Climate Pinata

This particular blogger has a few comments on the so called climate bill passed through the house this past week. I cannot get too worked up about it since I am sure this stack of self serving political hooey will never get past the Senate and is really no more than a ham fisted effort to score political points.

The goofs who pieced this together will likely attempt Das Kapital as an encore.

I am no longer sure what possesses these people. They are political animals, yet the polls regarding climate change are becoming progressively more negative. When that happens, you take the problem quietly off the table and send it back to committee to be chewed on until the next election. There is no win here. In fact there is ample opportunity to create multiple fiascos with democrat written all over it.

There is also no conceivable gain unless you are a crook feeding off government largesse.

All this is taking place while we all twiddle our thumbs and run an interesting economic experiment to discover if our Band-Aids will be sufficient to hold off a full blown depression. Right now we are getting the onslaught of a full blown recession

I suspect that the main reason this nonsense was passed was to educate the radical naïve left about the realities of creating good legislation. A hand on walk through the meat grinder for the rookies allows their experienced compatriots to hand off the task of education to the other side of the floor. It really does feel like a freshman effort.

Most disturbing is that the democrats seem locked away somewhere outside of history and that most are so ignorant that they are even determined to repeat the simplest blunders of the past, because they have the apparent power to do so.

It is as if they want to roll back the reforms of Reagan and reintroduce the economic skill and foreign policy genius of Carter. In the meantime they exhaust themselves with trifles such as this bill.

Has nothing been learned by these people? We had twenty years of economic success, upon which a Clinton presidency threw off the economic governors and a gob smacked Bush did not reassert control when it became clear that something was amiss. The 2000 dot-com bust was not a crisis in capitalism but a brisk change in direction to correct excess. The credit bust is a crisis in capitalism brought on by easy leveraging and secrecy.

Saturday, June 27, 2009.

Mad radical leftists win in the U.S. House

http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/06/mad-radical-leftists-wins-in-us-house.html

When I returned home last night, I have been watching CSPAN-1 for many hours. The discussions about the Waxman-Markey "climate bill" were just a stunning experience.

H.R. 2454: the 1092-page version
H.R. 2454: the 932-page version
I can't find the 1201-page version anywhere.

First, a comparison. The proceedings in the Czech Parliament are often a farce. Deputies attack each other personally and they often (but not always) speak about off-topic issues. And yes, I often enjoy these exchanges, too - although they can be too much of a good thing. From this point of view, the members of the U.S. Congress (from both parties) are true professionals, relatively speaking. They're better rhetors who always try to focus on the topic.

However, do these superficial differences matter for the outcome of key votes such as the Waxman-Markey bill - and the results of their work are the only thing that a citizen really cares about (or should care about)? The result showed that they don't: the mad document has narrowly passed, 219:212. As the numbers show, the "victory" would be impossible without these 8 traitors (omitted)

The bill has 1201 pages, although this full version is nowhere to be found. About 300 pages were added yesterday at 3:09 am. Hillary may have received a call at 3 am, with a big threat to the U.S. Did she manage to save her country? No, she didn't.It became extremely clear from the proceedings that virtually no one has read the bill, especially not the brand new 300-page amendment. No one in the U.S. House actually owned a copy of this amendment during the proceedings. John Boehner, the GOP minority leader, is close to an exception and we will discuss some of his findings below.

The supporters have uniformly been delusional imbeciles, talking about a shiny future, added jobs, reduced deficits, and saving the world. They have clearly no idea what's written in the bill and even if you told them, they wouldn't understand what it would mean. They're not capable of an elementary mental activity.

They're apparently not even supposed to be thinking: they are just paid to raise their hand in favor of any stupidity that their bosses ask them to support. They're individually irresponsible appendices of a filthy octopus. I just felt terrible for the U.S. when I saw e.g. those congresswomen who were manifestly included in the House because they were black, female, and simple-minded enough to blindly approve anything recommended by their white male "leaders".

BillLet me tell start somewhere. The very size of the bill, 1201 pages, means that most people - and even most "local experts" - have absolutely no chance to understand all of its glitches. (I offer USD 5 to the first person who shows some evidence that he or she has read the full text.) So this bill is, first of all, a stunning document transferring an immense amount of power to a few selected people who will know how to master the bill and benefit from its details.

For a comparison, a pretty good bill called the U.S. Constitution originally had four pages and it allowed a great country to work well for 230+ years. Those four pages are somewhat less than 1201 pages whose only purpose is to allow one particular green tumor to thrive for a few years, before it dies of hunger.

John Boehner has read most of it. He showed a graph of a hundred of institutions that are expected to "conspire" to make this newly planned huge sector of the grey economy thrive. Many of these institutions are new and their name is composed out of approximately 10 words each.

The bill allows the new octopus to infiltrate the life of all the individuals, force them to look for expert opinions about all kinds of things before very basic transactions, order even villages (which often can't afford to hire anyone) to employ useless green staff that is a part of this new mafia, force them to have power outlets (or expensive devices to sequester CO2, a harmless gas that we call life) at all conceivable and inconceivable, mostly useless places, and so on. In other words, you won't be able and your community or company won't be able to live normally without paying attention to the new mechanism and you won't be able to rely on having resources because you can always be ordered to waste them for nonsensical expenses dictated by the bill.

This bill is trying to distort ways how energy is used. Now, what activities depend on energy? It's impossible not to think about the crazy physics textbook that once made Richard Feynman so angry. The answer to all questions was "Energy makes it go". Feynman explained that children didn't learn anything, it was just an indoctrination by a vacuous cliché, and energy makes everything go but also stop. In fact, it is conserved, just being converted from one form to another. Sadly enough, the sentence "Energy makes everything go" is no longer vacuous with this bill because the bill implies that "Everything must be regulated".

Meanwhile, the bill is doing nothing measurable to actually help America become energy-independent: it does nothing to help nuclear energy, the realistic domestic sources of energy are being suppressed, and the currently unrealistic domestic sources of energy will probably remain unrealistic. Moreover, the bill depends on hundreds of technicalities reflecting the current details about existing technologies such as fuel cells. If there's any significant technological progress, which is the only hope to realize some dreams proclaimed by the bill, all these things will be getting obsolete and hundreds of pages will have to be modified and added (to describe the bureaucratic treatment of the new technologies) almost every year.

There are many regulations that imply that new billions of dollars will be moved from one place to another. However, the algorithms how to exactly calculate these billions and how to determine where they're moved are never well-defined, as Boehner has found out: the bill was clearly written by a few random sloppy amateurs-become-professionals - or the vagueness may have been either unavoidable or deliberate.

So whatever the reason is behind the vagueness, the bill will give an immense power to those who will be able to take over this gigantic new machinery and move billions to their preferred locations (and order such transfers) - a situation that is likely to attract huge corruption and make Saddam Hussein a modest, wise, and fair manager in comparison.

The extra expenses needed for this gigantic new structure to operate are going to be paid by the "polluters". That's very interesting because the same bill argues that there won't be any polluters in a near future. So who will pay for all these new green jobs at that time? Of course, this question is rhetorical because the U.S. will never get there.Amazingly enough, this nearly unprecedented communist-bureaucratic revolution is being justified mostly by "climate change".

