scientific, political community) have their ears stopped with gobs of wax.
I want to finish this post with a reference to a significant letter that appeared in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago. Signed by sixteen (sober) scientists, this letter lays out the case against hysteria better than I can and I urge the worshipers in the Church of the Green to read it and ponder it deeply. They make reference to Yale economist William Nordhaus who, while simply accepting the scientific conclusions of the IPCC uncritically, nevertheless concludes that the radical policies of the Kyoto accord, which calls for dramatic limitations on CO2 emissions in the west, are counter-productive to the extent that they undermine the health of our economy and its capacity to deal with climate problems in the future. The WSJ article states:
In conclusion, global warming is an unchallengeable “consensus” only among those who deeply yearn to save the planet. The conviction of those politicians and activists and (few) scientists that debate is destructive is itself destructive. It arises from the dungeons and dragons psychodrama going on in the minds of those deluded saints – where they embody themselves as the White Wizards and the skeptics as the Morlocks.
The appropriate role for conservatives is to oppose the bias of hysteria and the “cautionary principle;” to demand every essential cost-benefit analysis and, understanding the daydreams of the holy, to insist that progress comes by first placing our feet upon the ground.
SOURCE
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Even Revkin, below, does not like Warmists to be OBVIOUS crooks
Peter H. Gleick, a water and climate analyst who has been studying aspects of global warming for more than two decades, in recent years became an aggressive critic of organizations and individuals casting doubt on the seriousness of greenhouse-driven climate change. He used blogs, congressional testimony, group letters and other means to make his case.
Now, Gleick has admitted to an act that leaves his reputation in ruins and threatens to undercut the cause he spent so much time pursuing. His summary, just published on his blog at Huffington Post, speaks for itself. You can read his short statement below with a couple of thoughts from me:
The Origin of the Heartland Documents
Peter Gleick
Since the release in mid-February of a series of documents related to the internal strategy of the Heartland Institute to cast doubt on climate science, there has been extensive speculation about the origin of the documents and intense discussion about what they reveal. Given the need for reliance on facts in the public climate debate, I am issuing the following statement.
At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute’s climate program strategy. It contained information about their funders and the Institute’s apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy. I do not know the source of that original document but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.
Given the potential impact however, I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name. The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues. I can explicitly confirm, as can the Heartland Institute, that the documents they emailed to me are identical to the documents that have been made public. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication.
I will not comment on the substance or implications of the materials; others have and are doing so. I only note that the scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing, and a rational public debate is desperately needed. My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.
The Heartland Institute had already signaled that it plans to seek charges and civil action against the person who extracted its documents under a false identity. Foreshadowing today’s events, on Friday, Ross Kaminsky, a senior fellow and former board member at Heartland, posted a piece on the American Spectator site naming Gleick as an “obvious suspect.” Now they have their man.
I won’t speculate on how the legal aspects of this story might play out.
Another question, of course, is who wrote the climate strategy document that Gleick now says was mailed to him. His admitted acts of deception in acquiring the cache of authentic Heartland documents surely will sustain suspicion that he created the summary, which Heartland’s leadership insists is fake.
One way or the other, Gleick’s use of deception in pursuit of his cause after years of calling out climate deception has destroyed his credibility and harmed others. (Some of the released documents contain information about Heartland employees that has no bearing on the climate fight.) That is his personal tragedy and shame (and I’m sure devastating for his colleagues, friends and family).
The broader tragedy is that his decision to go to such extremes in his fight with Heartland has greatly set back any prospects of the country having the “rational public debate” that he wrote — correctly — is so desperately needed.
SOURCE
Warmist desperation ratchets up a notch further
Rather amusing, actually. In their desperation to attack Heartland (a libertarian organization to whom Nazism is anathema), the LA Times cites ‘Mein Kampf’ as an authority! Will they next be saying: "Widerstaende sind nicht da, dass man vor ihnen kapituliert, sondern dass man sie bricht"? Given their obvious interest in Hitler's thoughts, I would not be surprised
The Los Angeles Times editorializes:
Leaked documents from the Heartland Institute in Chicago, one of many nonprofits that spread disinformation about climate science in hopes of stalling government action to combat global warming, reveal that the organization is working on a curriculum for public schools that casts doubt on the work of climatologists worldwide.
