Skeptic's Corner

Climategate (Part II)

2011-12-05T07:34:00.000-05:00

FROM-The Weekly Standard

A sequel as ugly as the original.

Steven F. Hayward

December 12, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 13
The conventional wisdom about blockbuster movie sequels is that the second acts are seldom as good as the originals. The exceptions, like The Godfather: Part II or The Empire Strikes Back, succeed because they build a bigger backstory and add dimensions to the original characters. The sudden release last week of another 5,000 emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University—ground zero of “Climategate I” in 2009—immediately raised the question of whether this would be one of those rare exceptions or Revenge of the Nerds II.

Before anyone had time to get very far into this vast archive, the climate campaigners were ready with their critical review: Nothing worth seeing here. Out of context! Cherry picking! “This is just trivia, it’s a diversion,” climate researcher Joel Smith told Politico. On the other side, Anthony Watts, proprietor of the invaluable WattsUpWithThat.com skeptic website, had the kind of memorable line fit for a movie poster. With a hat tip to the famous Seinfeld episode, Watts wrote: “They’re real, and they’re spectacular!” An extended review of this massive new cache will take months and could easily require a book-length treatment. But reading even a few dozen of the newly leaked emails makes clear that Watts and other longtime critics of the climate cabal are going to be vindicated.

Climategate I, the release of a few thousand emails and documents from the CRU in November 2009, revealed that the united-front clubbiness of the leading climate scientists was just a display for public consumption. The science of climate change was not “settled.” There was no consensus about the extent and causes of global warming; in their private emails, the scientists expressed serious doubts and disagreements on some major issues. In particular, the email exchanges showed that they were far from agreement about a key part of the global warming narrative—the famous “hockey stick” graph that purported to demonstrate that the last 30 years were the warmest of the last millennium and which made the “medieval warm period,” an especially problematic phenomenon for the climate campaign, simply go away. (See my “Scientists Behaving Badly,” The Weekly Standard, December 14, 2009.) Leading scientists in the inner circle expressed significant doubts and uncertainty about the hockey stick and several other global warming claims about which we are repeatedly told there exists an ironclad consensus among scientists. (Many of the new emails make this point even more powerfully.) On the merits, the 2009 emails showed that the case for certainty about climate change was grossly overstated.

More damning than the substantive disagreement was the attitude the CRU circle displayed toward dissenters, skeptics, and science journals that did not strictly adhere to the party line. Dissenting articles were blocked from publication or review by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), requests for raw data were rebuffed, and Freedom of Information Act requests were stonewalled. National science panels were stacked, and qualified dissenters such as NASA prize-winner John Christy were tolerated as “token skeptics.” The CRU circle was in high dudgeon over the small handful of skeptics who insisted on looking over their shoulder, revealing the climate science community to be thin-skinned and in-secure about its enterprise—a sign that something is likely amiss. Even if there was no unequivocal “smoking gun” of fraud or wrongdoing, the glimpse deep inside the climate science community was devastating. As I wrote at the time (“In Denial,” March 15, 2010), Climategate did for the global warming controversy what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war 40 years ago: It changed the narrative decisively.

The new batch of emails, over 5,300 in all (compared with about 1,000 in the 2009 release), contains a number of fresh embarrassments and huge red flags for the same lovable bunch of insider scientists. It stars the same cast, starting with the Godfather of the CRU, Phil “hide the decline” Jones, and featuring Michael “hockey stick” Mann once again in his supporting role as the Fredo of climate science, blustering along despite the misgivings and doubts of many of his peers. Beyond the purely human element, the new cache offers ample confirmation of the rank politicization of climate science and rampant cronyism that ought to trouble even firm believers in catastrophic climate change.

In fact, the emails display candid glimpses of concern inside the CRU circle. Peter Thorne of NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration), who earned his Ph.D. in climate science at East Anglia in 2001, wrote Phil Jones in a 2005 message, “I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.” An appeal to “context,” which the climate campaigners say is crucial to understanding why excerpts such as this one are unimportant, does quite the opposite, and only points to the problems the climate change campaigners have brought upon themselves by their tribalism.

This exchange between Thorne and Jones, along with numerous similar threads in the new cache, is concerned with what should and shouldn’t be included in a chapter of the IPCC’s 2007 fourth assessment report—a chapter for which Jones was the coordinating lead author along with another key Climategate figure, Kevin Trenberth. The complete chapter (if you’re keeping score at home, it’s Chapter 3 of Working Group I, “Observations: Surface and Atmospheric Climate Change”) lists 10 “lead authors” and 66 “contributing authors” in addition to Jones and Trenberth. One of Jones’s emails from 2004 displays how explicitly political the process of assembling the IPCC report is: “We have a very mixed bag of LAs [lead authors] in our chapter. Being the basic atmos obs. one, we’ve picked up number of people from developing countries so IPCC can claim good geographic representation. This has made our task harder as CLAs [contributing lead authors] as we are working with about 50% good people who can write reasonable assessments and 50% who probably can’t.”

The final chapter was amended along lines Thorne recommended, but several other objections and contrary observations (one in particular from Roger Pielke Jr. about extreme weather events that has been subsequently vindicated) were scornfully dismissed. And appeals to context avoid the question: Is this “science-by-committee” a sensible way to sort out contentious scientific issues that hold immense public policy implications? Perhaps a politicized, semi-chaotic process like the IPCC is unavoidable in a subject as wide-ranging and complex as climate change; future historians of science can debate the issue. But the high stakes involved ought to compel a maximum of open debate and transparency. Instead, the IPCC process places a premium on gatekeepers and arbiters who control what goes in and what doesn’t, and it is exactly in its exercise of the gatekeeping function that the CRU circle has shredded its credibility and trustworthiness.

One thing that emerges from the new emails is that, while a large number of scientists are working on separate, detailed nodes of climate-related issues (the reason for dozens of authors for every IPCC report chapter), the circle of scientists who control the syntheses that go into IPCC reports and the national climate reports that the U.S. and other governments occasionally produce is quite small and partial to particular outcomes of these periodic assessments. The way the process works in practice casts a shadow over one of the favorite claims of the climate campaign—namely, that there exists a firm “consensus” about catastrophic future warming among thousands of scientists. This so-called consensus reflects only the views of a much smaller subset of gatekeepers.

Beyond additional bad news for the hockey stick graph, is there anything new in these emails about scientific aspects of the issue? This will take time to sort out, but I suspect anyone with the patience to go through the weeds of all 5,300 messages and cross check them against published results may well discover troubling new aspects of how climate modeling is done, and how weak the models still are on crucial points (such as cloud behavior). Some of the new emails frankly acknowledge such problems. There are arcane discussions about how to interpolate gaps in the data, how to harmonize different data sets, and how to resolve the frequent and often inconvenient (because contradictory) anomalies in modeling results. Definite examples of political influence have emerged already from a first pass over a sample of the massive cache.

In the editing process before the IPCC’s 2001 third assessment report, Timothy Carter of the Finnish Environmental Institute wrote in 2000 to three chapter authors with the observation, “It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group.” In this case, decisions at the highest levels of what specific figures and conclusions were to appear in the short “summary for policy makers”—usually the only part of the IPCC’s multivolume reports that the media and politicians read—required changing what appeared in individual chapters, a case of the conclusions driving the findings in the detailed chapters instead of the other way around. This has been a frequent complaint of scientists participating in the IPCC process since the beginning, and the new emails show that even scientists within the “consensus” recognize the problem. Comments such as one from Jonathan Overpeck, writing in 2004 about how to summarize some ocean data in a half-page, reinforce the impression that politics drives the process: “The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s included and what is left out.”

No amount of context can possibly exonerate the CRU gang from some of the damning expressions and contrivances that appear repeatedly in the new emails. More so than the 2009 batch, these emails make clear the close collaboration between the leading IPCC scientists and environmental advocacy groups, government agencies, and partisan journalists. There are repeated instances of scientists tipping their hand that they’ve thrown in their lot with the climate ideologues. If there were only a handful of such dubious messages, they might be explained away through “context,” or as conciliatory habits of expression. But they are so numerous that it doesn’t require an advanced degree in pattern recognition to make out that these emails constitute not just a “smoking gun” of scientific bias, but a belching howitzer. Throughout the emails numerous participants refer to “the cause,” “our cause,” and other nonscientific, value-laden terms to describe the implications of one dispute or another, while demonizing scientists who express even partial dissent about the subject, such as Judith Curry of Georgia Tech.

Since the beginning of the climate change story more than 20 years ago, it has been hard to sort out whether the IPCC represents the “best” science, or merely the findings most compatible with the politically driven climate policy agenda. Both sets of emails have lifted the lid on the insides of the process, and it isn’t pretty.

A good example of how the political-scientific complex works hand-in-glove to tightly control the results comes from May 2009, when the IPCC authors were working on a “weather generator,” which they hoped would produce climate change scenarios tailored to localities, so as to promote favored adaptive measures (sea walls, flood control, drought readiness, etc.). This is a small but hugely controversial aspect of climate modeling, and one where politicians and advocacy groups (the World Wildlife Fund was especially keen to have this kind of work done) may well be asking scientists to do the impossible. But there’s research money in it, so scientists are only too happy to oblige. Kathryn Humphrey, a science adviser in Britain’s DEFRA (Department of Environment, Forestry, and Rural Affairs—Britain’s EPA) wrote a worried note to Phil Jones and several other scientists involved in the project about criticisms of the cloistered working group behind the weather generator scheme, noting, “Ministers have also raised questions about this so we will need to go back to them with some further advice.” Jones tries to reassure Humphrey that he’s got the working group under control: “As I’ve said on numerous occasions, if the WG [working group] isn’t there, all the people that need [the weather generator] will go off and do their own thing. This will mean that individual sectors and single studies will do a whole range of different things. This will make the uncertainties even larger!” What Jones is referring to are numerous independent scientific efforts to “downscale” climate models to predict local impacts, and the fact that the results of these separate efforts have been chaotic, rather than demonstrating consensus. Hence the need for someone in authority to marginalize uncertainties and contradictory results. But this is properly called politics, not science.

Humphrey wrote back: “I know this is extremely frustrating for you and completely understand where you are coming from. This is a political reaction, not one based on any scientific analysis of the weather generator. We did the peer review to take care of that. I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story. They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.” (Emphasis added.) Even putting the most charitable possible construction on this exchange—namely that Humphrey really thought the criticisms of the weather generator lacked solid scientific foundation—other messages in the emails make clear that many scientists understand that their models really aren’t up to it, despite Jones’s attempts at reassurance.

In a 2008 email from Jagadish Shukla of George Mason University and the Institute of Global Environment and Society to a large circle of IPCC scientists, Shukla put his finger squarely on the problem: “I would like to submit that the current climate models have such large errors in simulating the statistics of regional [climate] that we are not ready to provide policymakers a robust scientific basis for ‘action’ at a regional scale. . . . It is inconceivable that policy-makers will be willing to make billion- and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.” Despite this and other cautionary messages from scientists, Jones, DEFRA, and the IPCC charged ahead with the weather generator anyway.

Other problems with climate modeling are more -subtle and less easily discerned from the emails. In particular, there is much discussion about the political pressure to tune the climate models to isolate and emphasize the effect of carbon dioxide only, even though there are other important greenhouse gases and related factors highly relevant to a complete understanding of climate change. Carbon dioxide was emphasized because it is the variable that the policymakers made central to their monomaniacal mission to suppress fossil fuels to the exclusion of other policy strategies, such as “geoengineering,” that might be considered in the event of drastic climate change. Here and there Jones and his compatriots complain about this constraint, but go along with it anyway. But it’s another case of policy-driven science, and not science-driven policy, which we are constantly reassured is the mission of the IPCC.

These are only a few of the many problems with the climate models on which all of the predictions of doom decades hence depend. It will take months of careful review to sort the wheat from the chaff, but there is enough evidence already to support the conclusion that the climate science establishment has greatly exaggerated what it knows. One of the stranger aspects of all of these emails is how much they are concerned with statistical refinement of climate models, and how little work there seems to be on basic atmospheric physics. There are curious exchanges over the impact of changes in solar activity on global warming. The effect of fluctuations in the sun have been consistently downplayed in the climate models and IPCC reports, despite a steady stream of science journal articles—most of them peer reviewed—that argue for a more substantial weighting of solar factors. As with so many parts of climate science, the empirical basis of solar factors is controversial and incomplete.

For example, a 2003 email from Michael Mann of Penn State summarily dismisses one variation of the solar story: “I’m now more convinced than ever that there is not one single scientifically defensible element at all [in this]—the statistics, supposed climate reconstruction, and supposed ‘Cosmic Ray Flux’ estimates are all almost certainly w/out any legitimate underpinning.” And yet the basis for the idea he dismisses was largely vindicated a few months ago in a major study from CERN, the European lab that is behind the Large Hadron Collider, which found a significant role for cosmic ray flux in cloud formation. The imperatives of climate orthodoxy came immediately into view when Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director of the CERN lab, told a German news-paper, “I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them. That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.”

