Tag Archives: Ross McKitrick

The Futility and Falsehoods of Climate Heroics

01 Tuesday Jun 2021

Posted by in Climate science, Environmental Fascism, Global Warming, Uncategorized

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The world’s gone far astray in attempts to battle climate change through forced reductions in carbon emissions. Last Wednesday, in an outrageously stupid ruling,a Dutch court ordered Royal Dutch Shell to reduce its emissions by 45% by 2030 relative to 2019 levels. It has nothing to do with Shell’s historical record on the environment. Rather, the Court said Shell’s existing climate action plans did not meet “the company’s own responsibility for achieving a CO2 reduction.” The decision will be appealed, but it appears that “industry agreements” under the Netherlands’ Climate Act of 2019 are in dispute.

Later that same day, a shareholder dissident group supporting corporate action on climate change won at least two ExxonMobil board seats. And then we have the story of John Kerry’s effort to stop major banks from lending to the fossil fuel industry. Together with the Biden Administration’s other actions on energy policy, we are witnessing the greatest attack on conventional power sources in history, and we’ll all pay dearly for it. 

The Central Planner’s Conceit

Technological advance is a great thing, and we’ve seen it in the development of safe nuclear power generation, but the environmental left has successfully placed roadblocks in the way of its deployment. Instead, they favor the mandated adoption of what amount to beta versions of technologies that might never be economic and create extreme environmental hazards of their own (see here, here, here, and here). To private adopters, green energy installations are often subsidized by the government, disguising their underlying inefficiencies. These premature beta versions are then embedded in our base of productive capital and often remain even as they are made obsolete by subsequent advances. The “putty-clay” nature of technology decisions should caution us against premature adoptions of this kind. This is just one of the many curses of central planning.

Not only have our leftist planners forced the deployment of inferior technologies: they are actively seeking to bring more viable alternatives to ruination. I mentioned nuclear power and even natural gas offer a path for reducing carbon emissions, yet climate alarmists wage war against it as much as other fossil fuels. We have Kerry’s plot to deny funding for the fossil fuel industry and even activist “woke” investors, attempting to override management expertise and divert internal resources to green energy. It’s not as if renewable energy sources are not already part of these energy firms’ development portfolios. Allocations of capital and staff to these projects are usually dependent upon a company’s professional and technical expertise, market forces, and (less propitiously) incentives decreed by the government. Yet, the activist investors are there to impose their will.

Placing Faith and Fate In Models

All these attempts to remake our energy complex and the economy are based on the presumed external costs associated with carbon emissions. Those costs, and the potential savings achievable through the mitigation efforts of government and private greenies around the globe, have been wildly exaggerated.

The first thing to understand about the climate “science” relied upon by the environmental left is that it is almost exclusively model-dependent. In other words, it is based on mathematical relationships specified by the researchers. Their projections depend on those specs, the selection of parameter values, and the scenarios to which they are subjected. The models are usually calibrated to be roughly consistent with outcomes over some historical time period, but as modelers in almost any field can attest, that is not hard to do. It’s still possible to produce extreme results out-of-sample. The point is that these models are generally not estimated statistically from a lengthy sample of historical data. Even when sound statistical methodologies are employed, the samples are blinkingly short on climatological timescales. That means they are highly sample-specific and likely to propagate large errors out-of-sample. But most of these are what might be called “toy models” specified by the researcher. And what are often billed as “findings” are merely projections based on scenarios that are themselves manufactured by imaginative climate “researchers” cum grant-seeking partisans. In fact, it’s much worse than that because even historical climate data is subject to manipulation, but that’s a topic for another day.

Key Assumptions

What follows are basic components of the climate apocalypse narrative as supported by “the science” of man-made or anthropomorphic global warming (AGW):

(A) The first kind of model output to consider is the increase in atmospheric carbon concentration over time, measured in parts per million (PPM). This is a function of many natural processes, including volcanism and other kinds of outgassing from oceans and decomposing biomass, as well absorption by carbon sinks like vegetation and various geological materials. But the primary focus is human carbon generating activity, which depends on the carbon-intensity of production technology. As Ross McKitrick shows (see chart below), projections from these kinds of models have demonstrated significant upside bias over the years. Whether that is because of slower than expected economic growth, unexpected technological efficiencies, an increase in the service-orientation of economic activity worldwide, or feedback from carbon-induced greening or other processes, most of the models have over-predicted atmospheric carbon PPM. Those errors tend to increase with the passage of time, of course.

