Climate Summit Success? Let’s Talk In Five Years

02 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Global Warming, Human Welfare

Tags

AGW, Benny Peisner, Carbon Emissions, Carbon Verification, Climate Alarmism, Climate and Terrorism, Climate Hysteria, Climate Summit, COP 21, global warming, IPCC, Joel Kotkin, Matt Ridley, Regressive Climate Policy

Misplaced priorities are on full display in Paris for the next ten days at the climate conference known as COP-21 (“Conference of the Parties”). Joel Kotkin makes note of the hysteria in evidence among climate activists fostered by political opportunists, economic illiteracy and fraudulent climate research. Of course, climate alarmism offers handsome rewards for politician-cronyists and rent-seeking corporatists. With that seemingly in mind, President Barack Obama is playing the role of opportunist-in-chief, claiming that climate change is the biggest threat to U.S. security while blithely asserting that the climate is responsible for the growing danger from terrorism. Here is Kotkin on such tenuous claims:

“… this reflects the growing tendency among climate change activists to promote their cause with sometimes questionable assertions. Generally level-headed accounts, such as in the Economist and in harder-edge publications like the Daily Telegraph, have demonstrated that many claims of climate change activists have already been disproven or are somewhat exaggerated.“

“Somewhat exaggerated” is an understatement, given the scandals that have erupted in the climate research community, the miserable predictive record of carbon forcing models, and the questionable practices employed by NASA and NOAA researchers in adjusting surface temperature data (see below for links). When it comes to climate activism, the Orwellian aspect of Groupthink is palpable:

“Rather than address possible shortcomings in their models, climate change activists increasingly tend to discredit critics as dishonest and tools of the oil companies. There is even a move to subject skeptics to criminal prosecution for deceiving the public.“

This is thoroughly contrary to the spirit of scientific inquiry, to say nothing of free speech. As if to parody their questionable approach to an issue of science, climate-change devotees have come out in full force to attack the excellent Matt Ridley, a sure sign that they find his message threatening to the power of their mantra. Ridley and Benny Peiser have an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this week entitled “Your Complete Guide to the Climate Debate” (should be ungated for now). The authors discuss the weakness of the scientific case for anthropomorphic global warming (AGW); the fact that they use findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to make this critique must be particularly galling to the alarmists. Ridley and Peisner cover the correspondingly flimsy case for draconian environmental policies to deal with the perceived threat of AGW. Also, they emphasize the regressive nature of the demands made by the environmental left, who are either ignorant or unfazed by the following truths:

“… there are a billion people with no grid electricity whose lives could be radically improved—and whose ability to cope with the effects of weather and climate change could be greatly enhanced—with the access to the concentrated power of coal, gas or oil that the rich world enjoys. Aid for such projects has already been constrained by Western institutions in the interest of not putting the climate at risk. So climate policy is hurting the poor.“

Finally, Ridley and Peisner explain the economic incentives that are likely to undermine any meaningful international agreement in Paris. Less developed countries have been asked to reduce their carbon emissions, which they can ill afford, and to agree to a verification framework. Those parties might agree if they view the framework as sufficiently easy to game (and it will be), and if they are compensated handsomely by the developed world. The latter will represent an insurmountable political challenge for the U.S. and other developed countries, who are already attempting to promulgate costly new restrictions on carbon emissions.

“Concerned about the loss of industrial competitiveness, the Obama administration is demanding an international transparency-and-review mechanism that can verify whether voluntary pledges are met by all countries. Developing countries, however, oppose any outside body reviewing their energy and industrial activities and carbon-dioxide emissions on the grounds that such efforts would violate their sovereignty.

… China, India and the ‘Like-Minded Developing Countries’ group are countering Western pressure by demanding a legally binding compensation package of $100 billion a year of dedicated climate funds, as promised by President Obama at the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009.

However, developing nations are only too aware that the $100 billion per annum funding pledge is never going to materialize, not least because the U.S. Congress would never agree to such an astronomical wealth transfer. This failure to deliver is inevitable, but it will give developing nations the perfect excuse not to comply with their own national pledges.“

These conflicting positions may mean that the strongest point of accord at the Paris conference will be to meet again down the road.

“Expect an agreement that is sufficiently vague and noncommittal for all countries to sign and claim victory. Such an agreement will also have to camouflage deep and unbridgeable divisions while ensuring that all countries are liberated from legally binding targets a la Kyoto.“

This morning, an apparently sleepy and deluded President Obama spoke at the Paris conference before heading back to the U.S. He insisted again that the agreement he expects to come out of Paris will be a “powerful rebuke” to terrorists. Yeah, that’ll show ’em! Even a feeble agreement will be trumpeted as a great victory by the conference parties; Obama and the Left will attempt to wield it as a political cudgel, a brave accomplishment if it succeeds in any way, and a vehicle for blame if it is blocked by the principled opponents of climate alarmism. The media will play along without considering scientific evidence running contrary to the hysterical global warming narrative. Meanwhile, the frailty of the agreement will represent something of a win for humanity.

Here are some links to previous posts on this topic from Sacred Cow Chips:

Climate Negotiators To Discuss Economic Cannibalism

A Cooked Up Climate Consensus

Fitting Data To Models At NOAA

Carbon Farce Meets Negative Forcings

Subsidized Waste: The Renewable Irony

Manipulating Temperatures, People & Policy

Record Hot Baloney

Alluring Apocalypse Keeps Failing To Materialize

The Stench of Green Desperation

Cut CO2, But What About the Environment?

