Uncategorized

Solving Global Warming Through Squalor

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Cross-posted from Coyote Blog:

I really want to thank Michael Tobis at environmentalist hang-out Grist.   For years people have accused me of over-reading  the intentions of climate catastrophists, so I am thankful that Tobis has finally stated what climate catastrophists are after (emphasis in the original, but it is the exact phrase I would have highlighted as well)

Is infinite growth of some meaningful   quantity possible in a finite space? No scientist is inclined to think   so, but economists habitually make this   claim without bothering to defend it with anything but, "I’m, an   economist and I say so", or perhaps more thoughtfully, "hey, it’s   worked until now".

Such ideas were good approximations in the past. Once the finite   nature of our world comes into play they become very bad approximations. You know, the gods of Easter Island smiled on its people "until now" for a long time, until they didn’t. The presumption of growth is so pervasive that great swaths of economic theory simply fail to make any sense if a negative growth rate occurs. What, for instance, does a negative discount rate portend? …

The   whole growth thing becomes a toxic addiction. The only path to a soft   landing is down; we in the overheated economies need to learn not just   to cope with decline but to celebrate it. We need not just an ideology   but a formal theory that can not only cope with reduced per capita   impact but can target it.

Decline isn’t bad news in an airplane. Decline is about reaching your destination. Perhaps there is some level of economic activity beyond which life gets worse? Perhaps in some countries we have already passed that point? Could the time where we’d all be better off with a gradual decline have arrived? How much attention should we pay to the folks who say we should keep climbing, that there’s no way we can run out of fuel, that we’ll think of something?

So there it is, in the third paragraph, with no danger of misinterpretation.  These folks want economic decline.  That’s a fancy way of saying "We want you poorer."

I could spend weeks writing about the fallacies and anti-human philosophy embedded in these four paragraphs, but here are just a few reactions.

The Zero Sum Fallacy

Every generation has people, like Mr. Tobis, who scream that we are all living in a petri dish and this is the generation we run out of Agar.  Of course they are always wrong.  Why? 

Well, first, the prime driver of economic growth is not resources but the human mind.  And the world of ideas has no capacity limits.   This is an  issue that Julian Simon wrote about so clearly.   Tobis is trying to apply physical models to wealth creation, and they just don’t apply.  (and by the way, ask the passengers of TWA flight 800 if decline isn’t bad news in an airplane).

Further, if we talk about the world of resources, we currently use a trivial fraction of the world’s resources.  By a conservative estimate, we have employed at most (including the soil we till for agriculture, extracted minerals, etc) less than 0.0001% of the earth’s mass.  In terms of energy, all energy (except nuclear) comes ultimately from the sun  (fossil fuels, hydropower reservoirs, etc are just convenient storage repositories of the sun’s energy).  We currently use an infinitesimal percentage of the sun’s energy. I wrote much more on the zero-sum wealth fallacy here.  And here is my ancestor blogger in Coyote Broadsheet making the same fallacy as Mr. Tobis back in the 19th century, writing on the Peak Whale Theory.

Wealth Benefits the Environment

Just like actual 20th century data tends to undermine catastrophic climate forecasts, experience over the last century tends to contradict the notion that growth is devastating to the environment. 

We can find the best example right here in the environmental Satan called the USA.  The US has cleaner air and water today than in any time in decades.  Because of technology and growth, we can produce more food on less land than ever — in fact the amount of land dedicated to agriculture has shrunk for years, allowing forests to steadily expand in the US for over eighty years (that is, until the environmentalists got the government to subsidize ethanol).   No one in Brazil would be burning huge tracts of the Amazon if they enjoyed the agricultural productivity we do in the US.  Sure, we have done some things that turn out to be environmentally bad (e.g. lead in gasoline) but our wealth has allowed us to fairly painlessly fix these mistakes, even if the fixes have not come as fast as environmentalists have desired. 

I will confess that the Chinese seem hell bent on messing up their air and water as much as possible, but, just like the United States, it will be the wealthy middle and upper class of China that will finally demand that things get cleaned up, and it will be their wealth, not their poverty, that allows them to do so.   Similarly, I don’t think CO2 reduction will do much of anything to improve our climate, but if we find it necessary, it will be through application of wealth, not squalor, that we overcome the problems. 

Here is a simple test:  Which countries of the world have the worst environmental problems?  Its is the poorest countries, not the wealthiest.

Growth / Climate Tradeoffs

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that man-made global warming increases severed storm frequency by 20%, or by 3 or 4 extra hurricanes a year (why this probably is not happening).  Even a point or two knocked off worldwide economic growth means hundreds of trillions of dollars in lost annual GDP a century from now (2% growth yields a world economy of $450 trillion in a century.  3% growth yields a world economy $1,150 trillion in a hundred years.)  So, using these figures, would the world be better off with the current level of hurricanes, or would it be better off with four more hurricanes but $700 trillion a year more to deal with them.  Hmmm.  Remember, life lost in a hurricane correlates much higher with poverty in the area the hurricane hit rather than with storm strength, as demonstrated by recent cyclones in Asia.  This general line of reasoning is usually described as warmer and richer vs. cooler and poorer. 

I cannot speak for Mr. Tobis, but many environmentalists find this kind of reasoning offensive.  They believe that it is a sin for man to modify the earth at all, and that changing the climate in any way is wrong, even if man is not hurt substantially by this change.  Of course, in climate, we have only been observing climate for 30-100 years, while climate goes through decadal, millennial, and even million-year cycles.  So it is a bit hard to tell exactly what is natural for Gaia and what is not, but that does stop environmentalists from declaring that they know what is unnatural.  I grew up in the deep South, and their position sounds exactly like a good fiery Baptist minister preaching on the sins of humanity. 

More from Jerry Taylor, who got Tobis started on his rant in the first place.

