Dispatches from District 48
Posts tagged ‘Climate’
Ending the Human Race to fight global warming
Taking the world back to the 19th century, very much in the same theme as this earlier post here on Coyote Blog.
The UN admits that their science has been corrupted by the desire to garner political and financial support.
I have also be reworking the site design because nearly everyone complained that the old color scheme was brutal on the eyes.
Under
mounting pressure from climate catastrophists to ignore uncertainties
in the science and to produce definitive statements that can be used as
calls for government interventionism, the UN will apparently release a new "warning" this week:
Global
warming is destroying species, raising sea levels and threatening
millions of poor people, the United Nations' top scientific panel will
say in a report today that U.N. officials hope will help mobilize the
world to take tougher actions on climate change.The report
argues that only firm action, including putting a price on
carbon-dioxide emissions, will avoid more catastrophic events.Those
actions will take a small part of the world's economic growth and will
be substantially less than the costs of doing nothing, the report says.
For the first time, the UN is trying to
argue explicitly that the cost of CO2 abatement is lower than the cost
of doing nothing. They are arguing that a cooler but poorer world is
superior to a warmer and richer world. I am glad they are finally
arguing this point. Because while we can argue about the truth of how
much the world has warmed and how much is due to man, the UN is DEAD
WRONG on this point. The cost of aggressive CO2 abatement is far, far
higher than the cost of doing nothing.
The report presumably will be released by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, who demonstrated his stunning ignorance of climate science, geology, and geography on a recent climate-junket to Antarctica. Let's take it line by line.
Is man destroying or threatening species? Absolutely. Is this threat from CO2 and warming? No, and I have read every inch of the UN IPCC report and you can find no evidence for this proposition.
But saying this rallies the environmental base (the hard core
environmentalists don't really care about poor people, at least when
their interests conflict with animals). Most of the evidence is that
species thrive in warmer weather, and polar bears have survived several
inter-glaciation periods where the north pole melted entirely in the
summer.
Are sea levels rising? Yes. In fact, they have been
rising for at least 150 years, and in fact have been rising steadily
and at roughly the same rate since the last ice age. We have seen
absolutely no acceleration of the underlying sea level rise trend.
Further, the UN's IPCC does have a forecast for sea level rise over the
next century. Even using temperature forecasts I consider exaggerated,
the UN does not forecast more than about a foot of sea level rise over
the coming century, only a bit more than what the sea level has risen
over the last 150 years. This is a great example of the disconnect
between the UN political climate reports and the science underlying
them. The guys writing the summary know that their report says only a
few inches of sea level rise, so they just say it is rising, and then
let the crazies like Al Gore throw around numbers like 20 feet.
Here is an interesting thought: If I say the sea levels
will rise 0" over the next 100 years, the UN will call me out and say I
am wrong. However, when Al Gore said sea levels will rise 20 feet in
his movie An Inconvenient Truth, no one at the UN or the IPCC
called him out, despite the fact that my forecast was only a few inches off from theirs and his was 19 feet off the mark.
And of course, there are the poor. The number one biggest
losers in any effort to abate CO2 emissions will be the poor. In
wealthy countries like the US, the poor will be the hardest hit by $10
or even $20 gas prices that would be necessary to rolling CO2
production back to 1990 levels. In the third world, nearly a billion
people just starting to emerge from poverty will have no chance of doing so if their economies are hamstrung with CO2 limits. The poor will be devastated by aggressive CO2 limits.
Weighed against this economic disaster would be, what?
How would rising world temperatures hurt the poor? Well, its not at
all clear. A foot of sea-level rise is very unlikely to hurt many poor
people, though it might inconvenience a few rich owners of beach-front
luxury homes. Here is a clarifying question I often ask people --
would you rather fifteen Atlantic hurricanes each year, or sixteen
hurricanes each year and Carribbean economies that are twice as rich
and therefore have twice the resources to handle hurricanes. This is
the colder and poorer vs. warmer and richer choice. We see this in Bangladesh today. Why do orders of magnitude more people die in Bangladesh cyclones than class 5 hurricanes on the US shore? Because they are poor, not because of anything having to do with global warming.
It is often claimed that global warming will cause
droughts, but in fact warmer world temperatures will vaporize more
water in the atmosphere and should net increase rain, not drought. And
many of the farmers in the northern hemisphere would enjoy longer
growing seasons and thereby more food production.
Glaciers
and ice caps are melting at a rapid rate; animals and plants are
shifting their range to accommodate warmer air and water; and planting
seasons are changing, the report said.
Yes, land-based ice is melting in the Northern Hemisphere. This is 15% of the world's ice. 85% of the world's ice is in Antarctica, which is increasing.
Seriously. I know you don't believe this if you trust the media, but
the ice that is melting in Greenland is tiny compared to the ice that
is increasing at the South Pole. In fact, the IPCC gets most of its
prjected sea rise from thermal expansion of warmer oceans, not from ice
melting. And don't you love the "planting seasons are changing." That
sounds like its scary, or something, until you recognize the truth is
that planting seasons are changing, becoming longer and more beneficial to food production!
