Climate Skeptic

You can find a lot of different definitions of post-modernism.  Here is one from Wikipedia, which seems appropriate because in some sense at its very core Wikipedia adopts a post-modernist approach to truth.  Post-modernism rejects objective truth, or at least man’s ability ever to identify such truth.   As applied to science, post-modernists would say that what we call scientific “truth” in in fact the results of social, cultural, and political forces within and acting on the scientific community.

Some elements of post-modernism actually provide a useful critique of science.  Its focus on biases and resulting observational blindness to certain results that falsify ones pre-conceived notions are useful caveats in a scientific process.  But the belief that a rational scientific process is not just difficult but impossible leads to all kinds of crazy conclusions.  Many in hard core postmodern circles would argue that since objective truth is impossible anyway, scientific findings should be guided by what is most socially useful. As Steven Schneider of Stanford says vis a vis climate:

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

And speaking of Steven Schneider, he is coauthor of a recent study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that has really made it plain to me that climate is becoming the first post-modern physical science.  Just note the incredible approach to his study, and how much it mirrors the precepts of post-modernism:  To decide who is right and wrong in climate science between skeptics and alarmists, the study authors have … wait for it .. counted them and measured their relative influence in academic circles.  Since the authors count more alarmists than skeptics, and judge that the alarmists are more influential in academic circles, then they must be right!  After all, truth is determined by those with the most political and cultural influence, not by silly stuff like testing hypotheses against observational data.

Postscript: I think a lot of the skeptic backlash against this study is overwrought, examples here and here.  To paraphrase another climate publication, this study is “not evil, just silly.”

It just is amazing to me that anyone can, with a straight face, advance this logic chain:

Again, here’s the situation: Mississippi homeowners sued 34 energy companies and utilities operating in the Gulf Coast for damage sustained to their property during Hurricane Katrina. The homeowners alleged that the defendants had emitted greenhouse gases, which increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which contributed to global warming, which accelerated the melting of glaciers, which raised the global sea level, which increased the frequency and severity of hurricanes, which caused the destructive force of Hurricane Katrina.

The attached article discusses some weird procedural hurdles, but my hope is that the court system will be better able to parse the absurdity of this logic than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.  If every scientist in the world was dedicated to the task for 50 years, there would still be no way to assess the impact of incremental CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere on the strength of Katrina, and in turn the effect of this altered strength on property damages.

The New Scientist (“new” in most magazine titles meaning “socialist”) has yet another whole issue aimed at slamming climate skeptics.  You might start to think they felt threatened or something.

I found the cover hugely ironic:

The implication I guess is that climate skeptics are somehow trying to silence real scientists.  This is enormously ironic.  With a couple of exceptions, including the unfortunate legal crusade by the Virginia AG against Michael Mann, it is climate alarmists rather than skeptics who have generally taken the position that the other side of the debate needs to be silenced.

By the way, as I said in the intro to my last video, I have chosen to embrace the title of denier – with one proviso.  Being a denier implies that one is denying some kind of proposition, so I am sure thoughtful people would agree that it is important to be clear on the proposition that is being denied.  For example, I always found the term “climate denier” to be hilarious.  You mean there are folks who deny there is a climate?

I don’t deny that climate changes – it changes all the time.  I don’t deny there is global warming – global temperatures are higher today than they were in 1900, just as they were higher in 1200 AD than they were in 900.  I don’t even deny that man is contributing somewhat to the warming, not just from CO2 but from effects like changes in land use.  What I deny is the catastrophe — that man’s actions are leading to catastrophic changes in the climate.  I believe many scientists have grossly over-estimated the sensitivity of temperatures to CO2 by grossly overestimating the net positive feedback in the climate system.  And I think much of the work assigning consequences to even small increases in global temperatures – from tornadoes to hurricanes to lizard extinction – is frankly crap.  While I think the first mistake (around sensitivity) is an honest error, some day scientists will look back on the horrendous “science” of the consequences of warming and be ashamed.