The whole industrial activity of the U.S. since 1776 may have (temporarily) added something between 0.05 and 0.2 °C to the global temperatures (would you prefer to sacrifice the U.S. to avoid this "serious" change?), and the business-as-usual in the U.S. would contribute an additional 0.1 - 0.5 °C per the 21th century - i.e. until the year 2100 which is so far that almost none of us will be here to see it. I am convinced that even the IPCC will agree about the figures. The greenhouse warming is small, the U.S. only influence a small part of it, and the growth will naturally decrease in a few decades or a century because of decreasing fossil fuel reserves, anyway.

The unmeasurably small cooling to be achieved by a century of this new system - which will surely be lost in local and global fluctuations and many other effects influencing the temperature - must be a really valuable thing because the U.S. House is not only ready to add trillions of new debt but also willing to transform their previously great country to a tyranny where energy-dependent jobs will be escaping to more friendly countries, where elementary business and human acts - and indeed, even manifestations of life - will need a bureaucratic stamp and approval (by bureaucrats whose number will have to be so large that they will de facto cover every piece of the country), a nation that is going to plan a rationally unmotivated global trade war with all countries in the world that are gonna realize that similar bills are a road to hell (the U.S. want to become a bigger version of North Korea, a rogue state that must bugger everyone else about its insane ideological viewpoints, in order to mask its own self-imposed internal problems).

You know, the Bolsheviks decided to transform the Russian society in a similar radical way back in 1917. At least, the champions of the existing regime together with the blue-dog Mensheviks of that time had the guts to try to stop the spreading Bolshevik cancer. At the end, they failed, and Russia was decimated by the Bolsheviks for more than 70 years, suffering from the economic decline, tens of millions of murdered people, and bringing the world to the verge of a nuclear holocaust. When the Bolsheviks got settled, they had all kinds of peaceful plans, and virtually all of them turned out to be nothing else than a wishful thinking: the real progress in the economy doesn't come from plans of a few mediocre officials who declared themselves as being important, without having passed any tests showing that they're talented.

The Waxman-Markey method to build new things in the economy is structurally analogous to the Lenin-Stalin method.

Is there someone in the U.S. today who will at least try to stop these blinded loons? At least the U.S. Senate? Well, I actually guess that the U.S. Senate will stop this looming storm. Meanwhile, we should better check that nothing like that will happen in Europe or at least not in the Czech Republic.

Rising Seas

As we have long since acknowledged, this past decade has been a warm decade in the run of things. The prior two decades showed a warming trend while this present decade saw that trend fully developed and a flattening out at its high. The past two years has seen precipitous decline suggesting that the warm decade may be over. This could be a response to the accelerated warming of 2007 or the commencement of a decadal downtrend and my bet is presently on the latter.

In the meantime, according to these reported numbers, we have added one inch or so to ocean over that period. That is too big to be a mistake so it gives us a magnitude for global response to a rise in temperature. According to this it has mostly come from the Greenland sheet which fits observations. It seems a bit rich, but is obviously not.

And yes, if this were to continue at this present temperature range it is plausible to anticipate an inch of rise per decade until the Greenland sheet is eliminated. Of course, Mother Nature is already signaling the opposite.

It seems though that two cold winters notwithstanding that the sea ice retreat is as quick as the past two years, suggesting that it takes a bit more than a simple drop in average temperatures. We also understand a bit better, reports of access during the Viking era. Once the bulk of the sea ice is reduced, the lower level remains quite stable in the face of colder weather.

That suggests that a simple repeat of 2007 every decade or so will progressively reduce the ice pack. It also suggests that historic conditions were a direct and unusual result of the little ice age itself and are not to be considered the natural default. So unless the little ice age comes back we can expect Greenland to get back in the dairy business and the Northwest Passage will continue to open every summer.

I suggest that we are living through the restoration of normal climatic conditions that will be similar to the medieval optimum and this will last until perhaps something goes bang in Alaska.

As an aside, the language of this item is intemperate at best and the numbers and claimed facts are been exaggerated right across the board. However 3.1 mm per year over a decade is a believable number since it is easy to construct accurate enough tidal gauges and the like in enough places to be so assured.

Oceans Rising Faster Than UN Forecast, Scientists Say (Update2)

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=afmw1nT6inhA

By Alex Morales

June 18 (Bloomberg) -- Polar ice caps are melting faster and oceans are rising more than the United Nations projected just two years ago, 10 universities said in a report suggesting that climate change has been underestimated.

Global sea levels will climb a meter (39 inches) by 2100, 69 percent more than the most dire forecast made in 2007 by the UN’s climate panel, according to the study released today in Brussels. The forecast was based on new findings, including that Greenland’s ice sheet is losing 179 billion tons of ice a year.

“We have to act immediately and we have to act strongly,” Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told reporters in the Belgian capital. “Time is clearly running out.”

In six months, negotiators from 192 nations will meet in Copenhagen to broker a new treaty to fight global warming by limiting the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and clearing forests.
“A lukewarm agreement” in the Danish capital “is not only inexcusable, it would be reckless,” Schellnhuber said.

Fossil-fuel combustion in the world’s power plants, vehicles and heaters alone released 31.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, 1.8 percent more than in 2007, according to calculations from BP Plc data.

‘Rapid and Drastic’

The scientists today portrayed a more ominous scenario than outlined in 2007 by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which likewise blamed humans for global warming. “Rapid and drastic” cuts in the output of heat-trapping gases are needed to avert “serious climate impacts,” the report said.

The report called for coordinated, “rapid and sustained” global efforts to contain rising temperatures. Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen, also in Brussels, told reporters that nations have to reverse the rising trend in emissions of heat-trapping gases.

“We need targets,” Rasmussen said. “All of us are moving toward the same ambitious goals.”

Scientists from institutions including Yale University, the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge compiled the 39-page report from research carried out since 2005, the cutoff date for consideration by the IPCC for its forecasts published in November 2007.

Sea Levels

Ocean levels have been rising by 3.1 millimeters a year since 2000, a rate that’s predicted to grow, according to the study. The projections of sea levels rising by a meter this century compare with the 18 to 59 centimeters (7 to 23 inches) forecast by the IPCC.

“There are indications that rates of sea-level rise are higher than projected, and impacts like Arctic melting are more rapid,” Martin Parry, who supervised part of the UN panel’s 2007 study, said in a telephone interview. He wasn’t involved in writing the new report.

Oceans are warming 50 percent faster than the IPCC predicted and Arctic sea ice is disappearing more rapidly in summer -- exposing darker ocean that absorbs more heat, the study said.

The academics produced the study, “Climate Change --Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions,” by compiling research submitted to a conference in Copenhagen in March. They also drew from an October 2006 report into the economics of climate change by Nicholas Stern, then the U.K. government’s chief economist.

Doing-Nothing Cost

Stern’s study, which wasn’t included in the IPCC report, said that the cost of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change can be limited to 1 percent of economic output while doing nothing could lead to damage costing as much as 20 percent of the world’s gross domestic product.

“Greater near-term emissions lock us into greater climate change requiring greater costs from climate impacts and more investment in adaptation,” Stern wrote in today’s study. “Furthermore, they lead to a faster rate of climate change with greater challenges for adaptation.”

By 2050, when the global population will be an estimated 9 billion people, per-capita gas emissions will need to have fallen to about 2 tons a year, compared with levels as high as 20 tons a person currently in the U.S., the report proposed.

