It's
better to say nothing and seem a fool than to open your mouth and remove all
doubt. –Anon
******************************************************************************
1. Warming or cooling? Is NASA-GISS
manipulating climate data?
3. IPCC climate models still imperfect:
Comments of a leading French meteorologist
5. New CCSP Report “Weather and Climate
Extremes in a Changing Climate”: Unfortunately, another biased assessment
6. Rebuttal to Newsweek on Weather
Extremes
8. When is a
consensus not a consensus?
9. Foggy science in
10. Polar bears spell
intrusive government control
11. Cap&Trade:
Its real cost—economic and political
12. And finally—the
‘endangered newt’ fuss in
NEWS YOU CAN USE
Edward N. Lorenz
(1917–2008) RIP
The
pioneer of chaos theory had a remarkable ability to distill complex systems to
their physical essence.
RETROSPECTIVE by Kerry Emanuel http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/320/5879/1025.pdf
********************************
GW believers are suckers: Florida Power & Light customers gave the company
$11.4 million over four years to develop green energy, but a report shows most
of the money went toward administrative and marketing costs. According to a 19-page
report written by the staff of
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2008/06/24/ap5149016.html
*******************************************
BELOW THE BOTTOM LINE:
G-8 group agrees
to cut GH gas emissions by 50% by 2050.
Enviro reaction:”Pathetic!”
La Scala (
***********************************
SUNSHADE WORLD: A GLOBAL WARMING SOLUTION?
Placing a 'sunshade' in space in order to counteract global warming was first
proposed in 1989. More recent studies concluded that such a scheme could
be developed and deployed in about 25 years time at a cost of several trillion
dollars. Recent research at the
################################################
1. WARMING OR COOLING? HOW NASA IS MANIPULATING CLIMATE DATA
By
Steven Goddard, The Register, 2 May 2008
A paper published in scientific journal Nature this week has reignited the
debate about Global Warming, by predicting that the earth won't be getting any
warmer until 2015. Researchers at the
Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences [
But how will we know whether the earth is
warming or cooling? Today, it all depends on the data source. Two authorities
provide us with analysis of long-term surface temperature trends. Both agree on
the global temperature trend until 1998, at which time a sharp divergence
occurred. The UK Meteorological Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Studies
[Had-CRU] data shows worldwide temperatures declining since 1998. According to
Hadley's data, the earth is not much warmer now than it was than it was in 1878
or 1941. By contrast, NASA-GISS data shows worldwide temperatures increasing at
a record pace - and nearly a full degree warmer than 1880.
The other two widely used global temperature
data sources are from earth-orbiting satellites -- UAH (
Confusing? How can scientists who report
measurements of the earth's temperature within one one-hundredth of a degree be
unable to concur if the temperature is going up or down over a ten year period?
Something appears to be inconsistent with the NASA data - but what is it?
Looking at the NASA website, we can see that
the person in charge of the temperature data is the eminent Dr. James Hansen --
Al Gore's science advisor and the world's leading long-term advocate of global
warming.
See
website for details. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/02/a_tale_of_two_thermometers/
Bottom
Line
Both of the satellite data sources, as well
as Had-CRU, show worldwide temperatures falling below the IPCC estimates.
Satellite data shows temperatures near or below the 30 year average - but NASA
data has somehow managed to stay on track towards climate Armageddon. You can
draw your own conclusions, but I see a pattern that is troublesome. In science,
as with any other endeavour, it is always a good idea to have some separation
between the people generating the data and the people interpreting it.
Bear in mind that warming and cooling
concerns are nothing new, as this alarming bulletin reminds us:
“The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are
growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot,”
according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from US Consul Ifft,
at
A RealClimate
blogger? No, that was the US Weather Bureau in 1922.
We saw a global cooling scare in 1924, a
global warming scare in 1933, another global cooling in the early 1970s, and
another warming scare today. Perhaps future generations will be able to reduce
the alarming increase in the number of climate alarms.
********************
2. SEPP TAKES A COLD LOOK AT THE NATURE (MAY 1, 2008) PAPER, PROMISING A COOL DECADE
Before we all go overboard about the paper in
Nature that predicts another decade
of cooling, let’s stop and ask some questions:
The claim that natural climate fluctuations
can and do overwhelm the ‘expected’ warming from an increase in GH gases is not
only plausible but fairly certain. But
we already know that; see NIPCC report
“Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate” http://www.sepp.org/publications/NIPCC_final.pdf
This means that the IPCC climate models have
all overestimated the ‘expected’ warming.
The likely reason is that they all incorporate a ‘positive feedback’
from water vapor that amplifies the meager warming from CO2. The actual feedback is likely to be
negative. The Nature authors don’t spell
this out.
As I understand it, the claim is that by
using a set of initial values of actual ocean data they find circulation
changes that lead to a temporary (a decade or so) cooling. But the accuracy and completeness of such ocean
data is dubious. So how sensitive is the
result to small errors in the initial values?
More important, since models can be used to run time backwards, will the
same initial values simulate the climate of the past decade. [Note that over such short periods the GH
effect is not relevant; the model tests mainly the dynamics of the ocean
circulation.