As all the new emails are dissected and analyzed, no doubt Jones and the CRU circle will be able to claim to have been misinterpreted or wrongly besmirched in many instances. But between their boorish behavior, attempts to conceal data and block FOIA requests, and dismissal of dissent, the climate science community has abdicated its credibility and done great damage to large-scale scientific inquiry.

It is worth revisiting one of the most infamous statements in the climate change saga, which came in 1989 from the late Stanford environmental scientist Stephen Schneider (who turns up in many of the emails in both Climategate features):

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but—which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.

Schneider used to complain correctly that his critics omitted the last line in his statement—“I hope that means being both”—but the lesson of the Climategate saga is that scientists who become advocates, or allow themselves to become adjuncts to an advocacy campaign, damage science and policy-making alike. They end up being neither effective nor honest. One of the poignant revelations of the new emails is that some of the scientists seem to grasp this. Tommy Wils, a British climate researcher at the University of Swansea, wrote in a 2007 note to a large list of recipients: “Politicians like Al Gore are abusing the fear of global warming to get into power (while having a huge carbon footprint himself).” About Michael Grubb, a prominent climate campaigner in Britain, Tom Wigley (a prominent figure in U.S. climate research circles) wrote in 2000: “Grubb is good at impressing ignorant people. . . . Eileen Claussen [then-head of the Pew Climate Center] thinks he is a jerk. . . . Basically he is a ‘greenie’; and he bends his ‘science’ to suit his ideological agenda.” Did any of the leading climate scientists ever say this publicly, or call out environmental activist organizations for their reckless distortions of climate change? Had the climate scientists been more honest about their doubts, and more willing to discipline their allies, they might not be going through the present agony of having their dirty laundry exposed.

If Climategate II does poor box office, it won’t be because the various internal reviews exonerated the CRU from the narrow allegations of fraud in Climategate I, but because the whole show has become a crashing bore. The latest U.N. climate summit that opened last week in Durban, South Africa, is struggling to keep the diplomatic circus on life support. Yet there is one more tantalizing detail that has been largely overlooked in the commentary so far. According to “FOIA,” the online name of the hacker/leaker behind the release of these emails, there are another 220,000 emails still out there, blocked by a heavily encrypted password that “FOIA” vaguely threatens or promises to release at some future date. Stay tuned for -Climategate III.

Steven F. Hayward is the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of the Almanac of Environmental Trends.

Absolute Certainty Is Not Scientific

2011-12-03T10:40:00.000-05:00

FROM-WSJ

Global warming alarmists betray their cause when they declare that it is irresponsible to question them.

By DANIEL B. BOTKIN

One of the changes among scientists in this century is the increasing number who believe that one can have complete and certain knowledge. For example, Michael J. Mumma, a NASA senior scientist who has led teams searching for evidence of life on Mars, was quoted in the New York Times as saying, "Based on evidence, what we do have is, unequivocally, the conditions for the emergence of life were present on Mars—period, end of story."

This belief in absolute certainty is fundamentally what has bothered me about the scientific debate over global warming in the 21st century, and I am hoping it will not characterize the discussions at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, currently under way.

Reading Mr. Mumma's statement, I thought immediately of physicist Niels Bohr, a Nobel laureate, who said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it." To which Richard Feynman, another famous physicist and Nobel laureate, quipped, "Nobody understands quantum mechanics."

I felt nostalgic for those times when even the greatest scientific minds admitted limits to what they knew. And when they recognized well that the key to the scientific method is that it is a way of knowing in which you can never completely prove that something is absolutely true. Instead, the important idea about the method is that any statement, to be scientific, must be open to disproof, and a way of knowing how to disprove it exists.

Therefore, "Period, end of story" is something a scientist can say—but it isn't science.

I was one of many scientists on several panels in the 1970s who reviewed the results from the Viking Landers on Mars, the ones that were supposed to conduct experiments that would help determine whether there was or wasn't life on that planet. I don't remember anybody on those panels talking in terms of absolute certainty. Instead, the discussions were about what the evidence did and did not suggest, and what might be disprovable from them and from future landers.

I was also one of a small number of scientists—mainly ecologists, climatologists and meteorologists—who in the 1970s became concerned about the possibility of a human-induced global warming, based on then-new measurements. It seemed to be an important scientific problem, both as part of the beginning of a new science of global ecology and as a potentially major practical problem that nations would have to deal with. It did not seem to be something that should or would rise above standard science and become something that one had to choose sides in. But that's what has happened.

Some scientists make "period, end of story" claims that human-induced global warming definitely, absolutely either is or isn't happening. For me, the extreme limit of this attitude was expressed by economist Paul Krugman, also a Nobel laureate, who wrote in his New York Times column in June, "Betraying the Planet" that "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." What had begun as a true scientific question with possibly major practical implications had become accepted as an infallible belief (or if you're on the other side, an infallible disbelief), and any further questions were met, Joe-McCarthy style, "with me or agin me."

Not only is it poor science to claim absolute truth, but it also leads to the kind of destructive and distrustful debate we've had in last decade about global warming. The history of science and technology suggests that such absolutism on both sides of a scientific debate doesn't often lead to practical solutions.

It is helpful to go back to the work of the Wright brothers, whose invention of a true heavier-than-air flying machine was one kind of precursor to the Mars Landers. They basically invented aeronautical science and engineering, developed methods to test their hypotheses, and carefully worked their way through a combination of theory and experimentation. The plane that flew at Kill Devil Hill, a North Carolina dune, did not come out of true believers or absolute assertions, but out of good science and technological development.

Let us hope that discussions about global warming can be more like the debates between those two brothers than between those who absolutely, completely agree with Paul Krugman and those who absolutely, completely disagree with him. How about a little agnosticism in our scientific assertions—and even, as with Richard Feynman, a little sense of humor so that we can laugh at our errors and move on? We should all remember that Feynman also said, "If you think that science is certain—well that's just an error on your part."

Mr. Botkin, president of the Center for the Study of the Environment and professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of the forthcoming "Discordant Harmonies: Ecology in a Changing World" (Oxford University Press).

The Great Global Warming Fizzle

2011-11-29T07:34:00.000-05:00

FROM-WSJ

The climate religion fades in spasms of anger and twitches of boredom.

By BRET STEPHENS

How do religions die? Generally they don't, which probably explains why there's so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can't kill what wasn't there to begin with.

Still, Zeus and Apollo are no longer with us, and neither are Odin and Thor. Among the secular gods, Marx is mostly dead and Freud is totally so. Something did away with them, and it's worth asking what.

Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.

As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term "climate change" when thermometers don't oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other "deniers." And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.

This week, the conclave of global warming's cardinals are meeting in Durban, South Africa, for their 17th conference in as many years. The idea is to come up with a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire next year, and to require rich countries to pony up $100 billion a year to help poor countries cope with the alleged effects of climate change. This is said to be essential because in 2017 global warming becomes "catastrophic and irreversible," according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency.

Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the climate apocalypse. Namely, the financial apocalypse.

The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won't be signing on to a new Kyoto. The Chinese and Indians won't make a move unless the West does. The notion that rich (or formerly rich) countries are going to ship $100 billion every year to the Micronesias of the world is risible, especially after they've spent it all on Greece.

Cap and trade is a dead letter in the U.S. Even Europe is having second thoughts about carbon-reduction targets that are decimating the continent's heavy industries and cost an estimated $67 billion a year. "Green" technologies have all proved expensive, environmentally hazardous and wildly unpopular duds.

All this has been enough to put the Durban political agenda on hold for the time being. But religions don't die, and often thrive, when put to the political sidelines. A religion, when not physically extinguished, only dies when it loses faith in itself.

That's where the Climategate emails come in. First released on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit two years ago and recently updated by a fresh batch, the "hide the decline" emails were an endless source of fun and lurid fascination for those of us who had never been convinced by the global-warming thesis in the first place.

But the real reason they mattered is that they introduced a note of caution into an enterprise whose motivating appeal resided in its increasingly frantic forecasts of catastrophe. Papers were withdrawn; source material re-examined. The Himalayan glaciers, it turned out, weren't going to melt in 30 years. Nobody can say for sure how high the seas are likely to rise—if much at all. Greenland isn't turning green. Florida isn't going anywhere.

The reply global warming alarmists have made to these dislosures is that they did nothing to change the underlying science, and only improved it in particulars. So what to make of the U.N.'s latest supposedly authoritative report on extreme weather events, which is tinged with admissions of doubt and uncertainty? Oddly, the report has left climate activists stuttering with rage at what they call its "watered down" predictions. If nothing else, they understand that any belief system, particularly ones as young as global warming, cannot easily survive more than a few ounces of self-doubt.

Meanwhile, the world marches on. On Sunday, 2,232 days will have elapsed since a category 3 hurricane made landfall in the U.S., the longest period in more than a century that the U.S. has been spared a devastating storm. Great religions are wise enough to avoid marking down the exact date when the world comes to an end. Not so for the foolish religions. Expect Mayan cosmology to take a hit to its reputation when the world doesn't end on Dec. 21, 2012. Expect likewise when global warming turns out to be neither catastrophic nor irreversible come 2017.

And there is this: Religions are sustained in the long run by the consolations of their teachings and the charisma of their leaders. With global warming, we have a religion whose leaders are prone to spasms of anger and whose followers are beginning to twitch with boredom. Perhaps that's another way religions die

Alternative Energy's Alternate Reality

2011-11-27T17:11:00.000-05:00

FROM-Forbes

Bill Frezza

Creating a “green energy” economy may be the most daunting central planning task ever attempted. It entails nothing less than the reengineering of our entire energy infrastructure. And, like all central planning schemes, it is based on a roadmap that eschews real-world experience and sound economics in favor of utopian ideology driven by political connections.

Now the experiment is unraveling, having barely begun. As the parade of government-subsidized failures like Solyndra, Stirling Energy, SpectraWatt, Evergreen Solar, Beacon Power, and others mount, now is a good time to look at how all the pieces of the alternative energy puzzle are supposed to fit together—and what happens when they don’t.

Everyone acknowledges that electricity generated from wind and solar cannot be produced and delivered at prices that compete with coal or gas. However, alternative energy advocates believe that someday the cost curves will cross, and that government subsidies will accelerate that day’s arrival.

For this to come true, multiple problems have to be solved before taxpayers run out of money or patience. Along the way, the alternative energy industry has to avoid getting sidetracked into the wrong technologies, as this will delay the eagerly awaited carbon-free future.

First, technology has to be invented that can deliver unprecedented levels of efficiency in the conversion of low energy-density sources like wind and solar into electricity suitable for transmission over the grid.

Second, the prices of fossil fuels have to rise, either because reserves become depleted or through the passage of regulatory encumbrances, such as a massive carbon tax.

Third, new techniques need to be developed to store electricity produced only while the sun shines or the wind blows, allowing that stored energy to be delivered later, when it is actually needed.

Fourth, massive transmission system upgrades need to occur to transport electricity from the wind and solar farms where it is produced to the urban areas where it is consumed.

Finally, unknown problems that crop up when immature technologies are brought to market have to be identified and resolved—from the scarcity of critical materials never before consumed in large quantities to the siting of massive structures that disturb the view of influential public figures. And, of course, after decades trying to protect wildlife from oil spills and other calamities, we must avert our eyes as windmills annually massacre millions of birds, many of them supposedly protected as endangered species.

Failure to solve any of these problems can doom the whole enterprise, stranding investments. Picking winners and losers in this interconnected risk management puzzle is like playing ten games of roulette simultaneously—you can only win if every bet comes in. Yet this has not dissuaded the Department of Energy from smacking your money down. So, how is our Nobel Prize-winning high roller doing?

Unchanging Science

2011-11-25T13:02:00.000-05:00

FROM-The Weekly Standard

Among other things the global warming crusaders got wrong: skepticism is a virtue, not a vice.

Joseph Bottum and William Anderson

In retrospect, we probably should have paid more attention when, around 2005, activists shifted their primary vocabulary from global warming to climate change to describe the impact of human beings on this biosphere we call the Earth. Both phrases had been around for a while, of course. Global warming got its modern start back in 1975, when the journal Science published a feature asking, “Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” In one form or another, climate change has been in use since the physicist Joseph Fourier wrote of the greenhouse effect in the 1820s.

For that matter, both are unexceptionable meteorological terms with reasonably clear meanings: global warming a particular species or instantiation of general changes in the globe’s climate. The public purpose of those words, however—the political intent: That was a different thing altogether. For decades, global warming seemed a powerful, dynamic term to use—an apocalyptic phrase that summoned a grim vision of the eschaton, our world reduced to a lifeless wasteland. The only trouble was that it required the world to be, you know, warming. Constantly. A cold winter, and people started to wonder. A chilly spring, and people started to doubt.

Recent news reports have been dominated by squabbles between Berkeley’s Richard Muller and Georgia Tech’s Judith Curry, both involved in research that led to the release of data in October from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures study. Muller claims that the fact of global warming now leaves “little room for doubt,” while Curry tells the Daily Mail that there exists “no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped.” And yet, even in the midst of touting the study, Muller admits that the Berkeley data show that temperatures have not risen over the last decade.