The University of Copenhagen coordinated the effort by the 10-school International Alliance of Research Universities. Other members include the University of California at Berkeley, Peking University, the Australian National University, ETH Zurich, the National University of Singapore and the University of Tokyo.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at:

amorales2@bloomberg.net.

Dr Morner on Sea Level Nonsense

Some of the statements regarding sea levels from the global warming crowd have been silly. The conservative increases predicted were minimal, and more importantly, within the error range and thus meaningless.

Surely that makes sense too. We have had a forty year temperature rise of less than a degree, now ended that is within the temperature channel associated with the Holocene for which we have zero evidence of significant convincing sea level variation.

Now we have Dr Morner who with meticulous work is able to demonstrate zero variation over the last fifty years. You can also be sure that the error factor has been thoroughly minimized. Bluntly put, our best possible measurements leave no wiggle room. The sea is not rising.

There is no newly minted Amazon flowing out of Greenland and Antarctica.

In the past, I have chosen to simply dismiss the more outrageous claims put out, expecting others would laugh them out. That has not happened. We have press coverage that panders to and promotes mindless ignorance in scientific topics and the claims are rarely addressed by anyone. In fact, the scientific community has jumped on the band wagon and is linking every grant application however tenuous to global warming. It has become as bad as the silliness surrounding cancer research in which thousands of single chemical variable have been proclaimed associated with greater cancer risk. Almost none of these ever passed beyond a grad student’s thesis and were swiftly forgotten.

Any objective thinking about sea levels would inform anyone that the likelihood of significant melt water having reached the Ocean unnoticed for the past fifty years is zero. That there is no current risk was also obvious even with the warmer summer of 2007.

the real shock in this article is the last bit about the Hong Kong guage. This is fraud in its finest hour.

Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told'

The uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story, writes Christopher Booker.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5067351/Rise-of-sea-levels-is-the-greatest-lie-ever-told.html

Christopher Booker

Last Updated: 6:31PM GMT 28 Mar 2009

If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.

Although the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.

But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".

When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster.

Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.

Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.

One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC's favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a "corrective factor" of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they "needed to show a trend".

When I spoke to Dr Mörner last week, he expressed his continuing dismay at how the IPCC has fed the scare on this crucial issue. When asked to act as an "expert reviewer" on the IPCC's last two reports, he was "astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one". Yet the results of all this "deliberate ignorance" and reliance on rigged computer models have become the most powerful single driver of the entire warmist hysteria.

•For more information, see Dr Mörner on YouTube (Google Mörner, Maldives and YouTube); or read on the net his 2007 EIR interview "Claim that sea level is rising is a total fraud"; or email him – morner@pog.nu – to buy a copy of his booklet 'The Greatest Lie Ever Told'

Gallup Discovers Rising Skepticism on Global Warming

This item comes by way of Marc Morano, who has the thankless task of throwing facts in the face of global warming fanatics from the US Senate.

It appears that the phrase ‘the public is an ass’ has been turned on its head. The public clearly is beginning to think that the pro global warming crowd is an ass.

As I have posted in the past, extraordinary theories require extraordinary proof. Instead Mother Nature has blandly reversed direction and destroyed the necessary trend line. We simply no longer have the supporting data to reasonably make the extraordinary claim. In the meantime the fanatics are making asses of themselves with over the top declarations.

This steady deterioration has happened in the face of unrelenting pro global warming press coverage in support of the position. Obviously the public can look out the window and see vigorous and sustained counter evidence cramping their lives as has not happened for many years.

BREAKING: Gallup Poll: 'Record-High 41% of Americans 'now say global warming is exaggerated!' - 'Highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting' in more than a decade – March 11, 2009

[Marc Morano Note on Gallup Poll: These dramatic polling results are not unexpected as prominent scientists from around the world continue to speak out publicly for the first time to dissent from the Al Gore, UN IPCC and media driven man-made climate fears. In addition, a steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, analyses, real world data and inconvenient developments have further decimated the claims of man-made global warming fear activists. Americans are finally catching on in large numbers that the UN IPCC is a POLITICAL -- not scientific organization. Man-made global warming fears have proven simply unsustainable – to use a nice green term.

Man-made climate fears may soon follow the previous failed eco-scares like the disappearing rainforest claims of the 1980’s and 1990’s. The New York Times recently reported about how the green groups and media promoted fears of the disappearing rainforests from that era may have been severely overblown. (See Rainforest fears fading away: “For every acre of rainforest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics” as once farmed land is returning to nature. Jan. 2009. – The fading rainforest scare inspired this global warming spoof of the year 2019. See: Spoof : “Scientists Now Say Global Warming Fears Fading Away - Claim Warming Consensus Never Existed” ) –

If new peer-reviewed studies are to be believed, today’s high school kids watching Gore’s movie will be nearing the senior citizen group AARP’s membership age (50 years) by the time warming allegedly “resumes” in 30 years! See: Climate Fears RIP…for 30 years!? – Peer-Reviewed Study Finds Global Warming could stop 'for up to 30 years! Warming 'On Hold?...'Could go into hiding for decades' study finds – Discovery.com – March 2, 2009 – Final quote: Dr. John Brignell, a skeptical UK Emeritus Engineering Professor at the University of Southampton wrote in 2008: “The warmers are getting more and more like those traditional predictors of the end of the world who, when the event fails to happen on the due date, announce an error in their calculations and a new date.” End Morano note. ]


BREAKING: Gallup Poll: 'Record-High 41% of Americans 'now say global warming is exaggerated!' - 'Highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting' in more than a decade – March 11, 2009

Key Quote: “A record-high 41% now say it is exaggerated. This represents the highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting on global warming seen in more than a decade of Gallup polling on the subject. Key Quote: 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.”

Key Quote: “However, the solitary drop in concern this year about global warming, among the eight specific environmental issues Gallup tested, suggests that something unique may be happening with the issue.”

Key Quote: “It is not clear whether the troubled economy has drawn attention away from the global warming message or whether other factors are at work.”

Key Quote: “Importantly, Gallup's annual March update on the environment shows a drop in public concern about global warming across several different measures, suggesting that the global warming message may have lost some footing with Americans over the past year.”

More Excerpts: The 2009 Gallup Environment survey measured public concern about eight specific environmental issues. 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. […] A record-high 41% now say it is exaggerated. This represents the highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting on global warming seen in more than a decade of Gallup polling on the subject. As recently as 2006, significantly more Americans thought the news underestimated the seriousness of global warming than said it exaggerated it, 38% vs. 30%. Now, according to Gallup's 2009 Environment survey, more Americans say the problem is exaggerated rather than underestimated, 41% vs. 28%. The trend in the "exaggerated" response has been somewhat volatile since 2001, and the previous high point, 38%, came in 2004. Over the next two years, "exaggerated" sentiment fell to 31% and 30%. Still, as noted, the current 41% is the highest since Gallup's trend on this measure began in 1997. Since 1997, Republicans have grown increasingly likely to believe media coverage of global warming is exaggerated, and that trend continues in the 2009 survey; however, this year marks a relatively sharp increase among independents as well. In just the past year, Republican doubters grew from 59% to 66%, and independents from 33% to 44%, while the rate among Democrats remained close to 20%. […] Importantly, Gallup's annual March update on the environment shows a drop in public concern about global warming across several different measures, suggesting that the global warming message may have lost some footing with Americans over the past year. Gallup has documented declines in public concern about the environment at times when other issues, such as a major economic downturn or a national crisis like 9/11, absorbed Americans' attention. To some extent that may be true today, given the troubling state of the U.S. economy. However, the solitary drop in concern this year about global warming, among the eight specific environmental issues Gallup tested, suggests that something unique may be happening with the issue. Certainly global warming has received tremendous attention this decade, including with Al Gore's Academy Award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." It is not clear whether the troubled economy has drawn attention away from the global warming message or whether other factors are at work. It will be important to see whether the 2009 findings hold up in next year's update of the annual environmental survey.