On many occasions, I have discussed the bad science that
goes into these apocalyptic forecasts. But that science is of top
quality compared to the economics that must have gone into the
statement that:
The most
stringent efforts to stabilize greenhouse gases would cost the world's
economies 0.12 percent of their average annual growth to 2050, the
report estimates.
This is absolute, unmitigated crap.
Though I have not seen specifics in this report, the UN's position has
generally been that emissions should be rolled back to 1990 levels (the
target embodied in the Kyoto treaty). Such a target implies reductions
of more than 20% from where we are today and well over 50% from where
we will be in 2050. These are enormous cuts that cannot be achieved
with current technology without massive reductions in economic growth.
The world economy is inextricably tied to the burning of fossil fuels.
And, unlike ancillary emissions like SO2, CO2 emissions cannot be
limited without actually reducing carbon combustion since it is
fundamental to the combustion chemistry. Even supporters of
legislation such as the Bingaman-Specter bill admit that as much as a
trillion dollars will need to be spent to reduce global temperatures
about 0.13C. And that is a trillion for the first tenth of a degree --
the law of diminishing returns means that each additional tenth will
cost more.
Lets look at history as our guide. Most of the European
countries and Japan signed onto the Kyoto Treaty to reduce emissions to
1990 levels. They have taken many expensive steps to do so,
implemented many more controls than in the US, and have gas prices as
much as double those in the US. During the period since 1990, most of
these countries, unlike the US and China and India, have been in a deep
and extended economic recession, which tends to suppress the growth of
fossil fuel consumption. Also, the CO2 numbers for countries like
Russia and Germany benefit greatly from the fall of the old Communist
Block, as their 1990 base year CO2 numbers include many horribly
inefficient and polluting Soviet industries that have since been shut
down. And, given all this, they STILL are going to miss
their numbers. These countries have experienced reductions in economic
growth orders of magnitude greater than this 0.12 percent quoted by the
UN, and that still is not enough to reduce CO2 to target levels. Only
outright contraction of the world's economy is going to suffice [note:
A strong commitment to replacing coal plants with nuclear might be a
partial solution, but it will never happen because the people calling
for CO2 controls are the same ones who shut down our nuclear programs.
Also, technological change is always possible. It would be awesome if
someone found a way to roll out sheets of efficient solar cells like
carpet out of Dalton, Georgia, but that has not happened yet.]
The UN has gotten to such low cost estimates for their
government controls because they have convinced themselves, much like
the promoters of building football stadiums for billionaire team
owners, that they will get a huge return from the government CO2
controls:
"There is high
agreement and much evidence that mitigation actions can result in
near-term co-benefits, for example improved health due to reduced air
pollution, that may offset a substantial fraction of mitigation costs,"
said the report, which summarizes research over five years of more than
2,000 of the world's top climate-change scientists...The U.N. panel embraced the arguments of British economist
Nicholas Stern, who concluded last year that the cost of taking tough
measures to curb pollution will be repaid in the long run.
Nicholas
Stern? Haven't we heard that name before? Why, yes we have. He is
the man that said that all of the world's climate problems would go
away if we forced all the western economies to look just like India.
Mr
Stern, the former chief economist of the World Bank, sends out a very
clear message: "We need to cut down the total amount of carbon
emissions by half by 2050." At current levels, the per capita global
emissions stand at 7 tonnes, or a total of 40-45 gigatonnes. At this
rate, global temperatures could rise by 2.5-3 degrees by then. But to
reduce the per capita emissions by half in 2050, most countries would
have to be carbon neutral. For instance, the US currently has, at 20-25
tonnes, per capita emissions levels that are three times the global
average.The European Union's emission levels stand at 10-15
tonnes per capita. China is at about 3-4 tonnes per capita and India,
at 1 tonne per capita, is the only large-sized economy that is below
the desired carbon emission levels of 2050. "India should keep it that way and insist that the rich countries pay their share of the burden in reducing emissions," says Mr Stern.
Which,
by the way, is exactly my point. I very much hope Mr. Stern continues
to make this clear in public. One of the ways catastrophists support
their cause of massive government interventionism is to try to portray
the answer as little cutsie actions, like your 5-year-old helping with
the recycling. This is not what is require to meet these targets.
What is required is ratchet down the US economy until we are all about
as wealthy as the average Indian. I guess that would at least take
care of the outsourcing "problem."
One of the ways that the UN gets away with this is that no
one has the time to read the detailed scientific report, and so
reporters rely on the summaries like these. Unfortunately, the same
people who write the scientific sections are not the people who write
the summaries. Careful language about uncertainties, which are still
huge, in the science are replaced by summaries written by politicians
that say:
The near-final draft,
approved Friday by representatives of more than 140 governments meeting
in Valencia, Spain, said global warming is "unequivocal" and said man's
actions are heading toward "abrupt or irreversible climate changes and
impacts."..."This will be viewed by all as a definitive report. It is
the blueprint for the Bali talks," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who
will be at the Indonesian U.N. meeting beginning Dec. 3 as part of a
U.S. senatorial delegation.
