Showing posts with label IPCC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IPCC. Show all posts

Monday, March 8, 2010

In Denial







This article effectively tracks the implosion of the global warming promotion.  As remarked at the end, it will not go quietly simply because so much has been invested for so long.  But go it shall

When I began this blog I spelled out that I did not accept the linking of global warming with human produced CO2 as a trustworthy hypothesis.   In fact I stated that the strategy of linkage was likely to backfire and cause huge damage to related legitimate issues.  It never occurred to me that the folks in charge of reporting on the so called linkage were busy cooking the science and suppressing dissent.   As time progressed, we were unearthing ample contrary data and plenty of informed dissent.

In fact, I was discerning the same pattern of misinformation and paid shills found around the uncovered short selling swindles operated over the past decade in the USA.  This did not make me any more comfortable.  When shills shriek about deniers, it is time to apply rigor.  Remember, if a ‘denier’ has nothing to say, it is best to ignore him because he will be suppressed by his lack of real data and expire from exhaustion.

I never thought that the end would be so catastrophic.  In fact, they went from a say ninety percent acceptance of dogma among the press to a ninety percent rejection in almost an eye blink.  It is only three months.  Four months ago I was digging up bits of science and asking obvious questions to chip away at the difficulties.  Now it is all been done for me.


The good news is that climate science will be much the better for it.  Findings will be debated and speculations will be kicked about.  I do not believe that we will have a satisfactory global climate model anytime soon and more importantly, scientists will not have to promise patent computational impossibilities in order to fund more shiny new computers.


In Denial

The meltdown of the climate campaign.

March 15, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 25


It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago—changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media—even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC—are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying “It is too so!” In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.

The body blows to the climate campaign did not end with the Climategate emails. The IPCC—which has produced four omnibus assessments of climate science since 1992—has issued several embarrassing retractions from its most recent 2007 report, starting with the claim that Himalayan glaciers were in danger of melting as soon as 2035. That such an outlandish claim would be so readily accepted is a sign of the credulity of the climate campaign and the media: Even if extreme global warming occurred over the next century, the one genuine scientific study available estimated that the huge ice fields of the Himalayas would take more than 300 years to melt—a prediction any beginning chemistry student could confirm with a calculator. (The actual evidence is mixed: Some Himalayan glaciers are currently expanding.) The source for the melt-by-2035 claim turned out to be not a peer-reviewed scientific assessment, but a report from an advocacy group, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which in turn lifted the figure from a popular magazine article in India whose author later disavowed his offhand speculation. 

But what made this first retraction noteworthy was the way in which it underscored the thuggishness of the climate establishment. The IPCC’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri (an economist and former railroad engineer who is routinely described as a “climate scientist”), initially said that critics of the Himalayan glacier melt prediction were engaging in “voodoo science,” though it later turned out that Pachauri had been informed of the error in early December—in advance of the U.N.’s climate change conference in Copenhagen—but failed to disclose it. He’s invoking the Charlie Rangel defense: It was my staff’s fault.

The Himalayan retraction has touched off a cascade of further retractions and corrections, though the IPCC and other organs of climate alarmism are issuing their corrections sotto voce, hoping the media won’t take notice. The IPCC’s assessment that 40 percent of the Amazonian rain forest was at risk of destruction from climate change was also revealed to be without scientific foundation; the WWF was again the source. The Daily Telegraph identified 20 more claims of ruin in the IPCC’s 2007 report that are based on reports from advocacy groups such as Greenpeace rather than peer-reviewed research, including claims that African agricultural production would be cut in half, estimates of coral reef degradation, and the scale of glacier melt in the Alps and the Andes. Numerous other claims were sourced to unpublished student papers and dissertations, or to misstated or distorted research. 

Peer reviewers in the formal IPCC process had flagged many of these errors and distortions during the writing of the 2007 report but were ignored. For example, the IPCC claimed that the world is experiencing rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather related events brought on by climate change. But the underlying paper, when finally published in 2008, expressly contradicted this, saying, “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.” Perhaps the most embarrassing walkback was the claim that 55 percent of the Netherlands was below sea level, and therefore gravely threatened by rising sea levels. The correct number is 26 percent, which Dutch scientists say they tried to tell the IPCC before the 2007 report was published, to no avail. And in any case, a paper published last year in Nature Geoscience predicting a 21st-century sea level rise of up to 32 inches has been withdrawn, with the authors acknowledging mistaken methodology and admitting “we can no longer draw firm conclusions regarding 21st century sea level rise from this study without further work.” The IPCC ignored several published studies casting doubt on its sea level rise estimates.

The IPCC isn’t the only important node of the climate campaign having its reputation run through the shredder. The 2006 Stern Review, a British report on the economics of climate change named for its lead author, Lord Nicholas Stern, was revealed to have quietly watered down some of its headline-grabbing claims in its final published report because, as the Telegraph put it, “the scientific evidence on which they were based could not be verified.” Like rats deserting a sinking ship, scientists and economists cited in the Stern Review have disavowed the misuse of their work. Two weeks ago the World Meteorological Association pulled the rug out from under one of Gore’s favorite talking points—that climate change will mean more tropical storms. A new study by the top scientists in the field concluded that although warmer oceans might make for stronger tropical storms in the future, there has been no climate-related trend in tropical storm activity over recent decades and, further, there will likely be significantly fewer tropical storms in a warmer world. “We have come to substantially different conclusions from the IPCC,” said lead author Chris Landsea, a scientist at the National Hurricane Center in Florida. (Landsea, who does not consider himself a climate skeptic, resigned from the IPCC in 2005 on account of its increasingly blatant politicization.)