Postscript:  Here is an interesting chicken or the egg problem:  Do you think Mr. Tobias learned about man-made global warming first, and then came to the conclusion that growth is bad?  Or did Mr. Tobias previously believe that man needed to be fewer and poorer, and become enthusiastic about global warming theory as a clever packaging for ideas most of the world’s population would reject?  The answer to this question is a window on why 1)  the socialists and anti-globalization folks have been so quiet lately (the have all jumped onto global warming); 2)  no one in the global warming movement wants to debate the science any longer  (because the point is not the science but the license to smack down the world economy)  and 3)  why so much of the Bali conference seems to be about wealth transfers than environmentalism.

Warming Forecasts

Hadley: 99+% Chance Climate Sensitivity is Greater than 2

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Climate sensitivity to CO2 is typically defined as the amount of warming that would be caused by CO2 levels rising from pre-industrial 280ppm to a doubled concentration at 460ppm.  Via Ron Bailey, here is what Hadley presented at Bali today:

Hadley climate models project that if atmospheric concentrations of GHG were stabilized at 430 ppm, we run a 63 percent chance that the earth’s eventual average temperature would exceed 2 degrees Celsius greater than pre-industrial temperatures and 10 percent chance they would rise higher than 3 degrees Celsius. At 450 ppm, the chances rise to 77 percent and 18 percent respectively. And if concentrations climb to 550 ppm, the chances that average temperatures would exceed 2 degrees Celsius are 99 percent and are 69 percent for surpassing 3 degrees Celsius.

I encourage you to check out this post wherein I struggle, based on empirical data, to get a sensitivity higher than 1.2, and even that is only achieved by assuming that all 20th century warming is from CO2, which is unlikely.  A video of the same analysis is below:

However, maybe this is good news, since many climate variables in 2007, including hurricane numbers and global temperatures, came out in the bottom 1 percentile of predicted outcomes from climate models.

Climate Propaganda

Congrats to the Associated Press

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I want to congratulate the Associated Press and the Arizona Republic for running this story:

Scientists fear Arctic thaw has reached ‘tipping point’

On the exact same day that this was published:

Arctic Sea Ice Re-Freezing at Record Pace

The record melting of Arctic sea ice observed this summer and fall led to record-low levels of ice in both September and October, but a record-setting pace of re-freezing in November, according to the NASA Earth Observatory. Some 58,000 square miles of ice formed per day for 10 days in late October and early November, a new record.

Still, the extent of sea ice recorded in November was well shy of the median extent observed over the past quarter century, as the image from Nov. 14 (above, right) shows. The dramatic increase in ice is evident, when compared to the record-low amount observed Sept. 16 (below, right). In both images, 100% sea ice is shown in white, and the yellow line encompasses the area ion which there was at least 15% ice cover in at least half of the 25-year record for the given month.

The re-freeze continues in December, such that the ice coverage is pretty much at the median level today.  The AP/Republic article is admirably free of any new facts except the oft-repeated "Arctic ice at all-time low,"  all-time of course meaning not all-time but in the last 30 years that we have been able to observe by sattellite.  And neither article bothers to mention the high coverage record that was set in the South Pole this very same year.

The AZ Republic article is mostly made up of dueling catastrophists competing to see who can have the most dire forecast:

Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.

This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions."

Anytime you see someone use the word "tipping" point in relation to climate, you should immediately be skeptical.  Tipping points imply runaway positive feedback, something that is a feature of nuclear fission but is generally not a feature of stable natural processes.  TJIC said it well the other day:

Wow, it’s almost as if there are negative feedback loops that keep the system centered, despite occasional perturbations.

Which is odd, because to listen to the global warming alarmists, one concludes that:

(a) the environment is a delicately balanced system that can be pushed, by the least little perturbation, into a runaway positive feedback loop, turning the Earth into another Venus.

(b) over the last 200 million years there have been asteroid impacts, brightenings and darkenings of the sun, and massive volcano eruptions, but the Earth’s environment has always returned to a slow oscillation around a moderate middle point.

Updates:  New NASA study says Artic melting part of a natural cycle.  Post here debunking the myth that the Northwest Passage was never opened prior to 2007.  More on tipping points in this post.

Climate Propaganda

Climate Activism is about Socialism, Not Science

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The first is from Ronald Bailey, at Reason, in a dispatch from Bali:

Without going into the details, the Greenhouse Development Rights Framework (GDR) proposal foresees levying the equivalent of a climate "consumption luxury tax" on every person who earns over a "development threshold" of $9,000 per year. The idea is that rich people got rich in part by dumping carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuels into the atmosphere, leaving less space for poor people to dump their emissions. In one scenario, Americans would pay the equivalent of a $780 per person luxury tax annually, which amounts to sending $212 billion per year in climate reparations to poor countries to aid their development and help them adapt to climate change. In this scenario, the total climate reparations that the rich must transfer annually is over $600 billion. This contrasts with a new report commissioned by the U.N. Development Program that only demands $86 billion per year to avoid "adaptation apartheid."

The second link comes via Tom Nelson, and is from Emma Brindal, "Climate Justice Campaign Coordinator" for Friends of the Earth Australia.

A common theme was that the “solutions” to climate change that are being posed by many governments, such as nuclear power, carbon capture and storage (CCS) and biofuels are false and are not rooted in justice. Another point was that as this current ecomonic system got us here in the first place, a climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources.

I would love to put Emma Brindal on stage and ask her even for a simplified explanation of a good median forecast for climate sensitivity and why.  I’d bet a million dollars she would flounder in any debate on the science.  Because it is not about the science.  Its about Ms. Brindal’s long-standing desire to attack freedom and capitalism, and climate catastrophism being a convinient vehicle, at the moment, to reach that goal.