It strikes me that a real scientific magazine that was actually seeking truth would, if it wanted to dedicate a whole issue to the climate debate, actually create a print debate between skeptics and alarmists to educate its readers.  If the alarmist case is so obvious, and its readers so smugly superior in their intellect, surely this would be the most powerful possible way to debunk skeptics.  Instead, the New Scientist chose, in a phrase I saw the other day and loved, to take a flamethrower to a field of straw men.

For those who want to watch the straw men go up in smoke, The Reference Frame has an index to the articles in this issue.

With Lenin’s Birthday Earth Day coming up, here are some thoughts from the original Earth Day back in 1970.  How many times do alarmists have to be wrong before they stop getting such breathless press?

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner for a 1970 Earth Day issue of “Environment,” a scientific journal.

He did not put an end date to his prediction. But Ehrlich did.

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Ehrlich said in 1970.

“The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

Ehrlich was an optimist compared to Denis Hayes, an aide to Nelson, the chief organizer for the first Earth Day.

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” Hayes said.

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa.

“By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions . . . By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

I am thrilled with the progress we have made on a number of real issues — including air and water pollution — since 1970.  It is unfortunate that our attention to these issues has been diverted by a 20 year obsession with trace amounts of CO2.

I thought this was an interesting analog to some activities in climate science:

some advocates for women’s health tried to pressure The Lancet into delaying publication of the new findings, fearing that good news would detract from the urgency of their cause, [Lancet editor] Dr. [Richard] Horton said in a telephone interview.“I think this is one of those instances when science and advocacy can conflict,” he said.

Dr. Horton said the advocates, whom he declined to name, wanted the new information held and released only after certain meetings about maternal and child health had already taken place.

He said the meetings included one at the United Nations this week, and another to be held in Washington in June, where advocates hope to win support for more foreign aid for maternal health from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Other meetings of concern to the advocates are the Pacific Health Summit in June, and the United Nations General Assembly meeting in December.

some advocates for women’s health tried to pressure The Lancet into delaying publication of the new findings, fearing that good news would detract from the urgency of their cause, [Lancet editor] Dr. [Richard] Horton said in a telephone interview.“I think this is one of those instances when science and advocacy can conflict,” he said.

Dr. Horton said the advocates, whom he declined to name, wanted the new information held and released only after certain meetings about maternal and child health had already taken place.

He said the meetings included one at the United Nations this week, and another to be held in Washington in June, where advocates hope to win support for more foreign aid for maternal health from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Other meetings of concern to the advocates are the Pacific Health Summit in June, and the United Nations General Assembly meeting in December.

“People who have spent many years committed to the issue of maternal health were understandably worried that these figures could divert attention from an issue that they care passionately about,” Dr. Horton said. “But my feeling is that they are misguided in their view that this would be damaging. My view is that actually these numbers help their cause, not hinder it.”

“People who have spent many years committed to the issue of maternal health were understandably worried that these figures could divert attention from an issue that they care passionately about,” Dr. Horton said. “But my feeling is that they are misguided in their view that this would be damaging. My view is that actually these numbers help their cause, not hinder it.”

From the Greenpeace website, via Tom Nelson:

Climate Rescue Weblog: Will the real ClimateGate please stand up? (part 2)

Emerging battle-bruised from the disaster zone of Copenhagen, but ever-hopeful, a rider on horseback brought news of darkness and light: “The politicians have failed. Now it’s up to us. We must break the law to make the laws we need: laws that are supposed to protect society, and protect our future. Until our laws do that, screw being climate lobbyists. Screw being climate activists. It’s not working. We need an army of climate outlaws.”

The proper channels have failed. It’s time for mass civil disobedience to cut off the financial oxygen from denial and skepticism.

If you’re one of those who believe that this is not just necessary but also possible, speak to us. Let’s talk about what that mass civil disobedience is going to look like.

If you’re one of those who have spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically-elected governments into submission, then hear this:

We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.

And we be many, but you be few.

So one side of the climate catastrophism argument abhors open debate, refuses to allow scientific work to be shared or replicated, and openly threatens violence, and it is those of us on the other side who are anti-science?