Which confirms, more or less, what seems to be emerging as the feeling of the general public: These recent winters have been cold, and the summers themselves not so hot. That, in turn, creates a problem, for no sense of impending apocalypse survives widespread disbelief. And so—right around the point where it all started to seem a little hard to swallow—the phrase climate change, more generic if less picturesque, began to slip into public pronouncements, supplanting the old, falsifiable term global warming. A bitter January in the Midwest could well be a sign of climate change. Hurricanes in the Caribbean, mudslides in Latin America, floods in Australia. Earthquakes, even. Everything and anything, the whole wild uncertainty of the world, proved that we were right to feel under the gun—faced with an eschatological doom of our own creation.

The more the term embraced, however, the less it explained. That’s not as contradictory as it may seem. There’s a simple epistemological process by which, as we move up the genus-species tree, we arrive at ideas that cover more cases but convey less information: Lots more mammals exist in general than marmosets in particular, but mammal doesn’t tell us as much about the beast in question as marmoset does. Move up high enough into the linguistic arbor, and you arrive at terms that refer to all but mean none: thing, for example, or being.

Or climate change, as far as that goes. The great emotional gain of the shift from global warming to climate change was that the name had become so generic that nothing imaginable could prove it wrong. Every shift in weather is a confirming instance. The only problem left was the pesky little scientific one that, well, nothing imaginable could prove it wrong. In its public use, in the mouths of activists and the titles of organizations such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the phrase had come to describe something nonfalsifiable.

This is what was in the background when Ivar Giaever, a Nobel laureate in physics, resigned recently from the American Physical Society—in protest over the society’s loudly declared position that evidence of human-caused climate change is “incontrovertible.” Giaever is not some committed global warming skeptic, but he decided that he just couldn’t stomach the claim that anything in science is incontrovertible. If you can’t imagine conditions under which it might be controverted, then you’re no longer doing science.

It was back in the 1930s that Karl Popper popularized the idea of falsifiability as a necessary property of a scientific proposition. Several of the intellectual currents of the era combined to make Popper’s work seem a major breakthrough. The mechanisms of inductive logic had become a crisis point in philosophy, for example, and the commonly used “fact-value distinction” lacked clarity.

None of these philosophical problems seem particularly pressing these days, but the concept of falsifiability still grants some insight into the vagaries of modern environmentalism. In politics, the notion that climate change can’t be falsified—everything only serves to confirm it, nothing imaginable can contradict it—has been a marvelous boon. In science, the fact that climate change can’t be falsified seems to prove, mostly, that climate change isn’t science: There’s no way to test for it, no way to quantify it, and no way to demonstrate it.

If politics is the human activity by which collective decisions are made, then (whatever the structure of the regime, from the most coercive authoritarianism to the most radical democracy) all government depends on some kind of agreement. Our political instincts have developed over many millennia, but the essential commonality is that we are most comfortable when we shape our opinions to the consensus of our group. As a general matter, we’d rather be wrong in a group than right but alone.

Science, on the other hand, is a methodological tool by which we coordinate observation, logic, and experiment to attempt to discover facts. Science doesn’t deal in either certainty or consensus. Every well-formed theory contains a set of testable hypotheses. When these hypotheses fail confirmation by repeated experiment, the theory has to change. Thus the progress of science is halting and erratic, ultimately convergent on, but never achieving, final explanations of our world.

Naturally, that means confusion reigns when scientists dabble in politics and politicians attempt to explain science—as when we are confronted by such oxymorons as “settled science.” And, unfortunately, in the worlds of climate change, such confusions seem to be happening a lot—from the United Nations agency that got caught taking an environmental activist group’s unsupported (and mistaken) word that Himalayan glaciers would all be melted away by 2035, to the Times Atlas that recently decided global warming would be more striking if 15 percent of the Greenland ice cap were arbitrarily erased from the map. To say nothing of the 2009 case in which bizarre emails between influential scientists and activists, hacked from a server at the University of East Anglia (which is climate-change central, keeper of international temperature records), were released to the public.

Professional scientists are people, of course, and thus participants in the rough and tumble of political debate. Professional politicians are also people, of a sort, and they’re always eager to use the prestige of science to claim support for their political goals. Most of the time, these crossover category errors stay relatively minor. Occasionally, however, conflations of politics and science snowball into disasters for both politics and science—and the debate over climate change is as clear an example as we’ve had since stem cells rolled into public view.

An hour’s poking around on the Internet reveals that no scientific consensus on massive human-caused climate change actually exists. Those afflicted with what economists call “perverse incentives,” however, want scientific consensus to exist, and they try, hard, to pull that consensus into being. Naturally, the debate is skewed toward the faction which controls the most political and economic resources—particularly the United Nations, on the commanding heights of resource allocation for activists through the mechanism of its various interlocking directorates of committees and NGOs.

The result is an astonishing tangle of mostly ad hominem arguments. Proponents of catastrophic global warming claim that their opponents are in denial and corrupted by corporate funding. Skeptics counter that these alarmists are corrupted by government funding and political pressure. The result has been good for neither politicians nor scientists, with every new poll betraying smaller numbers of those who trust either government or science to speak the truth—much less to fix our strange and broken world.

As far as the actual facts go, they go quickly, the first casualties in the battles at the crossroads of science and politics. We do know that there have been periodic ice ages for the past million or so years, and that the period of those ice ages is on the order of 100,000 years. About 10 percent of discernible history is made up of warm periods (such as our current climate), and the rest much colder, with large portions of the earth covered with thick ice.

The cause of this periodicity is not well understood. Human activity may have contributed to some of it recently, but clearly not to changes occurring over millions of years. Variations in solar irradiance, changes in atmospheric gases, variable ocean currents, and cosmic rays have been hypothesized, each the bearer of a much greater burden than human activity could be. We now appear, on the basis of prior history, to be in the last stages of a warm period which has existed, with some variations, for about 10,000 years.

Within each era, variances of climate occur, as warmer and colder periods of several hundred years come and go. The causes of these changes are similarly uncertain. Is there an ideal global average temperature? If so, what is it? And how do we measure it? Can our species influence these changes? If so, should we? In which direction? What are the costs, risks, and benefits? These questions are not, to say the least, in any realm of settled science.

Enter the climate scientists. The research enterprise in the modern world is a large-scale activity. Difficult questions are raised, and hypotheses are generated to move toward an answer. This requires hiring staff, recruiting experts and consultants, purchasing equipment, and putting all of it in a building, preferably on a university campus. Most of all, what’s needed for this kind of research is oceans of money. And where money is the driver, politics is the unavoidable road down which the scientist has to race. Grant-making authorities, whether in government, industries, or foundations, tend to have a preferred perspective on the process and outcome of research. These preferences are not lost on the applicant researchers.

A few research centers have dominated the study of climate change, and these are typically funded by national governments, with the approval of U.N. agencies and the transnational perspective that U.N. agencies represent. What has emerged, in other words, is a political consensus that emphasizes the claim of ongoing climate change which (1) tends toward warming, (2) is caused by human activity, and (3) threatens to be apocalyptic. Groupthink then emerges as the dominant social response, with ostracism of skeptics and excommunication of apostates.

As the grant-achieving scientists congealed their opinions around the hypothesis (and now doctrine) of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming—warmed, themselves, by their presumptive guardianship of truth and virtue—some have succumbed to the temptation to cut corners. Dissenting investigators have been marginalized, their research papers viewed with prejudice by academic journals. The principle of free availability of raw data has been ignored. Peer review has degenerated into pal review. Cases of data destruction and tampering have been documented.

Through all this, public opinion has remained bemused, and only mildly interested, with polls suggesting a small decrease in concern over catastrophic manmade climate change and a gradual increase in disbelief about the whole thing. Which has to concern the people whose livelihood depends on predicting catastrophe. Prophecy demands belief.

Perhaps the greatest reason for any of us to feel skepticism about climate change, however, is the unchanging politics of those who employed it to advance their agendas. Are we wrong to suspect that most global warming activists are merely using global warming as the latest in a long series of tools with which to demand fundamental changes in Western civilization?

Think of it this way: The premise of catastrophe produces the conclusion that the political and economic underpinnings of Western civilization must be discarded. Governments must take control of economies. Capitalism must give way. All decisions must be made by our scientific and political elite, for only they can save us from doom.

Now, in a purely logical world, the rejection of the premise would mean that we don’t have to accept the conclusion. If A, then B and not A together produce nothing. But the people who’ve been lecturing us for more than a decade now about global warming and climate change didn’t start by holding A. They began by holding B—the conclusion, the proposition that Western civilization must change. And it is, literally, a nonfalsifiable proposition: If global warming and climate change help lead to it, then hurray for global warming and climate change. If not, well, then, they’ll find something else.

Yet facts remain stubborn things, and the thesis of climate change, at least, is clearly in decline. The once-proud carbon-trading market in Chicago is now defunct. Similar European schemes have collapsed in confusion and fraud. Alternative scientific theory is beginning to find its footing. Flawed methods have been exposed. Leaked emails indicate a corrupted scientific process. Most of all, public opinion has not been stampeded, in spite of intense climate-change advocacy in the media.

Skepticism, the prime scientific virtue, still lives, in other words. If nothing else, Ivar Giaever may yet be able to rejoin the American Physical Society.

Psychiatrist William Anderson teaches at Harvard University. Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of The Second Spring: Words into Music, Music into Words.

Muller, the snakes, the end: UPDATE

2011-10-30T11:19:00.007-04:00

DATE

"Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues."

I often wonder why it is that the "skeptic community" is inclined to deal with the fraudulent alarmist community as if they somehow had to respect them as scientist. I guess it is that real scientist are trying to hold onto the idea that this a scientific dispute rather than an ideological one. That if they just present the evidence then their peers will see the error of their ways and be won over by such passe principles as seeking facts and evidence not to mention truth.

But sadly we no longer live in the age of reason where men are moved to seek truth. We now live near the end of the progressive age where the narrative of the accepted is the path to glory and riches if not honor. Honor and truth being of little value when trying to transform the world to your ideological bent or just make a buck

Having watched this battle for many years and having honed my instincts in observation of liars on the progressive scene, it was easily recognizabble that the BEST project put together by Richard Muller was just another front for the fraud of the global warming crowd.

Two things gave me pause, the fact that Dr, Judith Curry was involved as a team member and initially that Anthony Watts was drawn into the project as I guess, an observer. Having respect for both I like most hoped that this was indeed a legitimate attempt to ascertain the truth, though I had serious doubts which I expressed when I first wrote about BEST here where I noted:

This Berkley Earth Surface Group is part of the Novim Group. It appears based on a quick review of their literature that they are very much into Geo-Engineering. In fact in a linked PDF which is described as a Novim Overview their Executive Director Michael Ditmore is quoted:

.... When it comes to climate change, he said, the world doesn’t have time to let politics and innuendo block the best available scientific thinking from reaching the public.

“The problems are not unsolvable, but we’re running out of time,” Ditmore said.

It seems to me that Mr. Ditmore has already determined in his own mind that man made climate change/global warming is not something to be determined through study of the temperature records but rather an established fact in need of immediate control.

Being just an observer I let it go until a short time later when a video of a presentation by Dr. Muller was getting a lot of attention. It seemed as if the entire "realist community" was christening him as some sort of new skeptics hero for a few comments he made in the presentation and ignoring the over all warmist bias of the presentation.

I did a rather long analysis of his "talk" which received a lot of attention for a time, but I guess was not taken as seriously as I would have hoped because everyone seemed as if they were waiting on pins and needles for BEST to release their report, as if this might finally validate the skeptics points.
But the entire presentation by Dr Muller was nothing more than flim flam as I pointed out

The contradictions in Dr Muller's public positions on the science of global warming is obvious. On the one hand he says that virtually all the science flowing from the IPCC and the various proponent individuals and organizations is shoddy yet he believes that the science that underpins it which is the product of those same indviduals and organizations is accurate.

Nowhere is this contradiction more obvious than in the next section of his lecture when the good doctor goes after the "Hockey Stick" and "climategate". This is what made Dr Muller an instant hero in the realist community. This portion of the lecture went viral though it only represents 5 minutes of a 52 minute presentation.

He basically destroys the reputation and research of most of climate science's most notable super stars and yet he believes the science they promote is sound, amazing.

Here you had a man going through the science of global warming pointing out all the flaws, not only in the theory but also impugning the reputations of the scientist most responsible for promoting the theory and the manner in which they have arrived at that theory and yet he still found the theory to be valid, he is either a fool or a charlatan. Dr. Richard Muller is no fool.

In a later post I pointed this out

This has become the normal operating method in the climate science field, even when it does not involve climate scientist. For all his dramatic outrage at the scientist involved in the "climategate" scandal, Dr Muller seems totally willing to ignore inconvenient truths in his own analysis on the state of the science underpinning global warming. He is not alone as the vast majority of the rest of the scientific community seems to accept the theory on it's face without the least bit of critical thinking.