Full Gallup Results with charts and graphs:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/116590/Increased-Number-Think-Global-Warming-Exaggerated.aspx

Global Coal Reserves

This piece surprised me because it challenges the integrity of reported reserves by government agencies. He is saying that historically governments have seriously overstated coal reserves and that this process continues.

I beg to differ. Governments will report a resource rather than a reserve. The resource is the total amount of material that might or could be mined regardless of cost. Canada has a 1.7 trillion barrel resource in the tar sands. It has a reserve of 175 billion barrels economically available for now.

Once cost becomes an issue we are talking about reserves. These measure what can be reasonably mined in view of current costs and selling prices. A lot of perfectly good coal will get reclassified as rock.

The one thing that I learned about the mining industry is perfectly good ore reserves turn into rock amazingly often. In fact we are living through one such transition right now.

Double the selling price of coal and I am sure that vast new resources will spring up. Let me put this another way. I have inspected my share of oil drilling logs. Every so often another coal seam will be typically encountered since we normally drill in sedimentary basins. They are all too deep to ever consider mining for the present. None of these are ever even counted as resources.

It is obvious that the USA can double their resource estimate by the simple expedient of measuring deeper. At least it would be more ethical than the resources added by OPEC.

And a note on that. Few understand that the first two discovery wells in a new field plus seismic has proven sufficient to define proven oil reserves. It is very unlikely that later work will significantly increase that figure. In fact the reverse is likely. Those vast new OPEC reserves announced in the eighties did not coincide with new field discoveries. Therefore they are fairy tales.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/world-coal-rese.html

World Coal Reserves Could Be a Fraction of Previous Estimates

By Alexis Madrigal December 17, 2008 6:29:35 PMCategories: AGU 2008, Clean Tech, Energy, Geology

SAN FRANCISCO — A new calculation of the world's coal reserves is much lower than previous estimates. If validated, the new info could have a massive impact on the fate of the planet's climate.

That's because coal is responsible for most of the CO2 emissions that drive climate change. If there were actually less coal available for burning, climate modelers would have to rethink their estimates of the level of emissions that humans will produce.

The new model, created by Dave Rutledge, chair of Caltech's engineering and applied sciences division, suggests that humans will only pull up a total — including all past mining — of 662 billion tons of coal out of the Earth. The best previous estimate, from the World Energy Council, says that the world has almost 850 billion tons of coal still left to be mined.

"Every estimate of the ultimate coal resource has been larger," said ecologist Ken Caldeira of Stanford University, who was not involved with the new study. "But if there's much less coal than we think, that's good news for climate."

The carbon dioxide emitted when humans burn coal to create usable energy is primarily responsible for global warming. Leading scientists think that the stability of Earth's climate will be dictated by how the world uses — or doesn't use — its coal resources. And the thinking has been that the world has more than enough coal to wreak catastrophic damage to the climate system, absent major societal or governmental changes.

So the new estimate, which opens the slim possibility that humankind could do nothing to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions and still escape some of the impacts of climate change, comes as quite a shock.

Rutledge argues that governments are terrible at estimating their own fossil fuel reserves. He developed his new model by looking back at historical examples of fossil fuel exhaustion. For example, British coal production fell precipitously form its 1913 peak. American oil production famously peaked in 1970, as controversially predicted by King Hubbert. Both countries had heartily overestimated their reserves.

It was from manipulating the data from the previous peaks that Rutledge developed his new model, based on fitting curves to the cumulative production of a region. He says that they provide much more stable estimates than other techniques and are much more accurate than those made by individual countries.

"The record of geological estimates made by governments for their fossil fuel estimates is really horrible," Rutledge said during a press conference at the American Geological Union annual meeting. "And the estimates tend to be quite high. They over-predict future coal production."

More specifically, Rutledge says that big surveys of natural resources underestimate the difficulty and expense of getting to the coal reserves of the world. And that's assuming that the countries have at least tried to offer a real estimate to the international community. China, for example, has only submitted two estimates of its coal reserves to the World Energy Council — and they were wildly different.

"The Chinese are interested in producing coal, not figuring out how much they have," Rutledge said. "That much is obvious."

The National Research Council's Committee on Coal Research, Technology, and Resource Assessments to Inform Energy Policy actually agrees with many of Rutledge's criticisms, while continuing to maintain far sunnier estimates of the recoverable stocks of American coal.

"Present estimates of coal reserves are based upon methods that have not been reviewed or revised since their inception in 1974, and much of the input data were compiled in the early 1970’s," the committee wrote in a 2007 report. "Recent programs to assess reserves in limited areas using updated methods indicate that only a small fraction of previously estimated reserves are actually mineable reserves.”

And don't look to technology to bail out coal miners. Mechanization has actually decreased the world's recoverable reserves, because huge mining machines aren't quite as good at digging out coal as human beings are.

With Rutledge's new numbers, the world could burn all the coal (and other fossil fuels) it can get to, and the atmospheric concentration of CO2 would only end up around 460 parts per million, which is predicted to cause a 2-degree-Celsius rise in global temperatures.

For many scientists, that's too much warming. A growing coalition is calling for limiting the CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, down from the 380 ppm of today, but it's a far cry from some of the more devastating scenarios devised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"Coal emissions really need to be phased out proactively — we can't just wait for them to run out — by the year 2030," said Pushker Kharecha, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "There is more than enough coal to keep CO2 well above 350 ppm well beyond this century."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses economic models that assume that the world will not run out of coal. Some IPCC scenarios show 3.4 billion tons of coal being burned just through 2100.

That's more than five times what Rutledge thinks will be possible — and a good deal higher than the WEC's estimate for recoverable coal reserves, too.

On the other hand, if the world were really to encounter a swift and steep decline in accessible coal resources, it's unclear how humans could retain our current levels of transportation, industry and general energy-usage.

So, even if coal were to run out and the most dangerous climate change averted, the imperative to develop non–fossil-fuel energy sources would remain.

"Peak Oil and peak gas and peak coal could really go either way for the climate," Kharecha said. "It all depends on choices for subsequent energy sources."

Handy Post on GW

I share this post from another blogger as it has a really nice to read list prepared by one of his correspondents.

The illustration is also cute.

The items in the list are surprisingly complete in spelling out the various arguments.

This is a handy tool when reading another propaganda piece that is playing fast and loose with the evidence.

A Reader Shares His Doubts About Global Warming

Written by Timothy B. Hurst

Published on December 15th, 2008

Posted in Climate Change, Conservative, Leader

http://redgreenandblue.org/files/2008/12/global_warming_evidence.jpg


Last week, I received an email from a reader in Estonia (I was just as surprised we were big in the Baltics as you) who indicated that he used to be a believer in the global warming phenomenon until he “read some quite believable articles suggesting that man made Global Warming is a hoax.” Two of the pieces the reader pointed me to were authored by Robert Brisnmead, who, evidently, is a devoted climate change denier. The third was a longer, more detailed piece.