Update: In an interesting use of words, Greenpeace has removed and hidden the original post “in the interest of transparancey” and replaced it with a fairly lame message that says that obviously I and other misunderstood words like “army,”  “break the law,” and “We know where you live” as threatening.  Um, OK.  Any, Anthony was links to the original archived here.

Update #2: This is pretty good overheated stuff, along roughly the same lines.   Because there is no better way to promote open scientific debate than threatening to jail one side:

The criteria was “The scientific and medical community’s knowledge of the relationship of smoking and disease evolved through the 1950s and achieved consensus in 1964. However, even after 1964, Defendants continued to deny both the existence of such consensus and the overwhelming evidence on which it was based.”

So they ARE criminally liable if they continue to knowingly spread misinformation after the scientific community has achieved consensus. There is scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change and there has been for 15 to 20 years.

Insomuch as the corporate Deniers claim that they have investigated the climate science thoroughly and that there is no significant evidence it seems to me they have lied themselves into a corner. Either they are lying about having examined the science or they are lying about what the science says, but either way they are lying. This makes them liable to legal action.

We don’t have half a century to waste tolerating these disinformation campaigns. This is not a question of upholding freedom of speech, it is a matter of corporate and individual criminality. The value of these reports is not in casting doubt on the Denier arguments; those have been known all along to be nonsense. The value is that the reports present an opportunity to hold the guilty parties responsible for their crimes, and to end the disinformation campaigns with legal penalties appropriate to the magnitude of those crimes.

Next up, Fremch 19th century chemists are retroactively sued for challenging the nearly century-old consensus on the phlogistan theory of combustion.

..typical, at least, if you are a skeptic.  Tom Nelson beat me to the punch on an observation I was about to make about this interview with Marc Morano

[Check out this selection of questions from alarmist Randy Olson]:
RO: Okay, so let’s start with this — do you have doubts about President Obama’s birth certificate?
RO: Would you vote for Sarah Palin for president?
RO: Are you an anti-evolutionist?
RO: So who funds you?
RO: There are literally hundreds of celebrities on the global warming bandwagon. Are they all mis-informed? And why don’t you have any celebrities on the skeptics side?
RO: Last question. So you don’t feel that you’re anti-science?

Can you imagine an interview of, say, James Hansen that asked things like

• Do you have any doubts about the Bush National Guard memo’s publicized by Dan Rather?
• Would you vote for Ralph Nader for president?
• Are you an atheist?
• Who funds you?
• Are you willing to defend every statement Harrison Ford has made about global warming?
• Don’t  you feel like you are anti-freedom?

The asymmetry of how skeptics are treated in the media is startling.

Thought I would share a couple of bits of an email I got today.  The email showed a distinct lack of familiarity with the nuances of my climate position, so my guess is this may be a form letter.  I find it interesting a 17-year-old knows the term “NGO” but does not know to capitalize the first letter in a sentence (emphasis added).

hello.
this is a (hopefully) reasonable and (hopefully) well thought out message.
firstly i will say that i am 17 years old and not under the sway of any goverments/NGOs.
i believe that what you are doing with your climate skeptic blog is dangerous.
dangerous not only to yourself (in a minor way), but to my generation(in a much bigger way)….  [portion snipped out here basically talking about the writer's view of what science is beyond dispute and lecturing me on the precautionary principle]

you’ll probably think it’s rich, being lectured on ‘responsibility’ by a mere 17 year old, but hear (or read ) me out…
by publishing your blog i believe you are infringing upon successive generations’ fundamental basic human right to life.
denying climate change is fine if you just hold these veiws and keep them to yourself and don’t overtly act upon them.
it does however become infinitely more dangerous to my generation to preach these views as fact(or even air them in a serious manner).
as far as i see it, this is an issue of life and death.
the way i see it, you’re going along the ‘more likely to be death’ route, and please, if only for the sake of your children, or your children’s children, stop updating your blog.