Why does the skeptic community continually do battle with scientist who will obviously lie, distort, fudge and use any Alinskyesk trick in the book to promote their agenda? It is not as if these people are ever going to say, "Oh wow, now I get it, thanks for straightening me out." They don't care about science. From the Daily Mail:

In fact, Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties – a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained.

‘There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’

However, Prof Muller denied warming was at a standstill.

‘We see no evidence of it [global warming] having slowed down,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. There was, he added, ‘no levelling off’...

...‘This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting,’ Prof Curry said. ‘Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.’
Prof Muller also wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal. It was here, under the headline ‘The case against global warming scepticism’, that he proclaimed ‘there were good reasons for doubt until now’.

This, too, went around the world, with The Economist, among many others, stating there was now ‘little room for doubt’.

Such claims left Prof Curry horrified.

‘Of course this isn’t the end of scepticism,’ she said. ‘To say that is the biggest mistake he [Prof Muller] has made. When I saw he was saying that I just thought, “Oh my God”.’

In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.

They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation – as they should have done, she said, a long time ago.
Yesterday Prof Muller insisted that neither his claims that there has not been a standstill, nor the graph, were misleading because the project had made its raw data available on its website, enabling others to draw their own graphs.

However, he admitted it was true that the BEST data suggested that world temperatures have not risen for about 13 years. But in his view, this might not be ‘statistically significant’, although, he added, it was equally possible that it was – a statement which left other scientists mystified.

‘I am baffled as to what he’s trying to do,’ Prof Curry said.

What he is trying to do Dr Curry is feed the narrative. We now have another temperature study (with your name on it) reportedly confirming global warming is caused by CO2, thank you very much.

I invite you to watch again Dr. Muller's famous presentation or read my anylysis of it here and here but all you really need to know is what I pointed out after Dr Muller's congressional testimony:

Contradictions seem to be Dr Muller's method of operation. As an example during his recent testimony to congress he said:

Prior groups at NOAA, NASA, and in the UK (HadCRU) estimate about a 1.2 degree C land temperature rise from the early 1900s to the present. This 1.2 degree rise is what we call global warming. Their work is excellent, and the Berkeley Earth project strives to build on it.

Putting aside the much commented on inaccuracy of the 1.2 degree C claim, he also claims that the existing work by NOAA, NASSA and Had CRU is excellent. So why set up a new study to compete with them?...

So that he and his solution to the problem of AGW can be the new authority. It is shape shifting, the old way of promoting the BIG lie has been discredited. So a new way of presenting the same lie is put forward, by garnering support of the skeptic crowd by pointing out the very distortions and lies which are the foundation of the original lie to begin with. It seems not to matter that you can destroy the very foundation of the lie and still promote the lie itself! It is the very definition of intellectual dishonesty.

The global warming crowd does not need to be right to win, they just need to be the authority, When you are the authority then you have power and that is all this is about and always has been about... power, political and economic.

Truth only prevails when it is known and you can not unleash the truth from the bed of the devil. If you are looking for respect from those who wish to destroy you then you shall destroy yourself in the attempt.

The only way for this progressive beast to be beaten is through a new structure, the old system is corrupt and decaying, it can not be propped up. This distortion of truth is happening throughout our societal institutions, no more so than in academia and the media yet the realist scientist feel they must somehow play within it. This is not a time to convince the enemy of the rightness of your view, they know that they lie and simply do not care. How do you change a system that is willing to lie to have their way? You don't, you flee it and create new structures built on truth.

You do an Ayn Rand Shrug, a Tea Party Movement, a Pajama's Media, a NIPCC, you create new structures that can replace the old ones as they collapse which they inevitably will one way or another.

If you work within a corrupt system you are either corrupted or destroyed by the system. You can not be dependent on a lie for your livelihood and tell the truth, it never works. This may not be fair, but it is reality. When you live with snakes you are bound to be bit, it is as simple as that.

I suspect that like much of this progressive agenda it will come crashing down on society like an October blizzard. But for those who know the truth my advice is to cease to work from within and find or found new places from without. It is the best thing you can do for humanity and yourself.

UPDATE:

I had meant to make a comment on this section of the Mail article talking about Dr. Muller:

However, he admitted it was true that the BEST data suggested that world temperatures have not risen for about 13 years. But in his view, this might not be ‘statistically significant’, although, he added, it was equally possible that it was – a statement which left other scientists mystified

One of the reasons it would leave other scientist mystified is that none of the models which are a large part of the foundation for the global warming theory predicted this. If temperatures have not risen over the past thirteen years the theory has in affect been falsified. But this is precisely what has happened as Dr Muller admitted even before the BEST Analysis was done which ironically is exactly what he is chastising Jim Hanson of doing in this segment of his "lecture".

Consider what he is saying here. He says "it is still happening. (global warming) The fact that you do not have warming for thirteen years does not mean that you don't have a trend."

The dispute is not whether or not there has been a warming trend over the past 150 years, the dispute is whether or not that trend is primarily the result of man made carbon dioxide introduced into the atmosphere. If ever increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not generate an increase in temperature over a thirteen year period then what does that say? A proponent can say that natural variables or atmospheric sulfates counteracted the CO2 warming but then what does that say about the nature of the scientific models and scientific understanding which could not foresee this but wishes us to believe they see the increase in temperatures decades hence?

In real world terms, my grandchildren who are being the most indoctrinated by this theology have in fact never experienced the very thing they are being taught to fear.

Global Warming -- RIP

2011-10-27T07:28:00.000-04:00

FROM-RCP

By Victor Davis Hanson

Not long ago, candidate Obama promised to cool the planet and lower the rising seas. Indeed, he campaigned on passing "cap-and-trade" legislation, a radical, costly effort to reduce America's traditional carbon energy use.

The theory was that new taxes and greater regulations would make Americans pay more for fossil-fuel energy -- a good thing if it reduced our burning of coal, oil and gas. Obama was not shy in admitting that under his green plans, electricity prices would "necessarily skyrocket." His energy secretary, Steven Chu, at one point had even said, "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe" -- that is, about $8-$10 per gallon. Fairly or not, the warming movement seemed to cast a tiny elite imposing costs on a poorer and supposedly less informed middle class.

But despite a Democrat-controlled House and Senate in 2009-2010, President Obama never passed into law any global warming legislation. Now the issue is deader than a doornail -- despite the efforts of the Environmental Protection Agency to enact new regulations that would never pass Congress.

So what happened to the global warming craze?

Corruption within the climate-change industry explains some of the sudden turnoff. "Climategate" -- the unauthorized 2009 release of private emails from the Climatic Research Unit in the United Kingdom -- revealed that many of the world's top climate scientists were knee-deep in manipulating scientific evidence to support preconceived conclusions and personal agendas. Shrill warnings about everything from melting Himalayan glaciers to shrinking polar bear populations turned out not always to be supported by scientific facts.

Unfortunately, "green" during the last three years has also become synonymous with Solyndra-style crony capitalism. Common-sense ideas like more windmills, solar panels, retrofitted houses and electric cars have all been in the news lately. But the common themes were depressingly similar: few jobs created and little competitively priced energy produced, but plenty of political donors who landed hundreds of millions of dollars in low-interest loans from the government.

Of course, it didn't help that the world's most prominent green spokesman, Nobel laureate Al Gore, made tens of millions of dollars from his own advocacy. And he adopted a lifestyle of jet travel and energy-hungry homes at odds with his pleas for everyone else to cut back.

But even without the corruption and hypocrisy, sincere advocates of man-made global warming themselves overreached. At news that the planet had not heated up at all during the last 10 years, "global warming" gave way to "climate change" -- as if to warn the public that unseasonable cold or wet weather was just as man-caused as were the old specters of drought and scorching temperatures.

Then, when "climate change" was not still enough to frighten the public into action, yet a third term followed: "climate chaos." Suddenly some "green experts" claimed that even more terrifying disasters -- from periodic hurricanes and tornadoes to volcanoes and earthquakes -- could for the first time be attributed to the burning of fossil fuels. At that point, serially changing the name of the problem suggested to many that there might not be such a problem after all.

Current hard times also explain the demise of global warming advocacy. With high unemployment and near nonexistent economic growth, Americans do not want to shut down generating plants or pay new surcharges on their power bills. Most people worry first about having any car that runs -- not whether it's a more expensive green hybrid model.

Over the last half-century, Americans have agreed that smoky plants and polluting industries needed to be cleaned up. But when the green movement began to classify clean-burning heat as a pollutant, it began to lose the cash-strapped public.

While the Obama administration was subsidizing failed or inefficient green industries, radical breakthroughs in domestic fossil-fuel exploration and recovery -- especially horizontal drilling and fracking -- have vastly increased the known American reserves of gas and oil. Modern efficient engines have meant that both can be consumed with little, if any, pollution -- at a time when a struggling U.S. economy is paying nearly half a trillion dollars for imported fossil fuels. The public apparently would prefer developing more of our own gas, oil, shale, tar sands and coal as an alternative to going broke by either importing more fuels from abroad or subsidizing more inefficient windmills and solar panels at home.

We simply don't know positively whether recent human activity has caused the planet to warm up to dangerous levels. But we do know that those who insist it does are sometimes disingenuous, often profit-minded, and nearly always impractical.

Cult of Global Warming Is Losing Influence

2011-10-24T07:35:00.001-04:00

FROM-RCP

By Michael Barone

Religious faith is a source of strength in many people's lives. But religious faith when taken too far can prove ludicrous -- or disastrous.

On Oct. 22, 1844, thousand of Millerites, having sold all their possessions, climbed to the top of hills in Upstate New York to await the return of Jesus and the end of the world. They suffered "the great disappointment" when it didn't happen.

In 1212, or so the legends go, thousands of Children's Crusaders set off from France and Germany expecting the sea to part so they could march peaceably and convert Muslims in the Holy Land. It didn't, and many were shipwrecked or sold into slavery.

In 1898, the cavalrymen of the Madhi, ruler of Sudan for 13 years, went into the Battle of Omdurman armed with swords, believing that they were impervious to bullets. They weren't, and they were mowed down by British Maxim guns.

A similar but more peaceable fate is befalling believers in what I think can be called the religion of the global warming alarmists
.
They have an unshakeable faith that manmade carbon emissions will produce a hotter climate, causing multiple natural disasters. Their insistence that we can be absolutely certain this will come to pass is based not on science -- which is never fully settled, witness the recent experiments that may undermine Albert Einstein's theory of relativity -- but on something very much like religious faith.
All the trappings of religion are there. Original sin: Mankind is responsible for these prophesied disasters, especially those slobs who live on suburban cul-de-sacs and drive their SUVs to strip malls and tacky chain restaurants.

The need for atonement and repentance: We must impose a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, which will increase the cost of everything and stunt economic growth.

Ritual, from the annual Earth Day to weekly recycling.

Indulgences, like those Martin Luther railed against: private jet-fliers like Al Gore and sitcom heiress Laurie David can buy carbon offsets to compensate for their carbon-emitting sins.

Corporate elitists, like General Electric's Jeff Immelt, profess to share this faith, just as cynical Venetian merchants and prim Victorian bankers gave lip service to the religious enthusiasms of their days. Bad for business not to. And if you're clever, you can figure out how to make money off it.

Believers in this religion have flocked to conferences in Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto and Copenhagen, just as Catholic bishops flocked to councils in Constance, Ferrara and Trent, to codify dogma and set new rules.

But like the Millerites, the global warming clergy has preached apocalyptic doom -- and is now facing an increasingly skeptical public. The idea that we can be so completely certain of climate change 70 to 90 years hence that we must inflict serious economic damage on ourselves in the meantime seems increasingly absurd.

If carbon emissions were the only thing affecting climate, the global-warming alarmists would be right. But it's obvious that climate is affected by many things, many not yet fully understood, and implausible that SUVs will affect it more than variations in the enormous energy produced by the sun.

Skepticism has been increased by the actions of believers. Passage of the House cap-and-trade bill in June 2009 focused politicians and voters on the costs of global-warming religion. And disclosure of the Climategate emails in November 2009 showed how the clerisy was willing to distort evidence and suppress dissenting views in the interest of propagation of the faith.

We have seen how the United Nations agency whose authority we are supposed to respect took an item from an environmental activist group predicting that the Himalayan glaciers would melt in 2350 and predicted that the melting would take place in 2035. No sensible society would stake its economic future on the word of folks capable of such an error.

In recent years, we have seen how negative to 2 percent growth hurts many, many people, as compared to what happens with 3 to 7 percent growth. So we're much less willing to adopt policies that will slow down growth not just for a few years but for the indefinite future.

Media, university and corporate elites still profess belief in global warming alarmism, but moves toward policies limiting carbon emissions have fizzled out, here and abroad. It looks like we'll dodge the fate of the Millerites, the children's crusaders and the Mahdi's cavalrymen.

2011-10-06T08:35:00.000-04:00

FROM-The Wall Street Journal

During the decade that Al Gore dominated the environmental debate, global carbon-dioxide emissions rose by 28.5%.

