The Broken-Climate Canard

19 Thursday May 2016

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AGW, Al Gore, Anthropomorphic Global Warming, Climate Alarmism, Climate Causality, Climate Change, CO2, Coyote Blog, Draught Severity, Hurricane Katrina, Little Ice Age, Measurement Technology Bias, Publication Bias, Tornadic Activity, Warren Meyer, Weather or Climate Change

MovieDisaster

In the imagination of the climate alarmist, almost everything portends an approaching catastrophe. A hurricane? Tornado? Draught? Warm spell? Cold spell? Blizzard? Bad harvest? To their way of thinking, these are all signs that CO2 is damaging the climate. Obviously, these are weather events that imply nothing in the absence of corroborating evidence, though you wouldn’t know it from listening to the precaution pols. Warren Meyer at Coyote Blog has posted another in his series of essays on this topic, this time called “Are We Already Seeing Climate Change?” He provides links to the earlier installments — all interesting. In this installment, he covers five topics under the heading “Manufacturing A Sense that the Climate Is Broken”, which I think would have made a better title for his post. I’ll try to summarize the five points briefly, but do read the whole thing:

Publication Bias: This quote speaks for itself: “Every single tail-of-the-distribution weather event from around the world is breathlessly reported, leaving the impression among viewers that more such events are occurring, even when there is in fact no such trend. Further, since weather events can drive media ratings, there is an incentive to make them seem scarier.”

Claiming a Trend From One Data Point: This is the kind of error to which I alluded in the first paragraph. Think of Al Gore’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The charts offered by Meyer in this section are very nice. There is no upward trend in any of the following: hurricane energy; severe tornadic activity; the incidence of draughts or draught severity; heat waves; extremely hot days; and there is no abatement in the upward trend in crop yields. In fact, there is no trend in high temperature records in the U.S. The upward trend in average surface temperatures in the U.S. is entirely due to warmer nighttime temperatures.

Measurement Technology Bias: We now have the technology to measure various aspects of the climate from space. We can track polar ice extent with much more precision. Doppler radar technology and weather chasers have helped to identify more small tornados than we’d have known of 50 years ago. But when events seem noteworthy to alarmists, they draw extreme conclusions. To their great chagrin, these phenomena are often products of our enhanced ability to measure things.

What Is Normal?: This is related to measurement bias. Our detailed records on surface temperatures go back about 150 years, which is an extremely short slice of history. Temperature proxies from earlier eras, such as ice cores and fossilized tree rings, tell us that the recent past is not all that unusual. Moreover, we also know that glacier melting and sea level increases have been happening for much longer than the buildup of CO2. Those trends began near the end of the “Little Age Age”, around 1800. And there is evidence that these types of developments have happened before. Alarmists, however, assume that what we’ve witnessed in the recent past is unprecedented.

Collapsing Causality in a Complex System To a Single Variable: “With all the vast complexity of the climate, are we really to believe that every unusual weather event is caused by a 0.013 percentage point change (270 ppm to 400 ppm) in the concentration of one atmospheric gas?” Not likely! Here Meyer helps put the recent temperature trends in perspective: they are tiny relative to their annual variation, which occurs both across seasons and within days.

The public seems to regard the co-called climate catastrophe with more skepticism today than perhaps ten years ago. Not only do the facts contradict the dire predictions of carbon-forcing climate models and alarmist scare stories, but people also recognize that the costs of attempting to avoid a global warming trend are massive and, well, probably not worth it. Moreover, they rightly suspect unworthy political motives in the alarmist community. If some carbon-induced warming is an eventuality, and that’s an “if”, it might well prove to be beneficial for people and the planet. Relax!