Live Long and Prosper With Fossil Fuels

Divesting of Human Well-Being

Climate Negotiators To Discuss Economic Cannibalism

18 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Global Warming

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

AGW, Anthropomorphic Global Warming, Bjorn Lomborg, Carbon Emissions, Climate Change, COP 21, Don Boudreaux, economic growth, Foundation For a Positive Planet, Global Carbon Budget, Industrial Pollution, IPCC, Kuznets Curve, Manhattan Institute, Natural Pollution, Oren Cass

There is virtually zero chance that the coming round of international talks on climate change will produce a substantive agreement. The United Nations’ 21st Conference of the Parties (COP 21) on Climate Change is scheduled will be held in Paris, France from November 30 to December 11. The failure of earlier conferences to produce a meaningful pact informs us of the low odds of success: this conference, like the others, will be unproductive in any real sense. As in the past, there are severely conflicting objectives among the parties. Oren Cass explains the reasons in a recent report from the Manhattan Institute, “Leading Nowhere: The Futility and Farce of Global Climate Negotiations“:

“… there is no plausible path to an agreement premised on collective action or compensation: developing nations that must bear the brunt of emissions reductions in any successful scenario cannot achieve those reductions while pursuing rapid economic growth; developed nations cannot sufficiently compensate developing ones for forgoing such growth. Evidence from recent negotiations, as well as preparations for the next round of talks, reinforces this conclusion. … [A] third path to an agreement—coercion—has received little attention. No group of nations appears prepared to employ the approach and risk subsequent conflict.“

Even the President of the Foundation For a Positive Planet asks, “What Purpose Does COP 21 Still Serve?”

It’s worth emphasizing that the the developing world will account for 79% of the world’s cumulative carbon emissions by 2100 under a moderate growth scenario developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Cass points out that even if the world’s developed countries ceased all carbon emissions immediately, developing countries would face an impossible task in cutting emissions sufficiently to stay within the IPCC’s estimated “safe carbon budget” for the globe. The best that can be said is that the IPCC might be trying to set the bar high for negotiators, although that would make claims of success at COP 21 difficult. Perhaps that’s fine for activists, because they’ll have an ongoing “crisis” to meet their insatiable need for doomsaying.

Relatively impoverished developing countries will not wish to sacrifice their own economic growth at the altar of climate worship without compensation. In fact, redistribution might be a better description than compensation, which just might be the real point of the conference for many developing countries. Promises of carbon reductions are not guarantees in any case. Future compensation to the developing world, if any, should be contingent on actual results. But no matter the outcome of the negotiations, the importance of cheap words will be exaggerated.

The magnitude of any negotiated reductions in carbon emissions will be inadequate to put much of a dent in actual, climate outcomes, but they will be costly. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bjorn Lomborg describes estimates of lost global output due to proposed carbon cutbacks of $1 – $2 trillion each year by 2030 and beyond. That’s roughly 1% – 2% of projected real GDP. of course, there is considerable uncertainty around those estimates and even more around the magnitude of the possible climate effects. Lomborg estimates a best-case outcome amounting to a reduction in global temperatures of a fraction of a degree Fahrenheit. That difference could easily be swamped by natural climate effects. Worth it?

Indeed, imposed limits on economic growth will compound the difficulty of improving carbon efficiency and would consign third-world populations to an impoverished existence in both economic and environmental terms.

President Obama has promised significant carbon reduction in the U.S. However, the COP 21 negotiations do not fall under the “fast-track” authority that Obama was granted by Congress last May over trade agreements. Instead, the hoped-for climate agreement has been characterized as an update to a 1992 treaty to avoid a Congressional ratification process. In addition, Obama has already issued executive orders to push forward the climate measures he has promised to other parties to COP 21. So much for the separation of powers. However, a number of states are not taking it lying down. In fact, 24 states and others have filed suit against the new regulations, asking the D.C. Circuit Court to stay the regulatory plan while the case moves through the courts.

Anthropomorphic global warming (AGW) has been a preoccupation of the alarmist left since the late 20th century, when surface temperatures trended upward for a few decades. Climate change (10 posts at this link), on the other hand, is and always has been a fact of life, but the satellite temperature record has been trendless since the mid 1990s, while the alarmist climate models have predicted significant warming. Beyond the predictions themselves, there is little to suggest that some warming would constitute a disaster for mankind, and perhaps it would be a boon.

Nevertheless, even if we stipulate that carbon emissions must be reduced, there is an innocuous alternative to government regulatory intrusions and taxes for achieving that end: the enhanced carbon efficiency and technological innovation that economic growth makes possible. One of my favorite bloggers, economist Don Boudreaux, explains the logic of this alternative in this excellent post: “Economic Growth and Pollution Abatement“. He takes a “broad view” of pollution, not simply carbon or other industrial pollutants, because there are many forms of “natural” pollution that inflict greater misery than carbon ever will. With that in mind, Boudreaux appeals to the following relationships between pollution and income (or production):

Here is his description of the chart:

“The red curve in the nearby graph is the standard environmental Kuznets curve. This red curve shows the relationship between per-capita income and industrial pollutants. The blue curve shows the relationship between per-capita income and what we might, as a short-hand, call “naturally occurring pollutants” (that is, filth such as bacteria, mud on indoor floors, and rodent and bird droppings from the ceiling of one’s home).“

The red curve implies that a cleaner environment is a “luxury good”. I would also point out that the ascent of the red line at relatively low income levels will be muted by the substitution of cleaner fuels for primitive forms such as dung- and wood-burning, often burned indoors. This is consistent with Boudreaux’s point, though in a way that is not directly addressed by his explanation of the chart:

“… my hypothesis – which I believe is borne out by the historical record – is that people almost immediately start to consume greater cleanliness as they become wealthier.“

The combination of the two lines in the chart shows that economic growth is not unambiguously “bad” for the environment. It has certainly proven to be a good thing in terms of human health and welfare. As a consequence, developing countries should not be so foolish as to sacrifice economic growth for immediate carbon reductions. On the other hand, they may well make “promises” in exchange for massive compensation.