Climate Science Process

False Sense of Certainty

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Bruce Hall observes that climate forecasters probably need to adjust their confidence intervals.  For example:

  • NOAA predicted a the beginning of this season that there was an 85% chance of an above-normal season.  In fact, the hurricane season was well below average.  I haven’t done the math, but my guess is that if their forecast showed 85% probability of above normal, the year probably came in in the bottom 1% of its expected distributions
  • The UK Met Office predicted that there was a 60% probability that world temperatures in 2007 would be the highest in the last 100+ years, ie higher than temperatures in 1998.  In fact, it looks like 2007 will be among the coolest years in decades, and will come in as much as a half degree C below 1998, a huge difference.  Again, I have not run the numbers, but it is safe to say that this outcome would probably have been in the bottom 1% of the original forecast distribution.

If all your forecasts are coming out in the bottom 1% of the forecast range, then it is safe to assume that one is not forecasting very well.  Which reminds me of Michael Mann, who said with famous confidence that there was a 95-99% probability that 1998 was the hottest year in the last 1000, which is an absurd claim.  (Mann now denies having said this, but he is actually on film saying it, about 25 seconds into the linked clip).

Uncategorized

The Maoist Solution to Global Warming

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A while back I commented on a local newspaper article that analized the habits of a few families and suggested some nice little things the family could do to go green.  I observed that none of these proposed actions would do anything to abate CO2 in any meaningful way, and argued that the hidden agenda of such articles was to make the discussed aggresive CO2 reduction targets seem easy and painless to reach. 

In that article, they parise a couple of families for their efforts.  I observed that these families had between three and four kids, and that the people running the global warming movement would not be satisfied with their reusing of water bottles.  They would demand that similar families in the future give up their kids.  I wrote:

  • Everything you buy requires fossil fuels to produce, so you may only have half as much.  That means food for you and your kids too. 
  • In the next generation, no one is going to be having five and four kids.  Certainly those green Europeans would never do something as damaging as having four or five kids.  If you had aborted a few of the little darlings, just think how much CO2 you would have avoided?
  • The article says all your kids play sports.  OK, pick half of your kids, and tell them they don’t get to play sports any more.  Gotta cut that driving in half.  The good news is the other half of the kids can still play.
  • Those vacations you took last summer, to escape the heat in Arizona, well cut them in half as well.  That little play area in the mall makes a nice alternative to seeing Yellowstone, and all those tourists are just environmentally damaging Yellowstone anyway.

But cutting through my snark, the actual Maoist proposals for limiting children to save global warming are definitely out there (via Tom Nelson)

A WEST Australian medical expert wants families to pay a $5000-plus "baby levy" at birth and an annual carbon tax of up to $800 a child.

Writing in today’s Medical Journal of Australia, Associate Professor Barry Walters said every couple with more than two children should be taxed to pay for enough trees to offset the carbon emissions generated over each child’s lifetime.

Professor Walters, clinical associate professor of obstetric medicine at the University of Western Australia and the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth, called for condoms and "greenhouse-friendly" services such as sterilisation procedures to earn carbon credits.

And he implied the Federal Government should ditch the $4133 baby bonus and consider population controls like those in China and India.

Professor Walters said the average annual carbon dioxide emission by an Australian individual was about 17 metric tons, including energy use.

"Every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years, not simply by breathing but by the profligate consumption of resources typical of our society," he wrote.

So you thought that the socialists, the anti-growth / anti-technology folks, and the anti-globalization rioters all have gone silent over the last few years?  WRONG!  They have all joined the global warming movement — in fact, in many cases, they are driving the movement.  They have found that the global warming packaging can help them resell their failed ideas.  That is why no one in the global warming catastrophist movement wants to talk about the science.  Because its not about the science.  It is about the ends that they desire, and they have discovered that the global warming panic is the best possible vehicle for reaching those ends.

Uncategorized

Heading Back to the 19th Century

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For all of you who trust environmentalists when they declare that the science of catastrophic man-made global warming is "settled,"  it might be time to start digging into the facts a little deeper.  Because these folks are aiming to send you back to the 19th century:

The Conservatives will also suggest – most controversially of all – rationing individuals to as little as a single short-haul flight each year; any further journeys would attract progressively higher taxes, a leaked document entitled Greener Skies suggests.

via Tom Nelson

Climate Propaganda

This Warning Could Be Attached to All Global Warming Reporting

The NRO has appologized for the reporting and editing surrounding W. Thomas Smith’s recent trip to Lebanon.  But in reading their appology, it struck me that it could apply to nearly all global warming reporting.  Let me show you:

Having reviewed his work, we cannot vouch for the accuracy of his reporting. In general, too much of [the reporter’s] information came from sources who had an incentive to exaggerate the threat [global warming poses to the world] — and these sources influenced his reporting for the whole of his trip. While we agree that that threat is very real, our readers should have had more information about [the reporter]’s sources so that they could have better evaluated the credibility of the information he was providing.

I apologize to all of our readers. We should have required [the reporter] to clearly source all of his original reporting from [Bali]. [The reporter] let himself become susceptible to spin by those [advocating the catastrophist global warming position], so his reporting from there should be read with that knowledge. (We are attaching this note to all his [global warming] reporting.) This was an editing failure as much as it was a reporting failure. We let him down, and we let you down, and we’re taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Temperature Measurement

Surface Temperature Measurement Bias

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Frequent readers will know that I have argued for a while that substantial biases exist in surface temperature records.  For example, I participated in a number of measurement site photo surveys, and snapped this picture of the measurement station in Tucson that has gotten so much attention:

Tucson1

Global warming catastrophists do not want to admit this bias, because it would undermine their headlines-grabbing forecasts.  In particular, they have spent the last year or two bragging that their climate models must be right because they do such a good job of predicting history.  So what becomes of this argument if it is demonstrated that the "history" to which their models correlate so well is wrong?  (In fact, their models correlate with history only because they are fudged and plugged to do so, as described here).

Ross McKitrick, a Canadian economist, performs a fairly simple and compelling test on recent surface temperature records.  The chief suspected source of bias is from urbanization.  The weather station above has existed in Tucson in one form or another for 100 years.  When it was first in place, it sat in a rural setting near a small town characterized by horses and dirt roads.  Now it sits in an asphalt parking lot near cars and buildings, a block away from a power station, in the center of a town of a half million people.