Another
technique used by the UN that we see in play here is their willingness
to cherry-pick one author that follows the UN narrative to refute a
whole body of science that is contrary to the narrative. Thus, the UN
latched onto Michael Mann's hockey stick to overturn a consensus that
there was a Medieval warm period, and now they have latched onto
Nicholas Stern to overturn the opinion of, approximately, every other
economist in the world who think CO2 mitigation will be really
expensive.
As always, you are encourage to view my movie What is Normal: A Critique of Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming Theory or check out my book (free online) called A Skeptical Layman's Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming.
By the way, in the title I put "new" in quotes. Here is why. I just read a presentation by Dr. Richard Lindzen from 1992 that shows that catastrophists were declaring the debate "over" as early as 1989, before any real research had even been performed:
By early 1989, however, the popular media in Europe and the United States were declaring that "all scientists'' agreed that warming was real and catastrophic in its potential.
...
In the meantime, the global warming circus was in
full swing. Meetings were going on nonstop. One of the more striking of
those meetings was hosted in the summer of 1989 by Robert Redford at
his ranch in Sundance, Utah. Redford proclaimed that it was time to stop research and begin acting.
I suppose that that was a reasonable suggestion for an actor to make,
but it is also indicative of the overall attitude toward science.
Barbara Streisand personally undertook to support the research of
Michael Oppenheimer at the Environmental Defense Fund, although he is
primarily an advocate and not a climatologist. Meryl Streep made an
appeal on public television to stop warming. A bill was even prepared
to guarantee Americans a stable climate
I am trying to keep most of my long climate posts off this site and over at Climate Skeptic. However, I have cross-posted this one because it is a good example for laymen of just what crap gets put forward in the media today about global warming. It demonstrates the gullibility of the media, the gross exaggerations that exist in nearly every climate catastrophe article, and, as an added bonus, demonstrates the scientific incompetence of the man who leads the UN, the organization that has taken onto itself the role of summarizing the state of climate science.
OK, here is a great example of the media blithely accepting panicky catsrophism where none is warranted (Link HT to Maggies Farm)
Scientists
welcomed Ban Ki Moon to Antarctica with a glass of Johnny Walker Black
Label served "on the rocks" with 40,000-year-old polar ice. But the
researchers delivered an alarming message to the UN Secretary-General
about a potential environmental catastrophe that could raise sea levels
by six metres if an ice sheet covering a fifth of the continent
crumbles.The polar experts, studying the effects of global warming on the icy
continent that is devoted to science, fear a repeat of the 2002
collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf. The 12,000-year-old shelf was 220
metres (720ft) thick and almost the size of Yorkshire."I was told by scientists that the entire Western Antarctica is now
floating. That is a fifth of the continent. If it broke up, sea levels
may rise as much as six metres," Mr Ban said after being briefed at the
Chilean, Uruguayan and South Korean bases during a day trip to King
George Island, at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. ...Eduardo Frei Montalva Air Force Base, a year-round settlement of
corrugated-iron cabins belonging to Chile, lies in one of the world's
worst "hot spots" "“ temperatures have been rising 0.5C (0.9F) a decade
since the 1940s.
I don't even know where to start with this. So I will just fire off some bullets:
As always, you can consult my my book and my movie (both free online) for more details on all these topics.
Over at Climate Skeptic, I discuss the problem of graft. No, not bribery (though I do have a beef with the industry cabal that supposedly funds all skeptics for not coming through with my check). In this case, I discuss temperature reconstructions that graft one data series onto another, and try to draw conclusions about the inflection point which, suspiciously, occurs exactly at the spot the two series are spliced.
Over at Climate Skeptic, I post my single best argument why you shouldn't be panicked about anthropogenic global warming.
Over at Climate Skeptic, we can see Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, argue that the only way to really abate CO2 is for all the world's countries to be just like India. I kid you not. And, in fact I agree with him that if we really wanted to eliminate CO2 emissions with current technology, exactly this kind of poverty promotion program would be required. I just don't think it's necessary that we adopt such a goal.
As a postscript, I take on Mr. Stern's temperature forecasts of 2.5-3 degree C rise by 2050 and show why they make absolutely no sense in light of the last 100 years of empirical data.
Email I received with subject line "Climate Skeptic"
"How stupid are you"
Outstanding. I love scientific discourse.
There has been a lot of interest in my new climate video. Already we have nearly 450 1500 views at Google video and over 200 700 downloads of the video. I am now releasing the video through YouTube.
YouTube requires that all videos be under 10 minutes, so I have broken the film into six parts. If you want to just preview a portion, the second half of the fourth film and the first half of the fifth are probably the most critical.