Neither should the world be singularly focused on immediate carbon reductions, because economic growth will be accompanied by improvements in carbon efficiency and the development of technologies far superior to today’s wasteful renewables. The activists attending COP 21 hope to improve the world, but they would saddle humanity with unnecessary burdens. I pity the denizens of countries whose leaders force costly authoritarian energy policies upon them in an effort to set, or comply with, a radical agenda. Oh, wait, that might be us! But I am optimistic that any agreement reached in Paris, if there is any, won’t hold or won’t matter.

Francis Pontiff-icates In His Fallible Zone

24 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Capitalism, Global Warming, Poverty, Socialism

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Anti-Capitalism, Bono and Capitalism, Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux, economic growth, Karl Marx, Matters of Faith, Opiate of the Masses, Papal infallibility, Pope Francis, Raul Castro, Reason.com, Stephanie Slade, World Poverty

Pope Francis dispenses guidance in matters of faith from his heart. In matters of economics and science, his guidance doesn’t come from a well-informed mind. I’ve devoted two posts to Francis’ political follies this year: “Green Hubris: The Flub of Rome“, and “Francis’ Statist Vision Not Shared By Venezuelan Clergy“. While foreswearing ideology in the pulpit, he nevertheless promotes leftist economic ideology and denigrates capitalism, the single-best form of social organization for lifting mankind from privation. He ignores mountains of evidence demonstrating that his hopes for humanity are best served by free markets and liberty. Francis further confuses the issue of church teachings versus personal ideology by claiming that his views are longstanding views of the Church.

A dark theory of the Pope’s anti-capitalist rhetoric occurred to me. It has to do with an ecclesiastical variant on statism: just as statist elites like President Obama seem to prefer widespread dependence on the state, so too does the Pope wish for widespread dependence on the Church for spiritual nourishment. Karl Marx is often quoted as having said “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” However, the full quote is the following:

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.“

Perhaps the Pope understands this all too well. An impoverished world may well be a more pious world, and his condemnation of capitalism might help to lead us there. Is such an ulterior motive too Machiavellian to describe the kind-hearted pontiff? Probably. Perhaps the Devil made me think of it!

Like most on the Left, the Pope does the world’s poor no favor by way of blindly accepting the global warmist agenda, which is based on a hypothesis “proven” only in the sense that a certain class of climate models predict a directional outcome. Those models have accumulated a long track record of bad forecasts. Not only that: the surface temperature records reported by U.S. Government agencies and the media as “evidence” of global warming are not supported by satellite records, and trends have been heavily manipulated via downward adjustments to past temperatures. But even if we stipulate that the carbon-forcing models and the surface temperature records are correct, there are major questions regarding the severity of the outcome and whether it poses a two-sided risk to human welfare. Mediation of this hypothetical risk is extremely costly, requiring diversion of vast quantities of resources, and that takes a real human toll. This is why the policy prescriptions of the warmist community lack internal consistency. For example, they wish to restrict power production from fossil fuels in the developing world, forcing populations to deforest and rely on unhealthy wood burning — indoors! — to meet basic needs like heating and cooking.

Here is the full text of a letter from Don Boudreaux to the Washington Post:

“On the opening page of your website today you ask readers to register their agreement or disagreement with this statement of Pope Francis: ‘This is our sin: Exploiting the Earth and not allowing her to give us what she has within her.’

This claim is laughable. History testifies unmistakably that the earth is extremely stingy in volunteering to humans ‘what she has within her.’ Indeed, what the earth has within her are mere raw materials, by themselves useless unless and until human creativity discovers not only how to transform them into actual resources and outputs that improve human well-being (Ever try fueling your jet with crude oil?) but also how to ‘exploit’ the earth so that she releases her materials to us at a reasonable cost.

The Pope is vocal about helping the world’s poor. I believe that he’s sincere. So I sincerely hope that he comes to realize that the greatest sin of all against humanity would be the suppression of those capitalist institutions that have proven to be the only practical means of transforming what the earth has within her into a bounty of goods and services that allows the masses, for the first time in history, to live lives of material abundance and dignity upon her.“

A few of the comments that follow Boudreaux’s post on Cafe Hayek are good, too.

Stephanie Slade has an excellent piece in Reason entitled “If Pope Francis Wants to Help the Poor, He Should Embrace Capitalism“. Here are some samples addressing the power of markets and capitalism to improve human welfare and eradicate poverty:

“Pope Francis thinks free marketeers have been deluded by a ‘myth of unlimited material progress.’ If we have, it’s because we’ve seen for ourselves the wonders that economic development and technological advancement can bring—from modern medicine stopping diseases that were the scourge of civilizations for centuries, to buildings more able to withstand natural disasters than at any time before, to ever-widening access to the air conditioning he wishes us to use less of.“

“‘Entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.’ With those 10 words, spoken to an audience at Georgetown University in 2013, philanthropist rock star Bono demonstrated a keener understanding of economic reality than the leader of global Catholicism.

The U2 frontman clearly has it right—and Pope Francis is wrong to suggest that poverty is growing, or that capitalism, free markets, and globalization are fueling the (non-existent) problem. In just two decades, extreme poverty has been reduced by more than 50 percent. ‘In 1990, almost half of the population in developing regions lived on less than $1.25 a day,’ reads a 2014 report from the United Nations. ‘This rate dropped to 22 per cent by 2010, reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty by 700 million.’