It was a thorough debunking, as Roger Pielke Jr.’s invaluable blog (rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com) noted in highlighting key findings in the study: 

What about more intense rainfall? “[A] detectable change in tropical-cyclone-related rainfall has not been established by existing studies.” What about changes in location of storm formation, storm motion, lifetime and surge? “There is no conclusive evidence that any observed changes in tropical cyclone genesis, tracks, duration and surge flooding exceed the variability expected from natural causes.” Bottom line? “[W]e cannot at this time conclusively identify anthropogenic signals in past tropical cyclone data.”

When Pielke, an expert on hurricane damage at the University of Colorado at Boulder, pointed out defects in the purported global-warming/tropical storm link in a 2005 edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the lead author of the IPCC’s work on tropical storms, Kevin Trenberth, called the article “shameful,” said it should be “withdrawn,” but in typical fashion refused to debate Pielke about the substance of the article. 

Finally, the original Climategate controversy over the leaked documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) (see my “Scientists Behaving Badly,” The Weekly Standard, December 14, 2009) is far from over. The British government has determined that the CRU’s prolonged refusal to release documents sought in 95 Freedom of Information requests is a potential criminal violation.

The rout has opened up serious divisions within the formerly closed ranks of the climate campaign. Before Climategate, expressing skepticism about catastrophic global warming typically got the hefty IPCC report thrown in your face along with the mantra that “2,500 of the world’s top scientists all agree” about climate change. Now the IPCC is being disavowed like a Mission Impossible team with its cover blown. Senate Environment and Public Works chairman Barbara Boxer insisted on February 23 that she relied solely on U.S. scientific research and not the IPCC to support the EPA’s greenhouse gas “endangerment finding.” In her opening statement at a hearing, Boxer said, “I didn’t quote one international scientist or IPCC report. .  .  . We are quoting the American scientific community here.” The U.N. has announced that it will launch an “independent review” of the IPCC, though like the British investigation of the CRU, the U.N. review will probably be staffed by “settled science” camp followers who will obligingly produce a whitewash. But Pachauri’s days as IPCC chairman are likely numbered; there are mounting calls from within the IPCC for Pachauri to resign, amid charges of potential conflicts of interest (like Gore, Pachauri is closely involved with commercial energy schemes that benefit from greenhouse gas regulation) but also in part because Pachauri chose this delicate moment to publish a soft-core pornographic novel. (The main character is an aging environmentalist and engineer engaged in a “spiritual journey” that includes meeting Shirley MacLaine, detailed explorations of the Kama Sutra, and group sex.)

Robert Watson, Pachauri’s predecessor as chairman of the IPCC from 1997 to 2002, told the BBC: “In my opinion, Dr. Pachauri has to ask himself, is he still credible, and the governments of the world have to ask themselves, is he still credible.” Not the most ringing endorsement. Yvo de Boer, the head of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (the diplomatic contrivance that produced the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen circus), announced his surprise resignation on February 18. De Boer will join the private sector after years of saying that warming is the greatest threat humanity has ever faced.

The climate campaign is a movement unable to hide its decline. Skeptics and critics of climate alarmism have long been called “deniers,” with the comparison to Holocaust denial made explicit, but the denier label now more accurately fits the climate campaigners. Their first line of defense was that the acknowledged errors amount to a few isolated and inconsequential points in the report of the IPCC’s Working Group II, which studies the effects of global warming, and not the more important report of the IPCC’s Working Group I, which is about the science of global warming. Working Group I, this argument goes, is where the real action is, as it deals with the computer models and temperature data on which the “consensus” conclusion is based that the Earth has warmed by about 0.8 degrees Celsius over the last century, that human-generated greenhouse gases are overwhelmingly responsible for this rise, and that we may expect up to 4 degrees Celsius of further warming if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t stopped by mid-century. As Gore put it in his February 28 Timesarticle, “the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged.” I note in passing that the 2007 Working Group I report uses the terms “uncertain” or “uncertainty” more than 1,300 times in its 987 pages, including what it identified as 54 “key uncertainties” limiting our mastery of climate prediction.

This central pillar of the climate campaign is unlikely to survive much longer, and each repetition of the “science-is-settled” mantra inflicts more damage on the credibility of the climate science community. The scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal at East Anglia University, Phil (“hide the decline”) Jones dealt the science-is-settled narrative a huge blow with his candid admission in a BBC interview that his surface temperature data are in such disarray they probably cannot be verified or replicated, that the medieval warm period may have been as warm as today, and that he agrees that there has been no statistically significant global warming for the last 15 years—all three points that climate campaigners have been bitterly contesting. And Jones specifically disavowed the “science-is-settled” slogan:

BBC: When scientists say “the debate on climate change is over,” what exactly do they mean, and what don’t they mean?

Jones: It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well [emphasis added].

Judith Curry, head of the School of Earth and Atmos-pheric Sciences at Georgia Tech and one of the few scientists convinced of the potential for catastrophic global warming who is willing to engage skeptics seriously, wrote February 24: “No one really believes that the ‘science is settled’ or that ‘the debate is over.’ Scientists and others that say this seem to want to advance a particular agenda. There is nothing more detrimental to public trust than such statements.”

