Tag Archives: Cooling the Past

Tis the Season of Peak Climate Propaganda

09 Wednesday Aug 2023

Posted by in Climate

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It happens every summer! It’s been hot, and the news media and professional grifters in the anti-carbon climate-change establishment want us to panic about it. Granted, the weather really was quite hot for several weeks in July across parts of the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere, but it’s cooled off considerably since then, especially in my neck of the woods.

July is typically the warmest month of the year, and July 2023 was the warmest July for the troposphere on the satellite record. (The troposphere is the lowest 13 km of the atmosphere, but that’s an average — it’s thicker toward equatorial latitudes, thinner toward the poles.) However, attribution of this summer’s heat waves to carbon-induced climate change is misplaced. What follows are a few considerations in evaluating this claim, and the lengths to which climate activists go to distort weather data and reporting.

The Biggest Greenhouse Gas

One speculative explanation for the recent heat wave has gained some traction: the eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in the South Pacific on Jan. 15, 2022 (and see here). This underwater eruption spewed massive quantities of water vapor into the stratosphere, which encircled the globe in fairly short order. Water vapor acts as a greenhouse gas, and it is by far the most important greenhouse gas. This plume of vapor may have affected the climate with a delay, and it is not expected to dissipate for at least a couple of years. However, there are theories that the eruption might have led to some offsetting effects due to the reflective properties of water and ice in the stratosphere. See here for an interesting debate on the estimated effects of this “shock” to the atmosphere.

NASA has estimated that the Hunga Tonga eruption resulted in a 10% increase in atmospheric water vapor, while the European Space Agency puts the increase at 13%. Now, in addition to this added water vapor, we have the early effects of an El Niño event in the Pacific, which may elevate temperatures over the next couple of years.

However, the temperatures in July simply don’t justify the claim that we’re experiencing “unprecedented” warmth. The satellite records go back only to 1979, which is an especially narrow window on climatological scales. The longer record of temperatures shows earlier periods of higher temperatures, For example, U.S. surface temperature records indicate that the 1930s had periods warmer than this July. Moreover, while estimates of paleo-climate data are a matter of great dispute, there is no question that the globe has experienced warmer temperatures in the past, with an ice-free Arctic.

So, was July 3 really the hottest day in history? No way, and the worst part of this warm spell wasn’t even the warmth. Rather, it was the attempts to make weather a political matter, as if public policymakers possess some kind of control knob over weather phenomena, or as if we should bestow upon them dictatorial powers to act on their fantasy.

Longer Trends

There’s plenty of other evidence running contrary to the “hotter-than-any-time in-history” foolishness. Take a look at trends in hot and cool weather from individual U.S. weather stations over a somewhat longer time span than the satellite record. The red symbols shown on the map below mark stations reporting increases in the number of unusually hot days (heat in the 95th percentile) between 1948 – 2020, with larger symbols corresponding to greater increases in extremely hot days. The blue symbols mark stations reporting increases in the number of unusually cool days (in the 5th percentile) over the same period. The data in this chart is published by the EPA, and it is definitely not alarming.

The next chart shows the so-called Heat Wave Index produced by the EPA. Recent spikes in the index are muted relative to the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s.

Journalism or Exaggeration?

Reports of hot weather in Europe have been distorted as well, often placing more emphasis on forecasts of high temperatures than on the temperatures themselves. It’s almost as if authorities, with the aid of the news media and naive weather reporters, are determined to raise an exaggerated sense of alarm among the citizenry. Almost?

Cold 10x Deadlier Than Heat

The next chart vividly illustrates an attempt to propagandize climate misinformation. Take a look at the left side of this illustration, which appeared in the medical journal Lancet. Note the difference in the horizontal scale for heat deaths vs. cold deaths. The chart on the right side uses equivalent scales for heat vs. cold deaths. This should qualify the journal for some kind of award for mendacity, or perhaps sheer stupidity. It’s the cold that really kills, not the heat! I’m moving south!

Finding Hot Water

And here’s a take-down of some incredible water temperature propaganda. A PBS News Hour reporter has pushed claims that South Florida water temperatures reached 101 degrees this summer. The emphasis on a single reading was taken from a buoy not subject to the cooling effects of deep water circulation, and it is located where fresh water often overlays salt water, which traps heat. Data from other buoys not far away showed much lower temperatures.