How was this secular miracle achieved? The bulk of the answer is through economic development, as nascent markets began to take hold in large swaths of the world that were until recently desperately poor. A 2013 editorial from The Economist noted that… ‘Most of the credit… must go to capitalism and free trade, for they enable economies to grow—and it was growth, principally, that has eased destitution.’“

As Slade explains, far from a scourge on the environment, capitalism is and has been a great blessing:

“Both the economics and the history are clear: The more prosperous the developing world becomes, the more it too will be able to demand and achieve livable conditions. If your goal is to move the world to concern for the preservation of biodiversity, the answer is economic growth. If you want to increase access to clean water, the solution is to increase global wealth, and the consumer power that comes with it. Studies have shown that deforestation reverses when a country’s annual GDP reaches about $3,000 per capita. While some environmental indicators do get worse during the early stages of industrialization, the widely accepted Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis convincingly argues that they quickly reverse themselves when national income grows beyond a certain threshold. If the pope wants a cleaner world, the best way to get there is by creating a richer world—something Pope Francis’ own policy recommendations will make more difficult.“

A theme in Slade’s essay is that Francis is simply confused. On one level, he seems to know that technological advance is of great benefit to mankind, yet he is extremely wary of economic growth and believes that less production and consumption is better. That would make the job of alleviating conditions for the world’s poor much more challenging, if not impossible! He acknowledges that the environment has improved drastically in some parts of the world, but he seems unaware that the same areas are the most economically developed, and have the most well-developed markets. Like most on the Left, he also seems confused about the real meaning of capitalism. And the Pope “often blurs the line between public and private action.”

Slade concludes with some messages for Catholics. First, the Pope’s opinions on matters of faith are said to be infallible, according to Catholic doctrine. But opinions on topics like capitalism and the environment are outside his sphere of infallibility. Second, Slade is rightly offended by the Pope’s attitude that libertarianism and a belief in the efficacy of free markets is not compatible with Christianity.

Thus far during the Pope’s visit to Cuba and the U.S., he has thrilled the murderous Castro brothers and spoken out in favor of Obama’s climate agenda. Raul Castro is so happy about the Pope’s opinions on capitalism “that he might ‘start praying again’ and rejoin the church“. I truly hope that members of the Catholic flock, or any others, don’t take the Pope’s political exhortations too seriously.

Carbon Farce Meets Negative Forcings

22 Saturday Aug 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Global Warming, Technology

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Carbon Capture, Carbon Forcing Models, Carbon Nanotubes, Climate Change, crony capitalism, Fossil fuels, Green Cronies, MIT Technology Review, Nanotechnology, Negative Forcing, Peter Yeadon, Shape Shifting, Variable Transparency

A new technology is being refined that could reverse years of carbon forcings, given sufficiently wide application, and do so at a profit. That profit should not require the kind of costly subsidies that are now routinely paid to green crony capitalists. Instead, the profit should derive from real market demand for a valuable material. The MIT Technology Review covers the technology under “… How To Suck Carbon From The Air, Make Stuff From It“. It makes possible a form of carbon capture that produces carbon nanotubes, a promising material already in use but having much wider potential. From the second link above:

“Carbon nanotubes are a great example of how useful materials are being developed. This material is said to be one hundred times stronger than steel because of its ‘molecular perfection’ as explained in the paper ‘Year 2050: Cities in the Age of Nanotechnology’ by Peter Yeadon. In addition, because carbon atoms can bond with other matter; such material can be an ‘insulator, semi-conductor or conductor of electricity’”.

Carbon nanotubes have remarkable properties that will revolutionize fabrics and allow buildings to have incredible strength, “transient features” such as variable transparency, and shape shifting. The new technology is said to be more efficient than existing methods of producing carbon nanotubes, and probably much cheaper.

The first link above quotes the developers on the technology’s massive potential for carbon capture:

“They calculate that given an area less than 10 percent of the size of the Sahara Desert, the method could remove enough carbon dioxide to make global atmospheric levels return to preindustrial levels within 10 years, even if we keep emitting the greenhouse gas at a high rate during that period.“

That area is twice the size of California, but a much more modest deployment would certainly reduce the political pressure to decrease carbon emissions. The extent would depend upon the demand for nanotubes, which is expected to grow dramatically in the presence of declining costs. Perhaps we’ll want more carbon emissions if nanotube materials come into widespread use. That would be a welcome development in the developing world, where fossil fuels hold the potential to lift millions out of poverty, as they have for advanced countries in the past. However, such a change would require elites to acknowledge and yield to the supremacy of markets over politics.

A technology capable of such significant carbon capture obviously constitutes a negative carbon “forcer”. Therefore, another implication is that climate models with a heavy emphasis on carbon forcings may be rendered moot. Those models have persistently generated over-predictions of global temperatures, so a deemphasis is already long overdue.

Another hat tip to my buddy John Crawford, who recently has fed me some great information. John should accept my invitation to guest-blog on SCC sometime soon, or start his own blog!

Manipulating Temperatures, People & Policy

21 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Global Warming, Tyranny

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Bob Tisdale, Climate fraud, crony capitalism, global warming, Matt Ridley, NASA, NOAA, Robert Brown, Ronald Bailey, Satellite Temperatures, Surface Temperatures, Temperature adjustments, UK Met Office, Werner Brozek

The heavily-manipulated global surface temperatures quoted by NOAA and NASA point to another “hottest month on record” in July, but the satellite temperature measurements do not agree. Nor do several other widely-followed global temperature series maintained elsewhere, such as the UK Meteorological Office (UK Met Office). I wrote about the manipulation of surface temperatures by NOAA and NASA in January in “Record Hot Baloney“, and in “Fitting Data To Models At NOAA” in June:

“If the facts don’t suit your agenda, change them! The 18-year “hiatus” in global warming, which has made a shambles of climate model predictions, is now said to have been based on “incorrect data”, according to researchers at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Translation: they have created new data “adjustments” that tell a story more consistent with their preferred narrative, namely, that man-made carbon emissions are forcing global temperatures upward, more or less steadily.“

The last link provides detail on the nature of the manipulations. Perhaps surprisingly, rather large downward adjustments have been made to historical temperature data, reinforcing any upward trend in the late 20th century and hiding the current 18-year pause in that trend. Suffice it to say that the “adjustments” made by these agencies are at fairly detailed levels; some of the before-and-after comparisons shown by gifs at this link are rather astonishing. Some climate researchers have started to refer to the temperature series as “reconstructions” instead of “data”, out of respect for the legitimacy of actual data.