Climate Alarmists Warm To Speech Control

02 Monday May 2016

Posted by pnuetz in Global Warming

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ABC/Walt Disney, AGW, Al Gore, Climate Alarmism, Climate Doomsday, Coyote Blog, David French, ExxonMobile, False Consensus, Galileo, Heliocentrism, Inquisition, IPPC, Josh Gelernter, Judith Curry, Loretta Lynch, Natural Attribution, Rick Moran, Temperature Measurement, Warren Meyer

AGW-cartoon

The reactionaries in the global warming plunderbund are revealing their philosophical bankruptcy, dishonesty, and inner fascism. Science is a continuous process of learning through empirical observation, theory and testing. Refutation is as important to the process as original research and replication. Experimental results can be confirmed, but theory can never be established as absolute fact. The term “settled science” is very nearly an oxymoron, yet we constantly hear that climate science is “settled”. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We are asked by the warmists to accept sweeping conclusions on the basis of an extremely short historical record, one that is clouded by sharp disputes over measurement issues. The long-term record based on temperature proxies shows that recent trends are well within the range of natural variability. We are asked to accept conclusions based largely on models that have proven to be extremely inaccurate and that fail to account for important climate influences such as solar variation and oceanic cycles. And with essentially no historical justification, we are asked to accept assumptions about what global temperatures “should be”, and that we should make drastic sacrifices in a quixotic effort to make temperatures stay put. To do so, we are asked to divert resources on a massive scale to mitigate a risk that is speculative at best. An alternative view is that mankind should make sacrifices in order to adapt to change when it occurs, rather than taking the arrogant view that we can, with sufficient coercion and manipulation of private decisions, dominate natural forces to assure climate stability.

Warren Meyer at Coyote Blog has an excellent series of posts on climate change. The most recent of those posts is on natural attribution of climate change. It includes links to earlier parts of his series. Meyer compares today’s alarmists to a hypothetical observer predicting future temperatures in the year 1600, roughly the minimum of the “mini ice-age”. Of course, that observer would have said it would get colder based on his experience, but that would have been wrong. Today’s alarmists rest their case on a 20-year uptrend between 1978 and 1998, tying it to man-made carbon dioxide emissions. In fact, a longer-term view shows that surface temperatures had increased in similar spurts before carbon emissions were a factor of any kind.

Scoundrels tend to twist facts when the facts don’t support their view. Rick Moran reports on an academic paper concluding that it’s acceptable to lie about the threat posed by climate change. It’s not enough to present research and the full range of uncertainty surrounding forecasts, which is very wide. No, the reporting must be wrapped in a sort of Grimm’s fairy tale in order to teach the public a lesson, unschooled children that they are. Such is the manipulative nature of the warmist community.

And the dishonesty is extensive. Remember the claim that 97% of climate scientists accept the proposition of man-made global warming? It was debunked in short order, but the media seemingly can’t get enough of a disaster scenario, so the claim lives on. Famed climatologist Judith Curry has a number of posts on her blog explaining the misleading details of this bit of disinformation. Among the problems of methodology and reporting of this “survey” result is that it was not based on an actual survey of scientists. Instead, it rated abstracts of publications as to their consistency with particular views of the anthropomorphic global warming (AGW) proposition. Not only does this method double-count the views of individual scientists; the authors were highly selective about which scientists and how many of their publications were counted. Even more interestingly, the criteria were so loose that abstracts written by certain scientists known to be skeptical of AGW were counted within the 97%! In one of Curry’s posts, entitled “The Conceits of Consensus“, she discusses the weaknesses and refutations of the claim of a strong consensus, including the participation of non-scientist evaluators of research abstracts in the sample:

“Bottom line: inflating the numbers of ‘climate scientists’ in such surveys attempts to hide that there is a serious scientific debate about the detection and attribution of recent warming, and that scientists who are skeptical of the IPCC consensus conclusion are disproportionately expert in the area of climate change detection and attribution.“

Other studies have found that a majority of surveyed meteorologists (see here and here), geoscientists and engineers are skeptical of AGW. But again, this information is essentially ignored by the media and self-interested politicos because it does not support the crisis narrative that dictates coercive action by government.