A Youtube Playlist for the film is here. This is a cool feature I have not used before, but will effectively let you run the parts end to end, making the 50-minute video more or less seamless.
The individual parts are:
Climate Video Part 1: Introduction; how greenhouse gases work; historical climate reconstructions
Climate Video Part 2: Historical reconstructions; problems with proxies
Climate Video part 3: How much warming is due to man; measurement biases; natural cycles in climate
Climate Video Part 4: Role of the sun; aerosols and cooling; climate sensitivity; checking forecasts against history
Climate Video Part 5: Positive and negative feedback; hurricanes.
Climate Video Part 6: Melting ice and rising oceans; costs of CO2 abatement; conclusions.
You may still stream the entire climate film from Google Video here. (the video will stutter between the 12 and 17 second marks, and then should run fine)
You may download a 258MB full resolution Windows Media version of the film by right-clicking here.
You may download a 144MB full resolution Quicktime version of the film by right-clicking here.
My first climate movie, What is Normal? A Critique of Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming Theory is now available for free download. If you have the bandwidth, I encourage you to download the full 640x480 version as Windows Media Video, but be forewarned that the file is 258MB. This is actually a pretty small file for a 50+ minute movie, and the full resolution version looks much nicer than the streaming version.
Right-Click Here to Download Climate Movie in Full Resolution
Right-Click here for full resolution 144MB .mov quicktime version of Climate Movie
Make sure you turn up your volume -- I think I recorded this with a pretty low audio level.
If you are bandwidth-challenged, or you can't view a .WMV file, you may stream the video from Google video or download a reduced resolution version here. Unfortunately, to make the video stream effectively, the resolution is cut to 320x240, but having watched it, it still looks surprisingly good streamed.
Note, on the streaming version, the video stutters between the 12 and 17 second marks in the movie, but runs fine after that. By the way, thanks to all the commenters who gave me some good alternatives to using my own fairly week narration voice. I decided for this first release I wanted to see what I could achieve with a pure solo effort. Many thanks to Adobe Premier Elements, which made this effort possible.
Finally, you can stream the reduced resolution Google video version below:
"It's hot in the desert, so therefor warmer temperatures must cause drought." That is the logical fallacy I address today over at Climate Skeptic, where we find evidence that, if anything, global warming is making things wetter rather than drier.
Several readers have asked for my comment. This is what I posted over at Climate Skeptic:
This
morning I was all fired up to write something petty, like "Al Gore now
has made the same contributions to peace as have previous winners
Yassir Arafat and Henry Kissinger." Later, I considered a long and
drawn out post on the inaccuracies of "An Inconvinient Truth", but I
really have already done that in long form here and in short form here.
In truth, the Peace prize process has for years been about a group of
leftish statists making a statement, and often it has been about
tweaking the US, rather than a dispassionate analysis of true
contributions to peace made with the benefit of some historic distance
(as is done with the scientific prizes). Further, most folks I argue
with don't really care about the specific inacuracies in Gore's movie,
their response typically being something in the "fake but accurate"
line of reasoning.So instead I will say what I told a reader by email a few hours
ago. I tend to be optimistic about the world, and believe that we are
approaching a high water mark (so to speak) for the climate
catastrophists, where we will look back and see their influence peak
and start unwinding under the presure of science and the reality of the
enormous cost to abate CO2. Gore's Peace prize, in the same year as
his Oscar and that global warming music festival no one can even
remember the name of 3 months later, feels to me like it may be that
high water mark. The Peace Prize certainly was the high water mark
for Jimmy Carter's credibility, not to mention that of Henry Kissinger
and a myriad of others. Think of it this way -- if the guys who made
the peace prize decisions were investors, and you knew what they were
investing in, you would sell short. Seriously, just look at the
group. Well, they just invested in Al Gore.Update: One thing many commenters have not pointed
out is that Al Gore is really manuevering the US and China and India
(and the rest of the developping world) into a position that, if he has
his way, conflict is going to occur over who gets to grow and develop,
and who does not. CO2 catastrophism has the ablility to be the single
most destabalizing issue of the 21st century. This is peace?
Up until now, the retreat of Arctic ice to 30 year lows has been credited, without proof, to global warming. This never made a lot of sense to me, since at the same time Antarctic sea ice was hitting an all-time high. Over at Climate Skeptic, I discuss a new NASA study that proposes that Arctic sea ice melting over the last decade has been due mainly to shifting wind patterns that basically push the ice into warmer waters where it melts faster.
Over at Climate Skeptic, some investigation by the folks at SPPI have shown that in her new children's climate propaganda book, Laurie David actually reversed the legend on a key chart showing the 600,000 year history of CO2 and temperature. Recent analysis has shown, and most all scientists accept, that temperature increases actually preceded CO2 increases by 800 or more years in many of the past glacial cycles. Since this did not fit her story, David reverses the chart legend, making CO2 precede temperature the way David wants it. Going right to David's cited source, we find:
On page 103 of their book, David and Gordon cite the work of Siegenthaler et al.