McKitrick looked at the statistical correlation between economic growth and local temperature records.  What he found was that where there was growth, there was warming;  where there was less growth, there was less warming.  He has demonstrated that the surface temperature warming signal correlates strongly with urbanization and growth:

Our new paper presents a new, larger data set with a more complete set of socioeconomic indicators. We showed that the spatial pattern of warming trends is so tightly correlated with indicators of economic activity that the probability they are unrelated is less than one in 14 trillion. We applied a string of statistical tests to show that the correlation is not a fluke or the result of biased or inconsistent statistical modelling. We showed that the contamination patterns are largest in regions experiencing real economic growth. And we showed that the contamination patterns account for about half the surface warming measured over land since 1980.

The half figure is an interesting one.  For years, it has been known that satellite temperature records, which look at the whole surface of the earth, both land and sea, have been showing only about half the warming as the surface temerpature records.  McKitrick’s work seems to show that the difference may well be in urban contamination of the surface data.

So how has the IPCC reacted to his work?  For years, the IPCC ignored his work and his comments on their reports.  Finally, in the last IPCC report they responded:

McKitrick and Michaels (2004) and [Dutch meteorologists] de Laat and Maurellis (2006) attempted to demonstrate that geographical patterns of warming trends over land are strongly correlated with geographical patterns of industrial and socioeconomic development, implying that urbanization and related land surface changes have caused much of the observed warming. However, the locations of greatest socioeconomic development are also those that have been most warmed by atmospheric circulation changes (Sections 3.2.2.7 and 3.6.4), which exhibit large-scale coherence. Hence, the correlation of warming with industrial and socioeconomic development ceases to be statistically significant. In addition, observed warming has been, and transient greenhouse-induced warming is expected to be, greater over land than over the oceans (Chapter 10), owing to the smaller thermal capacity of the land.

So the IPCC argues that yes, areas of high industrial and socioeconomic development do show more warming, but that is not because of urban biases on measurement but because of "atmospheric circulation changes" that happen to warm these same urban areas.  Now, this is suspicious, since Occam’s Razor would tell us to assume the most obvious result, that urbanization puts upwards bias on temperature readings, rather than on natural circulation patterns that happen to coincide with urban areas. 

But it is more than suspicious.  It is a complete fabrication.  The report, particularly at the cited sections, has nothing about these circulation patterns either showing that they coincide with areas of economic growth or that they tend to preferentially warm these areas.   And does this answer really make any sense anyway?  A recent study in California showed warming in the cities, but not in the rural areas.  Does the IPCC really want to argue that wind patterns are warming just LA and San Francisco but not areas just 100 miles away? 

Climate Science Process

A Brief Window into How the IPCC Does Science

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I thought I had blogged on this topic of seal level measurement previously, but after reading this from Q&O and looking back, I see that I never posted anything.

As a brief background:

Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner is the head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden. He is past president (1999-2003) of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, and leader of the Maldives Sea Level Project. Dr. Mörner has been studying the sea level and its effects on coastal areas for some 35 years. He was interviewed by Gregory Murphy on June 6 for EIR

Climate scientists are notoriously touchy about non-climate folks "meddling" in their profession, but they have no such qualms when they venture off into statistics or geology or even astrophysics without much knowlege of what they are doing.  This story is telling, as told by Dr. Mörner:

Another way of looking at what is going on is the tide gauge. Tide gauging is very complicated, because it gives different answers for wherever you are in the world. But we have to rely on geology when we interpret it. So, for example, those people in the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], choose Hong Kong, which has six tide gauges, and they choose the record of one, which gives 2.3 mm per year rise of sea level. Every geologist knows that that is a subsiding area. It’s the compaction of sediment; it is the only record which you shouldn’t use. And if that figure is correct, then Holland would not be subsiding, it would be uplifting.

And that is just ridiculous. Not even ignorance could be responsible for a thing like that. So tide gauges, you have to treat very, very carefully. Now, back to satellite altimetry, which shows the water, not just the coasts, but in the whole of the ocean. And you measure it by satellite. From 1992 to 2002, [the graph of the sea level] was a straight line, variability along a straight line, but absolutely no trend whatsoever. We could see those spikes: a very rapid rise, but then in half a year, they fall back again. But absolutely no trend, and to have a sea-level rise, you need a trend.

Then, in 2003, the same data set, which in their [IPCC’s] publications, in their website, was a strai-ght line—suddenly it changed, and showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 mm per year, the same as from the tide gauge. And that didn’t look so nice. It looked as though they had recorded something; but they hadn’t recorded anything. It was the original one which they had suddenly twisted up, because they entered a “correction factor,” which they took from the tide gauge. So it was not a measured thing, but a figure introduced from outside. I accused them of this at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow —I said you have introduced factors from outside; it’s not a measurement. It looks like it is measured from the satellite, but you don’t say what really happened. And they ans-wered, that we had to do it, because otherwise we would not have gotten any trend!

That is terrible! As a matter of fact, it is a falsification of the data set. Why? Because they know the answer. And there you come to the point: They “know” the answer; the rest of us, we are searching for the answer. Because we are field geologists; they are computer scientists. So all this talk that sea level is rising, this stems from the computer modeling, not from observations. The observations don’t find it!

Current Weather

Observer Technology Bias in Hurricane Counts

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A while back, I demonstrated how apparent increases in tornadoes in the US is entirely attributable to doppler radar and more storm observation points rather than any actual increase in tornadoes.  When one corrects for this measurement change, say by limiting the count only to very large tornadoes that were unlikely to escape detection even with older technology, the tornado count has actually gone down.