(B) Most of the models promoted by climate alarmists are carbon forcing models, meaning that carbon emissions are the primary driver of global temperatures and other phenomena like storm strength and increases in sea level. With increases in carbon concentration predicted by the models in (A) above, the next stage of models predicts that temperatures must rise. But the models tend to run “hot.” This chart shows the mean of several prominent global temperature series contrasted with 1990 projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The following is even more revealing, as it shows the dispersion of various model runs relative to three different global temperature series:

And here’s another, which is a more “stylized” view, showing ranges of predictions. The gaps show errors of fairly large magnitude relative to the mean trend of actual temperatures of 0.11 degrees Celsius per decade.

(C) Climate sensitivity to “radiative forcing” is a key assumption underlying all of the forecasts of AGW. A simple explanation is that a stronger greenhouse effect, and increases in the atmosphere’s carbon concentration, cause more solar energy to be “trapped” within our “greenhouse,” and less is radiated back into space. Climate sensitivity is usually measured in degrees Celsius relative to a doubling of atmospheric carbon. 

And how large is the climate’s sensitivity to a doubling of carbon PPM? The IPCC says it’s in a range of 1.5C to 4.5C. However, findings published by Nic Lewis and Judith Curry are close to the low end of that range, and are those found by the author of the paper described here. 

In separate efforts, Finnish and Japanese researchers have asserted that the primary cause of recent warming is an increase in low cloud cover, which the Japanese team attributes to increases in the Earth’s bombardment by cosmic rays due to a weakening magnetic field. The Finnish authors note that most of the models used by the climate establishment ignore cloud formation, an omission they believe leads to a massive overstatement (10x) of sensitivity to carbon forcings. Furthermore, they assert that carbon forcings are mainly attributable to ocean discharge as opposed to human activity.

(D) Estimates of the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) per ton of emissions are used as a rationale for carbon abatement efforts. The SCC was pioneered by economist William Nordhaus in the 1990s, and today there are a number of prominent models that produce distributions of possible SCC values, which tend to have high dispersion and extremely long upper tails. Of course, the highest estimates are driven by the same assumptions about extreme climate sensitivities discussed above. The Biden Administration is using an SCC of $51 per ton. Some recommend the adoption of even higher values for regulatory purposes in order to achieve net-zero emissions at an early date, revealing the manipulative purposes to which the SCC concept is put. This is a raw attempt to usurp economic power, not any sort of exercise in optimization, as this admission from a “climate expert” shows. In the midst of a barrage of false climate propaganda (hurricanes! wildfires!), he tells 60 Minutes that an acceptable limit on warming of 1.5C is just a number they “chose” as a “tipping point.”

As a measurement exercise, more realistic climate sensitivities yield much lower SCCs. McKitrick presents a chart from Lewis-Curry comparing their estimates of the SCC at lower climate sensitivities to an average of earlier estimates used by IPCC:

High levels of the SCC are used as a rationale for high-cost carbon abatement efforts. If the SCC is overstated, however, then costly abatements represent waste. And there is no guarantee that spending an amount on abatements equal to the SCC will eliminate the presumed cost of a ton’s worth of anthropomorphic warming. Again, there are strong reasons to believe that the warming experienced over the past several decades has had multiple causes, and human carbon emissions might have played a relatively minor role. 

Crisis Is King

Some people just aren’t happy unless they have a crisis over which to harangue the rest of us. But try as they might, the vast resources dedicated to carbon reduction are largely wasted. I hesitate to say their effort is quixotic because they want more windmills and are completely lacking in gallantry. As McKitrick notes, it takes many years for abatement to have a meaningful impact on carbon concentrations, and since emissions mix globally, unilateral efforts are practically worthless. Worse yet, the resource costs of abatement and lost economic growth are unacceptable, especially when some of the most promising alternative sources of “clean” energy are dismissed by activists. So we forego economic growth, rush to adopt immature energy alternatives, and make very little progress toward the stated goals of the climate alarmists.

Playing Pretend Science Over Cocktails

13 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by in Global Warming

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It’s a great irony that our educated and affluent classes have been largely zombified on the subject of climate change. Their brainwashing by the mainstream media has been so effective that these individuals are unwilling to consider more nuanced discussions of the consequences of higher atmospheric carbon concentrations, or any scientific evidence to suggest contrary views. I recently attended a party at which I witnessed several exchanges on the topic. It was apparent that these individuals are conditioned to accept a set of premises while lacking real familiarity with supporting evidence. Except in one brief instance, I avoided engaging on the topic, despite my bemusement. After all, I was there to party, and I did!