Heartland officials say one of the documents was a fake, but the curriculum plans were reportedly discussed in more than one. According to the New York Times, the curriculum would claim, among other things, that “whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy.”
That is a lie so big that, to quote from “Mein Kampf,” it would be hard for most people to believe that anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”…
SOURCE (See the original for links)
Climate change science is junk science
Martin Hertzberg, Ph.D, wrote the following in response to an article by an alleged physicist who was taken in by "ad hominem" arguments :
The following commentary is submitted for your consideration in response to today’s guest commentary in the SDN by Dave Yost.
It is tragic that what should have been a respectful and objective evaluation of the available data on weather and climate by qualified, independent scientists, has instead degenerated into a partisan diatribe among journalists, environmentalists, historians and politicians: none of whom is qualified in either meteorology or climatology. Weather and climate are controlled by natural laws on a scale that is enormous compared to the scale of human activity. Those natural laws engender forces and motions in the Earth's atmosphere, its oceans, and its surface that are beyond human control. Weather and climate existed long before humans appeared on Earth, and they will continue to exist in the same way long after we are gone, either individually or collectively as the human race.
Those forces and motions are driven by the following phenomena. First, there is the motion of the Earth relative to the Sun: the periodic changes in its elliptical orbit, the rotation of the Earth about its axis, the periodic changes in the tilt of that axis, and the periodic precession of that axis. Second, there is the variation in solar activity, which causes changes in the amount of radiant energy that reaches the Earth and also causes variations in the cosmic ray input into its atmosphere, which affects the Earth's cloudiness. Third, there is the distribution of land and water on the Earth's surface, which controls the temperature distribution of the atmosphere, the availability of moisture, monsoon effects and the paths and intensities of hurricanes, typhoons and other storms. Fourth, there is the topography of the Earth's land mass, which causes copious precipitation on the windward side of mountains and aridity on the leeward side. Fifth, there are the motions within the Earth's oceans that determine moisture availability and its surface temperature distribution (El Nino and La Nina cycles).
The determinant of weather is mainly water in all of its forms: as vapor in the atmosphere; in its heat transport by evaporation and condensation, as the enormous circulating mass of liquid ocean whose heat capacity and mass/energy transport dominate the motions of our atmosphere and the precipitation from it, and finally as cloud, snow, and ice cover which influence the radiative balance between the Sun, the Earth, and free space. In comparison, the human emission of CO2 is totally insignificant for the Earth's weather and climate and there is not one iota of reliable evidence that proves otherwise.
Most of this was learned by me when I served as a research and forecasting meteorologist while on active duty in the U. S. Navy. That was long before the ersatz field now called “Climate Science” was fabricated out of thin air for the main purpose of promoting the theory that human emission of CO2 was causing “global warming/climate change/extreme weather phenomena.” Note that since it stopped warming about a decade ago, “global warming” morphed into “climate change,” but since climate has always changed, it morphed into “extreme weather phenomena.” Although the theory has become a moving target over the last decade, it is still relatively easy to track it and to shoot it down on the basis of the real data that is available.
Dave Yost's column claims that “it is now warmer than it has ever been.” That claim is false. Climatologists have long known that the Medieval Warm Period and dozens of other periods in the Earth's history were much warmer than today because of the factors enumerated above and long before any significant human emission of CO2. The data (see www.climate4you.com) show significant cooling in the Earth's average temperature over the last decade, no significant change in Arctic ice area coverage, and a significant decline in sea level over the last two years.
While I disagree strongly with most of the political positions of the Heartland Institute, they deserve considerable credit for sponsoring a series of conferences of the world's leading meteorologists and climatologists whose papers show clearly that the theory that human emission is causing “global warming/climate change/extreme weather phenomena” is without merit. The attempt in Orestes and Conway's “Merchants of Doubt” to defame and to cast doubt on the integrity of those distinguished scientists, is a disservice to both science and history. For the record, I have not received one cent of financial support from either the CATO or the Heartland Institutes, and I think they are wrong in most of their other political positions.