The next wave of climate revisionism is likely to reopen most of the central questions of “settled science” in the IPCC’s Working Group I, starting with the data purporting to prove how much the Earth has warmed over the last century. A London Times headline last month summarizes the shocking revision currently underway: “World May Not Be Warming, Scientists Say.” The Climategate emails and documents revealed the disarray in the surface temperature records the IPCC relies upon to validate its claim of 0.8 degrees Celsius of human-caused warming, prompting a flood of renewed focus on the veracity and handling of surface temperature data. Skeptics such as Anthony Watts, Joseph D’Aleo, and Stephen McIntyre have been pointing out the defects in the surface temperature record for years, but the media and the IPCC ignored them. Watts and D’Aleo have painstakingly documented (and in many cases photographed) the huge number of temperature stations that have been relocated, corrupted by the “urban heat island effect,” or placed too close to heat sources such as air conditioning compressors, airports, buildings, or paved surfaces, as well as surface temperature series that are conveniently left out of the IPCC reconstructions and undercut the IPCC’s simplistic story of rising temperatures. The compilation and statistical treatment of global temperature records is hugely complex, but the skeptics such as Watts and D’Aleo offer compelling critiques showing that most of the reported warming disappears if different sets of temperature records are included, or if compromised station records are excluded. 

The puzzle deepens when more accurate satellite temperature records, available starting in 1979, are considered. There is a glaring anomaly: The satellite records, which measure temperatures in the middle and upper atmosphere, show very little warming since 1979 and do not match up with the ground-based measurements. Furthermore, the satellite readings of the middle- and upper-air temperatures fail to record any of the increases the climate models say should be happening in response to rising greenhouse gas concentrations. John Christy of the University of Alabama, a contributing author to the IPCC’s Working Group I chapter on surface and atmospheric climate change, tried to get the IPCC to acknowledge this anomaly in its 2007 report but was ignored. (Christy is responsible for helping to develop the satellite monitoring system that has tracked global temperatures since 1979. He received NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement for this work.) Bottom line: Expect some surprises to come out of the revisions of the surface temperature records that will take place over the next couple of years.

Eventually the climate modeling community is going to have to reconsider the central question: Have the models the IPCC uses for its predictions of catastrophic warming overestimated the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases? Two recently published studies funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, one by Brookhaven Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz in the Journal of Geophysical Research, and one by MIT’s Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi in Geophysical Research Letters, both argue for vastly lower climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases. The models the IPCC uses for projecting a 3 to 4 degree Celsius increase in temperature all assume large positive (that is, temperature-magnifying) feedbacks from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; Schwartz, Lindzen, and Choi discern strong negative (or temperature-reducing) feedbacks in the climate system, suggesting an upper-bound of future temperature rise of no more than 2 degrees Celsius.

If the climate system is less sensitive to greenhouse gases than the climate campaign believes, then what is causing plainly observable changes in the climate, such as earlier arriving springs, receding glaciers, and shrinking Arctic Ocean ice caps? There have been alternative explanations in the scientific literature for several years, ignored by the media and the IPCC alike. The IPCC downplays theories of variations in solar activity, such as sunspot activity and gamma ray bursts, and although there is robust scientific literature on the issue, even the skeptic community is divided about whether solar activity is a primary cause of recent climate variation. Several studies of Arctic warming conclude that changes in ocean currents, cloud formation, and wind patterns in the upper atmosphere may explain the retreat of glaciers and sea ice better than greenhouse gases. Another factor in the Arctic is “black carbon”—essentially fine soot particles from coal-fired power plants and forest fires, imperceptible to the naked eye but reducing the albedo (solar reflectivity) of Arctic ice masses enough to cause increased summertime ice melt. Above all, if the medieval warm period was indeed as warm or warmer than today, we cannot rule out the possibility that the changes of recent decades are part of a natural rebound from the “Little Ice Age” that followed the medieval warm period and ended in the 19th century. Skeptics have known and tried to publicize all of these contrarian or confounding scientific findings, but the compliant news media routinely ignored all of them, enabling the IPCC to get away with its serial exaggeration and blatant advocacy for more than a decade.

The question going forward is whether the IPCC will allow contrarian scientists and confounding scientific research into its process, and include the opportunity for dissenting scientists to publish a minority report. Last March, John Christy sent a proposal to the 140 authors of IPCC Working Group I asking “that the IPCC allow for well-credentialed climate scientists to craft a chapter on an alternative view presenting evidence for lower climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases than has been the IPCC’s recent message—all based on published information. .  .  . An alternative view is necessary, one that is not censured for the so-called purpose of consensus. This will present to our policymakers an honest picture of scientific discourse and process.” Christy received no response. 

In the aftermath of Climategate, Christy proposed in Nature magazine that the IPCC move to a Wikipedia-style format, in which lead authors would mediate an ongoing discussion among scientists, with the caveat that all claims would need to be based on original studies and data. Such a process would produce more timely and digestible information than the huge twice-a-decade reports the IPCC now produces. Christy told me that he does not hold out much hope for serious IPCC reform. Although he was a lead author in the IPCC’s 2001 report and a contributing author for the 2007 report, the Obama administration has not nominated Christy to participate in the next report. IPCC participants are nominated by governments (a “gatekeeping exercise,” Christy rightly notes). The nomination period closes next week.