Hmm, I will pass.  But it is nice to know that folks like Al Gore, Michael Mann, and Steve Jones have passed down their fear and loathing of debate to the next generation.    I won’t share my response, but I asked him if he would prefer that my generation, instead of handing his generation a degree or so of warming, instead handed his generation an extra billion or so people in poverty.

A new site is collecting and archiving quotes and videos from celebrities and politicians on climate issues.

I have written a number of times about climate science and post-modernism, where taking the politically correct position and pushing for the “right” government actions is more important than fact-based analysis or the scientific method.  This is a great example of the IPCC acting as just such a post-modernist institution:

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action….

Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’

In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air.

Of course, IPCC leader Pachauri is unrepentant

Last night, Dr Pachauri defended the IPCC, saying it was wrong to generalise based on a single mistake. ‘Our procedure is robust,’ he added.

It was Pachauri who originally lashed out with these words at folks who originally criticized the Himalayan glacier claim:

However, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, told the Guardian: “We have a very clear idea of what is happening. I don’t know why the minister is supporting this unsubstantiated research. It is an extremely arrogant statement.”…

Pachauri dismissed the report saying it was not “peer reviewed” and had few “scientific citations”.

“With the greatest of respect this guy retired years ago and I find it totally baffling that he comes out and throws out everything that has been established years ago.”…

In response Pachauri said that such statements were reminiscent of “climate change deniers and school boy science”.

Rolling Stone (and here)  manages to write over 5000 words on those opposed to climate alarmism without once acknowledging that any skeptic might have well-intentioned disagreement with the science itself.  Without once addressing a single scientific issue in the debate, the article dismisses the need to do so by painting every skeptic of every stripe as shills for the oil and coal industry.    All the while ignoring identical rent-seeking, financial incentives, and enormous political and propaganda spending in the alarmist community.

This is such a stale and unhelpful way to address climate issues that I am relieved that 2009 may mark the year when this form of argument no longer had much power — which is why I have, perhaps over-optimistically, labeled this the last gasp of the old climate debate template.

By the way, I would like to again remind the skeptic community not to fall into the same trap.  Yes, I know it is good turn-about fun to demonstrate that skeptic spending pales before alarmist spending, or to talk about the billions of dollars Al Gore and others have on the line with their alarmism.  But while these are useful issues to point out in passing, the opportunity is available to actually force debates on the actual state of the science, and I would hate to squander it in dueling ad hominem battles.

From Hugo Rifkind

‘But there were these climate scientists at the University of East Anglia,’ you’ll chirrup, excitedly. ‘And leaked emails show that they were conspiring to conceal research that…’ Yeah, whatever. Not interested. So some of them are crooks. It’s like giving up on doctors because of Harold Shipman. I appreciate that you lot don’t like to be called ‘climate change deniers’ because of the implied Holocaust equivalence but, melodramatic as it is, the comparison hasn’t come from nowhere. You are the forces of anti-science, anti-reason and anti-fact. Your natural bedfellows are the 9/11 Truthers — people who believe that the way to deal with something frightening which they don’t understand is to recast it as part of a convoluted fantasy which they do. Go back a few hundred years, and it’s people like you who would have cried ‘witch’ and run for the kindling when the village crone predicted that bad things might happen if you shagged your sister.

Translation: I don’t care if he is beating his wife, she probably deserved it.

I will bet a million dollars this guy has not even spent 5 minutes at a science-based skeptics site. He is basically saying “once I willfully ignore all science-based skeptics, I come to the conclusion there are no science-based skeptics.”

Mr. Rifkind and his lot are welcome to send my any critiques of my video on the science of the skeptics position. Operators are standing by.

From Grist:

James Inhofe.
Marc Morano.
Richard Lindzen.
Bjørn Lomborg.
George W. Bush.

Names of shame, ignominy, criminals against humanity, against planet Earth itself.  Agents of the lethal delays in our response to escalating, accelerating, catastrophic global warming.

This is pretty funny,  The Climate Change “Science” Compendium from the UN Environmental Program (UNEP) pulls a key chart off of Wikipedia.  More also from Anthony Watt.