The reader also passed along a summary of the take-home arguments he gleaned in his newfound readings that I thought I would share with you. I’m only passing these along because the reader seemed like a friendly chap, not because I buy it. Do with it as you please.

1. The “Greenhouse Effect” is a natural and valuable phenomenon, without which, the planet would be uninhabitable.

2. Modest Global Warming, at least up until 1998 when a cooling trend began, has been real.

3. CO2 is not a significant greenhouse gas; 95% of the contribution is due to Water Vapor.

4. Man’s contribution to Greenhouse Gasses is relatively insignificant. We didn’t cause the recent Global Warming and we cannot stop it.

5. Solar Activity appears to be the principal driver for Climate Change, accompanied by complex ocean currents which distribute the heat and control local weather systems.

6. CO2 is a useful trace gas in the atmosphere, and the planet would actually benefit by having more, not less of it, because it is not a driver for Global Warming and would enrich our vegetation, yielding better crops to feed the expanding population.

7. CO2 is not causing global warming, in fact, CO2 is lagging temperature change in all reliable datasets. The cart is not pulling the donkey, and the future cannot influence the past.

8. Nothing happening in the climate today is particularly unusual, and in fact has happened many times in the past and will likely happen again in the future.

9. The UN IPCC has corrupted the “reporting process” so badly, it makes the oil-for-food scandal look like someone stole some kid’s lunch money. They do not follow the Scientific Method, and modify the science as needed to fit their predetermined conclusions. In empirical science, one does NOT write the conclusion first, then solicit “opinion” on the report, ignoring any opinion which does not fit their predetermined conclusion while falsifying data to support unrealistic models.

10. Polar Bear populations are not endangered, in fact current populations are healthy and at almost historic highs. The push to list them as endangered is an effort to gain political control of their habitat… particularly the North Slope oil fields.

11. There is no demonstrated causal relationship between hurricanes and/or tornadoes and global warming. This is sheer conjecture totally unsupported by any material science.

12. Observed glacial retreats in certain select areas have been going on for hundreds of years, and show no serious correlation to short-term swings in global temperatures.

13. Greenland is shown to be an island completely surrounded by water, not ice, in maps dating to the 14th century. There is active geothermal activity in the currently “melting” sections of Greenland.

14. The Antarctic Ice cover is currently the largest ever observed by satellite, and periodic ice shelf breakups are normal and correlate well with localized tectonic and geothermal activity along the Antarctic Peninsula.

15. The Global Warming Panic was triggered by an artifact of poor mathematics which has been thoroughly disproved. The panic is being deliberately nurtured by those who stand to gain both financially and politically from perpetuation of the hoax.

16. Scientists who “deny” the hoax are often threatened with loss of funding or even their jobs.

17. The correlation between solar activity and climate is now so strong that solar physicists are now seriously discussing the much greater danger of pending global cooling.

18. Biofuel hysteria is already having a disastrous effect on world food supplies and prices, and current technologies for biofuel production consume more energy than the fuels produce.

19. Global Warming Hysteria is potentially linked to a stress-induced mental disorder.

20. In short, there is no “climate crisis” of any kind at work on our planet.

Image: re-ality via flickr under a Creative Commons License

Tags: climate change, climate science, global warming, global warming is a hoax

650 Scientists Become Restless

One could say that the scientific community is getting restless. IPCC is now coming under vigorous attack because it is now simply ignoring the evidence and they are been called on it.

Global warming was very real for twenty years or so. That it plateaued over the last several years was a clear warning that the cause was not significantly anthropocentric. That the measured global temperature dropped 0.7 degrees rather abruptly made total nonsense out of the IPCC’s models if only because they completely failed to predict the decline.

If your model cannot predict a major reversal, then it is by definition naïve and must lack a critical input.
That appears to be the sun, unbelievably.

This event also sharply lowers the maximum likely magnitude of the CO2 greenhouse contribution from an optimistic 0 to 0.5 degrees to a far less optimistic 0 – 0.1 degrees which is another way of saying that it has gone from a maybe to negligible.

This is the first generation to have reliable space borne proxies with which to measure global climate and the obvious inputs and outputs. We may actually have a good predictive model in about a century that is able to operate with low enough noise components. Prior methods could never fully get around this very well. That is why the urban heat island is so problematic. All the adjustments end up been judgment calls.

The amount of resistance is now sharply rising and it looks like Poznan conference is providing the platform. It should be very clear that the global warming theory is possibly a very bad idea. That we should migrate out of the carbon economy is a valid proposition and needs a global initiative to implement. That it was a boneheaded strategic mistake to tie it to global warming has been my position from the beginning.


UN Blowback: More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims

Study: Half of warming due to Sun! –Sea Levels Fail to Rise? - Warming Fears in 'Dustbin of History'

POZNAN, Poland - The UN global warming conference currently underway in Poland is about to face a serious challenge from over 650 dissenting scientists from around the globe who are criticizing the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore. Set for release this week, a newly updated U.S. Senate Minority Report features the dissenting voices of over 650 international scientists, many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN. The report has added about 250 scientists (and growing) in 2008 to the over 400 scientists who spoke out in 2007. The over 650 dissenting scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.

The U.S. Senate report is the latest evidence of the growing groundswell of scientific opposition rising to challenge the UN and Gore. Scientific meetings are now being dominated by a growing number of skeptical scientists. The prestigious International Geological Congress, dubbed the geologists' equivalent of the Olympic Games, was held in Norway in August 2008 and prominently featured the voices and views of scientists skeptical of man-made global warming fears. [See Full report Here: & See: Skeptical scientists overwhelm conference: '2/3 of presenters and question-askers were hostile to, even dismissive of, the UN IPCC' ]

Full Senate Report Set To Be Released in the Next 24 Hours – Stay Tuned… HAS BEEN RELEASED

A hint of what the upcoming report contains:

“I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.” - Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.

“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical.” - Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology and formerly of NASA who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called “among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years.”

Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” - UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.

“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds…

I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists,” - Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.

“The models and forecasts of the UN IPCC "are incorrect because they only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity.” - Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico

“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” - U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.

“Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will.” – . Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, NZ.

“After reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri's asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it's hard to remain quiet.” - Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society's Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review.

“For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?" - Geologist Dr. David Gee the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.

“Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp…Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact.” - Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, is a former member of the Dutch UN IPCC committee.

“Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly (from promoting warming fears), without having their professional careers ruined.” - Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh.

“Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense…The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning.” - Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder of the Numerical Weather Forecast group, has more than 150 published articles.

“CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another….Every scientist knows this, but it doesn’t pay to say so…Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps Europeans in the driver’s seat and developing nations walking barefoot.” - Dr. Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan.