Apparently, propaganda in support of the increasingly dubious warmist position must be reinforced by more drastic measures. Prominent leftists in government are asking whether disputing climate change is punishable under the law. You read that right! Two state attorneys general have threatened to prosecute ExxonMobil for allegedly misleading investors and the public about climate change. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has proposed using RICO organized crime law to go after certain energy companies for climate change “denial”. Loretta Lynch, the U.S. Attorney General, has asked the FBI to look into it. To hell with freedom of speech. To hell with the spirit of free scientific inquiry. Your authoritarian masters insist that you must fall into line with their climate change agenda or else!

Josh Gelernter opens his recent discussion of this tyrannical gambit this way:

“Four hundred years ago this week, the Inquisition met in Rome to discuss Galileo’s support for the Copernican model of the cosmos, which placed the Sun at the center of the solar system. After five days of deliberation, a commission of inquisitors ruled that heliocentrism was ‘foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of the Holy Scripture.’ Not a good moment for the Church. Two days later, Galileo was summoned to the Vatican and ordered ‘to abstain completely from teaching or defending this doctrine and opinion or from discussing it . . . to abandon it completely . . . and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing.’“

To underscore the hypocrisy of these threats of prosecution, David French observes that there are many other instances in which the public has been misled while the presumed climate mavens profited from the hysteria. Could these opportunistic ploys also be subject to prosecution?:

Al Gore insisted ten years ago that by now we’d suffer a “climate doomsday” if we failed to take the measures he advocated;
Perhaps ABC/Walt Disney has profited from its breathless warnings that “in 2015 milk would cost almost $13 a gallon, gas would be more than $9 a gallon, ‘flames [would] cover hundreds of square miles,’ one billion people would be malnourished, and Manhattan would be flooding — all because of climate change.“
The Chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said, “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late….” And as French says: “The IPCC has received tens of millions of dollars while hyping the threat of global warming.“

French’s suggestions are not entirely tongue-in-cheek. These suggestions are no more outlandish than threats to prosecute anyone else over a legitimate dispute in scientific debate.

The AGW community suffers from a weak understanding of the philosophy of science, a dishonest presentation of the facts, and a tyrannical streak that should can only be tamed by stripping them of power. First, however, the voting public must wise up to the danger to our economic well being and our freedom posed by these fascist activists.

Would You Tax Coastal Development?

14 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by pnuetz in Central Planning, Global Warming

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Carbon forcing, central planning, Climate Alarmism, Climate Change, Coastal development, Coastal tax, Federal Flood Insurance, FEMA, Glacier Melts, Glenn Reynolds, Pigouvian subsidies, Pigouvian Taxes, Robin Hanson, Sea Ice Extent, Strait of Gibraltar, Subsidies, Taxing development

If sea levels are truly rising due to climate change, then public policy should stop encouraging new development in coastal areas. Stipulating that this threat is real for the moment, serious and damaging encroachment of the seas might be 50 years away or more. By that time, many of today’s coastal buildings will be gone, or at least candidates for replacement, under realistic assumptions about the average lives of structures. A relatively low-cost approach to the threat of rising seas would be to stop building along the most vulnerable coasts right now and move new development inland. Yet no one wants to do that, least of all coastal property owners. But there is little discussion of this alternative even among the true believers of a coming global warming apocalypse. Why not?

This and related questions have been asked recently by several writers, including Glenn Reynolds and economist Robin Hanson. There are alternatives to discouraging new construction along coasts. Other expensive abatement projects can be pursued, now and later, such as sea walls or even adding land mass excavated from the sea floor or inland. In fact, the prospect of damming the Strait of Gibraltar to protect Mediterranean coastlines has been discussed. The expense of such an unprecedented public works project is what prompted Hanson’s post. To the extent that such remedial projects are not funded privately, they represent social costs arising from coastal development.