By ROBERT BRYCE

Over the past two months, environmental activists have held protests at the White House and elsewhere hoping to convince the Obama administration to deny a permit for the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast. Some of those same activists have launched a series of demonstrations called "Moving Planet" to move "the planet away from fossil fuels towards a safer climate future." And next month, leaders from dozens of countries will meet at the 17th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Durban, South Africa.

But for all of the sturm und drang about climate change, what has actually happened? It's time to acknowledge five obvious truths about the climate-change issue:

1) The carbon taxers/limiters have lost. Carbon-dioxide emissions have been the environmental issue of the past decade. Over that time period, Al Gore became a world-renowned figure for his documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," for which he won an Oscar. In 2007, he, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), collected a Nobel Peace Prize for "informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change." That same year, the IPCC released its fourth assessment report, which declared that "most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions." (Emphasis in original.)

Two years later, Copenhagen became the epicenter of a world-wide media frenzy as some 5,000 journalists, along with some 100 world leaders and scores of celebrities, descended on the Danish capital to witness what was billed as the best opportunity to impose a global tax or limit on carbon dioxide.

The result? Nothing, aside from promises by various countries to get serious—really serious—about carbon emissions sometime soon.

Here's a reality check: During the same decade that Mr. Gore and the IPCC dominated the environmental debate, global carbon-dioxide emissions rose by 28.5%.

Those increases reflect soaring demand for electricity, up by 36%, which in turn fostered a 47% increase in coal consumption. (Natural-gas use increased by 29% while oil use grew by 13%.) Carbon-dioxide emissions are growing because people around the world understand the essentiality of electricity to modernity. And for many countries, the cheapest way to produce electrons is by burning coal.

2) Regardless of whether it's getting hotter or colder—or both—we are going to need to produce a lot more energy in order to remain productive and comfortable.

3) The carbon-dioxide issue is not about the United States anymore. Sure, the U.S. is the world's second-largest energy consumer. But over the past decade, carbon-dioxide emissions in the U.S. fell by 1.7%. And according to the International Energy Agency, the U.S. is now cutting carbon emissions faster than Europe, even though the European Union has instituted an elaborate carbon-trading/pricing scheme. Why? The U.S. is producing vast quantities of cheap natural gas from shale, which is displacing higher-carbon coal.

Meanwhile, China's emissions jumped by 123% over the past decade and now exceed those of the U.S. by more than two billion tons per year. Africa's carbon-dioxide emissions jumped by 30%, Asia's by 44%, and the Middle East's by a whopping 57%. Put another way, over the past decade, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions—about 6.1 billion tons per year—could have gone to zero and yet global emissions still would have gone up.

4) We have to get better—and we are—at turning energy into useful power. In 1882, Thomas Edison's first central power station on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan converted less than 3% of the heat energy of the coal being burned into electricity. Today's best natural-gas-fired turbines have thermal efficiencies of 60%. Nearly all of the things we use on a daily basis—light bulbs, computers, automobiles—are vastly more efficient than they were just a few years ago. And over the coming years those devices will get even better at turning energy into useful lighting, computing and motive power.

5) The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might—repeat, might—travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein's theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth's atmosphere.

Furthermore, even if we accept that carbon dioxide is bad, it's not clear exactly what we should do about it. In September, Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder published a report that determined "switching from coal to natural gas would do little for global climate." Mr. Wigley found that the particulates put into the atmosphere by coal-fired power plants, "although detrimental to the environment, cool the planet by blocking incoming sunlight."

If Mr. Wigley's right, then using sources that emit no particulates, like nuclear and natural gas, will not make a major difference in averting near-term changes in the climate caused by carbon dioxide. But then—and here's the part that most media outlets failed to discuss when reporting on the Wigley study—widespread use of renewables such as wind and solar won't help much, either.

Will Happer, a professor of physics at Princeton and a skeptic about global climate change, recently wrote that the "contemporary 'climate crusade' has much in common with the medieval crusades." Indeed, politicians and pundits are hectored to adhere to the orthodoxy of the carbon-dioxide-is-the-only-climate-problem alarmists. And that orthodoxy prevails even though the most ardent alarmists have no credible plans to replace the hydrocarbons that now provide 87% of the world's energy.

It's time to move the debate past the dogmatic view that carbon dioxide is evil and toward a world view that accepts the need for energy that is cheap, abundant and reliable.

Warmists Think We're Stupid

2011-10-04T08:10:00.000-04:00

FROM-American Spectator

By Ross Kaminsky

But they're not so hot themselves, as a Reason Foundation study delicately points out.

One of the key attributes of the global warming movement, like any cult, is that it posits a doomsday scenario if we don't follow their dangerous prescriptions. Whether it is cyanide-laced Kool Aid or the economic equivalent (were we to follow the cap-and-trade crowd), the "cure" is not only worse than the so-called problem but premised on the idea that people are stupid.

The warmists say that we'll have more disease and death if the planet warms even though studies by actual scientists frequently conclude otherwise.

This week's five-alarm fire (literally) comes from the NY Times which warns us that "Across millions of acres, the pines of the northern and central Rockies are dying, just one among many types of forests that are showing signs of distress these days." The article, which implies that the earth will die if we don't stop climate change from killing trees, is at least honest enough to use "if" six times, "might" three times, "may" seven times, and other qualifiers of their doomsday view such as "not sure," "possible," and "could."

While this particular Times story concerns North America, an actual study of African rainfall, done by scientists from NOAA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder (both hotbeds of climate change alarmism), concludes that changes in rainfall levels in both northern and southern Africa are due to changes in sea surface temperatures, and that those temperature changes are not human-caused. Furthermore, when the UN's IPCC tried to model the change in African rainfall based on human causes, they failed: "The ensemble of greenhouse-gas-forced experiments, conducted as part of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, fails to simulate the pattern or amplitude of the twentieth-century African drying, indicating that the drought conditions were likely of natural origin."

But if you really want to scare people into wasting their lives on public transport or sleeping in uncomfortably cold houses during the winter or subsidizing Solyndra, you have to make them think that human life is directly at stake.

One such example regards malaria, long the bogeyman for those warmists who, in the interest of scaring us about what the evil rich are doing to the southern hemisphere's poor, claimed for years that warming will cause a massive increase in the prevalence of and deaths from malaria.

However, a 2010 study led by scientists from the University of Florida concluded that "widespread claims that rising mean temperatures have already led to increases in worldwide malaria morbidity and mortality are largely at odds with observed decreasing global trends in both its endemicity and geographic extent." Furthermore, they said that any increase in malaria cases from warming would likely be two orders of magnitude smaller than the reduction in cases due to "control measures" taken by humans, such as bed nets and anti-malarial drugs. (Two orders of magnitude means 100x, so 10 is two orders of magnitude smaller than 1000.)

It's also worth noting that the lead scientist, whom I interviewed, was a full member of the cult of Algore. It was fascinating to hear him claim that when it comes to warming, people like me who think it's somewhere between an exaggeration and a hoax (and closer to the latter) are "bucking a broad scientific consensus." Yet when it came to his study's different results from other people's claims, he suggested that "Science is intrinsically adversarial, and we get at the truth through critical thought. That means scientists should question every single study they read." You don't say.

The key point is not that malaria cases won't increase, but that they won't increase because humans are smart and adaptable.

Malaria isn't the only case of warmists trying to scare us with disease and death: Every few years, it seems someone claims that global warming "is to blame for cholera bacteria becoming more widespread." (And here is another example from 2002.) But you know things aren't going well for the cult when even that same "the forests are burning!" New York Times has to tell us, as they did just one month ago, that "Cholera outbreaks seem to be on the increase, but a new study has found they cannot be explained by global warming." (Study link here.)

Perhaps you will not be surprised by a comparison between the two articles (at least their web versions): Last week's article about supposedly dying forests contained over 4,100 words, while the August 29th article saying that cholera outbreaks are not increasing due to climate change was -- wait for it -- a grand total of 230 words. And if that's not enough, the forests article was on the paper's front page, whereas the cholera article was on page D6.

Humans live in deserts and in the Arctic. We live in places like Denver and Chicago, each of which will see temperatures over more than a 100-degree (F) range in the course of a year -- and routinely a 30 or 40 degree range in a day (or 20 in an hour) in the mountains and deserts. And these aren't even the records. Imagine being in Spearfish, South Dakota, in 1943 when the temperature reportedly rose 49 degrees in two minutes! Or Loma, Montana, which in 1972 reported a 103-degree temperature rise in 24 hours? We scuba dive and mountain climb. We invent air conditioning and efficient heating systems. We have nearly eliminated smallpox and polio, two of the greatest scourges of eras past. In other words, we adapt to our environment -- in those cases when we can't adapt our environment to us.

For that reason, it defies common sense to believe that man-made global warming, even if it were real, would have the devastating impact that its anti-capitalist, wealth-redistributionist proponents claim.

Now we have the results of a much broader study, commissioned by the Reason Foundation, which points in exactly this same direction of adaptability. The study, entitled "The Amazing Decline in Deaths from Extreme Weather in an Era of Global Warming, 1900-2010" is summarized thus:

Aggregate mortality attributed to all extreme weather events globally has declined by 98% since the 1920s, in spite of a four-fold rise in population and much more complete reporting of such events.

Other highlights from the study's findings:

• "Droughts were the most deadly extreme weather category between 1900 and 2010, responsible for over 60 percent of extreme weather deaths during that time. The worldwide death rate from droughts peaked in the 1920s when there were 235 deaths a year per million people. Since then, the death rate has fallen by 99.9 percent. The study finds that global food production advancements, such as new crops, improved fertilizer, irrigation, and pesticides, along with society's better ability to move food and medical supplies, were responsible for reducing the number of deaths in times of severe drought."

• "Floods were to blame for 30 percent of the deaths during the timeframe studied, making them the second most deadly extreme weather category. The death rate for floods topped out in the 1930s at 204 deaths a year per million people. Deaths from floods have fallen by over 98 percent since then and there was an average of approximately one flood death per year per million people from 2000 to 2010."

• All of this while the advent of storm-finding and storm-reporting technologies have massively increased the number of reported extreme weather events. (This is not to say that the actual number of such events has increased, just the reporting thereof.) Of course, the same technology which allows storms to be reported allows them to be prepared for.

If people adapt, as we manifestly do, to almost anything thrown at us, it is difficult to take seriously the doomsday scenarios proffered by the UN's IPCC and their grant-chasing "scientists," supported by radical environmental leftists whose motivation is more to impoverish the west than to "save the planet."

That is why their "solutions" all involve two things: Curbing energy usage and production (which is to say, curbing humans' standard of living), and redistributing wealth from richer people and richer nations to poorer people and poorer nations. But if they really cared about the impact on people, rather than satisfying their own self-loathing as members of the human race, or even worse as Americans (gasp!), they would focus on aiding and speeding adaptation rather than trying to do the atmospheric equivalent of stopping continental drift.

For example, Denmark's Bjorn Lomborg, a professor of environmental economics, is a believer that global warming is man-made yet still argues that massive wealth-destroying policies are the wrong way to go. Instead, we should focus on much cheaper and more effective projects such as increasing clean water supplies in the third world.

People are becoming skeptical of man-made global warming not just because the warmists' mathematical models can't explain the lack of warming since 1998 and not just because Climategate proved how utterly corrupt "climate science" has become. But it's also because the solutions proposed, i.e. to stop using energy, are based on an obvious, even if never-ever-ever-ever-stated by the left, premise that people who live on 21st century Earth are too stupid to adapt to a changing environment -- even though we have as a species, even without the benefit of modern technology, done just that for millennia.

Reason's new study is just confirmation of what we all know in our gut: that "climate change," even if it were partially caused by man, is not the threat the left claims and not to be responded to by cutting our own economic throats, whether by cap-and-trade policies or by incinerating billions of dollars on the altar of "green energy" as our savior. Indeed, actually incinerating the money may have generated more energy for our nation than Solyndra and the like have, proving perhaps that while humans are not inherently stupid, bureaucrats and politicians may be a special case.

Packing Heat

2011-09-07T06:43:00.000-04:00

FROM-American Spectator

By Peter Ferrara

The theory that human activity is causing potentially catastrophic global warming is not science. It is politics, driven by special interests with ideological, political and economic stakes in the theory.

For environmentalists, global warming corresponds with the authoritarian goal at the core of their movement: repeal of the industrial revolution (which President Obama's EPA has begun to implement). For governments, it presents an opportunity to vastly expand their power and control through taxes, regulation and bureaucracy.

The theory also presents an opportunity for the United Nations to vastly expand its power and control. As an organization of world governments who would also gain enormously from acceptance of the theory, the UN is doubly corrupted as an honest broker on the issue. Yet, perversely, governments across the globe have delegated authoritative inquiry on the issue to the UN through its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Wily environmentalists have also successfully weaved economic stakes in the theory for some in the business community, starting with tens of billions -- growing into hundreds of billions -- of government subsidies for businesses that will pose as potential producers of the "green energy of tomorrow." This enables wily politicians to attempt to snooker voters with promises of "green jobs." Of course, those jobs would only become available if self-supporting producers of abundant low cost energy are replaced with an entire "green" industry that can survive on corporate welfare while producing unreliable high cost energy for the economy (resulting in job loss and a decline in America's standard of living).

