It didn’t have to be that way.   I think readers know my position on global warming science, but the elevator version is this:  Increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will almost certainly warm the Earth — absent feedback effects, most scientists agree it will warm the Earth about a degree C by the year 2100.  What creates the catastrophe, with warming of 5 degrees or more, are hypothesized positive feedbacks in the climate.  This second theory of strongly net positive feedback in climate is poorly proven, and in fact evidence exists the sign may not even be positive.  As a result, I believe warming from man’s Co2 will be small and manageable, and may even been unnoticeable in the background noise of natural variations.

I get asked all the time - “what if you are wrong?  What if the climate is, unlike nearly every other long-term stable natural process, dominated by strong positive feedbacks?  You buy insurance on your car, won’t you buy insurance on the earth?”

Why, yes, I answer, I do buy insurance on my car.  But I don’t pay $20,000 a year for a policy with a $10,000 deductible on a car worth $11,000.  That is Waxman-Markey.

In fact, there is a plan, proposed by many folks including myself and even at least one Congressman, that would act as a low-cost insurance policy.  It took 1000+ pages to explain the carbon trading system in Waxman-Markey– I can explain this plan in two sentences:  Institute a federal carbon excise tax on fuels whose rate increases with the carbon content per btu of the fuel.  All projected revenues of this carbon tax shall be offset with an equivalent reduction in payroll (social security) taxes. No exemptions, offsets, exceptions, special rates, etc.  Everyone gets the same fuel tax rate, everyone gets the same payroll tax rate cut.

Here are some of the advantages:

• Dead-easy to administer.  The government overhead to manage an excise tax would probably be shockingly large to any sane business person, but it is at least two orders of magnitude less than trying to administer a cap and trade system.  Just compare the BOE to CARB in California.
• Low cost to the economy.  This plan may hurt the economy or may even boost it, but either effect is negligible compared to the cost of Waxman-Markey.  Politically it would fly well, as most folks would accept a trade of increasing the cost of fuel while reducing the cost of employment.
• Replaces one regressive (or at least not progressive) tax with a different one.  In net should not increase or decrease how progressive or regressive the tax code is.
• Does not add any onerous carbon tracking or reporting to businesses

Here are why politicians will never pass this plan:

• They like taxes that they don’t have to call taxes.  Take Waxman-Markey — supporters still insist it is not a tax.  This is grossly disingenuous.  Either it raises the cost of electricity and fuel or it does not.  If it does not, it has absolutely no benefits on Co2 production.  If it does, then it is a tax.
• The whole point is to be able to throw favors at powerful campaign supporters.  A carbon tax leaves little room for this.  A cap and trade bill is a Disneyland for lobbyists.

Here are three problems, which are minor compared to those of Waxman-Market:

• We don’t know what the right tax rate is.  But almost any rate would have more benefit, dollar for dollar, than Waxman-Market.  And if we get it wrong, it can always be changed.  And it we get it too high, the impacts are minimized because that results in a higher tax cut in employment taxes.
• Imports won’t be subject to the tax.  I would support just ignoring this problem, at least at first.  We don’t worry about changing import duties based on any of our other taxes, and again this will affect the mix but likely not the overall volumes by much
• Making the government dependent on a declining revenue source.  This is probably the biggest problem — if the tax is successful, then the revenue source for the government dries up.  This is the problem with sin taxes in general, and why we find the odd situation of states sometimes doing things that promote cigarette sales because they can’t afford declining cigarette taxes, the decline in which was caused by the state’s efforts to tax and reduce cigarette use.

Postscript: The Meyer Energy Plan Proposal of 2007 actually had 3 planks:

1. large federal carbon tax, offset by reduction in income and/or payroll taxes
2. streamlined program for licensing new nuclear reactors
3. get out of the way

As we’ve discussed before (and is well known), clouds are the greatest source of uncertainty in climate sensitivity. Low-level (”boundary layer”) tropical clouds have been shown to be the largest source of inter-model difference among GCMs. Clouds have been known to be problematic for GCMs since at least the Charney Report in 1979. Given the importance of the topic for GCMs, one would have thought that AR4 would have devoted at least a chapter to the single of issue of clouds, with perhaps one-third of that chapter devoted to the apparently thorny issue of boundary layer tropical clouds.

This is what an engineering study would do - identify the most critical areas of uncertainty and closely examine all the issues related to the critical uncertainty. Unfortunately, that’s not how IPCC does things. Instead, clouds are treated in one subsection of chapter 8 and boundary layer clouds in one paragraph.