“The [global warming] scaremongering has its justification in the fact that it is something that generates funds.” - Award-winning Paleontologist Dr. Eduardo Tonni, of the Committee for Scientific Research in Buenos Aires and head of the Paleontology Department at the University of La Plata. # #

In addition, the report will feature new peer-reviewed scientific studies and analyses refuting man-made warming fears and a heavy dose of inconvenient climate developments. (See Below: Study: Half of warming due to Sun! –Sea Levels Fail to Rise? - Warming Fears in 'Dustbin of History')

The Senate Minority Report is an update of 2007’s blockbuster U.S. Senate Minority Report of over 400 dissenting scientists. See here: This new report will contain the names, quotes and analyses of literally hundreds of additional international scientists who publicly dissented from man-made climate fears in just 2008 alone. The chorus of scientific voices skeptical grow louder as a steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, analyses and real world data challenge the UN and former Vice President Al Gore's claims that the "science is settled" and there is a "consensus." The original 2007 U.S. Senate report is available here

UN Conference Chills Out

It is enough to say that the much ballyhooed international conference that is now taking place in Poland was greeted by a UN generated report essentially saying what has been unavoidable for eighteen months. That the world has decided to cool off by 0.7 degrees without any fanfare or the slightest bit of notice.

Even the UN is learning that the climate will persistently warm up over years and decades and then abruptly cool. It actually explains and illuminates a lot about past historical climate shifts and even may partly explain the mythology of the Boreal Wind.

That may well be a folk memory of strong unusual Arctic summer winds been followed by bitterly cold winters.

There is nothing like living through a transition time to get a handle on the mechanisms at work.

I am looking forward to the communiqués that will come out of this conference. I wonder if they can grab the nettle or are we to be treated like idiots.

The moment the temperature dropped in the winter of 2008 after the spectacularly warm summer of 2007, the current cycle of warming was patently over. The big question now is whether a fresh warming cycle will begin, or if the decline will continue for some time.

Remember that the Romans faced a frozen Rhine and tens of thousands of so called Germanic barbarians on the other side with slim warning from the preceding years if any. A one degree drop in the next year or so would likely give us analogous conditions.


World Climate Report

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2008/12/02/will-the-un-chill-out-on-climate-change/

The Web’s Longest-Running Climate Change Blog
December 2, 2008

Will the U.N. Chill Out on Climate Change?

Filed under: Climate Politics, Surface, Temperature History —

10,000 people from 86 countries have descended upon Poznan, Poland for yet-another United Nations meeting on climate change. This time, it’s the annual confab of the nations that signed the original U.N. climate treaty in Rio in 1992. That instrument gave rise to the infamous 1996 Kyoto Protocol on global warming, easily the greatest failure in the history of environmental diplomacy.

Kyoto was supposed to reduce global emissions of carbon dioxide below 1990 levels during the period 2008-2012. But since it was signed, the atmospheric concentration of this putative pollutant continued to rise, pretty much at the same rate it did before Kyoto. (Even if the world had lived up to the letter of the Kyoto law, it would have exerted an influence on global temperature that would have been too small to measure.)

The purpose of the Poznan meeting is to work out some type of framework that goes “Beyond Kyoto.” After completely failing in its first attempt to internationally limit carbon dioxide emissions, the U.N. will propose reductions far greater than those called for by Kyoto. Kyoto failed because it was too expensive, so anything “beyond” will cost much more.

The fact is that the world cannot afford any expensive climate policies now. Economic conditions are so bad that carbon dioxide emissions—the byproduct of our commerce—are likely going down because of the financial cold spell, not the climatic one. Indeed, a permanent economic ice-age would likely result from any mandated large cuts in emissions. If you’re liking your 401(k) today, you’ll love “Beyond Kyoto.”

Before proposing an even harsher treaty the U.N. ought to pay attention to its own climate science. It regularly publishes temperature histories from its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was formed in the late 1980s with the express charge of finding a scientific basis for a global climate treaty.

Since Kyoto, a very funny thing has happened to global temperatures: IPCC data clearly show that warming has stopped—even though its computer models said such a thing could not happen.

According to the IPCC, the world reached its high-temperature mark in 1998, thanks to a big “El Niño,” which is a temporary warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean that occurs once or twice a decade. El Niño years are usually followed by one or two relatively cold years, as occurred in 1999 and 2000. The cooling is, not surprisingly, called La Niña. No one knows what really causes these cycles but they have been going on sporadically for millennia.

Wait a minute. Starting an argument about global warming in 1998 is a bit unfair. After all, that’s starting off with a very hot temperature, followed by two relatively cool years.

Fine. Take those years out of the record and there’s still no statistically significant warming since 1997. When a scientist tells you that some trend is not “significant,” he or she is saying that it cannot mathematically be distinguished from no trend whatsoever.

More important, as shown in our Figure 1, there’s not going to be any significant trend for some time.

Assume, magically, that temperatures begin to warm in 2009 at the rate they were warming before the mid-90s, and that they continue to warm at that rate.

We show two alternatives. One includes the El Niño/La Niña cycle of 1998-2000. Assuming that the old rate of warming reappears in 2009 and continues, the warming since 1998 does not become statistically significant until 2021.

Our other alternative simply removes the El Niño/La Niña cycle and starts in 1997. Under that assumption, warming doesn’t become significant until 2020.
Whatever the assumption, even if the earth resumes warming at the pre-1998 rate, we will have nearly a quarter-century without a significant warming trend.

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/wp-images/poznan_fig1.JPG

Figure 1. Top: Observed temperature, 1998-2008 (blue circles), plus a constant rate of warming beginning in 2009 at the rate established from 1977 through 1997 (0.17°C/decade) (red circles). Warming since 1998 does not become statistically significant until 2021.

Bottom: Same as above, but the observed temperatures beginning in 1997 through 2008 (filled blue circles), and ignoring the El Niño/La Niña swing in 1998-2000 (open blue circles). The constant rate of warming is assumed to begin in 2009 (filled red circles). In this case, warming does not become significant until 2020.

Perhaps the delegates at Poznan ought to look at the IPCC’s latest (2007) compendium on climate. It used 21 different climate models to forecast the future, and subjected each to different “storylines” (in the U.N.’s parlance) for global emissions of carbon dioxide. They are there for the world to see, on page 763 of the volume on climate science (reproduced as our Figure 2). Not one of them predicts a quarter-century without warming—even under a scenario in which emissions increase faster than they already are.

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/wp-images/poznan_fig2.JPG

Figure 2. Temperature projections from 2000 to 2100 from the suite of climate models used by the IPCC for three different “storylines”—SRES A2 (top); SRES A1B (middle); SRES B1 (bottom) (source: IPCC AR4, page 763).

The bottom line is that the U.N.’s own climate models have failed, barely a year after they were made public. They have demonstrated a remarkable inability to even “predict” the present! Can 10,000 people in Poznan somehow ignore this?

They shouldn’t. Instead they should be thankful. The lack of recent and future warming almost certainly means that the ultimate warming of this century is going to be quite modest. Instead, they should keep in mind that expensive policies to fight a modest climate change will only worsen the unprecedented cold snap affecting the global economy.

Early Onset of Winter Sea Ice

I am sure that few have noticed this but the Arctic sea ice has appeared a bit ahead of schedule. This conforms to the information that the globe itself dropped most of a degree this past year. A much thicker layer of first year ice fits and it may approach what is considered normal from historical records.

Right now the folks supporting the pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) model are making the global warming enthusiasts into purveyors of nonsense. Sorry al Gore.

Another tidbit that I picked up on recently was that the era of the Little Ice age was unprecedented during the Holocene. I presume this is meant in terms of its duration, since volcanic popped up and provided cool offs and equally swift recoveries. The little ice age was sustained over decades. I am not sure to believe that as a valid observation and will now try to get a handle on its’ validity. Help is welcome since an unprecedented event in the Holocene begs explanation.