The Thin Green Line blog really wants to mix it up and debunk those scientific myths propounded by skeptics.  I had my hopes up for an interesting debate, until I clicked through and saw that the author spent the entire post fact-checking Sen. Inhofe’s counts of scientists who are skeptical.  Barf.  I wrote back in the comments:

I just cannot believe that your “best” argument is to get into this stupid scientist headcount scoreboard thing.  Never has any argument had less to do with science than counting heads and degrees.  Plenty of times the majority turns out to be correct, but on any number of issues lone wolfs have prevailed after decades of being reviled by the majority of scientists (plate tectonics theory comes to mind).

If you want to deal with the best arguments from the scientific rather than political wing of the skeptic community, address this next:  It is  very clear in the IPCC reports (if one reads them) that in fact catastrophic warming forecasts are based on not one but two independent theories.  The first is greenhouse gas theory, and I agree that it is a fairly thin branch to try to deny that greenhouse gas theory is wrong.  The IPCC says that greenhouse gas effects in isolation will cause about 1-1.2C of warming by 2100, and I am willing to agree to that.

However, this is far short of popular forecasts, which range from 3C and up (and up and up).   The rest of the warming comes from a second independent theory, that the world’s climate is dominated by positive feedbacks.  Over 2/3 of the IPCC’s warming forecasts, and a higher percentage of more aggressive forecasts, come from this second order feedback effect rather than directly from greenhouse gas warming.

There is a reason we never hear much of this second theory.  It’s because it is very, very weak.  So weak that honest climate scientists will admit they are not even sure of the sign (positive or negative) of key feedbacks (e.g. clouds) or which feedbacks dominate.  It is also weak because many of the modelers have chosen assumptions for positive feedbacks on the far end of believability.  Recent forecasts of 15F of warming imply a feedback percentage of positive 85%**, and when people talk of “tipping points” they are implying feedbacks greater than 100%.

There is just no evidence that feedbacks are this high, and even some evidence they are net negative.  In fact, just a basic reality check would make any physical scientist suspicious of a long-term stable system with a 70-85% positive net feedback fraction.  Really?

When global warming alarmists try to cut off debate, they claim the science is settled, but this is half disingenuous.  It is fairly strong and I am willing to accept it for the greenhouse effect and 1C per century.  But the science behind net positive climate feedback is weak, weak, weak, particularly when trying to support a 15F forecasts.

I would love to see this addressed.

(**note for readers new to feedback issues.  The initial warming from CO2 is multiplied by a feedback F.  F=1/(1-f), where f is the fraction of the initial input that is fed back in the first round of a recursive process.  Numbers above like 70%, 85%, and 100% refer to f.  For example, an f of 75% makes F=4, which would increase a warming forecast from 1C in 2100 from CO2 alone to a total of 4C.)

Paul Krugman writes in the NY Times:

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research….

Well, sometimes even the most authoritative analyses get things wrong. And if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians based their dissent on hard work and hard thinking — if they had carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided — they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.

But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial….

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.

So is it fair to call it willful blindness when Krugman ignores principled arguments against catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory in favor of painting all skeptics as unthinking robots driven by political goals? Yes it is.

I am not entirely sure how Krugman manages to get into the head of all 212 “no” voters, as well as all the rest of us skeptics he tars with the same brush, to know so much about our motivations.  He gives one example of excessive rhetoric on the floor of Congress by a skeptic — and certainly we would never catch a global warming alarmist using excessive rhetoric, would we?

Mr. Krugman, that paragon of thinking all of us stupid brutes should look up to, buys in to a warming forecast as high as 9 degrees (Celsius I think, but the scientist Mr. Krugman cannot be bothered to actually specify units).  In other words, he believes there will be about 1 degree per decade warming, where we saw exactly zero over the last decade.  Even in the panicky warming times of the eighties and nineties we never saw more than about 0.2C per decade.  Mr. Krugman by implication believes the the Earth’s climate is driven by strong positive feedback (a must to accept such a high forecast) — quite an odd assumption to make about a long-term stable stystem without any good study showing such feedback and many showing the opposite.