What is so shocking is the way formerly objective, reliable Western science has been seduced by all these interests into intellectual corruption in service of the global warming fraud (less shocking when you consider the tens of billions in "research" funding provided by the above special interests). But don't forget that scientists live and breathe in the far left environment of the academic world. Thus, many of them have social and ideological interests in advancing the global warming charade.

The confluence of all these special interests and their money has now corrupted the broader scientific community. Formerly venerable, objective, respected scientific bodies such as the National Academy of Sciences have been taken over by politicians in scientific drag. Formerly independent scientific journals and publications have gone the same route rather than suffer the social and financial opprobrium that service to the truth will entail.

This growing intellectual corruption is greatly magnified by our thoroughly politicized Old Media, which operates today only in service of politically correct causes. Consequently, so much of the public discussion on global warming that we see is actually "play acting," with supposed scientists, journalists, media commentators, politicians and others posing as if objective science actually demonstrates the danger of human caused global warming. One day Al Gore will receive an Oscar for his role in posing as savior of the planet, which actually reflects delusional mental illness in the man who almost became our president.

But the politicization of Western science means the decline of Western science as well. That in turn augurs the decline of Western civilization, as objective science was a foundation of the rise of the West for centuries.

Climate Change Reconsidered

But real, objective science continues to flourish at little noticed work stations, offices, and independent institutes and foundations across the globe. The budding international headquarters of this worldwide counterrevolution has now flowered at the Chicago based Heartland Institute, which bravely soldiered on in devotion to real climate science when even compatriots told them objectivity on this issue was a lost cause.

In 2009, Heartland published the 858-page Climate Change Reconsidered, a comprehensive, dispassionate, thoroughly scientific refutation of the theory that human activity is causing global warming. That served as the first answer to the quadrennial Assessment Reports of the UN's IPCC. No one is knowledgeable about the true scientific debate over global warming until they have read and analyzed this thorough publication. Play acting commentators should be challenged for their response to this report, and publicly dismissed if they have none.

On August 29, Heartland released a 400-page follow up report titled Climate Change Reconsidered, reflecting the same thorough, objective, dispassionate analysis of the theory of global warming, and updating the science and developments. Heartland will continue the pattern of presenting full scientific alternatives to the UN's IPCC Assessment Reports (AR), planning to produce another full report in 2013 when the next IPCC AR is expected. Heartland has also sponsored annual international scientific conferences on climate change, several of which I have attended.

Hundreds of scientists from across the planet are now speaking out in opposition to the corruption of climate science. Among them are Fred Singer, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science at the University of Virginia, and the founder and first Director of the National Weather Satellite Service; Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and U.S. Science Team Leader for the AMSR-E instrument flying on NASA's Aqua satellite; William Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University; Syun-ichi Akasofu, Professor of Physics and former director of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska; Patrick Michaels, Research Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and past President of the American Association of State Climatogists; and David Douglass, Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester. Physics icon Freeman Dyson expressed similar skepticism in the New York Times. These scientists are as good and as credentialed as any working on the UN's IPCC Assessment reports.

The just released Interim Report concludes that "natural causes are very likely to be the dominant cause of the climate change that took place in the twentieth and the start of the twenty-first centuries. We are not saying that anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHG) cannot produce some warming or have not in the past. Our conclusion is that the evidence shows they are not playing a substantial role."

The authors add, "the net effect of continued warming and rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere is most likely to be beneficial to humans, plants, and wildlife."

The Evidence Shows

The theory of global warming holds that carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases produced by human civilization collect in the atmosphere. They let radiation from the sun in, but like a greenhouse they prevent the radiation from escaping back out, leading temperatures to increase, potentially to catastrophic levels. Humans cause CO2 emissions primarily by burning fossil fuels like oil, coal, natural gas, and wood, which was the foundation of the industrial revolution.

But the established temperature record from the official sources is not consistent with this theory. Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions continually increased, yet temperatures did not steadily increase. Surface temperatures in the U.S. were warmer in the 1930s than they are today. From 1940 to the late 1970s, U.S. surface temperatures declined, despite all the increased burning of fossil fuels during that period, leaving no significant difference at that point from 1900. This decline actually prompted speculation at the time that a new ice age was coming. Surface temperatures then increased until the unrelated El Nino weather phenomenon in 1998, sponsoring the global warming hysteria. Since 1998, surface temperatures have actually declined again.

More reliable and relevant is the satellite data on global atmospheric temperatures, which is not distorted by the location, coverage, and surrounding activities of land based weather stations (highly unreliable outside the U.S. and Europe), and covers the whole planet. The satellite data starts in 1979, and shows no increase in global temperature trends until 1998, when El Nino caused a sharp temperature spike. Since then the satellite data again shows that global atmospheric temperatures have declined.

If supposed greenhouse gas emissions were causing global warming, then we should have seen a far more steady increase in temperatures. What the objective scientists are now saying is that this up and down pattern of temperature is far more consistent with natural causes. The temperature variation patterns follow variations in solar activity (like sunspots) and major ocean current temperature trends. For example, a major influence on global temperatures is what is known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which turns from warm to cold and back every 20 to 30 years, as cold water from deep in the ocean cycles up and is warmed by the sun. This PDO variation seems to follow closely with the actual temperature variation trends.

Global temperatures were also warmer than today during the Medieval Warm Period, a period of several hundred years around 1000 A.D, when now icy Greenland was named and actually farmed by settlers (who long since fled as the cold and ice advanced). Even higher temperatures prevailed during a period known as the Holocene Climate Optimum, which ran roughly from 6000 B.C. to 3000 B.C. In fact, temperatures were higher than today during most of the period from 9000 B.C. to the birth of Christ. Yet, there was no significant human burning of fossil fuels during these periods.

CO2 is a naturally occurring substance in the Earth's atmosphere essential to life. Plants need to take in CO2 to live, and emit oxygen, which is essential to animal life. Animals breathe in oxygen and emit CO2. Proxy records scientists use to reconstruct the past show that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were much higher in the past than today. For hundreds of millions of years prior to 400 million years ago, atmospheric CO2 concentrations were well over 30 times greater than today. But CO2 concentrations have actually been in sharp decline since then. From roughly 50 million back to 350 million years ago, fluctuating CO2 concentrations were generally 3 to 15 times their current levels. Princeton's Happer argues that we have been suffering a CO2 famine that has harmed plant life and agriculture.

CO2 concentrations have begun rising again, due primarily to the industrial revolution and increased burning of fossil fuels, up 44 percent from 150 years ago. And this is already causing more rapid growth of plant life. But CO2 still accounts for only 0.039 percent of all atmospheric molecules, less than 1 percent of the concentration in human breath.

Moreover, humans and their activities currently account for only 3 percent of CO2 emissions each year. And less than half of the CO2 emitted by fossil fuel burning remains in the atmosphere; the rest is absorbed by the ocean or incorporated by the terrestrial biosphere. This is why policies to reduce human CO2 emissions such as the Kyoto treaty, even if fully implemented, would have negligible effects on future temperatures, reducing the temperatures that would otherwise result by 0.02 degrees C by 2050 for Kyoto, as conceded by even global warming alarmists.

Marching Science Proves the Special Interests Wrong

Real science continues to march on, despite the politicians and media flacks. Right now, scientific proofs are developing and being published that disprove the global warming theory.

Published, peer reviewed papers by MIT's Lindzen find that a doubling of (CO2) in the atmosphere would increase temperatures by 0.7 degrees, less than half the estimate of the theoretical climate models relied on by the UN's IPCC. Another published paper by NASA's Spencer shows, using atmospheric temperature data from NASA's Terra satellite, that much more heat escapes back out to space than is assumed captured in the atmosphere by greenhouse effects under the UN's theoretical climate models. This explains why the warming temperature changes predicted by the UN's global warming models over the past 20 years have been so much greater than the actual measured temperature changes.

Last month came the results of another major experiment by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), involving 63 scientists from 17 European and U.S. institutes. The results show that the sun's cosmic rays resulting from sunspots have a much greater effect on Earth's temperatures through their effect on cloud cover than the UN's IPCC has been assuming. More cosmic rays mean more cloud cover, which cools temperatures. Less cosmic rays mean less cloud cover, raising temperatures. This again shows what the NIPCC and Heartland have been saying, that natural causes have the dominant effect on Earth's temperatures, not greenhouse gases.

Finally, the UN's own climate models project that if man's greenhouse gas emissions were causing global warming, there would be a particular pattern of temperature distribution in the atmosphere, which scientists call "the fingerprint." Temperatures in the troposphere portion of the atmosphere above the tropics would increase with altitude producing a "hotspot" near the top of the troposphere, about six miles above the earth's surface. Above that, in the stratosphere, there would be cooling. But higher quality temperature data from weather balloons and satellites now show just the opposite: no increasing warming with altitude in the tropical troposphere, but rather a slight cooling, with no hotspot and no fingerprint. QED.

Watching A Green Fiction Unravel

2011-08-31T08:26:00.000-04:00

FROM-IBD

Science: Experiments performed by a European nuclear research group indicate that the sun, not man, determines Earth's temperature. Somewhere, Al Gore just shuddered as an unseasonably cool breeze blows by.

The results from an experiment to mimic Earth's atmosphere by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, tell researchers that the sun has a significant effect on our planet's temperature. Its magnetic field acts as a gateway for cosmic rays, which play a large role in cloud formation.

Consequently, when the sun's magnetic field allows cosmic rays to seed cloud cover, temperatures are cooler. When it restricts cloud formation by deflecting cosmic rays away from Earth, temperatures go up.

Or, as the London Telegraph's James Delingpole delicately put it:

"It's the sun, stupid."

This new finding of 63 scientists from 17 European and U.S. institutes from an experiment that's been ongoing since 2009 is, if we may paraphrase Vice President Joe Biden, a big deal. Which is exactly why the mainstream media, with so much invested in global warming hysteria, is letting last week's announcement from CERN pass like a brief summer shower, ignoring it.

Even CERN's own director general, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, is trying to avoid the meaning of the findings.

He told Germany's Die Welt Online that he's "asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them. That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate."

But, as British science writer Nigel Calder points out, Heuer would have no reservations about entering "'the highly political arena of the climate change debate' provided" his results endorsed man-made warming.

How long the Al Gores, James Hansens, Rolf-Dieter Heuers and other defenders of the indefensible can hang on to their fable isn't altogether clear.

With the help of an eager media, they have spun a nearly believable tale of fright and insulated themselves well from the skeptics.

But their days are few. Truth keeps getting in the way of their indoctrination effort.

And it's not just the CERN research creating a problem for them. They also need to explain why sea levels, like presidential approval numbers and consumer confidence, have fallen. According to NASA, the oceans are down a quarter of an inch this year compared to 2010.

Under the rules of climate change, sea levels, due to melting ice and water that expands as it warms, should be increasing in a way that we're all supposed to believe is a threat. But NASA scientists say that El Nino and La Nina, weather cycles in the Pacific Ocean, have caused sea levels to fall.

Apparently these natural warming and cooling cycles are stronger than the persuasion powers of even Barack Obama. It was the Illinois senator who so humbly proclaimed during the 2008 presidential campaign that his nomination as the Democratic candidate signaled the "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow."

Gore never promised he would drain the oceans. But during his propaganda movie "An Inconvenient Truth," he did make the claim that human carbon dioxide output is forcing warming that will push sea levels 20 feet higher "in the near future."

While United Nations estimates are much more conservative, the certainty of rising sea levels is still an article of faith among global warming believers.

So the news out of NASA, coupled with the CERN experiment, has got to be discouraging for the global warming believers.

That is as it should be.

The promoters of the faith had a long run. They've been feted and joined by the media, and conned a good piece of the public into believing their claims of inevitable disaster. They've made wild amounts of money and increased their realm of influence.

But now it's time for reality to intervene. For sound thinking to overcome shallow thought and trendy pursuit. To rely on observable facts. To move beyond the oppressive reign of junk science.

Glenn Beck Show rips Al Gore

2011-08-29T20:30:00.001-04:00

Mental illness rise linked to climate

2011-08-28T17:06:00.000-04:00

I know that "climate Change" has driven me close to the edge over the past few years

FROM-Sidney Morning Herald

Erik Jensen Health

RATES of mental illnesses including depression and post-traumatic stress will increase as a result of climate change, a report to be released today says.

The paper, prepared for the Climate Institute, says loss of social cohesion in the wake of severe weather events related to climate change could be linked to increased rates of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress and substance abuse.

As many as one in five people reported ''emotional injury, stress and despair'' in the wake of these events.

The report, A Climate of Suffering: The Real Cost of Living with Inaction on Climate Change, called the past 15 years a ''preview of life under unrestrained global warming''.