Finally, if changes in ocean dynamics can
produce cooling, then an appropriate set of initial conditions must exist that
produces a warming (natural) trend. It
seems to me this shows that a warming trend per se cannot be used to support
anthropogenic warming unless it persists for at least several decades. IPCC
Climate models still imperfect.
*************************
3. IPCC CLIMATE
MODELS STILL IMPERFECT: COMMENTS OF A LEADING FRENCH METEOROLOGIST
Excerpts from a letter of the distinguished
French meteorologist Prof Pierre Morel (Univ of Paris) -- based on a paper he
wrote for GEWEX News (one of the World Climate Research Program publications)
on the believability of past or current climate models and the role the
"water cycle science" community could play in helping climate
modelers clean up their act.
He agrees that “the line of reasoning used by
the IPCC to buttress its statements on global change is fraught with unresolved
problems and far from compelling - at least in my eyes.” The over-interpretation (a fortiori the
outright manipulation) of imperfect past records is not likely to allow the
controversy to settle. Incidentally, the same remark applies to somewhat
tentative paleo-climatic reconstructions, anecdotal climate stories, etc... and
also reconstructions of missing solar irradiance data.
“Irrespective of the multiplicity of known or
yet to-be-discovered factors that may impact climate, I claim we should have a
clear understanding of the impact of further CO2 loading of the atmosphere will
have on global-mean tropospheric and surface temperature. We know that
doubling the atmospheric concentration of CO2 will also double the amount in
the stratosphere where the energy balance is entirely determined by known
radiation physics. Thus we can compute exactly the impact of the CO2 greenhouse
on OLR [Outgoing Long-wave Radiation] at the tropopause level. Everything
else being the same, the extra stratospheric blanketing effect of doubling CO2
will require OLR at the tropopause to increase by some 4.3 Watt/m2 just for
maintaining the planetary radiation balance [This is the famous or infamous
forcing imposed on the "climate system" by the doubling of CO2].
[SEPP Comment: But the stratosphere is cooling, thus
reducing the amount of OLR]
“Now, as mentioned in the paper there is no
such thing as a specific "global warming response" to a small [e.g.
0.1K per decade], long-term shift of the main event, which is the
seasonal cycle of each hemisphere successively [typically 5-10C variations in
hemispheric-mean temperature]. There is no physical reason why the
tropospheric response to slow change in the stratospheric blanketing effect
should be much different from the undoubtedly very complicated but
well-documented response to the much larger seasonal cycle in solar
irradiance. I explain how the same "fast tropospheric
processes" operate in both cases and also draw attention to the
little-noticed fact that the seasonal response of the Northern
hemisphere exhibits precisely the same sensitivity as that of the Southern
hemisphere, about ~ 0.6 K/Watt.m-2.
“So quite independently of any effect that
may be related to changes in solar activity through yet unknown mechanisms, we
have (I think) good reasons to believe that doubling atmospheric CO2 will cause
a global tropospheric warming ~ 2.5K, give and take maybe 1K in order to
account for losses through transient North-South heat transfer (maybe not so
much if one considers the meteorological rather than geographic equator), other
smaller corrections and, of course, a whole slew of slower adjustment/feedback
processes (involving the oceans, ice, etc.). You yourself mention the
fact that a large change in CO2 concentration is an essential component of the
glaciation process. As a matter of fact. I believe that, irrespective of
the triggering cause, a global ice-age regime cannot be established nor
sustained without a vast reduction in CO2 and other greenhouse gas
concentrations.
“So, while I share your doubts regarding the
validity of climate model physics, I do believe that they get the main event
(global warming) more or less right because they have been able to
"tune" their "hand-selected" coefficients so as to
match the existing seasonal cycle.
”In this respect, Lindzen "Iris" or
tropical "heat vent" argument is moot. This process, if proven, will
just be one among many tropospheric adjustments that contribute to increasing
the OLR loss at the tropopause level, as required to maintain the planetary radiation
balance under an increased CO2 greenhouse.
“I was amused by the story about Tuvalu. I
actually met with the Prime Minister of Tuvalu in Geneva, when he made quite an
eloquent plea for his beleaguered (?) people on the occasion of a big
inter-governmental bash on Global Warming in 1992 or 93. It is quite true
that transient ocean circulation changes, as well as regional orogenic effects,
can easily overshadow the global sea-level trend at any particular
location. Nevertheless while global sea-level rise was ~ 20cm in the 20th
century, the current trend extracted from 14 years of very precise
TOPEX/JASON-1 observations is now 3.5mm/year or 35cm/century.
With my best regards.
Pierre Morel
Professeur
Emeritus, Universite de Paris VI
*******************
4. A BETTER WAY THAN CAP AND TRADE
By Bjorn Lomborg, The
Washington Post, 26 June 2008
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/25/AR2008062501946.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
The bitter arguments in the Senate this month over the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill, which would have required major emitters to pay for the right to discharge greenhouse gases, proved that climate change caused by humans has come to the fore of U.S. policy debates. This fact may comfort those who believe that future generations will judge us on the zeal with which we face the challenge. It may even assuage the fears of those who believe that warming will end life as we know it. But political rhetoric is unlikely to put us on a path toward solving the problem of climate change in the best possible way.