Steve McIntyre points out that the same effect exists for hurricanes.  In the early 1900’s, whole storms could easily be missed if no ship crossed paths with the storm and the storm never made landfall.  Better technology (e.g. satellites) bias current hurricane numbers upwards, but by how much.  In his post, he has a count of named Atlantic storms in just the last 20 years that would likely have escaped detection fifty years ago.  How many were there?

Frankly I was surprised. There are 52 storms on the list.That’s 52 out of the 252 storms in the official record, or 20% of the total. That’s 20% of the modern storms which lack a single classical (ship or shore) report of storm winds. Wow.

The obvious question is: how can one compare these satellite- and aircraft-based storms, which left no ship or shore evidence, with pre-1945 records which were based solely on ship and shore observations?

The result is a significant bias.  Below, he has only removed these 52 storms from the last 20 years.  Others post-WWII but before 1980 would have to be removed.  One can observe that nearly all of the increase in storms in the last half century seems to be due to this measurement bias, and not to, say, global warming:

1130073 click for larger version

Temperature History

Its the Cities, Stupid

New study conducted in California (emphasis added):

We investigated air temperature patterns in California from 1950 to 2000. Statistical analyses were used to test the significance of temperature trends in California subregions in an attempt to clarify the spatial and temporal patterns of the occurrence and intensities of warming. Most regions showed a stronger increase in minimum temperatures than with mean and maximum temperatures. Areas of intensive urbanization showed the largest positive trends, while rural, non-agricultural regions showed the least warming. Strong correlations between temperatures and Pacific sea surface temperatures (SSTs) particularly Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) values, also account for temperature variability throughout the state. The analysis of 331 state weather stations associated a number of factors with temperature trends, including urbanization, population, Pacific oceanic conditions and elevation. Using climatic division mean temperature trends, the state had an average warming of 0.99°C (1.79°F) over the 1950–2000 period, or 0.20°C (0.36°F) decade.

Southern California had the highest rates of warming, while the NE Interior Basins division experienced cooling. Large urban sites showed rates over twice those for the state, for the mean maximum temperatures, and over 5 times the state’s mean rate for the minimum temperatures. In comparison, irrigated cropland sites warmed about 0.13°C [per decade] annually, but near 0.40°C for summer and fall minima. Offshore Pacific SSTs warmed 0.09°C decadefor the study period.

So, warming has occured mainly in the urban areas, while the least developped regions have cooled.  Increase of minimum temperatures rathern than daily maximum’s could be a result of CO2, but is more likely a signature of urban heat islands.  In particular, look at Anthony’s map in the linked article.  Notice the red dots for hotter areas and the cool dots for cooler areas.  The red dots are all on… cities.  The blue dots are all in the countryside.  You make the call — urban heat or greenyhouse effect.

Warming Forecasts

Climate Models Match History Because They are Fudged

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When catastrophist climate models were first run against history, they did not even come close to matching.  Over the last several years, after a lot of time under the hood, climate models have been tweaked and forced to match historic warming observations pretty closely.  A prominent catastrophist and climate modeller finally asks the logical question:

One curious aspect of this result is that it is also well known [Houghton et al., 2001] that the same models that agree in simulating the anomaly in surface air temperature differ significantly in their predicted climate sensitivity. The cited range in climate sensitivity from a wide collection of models is usually 1.5 to 4.5 deg C for a doubling of CO2, where most global climate models used for climate change studies vary by at least a factor of two in equilibrium sensitivity.

The question is: if climate models differ by a factor of 2 to 3 in their climate sensitivity, how can they all simulate the global temperature record with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Kerr [2007] and S. E. Schwartz et al. (Quantifying climate change–too rosy a picture?, available at www.nature.com/reports/climatechange, 2007) recently pointed out the importance of understanding the answer to this question. Indeed, Kerr [2007] referred to the present work and the current paper provides the ‘‘widely circulated analysis’’ referred to by Kerr [2007]. This report investigates the most probable explanation for such an agreement. It uses published results from a wide variety of model simulations to understand this apparent paradox between model climate responses for the 20th century, but diverse climate model sensitivity.

One wonders how it took so long for supposedly trained climate scientists right in the middle of the modelling action to ask an obvious question that skeptics have been asking for years (though this particular guy will probably have his climate decoder ring confiscated for brining this up).  The answer seems to be that rather than using observational data, modellers simply make man-made forcing a plug figure, meaning that they set the man-made historic forcing number to whatever number it takes to make the output match history. 

Gee, who would have guessed?  Well, actually, I did, though I guessed the wrong plug figure.  I did, however, guess that one of the key numbers was a plug for all the models to match history so well:

I am willing to make a bet based on my long, long history of modeling (computers, not fashion).  My guess is that the blue band, representing climate without man-made effects, was not based on any real science but was instead a plug.  In other words, they took their models and actual temperatures and then said "what would the climate without man have to look like for our models to be correct."  There are at least four reasons I strongly suspect this to be true:

  1. Every computer modeler in history has tried this trick to make their models of the future seem more credible.  I don’t think the climate guys are immune.
  2. There is no way their models, with our current state of knowledge about the climate, match reality that well. 
  3. The first time they ran their models vs. history, they did not match at all.  This current close match is the result of a bunch of tweaking that has little impact on the model’s predictive ability but forces it to match history better.  For example, early runs had the forecast run right up from the 1940 peak to temperatures way above what we see today.
  4. The blue line totally ignores any of our other understandings about the changing climate, including the changing intensity of the sun.  It is conveniently exactly what is necessary to make the pink line match history.  In fact, against all evidence, note the blue band falls over the century.  This is because the models were pushing the temperature up faster than we have seen it rise historically, so the modelers needed a negative plug to make the numbers look nice.

Here is one other reason I know the models to be wrong:  The climate sensitivities quoted above of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees C are unsupportable by history.  In fact, this analysis shows pretty clearly that 1.2 is about the most one can derive for sensitivity from our past 120 years of experience, and even that makes the unreasonable assumption that all warming for the past century was due to CO2.