(2005), for their written and graphical contention that temperature lags CO2.
However, Siegenthaler et al. clearly state the opposite:"The
lags of CO2 with respect to the Antarctic temperature over
glacial terminations V to VII are 800, 1600, and 2800 years, respectively, which
are consistent with earlier observations during the last four glacial
cycles."(Siegenthaler et al., 2005, Science, vol. 310,
1313-1317)
More, including the graphs themselves, before and after tampering, at climate skeptic.
Over at Climate Skeptic, some investigation by the folks at SPPI have shown that in her new children's climate propaganda book, Laurie David actually reversed the legend on a key chart showing the 600,000 year history of CO2 and temperature. Recent analysis has shown, and most all scientists accept, that temperature increases actually preceded CO2 increases by 800 or more years in many of the past glacial cycles. Since this did not fit her story, David reverses the chart legend, making CO2 precede temperature the way David wants it. Going right to David's cited source, we find:
On page 103 of their book, David and Gordon cite the work of Siegenthaler et al.
(2005), for their written and graphical contention that temperature lags CO2.
However, Siegenthaler et al. clearly state the opposite:"The
lags of CO2 with respect to the Antarctic temperature over
glacial terminations V to VII are 800, 1600, and 2800 years, respectively, which
are consistent with earlier observations during the last four glacial
cycles."(Siegenthaler et al., 2005, Science, vol. 310,
1313-1317)
More, including the graphs themselves, before and after tampering, at climate skeptic.
Matt may be right that I haven't harangued people about climate change
recently, so here goes: dude, if you're still a climate change skeptic, it's
time for a rethink. When the science correspondent for Reason magazine
comes over to the reality of anthropogenic global warming, it's safe to say that
the skeptics have lost the debate. Not only the vast majority of the scientific
community, but even most of the hard-core skeptics at conservative magazines,
have abandonned the hope that we are not warming up the climate.There's still debate about the effects of the warming, and what we should do
about it. But there's not much question that it's happening.
Duh. The vision of the skeptic community denying that the world is
warming at all is a straw man created by the climate catastrophists to avoid
arguing about the much more important point in her second paragraph. What I
can't understand is McArdle's, and many intelligent people I meet, seeming
unintrest in the degree of man-made impact.
The chief debate really boils down to those of us who think that
climate sensitivity to CO2 is closer to 1C (ie the degrees the world will warm
with a doubling of CO2 concentrations from pre-industrial levels) and those who
think that the sensitivity is 3-5C or more. The lower sensitivity implies a
warming over the next century of about a half degree C, or about what we saw in
the last century. The higher numbers represesent an order of magnitude more
warming in the next century. The lower numbers imply a sea level rise measured
in inches. The higher numbers imply a rise of 1-2 feet (No one really know
where Al Gore gets his 20 foot prediction in his movie). The lower numbers we
might not even notice. The higher numbers will certainly cause problems.
The other debate is whether the cost of CO2 abatement should even be
considered. I have talked to many people who say the costs are irrelevant -
Gaia must come first. But steps to make any kind of dent in CO2 production with
current technologies will have a staggering impact on the world economy. For
example, there are a billion Asians poised to finally to enter the middle class
who we will likely consign back to poverty with an aggressive CO2 reduction
program. With such staggering abatement costs, it matters how bad the
effects of man-made global warming will be.
There are many reasons a 1.0 climate sensivity is far more defensible
than the higher sensitivities used by catastrophists. My
argument a lower climate sensitivity and therefore a less aggresive posture on
CO2 is here. Cross-posted at Climate Skeptic.
Update: Sure, we skeptics debate the degree of past warming, but it really can't be denied the earth is warmer than 100 years ago. The problem catastrophists have with defending their higher climate sensitivities is that these sensitivities imply that we should have seen much more warming over the past 100 years, as much as 1.5C or more instead of about 0.6C. These scientists have a tendency to try to restate historical numbers to back their future forecast accuracy. We skeptics fight them on this, but it does not mean we are trying to deny warming at all, just make sure the science is good as to the magnitude.
One other thought - everyone should keep two words in mind vis a vis CO2 and its effect on temperature: Diminishing Return. Each new molecule of CO2 has less impact on temperature than the last one. Only by positing a lot of weird, unlikely, and unstable positive feedbacks in the climate can scientists reach these higher sensitivity numbers (more here). A good economist would laugh if they understood the assumptions that were being made in the catastrophic forecasts that are being used to influence government action.
Cars made by GM and fuel produce by Exxon may be responsible for a lot of CO2, but no one is creating as much global warming as James Hansen and NASA do just sitting at their computers. An example, showing a cooling trend in New Zealand before their adjustments, but a strong warming trend after NASA is through with the data, is posted at Climate Skeptic.