We are now having our second cold year and this one is looking like it is heading toward the lower third of observed temperatures. IPCC and Jim Hansen is actually looking a little rattled over this one.

As I stated when I began this blog, I believed that monitoring changing climatic conditions is a worthy endeavor, and that involving ourselves in the effort to sequester CO2 was simply good husbandry. I also stated that the linkage between these two phenomena was suspect and quite likely within the band of data noise and thus indeterminate. I thought that attempting to support linkage as a truth was simply going to become untenable as soon as the weather decided to change. It appears that is what has now happened.

Unless something surprising comes along, the only interpretation that can now be supported is a recovery of perennial sea ice in the Arctic. We came very close to a warmer Arctic, but not close enough.

An ice free summer Arctic is still a worthy objective but must surely wait for a human led restoration of the Bronze Age Sahara. That would collect and retain the extra heat that is necessary.

Roy Spencer on the Pacific Decadal Oscillation

This recently released paper is very compelling in that it is able to assign the observed temperature data to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). It should have always been a priority to establish the importance of this variable, simply because the Pacific represents a uniform surface covering half the globe. Anything happening there in the atmosphere must naturally be the most significant atmospheric effect and we have already had El Nino and La Nino to integrate into our models.

Suddenly, this work reveals that the Northern Hemispheric warming that we have experienced over the past two decades is linked directly to shifts in the Pacific that make convincing sense and could even be anticipated. This is the natural driver of normal climate variation which we certainly have not broken out of at all.

This paper is critical of the IPCC modeling and proves that it is rubbish through a well developed critique, including a challenge to show him wrong.

We are going from an unconvincing argument for CO2 forcing to a sound demonstration that its effect is minor. It is time for the enthusiasts to beat a retreat before Mother Nature shows up at the party and ruins it all. Of course we will then hear extensively from the sunspot crowd.

The evidence supported a decadal shifting of heat back and forth across the equator in one way or the other and that makes a great deal of sense because it gives the Earth a mechanism with which to keep the heat content of the globe in balance. Otherwise we need to rely on a centuries’ long cycle that readjusts the ocean currents. It is simply too slow.

I now feel that we are getting a real handle on the climatic levers and switches. Now if I could figure out which North Pacific volcano caused the Little Ice Age we would be almost home free.



Global Warming as a Natural Response to Cloud Changes Associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

byRoy W. Spencer, PhD

Principal Research Scientist The University of Alabama in Huntsville (posted October 19, 2008; updated 10/20/08, 6:35 a.m.)

(what follows is a simplified version of a paper I am preparing for submission to Geophysical Research Letters)

Abstract

A simple climate model forced by satellite-observed changes in the Earth's radiative budget associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is shown to mimic the major features of global average temperature change during the 20th Century - including two-thirds of the warming trend. A mostly-natural source of global warming is also consistent with mounting observational evidence that the climate system is much less sensitive to carbon dioxide emissions than the IPCC's climate models simulate.

1. Introduction

For those who have followed my writings and publications in the last 18 months (e.g. Spencer et al., 2007), you know that we are finding satellite evidence that the climate system could be much less sensitive to greenhouse gas emissions than the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) climate models suggest.

To show that we are not the only researchers who have documented evidence contradicting the IPCC models, I made the following figure to contrast the IPCC-projected warming from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide with the warming that would result if the climate sensitivity is as low as implied by various kinds of observational evidence.

Fig. 1. Projected warming (assumed here to occur by 2100) from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from the IPCC climate models versus from various observational
indicators.

http://www.weatherquestions.com/PDO-and-20th-Century-warming-Fig01.jpg

The dashed line in Fig. 1 comes from our recent apples-to-apples comparison between satellite-based feedback estimates and IPCC model-diagnosed feedbacks, all computed from 5-year periods (Spencer and Braswell, 2008a). In that comparison, there were NO five year periods from ANY of the IPCC model simulations which produced a feedback parameter with as low a climate sensitivity as that found in the satellite data.

The discrepancy between the models and observations seen in Fig. 1 is stark. If the sensitivity of the climate system is as low as some of these observational results suggest, then the IPCC models are grossly in error, and we have little to fear from manmade global warming. [I am told that the 1.1 deg. C sensitivity of Schwartz (2007) has more recently been revised upward to 1.9 deg. C.]

But an insensitive climate system would ALSO mean that the warming we have seen in the last 100 years can not be explained by increasing CO2 alone. This is because the radiative forcing from the extra CO2 would simply be too weak to cause the ~0.7 deg. C warming between 1900 and 2000... there must be some natural warming process going on as well.

Here I present new evidence that most of the warming could actually be the result of a natural cycle in cloud cover forced by a well-known mode of natural climate variability: the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

2. A Simple Model of Natural Global Warming

As Joe D'Aleo and others have pointed out for years, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has experienced phase shifts that coincided with the major periods of warming and cooling in the 20th Century. As can be seen in the following figure, the pre-1940 warming coincided with the positive phase of the PDO; then, a slight cooling until the late 1970s coincided with a negative phase of the PDO; and finally, the warming since the 1970s has once again coincided with the positive phase of the PDO.


Fig. 2. Five-year running averages in (a) global-average surface temperature, and (b) the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) index during 1900-2000.

http://www.weatherquestions.com/PDO-and-20th-Century-warming-Fig02.jpg

Others have noted that the warming in the 1920s and 1930s led to media reports of decreasing sea ice cover, Arctic and Greenland temperatures just as warm as today, and the opening up of the Northwest Passage in 1939 and 1940.

Since this timing between the phase of the PDO and periods of warming and associated climate change seems like more than mere coincidence, I asked the rather obvious question: What if this known mode of natural climate variability (the PDO) caused a small fluctuation in global-average cloud cover?

Such a cloud change would cause the climate system to go through natural fluctuations in average temperature for extended periods of time. The IPCC simply assumes that this kind of natural cloud variability does not exist, and that the Earth stays in a perpetual state of radiative balance that has only been recently disrupted by mankind's greenhouse gas emissions. This is an assumption that many of us meteorologists find simplistic and dubious, at best.

I used a very simple energy balance climate model, previously suggested to us by Isaac Held and Piers Forster, to investigate this possibility. In this model I ran many thousands of combinations of assumed: (1) ocean depth (through which heat is mixed on multi-decadal to centennial time scales), (2) climate sensitivity, and (3) cloud cover variations directly proportional to the PDO index values.

In effect, I asked the model to show me what combinations of those model parameters yielded a temperature history approximately like that seen during 1900-2000. And here's an average of all of the simulations that came close to the observed temperature record:

Fig. 3. A simple energy balance model driven by cloud changes associated with the PDO can explain most of the major features of global-average temperature fluctuations during the 20th Century. The best model fits had assumed ocean mixing depths around 800 meters, and feedback parameters of around 3 Watts per square meter per degree C.

http://www.weatherquestions.com/PDO-and-20th-Century-warming-Fig03.jpg

The "PDO-only" (dashed) curve indeed mimics the main features of the behavior of global mean temperatures during the 20th Century -- including two-thirds of the warming trend. If I include transient CO2 forcing with the PDO-forced cloud changes (solid line labeled PDO+CO2), then the fit to observed temperatures is even closer. It is important to point out that, in this exercise, the PDO itself is not an index of temperature; it is an index of radiative forcing which drives the time rate of change of temperature. Now, the average PDO forcing that was required by the model for the two curves in Fig. 3 ranged from 1.7 to 2.0 Watts per square meter per PDO index value. In other words, for each unit of the PDO index, 1.7 to 2.0 Watts per square meter of extra heating was required during the positive phase of the PDO, and that much cooling during the negative phase of the PDO.