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Greener Than Thou
By Alan Caruba
The most obnoxious and hypocritical people are those who are always preaching a “greener” way of life, insisting that anything that constitutes our modern lifestyles are destroying the Earth and depleting its natural resources. Never mind that we depend upon oil, natural gas, coal, and a host of minerals and chemicals for that lifestyle, the absence of which caused people in earlier eras to live shorter, far more unpleasant lives.
Oil, other than ust an energy source is also a component in countless products, starting with plastic, and is so vital to modern life that its value goes far beyond just being able to drive our cars to visit grandma.
Greener than thou has replaced holier than thou ever since Rachel Carson penned her pernicious and seriously flawed attack on DDT and other chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides in 1962. The result has been the needless deaths of millions from malaria in Africa and subtropical nations after the U.S. banned DDT and other nations followed suit. If there was a comparable pesticide available today, the U.S. would not be suffering a biblical plague of bed bugs.
A bone fide environmentalist, David Owen, has written a book that quite literally filets environmentalism, “The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse.” ($14.00, Riverhead Press, softcover).
Owen, who has authored 14 previous books, examines the way environmentalism frequently makes no sense at all. This is not to be confused with conservation, the earlier movement that led to the preservation of some of the nation’s natural wonders.
To live an environmentally acceptable way of life is the same as striving to be a saint, avoiding “sin” in order to secure a place in heaven. It is not only virtually impossible, but to be human is to consume what Nature provides. If you think about, all of Earth's creatures are consumers, depending on where they are on the food chain.
For example, when environmentalists convinced Congress to reduce the amount of water in toilet tanks, the only thing they accomplished was to require that the newer, smaller tanks had be flushed twice to rid he toilet of feces and urine, i.e., more use of water, not less. The EPA has just issued a ruling they claim is necessary to reduce mercury emissions despite the fact that your average volcanic eruption puts more into the atmosphere than any human imposed restrictions could ever achieve. Congress, however, passed a law banning 100-watt incandescent light bulbs, thus requiring people to purchase mercury-filled ones that, if broken, require a hazmat team to clean up after.
Environmentalism is essentially irrational.
It believes that humans actually have anything to do with “saving the Earth” when the natural forces of the Earth are so far beyond any “control” that it routinely reminds us of this fact. We have zero impact on the climate and, as for carbon dioxide, the villain of all “global warming” claims, humans exhale about six pounds of it every day. And there are seven billion of us. Even so, it constitutes barely 0.033 percent of the atmosphere.
Owen begins by posing the question, “How do we truly begin to think about less—less fossil fuel, less carbon, less water, less waste, less habitat destruction, less population stress—when our sense of economic, cultural, and personal well-being is based on more?”
The real question at the heart of all environmentalism is what do we do when there are seven billion humans using the resources of the Earth and the real answer for environmentalists is how do we reduce the Earth’s population and how do they grow rich in the process? That is what lies at the heart of all the “solutions” put forth by the United Nations environmental program; an enemy of the human race if there ever was one.
What environmentalists want is “a vast, unprecedented transformation of human behavior in our relationship with energy and consumption.” The next time you hear anyone call for a “transformation” know also that they are a charlatan seeking control over your life.
The environmental assumption is that the Earth is running out of the sources of energy and that consumption is bad. Both are equally wrong because the Earth is not running out of the sources of energy and consumption is what humans and all other species on Earth do every day.
Owen believes that humans are “the world’s main emitter of manmade greenhouse gases” and this is utterly false. The so-called greenhouse gases are the ones in the atmosphere that not only keep the Sun from turning the Earth into a desiccated version of Mars or the Moon, but in the case of carbon dioxide, it is responsible for every single element of vegetation upon which all life depends.
Owen and many environmentalists would prefer that all of humanity live packed side-by-side in crowded cities, using mass transit or bicycling to work to save the Earth, but anyone who gives two thoughts to the amount of energy consumed to maintain a city knows this too is yet another idiotic environmental conceit.
Indeed, Owen notes that “There are many downsides to density, including the fact that squeezing people and their destinations close together makes diseases, wars, and natural disasters more efficient, too.”
That, says Owen, is a conundrum. Indeed, his book is filled with environmental conundrums that he tries to resolve while overtly and inadvertently exposing the idiocy of environmentalism.