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), a co-sponsor of the bill, has called it "the world's most far-reaching program to fight global warming." It is indeed policy on a grand scale. It would slow American economic growth by trillions of dollars over the next half-century. But in terms of temperature, the result will be negligible if China and India don't also commit to reducing their emissions, and it will be only slightly more significant if they do. By itself, Lieberman-Warner would postpone the temperature increase projected for 2050 by about two years.
Politicians favor the cap-and-trade system because it is an indirect tax that disguises the true costs of reducing carbon emissions. It also gives lawmakers an opportunity to control the number and distribution of emissions allowances, and the flow of billions of dollars of subsidies and sweeteners.
Many people believe that everyone has a moral obligation to ask how we can best combat climate change. Attempts to curb carbon emissions along the lines of the bill now pending are a poor answer compared with other options.
Consider that today, solar panels are one-tenth as efficient as the cheapest fossil fuels. Only the very wealthy can afford them. Many "green" approaches do little more than make rich people feel they are helping the planet. We can't avoid climate change by forcing a few more inefficient solar panels onto rooftops.
The answer is to dramatically increase research and development so that solar panels become cheaper than fossil fuels sooner rather than later. Imagine if solar panels became cheaper than fossil fuels by 2050: We would have solved the problem of global warming, because switching to the environmentally friendly option wouldn't be the preserve of rich Westerners.
This message was recently backed up by the findings of the Copenhagen Consensusproject, which gathered eight of the world's top economists -- including five Nobel laureates -- to examine research on the best ways to tackle 10 global challenges: air pollution, conflict, disease, global warming, hunger and malnutrition, lack of education, gender inequity, lack of water and sanitation, terrorism, and trade barriers.
These experts looked at the costs and benefits of different responses
to each challenge. Their goal was to create a prioritized list showing how
money could best be spent combating these problems.The panel concluded that the
least effective use of resources in slowing global warming would come from
simply cutting carbon dioxide emissions.
Research for the project was done by a lead author of the report of
theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- the group that shared last
year's Nobel Peace Prize with former vice president Al Gore -- who noted that
spending $800 billion over 100 years solely on mitigating emissions would
reduce inevitable temperature increases by just 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit by the
end of this century. Even accounting for the key environmental damage from
warming, we would lose money, with avoided damage of just $685 billion for our
$800 billion investment.
The economists didn't conclude that the world should ignore the effects of climate change. They pointed out that a better response than cutting emissions would be to dramatically increase research and development on low-carbon energy -- such as solar panels and second-generation biofuels.
The United States has an opportunity to lead the world on research and development, which would give it the moral authority to demand that everyone else do the same. The world's sole superpower could finally provide the leadership on climate change that has been lacking in the White House.
Even if every nation spent 0.05 percent of its gross domestic product on research and development of low-carbon energy, this would be only about one-tenth as costly as the Kyoto Protocol and would save dramatically more than any of Kyoto's likely successors.
In the United States, this approach would open up new avenues for the nation's creative, innovative spirit and leave behind the political mess of Kyoto-type negotiations. A low-carbon energy, high-income future is possible. Unfortunately, the political battles we just witnessed in Washington have done nothing to make it a reality.
The writer is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Consensus Center, Copenhagen Business School.
[SEPP comment: Anything is
better than C&T. But Lomborg still doesn’t get it; still believes in IPCC
science and in ‘pie-in-the-sky’ solutions to a non-existent problem]
************************
5. NEW CCSP [CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE PROGRAM] REPORT “WEATHER AND
CLIMATE EXTREMES IN A CHANGING CLIMATE”:
UNFORTUNATELY, ANOTHER BIASED ASSESSMENT
By
former Colorado State Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr., presently senior
scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder. June 20, 2008
Excerpt: Since this assessment is so clearly biased, it should be rejected as
providing adequate climate information to policymakers. There also should be
questions raised concerning having the same individuals preparing these reports
in which they are using them to promote their own perspective on the climate,
and deliberately excluding peer reviewed papers that disagree with their
viewpoint and research papers. This is a serious conflict of interest. []
This report perpetuates the use of
assessments to promote a particular perspective on climate change, such as they
write in the Executive
Summary: “It is well established through formal attribution studies that
the global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced
increases in heat-trapping gases. Such studies have only recently been used to
determine the causes of some changes in extremes at the scale of a continent. Certain
aspects of observed increases in temperature extremes have been linked to human
influences. The increase in heavy precipitation events is associated with an
increase in water vapor, and the latter has been attributed to human-induced
warming.”