But what evidence do we have that any such cloud-induced changes in the Earth's radiative budget are actually associated with the PDO? I address that question in the next section

3. Satellite Evidence for Radiative Budget Changes Forced by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation

To see whether there is any observational evidence that the PDO has associated changes in global-average cloudiness, I used NASA Terra satellite measurements of reflected solar (shortwave, SW) and emitted infrared (longwave, LW) radiative fluxes over the global oceans from the CERES instrument during 2000-2005, and compared them to recent variations in the PDO index. The results can be seen in the following figure:

Fig. 4. Three-month running averages of (a) the PDO index during 2000-2005, and (b) corresponding CERES-measured anomalies in the global ocean average radiative budget, with and without the feedback component removed (see Fig. 5). The smooth curves are 2nd order polynomial fits to the data.

http://www.weatherquestions.com/PDO-and-20th-Century-warming-Fig04.jpg

But before a comparison to the PDO can be made, one must recognize that the total radiative flux measured by CERES is a combination of forcing AND feedback (e.g. Gregory et al., 2002; Forster and Gregory, 2006). So, we first must estimate and remove the feedback component to better isolate any radiative forcing potentially associated with the PDO.

As Spencer and Braswell (2008b) have shown with a simple model, the radiative feedback signature in globally-averaged radiative flux-versus-temperature data is always highly correlated, while the time-varying radiative forcing signature of internal climate fluctuations is uncorrelated because the forcing and temperature response are always 90 degrees out of phase. This allows some measure of identification and separation of the two signals.

The following figure shows what I call "feedback stripes" associated with intraseasonal fluctuations in the climate system. The corresponding feedback estimate (line slope) of 8.3 Watts per square meter per degree C was then used together with three-month anomalies in tropospheric temperature from AMSU channel 5 remove the estimated feedback signal from the radiative flux data to get the "forcing-only" curve in Fig. 4b.

Fig. 5. Three-month running averages of global oceanic CERES radiative flux changes versus tropospheric temperature changes (from AMSU channel 5, see Christy et al., 2003) for the time period in Fig. 4. The average feedback estimate (see sloped lines) was then used together with the AMSU5 data to estimate and remove the feedback component from the CERES radiative fluxes, leaving the radiative forcing shown in Fig. 4b.

http://www.weatherquestions.com/PDO-and-20th-Century-warming-Fig05.jpg

[NOTE: This feedback estimate is not claimed to necessarily represent long-term climate sensitivity (which in this case would be very low, 0.44 deg. C); it is instead the feedback occurring on intraseasonal and interannual time scales which is merely being removed to isolate the forcing signal. It should be remembered that, according to our current paradigm of climate variability, there can only be two sources of radiative variability: forcing and feedback. As shown by Spencer and Braswell (2008a, 2008b), the usual practice of fitting a regression line to all of the data in Fig. 5 would result in a regression slope biased toward zero (high sensitivity) because the presence of any time-varying internal radiative forcing -- which is always occurring -- would be mistakenly included as part of the feedback

When the feedback is removed, we see a good match in signal.] Fig. 4 between the low-frequency behavior of the PDO and the radiative forcing (which is presumably due to cloud fluctuations associated with the PDO). Second-order polynomials were fit to the time series in Fig. 4 and compared to each other to arrive at the PDO-scaling factor of 1.9 Watts per square meter per PDO index value.

It is significant that the observed scale factor (1.9) that converts the PDO index into units of heating or cooling is just what the model required (1.7 to 2.0) to best explain the temperature behavior during the 20th Century. Thus, these recent satellite measurements - even though they span less than 6 years -- support the Pacific Decadal Oscillation as a potential major player in global warming and climate change.

4. Discussion & Conclusions

The evidence continues to mount that the IPCC models are too sensitive, and therefore produce too much global warming. If climate sensitivity is indeed considerably less than the IPCC claims it to be, then increasing CO2 alone can not explain recent global warming. The evidence presented here suggests that most of that warming might well have been caused by cloud changes associated with a natural mode of climate variability: the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

The IPCC has simply assumed that mechanisms of climate change like that addressed here do not exist. But that assumption is quite arbitrary and, as shown here, very likely wrong. My use of only PDO-forced variations in the Earth's radiative energy budget to explain two-thirds of the global warming trend is no less biased than the IPCC's use of carbon dioxide to explain global warming without accounting for natural climate variability. If any IPCC scientists would like to dispute that claim, please e-mail me at roy.spencer (at) nsstc.uah.edu.

If the PDO has recently entered into a new, negative phase, then we can expect that global average temperatures, which haven't risen for at least seven years now, could actually start to fall in the coming years. The recovery of Arctic sea ice now underway might be an early sign that this is indeed happening.

I am posting this information in advance of publication because of its potential importance to pending EPA regulations or congressional legislation which assume that carbon dioxide is a major driver of climate change. Since the mainstream news media now refuse to report on peer-reviewed scientific articles which contradict the views of the IPCC, Al Gore, and James Hansen, I am forced to bypass them entirely.

We need to consider the very real possibility that carbon dioxide - which is necessary for life on Earth and of which there is precious little in the atmosphere - might well be like the innocent bystander who has been unjustly accused of a crime based upon little more than circumstantial evidence.

REFERENCESChristy, J. R., R. W. Spencer, W. B. Norris, W. D. Braswell, and D. E. Parker (2003), Error estimates of version 5.0 of MSU/AMSU bulk atmospheric temperatures, J. Atmos. Oceanic Technol., 20, 613- 629.

Douglass, D.H., and R. S. Knox, 2005. Climate forcing by volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo. Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, doi:10.1029/2004GL022119.

Forster, P. M., and J. M. Gregory (2006), The climate sensitivity and its components diagnosed from Earth Radiation Budget data, J. Climate, 19, 39-52.

Gregory, J.M., R.J. Stouffer, S.C.B. Raper, P.A. Stott, and N.A. Rayner (2002), An observationally based estimate of the climate sensitivity, J. Climate, 15, 3117-3121.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis, report, 996 pp., Cambridge University Press, New York City.

Schwartz, S. E. (2007), Heat capacity, time constant, and sensitivity of the Earth's climate system. J. Geophys. Res., 112, doi:10.1029/2007JD008746.

Spencer, R.W., W. D. Braswell, J. R. Christy, and J. Hnilo (2007), Cloud and radiation budget changes associated with tropical intraseasonal oscillations, Geophys. Res. Lett., 34, L15707, doi:10.1029/2007GL029698.

Spencer, R.W., and W.D. Braswell (2008a), Satellite measurements reveal a climate system less sensitive than in models, Geophys. Res. Lett., submitted.

Spencer, R.W., and W.D. Braswell (2008b), Potential biases in cloud feedback diagnosis: A simple model demonstration, J. Climate, November 1.