Even a reformed IPCC that offered a more balanced account of climate science would make little difference to the fanatical climate campaigners, whose second line of defense is to double-down on demonizing skeptics and “deniers.” Greenpeace, which should be regarded as the John Birch Society of the environmental movement, is filing its own Freedom of Information Act and state public record act requests to obtain private emails and documents from university-based climate skeptics such as Christy, Pat Michaels (University of Virginia), David Legates (University of Delaware), and Willie Soon (Harvard University/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), hoping to stir up a scandal commensurate with Climategate by hyping a supposed nefarious link between such researchers and energy companies. Greenpeace has sent letters to nongovernmental skeptics and organizations requesting that they submit to polygraph examinations about their role in or knowledge of the “illegally hacked” CRU emails. “We want to do our part,” Greenpeace’s letter reads, “to help international law enforcement get to the bottom of this potentially criminal act by putting some basic questions to people whose bank accounts, propaganda efforts or influence peddling interests benefitted from the theft.” One wonders whether Greenpeace has really thought this through, as a successful FOIA request for the emails of American scientists would open the floodgates to further probing of James Hansen at NASA, Michael Mann at Penn State, and other government climate scientists who probably wrote emails as embarrassing or crude as Phil Jones and the CRU circle. 

Greenpeace is hardly alone in its paranoia. Britain’s former chief government science adviser, Sir David King, popped off to the press in early February that a foreign intelligence service working with American industry lobbyists​—he intimated that he had the CIA and ExxonMobil in mind—were responsible for hacking the CRU emails last year. King backed away from this claim the next day, admitting he had no information to back it up.

The climate campaign camp followers are exhausting their invective against skeptics. Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Guardian that climate skeptics are akin to tobacco scientists—some of the same people, in fact, though he gave no names and offered no facts to establish such a claim. In the Los Angeles Times Bill McKibben compared climate skeptics to O.J. Simpson’s “dream team” of defense attorneys able to twist incontrovertible scientific evidence. Not to be outdone, Senator Bernie Sanders (Socialist-VT) compared climate skeptics to appeasers of Hitler in the 1930s, a comparison, to be sure, that Al Gore has been making since the early 1990s, but Sanders delivered it with his patented popping-neck-veins style that makes you worry for his health. 

In addition to being a sign of desperation, these ad hominem arguments from the climate campaigners also make clear which camp is truly guilty of anti-intellectualism. Gore and the rest of the chorus simply will not discuss any of the scientific anomalies and defects in the conventional climate narrative that scientists such as Christy have pointed out to the IPCC. Perhaps the climate campaign’s most ludicrous contortion is their response to the record snowfall of the eastern United States over the last two months. The ordinary citizen, applying Occam’s Razor while shoveling feet of snow, sees global warming as a farce. The climate campaigners now insist that “weather is not climate,” and that localized weather events, even increased winter snowfall, can be consistent with climate change. They may be right about this, though even the IPCC cautions that we still have little ability to predict regional climate-related weather changes. These are the same people, however, who jumped up and down that Hurricane Katrina was positive proof that catastrophic global warming had arrived, though the strong 2005 hurricane season was followed by four quiet years for tropical storms that made a hash of that talking point.

The ruckus about “weather is not climate” exposes the greatest problem of the climate campaign. Al Gore and his band of brothers have been happy to point to any weather anomaly—cold winters, warm winters, in-between winters​—as proof of climate change. But the climate campaigners cannot name one weather pattern or event that would be inconsistent with their theory. Pretty convenient when your theory works in only one direction. 

The unraveling of the climate campaign was entirely predictable, though not the dramatic swiftness with which it arrived. The long trajectory of the climate change controversy conforms exactly to the “issue-attention cycle” that political scientist Anthony Downs explained in the Public Interest almost 40 years ago. Downs laid out a five-stage cycle through which political issues of all kinds typically pass. A group of experts and interest groups begin promoting a problem or crisis, which is soon followed by the alarmed discovery of the problem by the news media and broader political class. This second stage typically includes a large amount of euphoric enthusiasm—you might call this the dopamine stage—as activists conceive the issue in terms of global salvation and redemption. One of the largest debilities of the climate campaign from the beginning was their having conceived the issue not as a practical problem, like traditional air pollution, but as an expression, in Gore’s view, of deeper spiritual and even metaphysical problems arising from our “dysfunctional civilization.” Gore is still thinking about the issue in these terms, grasping for another dopamine rush. In his February 28 New York Times article, he claimed that an international climate treaty would be “an instrument of human redemption.”

The third stage is the hinge. As Downs explains, there comes “a gradually spreading realization that the cost of ‘solving’ the problem is very high indeed.” This is where we have been since the Kyoto process proposed completely implausible near-term reductions in fossil fuel energy—a fanatical monomania the climate campaign has been unable to shake. In retrospect it is now possible to grasp the irony that President George W. Bush’s open refusal to embrace the Kyoto framework kept the climate campaign alive by providing an all-purpose excuse for the lack of “progress” toward a binding treaty. With Bush gone, the intrinsic weakness of the carbon-cutting charade is impossible to hide, though Gore and the climate campaigners are now trying to blame the U.S. Senate for the lack of international agreement.

“The previous stage,” Downs continued, “becomes almost imperceptibly transformed into the fourth stage: a gradual decline in the intensity of public interest in the problem.” Despite the relentless media drumbeat, Gore’s Academy Award and Nobel Prize twofer, and millions of dollars in paid advertising, public concern for climate change has been steadily waning for several years. In the latest Pew survey of public priorities released in January, climate change came in dead last, ranked 21st out of 21 issues of concern, with just 28 percent saying the issue should be a top priority for Congress and President Obama. That’s down 10 points over the last three years. 