Uncategorized

Cooler, but with a Worse Environment

As a follow-up to my post on the problems with a cooler but poorer world, let’s look at a likely scenario of a cooler world with a worse environment.

Al Gore is a huge supporter of biofuels, and particularly corn-based ethanol, as a "solution" to global warming.  In fact, Al Gore claims that in addition to inventing the Internet, he "saved" corn-based ethanol (from a pro-ethanol site):

Vice-President Al Gore
Third Annual Farm Journal Conference, December 1, 1998
http://clinton3.nara.gov/WH/EOP/OVP/speeches/farmj.html

"I was also proud to stand up for the ethanol tax exemption when it was under attack in the Congress — at one point, supplying a tie-breaking vote in the Senate to save it. The more we can make this home-grown fuel a successful, widely-used product, the better-off our farmers and our environment will be."

It is good to know that when the economic and environmental toll from our disastrous subsidization of corn ethanol is finally tallied, we will know where to send the bill.  HT: Tom Nelson

And it fact, Al Gore’s ethanol support is putting him in opposition to… leading environmentalists.

Environmentalists are warning against expanding the production of biofuels, noting the proposed solution to global warming is actually causing more harm than it is designed to alleviate. Experts report biodiesel production, in particular, is causing the destruction of virgin rainforests and their rich biodiversity, as well as a sharp rise in greenhouse gas emissions.

Opponents of biofuels read like a Who’s Who of environmental activist groups. The Worldwatch Institute, World Conservation Union, and the global charity Oxfam warn that by directing food staples to the production of transport fuels, biofuels policy is leading to the starvation and further impoverishment of the world’s poor.

On November 15, Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior unfurled a large banner reading "Palm Oil Kills Forests and Climate" and blockaded a tanker attempting to leave Indonesia with a cargo full of palm oil. Greenpeace, which warns of an imminent "climate bomb" due to the destruction of rich forests and peat bogs that currently serve as a massive carbon sink, reports groups such as the World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, and Flora and Fauna International have joined them in calling for an end to the conversion of forests to croplands for the production of biofuels

"The rush to address speculative global warming concerns is once again proving the law of unintended consequences," said James M. Taylor, senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute. "Biofuels mandates and subsidies are causing the destruction of forests and the development of previously pristine lands in a counterproductive attempt to improve the environment.

"Some of the world’s most effective carbon sinks are being destroyed and long-stored carbon is now being released into the atmosphere in massive quantities, merely to make wealthy Westerners feel like they are ‘doing something’ to address global warming. The reality is, they are making things worse," Taylor noted.

Uncategorized

Why Cooler but Poorer is the Wrong Choice

A lot of folks are sitting around in Bali this week trying to figure out how they can sell the rest of us on a cooler but poorer world.  Cooler but poorer is the name I and others put on a world that may be a few tenths of a degree cooler from less CO2, but certainly will be trillions of dollars poorer through expensive government mandates and restrictions on economic growth.

The fact is that small changes in economic growth rates have a much, much greater effect on human well-being than small changes in temperatures:  (HT to Tom Nelson, who is trying to make himself the Glen Reynolds of global warming skepticism.)

Their report suggests that a central plank in the global warming argument – that it will result in a big increase in deaths from weather-related disasters – is undermined by the facts. It shows deaths in such disasters peaked in the 1920s and have been declining ever since.

Average annual deaths from weather-related events in the period 1990-2006 – considered by scientists to be when global warming has been most intense – were down by 87% on the 1900-89 average. The mortality rate from catastrophes, measured in deaths per million people, dropped by 93%.

The report by the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change, a grouping of 41 mainly free-market bodies, comes on the eve of an international meeting on climate change in Bali.

Indur Goklany, a US-based expert on weather-related catastrophes, charted global deaths through the 20th century from “extreme” weather events.

Compared with the peak rate of deaths from weather-related events in the 1920s of nearly 500,000 a year, the death toll during the period 2000-06 averaged 19,900. “The United Nations has got the issues and their relative importance backward,” Goklany said.

The number of deaths had fallen sharply because of better warning systems, improved flood defences and other measures. Poor countries remained most vulnerable.

Temperature History

Why Historic Proxy Studies Matter

2 Comments

Over the last several years, there has been quite a bit of debate in climate
circles over historical temperature reconstructions from various "proxies" like
ice cores and tree ring widths.  The debate really heated up a few years back
when Michael Mann introduced, and the climate catastrophists at the UN IPCC
adopted, the hockey stick chart.  Until that time, both scientists and
historians agreed that there was good evidence for a period in the Middle Ages
with temperatures as warm or warmer than today (thus the name "Greenland" and
not "Glacierland") and a period known as the Little Ice Age in the 17th to 19th
centuries that was quite frosty.  Mann attempted to refute this view, using data
mainly from bristlecone pine tree rings, that the temperature history over the
last 1000 years was in fact quite stable, at least until man started producing
CO2.  (I was not writing on climate at the time, but I always wondered if any
editor availed himself of the "Mann blames Man" headline.)

But why do these temperature reconstructions matter?  Aren’t we more
concerned with the temperature in 2050 than in 1050?  Yes and no.  To really do
any kind of job at predicting future temperatures, we need more than egghead
computer models tweaked in some scientist’s office.  What we really need are
good empirical studies about the sensitivity of temperature to different
variables.

We can see the importance of historical proxies in the recent study by
Scafetta and West (pdf) which looked at historical correlations between solar
activity and temperatures.  The authors performed their analysis multiple times,
both using "flat" historical reconstructions like Mann’s and other
reconstructions (e.g. Moberg)
which show more historical variability.  The authors concluded (emphasis
added):

Climate is relatively insensitive to solar changes if a
temperature reconstruction showing little preindustrial variability is adopted.
In this scenario most of the global warming since 1900 has to be interpreted as
anthropogenically induced. On the other hand, if a secular temperature
showing large preindustrial variability is adopted, such as MOBERG05, the
climate is found to be very sensitive to solar changes and a significant
fraction of the global warming that occurred during last century should be solar
induced. If ACRIM satellite composite is adopted the Sun might have
further contributed to the recent global warming.