In the meantime, the “warmist” propaganda keeps flowing from NOAA and NASA, and it is hungrily swallowed and then regurgitated by media alarmists. The media love a good scare story. They are so complicit in reinforcing the warmist narrative they will ignore the revelation of a faulty temperature sensor at National Airport in Washington, D.C. (another hat tip to John Crawford). It has been recording temperatures averaging 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit too warm for the past 19 months. Now that the sensor has been changed, NOAA states that it will not make any adjustments to the past 19 months of recorded temperatures from the National weather station, despite the fact that they have routinely made many other changes, often without any real explanation.

Here is a recent opinion from Duke University Professor Robert Brown on the divergence of satellite and NASA/NOAA surface temperatures and the adjustments to the latter:

“The two data sets should not be diverging, period, unless everything we understand about atmospheric thermal dynamics is wrong. That is, I will add my “opinion” to Werner’s and point out that it is based on simple atmospheric physics taught in any relevant textbook. …

This does not mean that they cannot and are not systematically differing; it just means that the growing difference is strong evidence of bias in the computation of the surface record.“

Every new report issued by NOAA/NASA on record warm temperatures should be severely discounted. They are toiling in the service of a policy agenda; it will cost you dearly, and it will severely punish the less fortunate here and especially in less developed parts of the world; and it will reward the statist elite, bureaucrats and Green crony capitalists. Ronald Bailey in Reason recently weighed in on the consequences of this “apocalyptic anti-progress ideology“. Or read the wise words of Matt Ridley on “The recurrent problem of green scares that don’t live up to the hype“. Hey greens, relax! And don’t waste our resources and our well being on precautions against exaggerated risks.

A Cooked-Up Climate Consensus

14 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Global Warming

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

97% Consensus, AGW, Anthropomorphic Global Warming, Climate Change, Climate change consensus, Climate fraud, Ian Plimer, John Cook, Matt Ridley, Peer Review Process, Richard Tol, Scientism, University of Queensland

Consensus: the world is flat; the science is settled. Consensus: the earth is at the center of the universe; the science is settled. Consensus: bloodletting can cure diseases; the science is settled. Did these ideas truly represent scientific consensus? They probably thought so at the time, but it’s more likely that they derived from long- and widely-held assumptions that had never been tested adequately via scientific methods. It might have been difficult, if not impossible, to test those propositions using the methods available at the time. There are certainly other examples of “settled science” that were later revised, such as certain aspects of Newtonian physics.

The so-called “consensus” on climate change is similar to the first few “scientistic” assertions above, except that it’s a much less honest mistake. The most prominent claim about it is that 97% of climate scientists agree that humans have contributed to global warming. That is incorrect in several ways. Its genesis is a 2013 paper by John Cook of the University of Queensland. Richard Tol of the University of Sussex examines the facts surrounding the Cook paper in “Global warming consensus claim does not stand up“. The claim itself is a misrepresentation of Cook’s findings, according to Tol:

“The 97% refers to the number of papers, rather than the number of scientists. The alleged consensus is about any human role in climate change, rather than a dominant role….“

It is well known that the peer review process in the climate research community was fundamentally corrupt during the period covered by Cook’s examination of the literature. Papers submitted to academic journals by climate “dissenters” were often shut out, which would have biased Cook’s findings even if his review had been conducted honestly. Tol goes on to note the distortions introduced by Cook’s research, including a non-representative sample of papers:

“The sample was padded with irrelevant papers. An article about TV coverage on global warming was taken as evidence for global warming. In fact, about three-quarters of the papers counted as endorsements had nothing to say about the subject matter.“

It gets even worse:

“Cook enlisted a small group of environmental activists to rate the claims made by the selected papers. Cook claims that the ratings were done independently, but the raters freely discussed their work. There are systematic differences between the raters. Reading the same abstracts, the raters reached remarkably different conclusions – and some raters all too often erred in the same direction. Cook’s hand-picked raters disagreed what a paper was about 33% of the time. In 63% of cases, they disagreed about the message of a paper with the authors of that paper.“

On top of all that, Cook was uncooperative when asked to make his data available to other researchers. Apparently a hacker obtained the data, which revealed a highly questionable data collection process (and that Cook had lied regarding the existence of time stamps on the surveys):

“After collecting data for 8 weeks, there were 4 weeks of data analysis, followed by 3 more weeks of data collection. The same people collected and analysed the data. After more analysis, the paper classification scheme was changed and yet more data collected.“

In short, the Cook research upon which the 97% claim is based is trash. There are a number of points upon which climate researchers can largely agree in principle, including the fact that greenhouse gases would warm the planet, but only if ceteris paribus is invoked. There are many feedback effects and confounding influences that change the relationship, and the actual time span of data that can be brought to bear on the issue is strikingly short to justify bold conclusions. Unfortunately, the research environment is so politicized that even the data itself is subject to manipulation. Astonishingly, many assertions about the actual climate are, in fact, based on model output, not actual data!