A separate Pew poll taken last October, before Climate-gate, reported a precipitous drop in the number of Americans who think there is “solid evidence” of global warming, from 71 percent in 2008 to 57 percent in 2009; the number who think humans are responsible for warming dropped in the Pew poll from 47 to 36 percent. Surveys from Rasmussen and other pollsters find similar declines in public belief in human-caused global warming; European surveys are reporting the same trend. In Gallup’s annual survey of environmental issues, taken last spring, respondents ranked global warming eighth out of eight environmental issues Gallup listed; the number of people who say they “worry a great deal” about climate change has fallen from 41 to 34 percent over the last three years. Gallup’s Lydia Saad commented: “Not only does global warming rank last on the basis of the total percentage concerned either a great deal or a fair amount, but it is the only issue for which public concern dropped significantly in the past year.”

“In the final [post-problem] stage,” Downs concluded, “an issue that has been replaced at the center of public concern moves into a prolonged limbo—a twilight realm of lesser attention or spasmodic recurrences of interest.” The death rattle of the climate campaign will be deafening. It has too much political momentum and fanatical devotion to go quietly. The climate campaigners have been fond of warning of catastrophic “tipping points” for years. Well, a tipping point has indeed arrived​—just not the one the climate campaigners expected. 

The lingering question is whether the collapse of the climate campaign is also a sign of a broader collapse in public enthusiasm for environmentalism in general. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, two of the more thoughtful and independent-minded figures in the environmental movement, have been warning their green friends that the public has reached the point of “apocalypse fatigue.” They’ve been met with denunciations from the climate campaign enforcers for their heresy. The climate campaign has no idea that it is on the cusp of becoming as ludicrous and forlorn as the World -Esperanto Association.

Steven F. Hayward is the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of the forthcoming Almanac of Environmental Trends (Pacific Research Institute).
-

Friday, February 12, 2010

Inside the Climate Bunker




The disintegration of IPCC ‘s vaunted authority  and the reputation of its leader is spelled out starkly here.

I simply do not see how they can plan to rebuild.  Their product is scientific credibility and they have been caught playing fast and loose to support an agenda.  Greenpeace does it better and no one actually believes a word they say for good reason.

India has outright bolted and most other countries are surely embarrassed. More shoes are going to fall.

The problem lies in the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize for its flawed efforts.  The illustrious committee has been quick to support what may be best described as politically correct and fashionable causes.  They often get it right.  Yet at time as they must, they get it horribly wrong also.

When an award is granted for a science, it has been long since subjected to peer review.  I suppose the IPCC was thought to be so acclaimed.  Today its advocacy has been publically exposed.  I wonder how you go about retracting a Peace Prize.

In fact, I wish the committee would abandon the annual presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize simply because there are few enough worthy candidates to support an annual presentation.   If instead nominees were reviewed and placed on a short list and not awarded the prize as insufficiently timely, then the benefit of promoting peace could be sustained.  It might even encourage a few to honor a treaty or two for a few years


Inside the Climate Bunker

How global-warming deniers are running circles around the U.N.'s top climate body.


BY CHRISTINA LARSON | FEBRUARY 9, 2010

Three years ago, Rajendra K. Pachauri was accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N.'s climate science panel. Now the IPCC head is under fire from critics for a catalogue of recent embarrassments: his initial kneejerk defense of the "Climategate" emails (Pachauri first questioned the motives of those who had hacked into the University of East Anglia's email system, then said there was "virtually no possibility" that IPCC findings were impacted), the fight he picked with the Indian environmental minister when the latter questioned certain data on glacier melt within India (Pachauri called  the government report's "voodoo science"), and the steamy soft-core novel, Return to Almora, he released last month (somewhere between memoir and fantasy, it features the sexual exploits of a 60-something globetrotting climate expert, and has scandalized an Indian public not accustomed to its masturbating scenes and erotic explicitness).

Few stars have risen and fallen so quickly as Pachauri's, who has gone from being an international climate hero to subject of increasing ridicule at home and abroad. Pachauri, an economist and former railroad engineer from a small town in the Himalayan foothills of north India, assumed his position at the helm of the IPCC in 2002. At the time, he had the enthusiastic backing of the Bush administration, which had grown tired of fielding industry complaints about his predecessor Robert Watson and hoped (wrongly, it turned out) that Pachauri would prove less vocal in his calls for carbon-reduction efforts.

But even as his credentials and honors stacked up -- from the government of France anointing him an "Officier de la legion d'honneur" to GQ India naming him 2009's "Global Indian of the Year" (FP even named him a "top global thinker" last year) -- Pachauri couldn't quite discipline his tongue. Or perhaps he didn't care what impression his verbal zingers left. In 2008, he told the Chicago Tribune: "I tell people I was born a Hindu who believes in reincarnation. It will take me the next six lives to neutralize my carbon footprint. There's no way I can do it in one lifetime."

But he attracted the most attention for barbs directed at his critics, calling those who've questioned IPCC reports "flat-earthers" -- "they are indulging in is skulduggery of the worst kind," he told the Financial Times-- and generally bristling at the prospect of unwanted scrutiny, without providing clear answers to valid questions about his stewardship.  ("My conscience is clear," he announced to the New York Times this week.) But while Pachauri's larger-than-life persona and propensity for conducting himself as though beyond reproach catches attention, these characteristics don't in and of themselves defame the organization he heads -- as much as global-warming deniers are happy to seize upon any opportunity to poke holes in climate science in general.