Simply put, farmers are the world’s natural environmentalists, relying on the weather—which they cannot control—and the stewardship of their land to feed themselves and others. They must, however, have a means to move their crops to places where other humans can acquire them and that requires a massive system of transportation which, in turn, requires the affordable use of energy.
Environmentalism’s goals, clean air and water, are laudable, but a massive governmental bureaucracy to require that people use less energy and consume less is not.
Time and time again we see examples of environmentalism that only manage to kill people, whether it is the banning of beneficial chemicals or the use of the least efficient forms of electrical power, wind and solar energy.
The least reported story out of Europe these days is the extreme cold that is literally killing people because it puts the lie to all the environmental “solutions” advanced since the 1960s. Environmentalism has been decried as a religion and, for those who want to deny a greater power, Nature or God, it remains their holy grail.
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Fatal Error: Believing the Vacuum of Space has a Temperature
by John O'Sullivan
Astrophysicists will tell you that the vast emptiness of outer space has no temperature. Space is empty, thus it is temperature-less. But ask a climatologist and you’ll be told space is 'cold.' Such fallacy spawned the fatal error in the junk science known as 'greenhouse gas theory,' also called the 'greenhouse effect' (GHE).
Alberto Miatello has now published his own stunning debunk of Dr. Roy Spencer’s‘Yes, Virginia, Cooler Objects Can Make Warmer Objects Even Warmer Still’ (July 23, 2010) dissecting how the fallacy of 'cold' outer space allowed climatologists to believe Earths’ atmosphere acted like a ‘blanket’ to help keep our planet ‘warmer than it otherwise would be.’
Miatello’s paper adroitly affirms a prior compelling evisceration of Spencer’s errors by Dr. Pierre R. Latour in Latour’s masterful, 'No, Virginia, Cooler Objects Cannot Make Warmer Objects Even Warmer Still.'
The Miatello and Latour papers utterly vindicate the groundbreaking analysis of the ‘Slaying the Sky Dragon’ book - the world’s first full-volume refutation of the greenhouse gas hypothesis - a publication that some critics have tried and failed to discredit. Miatello’s exposure of the 'cold' space fallacy is further compelling affirmation that fudged numbers were fed into the bogus ‘greenhouse gas theory’ equations.
Miatello’s new paper, ‘Roy Spencer and the Vacuum Bottle Flask’ (February, 2012), not only refutes Spencer’s errors but also once again affirms the damning analysis of savvy climatologist, Dr. Tim Ball who points out, “Climatology is a generalist discipline in a world of specialization.”
Generalists, we find, often need specialist help. We can forgive principled experts such as doctors Roy Spencer and Richard Lindzen because they are not specialists. As Miatello points out,
“The vacuum space is neither cold nor hot, being void of all molecules/atoms (or almost void) and as such has no temperature. Then, you can clearly see the aftermath of Spencer's wrong idea of ‘cold’ vacuum outer space.”
What did the 'Cold Space' Fallacy do for Greenhouse Gas Believers?
Anyone who reads Roy Spencer’s ‘Yes, Virginia...’ can adduce that Spencer truly believes that vacuum space is cold, because unlike Pierre Latour’s ‘No, Virginia…’ debunk, Spencer did not feel the need to add quotation marks on the word ‘cold.’
Miatello observes, “I saw that Pierre understood that the cosmic vacuum is not cold, and so did not devote much attention to the point. However, I saw that it was important to identify Spencer’s error that vacuum space is NOT cold.”
But how significant is this?
“IF the vacuum of space were cold - then it would be true what Spencer (and many GHE supporters) maintain, namely: the colder body reduces the rate of the heat loss by the hotter body, etc.”
But because we know that vacuum space is neither cold nor hot (being almost void of matter and thus having no temperature) we can clearly see the aftermath of Spencer's wrong idea of a 'cold' vacuum of outer space.
No ‘Heat Loss Blanket Effect’ because Vacuum Space is ‘Neutral’ not ‘Cold’
This then has a fatal knock on effect for GHE calculations. We can better understand the root of the big mistake by GHE promoters because they actually believe that our 'colder' atmosphere is reducing the rate of heat loss, as a blanket with our body, just because (in my opinion) they believe that vacuum space is ‘cold.’