The zombie alarmists express their views within a self-reinforcing echo chamber, reacting to each others’ virtue signals with knowing sarcasm. They also seem eager to avoid any “denialist” stigma associated with a contrary view, so there is a sinister undercurrent to the whole dynamic. These individuals are incapable of citing real sources and evidence; they cite anecdotes or general “news-say” at best. They confuse local weather with climate change. Most of them haven’t the faintest idea how to find real research support for their position, even with powerful search engines at their disposal. Of course, the search engines themselves are programmed to prioritize the very media outlets that profit from climate scare-mongering. Catastrophe sells! Those media outlets, in turn, are eager to quote the views of researchers in government who profit from alarmism in the form of expanding programs and regulatory authority, as well as researchers outside of government who profit from government grant-making authority.

The Con in the “Consensus”

Climate alarmists take assurance in their position by repeating the false claim that  97% of climate scientists believe that human activity is the primary cause of warming global temperatures. The basis for this strong assertion comes from an academic paper that reviewed other papers, the selection of which was subject to bias. The 97% figure was not a share of “scientists”. It was the share of the selected papers stating agreement with the anthropomorphic global warming (AGW) hypothesis. And that figure is subject to other doubts, in addition to the selection bias noted above: the categorization into agree/disagree groups was made by “researchers” who were, in fact, environmental activists, who counted several papers written by so-called “skeptics” among the set that agreed with the strong AGW hypothesis. So the “97% of scientists” claim is a distortion of the actual findings, and the findings themselves are subject to severe methodological shortcomings. On the other hand, there are a number of widely-recognized, natural reasons for climate change, as documented in this note on 240 papers published over just the first six months of 2016.

Data Integrity

It’s rare to meet a climate alarmist with any knowledge of how temperature data is actually collected. What exactly is the “global temperature”, and how can it be measured? It is a difficult undertaking, and it wasn’t until 1979 that it could be done with any reliability. According to Roy Spencer, that’s when satellite equipment began measuring:

“… the natural microwave thermal emissions from oxygen in the atmosphere. The intensity of the signals these microwave radiometers measure at different microwave frequencies is directly proportional to the temperature of different, deep layers of the atmosphere.“

Prior to the deployment of weather satellites, and starting around 1850, temperature records came only from surface temperature readings. These are taken at weather stations on land and collected at sea, and they are subject to quality issues that are generally unappreciated. Weather stations are unevenly distributed and they come and go over time; many of them produce readings that are increasingly biased upward by urbanization. Sea surface temperatures are collected in different ways with varying implications for temperature trends. Aggregating these records over time and geography is a hazardous undertaking, and these records are, unfortunately, the most vulnerable to manipulation.

The urbanization bias in surface temperatures is significant. According to this paper by Ross McKitrick, the number of weather stations counted in the three major global temperature series declined by more than 4,500 since the 1970s (over 75%), and most of those losses were rural stations. From McKitrick’s abstract:

“The collapse of the sample size has increased the relative fraction of data coming from airports to about 50% (up from about 30% in the late 1970s). It has also reduced the average latitude of source data and removed relatively more high altitude monitoring sites. Oceanic data are based on sea surface temperature (SST) instead of marine air temperature (MAT)…. Ship-based readings changed over the 20th century from bucket-and-thermometer to engine-intake methods, leading to a warm bias as the new readings displaced the old.“

Think about that the next time you hear about temperature records, especially NOAA reports on a “new warmest month on record”.

Data Manipulation

It’s rare to find alarmists having any awareness of the scandal at East Anglia University, which involved data falsification by prominent members of the climate change “establishment”. That scandal also shed light on corruption of the peer-review process in climate research, including a bias against publishing work skeptical of the accepted AGW narrative. Few are aware now of a very recent scandal involving manipulation of temperature data at NOAA in which retroactive adjustments were applied in an effort to make the past look cooler and more recent temperatures warmer. There is currently an FOIA outstanding for communications between the Obama White House and a key scientist involved in the scandal. Here are Judith Curry’s thoughts on the NOAA temperature manipulation.

Think about all that the next time you hear about temperature records, especially NOAA reports on a “new warmest month on record”.

Other Warming Whoppers

Last week on social media, I noticed a woman emoting about the way hurricanes used to frighten her late mother. This woman was sharing an article about the presumed negative psychological effects that climate change was having on the general public. The bogus premises: we are experiencing an increase in the frequency and severity of storms, that climate change is causing the storms, and that people are scared to death about it! Just to be clear, I don’t think I’ve heard much in the way of real panic, and real estate prices and investment flows don’t seem to be under any real pressure. In fact, the frequency and severity of severe weather has been in decline even as atmospheric carbon concentrations have increased over the past 50 years.