There is, however, at least one item in the recent round of Pachauri-bashing that does the U.N. panel no credit: a glaring error in an IPCC report about the date by which Himalayan glaciers are likely to have disappeared entirely. The underlying technical report of the panel's 2007 climate assessment  erroneously stated that by 2035 the glaciers would be gone entirely, when scientific consensus places the date much later (studies cited by the BBC project a date closer to 2350 -- more than 300 years later).

The 2035 date was an alarming, attention-grabbing finding -- and many journalists, including Stephan Faris last year in Foreign Policy, cited it as evidence that global warming is an urgent crisis. But, after the Indian government released its own report with conflicting glacier-melt data last fall, glacier scientists went back to the IPCC report and began to raise questions about the 2035 date. The chatter among experts was picked up in Science magazine last year, before spilling into the mainstream media, which has already been primed by the "Climategate" saga and a disappointing outcome in Copenhagen to turn climate-science disputes into heightened political narratives. (The initial error may have come because the IPCC cited a decade-old interview in The New Scientist which quoted a scientist mentioning the date 2035, as opposed to sourcing peer-reviewed scientific literature.)

With all the attention, one might think the IPCC would by now have a precise and consistent explanation -- or point to an ongoing investigation -- for how this error crept in. Alas.
It is telling that when I wanted to inquire about just how such an eye-popping error had made its way into the report, I was able to speak with the very the scientist responsible for coordinating that section, as opposed to a well-rehearsed communications officer. (Media savvy does not come naturally to the IPCC, a two-decade-old body charged with identifying points of scientific consensus among the growing body of expert literature on climate change. And even as the weight of the world rests on its shoulders, the panel still relies largely on unpaid scientists who volunteer their time.)

That scientist, Christopher Field, is director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology. His own work focuses on the carbon cycle, and he cochairs the working group responsible for the section of the IPCC assessment that deals with impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, including glacier melt.

If anyone has the wherewithal to identify precisely how the error survived the panel's extensive review process -- which involved soliciting more than 2,500 reviewers and experts, and more than 9,000 review comments -- it would be him.
Here is what he told me:
"That statement [about Himalayan glacier melting by 2035] is in the literature that the report cites, but it's not a statement consistent with other scientific information available ... It should not have made it into final report."
In other words, an outlier source was picked up by the chapter's authors. But what of the vaunted review process? With all the input and reactions from some so many scientific experts, did no one flag that item as questionable?
"No ... In principle, [our process] should have turned over every rock and leaf in the forest."

Interestingly, the error did come to light last fall, nearly two years after the report's initial publication, when competing glacier-melt data was released by India's ministry of environment and forests. That discrepancy quickly focused the attention of international glaciologists on both sets of data, and questions about the particulars of IPCC glacier data soon surfaced. (This, of course, raises the question of whether the IPCC's process for soliciting peer comments is targeting the right people.)
So when it became clear that a storm was brewing, how did the IPCC respond? Sloooowly.
The first rule of political damage control is to admit mistakes quickly and control the narrative, but the IPCC is still not accustomed to operating in the news cycle as opposed to on a more academic timetable. Field says that the brewing controversy was clearly on the IPCC's radar screen by Jan. 1, but that it then took until Jan. 20 for the panel to meet and put a press statement online.
"The IPCC is kind of slow responding," Field says. "It took two weeks to analyze the situation and get the statement on the website."
And now that the IPCC has acknowledged an error, what comes next?
"The IPCC does not have a formal error correction policy in place ... Historically the approach is to address [any errors] in the next assessment [due out in 2014], but in the current environment, where there is now a lot of connection to the news cycle, waiting for next assessment is not good option." He adds that it is a "high priority" to develop one.
David Victor of Stanford's School of International Relations and Pacific Studies says: "They [the IPCC] have kind of a bunker mentality -- it's not excusable but understandable."
In the time since the U.N. created the IPCC in 1988, global interest in climate change has risen dramatically, and so, too, the spotlight on and expectations for the scientific panel.  "The stakes and the pressure have both gotten higher," says Andrew Revkin, the longtime New York Times climate reporter and author of theDotEarth blog. "The IPCC was an experiment from the get-go -- there's never been anything like it ... it's still more of a 20th-century process than a 21st-century process."

The ambition and global importance of the IPCC is growing, while its methods and resources are struggling to keep up. Confusion, not orchestrated bias or, as some have asserted, greed, seems the most likely cause of recent slipups. But with the fate of the planet in the balance, that's not good enough.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Global Warming Nonsense



I am not sure when this was written but the content makes it fairly recent. This is an excellent article that lists the reasons for the weakness of the pro warming argument. There is little that can be added except to suggest that one takes the time to read through it and enjoy. It is well written.



It is remarked that scientists have been far too quick to accept work in other fields quite blindly without effectively doing their own homework. The problem has been their willingness to second such work. So science becomes public relations.



This is a good antidote.



Global Warming - Nonsense!


http://globalwarming-nonsense.com/



What is global warming? Put simply, it is the belief that humans have caused the average temperatures on earth to increase by the adding of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by the burning of carbon-based fuels like petroleum, wood and coal.