There is strong disagreement at the highest levels of the scientific community regarding the balance of the evidence on climate change and whether it justifies radical policy change. Matt Ridley examines this issue in “The Climate Wars’ Damage To Science“:

“Today’s climate science, as Ian Plimer points out in his chapter in The Facts, is based on a ‘pre-ordained conclusion, huge bodies of evidence are ignored and analytical procedures are treated as evidence’. Funds are not available to investigate alternative theories. Those who express even the mildest doubts about dangerous climate change are ostracised, accused of being in the pay of fossil-fuel interests or starved of funds; those who take money from green pressure groups and make wildly exaggerated statements are showered with rewards and treated by the media as neutral.“

Ridley goes on to recount the litany of scandals that have erupted within the climate establishment over the past few years. It is well worth reading, but ultimately these developments can’t help but damage science, its reputation with the public, and its usefulness to mankind.

Green Hubris: The Flub of Rome

21 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Global Warming

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Brendan O'Neil, Club of Rome, Fr. Robert Sirico, Free Markets, Green Theology, IPCC, John Hinderaker, Limits to Growth, Matt Ridley, Papal encyclical, Patrick J. Michaels, Politics of Science, Prometheus, Thomas Malthus, Tim Ball

The Papal Encyclical published last week has generated controversy for venturing into areas about which Pope Francis, and for that matter the Catholic Church, has absolutely no authority or expertise. Pope Francis has noble aims. His compassion for the poor is admirable and even poignant. Nevertheless, the Pope errs in his assessment of scientific, technological and economic issues, and he fails to reference or consider mountains of evidence that contradict the views that dominate this encyclical. It should come as no surprise that he has been swept along by the Leftist orthodoxy, of which he has long been a part.

On one hand, Pope Francis expresses a viewpoint that is almost universally shared: that we are stewards of the natural world and have a moral obligation to treat it well for the benefit of others now and in the future. However, he also believes in the unproven proposition of anthropomorphic global warming (AGW), that human activities are causing global temperatures to rise inexorably. He takes the questionable view that ongoing technological advances will benefit only the rich, leaving the poor behind in increasingly desperate circumstances. And he recklessly questions the morality of free markets and capitalism, asserting that they benefit only the rich and work against the interests of the broader masses.

One of the most interesting pieces of commentary on the Encyclical appeared in The Wall Street Journal, entitled “The Pope’s Green Theology“, written by Fr. Robert Sirico, a Catholic priest. (If the link doesn’t work, Google “wsj Sirico Green Theology”.)

“… capitalism has spurred the greatest reduction in global poverty in world history: The number of people living on $1.25 a day fell to 375 million in 2013 from 811 million in 1991, according to the International Labor Office. This is only one statistic among reams of evidence that vindicate capitalism. An honest debate among experts will lay this canard to rest.

The encyclical unwisely concedes too much to the secular environmental agenda, for example, by denigrating fossil fuels. But it also voices moral statements dismissing popular, ill-conceived positions. The repeated lie that overpopulation is harming the planet—expressed by even some of the advisers for the Vatican—is soundly rejected.“

Much of the evidence on global temperatures contradicts the Pope’s position, yet he sides with the groupthink of the environmental Left based on model predictions that have been consistently wrong over several decades. The models have drastically over-predicted global temperature trends, even before the “pause” in warming that began in the late 1990s.

It is rather early in the game for the Catholic Church to take such an unequivocal position on an issue as far afield from matters of religious faith as climate science. As Dr. Tim Ball notes, the Catholic Church has not always bet well on science, going back to its denunciation of Galileo almost 400 years ago. Apparently, any lessons learned from that episode about the process of scientific inquiry have been forgotten. Matt Ridley has a great (if lengthy) essay on the politics of science and the damage that politicized climate science has done to the cause of real understanding:

“Expertise, authority and leadership should count for nothing in science. The great Thomas Henry Huxley put it this way: ‘The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.’ Richard Feynman was even pithier: ‘Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.’”

Climate science is really in its infancy. Recorded history of the climate is in its infancy as well. The scant evidence of global warming during the 20th century is well within the range of natural variation estimated for the past 8,000 years, according to a study by a former lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC). For the Pope, or anyone else, to make strong claims about “the science”, or to prescribe draconian limits on individual liberty in an effort to plan “the climate”, is hubris of the first order. That’s ironic given the Pope’s condemnation of what he characterizes as mankind’s Promethean hubris, as if making the world more livable was sinful. The Encyclical condemns technological progress, going so far as to denigrate the use of air conditioning. That attitude is driven by objections to energy use; nevertheless, the Pope reveals a deep mistrust of technology and betrays the soul of a Luddite.

Patrick J. Michaels of CATO’s Center for the Study of Science wrote about the Pope’s climate views and the morality of “dense energy” in April:

“Abundant and dependable energy frees mankind from a menial existence, allowing us to use our given talents for the greater good. The mental capital of the poor in the underdeveloped world is untapped without dense energy. The burning of dung for cooking is a major cause of early death from pulmonary disease. The massive deforestation that must occur without dense energy amplifies floods from ubiquitous tropical downpours.“

Here is a link to some very sarcastic commentary from Brendan O’Neil at Reason on the Pope’s “Dotty Green Theology“. O’Neil mentions the tyrannical fantasies dancing in the minds of some on the environmental Left:

“Christianity’s end-of-worldism is getting a new airing in the apocalypse obsession of greens, who warn of an eco-unfriendly End of Days. Its promise of Godly judgement for our wicked ways has been replaced by greens’ promise that we’ll one day be judged for our planetary destructiveness. A leading British green has fantasised about ‘international criminal tribunals’ for climate-change deniers, who will be ‘partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths.'”