The federal government still subsidizes flood insurance on many coastal properties, though efforts to phase-out this FEMA program have been underway for a few years. However, governments seem only too willing to undertake the investment in public infrastructure and ongoing maintenance made necessary by new coastal development. And like other development projects, tax abatements and other subsidies are still granted for coastal development. Why do these policies escape notice from coastal green elites? Public outlays with private beneficiaries along threatened coasts are an immediate drain on resources, relieving private developers and property buyers of shoreline risk.

Reynolds (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) and Hanson suggest that new development should be taxed in coastal areas. That, and ending subsidies for development along coasts, is an economically and ecologically defensible alternative to the public expense of ubiquitous sea walls. However, a coastal tax might not be in the immediate interests of elites who claim that mankind faces an insurmountable global warming problem. Better to put off these sorts of remedial measures, especially while you can tax and regulate fossil fuels, and maybe live on the coast!

The position of the warmist community is that carbon emitters must cease and desist, in the hope that the seas will stop rising. They are willing to destroy entire industries (fossil fuels) in pursuit of their goals, but are unlikely to achieve them without inflicting drastic economic harm. If greens are so amenable to central control of economic activity and individual behavior (so long as they are at the controls), it would be prudent to take precautions now that will help to minimize the damage later. Discouraging coastal development with taxes and denial of subsidies is the sort of classic intervention that any Pigouvian planner should love. There is even evidence that sea levels have been much higher at times in the past. An earnest central planner might say that coastal development should always be discouraged to mitigate the risk of destruction.

I am skeptical of alarmist claims, including those related to rising sea levels. In fact, the connection between carbon emissions, global temperatures and sea levels is not well established, and whether sea levels are rising due to human activity is a matter of some dispute. Furthermore, global sea ice extent is not declining dramatically, if at all, and the storied glacier melts have been greatly exaggerated. Climate activists pursue their agenda despite the gross inaccuracy of past carbon-forcing forecasts, the gaping uncertainty surrounding model predictions going forward, and the crushing expense of the measures they advocate. The expense, however, is not one that activists expect to compromise their own standard of living. They either assume that it will be borne by others or that their draconian prescriptions will usher in an era of “sustainability”, powered by new, renewable energy sources. Not many of these alarmists would boast that their policies can quickly reverse the sea level rises they’ve told us to fear, but they dare not suggest taxes on coastal development until they see more convincing evidence. At least that much is sensible, if ironic!

Climate Summit Success? Let’s Talk In Five Years

02 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by pnuetz in Global Warming, Human Welfare

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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

Aside

Harvard Falls For It

21 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by pnuetz in Uncategorized

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AGW, Climate Alarmism

Here’s a truth: building a “consensus” is seldom real science, it’s politics. For proof that politics is at the center of climate alarmism, look no further than the dishonesty with which the alarmists have conducted their campaign to promote anthropomorphic global warming, the shrill panic they seek to encourage, the demonization of skeptics, the politicization of a wide range of otherwise private decisions, and the attempt to brainwash the public via sensation-seeking media and a gullible educational establishment.

“Perhaps eons hence someone picking through the rocks in what once was Cambridge will find fossils of delicate imprint showing that intelligent life once lived until it was lost in a mass extinction brought on by ‘consensus.'”

Global Yarning

08 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by pnuetz in Uncategorized

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AGW, Climate Alarmism, Energy

Two interesting opinions on aspects of the climate change debate on wsj.com today. The first covers the unmistakable change toward more guarded assertions on the science of climate change in the IPCC’s latest report: Second Climate Thoughts. Less alarmism is good, even if the responsible parts of the discussion were buried in the document after a lengthy summary containing juicy alarmist headlines. At least some honest inquiry has begun to influence the IPCC.

The second wsj piece discusses the bias against traditional energy sources holding sway at U.S. colleges and universities. It laments the failure of those institutions to direct students toward fields having anything to do with fossil fuels, despite the lucrative nature of careers in that area: How Climate Change Conquered the American Campus.