But, more interestingly, Mr. Krugman also used to be a very good, Nobel-prize winning economist before he entered his current career as political hack.  (By the way, this makes for extreme irony – Mr. Krugman is accusing others of ignoring science in favor of political motivations.  But he is enormously guilty of doing the same in his own scientific field).   It is odd that Mr. Krugman would write

But in addition to rejecting climate science, the opponents of the climate bill made a point of misrepresenting the results of studies of the bill’s economic impact, which all suggest that the cost will be relatively low.

Taking this statement at face value, a good economist would know that if the costs of a cap-and-trade system are low, then the benefits will be low as well.  Cap-and-trade systems or more direct carbon taxes only work if they are economically painful for energy consumers.  It is this pain that changes behaviors and reduces emissions.  A pain-free emissions reduction plan is also a useless one.  And in fact, the same studies that show the bill would have little economic impact also show it will have little emissions impact.  And thus it is particularly amazing Krugman can play the “traitor” card on 212 people who voted against a bill nearly everyone on the planet (including the ones who voted for the bill) know will not be effective.

I remember the good old days when Democrats thought it was bad when Republicans called folks who did not agree with them on Iraq “traitors.”  After agreeing with Democrats at the time, I am disapointed that they have adopted the same tactic now that they are in power.

In this post I want to address a minor point on chartsmanship.  Everyone plays this game with scaling and other factors to try to make his or her point more effective, so I don’t want to make too big of a deal about it.   But at some point the effort becomes so absurd it simply begs to be highlighted.

Page 13 of the GCCI report has this chart I have already seen circulating around the alarmist side of the web:

There are two problems here.

One, the compression of the X axis puts the lower and upper scenario lines right on top of each other.  This really causes the higher scenario  (which, at 900ppm, really represents a number higher than we are likely to see even in a do-nothing case) to visually dominate.

The other issue is that the Y-axis covers a very, very small range, such that small changes are magnified visually.  The scale runs from 0% of the atmosphere up to 0.09% of the atmosphere.  If one were to run the scale to cover a more reasonable range, he would get this  (with orange being the high emissions case and blue being the lower case):

Even this caps out at just 1% of the atmosphere.  If we were to look at the total composition of the atmosphere, we would get this:

From the Guardian:

Today’s release of the study, titled Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, was overseen by a San Francisco-based media consulting company…

The nearly 200-page study was scrubbed of the usual scientific jargon, and was given a high-profile release by Obama’s science advisor, John Holdren, and the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Jane Lubchenco.

Wow, that’s sure how I learned to handle a scientific report back when I was studying physics – scrub it of the science and give it to an activist PR firm!   Do you need any more evidence that climate science has become substantially dominated by post-modernist scientists, where ideological purity and staying on message is more important than actually having the science right?

I saw a draft of this report last year, but I am still trying to download this new version.  I expect to be sickened.  Here is a taste of where they are coming down:

If today’s generation fails to act to reduce the carbon emissions that cause global warming, climate models suggest temperatures could rise as much as 11F by the end of the century.

11F is about 6.1C.  I don’t know if they get this by increasing the CO2 forecast or by increasing the sensitivity or both, but it is vastly higher than the forecasts even of the over-apocalyptic IPCC.  I think one can fairly expect two things, though — 1) More than 2/3 of this warming will be due to positive feedback effects rather than Co2 acting alone and 2) There will be little or no discussion of the evidence that such positive feedback effects actually dominate the climate.

Apparently the report will make up for having all the science stripped out by spending a lot of time on gaudy worst case scenarios:

That translates into catastrophic consequences for human health and the economy such as more ferocious hurricanes in coastal regions – in the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, punishing droughts to the south-west, and increasingly severe winter storms in the north-east and around the Great Lakes.

The majority of North Carolina’s beaches would be swallowed up by the sea. New England’s long and snowy winters might be cut short to as little as two weeks. Summers in Chicago could be a time of repeated deadly heat waves. Los Angelenos and residents of other big cities will be choking because of deteriorating air quality.