Of course, they would be right if the vacuum of outer space were truly ‘cold.’
But unfortunately for them, vacuum space is neutral (neither cold nor hot), and so the rate of heat loss by our 'hotter body' (earth's surface at +15° C), surrounded by a colder body (atmosphere at - 18°C) is much larger than what they believe!
There is no greenhouse effect, our atmosphere is not surrounded by a ‘colder’ vacuum space and thus our atmosphere is not a blanket reducing the rate of heat loss. On the contrary, our gaseous and 'wet' atmosphere is acting to cool our planet's surface by convection and conduction while constrained within the energy neutral zone of the 'thermos flask' of vacuum space.
Such reasoning is faultless and demands the immediate cessation of all further reliance on spurious GHE numbers. It’s now all exposed as pure GIGO: ‘garbage in - garbage out.’
Paging James Hansen: NASA’s Errant Evangelist of Climate Fraud
The crass notion of ‘cold’ outer space is but one of several gross misunderstandings built into the calculations of the increasingly discredited ‘theory’ that is the cornerstone of the $100 billion man-made global warming industry.
Although we can justly forgive Spencer for his errors, we cannot forgive the ultimate instigator of the GHE fraud: NASA’s Dr. James Hansen. Hansen has stubbornly refused to listen to fellow NASA veterans like Dr. Pierre Latour and others - experts who actually put Neil Armstrong on the moon.
And Hansen is not alone within NASA for sustaining this fraud. Since the glory days of the Apollo Mission, the once great U.S. space agency has lost its way. It abandoned its place at the cutting-edge of space science to descend into political advocacy; recently being caught out faking sea level rises and surface temperature records.
In 1969 when Armstrong took his ‘giant leap’ to walk on the moon no one at Mission Control was confused about whether space was 'cold’ or not. Everyone understood that in the airless void outside Earth there was neither ‘hot’ nor ‘cold’ - just emptiness. The reason: Back then, NASA applied the traditional scientific method rather than post-normal science.
One of the greatest dangers to the astronauts was not freezing in their suits but getting the excess body heat away from their skin. This is because in a vacuum, with the absence of any molecules, the free exchange of temperature is virtually impossible.
NASA Literature Contradictory and Confused on “Cold” Outer Space
After pulling out of the ‘space race’ a politicized NASA applied a self-contradictory double-speak to maintain the illusion that space is ‘cold’ when describing the need for huge radiators on the International Space Station (ISS). NASA spin doctors now crassly state: "MLI insulation does a double-duty job: keeping solar radiation out, and keeping the bitter cold of space from penetrating the Station's metal skin."
NASA then admits, in its ‘Staying Cool in Space’ web page that the "ISS needs huge radiators to get rid of its excess heat." So much for the ‘cold’ of space!
So deadly is the risk of astronauts being cooked alive in the ‘cold’ tin can of the ISS that the vehicle requires 14 honeycombed aluminum panels each measuring 6 by 10 feet (1.8 by 3 meters), for a total of 1680 square feet (156 square meters) of ammonia-tubing-filled heat exchange area just to stay cool.
Our Planet: the Air Conditioning Chiller
Firmly shoulder-to-shoulder with the ‘Slayers’ is yet another compelling voice in a growing cacophony of specialist voices demonstrating that the time has come for a full re-examination, then abandonment of the false GHE paradigm.
For too long highly educated scientists have imagined our atmosphere as a ‘blanket,’ instead of a ‘refrigerator,’ or at least an ‘air conditioning chiller’ surrounding our planet, as it is in reality.
With the myth that space is ‘cold’ now firmly debunked Miatello calls on Spencer and other principled climatologists to work with us to promote a new ‘Copernican revolution’ throughout the blogosphere.
Once climate scientists understand that the concept of a ‘blanket’ trapping effect is false then they will grasp the fact that the very foundation of the greenhouse gas effect itself is also proven to be false. As such, the necessary scientific proof is now in hand to bring a swift end to the needless and grossly expensive restriction on human emissions of the benign trace gas, carbon dioxide.