The true facts, however, do not support the idea of man-made global warming! Natural processes totally dispel anything that man can accomplish - a small rainstorm produces more energy than a large nuclear explosive releases and the lowest category of hurricane produces more energy than all of the nuclear weapons ever created by man.




The eruption of Mount St Helens put more pollutants into the atmosphere than the entire history of man kind. Think about it. Most geologists and now, most scientists around the world, do not accept the idea that global warming resulting from human activities is a viable theory - because most have an appreciation for the kind of power inherent in natural systems created by mother earth.



Conversely, most biologists do accept the idea of human created global warming and quote scientists in other fields, without ever understanding those fields sufficiently enough to make a logical assessment as to whether the studies were reasonable or even logical in their methods and claims. They simply take it on faith that the scientists touting global warming are correct in their methods and assumptions.



Geologists point to a period of much warmer weather prior to the minor Ice Age of 1350-1850 A.D., in which it was possible to farm in most of Scandinavia, Canada and even in Greenland (and why was it called Greenland? Duhh!). It is now too cold to farm in Greenland, northern Canada and all but the southern tip of Scandinavia. Historians speak of times in the past when the planet was much warmer than now, such as prior to the fifth century A.D. or the 11th century B.C., when northern Europe was similar to the Mediterranean in overall climatic conditions.



There is an erroneous assumption flying around these days that CO2 is some how an important forcing factor on the global climate, when every last piece of empirical evidence shows otherwise. Al Gore, and I'm positive he's not the only one, has a graph with 500,000 years of ice core samples showing their chronological temperature and respective CO2 levels. There is a nice correlation, and the two are definitely linked, but he lies and pretends the relationship is the other way around. In every single time period it is clear that CO2 levels always trail temperature changes by 500-800 years.



Our climate is changing, just as it has always done, and always will. In fact, the only constant about our climate is that it changes, which makes you realize the term "climate change" is at best meaningless, and at worst intentionally ambiguous. It feels silly that I need to say this, but clearly it has to be done. The main determinant of our climate is not some gas, which comprises 0.038% of the atmosphere, but the Sun, the planet's orbital eccentricities and axial wobble, cosmic ray flux, and other celestial factors. Greenhouse gases play an important role, but a passive one. It should not come as a surprise that our entire solar system has been warming for the last quarter century, or that the most accurate weather forecasts come from algorithms that concentrate on solar fluctuations and cosmic rays.



Scientists worldwide have now jumped on the global warming bandwagon. It’s become a fad, a trend, a wave of enthusiasm and the scientists are going along with the fad to simply get lucrative research grants and the media spotlight. The various activist groups are going along with it because it supports their socialist agenda of wiping out industry and personal freedoms. Global warming has even hit the big screen with “An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary on Al Gore's campaign to make the issue of global warming a recognized problem worldwide. For Al Gore the movie has been a $100 million earnings windfall, international recognition and has stirred a global debate which will rage on for the next few decades.



Let's talk about Earth's historical and current temperatures. Global warming alarmists would have us believe that we are now seeing a global temperature at a height not achieved for a very long time. This is simply not factual. We have seen temperatures even within the last 1,000 years higher than our present, which is not even a blip in Earth’s history.



Possibly the most infamous display of this nonsense is the "hockey-stick graph":


Although Mann et al compiled it in 1998, it was not until 2003 that the first independent person was able to look at the algorithms used in the graph, because they refused to release it. It turned out that, even using completely randomized data, one could create a graph that looked exactly the same because the algorithms had a bias to exaggerate the last century! Not only that, but it should be obvious from the fact that the Vikings were settling and farming Greenland from the 9th to the 13th century, in places now covered with permafrost and ice, that this graph is just total nonsense! Of course, this was not before the graph had been used as the backdrop for the 2001 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. You would have thought that was a pretty good indication of their scientific integrity, but I promise you it gets much, much worse. Perhaps even more interesting than the inability of the IPCC to verify its data before using it at all, let alone as a centerpiece, or subsequently apologizing after it became public how fraudulent the graph was, is the fact that environmentalists to this day still use this graph to illustrate their points. Al Gore's entire sensationalist "documentary" (boy is that charitable) revolves around this widely discredited graph and others like it. It should honestly occur to us that anyone who continues to use this graph to support their arguments has little interest in actually presenting reality. The IPCC used to publish the real temperature data on the past millennium in its earlier reports, but not anymore because it’s an inconvenient truth to their agenda.



What about recent temperature rises in the last century? Surely it is impossible to deny that we are seeing warming now at an unusual and alarming rate? Well, you'd be surprised. Measuring Earth's average temperature to any interesting degree of precision is a considerably complex task. Even defining exactly what the absolute surface air temperature means is challenging, giving plenty of room for pursuing an agenda. The vast majority of graphs you've seen on this subject will have come from data using land-based measurements, as these allow the graph to continue back beyond the 1970s. There are numerous problems with land-based measurements, ranging from the fact that land only accounts for 30% of the planet's surface, to urban heat islands and other effects from changes in local land use. Dr. Dick Morgan, former advisor to the World Meteorological Organization and climatology researcher at University of Exeter, U.K. says, [7] "Had the IPCC used the standard parameter for climate change (the 30 year average) and used an equal area projection, instead of the Mercator (the 2D representation of a sphere which exaggerates the polar area) warming and cooling would have been almost in balance." However, in the last 30 years we've had consistent measurements from weather balloons and satellites, which produce much more reliable results for obvious reasons, and what we've observed from this equipment is a only a very slight warming trend. This data should be puzzling to the people who built the climate models for the IPCC, because they actually predicted the reverse - the troposphere should be warming faster than the surface if the current warming is due to the 'greenhouse effect'.