Future generations could face potential food shortages because of declining wheat and corn yields in the breadbasket of the mid-west, increased outbreaks of food poisoning and the spread of epidemic diseases.

This strikes me as roughly equivilent to turning in a copy of Lucifer’s Hammer in response to a request for a scientific study of the physics of comets.

I have written a number of times about the “global warming accelerating” meme.  The evidence is nearly irrefutable that over the last 10 years, for whatever reason, the pace of global warming has decelerated (click below to enlarge)

This is simply a fact, though of course it does not necessarily “prove” that the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is incorrect.  Current results continue to be fairly consistent with my personal theory, that man-made CO2 may add 0.5-1C to global temperatures over the next century (below alarmist estimates), but that this warming may be swamped at times by natural climactic fluctuations that alarmists tend to under-estimate.

Anyway, in this context, I keep seeing stuff like this headline in the WaPo

Scientists:  Pace of Climate change Exceeds Estimates

This headline seems to clearly imply that the measured pace of actual climate change is exceeding previous predictions and forecasts.   This seems odd since we know that temperatures have flattened recently.  Well, here is the actual text:

The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said Saturday.

“We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations,” Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

So in fact, based on the first two paragraphs, in true major media tradition, the headline is a total lie.  In fact, the correct headline is:

“Scientists Have Raised Their Forecasts for Future Warming”

Right?  I mean, this is all the story is saying, is that based on increased CO2 production, climate scientists think their forecasts of warming should be raised.  This is not surprising, because their models assume a direct positive relationship between CO2 and temperature.

The other half of the statement, that “higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems” is a gross exaggeration of the state of scientific knowledge.  In fact, there is very little good understanding of climate feedback as a whole.  While we may understand individual pieces – ie this particular piece is a positive feedback – we have no clue as to how the whole thing adds up.  (see my video here for more discussion of feedback)

In fact, I have always argued that the climate models’ assumptions of strong positive feedback (they assume really, really high levels) is totally unrealistic for a long-term stable system.  In fact, if we are really seeing runaway feedbacks triggered after the less than one degree of warming we have had over the last century, it boggles the mind how the Earth has staggered through the last 5 billion years without a climate runaway.

All this article is saying is “we are raising our feedback assumptions higher than even the ridiculously high assumptions we were already using.”  There is absolutely no new confirmatory evidence here.

But this creates a problem for alarmists

For you see, their forecasts have consistently demonstrated themselves to be too high.  You can see above how Hansen’s forecast to Congress 20 years ago has played out (and the Hansen A case was actually based on a CO2 growth forecast that has turned out to be too low).  Lucia, who tends to be scrupulously fair about such things, shows the more recent IPCC models just dancing on the edge of being more than 2 standard deviations higher than actual measured results.

But here is the problem:  The creators of these models are now saying that actual CO2 production, which is the key input to their model, is far exceeding their predictions.  So, presumably, if they re-ran their predictions using actual CO2 data, they would get even higher temperature forecasts. Further, they are saying that the feedback multiplier in their models should be higher as well.  But the forecasts of their models are already high vs. observations — this will even cause them to diverge further from actual measurements.

So here is the real disconnect of the model:  If you tell me that modelers underestimated the key input (CO2) in their models,  and have so far overestimated the key output (Temperature), I would have said the conclusion to this article is that climate sensitivity must be lower than what was embedded in the models.  But they are saying exactly the opposite.  How is this possible?

Postscript: I hope readers understand this, but it is worth saying because clearly reporters do not understand this:  There is no way that climate change from CO2 can be accelerating if global warming is not accelerating.  There is no mechanism I have ever heard by which CO2 can change the climate without the intermediate step of raising temperatures.  Co2–>temperature increase–>changes in the climate.

Update: Chart originally said 1998 forecast.  Has been corrected to 1988.

Update#2: I am really tired of having to re-explain the choice of using Hansen’s “A” forecast, but I will do it again.  Hansen had forecasts A, B, C, with A being based on more CO2 than B, and B with more CO2 than C.  At the time, Hansen said he thought the A case was extreme.  This is then used by his apologists to say that I am somehow corrupting Hansen’s intent or taking him out of context by using the A case, because Hansen himself at the time said the A case was probably high.