It turns out that this one paragraph was lifted almost intact from the work of the lead author of this section of the report.  The “almost” is interesting, though, because every single change made was to eliminate or tone down any conclusion that cloud feedback might actually offset greenhouse warming.  He has a nearly line by line comparison, which is really fascinating.  One sample:

Bony et al 2006 had stated that the “empirical” Klein and Hartmann (1993) correlation “leads” to a substantial increase in low cloud cover, which resulted in a “strong negative” cloud feedback. Again IPCC watered this down: “leads to” became a “suggestion” that it “might be” associated with a “negative cloud feedback” - the term “strong” being dropped by IPCC.

Remember this is in the context of a report that generally stripped out any words that implied doubt or lack of certainty on the warming side.

For decades now, the GISS surface temperature metric has diverged from satellite measurement, showing much more warming than have the satellites.   Many have argued that this divergence is in large part due to poor siting of measurement sites, making them subject to urban heat island biases.  I also pointed out a while back that much of the divergence occurs in areas like Africa and Antarctica where surface measurement coverage is quite poor compared to satellite coverage.

Anthony Watt had an interesting post where he pointed out that

This means that all of the US temperatures – including those for Alaska and Hawaii – were collected from either an airport (the bulk of the data) or an urban location

I will remind you that my son’s urban heat island project (which got similar results as the “professionals”) showed a 10F heat island over Phoenix, centered approximately on the Phoenix airport.  And don’t forget the ability of scientists to create warming through measurement adjustments in the computer, a practice on which Anthony has an update (and here).

Phillips’s findings, which were published earlier this year in the journal Science, are sobering. The world’s forests are an enormous carbon sink, meaning they absorb massive quantities of carbon dioxide, through the processes of photosynthesis and respiration. In normal years the Amazon alone absorbs three billion tons of carbon, more than twice the quantity human beings produce by burning fossil fuels. But during the 2005 drought, this process was reversed, and the Amazon gave off two billion tons of carbon instead, creating an additional five billion tons of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. That’s more than the total annual emissions of Europe and Japan combined….

Phillips’s findings, which were published earlier this year in the journal Science, are sobering. The world’s forests are an enormous carbon sink, meaning they absorb massive quantities of carbon dioxide, through the processes of photosynthesis and respiration. In normal years the Amazon alone absorbs three billion tons of carbon, more than twice the quantity human beings produce by burning fossil fuels. But during the 2005 drought, this process was reversed, and the Amazon gave off two billion tons of carbon instead, creating an additional five billion tons of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. That’s more than the total annual emissions of Europe and Japan combined.

As if that’s not enough bad news, new research presented in March at a conference organized by the University of Copenhagen, with the support of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says that as much as 85 percent of the Amazon forests will be lost if the temperature in the region increases by just 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit.

There are several questions I had immediately, which I won’t dwell on too much in this article because I have yet to get a copy of the actual study.  However, some immediate thoughts:

• Studies like this are interesting, but a larger question for climate science is at what point does continuing to study only positive feedback effects in climate without putting similar effort into understanding and scaling negative feedback effects become useless?  After all, it is the net of positive and negative feedback effects that matter.  Deep understanding of one isolated effect in a wildly complex and chaotic system only has limited utility.
• I am willing to believe that a 2005 drought led to a 2005 reduction or even reversal of the Amazon’s ability to consume carbon.  But what has happened since?  It seems to me quite possible that when the rains returned, there was a year of faster than average growth, and that much of the carbon emitted in 2005 may well have been re-absorbed in the subsequent years.
• I am always suspicious of studies focusing on one area that simultaneously draw conclusions about links to certain climate effects.  For example, did the biologists measuring forest growth really put an equal quality effort into showing that the drought was not caused by el Nino or other ENSO variations and was instead caused by global warming?  I doubt it.  I have not seen the study in question, but in every one I have seen like this the connection of the effect measured to anthropogenic global warming is gratuitous and unproven, but accepted in a peer-reviewed journal nonetheless because the core findings (in this case on forest growth) were well studied and the global warming conclusion fit the pre-conceived notions of the reviewers.

But should we worry?  Will the Amazon warm 7.2F (4C) and be wiped out?  Well, I thought I would look.  I was prompted to run the numbers because I know that most global temperature metrics show little or no warming over the last 30 years in the tropics, but I had never seen numbers just for the Amazon area.

To get these numbers, I went to the KNMI climate explorer and pulled the UAH satellite near-surface data for the Amazon and nearby oceans.  I know some folks have problems with satellite because they are only near-surface, but 30 years of history has shown that this data comes very close to following surface temperature changes, and all the surface measurement databases for this area are so riddled with holes and data gaps that they are virtually useless (trying to use the surface temperature record outside of the US and Europe and some small parts of Asia and Australia is very dangerous).