I heard another laughable claim at the party: that maps are showing great areas of the globe becoming increasingly dry, mostly at low latitudes. I believe the phrase “frying” was used. That is patently false, but I believe it’s another case in which climate alarmists have confused model forecasts with fact.

The prospect of rising sea levels is another matter that concerns alarmists, who always fail to note that sea levels have been increasing for a very long time, well before carbon concentrations could have had any impact. In fact, the sea level increases in the past few centuries are a rebound from lows during the Little Ice Age, and levels are now back to where the seas were during the Medieval Warm Period. But even those fluctuations look minor by comparison to the increases in sea levels that occurred over 8,000 years ago. Sea levels are rising at a very slow rate today, so slowly that coastal construction is proceeding as if there is little if any threat to new investments. While some of this activity may be subsidized by governments through cheap flood insurance, real money is on the line, and that probably represents a better forecast of future coastal flooding than any academic study can provide.

Old Ideas Die Hard

Two enduring features of the climate debate are 1) the extent to which so-called “carbon forcing” models of climate change have erred in over-predicting global temperatures, and 2) the extent to which those errors have gone unnoticed by the media and the public. The models have been plagued by a number of issues: the climate is not a simple system. However, one basic shortcoming has to do with the existence of strong feedback effects: the alarmist community has asserted that feedbacks are positive, on balance, magnifying the warming impact of a given carbon forcing. In fact, the opposite seems to be true: second-order responses due to cloud cover, water vapor, and circulation effects are negative, on balance, at least partially offsetting the initial forcing.

Fifty Years Ain’t History

One other amazing thing about the alarmist position is an insistence that the past 50 years should be taken as a permanent trend. On a global scale, our surface temperature records are sketchy enough today, but recorded history is limited to the very recent past. There are recognized methods for estimating temperatures in the more distant past by using various temperature proxies. These are based on measurements of other natural phenomenon that are temperature-sensitive, such as ice cores, tree rings, and matter within successive sediment layers such as pollen and other organic compounds.

The proxy data has been used to create temperature estimates into the distant past. A basic finding is that the world has been this warm before, and even warmer, as recently as 1,000 years ago. This demonstrates the wide range of natural variation in the climate, and today’s global temperatures are well within that range. At the party I mentioned earlier, I was amused to hear a friend say, “Ya’ know, Greenland isn’t supposed to be green”, and he meant it! He is apparently unaware that Greenland was given that name by Viking settlers around 1000 AD, who inhabited the island during a warm spell lasting several hundred years… until it got too cold!

Carbon Is Not Poison

The alarmists take the position that carbon emissions are unequivocally bad for people and the planet. They treat carbon as if it is the equivalent of poisonous air pollution. The popular press often illustrates carbon emissions as black smoke pouring from industrial smokestacks, but like oxygen, carbon dioxide is a colorless gas and a gas upon which life itself depends.

Our planet’s vegetation thrives on carbon dioxide, and increasing carbon concentrations are promoting a “greening” of the earth. Crop yields are increasing as a result; reforestation is proceeding as well. The enhanced vegetation provides an element of climate feedback against carbon “forcings” by serving as a carbon sink, absorbing increasing amounts of carbon and converting it to oxygen.

Matt Ridley has noted one of the worst consequences of the alarmists’ carbon panic and its influence on public policy: the vast misallocation of resources toward carbon reduction, much of it dedicated to subsidies for technologies that cannot pass economic muster. Consider that those resources could be devoted to many other worthwhile purposes, like bringing electric power to third-world families who otherwise must burn dung inside their huts for heat; for that matter, perhaps the resources could be left under the control of taxpayers who can put it to the uses they value most highly. The regulatory burdens imposed by these policies on carbon-intensive industries represent lost output that can’t ever be recouped, and all in the service of goals that are of questionable value. And of course, the anti-carbon efforts almost certainly reflect a diversion of resources to the detriment of more immediate environmental concerns, such as mitigating truly toxic industrial pollutants.

The priorities underlying the alarm over climate change are severely misguided. The public should demand better evidence than consistently erroneous model predictions and manipulated climate data. Unfortunately, a media eager for drama and statism is complicit in the misleading narrative.

FYI: The cartoon at the top of this post refers to the climate blog climateaudit.org. The site’s blogger Steve McIntyre did much to debunk the “hockey stick” depiction of global temperature history, though it seems to live on in the minds of climate alarmists. McIntyre appears to be on an extended hiatus from the blog.

Fitting Data To Models At NOAA

08 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by in Global Warming

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Dilbert Made Up Numbers

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:

  1. 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.
  2. NOAA added extra weight to the buoy readings, a decision which was unexplained.
  3. 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.