But the only difference between A, B, and C were not the model assumptions of climate sensitivity or any other variable — they only differed in the amount of Co2 growth and the number of volcano eruptions (which have a cooling effect via aerosols).  We can go back and decide for ourselves which case turned out to be the most or least conservative.   As it turns out, all three cases UNDERESTIMATED the amount of CO2 man produced in the last 20 years.  So, we should not really use any of these lines as representative, but Scenario A is by far the closest.  The other two are way, way below our actual CO2 history.

The people arguing to use, say, the C scenario for comparison are being disingenuous.  The C scenario, while closer to reality in its temperature forecast, was based on an assumption of a freeze in Co2 production levels, something that obviously did not occur.

Here is a little glimpse of how climate alarmism works.  Check out this article in the NewScientist (I don’t know anything about this particular publication, but my general assumption is that most periodicals use “New” in the context of such a title as a synonym for “socialist.”):

Rather than spreading out evenly across all the oceans, water from melted Antarctic ice sheets will gather around North America and the Indian Ocean. That’s bad news for the US East Coast, which could bear the brunt of one of these oceanic bulges.

It goes on and on with more detail, which sounds really scary:

First, Jerry Mitrovica and colleagues from the University of Toronto in Canada considered the gravitational attraction of the Antarctic ice sheets on the surrounding water, which pulls it towards the South Pole. As the ice sheet melts, this bulge of water dissipates into surrounding oceans along with the meltwater. So while the sea level near Antarctica will fall, sea levels away from the South Pole will rise.

Once the ice melts, the release of pressure could also cause the Antarctic continent to rise by 100 metres. And as the weight of the ice pressing down on the continental shelf is released, the rock will spring back, displacing seawater that will also spread across the oceans.

Redistributing this mass of water could even change the axis of the Earth’s spin. The team estimates that the South Pole will shift by 500 metres towards the west of Antarctica, and the North Pole will shift in the opposite direction. Since the spin of the Earth creates bulges of oceanic water in the regions between the equator and the poles, these bulges will also shift slightly with the changing axis….

The upshot is that the North American continent and the Indian Ocean will experience the greatest changes in sea level – adding 1 or 2 metres to the current estimates. Washington DC sits squarely in this area, meaning it could face a 6.3-metre sea level rise in total. California will also be in the target zone.

Spotting the skipped logic step does not require one to be a climate skeptic.  Anyone familiar with the most recent IPCC report should see it too.  Specifically, the authors simply posit — without even bothering to mention it as an assumption! — that tons of land-based ice (remember, sea ice melting has no effect on sea levels) is going to melt in Antarctica.  But just about everyone, even the alarmists at the IPCC, predict just the opposite, even in 3C per century global warming scenarios.

Why?  Well, for a couple of reasons.  The first is that Antarctica is so cold that several degrees of warming will not bring most of the continent above freezing, even in the summer.  The exception is probably the Antarctic Peninsula, which sticks out north of the rest of the continent and accounts for 2% of the land mass and a much smaller percentage of the total ice pack.

The other reason is that if the world warms, the seas around Antarctica will warm and the models show the warming surrounding seas increasing precipitation on the continent and actually increasing snow pack.  In fact, increases in Antarctic ice pack actually exceed decreases forecast in ice packs around the rest of the world.  The entirety of the IPCC ocean rise scenario is driven by the thermal expansion of water, not net ice melting.

By the way, I presume these guys have their math right, but it seems astonishing to me that the ice mass (or lack of it) could really exert enough gravitational pull to change sea levels in the northern hemisphere by a meter or two.  Gravity is an astonishingly weak force — does this reality check?  I had always thought differences in ocean levels (say for example the fact that the Atlantic and Pacific are not the same height on either side of the Panama Canal)  had more to do with differentials in evaporation rates.

PS- Is telling me global warming will flood Washington DC supposed to make me be against global warming?  Because that sounds pretty good to me. ;=)