Some thoughts:

  • So, which results should we rely on?  The ones using Mann’s data
    or the ones using Moberg’s?  Well, even the catastrophists at the IPCC have
    abandoned Mann in favor of Moberg, so one should assume the conclusions in bold
    are very much in play.
  • Either way, don’t panic!  Even if all the 0.6C warming in the last century was due to CO2, simple math says that we should not expect more than about 1 degree more warming over the next century  (calculation here).  If the sun caused half of that 0.6C, then you can cut future warming forecasts in half.
  • Mann’s work is full of errors, both statistical and otherwise.  Beginning with McIntyre and McKittrick, and proceeding to many major scientists, his work has been discredited, though he does keep trying to save the thin branch (probably from a bristlecone pine!) he has crawled out on, but he refuses to fix even basic scribal errors pointed out in his first study.  I discuss more of the problems with Mann and other similar proxy studies, including the divergence problem, here.
  • Both CO2 Science and Climate Audit have more on historical proxy studies and their problems than you can ever digest.
  • Though it doesn’t make the front pages, there are still good common sense peer-reviewed studies that show the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age that we could expect from narrative historical records.  One such is Loehle, Via Climate Audit  (temperature anomaly over last 2000 years or so, via proxies):

Loehle9

  • Steven Milloy, via Tom Nelson, has much more on the sun as the primary driver of climate.
  • You can view the section of my global warming film on historical proxies below.  The proxy part starts around 3:00 minutes in (or -5:30 from the end if it is shown that way)

     

Climate Propaganda

Don’t Panic!

3 Comments

Albert Einstein’s dream is now a reality.  We have a new unified field theory:  Global Warming causes everything bad.   Via Tom Nelson and American Thinker, comes this list by Dr. John Brignell of links to articles in the media attributing various bad things to Global Warming.  Currently, his list has over 600 items!  Some excerpts:

Agricultural land increase, Africa devastated,  African aid threatened, Africa hit hardest, air pressure changes, Alaska reshaped, allergies increase, Alps melting, Amazon a desert, American dream end,  amphibians breeding earlier (or not),  ancient forests dramatically changed, animals head for the hills, Antarctic grass flourishes, anxiety, algal blooms, archaeological sites threatened, Arctic bogs melt, Arctic in bloom, Arctic lakes disappear, asthma, Atlantic less salty, Atlantic more salty…

itchier poison ivy, jellyfish explosion, Kew Gardens taxed, kitten boom, krill decline, lake and stream productivity decline, lake shrinking and growing, landslides, landslides of ice at 140 mph, lawsuits increase, lawsuit successful, lawyers’ income increased (surprise surprise!), lightning related insurance claims, little response in the atmosphere, lush growth in rain forests, Lyme disease,  Malaria, malnutrition,  mammoth dung melt, Maple syrup shortage…

wheat yields crushed in Australia, white Christmas dream ends, wildfires, wind shift, wind reduced, wine – harm to Australian industry, wine industry damage (California), wine industry disaster (US), wine – more English, wine -German boon, wine – no more French ,  winters in Britain colder, wolves eat more moose, wolves eat less, workers laid off, World bankruptcy, World in crisis, World in flames, Yellow fever.

All I can say is:

Dont_panic_earth_300w

Cross-posted at Coyote Blog

Temperature Measurement

Urban vs. Rural Warming

7 Comments

CO2 Science links to this study.  Climate catastrophists bend over backwards to try to argue that there are no such thing as urban heat islands.  But of course, whenever anyone gathers actual data rather than trying to use goofy computer model approaches, the answer is always the same:

To assess the validity of this assumption, LaDochy et al. "use temperature trends in California climate records over the last 50 years [1950-2000] to measure the extent of warming in the various sub-regions of the state." Then, "by looking at human-induced changes to the landscape, [they] attempt to evaluate the importance of these changes with regard to temperature trends, and determine their significance in comparison to those caused by changes in atmospheric composition," such as atmospheric CO2 concentration….

The three researchers found that "most regions showed a stronger increase in minimum temperatures than with mean and maximum temperatures," and that "areas of intensive urbanization showed the largest positive trends, while rural, non-agricultural regions showed the least warming." In fact, they report that the Northeast Interior Basins of the state actually experienced cooling. Large urban sites, on the other hand, exhibited rates of warming "over twice those for the state, for the mean maximum temperatures, and over five times the state’s mean rate for the minimum temperature."

I would have thought the following conclusion would have been a blinding glimpse of the obvious, but I guess it still needs to be said over and over:

LaDochy et al. write that "if we assume that global warming affects all regions of the state, then the small increases seen in rural stations can be an estimate of this general warming pattern over land," which implies that "larger increases," such as those found in areas of intensive urbanization, "must then be due to local or regional surface changes."

Warming Forecasts

More on Feedback

2 Comments

(cross-posted from Coyote Blog)

Kevin Drum links to a blog called Three-Toed Sloth in a post about why our climate future may be even worse than the absurdly cataclysmic forecasts we are getting today in the media.  Three-Toed Sloth advertises itself as "Slow Takes from the Canopy of the Reality-Based Community."  His post is an absolutely fabulous example how one can write an article where most every line is literally true, but the conclusion can still be dead wrong because one tiny assumption at the beginning of the analysis was incorrect  (In this case, "incorrect" may be generous, since the author seems well-versed in the analysis of chaotic systems.  A better word might be "purposely fudged to make a political point.")