This claim conflicts with the 2005 National
Research Council report. National Research Council, 2005: Radiative forcing of
climate change: Expanding the concept and addressing uncertainties. Committee
on Radiative Forcing Effects on Climate Change, Climate Research Committee,
Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Division on Earth and Life Studies,
The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 208 pp where a diversity of
human climate forcings were found to alter global average radiative warming,
including from atmospheric aerosols and due to the deposition of soot on snow
and ice. The claim of an increase in atmospheric water vapor conflicts with a
variety of observations as summarized on Climate Science. To further illustrate
the bias in the report, the assessment chose to ignore peer reviewed research
that raises serious questions with respect to the temperature data that is used
in their report. As just one example, they ignored research where we have shown
major problems in the use of surface air temperature measurements to diagnose
long-term temperature trends including temperature extremes.
http://climatesci.org/2008/06/20/new-ccsp-report-appears-weather-and-climate-extremes-in-a-changing-climate-unfortunately-another-biased-assessment/
==============================================
What
the CCSP Extremes Report Really Says-
By
Roger Pielke, Jr., professor in the environmental studies program at the
University of Colorado and a former director of its Center for Science and
Technology Policy Research. June 20,
2008
Excerpt: In closing, the CCSP report is notable because of what it does not
show and what it does not say. It does not show a clear picture of ever
increasing extreme events in the United States. And it does not clearly say why
damage has been steadily increasing. Overall, this is not a good showing by the
CCSP. [] 1. Over the long-term U.S. hurricane landfalls have been declining.
Yes, you read that correctly.
From the appendix (p. 132): The final example
is a time series of U.S. landfalling hurricanes for 1851-2006 . . . A linear
trend was fitted to the full series and also for the following subseries:
1861-2006, 1871-2006, and so on up to 1921-2006. As in preceding examples, the
model fitted was ARMA (p,q) with linear trend, with p and q identified by AIC.
For 1871-2006, the optimal model was AR(4), for which the slope was -.00229,
standard error .00089, significant at p=.01. For 1881-2006, the optimal model
was AR(4), for which the slope was -.00212, standard error .00100, significant
at p=.03. For all other cases, the estimated trend was negative, but not
statistically significant.
2. Nationwide there have been no long-term
increases in drought. Yes, you read that correctly. From p. 5: Averaged over
the continental U.S. and southern Canada the most severe droughts occurred in
the 1930s and there is no indication of an overall trend in the observational
record . . . [] What debate? The report offers not a single reference to
justify that there is a debate on this subject.
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/001462what_the_ccsp_extrem.html
***************************************
6. REBUTTAL TO NEWSWEEK
ON WEATHER EXTREMES
By Marc Morano 6/29/08
Note: here are quick rebuttals
to this Newsweek's latest silliness. 1) Sharon Begley of Newsweek unhinged. She
really is trying to outdo her previous shoddy reporting. Her track record for
climate reporting is comical. See: Newsweek's Climate Editorial Screed Violates
Basic Standards of Journalism - August 2007 - http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=38d98c0a-802a-23ad-48ac-d9f7facb61a7
2) If only Begley had bothered to read the actual data contained in a June 2008
report from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. A sampling of what the
report reveals includes: Hurricanes declining, no long term increases in
drought - There have been no observed changes in the occurrence of tornadoes or
thunderstorms - There have been no long-term increases in strong East Coast
winter storms (ECWS), called Nor'easters - There are no long-term trends in
either heat waves or cold spells, though there are trends within shorter time
periods in the overall record. But all of the above appear to be INCREASING in
unverified climate models. Computer models predictions are not evidence. For
full report see: http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/3588
**********************
7. SCIENTIST SMACKS DOWN ACTIVISTS AT REALCLIMATE.ORG:
By
atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and
Coordination Center in Pittsburgh and a founding member of the American Society
for Mass Spectrometry.
Excerpt: Quoting RealClimate.org as a
reliable source of information on climate science is like quoting Disneyland.com
for reliable information on mouse behavior. "Real Climate" is a
staged and contracted production, which wasn't created by
"scientists", it was actually created by Environmental Media
Services, a company which specializes in spreading environmental junk science
on behalf of numerous clients who stand to benefit financially from scare
tactics through environmental fear-mongering.
There you will find the word
"model" used a million times, for the entire basis of the Global
Warming Hoax is based on computer modeling ( not climate science ) which has
thus far failed to predict anything accurately since day one. For example, one
of their past clients, Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, hired them to create the
illusion that Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) was somehow dangerous, despite the
fact that it had been fully tested and approved by the FDA. After a lengthy
national fearmongering campaign by Environmental Media Services, Ben &
Jerry's proudly announced that their ice cream was "BGH-free"... as if
it made any difference.
Real
Climate has become the Alamo for
folks like the highly discredited Michael Mann, whose original analytical
blunder led to the famous "hockey stick" curve, which helped kick off
the Great Global Warming Hoax after it was picked up by science illiterate Al
Gore and proudly paraded around the globe. The hockey stick was proven to be an
absurd blunder, but by then you couldn't put the genie back into the bottle,
and today we are wasting billions of dollars on a cure for a nonexistent
disease. Perhaps the best summary of "Real Climate" was given by a
Harvard trained atmospheric physicist and Alfred P. Sloan Professor of
Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Richard Lindzen,
who said, "This website appears to constitute a support center for global
warming believers, wherein any criticism of global warming is given an answer
that, however implausible, is then repeated by the reassured believers."
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/pgutis/public_enemies.html#comment1178
***********
8. WHEN IS A
CONSENSUS NOT A CONSENSUS?