While we're on the subject of climate models, I'd like to say a few things. Climate models are in their infancy. They are highly dependent on the assumptions that go into them, and there are a lot of them. In fact, there are so many assumptions and parameters that it is genuinely possible to create any relationship you like. Climate models are made fun by the inclusion of "positive feed-backs" (multiplier effects) so that a small temperature increment expected from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide invokes large increases in water vapor, which seem to produce exponential rather than logarithmic temperature response to CO2. It seems to have become somewhat of a game to see who can add in the most creative feedback mechanisms to produce the scariest warming scenarios from their models, but there remains no evidence that the planet behaves in such a manner. Not only is it highly debatable as to whether water vapour acts as a positive or negative feed-back, but what has been observed in laboratories is that CO2 actually has a logarithmic relationship with temperature. The IPCC literally made its entire conclusion from the results of 6 models. Three of these were extreme scenarios with numbers like a global population of 15 billion by 2100 (almost all demographers expect our population to level at 9 billion), and even the 3 that were ‘moderate’ were predicting things like the annual rainfall in Ireland should be equivalent to the Sahara’s. Today. The unreliable nature of these models probably helps to explain why the IPCC cut almost of all its predictions by a third from 2001 to its most recent report. They also failed to predict the fall in methane levels we've seen since 2002, and their predictions for sea temperatures have been halved due to "incorrectly calibrated instrumentation". As the saying in computer programming goes; "Garbage in, garbage out".



There is an erroneous assumption flying around these days that CO2 is some how an important forcing factor on the global climate, when every last piece of empirical evidence shows otherwise. Al Gore, and I'm positive he's not the only one, has a graph with 500,000 years of ice core samples showing their chronological temperature and respective CO2 levels. There is a nice correlation, and the two are definitely linked, but he lies and pretends the relationship is the other way around. In every single time period it is clear that CO2 levels always trail temperature changes by 500-800 years. Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia had the following to say about this; [8] "Al Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak, that they are pathetic. The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science." The historical evidence consistently shows temperature is independent of CO2. In fact, 450 million years ago when we were in the depths of the coldest period the Earth has had in half a billion years, CO2 levels were 10 times above today's! Even using the last century as evidence for a dependent relationship is meaningless. 65% of the warming this century occurred in the first three decades, and then, while CO2 levels continued to rise, temperatures fell for four decades in a row.



Another misconception that seems to be rife at the moment is that some how CO2 is a pollutant. I'm sure that you've all learned that this gas is actually fundamental to our existence, but this seems to be as good a time as any to re-cap. Estimates vary, but somewhere around 15% seems to be the common number cited for the increase in global food crop yields due to increased carbon dioxide since 1950. This increase has both helped avoid a Malthusian disaster and preserved or returned enormous tracts of marginal land as wildlife habitat that would otherwise have had to be put under the plow in an attempt to feed the growing global population. Commercial growers deliberately generate CO2 and increase its levels in agricultural greenhouses to between 700ppmv and 1,000ppmv to increase productivity and improve the water efficiency of food crops far beyond those in the somewhat carbon-starved open atmosphere. CO2 feeds the forests, grows more usable lumber in timber lots meaning there is less pressure to cut old growth or push into "natural" wildlife habitat, makes plants more water efficient helping to beat back the encroaching deserts in Africa and Asia and generally increases bio-productivity. If it's "pollution," then it's pollution the natural world exploits extremely well and to great profit. What should be obvious is that increases in CO2 directly increase the vitality of the bio-world. It is no wonder that the Sahara has shrunk 300,000 km^2 in the last couple decades, or that the dinosaurs managed to find the sustenance to survive, despite their size, in an era with 5 times our current CO2 levels.



The last myth I'd like to debunk is the idea that global warming is necessarily a bad thing, regardless of whether we have any significant control over it, or that historically warm periods have been the most prosperous for humans. By far the most hyped consequences are increasing intensities of weather storms, and rising sea levels. Global storm intensities are dominated by the temperature difference between the equator and the poles, and it really is that simple. Even by the IPCC's own admission, in manipulating the area of the poles using the Mercator system to distort the global temperature, the poles must be warming at a rate faster than the equator and this subsequently leads to gentler storms, despite the media explicitly or implicitly making an attempt to blame every last weather anomaly on "climate change". Ah yes, you say, but that would imply that we are in danger of rising sea levels because the warming would melt the ice at the poles. Well, consider this. Since the last ice age 18,000 years ago the global sea level has risen by 130 meters, and is still doing so at a current rate of around 20cm per century, which is dwarfed by local tectonic movements. This will obviously displace people, but it will pale in insignificance when compared to the migrations over the next century caused by other factors such as geographical changes in important resources, fresh water locations, industrialization, etc. Dramatic pictures of breaking seasonal ice is just patent propaganda, the reality is that Antarctica’s ice mass has now been growing for the last 30 years against a 6,000 year trend of melting, and it contains over 90% of the world’s land ice (sea ice, by Archimedes’s principle, does not affect sea levels). Dr. Wibjorn Karlen, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden, admits, [9] "Some small areas in the Antarctic Peninsula have broken up recently, just like it has done back in time. The temperature in this part of Antarctica has increased recently, probably because of a small change in the position of the low pressure systems."


Editor: Bert Tassoni