He begins with this:

The climate system contains a lot of feedback loops.  This means that the ultimate response to any perturbation or forcing (say, pumping 20 million years of accumulated fossil fuels into the air) depends not just on the initial reaction, but also how much of that gets fed back into the system, which leads to more change, and so on.  Suppose, just for the sake of things being tractable, that the feedback is linear, and the fraction fed back is f.  Then the total impact of a perturbation I is

J + Jf + Jf2 + Jf3 + …

The infinite series of tail-biting feedback terms is in fact a geometric series, and so can be summed up if f is less than 1:

J/(1-f)

So far, so good.  The math here is entirely correct.  He goes on to make this point, arguing that if we are uncertain about  f, in other words, if there is a distribution of possible f‘s, then the range of the total system gain 1/(1-f) is likely higher than our intuition might first tell us:

If we knew the value of the feedback f, we could predict the response to perturbations just by multiplying them by 1/(1-f) — call this G for "gain".  What happens, Roe and Baker ask, if we do not know the feedback exactly?  Suppose, for example, that our measurements are corrupted by noise — or even, with something like the climate, that f is itself stochastically fluctuating.  The distribution of values for f might be symmetric and reasonably well-peaked around a typical value, but what about the distribution for G?  Well, it’s nothing of the kind.  Increasing f just a little increases G by a lot, so starting with a symmetric, not-too-spread distribution of f gives us a skewed distribution for G with a heavy right tail.

Again all true, with one small unstated proviso I will come back to.  He concludes:

In short: the fact that we will probably never be able to precisely predict the response of the climate system to large forcings is so far from being a reason for complacency it’s not even funny.

Actually, I can think of two unstated facts that undermine this analysis.  The first is that most catastrophic climate forecasts you see utilize gains in the 3x-5x range, or sometimes higher (but seldom lower).  This implies they are using an f of between .67 and .80.  These are already very high numbers for any natural process.  If catastrophist climate scientists are already assuming numbers at the high end of the range, then the point about uncertainties skewing the gain disproportionately higher are moot.  In fact, we might tend to actually draw the reverse conclusion, that the saw cuts both ways.  His analysis also implies that small overstatements of f when the forecasts are already skewed to the high side will lead to very large overstatements of Gain.

But here is the real elephant in the room:  For the vast, vast majority of natural processes, f is less than zero.  The author has blithely accepted the currently unproven assumption that the net feedback in the climate system is positive.  He never even hints at the possibility that that f might be a negative feedback rather than positive, despite the fact that almost all natural processes are dominated by negative rather than positive feedback.  Assuming without evidence that a random natural process one encounters is dominated by negative feedback is roughly equivalent to assuming the random person you just met on the street is a billionaire.  It is not totally out of the question, but it is very, very unlikely.

When one plugs an f in the equation above that is negative, say -0.3, then the gain actually becomes less than one, in this case about 0.77.  In a negative feedback regime, the system response is actually less than the initial perturbation because forces exist in the system to damp the initial input.

The author is trying to argue that uncertainty about the degree of feedback in the climate system and therefore the sensitivity of the system to CO2 changes does not change the likelihood of the coming "catastrophe."  Except that he fails to mention that we are so uncertain about the feedback that we don’t even know its sign.  Feedback, or f, could be positive or negative as far as we know.  Values could range anywhere from -1 to 1.  We don’t have good evidence as to where the exact number lies, except to observe from the relative stability of past temperatures over a long time frame that the number probably is not in the high positive end of this range.  Data from climate response over the last 120 years seems to point to a number close to zero or slightly negative, in which case the author’s entire post is irrelevant.   In fact, it turns out that the climate scientists who make the news are all clustered around the least likely guesses for f, ie values greater than 0.6.

Incredibly, while refusing to even mention the Occam’s Razor solution that f is negative, the author seriously entertains the notion that f might be one or greater.  For such values, the gain shoots to infinity and the system goes wildly unstable  (nuclear fission, for example, is an f>1 process).  In an f>1 world, lightly tapping the accelerator in our car would send us quickly racing up to the speed of light.  This is an ABSURD assumption for a system like climate that is long-term stable over tens of millions of years.  A positive feedback f>=1 would have sent us to a Venus-like heat or Mars-like frigidity eons ago.

A summary of why recent historical empirical data implies low or negative feedback is here.  You can learn more on these topics in my climate video and my climate book.  To save you the search, the section of my movie explaining feedbacks, with a nifty live demonstration from my kitchen, is in the first three and a half minutes of the clip below:

Climate Propaganda

Ending the Human Race to Prevent Global Warming

12 Comments

The other day, in this post on an article to help make families more green by our local paper, I observed that the paper seemed to be stopping short of the real CO2 remedies, and should have had this advice for the two families who collectively had nine kids between them:

In the next generation, no one is going to be having five and four kids.  Certainly those green Europeans would never do something as damaging as having four or five kids.  If you had aborted a few of the little darlings, just think how much CO2 you would have avoided?

Now of course I was being tongue-in-cheek, in that I would never give anyone such advice.  My point was in part to demonstrate that cutesie little pieces of advice like getting the kids to recycle more helped to reinforce the false impression that CO2 rollbacks to 1990 levels would be relatively easy.  But several readers wrote me that I was posting a straw man — that no one in the green movement was seriously talking about limiting children.  WRONG!  My father-in-law, as much as I loved the man, was a long-time greenie who believed having more than two children was close to immoral, and felt that population growth was the number one environmental problem in the world. 

And check out this new green hero:

Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love, to feel a little hand slipping into hers – and a voice calling her Mummy.

But the very thought makes her shudder with horror.

Because when Toni terminated her pregnancy, she did so in the firm belief she was helping to save the planet.

Incredibly, so determined was she that the terrible "mistake" of pregnancy should never happen again, that she begged the doctor who performed the abortion to sterilise her at the same time.

He refused, but Toni – who works for an environmental charity – "relentlessly hunted down a doctor who would perform the irreversible surgery.

Finally, eight years ago, Toni got her way.

At the age of 27 this young woman at the height of her reproductive years was sterilised to "protect the planet". ….

"Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet," says Toni, 35.

"Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population."