Spreads Like Wildfire

Another fallacious claim we hear too often is that global warming is literally causing the world to go up in flames. The facts run contrary to these scare stories. Björn Lomborg notes the following:

“For more than two decades, satellites have recorded fires across the planet’s surface. The data are unequivocal: Since the early 2000s, when 3% of the world’s land caught fire, the area burned annually has trended downward.

“In 2022, the last year for which there are complete data, the world hit a new record-low of 2.2% burned area. Yet you’ll struggle to find that reported anywhere.”

The heavy focus by the media on this year’s wild fires in North America offers a perfect example of the media’s tendency to “cherry pick for clicks”. Africa and Europe have had little burning this year, and in North America, arson has played a conspicuous role (and see here) in the wildfires.

Distorted Measurements

Personally, I have trouble accepting claims that temperatures are any warmer now than they were in my youth, at least where I grew up. My subjective and local assessment aside, there are strong reasons to doubt the reliability and significance of trends in official temperature records. The urban heat-island effect has distorted temperatures by ever greater magnitudes, as growing metropolitan areas absorb heat readily compared to rural green space.

Furthermore, poor siting of weather stations and temperature gauges has become all too common. This includes equipment located at airports and other areas in close proximity to asphalt or concrete. This contributes to an upward bias in more recent temperature data. It’s also worth noting in this context that satellite temperature readings must be calibrated periodically to surface temperatures. If the latter are corrupted in any way, the satellite readings may be corrupted as well.

“Adjusting” the Past

Official historical records also include a variety of “adjustments” to temperature data that raise concerns. Ostensibly, these adjustments are justified by an interest in maintaining a consistent historical record. Changes in equipment or it’s exact location can create discontinuities, for example. Unfortunately, the adjustments appear to have had a systematic tendency to “cool the past” relative to more recent data. This reinforcement of the warming trend over the past few decades is suspicious, to say the least. It does very little to build confidence in the agencies responsible for these records.

Conclusion

The hot temperatures in July brought the usual deluge of propaganda, including distortions in the reporting of weather phenomena. And we hear increasing calls to force transition to EVs (which are powered mostly by fossil-fuel electric plants), subsidize intermittent renewable power sources, and to end the use of air conditioning and gas stoves. Yet these coercive measures would do nothing to prevent summer heat or climate change generally. Water vapor represents 95% of greenhouse gases, and the huge vapor shock from the Hunga Tonga eruption might well make us prone to warmer temperatures for at least some months to come, mixed with signals from the Pacific El Niño pattern. But these are not evidence of a man-made crisis, despite perverse cheers from those rooting for more draconian state intrusions and an end to growth, or indeed, a reversal in gains to human well being.

Green Climate Policy Wreaks Poverty

03 Friday Sep 2021

Posted by in Climate science, Environmental Fascism

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Have no doubt: climate change warriors are at battle with humanity itself, ostensibly on behalf of the natural world. They would have us believe that their efforts to eliminate the use of fossil fuels are necessary to keep our planet from becoming a blazing hothouse. However, the global temperature changes we’ve witnessed over the past 150 years, based on the latest Assessment Report (AR6) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are well within the range of historical variation.

“Remodeled” History

Jennifer Marohasy posted an informative discussion of the IPCC’s conclusions last month, putting them into a broader climatological context and focusing in particular on measurement issues. In short, discussing “global” temperatures with any exactitude is something of a sham. Moreover, the local temperature series upon which the global calculations are based have been “remodeled.” They are not direct observations. I don’t think it’s too crude to say they’ve been manipulated because the changed records are almost always in one direction: to “cool” the past.

Judith Curry is succinct in her criticism of the approach to climate change adopted by alarmist policymakers and many climate researchers: 

“In a nutshell, we’ve vastly oversimplified both the problem and its solutions. The complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity of the existing knowledge about climate change is being kept away from the policy and public debate. The solutions that have been proposed are technologically and politically infeasible on a global scale.”

We need a little more honesty!

The Real Victims

I want to focus here on some of the likely casualties of the war on fossil fuels. Those are, without a doubt, the world’s poor, who are being consigned by climate activists to a future of abject suffering. Joel Kotkin and Hügo Krüger are spot-on in their recent piece on the inhumane implications of anti-carbon ideology.

Energy-poor areas of the world are now denied avenues through which to enhance their peoples’ well being. Attempts to fund fossil-fuel power projects are regularly stymied by western governments and financial institutions in the interests of staving off political backlash from greens. Meanwhile, far more prosperous nations power their economies with traditional carbon-based energy sources. Most conspicuously, China continues to fuel its rapid growth with coal and other fossil fuels, getting little pushback from climate activists. If you’re wondering how the composition of energy output has evolved, this time-lapse chart is a pretty good guide.