SOURCE
What if They are Wrong?
by Mike Stopa
Because the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) depends on a feedback mechanism between an increase in CO2 and an increase in atmospheric water – a mechanism about which there is considerable, scientifically justified doubt – it is possible that CO2 has effectively no influence on global climate.
There is now considerable data collected, and being collected, that gives a fairly accurate view of the global temperature, insofar as such a thing can be defined. And the temperature record shows reasonably clearly that a heating took place from around the beginning of the industrial age in the early 20th century until around 1940, followed by 30-40 years of cooling, followed again by 20 years of warming until ~1998. In an interesting admission the (British) Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit have now admitted that the global temperature has ceased rising for the last 15 years. Don Surber has done a nice little riff on this report here.
The main point is that there are other potential mechanism to account for the warming trend of 1980-1998 than CO2. Notably, ocean climates and interactions between solar wind and cosmic rays relating to earth’s cloud formation are scientifically established mechanisms for the change.
Here I ask this. Suppose it turns out that CO2 has essentially nothing to do with the earth’s climate. How will the history of this colossal mistake be written?
They will say that a mechanism called the “greenhouse effect,” was postulated long ago (~1824 by Joseph Fourier) and gained adherents in the late 20th century. They will say that the theory was seemingly invalidated by the decrease in global temperatures from 1940-1975, but that the adherents patched this up by explaining the cooling with pollution, specifically sulfur, from industry
They will say that the theory was challenged by the noted vast gap between the amount of CO2 produced by civilization and the substantially smaller increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, but that the theory was patched up by examining the increased CO2 uptake by the hydrosphere and the biosphere.
They will say the theory was seemingly invalidated by the evidence that the atmosphere was already nearly opaque in the wavelengths that are absorbed by CO2 and so the additional CO2 could have, on its own, little effect, but that the theory was patched up by positing a feedback mechanism between the small temperature increases directly due to CO2 and the production of water vapor which is the main greenhouse gas.
They will note that the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) proceeded much like any scientific theory (cf. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) in that it was modified and patched up and adjusted to fit empirical challenges until it finally collapsed altogether under the weight of incontrovertible evidence. But, the scientific historians will have a new phenomenon to consider, and that is the social and political context of this particular scientific theory.
Kuhn describes very well the build-up of evidence that ultimately leads to the over-turning of accepted orthodoxy within the scientific community, of some particular theory. But AGW is intrinsically wrapped up with political ideology and, increasingly, with economics and government (cf. “Solyndra”). The only apt comparison I can think of is Lysenkoism, the anti-genetics theory of Trofim Lysenko that was bought wholesale by Stalin and ultimately hobbled the entire Soviet biological establishment for generations (to say nothing of its role in leading to the starvation of people who followed its tenets in regard to things like agriculture).
Scientific revolutions are difficult and traumatic enough without the added inertia of government sponsorship. To put it more bluntly, scientists have difficulty enough admitting that they have egg on their faces. Throw in the Solyndras of the world and the United Nations and the entire anti-capitalist Global Left and the backing out of this theory will be nothing short of a fiasco.
If someone were, for instance, to come up with indisputable evidence tomorrow that CO2 has essentially no impact on earth’s climate, could the world accept it? With the development of frakking and the concomitant extension of carbon based energy resources hundreds of years into the future, what would they do with all the windmills?
Well, the truth of this issue should be apparent within about 15 years…at which point we may be allowed to buy incandescent light bulbs again.
Update:
My recent post, “What if They Are Wrong,” explored the possibility that human-generated CO2 will be determined, after all is said and done, to have no appreciable affect on climate. The post generated a lot of discussion. I want to follow up on some of that discussion with this brief post.
CO2 is, after all, a trace gas and humanity has added to it a trace amount. An essential requirement that it have a major influence on our climate is a set of feedback mechanisms that magnify its effect. Most notably, for CO2 increase to have any seriously dangerous ramifications for human life it is necessary that a positive and significant feedback exist between the CO2 abundance in the atmosphere and the water abundance. This feedback loop, its sign and its magnitude, are seriously in question.