At a recent meeting of the National Associate of State Treasurers
(Yawn), John Podesta, after stating hilariously that what the world
really needed was continued leadership by state treasurers on the
global warming issue, argued:
"Climate change is a threat to the long-term value of the economy and
failure to calculate its impacts or manage or reduce its harm mean that
our assets are being over valued, and the risks we face are being under
reported."
I have a lot of interest in global warming, which is why I created a second blog Climate Skeptic to deal with these issues. There is a lot about anthropogenic warming we do not understand. But what is nearly a total 100% lock is that, at least for the United States, the cost to our economy of regulations to limit CO2 will be far higher than the likely net-negative effects of warming (Al Gore's 20 foot sea level rises and other anti-rational claims notwithstanding). At its heart, isn't the risk really of damage from government regulation, rather than the climate?
Via Michael Giberson of Knowledge Problem, the NY Attorney General is concerned that certain companies are not disclosing global warming-related risks, but he is at least more honest about what those risks are:
Last Friday, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo sent subpoenas
to five power generating companies seeking to find out if the companies
had properly disclosed financial risks associated with proposed new
coal-fired power plants.All five of the letters accompanying the subpoenas are available from the NYAG's website. Here is the opening paragraph of the letter to Dominion Resources, Inc.:
We are aware that Dominion Resources, Inc., ("Dominion")
has plans to build a coal-fired electric generating unit that would
generate 585 megawatts of electricity without current plans to capture
and sequester the resulting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The
increase in CO2 emissions from the operating of this unit, in
combination with Dominion's other coal-fired plants, will subject
Dominion to increased financial, regulatory, and litigation risks. We
are concerned that Dominion has not adequately disclosed these risks to
its shareholders, including the New York State Common Retirement Fund,
which is a significant holder of Dominion stock. Pursuant to the
Attorney General's investigatory authority under New York General
Business Law § 352, and New York Executive Law § 63(12), accompanying
this letter is a subpoena seeking information regarding Dominion's
analysis of its climate risks and its disclosures of such risks to
investors.A little later, the letter gets more specific: "For example, any one
of the several new or likely regulatory initiatives for CO2 emissions
from power plants "“ including state carbon controls, EPA's regulations
under the Clean Air Act, or the enactment of federal global warming
legislation "“ would add a significant cost to carbon-intensive coal
generation, such as the new coal plant planned by Dominion." In
addition to Dominion, the NYAG's office sent subpoenas to AES, Dynegy,
Peabody, and Xcel. Here is the story from the New York Times.The letter doesn't say so explicitly, but I'm sure the message was
clear, that in addition to new or likely legislative actions and
substantive regulatory initiatives, the companies also faced the risks
and costs associated with being harassed by swarms of officers from the
NYAG's office.
You can see what is going on here -- following in the rich tradition established by the egregious Eliot Spitzer, the NY AG is again overreaching his office's authority and attempting to set regulatory policy rather than enforce it. But at least he is honest in portraying the main risk to be a government regulatory backlash on these companies.
Thinking about this, couldn't every company put this in their boilerplate? I mean, for most of us, the number one risk we face all the time is that the government will either do something to us specifically or the economy in general to hurt results. Let's just have everyone add the line "the government poses a huge risk to our business plan" and be done with it.
Over at Climate Skeptic, I discuss Anthony Watt's preliminary findings as to the quality of measurement in the surface temperature installations that are used to measure global warming. If we call global warming "the signal", then the signal is currently thought to have been about 0.6C over the last century. However, Watt has good reason to estimate that 85% of the US Historical Climate Network has installation biases that create errors from 1-5C,or about 2-8 times the signal. And these are not random biases that cancel out, but tend to all bias the numbers higher, leading to systematic over-estimation of temperature increases.
Over at Climate Skeptic, I discuss Anthony Watt's preliminary findings as to the quality of measurement in the surface temperature installations that are used to measure global warming. If we call global warming "the signal", then the signal is currently thought to have been about 0.6C over the last century. However, Watt has good reason to estimate that 85% of the US Historical Climate Network has installation biases that create errors from 1-5C,or about 2-8 times the signal. And these are not random biases that cancel out, but tend to all bias the numbers higher, leading to systematic over-estimation of temperature increases.
I am sure everyone has heard that Arctic sea ice is, as the National Geographic described it, at an "all-time low." Of course those would expect the words "all-time" to mean just that will be disappointed to learn that they really mean "since 1979 when we started measuring it by satellite."
At Climate Skeptic, I write that it has come to my attention that the earth has two poles, and it's odd no one talks about the other one. Maybe they forgot? Well it turns out that Antarctic sea ice is at an all time high (using the term in the same way that National Geographic does).
As an end note, I also discuss Glacier Bay, Alaska. It turns out the glaciers there are retreating, but about 99% of the retreat occurred between 1793 and 1907.
After NASA was forced to restate its US temperature data downward, James Hansen argued that the US doesn't matter. After it was observed that long-term temperature measurement is flawed in South America and Africa, James Hansen agreed and argued that South America and Africa don't matter. Since oceans cover 75% of the globe and we have no long-term temperature record for these oceans or for Antarctica, I ask the question at Climate Skeptic: What does matter?