''While cyclones, drought, bushfires and floods are all a normal part of Australian life, there is no doubt our climate is changing,'' the report says.

''For instance, the intensity and frequency of bushfires is greater. This is a 'new normal', for which the past provides little guidance …

''Moreover, recent conditions are entirely consistent with the best scientific predictions: as the world warms so the weather becomes wilder, with big consequences for people's health and well-being.''

The paper suggests a possible link between Australia's recent decade-long drought and climate change. It points to a breakdown of social cohesion caused by loss of work and associated stability, adding that the suicide rate in rural communities rose by 8 per cent.
The report also looks at mental health in the aftermath of major weather events possibly linked to climate change.

It shows that one in 10 primary school children reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in the wake of cyclone Larry in 2006. More than one in 10 reported symptoms more than three months after the cyclone.

''There's really clear evidence around severe weather events,'' the executive director of the Brain and Mind Research Institute, Professor Ian Hickie, said.
''We're now more sophisticated in understanding the mental health effects and these effects are one of the major factors.

''What we have seriously underestimated is the effects on social cohesion. That is very hard to rebuild and they are critical to the mental health of an individual.''

Professor Hickie, who is launching the report today, said climate change and particularly severe weather events were likely to be a major factor influencing mental health in the future.

''When we talk about the next 50 years and what are going to be the big drivers at the community level of mental health costs, one we need to factor in are severe weather events, catastrophic weather events,'' he said

"Notable Quotes"

2011-08-20T20:36:00.000-04:00

"It was ever thus . . . it's really remarkable, in fact, how often the aliens in science fiction just happen to be preoccupied with the exact same political issues that obsessed intellectuals of the era when the fiction was written. And yet it's still somehow breathtaking. They don't even notice that they're not noticing all their embedded assumptions. For example, the scientists do not even consider the possibility that the recent decline in church attendance among the citizens of the world's most powerful nations could be a signal to advanced, god-fearing aliens that we are a decadent and irreligious species who should be wiped out.

Of all the possibilities, the one that seems least likely to me is that advanced aliens capable of traveling between the stars will turn out to view global warming in very much the way that a handful of Western scientists do."

Megan McArdle

Rick Perry vs. the Global Warming Fraud

2011-08-17T17:59:00.000-04:00

FROM-Human Events

Speaking out against the crime of the century.

by John Hayward

Rick Perry, having already demonstrated his meteorological powers by summoning a “black cloud” which destroyed what remained of MSNBC’s credibility, decided to finish off global warming for breakfast in New Hampshire. According to an Associated Press report:

Rick Perry says he does not believe in global warming. The newest Republican presidential candidate also says he would not have signed the debt-ceiling compromise brokered by Republicans and Democrats.

The Texas governor made the comments as he launched a two-day New Hampshire campaign tour. He was speaking at a packed breakfast event with business leaders Wednesday.

Perry said global warming is based on scientists manipulating data. He said he wouldn't devote federal resources to battling the environmental concern.

The Republican also said the debt-ceiling compromise, which helped avoid a national default, sent the wrong message by spending money the nation doesn't have.

Note the way the AP phrases this report: “Rick Perry says he does not believe in global warming.” Maybe he also “doesn’t believe” in gravity, or Barack Obama’s magical powers to create jobs. Clearly the AP finds his lack of faith… disturbing.

I’ll bet Perry used somewhat more forceful language than that. Last week, in a sneering article designed to convey the impression that Perry is a blinkered loon for failing to believe in the “global warming” that nobody can prove without resorting to outright fraud, the UK Guardian said Perry referred to their climate religion as “all one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight.”

For good measure, back in 2007 Perry – who used to work for Al Gore’s campaign, back when he was a Democrat – said of the global-warming pope, “I’ve heard Al Gore talk about man-made global warming so much that I’m starting to think that his mouth is the leading source of all that supposedly deadly carbon dioxide.”

It’s curious to see liberals freaking out over someone who says he doesn’t believe in “global warming,” because supposedly they don’t believe in that any more, either. It’s “climate change” now. No matter what happens – wet or dry, hot or cold, ice or floods – only the extensively compensated clergy can calm the angry sky gods, and transform their will into law over the benighted masses.

It’s good to see Perry isn’t backpedaling on this. It’s important. The global-warming hoax is the crime of the century. The amount of money stolen by the con artists, or lost in mad attempts to comply with their bizarre religion, is literally incalculable. Countless billions have been handed over to them in funding, sacrificed to comply with deranged eco-regulation, and spent on propaganda aimed at children.

East Anglia emails admitting falsified evidence, polar-bear studies exposed as utter frauds, countless studies conveniently “misinterpreted,” ranting lunatic Al Gore as a figurehead… the con is over, and the perpetrators should be prosecuted. We can never recover the wealth seized and destroyed by these scam artists, but they should be denied every opportunity to swipe another nickel. Every other Republican candidate should be competing with Rick Perry to win that job.

69% Say It’s Likely Scientists Have Falsified Global Warming Research

2011-08-03T17:10:00.000-04:00

FROM-Rasmussen Report

The debate over global warming has intensified in recent weeks after a new NASA study was interpreted by skeptics to reveal that global warming is not man-made. While a majority of Americans nationwide continue to acknowledge significant disagreement about global warming in the scientific community, most go even further to say some scientists falsify data to support their own beliefs.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of American Adults shows that 69% say it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data in order to support their own theories and beliefs, including 40% who say this is Very Likely. Twenty-two percent (22%) don’t think it’s likely some scientists have falsified global warming data, including just six percent (6%) say it’s Not At All Likely. Another 10% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here .)

The number of adults who say it’s likely scientists have falsified data is up 10 points from December 2009
.
Fifty-seven percent (57%) believe there is significant disagreement within the scientific community on global warming, up five points from late 2009. One in four (25%) believes scientists agree on global warming. Another 18% aren’t sure.
Republicans and adults not affiliated with either major political party feel stronger than Democrats that some scientists have falsified data to support their global warming theories, but 51% of Democrats also agree.
Men are more likely than women to believe some scientists have put out false information on the issue.

Democrats are more likely to support immediate action on global warming compared to those from other party affiliations.

Read Article here

SCIENTIST TIED TO GLOBAL WARMING BEING INVESTIGATED FOR ‘SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT

2011-07-28T08:33:00.000-04:00

FROM-The Blaze

JUNEAU, Alaska (The Blaze/AP) — A federal wildlife biologist whose observation in 2004 of presumably drowned polar bears in the Arctic helped to galvanize the global warming movement has been placed on administrative leave and is being investigated for scientific misconduct, possibly over the veracity of that article. Newser has more:

Charles Monnett is being investigated for unspecified “integrity issues” apparently linked to his report that polar bears could face an increased threat of death if they’re forced to swim farther as Arctic ice recedes.

Monnett, an Anchorage-based scientist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, or BOEMRE, was told July 18 that he was being put on leave, pending results of an investigation into “integrity issues.” But he has not yet been informed by the inspector general’s office of specific charges or questions related to the scientific integrity of his work, said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

Read entire article here

"...getting back to normal.”

2011-07-26T19:54:00.001-04:00

Not being a scientist, or truth be told not even a great intellect, much of my education and knowledge is based upon common sense observation and instruction. When it comes to the topic of global warming aka "climate change" my skepticism has been a product of simple common sense rather than any great intellectual mastery of the subject. Early on in my study of the narrative of global warming one of the best lessons in common sense skepticism was hammered home to me when I read this article and interview of the late Reid Bryson.

In the article he recounts this simple tale:

Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current headlines. “What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps?”

We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. Bryson interrupts excitedly.

“A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went,” he says. “There used to be less ice than now. It’s just getting back to normal.”

The implications of this observation on the entire theory of man made global warming are immense if only common sense had anything to do with the discussion at all, but alas it does not. Everyone wants to be an intellectual but it is common sense which is discrediting the narrative more than scientific papers.

So it was with some interest and another "whoa Betsy" moment that I read this post over at the Inconvenient Skeptic site earlier. The entire post is well worth the read, the main focus being on a recent trip to Glacier National Park by the author and some pictures of glaciers he took comparing them to earlier pictures from the recent past. The pictures seem to indicate that the glaciers may be making a comeback despite the doomsday projections of warmist. But what really caught my attention was this comment:

One question I wanted to ask the rangers there was “How old are the glaciers there?” There is a very common misconception that the glaciers there exist from the last ice age. That of course is wrong, but I was curious what they would say. The answer I got from the ranger was 3,000 years old. That is a reasonable answer, but one I find unlikely. Glaciers farther north and higher than Glacier National Park are typically much younger than that. I have never been able to find an ice core from glacier national park that would answer this question. Certainly it is possible that some of the glaciers are 3,000 years old, but I suspect that 900-1,000 is more accurate. I have yet to find enough accurate information to answer this though.

This comment blew me away, I admit that it had never occurred to me to question how old these or any other glaciers might be. As the author notes if I had ever thought about it I would have assumed that these and most glaciers date back to the last ice age. However even taking the rangers answer at face value this would put the glaciers well within a human historic time frame rather than some prehistoric event explained away by planetary orbits or primordial volcanic eruptions. To put it simply during the rise of the Roman Empire (Roman Warming Period) there were no glaciers in Glacier National Park.

Being enthralled by this I did a quick search to see if there was any scientific literature about the age of the glaciers in Glacier National Park. It took me all of two clicks of my handy mouse to find this paper from the U.S. Geological Survey titled

Glaciers of North America—
GLACIERS OF THE CONTERMINOUS UNITED STATES
GLACIERS OF THE WESTERN UNITED STATES
By ROBERT M. KRIMMEL

With a section on GLACIER RETREAT IN GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, MONTANA
By CARL H. KEY, DANIEL B. FAGRE, and RICHARD K. MENICKE

There is a very detailed account of previous studies of the glaciers in the park and the retreat of the glaciers over the past 150 years.

All named glaciers within the park are mountain glaciers that have retreated dramatically since the middle 19th-century end of the Little Ice Age in the Western United States.

Since the end of the Little Ice Age, small glaciers that were insulated or protected by the surrounding topography tended to lose proportionately less area to recession. Commonly, they changed rapidly to a stagnant condition. The larger glaciers generally experienced proportionately greater and more rapid reduction in area than the smaller glaciers, but they still continue to be active (ﬁg. 25A). During the last 150 years, the larger glaciers,which had descended below cirque margins into subalpine terrain, would have had the greatest exposure to solar radiation and warmer temperatures for longer periods of time. As these large glaciers retreated and shrank in area, they regularly separated into discrete ice masses.

As you can plainly see the glacier melt in the park is not a recent development and easily preceding the advent of the internal combustion engine.

On the subject of time lines I found this comment to be quite interesting:

In all cases, it must be noted that, although initially the distance of retreat was small, substantial thinning—and therefore appreciable volume loss—likely took place. This
preceded the eventual retreat of termini. From 1910 onward, recession rates increased (Dyson, 1948; Johnson, 1980). This corresponded to a period of increased scientiﬁc interest in Glacier National Park glaciers, and many of the early investigators bore witness to dramatic instances of glacier recession. Following the middle 1940’s, recession rates decreased, and glaciers became increasingly conﬁned within cirque margins

So it a pretty well established fact that the Glaciers in Glacier National Park have been receding for over 150 years and not some cataclysmic current event except in the minds of the ALGORES of the world.

But how old are they? (My emphasis)

Because of the apparently long and relatively stable climatic interval preceding the Little Ice Age, it is believed that most of the glacier ice remaining in Glacier National Park was formed during the Little Ice Age and is not a relic from the Pleistocene Epoch...

Interesting isn't it that they refer to the time prior to the formation of glaciers in the park as "relatively stable climatic interval " or as Reid Bryson might have said "back when it was normal."

Further we learn

The Little Ice Age comprised a several-hundred-year-long cool period(about 1400 to about 1850 in North America), during which Glacier National Park glaciers formed and expanded

So it seems that perhaps our ranger may be off a bit in his information. According to this paper the glaciers in the park are a product of the Little Ice Age. If this is indeed true and I have little reason to question the authors, they being scientist and all, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 the glaciers in Glacier National Park were just babies if they were there at all.

So for all the hysteria over melting glaciers in Glacier National Park, the facts seems to be that they are a product of an unstable and hostile period of "climate change" which disrupted the normal optimum which we ought to enjoy while we have it.

So as I have previously observed:

If for example as was proven before the AGW nonsense took hold of science, the Medieval Warming Period was warmer than today, as was accepted until these guys got their hands and agenda on the data and the process, why did we not have runaway warming? Where was the enhanced greenhouse effect while they were making wine in England?

Or when there were no glaciers in Glacier National Park.

Why Hasn’t The Earth Warmed In Nearly 15 Years?

2011-07-17T09:55:00.000-04:00

FROM-Forbes

Patrick Michaels

There is no statistically significant warming trend since November of 1996 in monthly surface temperature records compiled at the University of East Anglia. Do we now understand why there’s been no change in fourteen and a half years?