Let’s hope the Pope isn’t on board with that, though he did propose that a worldwide governing body take charge of environmental issues. Please, no favors! John Hinderaker, in the context of the Encyclical, discusses the regressive impact of policies that raise energy prices. That’s consistent with the Pope’s green objectives. Hinderaker cites figures showing that those earning less than $30,000 per year in the U.S. spend 23% of their after-tax income on energy, compared to just 7% for those earning $50,000 or more.

It is extremely late in the game for the Pope to inveigh against capitalism, with all evidence pointing to the long-term success of free markets in lifting the poor from the depths of privation. In fact, the Encyclical is strongly reminiscent of the Malthusian “Limits to Growth” published by the Club of Rome. That “study” contained what has proven to be among the worst collections of prognostications of all time, and the Club persists in purveying doom and gloom to this day.

I have written before on Sacred Cow Chips about Pope Francis’ statist, anti-market inclinations. From that post:

“… it is not just the secular Left that fails to recognize the inherent conflict between big government and religious liberty. Pope Francis himself seems oblivious to the dangerous implications of big government for religious freedom. His apostolic exhortation for greater reliance on the state to care for the poor simultaneously embraces socialism and condemns capitalism. I take no issue in principle with the provision of a social safety net, but the Pope should be more results-oriented in assessing different forms of social organization and their impacts on poverty. Big government typically fails to achieve the kinds of humane objectives usually espoused by the Left. The sad ‘road to serfdom’ has played out too many times in the past.“

Fitting Data To Models At NOAA

08 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Global Warming

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

AGW, Anthony WAtts, Anthropomorphic Global Warming, buoy vs ship temperatures, Carl Beisner, Global Mean Temperature, Global Warming Hiatus, Judith Curry, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, Ross McKitrick, Temperature adjustments, Watt's Up With That?

If the facts don’t suit your agenda, change them! The 18-year “hiatus” in global warming, which has made a shambles of climate model predictions, is now said to have been based on “incorrect data”, according to researchers at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Translation: they have created new data “adjustments” that tell a story more consistent with their preferred narrative, namely, that man-made carbon emissions are forcing global temperatures upward, more or less steadily. The New York Times’ report on the research took a fairly uncritical tone, despite immediate cautions and rebuttals from a number of authorities. On balance, the NOAA claims seem rather laughable.

Ross McKitrick has an excellent discussion of the NOAA adjustments on the Watts Up With That? blog (WUWT). His post reinforces the difficulty of aggregating temperature data in a meaningful way. A given thermometer in a fixed location can yield drifting temperatures over time due to changes in the surrounding environment, such as urbanization. In addition, weather stations are dispersed in irregular ways with extremely uneven coverage, and even worse, they have come and gone over time. There are gaps in the data that must be filled. There might be international differences in reporting practices as well. Sea surface temperature measurement is subject to even greater uncertainty. They can be broadly classified into temperatures collected on buoys and those collected by ships, and the latter have been taken in a variety of ways, from samples collected in various kinds of buckets, hull sensors, engine room intakes, and deck temperatures. The satellite readings, which are a recent development, are accurate in tracking changes, but the levels must be calibrated to other data. Here’s McKitrick on the measurements taken on ships:

“… in about half the cases people did not record which method was used to take the sample (Hirahari et al. 2014). In some cases they noted that, for example, ERI readings were obtained but they not indicate the depth. Or they might not record the height of the ship when the MAT reading is taken.“

The upshot is that calculating a global mean temperature is a statistical exercise fraught with uncertainty. A calculated mean at any point in time is an estimate of a conceptual value. The estimate is one of many possible estimates around the “true” value. Given the measurement difficulties, any meaningful confidence interval for the true mean would likely be so broad as to render inconsequential the much-discussed temperature trends of the past 50 years.

McKitrick emphasizes the three major changes made by NOAA, all having to do with sea surface temperatures:

NOAA has decided to apply an upward adjustment to bring buoy temperature records into line with ship temperatures. This is curious, because most researchers have concluded that the ship temperatures are subject to greater bias. Also, the frequency of buoy records has been rising as a share of total sea temperature readings.
NOAA added extra weight to the buoy readings, a decision which was unexplained.
They applied a relatively large downward adjustment to temperatures collected by ships during 1998-2000.

Even the difference between the temperatures measured by ships and buoys (0.12 degrees Celsius), taken at face value, has a confidence interval (95%?) that is about 29 times as large as the difference. That adjustments such as those above are made with a straight face is nothing short of preposterous.

A number of other researchers have weighed in on the NOAA adjustments. Carl Beisner summarizes some of this work. He quotes McKitrick as well as Judith Curry:

“I think that uncertainties in global surface temperature anomalies is [sic] substantially understated. The surface temperature data sets that I have confidence in are the UK group and also Berkeley Earth. This short paper in Science is not adequate to explain and explore the very large changes that have been made to the NOAA data set. The global surface temperature datasets are clearly a moving target.“

There are a number of other posts this week on WUWT regarding the NOAA adjustments. Some of the experts, like Judith Curry, emphasize the new disparities created by NOAA’s adjustments with other well-regarded temperature series. It will be interesting to see how these differences are debated. Let’s hope that the discussion is driven wholly by science and not politics, but I fear that the latter will have a major impact on the debate. It has already.

The Stench of Green Desperation

23 Saturday May 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Global Warming

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

AGW, Antarctic ice extent, Carbon Emissions, Christopher Monckton, Coast Guard Academy, Forbes, Global warming middle east, ISIS, NASA satellite data, Obama Commencement Speech, Palmyra, Polar bear population, Sea Ice Extent, Watt's Up With That?