I used latitude 5N to 30S and Longitude 90W to 30W as shown on the box below:

Pulling the data and graphing it, this is what we see (click to enlarge):

Over the last 30 years, the area has seen a temperature trend of about a half degree C (less than one degree F) per century.  I included the more recent trend in green because the first thing I always hear back is “well, the trend may have been low in the past, but it is accelerating!” In fact, most of this warming trend was in the first half of the period — since 1995 the trend has been negative more than a degree per century.

So how much are we in danger of hitting anywhere close to 7.2F?

I am personally worried about man destroying the Amazon, but not by CO2.  My charity of choice is private land trusts that purchase land in the Amazon for preservation.  I still think that is a better approach to saving the Amazon than worrying about US tailpipe emissions.

I found this bit from Bruce McQuain similar in spirit to the rest of the bill, but hugely ironic:

Consider the mundane topic of shade trees:

SEC. 205. TREE PLANTING PROGRAMS.

(a) Findings- The Congress finds that–

(1) the utility sector is the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States today, producing approximately one-third of the country’s emissions;

(2) heating and cooling homes accounts for nearly 60 percent of residential electricity usage in the United States;

(3) shade trees planted in strategic locations can reduce residential cooling costs by as much as 30 percent;

(4) shade trees have significant clean-air benefits associated with them;

(5) every 100 healthy large trees removes about 300 pounds of air pollution (including particulate matter and ozone) and about 15 tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year;

(6) tree cover on private property and on newly-developed land has declined since the 1970s, even while emissions from transportation and industry have been rising; and

(7) in over a dozen test cities across the United States, increasing urban tree cover has generated between two and five dollars in savings for every dollar invested in such tree planting.

So now the federal government will issue guidelines and hire experts to ensure you plant shade trees properly:

(4) The term ‘tree-siting guidelines’ means a comprehensive list of science-based measurements outlining the species and minimum distance required between trees planted pursuant to this section, in addition to the minimum required distance to be maintained between such trees and–

(A) building foundations;

(B) air conditioning units;

(C) driveways and walkways;

(D) property fences;

(E) preexisting utility infrastructure;

(F) septic systems;

(G) swimming pools; and

(H) other infrastructure as deemed appropriate

Why is this ironic?  Well, this is the same Federal government that cannot spare a dime (or more than 0.25 FTE) for bringing up its temperature measurement sites (whose output help drive this whole bill) to its own standards, allowing errors and biases in the measurements 2-3 times larger than the historic warming signal we are trying to measure.  See more here.

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.

However, I think skeptics are getting a bit carried away.  Let’s try to avoid the exaggeration and hype of which we often accuse global warming alarmists.  This decision does not reflect well on the EPA, but let’s make sure we understand what it was and was not:

• This was not a “study” in the sense we would normally use the word.  These were comments submitted by an individual to a regulatory decision and/or a draft report.  The  authors claimed to only have 4 or 5 days to create these comments.  To this extent, they are not dissimilar to the types of comments many of us submitted to the recently released climate change synthesis report (comments, by the way, which still have not been released though the final report is out — this in my mind is a bigger scandal than how Mr. Carlin’s comments were handled).  Given this time frame, the comments are quite impressive, but nonetheless not a “study.”
• This was not an officially sanctioned study that was somehow suppressed.  In other words, I have not seen anywhere that Mr. Carlin was assigned by the agency to produce a report on anthropogenic global warming.  This does not however imply that what Mr. Carlin was doing was unauthorized.  This is a very normal activity — staffers from various departments and background submitting comments on reports and proposed regulations.  He was presumably responding to an internal call for comments by such and such date.
• I have had a number of folks write me saying that everyone is misunderstanding the key email — that it should be taken on its face — and read to mean that Mr. Carlin commented on issues outside of the scope of the study or based document he was commenting on.  An example might be submitting comments saying man is not causing global warming to a study discussing whether warming causes hurricanes.   However, his comments certainly seem relevant to Endangerment question — the background, action, and proposed finding the comments were aimed at is on the EPA website here.  Note in particular the comments in Carlin’s paper were totally relevant and on point to the content of the technical support document linked on that page.
• The fourth email cited by the CEI, saying that Mr. Carlin should cease spending any more time on global warming, is impossible to analyze without more context.  There are both sinister and perfectly harmless interpretations of such an email.  For example, I could easily imagine an employee assigned to area Y who had a hobbyist interest in area X and loved to comment on area X being asked by his supervisor to go back and do his job in area Y.  I have had situations like that in the departments I have run.