By Roger Helmer,
MEP {Member of European Parliament from UK], June 24, 2008
At the end of the drafting process for the failed European Constitution, after eighteen months of deliberation in Brussels at a "European Convention" of MEPs, national MPs, government and Commission representatives, the Chairman Valery Giscard d'Estaing proudly declared: "We have a consensus". My good friend David Heathcoat-Amory MP leapt up on behalf of his beleaguered handful of sceptics (who had somehow slipped in under the wire), and declared that there was no consensus, since his group took a different view, and indeed published a minority report.
"Well", replied Giscard magisterially, "We have a substantial majority, and that's a consensus in Europe".
We see rather a similar position in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We are constantly told that the IPCC represents the overwhelming consensus of the 2500 scientists on its various panels. Indeed we are often told that the IPCC represents an overwhelming consensus of all scientists -- despite the 32,000 scientists who have signed the Oregon Petition, challenging the conventional alarmist view.
But not even the 2,500 IPCC reviewers have a consensus. There are constant stories of members of the IPCC panel disagreeing with its findings, but being ignored by the small and zealous group of bureaucrats and civil servants who write the "Summary for Policymakers" (which is always much more hard-line than the supporting scientific documents -- but then politicians and journalists rarely read beyond the Summary). One scientist actually threatened legal action to get his name removed from the reviewers' list because he disagreed with the findings.
Two of these dissenting IPCC panellists spoke at a seminar which I hosted yesterday in the European parliament in Brussels. Fred Singer is Emeritus Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and used to run the US meteorological satellite service. He remarked that the IPCC accepts his corrections of their spelling, but never accepts his corrections of their conclusions. Fred was wearing a lapel-pin given to all 2,500 members when the IPCC was awarded its Nobel Prize in 2007. Hans Labohm is a Dutch economist, writer and former diplomat, who was once deputy head of policy at the Dutch Foreign Ministry.
They and others have formed an alternative scientific forum, which they call the "Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change", or NIPCC, and they presented their report "Nature, not Human Activity, Controls the Climate". They do not dispute the data. Indeed they quote extensively from data published by the IPCC, and base their findings on that data. Their key conclusions are first, that the pattern, or "fingerprint", of warming predicted by CO2-based greenhouse gas computer models is hugely different from the observed pattern. The models predict maximum warming in the high atmosphere (10 to 12 kms), and mainly in the tropics. Observations from both balloons and satellites show almost the opposite -- most of what little warming there is, is in the northern hemisphere, away from the tropics, and at the surface. This is simply not the pattern of greenhouse warming. The CO2 hypothesis has been falsified by the data.
Second, they note that global temperatures over the short term correlate rather poorly with CO2 levels, but correlate very accurately with solar variations.
Thirdly, while long-term climate records (from ice cores) show a striking correlation between temperature and CO2 levels, the CO2 levels lag the temperature by around 800 to 1000 years. Clearly, therefore, the warmists have the cart before the horse. It is not CO2 that causes warming. It is warming (driven by the sun) that causes CO2. And the mechanism by which it could do so is well understood, depending on large-scale exchanges of CO2 between the oceans and the atmosphere. These exchanges are temperature-dependent.
Hans looked at the economic and geo-political implications of climate policy, and concluded that the EU is boxing itself into a corner. It may well posture and pontificate about moral leadership, but no one much will follow. EU policies on climate will further impoverish a continent which is already slipping down global league tables for economic performance. But those policies will do nothing -- literally nothing whatever -- to change the earth's climate.
The NIPCC report is available on Professor Singer's web-site at www.sepp.org
9. FOGGY SCIENCE IN LONDON
By S.
FRED SINGER, The New York Sun, May 23, 2008
http://www.nysun.com/opinion/foggy-science-in-london/77404/
Tomorrow, May 24, the G-8 environment
ministers will be in Japan to commence their annual meeting. Back in London,
though, the world's oldest science academy, the Royal Society of London,
recently has become a vocal advocate of climate alarmism. RS fellows have
included Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.
But, under the previous leadership of Lord
Robert May, the Society seems to have taken a wrong turn. They even tried to enlist
other science academies into joining them in an alarmist manifesto. However,
the U.S. National Academy, though sharing some of these views, decided not to
sign up, and the Russian Academy of Sciences has taken an opposing position.
In June 2007, the Royal Society published a
pamphlet, titled "Climate Change Controversies: a simple guide,"
designed to undermine the scientific case of climate skeptics. They presented
what they called "misleading arguments" on global warming and then
tried to shoot them down.
In countering the RS pamphlet, I have
prepared a response that is being published tomorrow by the London-based Centre
for Policy Studies under the title "Not so simple? A scientific response
to the Royal Society's paper."
Throughout, the Royal Society has relied
heavily on the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which
used to be regarded as a reliable source of scientific information. The RS thus
adopts the IPCC claim that current warming is almost certainly anthropogenic (human-caused)
but presents no independent evidence to support such a claim.
In its pamphlet, the Royal Society purports
to speak on behalf of a consensus of scientists. But no such consensus exists.