“Devastating release of carbon emissions has ancient Syrian city of Palmyra now under ISIS control“.

Tongue in cheek, of course, from Twitchy. But maybe not so much: in his commencement address to graduates of the Coast Guard Academy this week, President Obama took the laughable positions that global warming was a) contributing to unrest in the middle east; and b) is an immediate threat to U.S. national security. He bases this immediacy on climate models that have been not just wrong, but extremely wrong, as well as a series of related distortions. These are rebutted one-by-one in “Does the ‘leader’ of the free world really know so little about climate?” by Christopher Monckton.

Global warming activists are so fond of their scare stories that they just can’t stop, despite a long track record of predictive lousiness. But their sins extend beyond bad predictions to bad data itself. One scare story has the world’s sea-ice extent shrinking drastically, especially in the Arctic. Now, NASA has come clean on this point: updated data from the agency shows that sea ice has not contracted over the past 35 years, it has actually increased somewhat. The data is charted here. From the Forbes link:

“Updated data from NASA satellite instruments reveal the Earth’s polar ice caps have not receded at all since the satellite instruments began measuring the ice caps in 1979. Since the end of 2012, moreover, total polar ice extent has largely remained above the post-1979 average.“

To this day I see posts suggesting that the polar ice caps in a fast melt and that polar bears are increasingly endangered. Both assertions are simply not true. The global polar bear population has recovered from the lows of 50 years ago and is stable. Most regional populations are stable, some are in decline, and some are growing.

Another claim is that that Antarctic ice is melting. In fact, the ice extent around Antarctica is at record levels. There is massive volcanic activity under an area in western Antarctica, where some ice loss has been recorded. That is hardly proof of a man-made carbon-induced effect. Along with the fictitious ice melt, alarming predictions of increased sea levels are often heard. But sea level increases in the past 100 years are minuscule relative to more distant historical episodes.

President Obama is casting about for a legacy other than failure. His signature health care plan is in jeopardy on several fronts, his foreign policy is bumbling (even to a non-interventionist), his economic legacy is weak at best, his legacy of cronyism is legend, and his legacy of debt is gargantuan. As to Obama’s record on the environment, he just might be a slave to defunct climate researchers.

Record Hot Baloney

18 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Global Warming

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Bob Tisdale, Cartoons By Josh, Climate fraud, El Nino, global warming, NASA, NOAA, Temperature Adjustment, Temperature records, Wall Street Journal, Watt's Up With That?

It’s easy to make big headlines that serve a policy agenda when you can control the process generating “scientific” data. Here’s the latest in an ongoing fraud perpetrated by NASA, NOAA and a few other organizations. The disinformation is happily scooped up and reported by the unsuspecting news media, in this case The Wall Street Journal. The headline says that 2014 was the warmest year on record back to 1980, but there are several important respects in which the report from NASA and NOAA is misleading.

The surface temperature records maintained by NASA and NOAA (and others) utilize the same source data (despite NASA’s claim that the two series are “independent”), but they are heavily adjusted by the respective agencies. We can all probably agree that more recent temperature measurements (the raw data) are more reliable due to the availability of better and more numerous instruments (particularly for ocean surface temperatures). However, combining recent measurements with older data in a way that assures comparability is difficult over more than a few decades. Weather stations come, go, and relocate, environmental conditions around stations change with urbanization and airport expansions, and new measurement techniques are introduced.

Constructing a consistent temperature series over 130+ years at the world or regional level is therefore subject to much controversy. Here is a page with links to several good posts of the problems inherent in these efforts. Data is “infilled” and sometimes deleted, and statistical techniques are often applied in an effort to achieve consistency over time. However, it is curious that the NASA and NOAA adjustments over time seem to pivot around the levels of the 1950s and 1960s, as if to suggest that the temperatures measured in those decades are the most reliable part of the series. Take a look at the “gifs”in this post, which show temperatures before and after adjustments. An apparent consequence of the NASA / NOAA statistical techniques, which may seem even more curious to the casual observer, is that new observations can influence the entire temperature series. That is, adding 2014 temperatures to the series may lead to fresh downward adjustments to 1936 temperatures, if it suits the agencies. By the way, 1936 was a very warm year, but according to these agencies, it’s been getting less warm.

Another fascinating aspect of the report on 2014 temperatures is the obvious attempt to propagandize. This Bob Tisdale post sheds light on three serious omissions in the report and the related effort to “spin” the findings for the press:

1) The range of uncertainty cited by NOAA in background documents indicates that the small margin (0.04 deg C for NOAA, 0.02 deg C by NASA) by which the reported 2014 global temperature exceeds the previous high is within the confidence interval around the previous high. By their own standard, it was “more unlikely than likely”that the 2014 temperature was the warmest on record, but that is not what the agencies report in their “Highlights.”

2) The report states that “This is the first time since 1990 the high temperature record was broken in the absence of El Niño conditions at any time during the year in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean….” Yet there were El Nino conditions elsewhere in the Pacific in 2014.

3) “NOAA failed to discuss the actual causes of the elevated global sea surface temperatures in 2014, while making it appear that there was a general warming of the surfaces of the global oceans.”

Tisdale notes elsewhere that the tiny margins of “record warmth” reported by NASA and NOAA contribute to a growing disparity between reported “actual temperatures” and those projected by climate warming models. The “Warmist” community will view the NASA / NOAA findings favorably, as the new “record high” supports their narrative,” providing new fodder for the agenda to end the use of fossil fuels and to regulate activities deemed “unsustainable.” Unfortunately, the misleading reports are likely to seem credible to the general public, which is largely ignorant of the agencies’ rampant manipulation of temperature data.

Hat Tip: Watts Up With That? and cartoonist Josh!