If you read the news stories surrounding a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Boston University’s Robert Kaufmann and three colleagues, you’d say yes, indeed. It’s China’s fault. By dramatically increasing their combustion of coal, they have increased the concentration of fine particles in the atmosphere called sulphate aerosols, which reflect away solar radiation, countering the warming that should be occurring from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Further, if this is true, then (as is usual in climate-world), “it’s worse than we thought.” After all, China will eventually reduce their sulfate emissions as their population becomes affluent enough to demand something better than miasmic air. Indeed, they are already beginning to clean things up, and when they finally do, all the cooling particles will be gone and the earth will warm substantially.

Reality may be a bit simpler, or much more complicated. But the reason this is all so important is that if there is no good explanation for the lack of warming, then an increasingly viable alternative is that we have overestimated the gross sensitivity of temperature to carbon dioxide in our computer models.

One problem is that we really don’t know how much cooling is exerted by sulfates, or whether they are just a convenient explanation for the failure of the forecasts of dramatic warming. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which grants itself climate authority, states that our “Level of Scientific Understanding” of the effects range between “low” and “very low,” with a possible cooling between zero (none) and a whopping 3.5 degrees (C) when the climate comes to equilibrium (which it will never do). That’s a plenty large range from which to pick out a number to cancel about as much warming as you’d like.

Kaufmann’s team looked into how sulfate uncertainty impacted its results and decided that it was relatively minor. However, we can’t find any independent test showing that the geographic “fingerprint” of a dramatic recent increase in sulfate cooling is actually being observed. More on this in a minute.

The other problem — and climate flatliners hate me for pointing this out — is that the beginning of the period of “no warming” includes the warmest year in the instrumental record, caused by the great El Nino of 1997-1998. In a modestly warming world, starting off at or near an anomalously high point pretty much assures little or no warming for years afterward.

Kaufmann’s team (and others) have duly noted that El Nino cycles are one factor partially responsible for the lack of recent warming. There’s little doubt of this. Further, if you back out solar changes and volcanism, as they did, you can convince yourself that there is still an underlying “residual” warming trend, but it is masked by all these variables. This has been done repeatedly in the scientific literature, which, until now, did not include increasing the sulfate effect on recent temperatures.

Where is the test of the hypothesis that sulfates are indeed responsible for the lack of warming? In this paper, it’s simply “modeled-in” as it fits the data well. That’s correlation, not causation.

There is very little exchange of air between the northern and southern hemispheres, and basic climate science shows that most sulfates from China will rain out before they get across the thermal equator. In fact, there is a great deal of literature out there published by luminaries like the Department of Energy’s Ben Santer and NASA’s James Hansen claiming relative cooling of the northern hemisphere from sulfates, compared to the southern.

So, if it is indeed sulfates cooling the warming, given that there is no net change in global temperature, then the northern hemisphere should be cooling since 1998 (the first year in Kaufmann’s paper) while the southern warms. Here are the sad facts:

The opposite is occurring. Why this test was not performed eludes me. Perhaps that is because it provides yet another piece of evidence supporting the hypothesis that we have simply overstated the sensitivity of surface temperature to changes in carbon dioxide.

Patrick J. Michaels is Senior Research Fellow for Research and Economic Development at George Mason University and author and editor of “Climate Coup: Global Warming’s Invasion of our Government and our Lives.”

The Green Economy Withers

2011-07-16T08:59:00.000-04:00

FROM-IBD

Even after fudging numbers and ignoring the huge subsidies, a liberal think tank reports that growth in the alternative-energy sector lags the rest of the economy.

Green jobs were supposed to be our salvation, both for the earth and for the economy, according to the Obama administration. White House policy based on this flawed premise led to offshore and onshore drilling bans and the locking-up of energy-rich lands while huge alternative energy subsidies (aka "investments") found their way into the stimulus and other legislation.

As happens when government tries to pick winners and losers, the government lost — no, we all lost. As has happened in countries such as Spain, this misallocation of resources has succeeded only in stalling our economy as unemployment and debt grow.

In Spain's case, it was found that for every "green" job created, 2.2 jobs were lost in the rest of the economy.

Along comes the Brookings Institution with a report touting the fact that nearly 2.7 million people brought home paychecks in 2010 working in the "clean economy." That's a 3.4% increase in "green jobs" since 2003, and it sounds terrific until you realize the economy as a whole grew at a 4.2% rate over the same period.

As the folks at HotAir.com duly note, Brookings got to its conclusions by including, for example, all mass transit workers regardless of the actual energy source. They also lump in people such as organic farmers and nuclear energy workers, though the greenies have never touted nuclear energy as "clean" or nuclear jobs as "green."

Discounted is the role of government mandates and subsidies, without which the alternative energy sector would wither and die. A good many of these "green jobs" exist in the public sector of federal, state and local governments. And they come at huge expense.

A 2008 report by the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration reported that in 2007, while the average subsidy per megawatt hour for all energy sources was $1.65, the subsidy for wind and solar was about $24 per megawatt hour. On the nonelectricity generating side, ethanol received a subsidy of $5.72 per million British thermal unit.

Remember Solyndra Inc., the first recipient of $535 million of stimulus cash in 2009 to hire 1,000 workers for "green jobs"? The company had never shown a profit, and in the end the Fremont, Calif.-based solar panel manufacturer never came through.
A month after President Obama's visit, the company he praised withdrew its public offering plans. A few weeks later, congressional auditors announced that the Energy Department had given favorable treatment to some loan-guarantee applicants.

Coincidently, Solyndra's majority owner, billionaire George Kaiser, was a top fundraiser for the 2008 Obama-Biden campaign.

This is how we set energy policy. It is based not on the free market and supply and demand, but on ideology and crony capitalism. Energy prices then "necessarily skyrocket," causing job loss and consumer pain as money that might be spent to buy stuff goes just to keep the lights on.
As we have noted, the focus on green jobs comes at the expense of other jobs. An oil industry study says that 190,000 jobs could be created by 2013 if offshore development permits in the Gulf of Mexico were returned. Just finishing the Keystone XL pipeline to bring Canadian tar sands oil to Houston-area refineries could net hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Alternative energy cannot survive without mandates and subsidies, and cannot compete in the free market with proven and plentiful sources like petroleum.

The Brookings report may have been meant to tout the green economy, but it only serves to underscore its failure and the opportunity costs it imposes on the American people and economy.

"Notable Quotes"

2011-07-15T08:20:00.002-04:00

"Now for the next IPCC report [due in 2013] the UN experts have to examine hundreds of reports – but indeed the selection is tougher than ever. The haggling over the results is like dealing at a bazaar: On one hand scientists have published alarming sea level prognoses, which surpass those given by the last IPCC Report. And on the other hand the actual sea level measurements indicate no detectable extreme increase."

Der Spiegal

ht/Not Trick Zone

Warmist Cargo Cult Science Returns

2011-06-28T07:12:00.000-04:00

FROM-American Thinker

By Timothy Birdnow

Michael Mann, Pennsylvania State University climate Svengali, a member of the CRU (he figured prominently in the e-mail scandals at East Anglia), and great Pittsburgh Penguins fan (he created the famed "hockey stick graph" that was so influential on the 2007 IPCC Climate Change report) has stepped in it again, this time co-authoring a new study (Kemp et. al) that claims to show a massive acceleration in sea level rise in North Carolina that coincides with the industrial era.

This study claims to reconstruct 2,000 years of sea levels. (It actually extrapolates from a study of shallow salt marshes with an historical reconstruction going back 300 years and based on the prevalence of foraminifera fossils to reconstruct the past sea levels. These reside in the very shallow, sandy pools and die in deeper waters, so theoretically we can see where sea levels were in the past.) They used tide gauge data to calibrate. By observing agreement between direct observations and this proxy reconstruction they can estimate the rate of rise and extrapolate into the past. Or so they claim.

They were exhaustive in their methodology; choosing a whopping two points (Sand Point and Tump Point) to study the fossils and calibrating from data from two other points (Wilmington and Hampton Roads). Their conclusion? Sea level rise has accelerated, and this "correlates" to the industrial era.

According to the abstract:

Sea level was stable from at least BC 100 until AD 950. Sea level then increased for 400 y at a rate of 0.6 mm/y, followed by a further period of stable, or slightly falling, sea level that persisted until the late 19th century. Since then, sea level has risen at an average rate of 2.1 mm/y, representing the steepest century-scale increase of the past two millennia. This rate was initiated between AD 1865 and 1892.

Louisiana comes to mind.

Louisiana has lost considerable coastal marshland as a result of human intervention. Flood control dams and levees prevent swollen rivers from picking up silt, and dredging to keep the coastal waterways open move the silt from its natural place, leading to erosion of the coastal shallows. According to this Tulane.edu paper:

The main forms of human disturbance are the river-control structures such as dams and levees, the dredging of canals, and draining and filling.

[...]

A large part of the sediment gathered by existing marshes is accumulated during seasonal flooding. Flood overtopping and overbank sedimentation, both vital to the survival of existing marshes, were dramatically reduced as large areas ceased to be flooded. River water also helped to reduce marsh salinity and provide nutrients, and its loss has resulted in the breakup and dispersal of large amounts of nutrient-starved marshlands.

And without the extra silt brought from floodwaters, the shallows are subject to erosion and breakup. This would clearly warp the fossil record, but would also warp the tidal gauge record as well; the sea would appear to be rising when in fact the land is sinking, being washed away.

Writing in Wattsupwiththat, Willis Eschenbach provides us with a map of the North Carolina sites from 1733 juxtaposed with a satellite photo from 1990. Notice the radical difference between the two.

Clearly, erosion is a problem here, yet the authors of the paper fail to give it any credence. Of course the fossil record will show sea level rise!

As to the "correlation" between the industrial era and this increase in rise rate, well, the rate increase appears to begin around 1880, well before the rise in industrial emissions. It would not be before increases in land-use change that would contribute to erosion.

The only plus in this work is that Mann signs off on the Medieval Warming Period and Little Ice Age -- something he steadfastly refused to do while defending his "hockey stick graph." This paper admits that both occurred, and the authors should have realized that this also explains why there was sea-level rise increase during the 19th century, but it seems to go over their heads.

Of course, older tide gauge data is likely to be poor, too, and the older data is suspect.

And it's not even consistent with itself. According to Willis Eschenbach:

The first conclusion is that as is not uncommon with sea level records, nearby tide gauges give very different changes in sea level. In this case, the Wilmington rise is 2.0 mm per year, while the Hampton Roads rise is more than twice that, 4.5 mm per year. In addition, the much shorter satellite records show only half a mm per year average rise for the last twenty years.

So they have taken two, count them, two records and averaged them!

This also contradicts all other studies that show a far lower sea-level rise.

This is in no way, shape, or form science; it is advocacy in costume. It's a play with sets, props, actors pretending to be a work of science. There was a predetermined outcome, the sites of study were chosen with that outcome in mind, and the authors issued a big, glossy press release before the publication of the paper in order to make a splash with the salivating dogs of the mainstream media. They knew this would be analyzed to death, but wanted it to get before the public first. Likely the public would hear that, yes, sea levels are rising faster and would get little of the rebuttal.

Despite this, people like Mann continue their climatological malpractice, and are even accorded respect. Such shoddy workmanship in any other field would put the principal into another line of work.

But not in climatology; being a charlatan hack seems to be de rigueur.

During the Second World War Allied airfields brought wonderful treasures to New Guinea, and when the war ended the natives, believing the airplanes were from the gods, built their own airports, hoping to use sympathetic magic to bring back the planes and their wondrous treasures. Richard Feynman coined the phrase "cargo cult science" to illustrate a form of pseudo-science, something that looked like science but was not -- like the "airports" of the islanders.

This is cargo cult science at its most onerous.

Climate Change Scientist Faces Ethics Questions

2011-06-22T21:57:00.000-04:00

FROM-FOX News

STOP THE PRESSES !

2011-06-20T17:16:00.000-04:00

Sanity in the Main Stream Media

Email dumps - Palin & U.Va.

FROM-Richmond Times-Dispatch

Blogger Glenn Reynolds recently circulated a comment that highlights yet another glaring inconsistency among the establishment media.

Major organs of the press have been so eager to air the dirty laundry from Sarah Palin's emails — obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request — that they have turned to "crowdsourcing" to expedite the job. In other words, they're disseminating the material to the general readership so they can find the juicy bits faster.

Contrast that with the vitriol and scorn heaped on conservatives who have requested that the University of Virginia divulge emails written by climatologist Michael Mann when he was employed there. The very idea that anyone would request such private material is an atrocious assault on privacy and academic freedom, is the general view — at least inside liberal echo chambers.

True, Palin and Mann are differently situated. Although both are now private citizens and although all the emails in question were written on the government dime, he has never run for public office, while she has. But the differences are not nearly so great as the manner in which the two cases — or, for that matter, the earlier Climategate email controversy — have been treated.

Repugnant double standards will continue until the day when opinion-makers begin to put principles first and personalities second. That day, we fear, remains very far off. By the way, the Palin emails have redounded to the author's benefit and have left her critics dismayed.