Direct polling of climate scientists has shown that about 30% are
"skeptical" of anthropogenic global warming. More than 31,000
American scientists recently signed the Oregon Petition, which expresses doubt
about the major conclusions of the IPCC, and opposes the drastic mitigation
demands of the Kyoto Protocol and the proposed "cap-and-trade"
legislation of the U.S. Congress.
My response to the RS is based on the work of
some two dozen independent climate scientists from 16 nations who contributed
to the report of the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change, or
NIPCC, titled "Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate." NIPCC
corrects many of the errors and misstatements made in the IPCC report,
discusses evidence ignored by the IPCC, and cites evidence available since May
2006, the cut-off date for the latest IPCC Report of May 2007.
The science-based arguments for a more
rational approach to global warming and climate change can be summarized as
follows:
* The Earth's climate always has changed,
with cycles of both warming and cooling, long before humans were a factor. The
cycle lengths range from decades, to the 1,500-year cycle discovered in
Greenland ice cores, to the 17 ice ages that dominated the past 2 million
years.
* The NIPCC report presents solid evidence
that any man-made global warming to date has been insignificant in comparison
with these natural climate cycles. By contrast, the IPCC has no real evidence
to support their claim of anthropogenic global warming.
* While recent man-made increases in
atmospheric carbon dioxide may, in principle, make some contribution to
temperature rise, the linkages assumed in order to predict significant future
global warming are not proven.
*Contrary to the computer simulations of
climate models, temperatures have not risen over the last decade — despite a
continuing rise in CO2 llevels.
* Other factors, such as variable solar
activity, solar wind, and cosmic rays, all seem to have a more significant
impact on the earth's climate.
* Panicky reactions to exaggerated scenarios
of global warming are bound to be costly and do great damage to world economic
development.
* Adaptation, not mitigation, is a more
appropriate response to climate change — particularly ffor poorer countries.
Fear of global warming is distorting energy
policy. Urgent action is needed to secure future energy supplies: the closure
of existing coal-powered stations and old nuclear stations over the next 10 to
20 years risks causing a serious energy shortage until new nuclear power can be
brought on stream. Yet resistance by anti-fossil fuel protesters already is
retarding the development of much needed conventional generating capacity.
The choices that are being made now about the
use of resources and the costs imposed on global development will have a huge
impact on both current and future prosperity. It is imperative, for the sake of
rational policy development worldwide, that the debate on the true nature of
global warming and its causes move from being a matter of assertion and
exaggerated scaremongering to a more reasoned debate based on the scientific
facts.
It is a pity that the Royal Society, rather
than facilitate debate, has tried to misrepresent the honest views of those who
are skeptical of what has become climate change orthodoxy.
-------------------------------
Mr.
Singer, a professor emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of
Virginia, is the former director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service. As a
reviewer of IPCC reports, he shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.
His most recent book is "Unstoppable Global Warming — Every 1500 Years.
*****************************************
10. MARCH OF THE POLAR BEARS
By
George Will, May 22, 2008
WASHINGTON -- A preventive war worked out so
well in Iraq that Washington last week launched another. The new preventive war
-- the government responding forcefully against a postulated future threat --
has been declared on behalf of polar bears, the first species whose supposed
jeopardy has been ascribed to global warming.
The Interior Department, bound by the
Endangered Species Act, has declared polar bears a "threatened"
species because they might be endangered "in the foreseeable future,"
meaning 45 years. (Note: 45 years ago, the now-long-forgotten global cooling
menace of 35 years ago was not yet foreseen.) The bears will be threatened if
the current episode of warming, if there really is one, is, unlike all the
previous episodes, irreversible, and if it intensifies, and if it continues to
melt sea ice vital to the bears, and if the bears, unlike in many previous
warming episodes, cannot adapt.
Because of restrictions on hunting, polar
bears might be more numerous today than ever and might be twice as numerous as
they were three decades ago -- when the media were fanning frenzy about global
cooling. (Science magazine, March 1975, reported "the approach of a
full-blown 10,000-year ice age.") As Nigel Lawson, a former British
Cabinet member, writes in his new book "An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look
at Global Warming":
"Over the past two-and-a-half-million years,
a period during which the planet's climate fluctuated substantially, remarkably
few of the earth's millions of plant and animal species became extinct. This
applies not least, incidentally, to polar bears, which have been around for
millennia, during which there is ample evidence that polar temperatures have
varied considerably."
But Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne says
the "threatened" label is mandatory because sea ice has been melting
and computer models postulate future melting caused by human activity. So, now
that human activity is assumed to be the primary cause, or even a measurable
cause, of warming, the decision to classify the bears as threatened has become
a mighty lever.
Now that polar bears are wards of the
government, and now that it is a legal doctrine that humans are responsible for
global warming, the Endangered Species Act has acquired unlimited application.
Anything that can be said to increase global warming can -- must -- be said to
threaten bears already designated as threatened.