One of the most incredible aspects of this situation is how nuclear energy has been spurned, despite its status as a proven and safe solution to carbon-free power. This excellent thread by Michael Schellenberger covers the object lesson in bad public policy offered by the proposed closing of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California.

In both the U.S. and other parts of the world, as Kotkin and Krüger note, it is not just the high up-front costs that lead to the rejection of these nuclear projects. The green lobby and renewable energy interests are now so powerful that nuclear energy is hardly considered. Much the same is true of low-carbon natural gas: 

“Sadly, the combination of virtue-signaling companies and directives shaped by green activists in rich countries – often based on wildly exaggerated projections, notes former Barack Obama advisor Steve Koonin – make such a gradual, technically feasible transition all but impossible. Instead, it is becoming increasingly unlikely that developing countries will be able to tap even their own gas.”

Energy is the lifeblood of every economy. Inadequate power creates obstacles to almost any form of production and renders some kinds of production impossible. And ironically, the environmental consequences of “energy poverty” are dire. Many under-developed economies are largely dependent on deforestation for energy. Without a reliable power grid and cheap energy, consumers must burn open fires in their homes for heat and cooking, a practice responsible for 50% of child pneumonia deaths worldwide, according to Kotkin and Krüger.

Green Environmental Degradation

Typically, under-developed countries are reliant on the extraction of natural resources demanded by the developed world:

“The shift to renewables in the West, for example, has increased focus on developing countries as prime sources for critical metals – copper, lithium, and rare-earth minerals, in particular – that could lead to the devastation of much of the remaining natural and agricultural landscape. … Lithium has led to the depletion of water resources in Latin America and the further entrenchment of child labor in the Democratic Republic of the Congoas the search for cobalt continues.”

Unfortunately, the damage is not solely due to dependence on resource extraction:

“The western greens, albeit unintentionally, are essentially turning the Third World into the place they send their dirty work. Already, notes environmental author Mike Shellenberger, Africans are stuck with loads of discarded, highly toxic solar panels that expose both the legions of rag-pickers and the land itself to environmental degradation – all in the name of environmentalism.”

Battering the Poor In the West

Again, wealthy countries are in far better shape to handle the sacrifices required by the climate calamitists, but it still won’t be easy. In fact, lower economic strata will suffer far more than technocrats, managers, and political elites. The environmental left leans on the insidious lever of energy costs in order to reduce demand, but making energy more costly takes a far larger bite out of the budgets of the poor. In another recent piece, “Jim Crow Returns to California,” Kotkin discusses the disparate impact these energy policies have on minorities. 

“This surge in prices derives from the state’s obsession — shared by the ruling tech oligarchs — with renewable energy and the elimination of fossil fuels. Yet as a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report has shown, over-reliance on renewables is costly, because it requires the production of massive (and environmentally unfriendly) battery-storage capacity — the price of which is invariably passed on to the taxpayer.

This is not bad news for the tech oligarchs, who have been prominent among those profiting from ‘clean energy’ investments. But many other Californians, primarily those in the less temperate interior, find themselves falling into energy poverty or are dependent on state subsidies that raise electricity prices for businesses and the middle class. Black and Latino households are already forced to pay from 20 to 43% more of their household incomes on energy than white households. Last year, more than 4 million households in California (30% of the total) experienced energy poverty.”

Kotkin touches on other consequences of these misguided policies to minority and non-minority working people. In addition to jobs lost in the energy sector, a wide variety of wage earners will suffer as their employers attempt to deal with escalating energy costs. The immediate effects are bad enough, but in the long-run the greens’ plans would scale back the economy’s productive machinery in order to eliminate carbon emissions — net zero means real incomes will decline! 

Energy costs have a broad impact on consumer’s budgets. Almost every product imaginable is dependent on energy, and consumer prices will reflect the higher costs. In addition, the “green” effort to curtail development everywhere except in high-density transit corridors inflates the cost of housing, inflicting more damage on workers’ standards of living.

Tighten Your Belts

These problems won’t be confined to California if environmental leftists get their version of justice. Be prepared for economic stagnation for the world’s poor and a sharply reduced standard of living in the developed world, but quite unnecessarily. We’ll all pay in the long run, but the poor will pay much more in relative terms.