To take one example, it is well-established that water vapor in the upper troposhpere and lower stratosphere (the region known as the “tropopause”) has been decreasing for the last ten years. This was not only not predicted by climatological computer models, it has not yet been explained by those models. Speculations as to the origin of this drying out include an unexpectedly large rise from the 1998 El Nino (which is only now drying out) to a decrease in the atmospheric content of methane, another greenhouse gas, over the past decade or more. Alas, the decrease of the methane is also not explained.
A short but well-presented description of this discrepancy was given almost exactly two years ago in Scientific American (hardly a global warming skeptic publication!). Sci. Am. quotes one of the authors of the original (Science Magazine) study thusly:
“We found that there was a surface temperature impact due to changes in water vapor in a fairly narrow region of the stratosphere,” explains research meteorologist Karen Rosenlof of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Aeronomy Laboratory, one of the authors of the study. “The reason for the water vapor change is the temperature drop at the interface between the troposphere and the stratosphere over the tropics. What we don’t know is why the temperature dropped.”
Note that the researchers in this publication are by no means heretics in the scientific establishment. They make genuine efforts to explain these findings. But the results are still a mystery.
All told, stratospheric water vapor declined by 10 percent since 2000, based on satellite and balloon measurements, yet that was enough to appreciably affect temperatures at ground level according to climate models. “Reduce the water vapor and you have less long-wave radiation coming back down to warm the troposphere,” Rosenlof says. Conversely, an apparent increase in water vapor in this region in the 1980s and 1990s exacerbated global warming.
And, as noted above, the authors considered the influence of methane on the atmospheric water:
Of course, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is also affected by another potent greenhouse gas—methane—which has unexpectedly failed to increase in recent years. “The other influence is methane, which breaks down into two water molecules and CO2 in the stratosphere,” explains climate scientist Drew Shindell of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). “Methane’s growth rate has dropped, so it’ll have become a weaker source of stratospheric water, but we don’t fully understand why its concentrations have not increased as rapidly in recent years as they did for the previous several decades.”
As a producer of greenhouse heating, methane is typically considered to be about twenty times as effective, molecule-for-molecule, as CO2.
The main issue I am raising is not that the scientists who are at the front line of this research are blind or bellicose – not that they are unscrupulous or fraudulent. Most of the scientists working in the field are not trying to push an ideological position but are genuinely trying to get at the truth. If they can be accused of any moral failing, it is simply the tendencey to go with the flow when it comes to writing grant proposals and alluding to the possibility of global warming as a justification for supporting their research. Nothing horrible about that.
That does not say that there are not a few at the top and at the edges who are true believers – who think that behaving as deceivers is ethically the right thing to do given the gravity of the threat (that they perceive) and the ignorance of the masses to that threat (as they perceive).
Sound science will, unimpeded by the hysterics, lead to sensible public policy. It is my belief that the final conclusion will be that CO2 produced by humanity will be found to be of only minor importance for global climate and that it will be heavily outweighed by exchange of heat with oceans of evolving temperature and other factors such as solar-determined cloud formation. But I am open to evidence and, alas, a lot of global warming hysterics in the scientific community (and especially in the non-scientific, political community) have their ears stopped with gobs of wax.
I want to finish this post with a reference to a significant letter that appeared in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago. Signed by sixteen (sober) scientists, this letter lays out the case against hysteria better than I can and I urge the worshipers in the Church of the Green to read it and ponder it deeply. They make reference to Yale economist William Nordhaus who, while simply accepting the scientific conclusions of the IPCC uncritically, nevertheless concludes that the radical policies of the Kyoto accord, which calls for dramatic limitations on CO2 emissions in the west, are counter-productive to the extent that they undermine the health of our economy and its capacity to deal with climate problems in the future. The WSJ article states:
A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls.
In conclusion, global warming is an unchallengeable “consensus” only among those who deeply yearn to save the planet. The conviction of those politicians and activists and (few) scientists that debate is destructive is itself destructive. It arises from the dungeons and dragons psychodrama going on in the minds of those deluded saints – where they embody themselves as the White Wizards and the skeptics as the Morlocks.
The appropriate role for conservatives is to oppose the bias of hysteria and the “cautionary principle;” to demand every essential cost-benefit analysis and, understanding the daydreams of the holy, to insist that progress comes by first placing our feet upon the ground.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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Jim Hansen and his twin