Want to build a power plant in Arizona? A
building in Florida? Do you want to drive an SUV? Or leave your cell phone
charger plugged in overnight? Some judge might construe federal policy as
proscribing these activities. Kempthorne says such uses of the act, unintended
by those who wrote it in 1973, would be "wholly inappropriate." But
in 1973, climate Cassandras were saying that "the world's climatologists
are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age" (Science
Digest, February 1973). And no authors of the Constitution or the Fourteenth
Amendment intended to create a "fundamental" right to abortion, but
there it is.
No one can anticipate or control the
implications that judges might discover in the polar bear designation. Give
litigious environmentalists a compliant judge and the Endangered Species Act
might become what New Dealers wanted the National Industrial Recovery Act of
1933 to be -- authority to regulate almost everything.
What Friedrich Hayek called the "fatal
conceit" -- the idea that government can know the future's possibilities
and can and should control the future's unfolding -- is the left's agenda. The
left exists to enlarge the state's supervision of life, narrowing individual
choices in the name of collective goods. Hence the left's hostility to markets.
And to automobiles -- people going wherever they want whenever they want.
Today's "green left" is the old
"red left" revised. Marx, a short-term pessimist but a long-term
optimist, prophesied deepening class conflict, but thought that history's
violent dialectic would culminate in a revolution that would usher in material
abundance and such spontaneous cooperation that the state would wither away.
The green left preaches pessimism:
Ineluctable scarcities (of energy, food, animal habitats, humans' living space)
will require a perpetual regime of comprehensive rationing. The green left
understands that the direct route to government control of almost everything is
to stigmatize, as a planetary menace, something involved in almost everything
-- carbon.
Environmentalism is, as Lawson writes, an
unlimited "license to intrude." "Eco-fundamentalism," which
is "the quasi-religion of green alarmism," promises "global
salvationism." Onward, green soldiers, into preventive war on behalf of
some bears who are simultaneously flourishing and "threatened."
georgewill@washpost.com
---------------------------------------
Copyright
2008, Washington Post Writers Group Page Printed from:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/05/green_fundamentalism.html
at May 23, 2008 - 02:44:06 PM PDT
************************************
11. EDITORIAL: CLIMATE REALITY BITES
The
Wall Street Journal, 27 May
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121184454327221281.html
[Note:
Written before the cap&trade bill was withdrawn. After tens of billions of dollars, endless
international media hype, a Nobel Prize and an Oscar, even many Democratic
Senators couldn’t bring themselves to support the recent global warming bill.]
The global warming debate arrives in the
Senate next week, and it's about time. Finally, the Members will have to vote
on something real, as opposed to their buck-passing to courts and regulators,
and their easy trashing of President Bush.
The vehicle is a bill that principal sponsors Joe Lieberman and John
Warner are calling "landmark legislation." They're too modest.
Warner-Lieberman would impose the most extensive government reorganization of
the American economy since the 1930s.
Thankfully, the American system makes it hard
for colossal tax and regulatory burdens to foxtrot into law without scrutiny.
So we hope our politicians will take responsibility for the global-warming
policies they say they favor. Or even begin to understand what they say they
favor. For a bill as grandly ambitious as Warner-Lieberman, very few staff,
much less Senators, even know what's in it. The press corps mainly cheerleads
this political fad, without examining how it would work or what it would cost.
So allow us to fill in some of the details.
Almost all economic activity requires energy,
and about 85% of U.S. energy generates carbon dioxide and other greenhouse
gases. For centuries, these emissions were considered the natural byproduct of
combustion. As recently as the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments, they were
consciously not even described as a "pollutant." But now that the
politicians want to decrease those emissions, the government must create a new
commodity - the right to create CO2 - and put a price on it. This is an
unprecedented tax that would profoundly touch every corner of American life.
The policy preferred by the environmental
lobby is called cap and trade. The government would set a limit on emissions
that declines every year. The goal of Warner-Lieberman is to return to 2005
levels by 2012, and to reduce that by 30% by 2030. "Allowances" for emissions would be
distributed to covered businesses - power, oil, gas, heavy industry,
manufacturing, etc. If they produced less than their allotment, the companies
could sell the allowances, or trade them. Cap and trade limits on energy are
thus sometimes misleadingly described as a "free market" policy that
would create the flexibility for CO2 reductions how and where they are least
expensive. But the limits are still a huge tax.
And for the most part, the politicians favor
cap and trade because it is an indirect tax. A direct tax - say, on gasoline -
would be far more transparent, but it would also be unpopular. Cap and trade is
a tax imposed on business, disguising the true costs and thus making it more
politically palatable. In reality, firms will merely pass on these costs to
customers, and ultimately down the energy chain to all Americans. Higher prices
are what are supposed to motivate the investments and behavioral changes
required to use less carbon.
The other reason politicians like cap and
trade is because it gives them a cut of the action and the ability to pick
winners and losers. Some of the allowances would be given away, at least at the
start, while the rest would be auctioned off, with the share of auctions
increasing over time. This is a giant revenue grab. The Congressional Budget
Office estimates that these auctions would net $304 billion by 2013 and $1.19
trillion over the next decade. Since the government controls the number and
distribution of allowances, it is also handing itself the political right to
influence the price of every good and service in the economy.