What does appear to have happened is that Mr. Carlin responded to a call for comments, submitted comments per the date and process required, and then had the organization refuse to forward those comments because they did not fit the storyline the EPA wanted to put together.  This content-based rejection of his submission does appear to violate normal EPA rules and practices and, if not, certainly violates the standards we would want such supposedly science-based regulatory bodies to follow.  But let’s not upgrade this category 2 hurricane to category 5 — this was not, as I understand it, an agency suppressing an official agency-initiated study.

I may be a cynical libertarian on this, but this strikes me more as a government issue than a global warming issue.  Government bureaucracies love consensus, even when they have to impose it.  I don’t think there is a single agency in Washington that has not done something similar — ie suppressed internal concerns and dissent when the word came down from on high what the answer was supposed to be on a certain question they were supposed to be “studying.”**  This sucks, but its what we get when we build this big blundering bureaucracy to rule us.

Anyway, Anthony Watt is doing a great job staying on top of this issue.  His latest post is here, and includes an updated version of Carlin’s comments.   Whatever the background, Carlin’s document is well worth a read.  I have mirrored the document here.

**Postscript: Here is something I have observed about certain people in both corporate and government beauracracies.  I appologize, but I don’t really have the words for this and I don’t know the language of psychology.   There is a certain type of person who comes to believe, really believe, their boss’s position on an issue.  We often chalk this up from the outside to brown-nosing or an “Eddie Haskell” effect where people fake their beliefs, but I don’t think this is always true.  I think there is some sort of human mental defense mechanism that people have a tendency to actually adopt (not just fake) the beliefs of those in power over them.  Certainly some folks resist this, and there are some issues too big or fundamental for this to work, but for many folks their mind will reshape itself to the beaucracracy around it.  It is why sometimes organizations cannot be fixed, and can only be blown up.

Update: The reasons skeptics react strongly to stuff like this is that there are just so many examples:

Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming….

Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.

Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea….

Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week’s meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor’s, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: “it was the position you’ve taken on global warming that brought opposition”.

Dr Taylor was told that his views running “counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful”. His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – was “inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG”.

From Odd Citizen.  More at Watts Up With That.

Though less subtle than I would have expected, this should come as no surprise to readers of my series on the recent government climate report.  All even-handed discussion or inclusion of data that might muddy the core message have been purged from a document that is far more like an advocacy group press release than a scientific document.

Update: More here.

Update #2: I understand those who are skeptical of this, and feel this may have been some kind of entirely justified rebuff.  I have folks all the time sending me emails begging me to post their articles as guest authors on this blog and I say no to them all, and there is no scandal to that.  Thomas Fuller, and environmental writer for the San Francisco Examiner, was skeptical at first as well.  His story here.

Here are the differences in trendline by area of the world (he covers the whole world by grouping ocean areas with nearby continents).  GISS trend minus UAH trend, degrees C per decade:

Arctic:  0.134

North America:  -0.026

South America: -0.013

Europe:  0.05

Africa:  0.104

Asia:  0.077

Australia:  -0.02

Antarctica:  0.139

So, the three highest differences, each about an order of magnitude higher than differences in other areas, are in 1.  Antarctica;  2. Arctic; and 3. Africa.  What do these three have in common?

Well, what the have most in common is the fact that these are also the three areas of the world with the poorest surface temperature coverage.  Here is the GISS coverage showing color only in areas where they have a thermometer record within a 250km box:

The worst coverage is obviously in the Arctic, Antarctica and then Africa.  Coincidence?

Those who want to argue that the surface temperature record should be used in preference to that of satellites need to explain why the three areas in which the two diverge the most are the three areas with the worst surface temperature data coverage.  This seems to argue that flaws in the surface temperature record drive the differences between surface and satellite, and not the other way around.

Apologies to Tisdale if this is where he was going in his next post in the series.

The first thing I would observe is that the decline seems exaggerated through some scaling and smoothing gains.    The raw data, from the Cyrosphere Today site   (note different units, a square mile = about 2.6 sq. km).

But the most interesting part is what is not mentioned, even once, in this section of the report:  The Earth has two poles.  And it turns out that the south pole has actually been gaining sea ice, such that the total combined sea ice extent of the entire globe is fairly stable (click for larger version).

Now, there are folks who are willing to posit a model that allows for global warming and this kind of divergence between the poles.  But the report does not even go there.  It demonstrates an inferiority complex I see in many places of the report, refusing to even hint that reality is messy in fear that it might cloud their story.