Good news this week: James Hansen and NASA have now deigned to release for scrutiny their taxpayer-funded temperature aggregation and adjustment code. I go in more detail and explain why this matters over at Climate Skeptic.
By the way, if you are wondering why I have calmed down a bit on climate of late here at Coyote Blog, it is because I have decided that my climate work really was diluting what I want to do here at Coyote Blog, and it really deserved its own home and audience. I have begun archiving old posts over at Climate Skeptic, and I will do most of my new posting on climate there. Those interested in the climate issues are encouraged to bookmark the new site and/or subscribe to its feed.
For a little while, I will still mirror the headlines over here at Coyote Blog (after all, the paint is still so wet over at Climate Skeptic that I don't think Google has found me yet -- a few blogrolls wouldn't hurt, hint, hint.)
Also, in the next few weeks I plan release my own video on issues with catastrophic anthropogenic (man-made) global warming theory. The core of this video will be based on this skeptics summary post and my 60-second climate overview as well as my free 80-page skeptics primer, of course.
I know I have deluged you with a lot of climate change posts of late. I think this particular post is important, as it is the clearest single argument I can make as to why I am skeptical that man-made global warming will rise to catastrophic levels. It is not comprehensive, it took me 80 pages to do that, but it should get anyone thinking.
It turns out to be quite easy to do a simple but fairly robust reality check of global warming forecasts, even without knowing what a "Watt" or a "forcing" is. Our approach will be entirely empirical, based on the last 100 years of climate history. I am sensitive that we skeptics not fall into the
9/11 Truther syndrome of arguing against a coherent theory from
isolated anomalies. To this end, my approach here is holistic and not
anomaly driven. What we will find is that, extrapolating from history, it is almost impossible to get warming numbers as high as those quoted by global warming alarmists.
Climate Sensitivity
The one simple concept you need to understand is "climate sensitivity." As used in most global warming literature, climate sensitivity is the amount of global warming that results from a doubling in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Usually, when this number is presented, it refers to the warming from a doubling of CO2 concentrations since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The pre-industrial concentration is generally accepted as 280ppm (0.028% of the atmosphere) and the number today is about 380ppm, so a doubling would be to 560ppm.
As a useful, though not required, first step before we begin, I encourage you to read the RealClimate simple "proof" for laymen that the climate sensitivity is 3ºC, meaning the world will warm 3 degrees C with a doubling of CO2 concentrations from their pre-industrial level. Don't worry if you don't understand the whole description, we are going to do it a different, and I think more compelling, way (climate scientists are a bit like the Wizard of Oz -- they are afraid if they make things too simple someone might doubt they are a real wizard). 3ºC is a common number for sensitivity used by global warming hawks, though it is actually at the low end of the range that the UN IPCC arrived at in their fourth report. The IPCC (4th report, page 798) said that the expected value is between 3ºC and 4ºC and that there was a greater chance the sensitivity was larger than 6ºC than that it was 1.5ºC or less. I will show you why I think it is extraordinarily unlikely that the number is greater even than 1.5ºC.
Our Approach
We are going to derive the sensitivity (actually a reasonable range for sensitivity) for ourselves in three steps. First, we will do it a simple way. Then, we will do it a slightly harder but more accurate way. And third, we will see what we would have to assume to get a number anywhere near 3ºC. Our approach will be entirely empirical, using past changes in CO2 and temperature to estimate sensitivity. After all, we have measured CO2 going up by about 100 ppm. That is about 36% of the way towards a doubling from 280 to 560. And, we have measured temperatures -- and though there are a lot of biases in these temperature measurements, these measurements certainly are better than our guesses, say, of temperatures in the last ice age. Did you notice something odd, by the way, in the RealClimate derivation? They never mentioned measured sensitivities in the last 100 years -- they jumped all the way back to the last ice age. I wonder if there is a reason for that?
A First Approximation
OK, let's do the obvious. If we have experienced 36% of a doubling, then we should be able to take the historic temperature rise from CO2 for the same period and multiply it by 2.8 (that's just reciprocal of 36%) and derive the temperature increase we would expect for a full doubling.
The problem is that we don't know the historic temperature rise solely form CO2. But we do know how to bound it. The IPCC and most global warming hawks place the warming since 1900 at about 0.6ºC. Since no one attributes warming before 1900 to man-made CO2 (it did warm, but this is attributed to natural cyclical recovery from the little ice age) then the maximum historic man-made warming is 0.6ºC. In fact, all of that warming is probably not from CO2. Some probably is from continued cyclical warming out of the little ice age. Some, I believe strongly, is due to still uncorrected biases, particularly of urban heat islands, in surface temperature data.