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates
that this meddling would cause a cumulative reduction in the growth of GDP by
between 0.9% and 3.8% by 2030. Add 20 years, and the reduction is between 2.4%
and 6.9% - that is, from $1 trillion to $2.8 trillion. These estimates assume that electricity
prices will increase by 44% above what they would otherwise be by 2030. They
also assume that existing coal-fired power plants, which currently provide
about 50% of U.S. electric power, will be shut down - to be replaced with at
least 150% growth in new nuclear facilities, plus other
"alternatives." Yet there are only 104 current U.S. nuclear plants,
and the industry itself says it's optimistic to think even 30 more can be built
by 2020.
In fact, it is pointless to project so far
out over multiple decades, since no one knows how markets and consumers would
respond, whether the rules would remain constant, or what new technologies
might come along. While moralizing about America, most of Europe has failed to
meet its mandatory cap and trade goals under the Kyoto Protocol. But the U.S.
isn't Italy; we will enforce our laws. So our guess is that these cost
estimates are invariably far too low.
In a bow to this reality, California Democrat
Barbara Boxer last week introduced 157 pages of amendments to Warner-Lieberman.
Most notably, she sets aside at least $800 billion through 2050 for consumer
tax relief. So while imposing a huge new tax on all Americans, she vouchsafes
to return some of the money to some people. Needless to say, the Senator will
be the judge of who receives her dispensation.
Ms. Boxer's amendment shows that cap and
trade is also a massive wealth redistribution scheme - all mediated by her and
her fellow Platonic rulers. Oh, and she also includes an "emergency
off-ramp," should costs prove too onerous. This is really a political
"off-ramp" to make Warner-Lieberman seem less dangerous, but you can
imagine her reaction if some future Republican President decided to take it.
The upshot is that trillions in assets and millions of jobs would be at the
mercy of Congress and the bureaucracy, all for greenhouse gas reductions that
would have a meaningless impact on global carbon emissions if China and India
don't participate. And only somewhat less meaningless if they do.
Warner-Lieberman has no chance of becoming
law this year with President Bush in the White House. But the goal of this
Senate exercise is political - to get Members on the record early, preferably
before the burdens of cap and trade become more widely understood; to give
Democrats a campaign issue; and to pour the legislative foundation that the
next Administration could cite as it attempts to regulate carbon limits while
waiting for Congress to act.
So by all means let's have this debate amid
$4 gasoline, and not only on C-Span. If Americans are going to cede this much
power to the political class, they at least ought to do it knowing the price
they will pay.
***********************************
12. GLOBAL WARMING POLITICS: A HOT TOPIC BLOG
By
Philip Stott, Friday, 16 May 2008
It is one of those ‘Would You Believe It!’
stories. Leicestershire County Council in England has just had to fork out £1.2
million to protect great crested newts (Triturus cristatus). Unfortunately,
there were no pesky great crested newts at the location in question [‘Newt
Rules “Outrageous”’, Leicester Mercury, May 16; see also: ‘No newts is bad news
as council spends £1m’, The Daily Telegraph, May 15/16]:
“A council leader has written to the
Government to complain about rules protecting newts after a search for the
creatures delayed a bypass and cost taxpayers up to £1.2 million. Building of the Earl Shilton bypass was
disrupted for weeks after evidence of the great-crested newt was found. Leicestershire County Council put fences up
around the site to keep the newts off the area to be built. Traps were put up
on the site to catch them, but a month-long search found no newts were living
on the site.”
A local MP speaks for us all: Andrew Robathan, MP for Blaby, said the saga
was ‘ludicrous’. “There are estimated
to be 66,000 breeding ponds for great-crested newts in the UK. Why are we
bothering with this? I’m very fond of
newts but it is complete rubbish. They are not rare by any stretch of the
imagination. I’m a very keen
conservationist, but that doesn’t mean we should be spending millions of pounds
on a newt - or no newts.”
Pissed
As Newts
What does this tell us about the avalanche of
advice currently tumbling down on us from ‘environmental experts’ and their
ilk? The Daily Telegraph comments:
“The action was taken on the strength of a
report from environmental experts, which found there could have been between
one and 10 of the 6 in amphibians on the site.”
Now, following that advice has cost a
cash-strapped county council over 1 million pounds, at a rate of 1 million
pounds per no newt found. Are we all becoming pissed as newts? What, then, will be cost of ‘global warming’
policies - a trillion pounds per no ‘global warming’ effect or reduction?
‘Environmental experts’ and so-called ‘Green
Gurus’ have become one of the curses of the age. They are frequently mere
jobsworths, spouting ill-digested PC nonsense like pickled newts.
Unfortunately, in the current economic climate, they are also too often a
threat to our economy. Perhaps we should
make them an extinct species [such as Old ‘King Newt’ himself, Ken Livingstone,
ex-Mayor of London] - all those well-meaning souls with soft, middle class
‘studies’ degrees, like ‘Environmental Studies’ and ‘Development Studies’. Yuk!
Oh boy! Macbeth’s three midnight hags would
have a very expensive time of it these days: “Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
wool of bat, and tongue of dog".
“Cost an arm and a leg, love! I’d stick to a crystal ball like those
‘global warmers’!”