But let's for a moment attribute, unrealistically, all of this 0.6ºC to man-made CO2 (this is in fact what the IPCC does in their report). This should place an upper bound on the sensitivity number. Taking 0.6ºC times 2.8 yields an estimated climate sensitivity of 1.7ºC. Oops. This is about half of the RealClimate number or the IPCC number! And if we take a more realistic number for man-made historic warming as 0.4ºC, then we get a sensitivity of 1.1ºC. Wow, that's a lot lower! We must be missing something important! It turns out that we are, in this simple analysis, missing something important. But taking it into account is going to push our sensitivity number even lower.
A Better Approximation
What we are missing is that the relation between CO2 concentration and warming is not linear, as implied in our first approximation. It is a diminishing return. This means that the first 50 ppm rise in CO2 concentrations causes more warming than the next 50 ppm, etc. This effect has often been compared to painting a window. The first coat of paint blocks out a lot of light, but the window is still translucent. The next coat blocks out more light, but not as much as the first. Eventually, subsequent coats have no effect because all the light is already blocked. CO2 has a similar effect on warming. It only absorbs certain wavelengths of radiation returning to space from earth. Once the absorption of those wavelengths is saturated, extra CO2 will do almost nothing. (update: By the way, this is not some skeptic's fantasy -- everyone in climate accepts this fact).
So what does this mean in English? Well, in our first approximation, we assumed that 36% of a CO2 doubling would yield 36% of the temperature we would get in a doubling. But in reality, since the relationship is a diminishing return, the first 36% of a CO2 doubling will yield MORE than 36% of the temperature increase you get for a doubling. The temperature increase is front-loaded, and diminishes going forward. An illustration is below, with the linear extrapolation in red and the more realistic decreasing exponential extrapolation in blue.
The exact shape and equation of this curve is not really known, but we can establish a reasonable range of potential values. For any reasonable shapes of this curve, 36% of a CO2 doubling (where we are today) equates to from 43% to 63% of the final temperature increase over a doubling. This would imply that a multiplier between 2.3 and 1.6 for temperature extrapolation (vs. 2.8 derived above for the straight linear extrapolation above) or a climate sensitivity of 1.4ºC to 1.0ºC if man-made historic warming was 0.6ºC and a range of 0.9ºC to 0.6ºC for a man-made historic warming of 0.4ºC. I tend to use the middle of this range, with a multiplier of about 1.9 and a man-made historic warming of 0.5ºC to give a expected sensitivity of 0.95ºC, which we can round to 1ºC.
This is why you will often hear skeptics cite numbers closer to 1ºC rather than 3ºC for the climate sensitivity. Any reasonable analysis of actual climate experience over the last 100 years yields a sensitivity much closer to 1ºC than 3ºC. Most studies conducted before the current infatuation with showing cataclysmic warming forecasts came up with this same 1ºC, and peer-reviewed work is still coming up with this same number.
So what does this mean for the future? Well, to predict actual temperature increases from this sensitivity, we would have to first create a CO2 production forecast and, you guessed it, global warming hawks have exaggerated that as well. The IPCC says we will hit the full doubling to 560ppm around 2065 (Al Gore, incredibly, says we will hit it in the next two decades). This means that with about 0.5C behind us, and a 3 sensitivity, we can expect 2.5C more warming in the next 60 years. Multiply that times exaggerated negative effects of warming, and you get instant crisis.
However, since actual CO2 production is already below IPCC forecasts, we might take a more reasonable date of 2080-2100 for a doubling to 560. And, combining this with our derived sensitivity of 1ºC (rather than RealClimate's 3ºC) we will get 0.5C more warming in the next 75-100 years. This is about the magnitude of warming we experienced in the last century, and most of us did not even notice.
I know you are scratching you head and wondering what trick I pulled to get numbers so much less than the scientific "consensus." But there is no trick, all my numbers are empirical and right out of the IPCC reports. In fact, due to measurement biases and other climate effects that drive warming, I actually think the historic warming from CO2 and thus the sensitivity is even lower, but I didn't want to confuse the message.
So what are climate change hawks assuming that I have not included? Well, it turns out they add on two things, neither of which has much empirical evidence behind it. It is in fact the climate hawks, not the skeptics, that need to argue for a couple of anomalies to try to make their case.
Is Climate Dominated by Positive Feedback?
Many climate scientists argue that there are positive feedbacks in the climate system that tend to magnify and amplify the warming from CO2. For example, a positive feedback might be that hotter climate melts sea ice and glaciers, which reduces the reflectiveness of the earth's surface, which causes more sunlight to be absorbed, which warms things further. A negative feedback might be that warmer climate vaporizes more water which forms more clouds which blocks sunlight and cools the earth.
Climate scientists who are strong proponents of catastrophic man-made warming theory assume that the climate is dominated by positive feedbacks. In fact, my reading of the IPCC report says that the climate "consensus" is that net feedback in the climate system is positive and tends to add 2 more degrees of temperature for every one added from CO2. You might be thinking - aha - I see how they got a sensitivity of 3ºC: Your 1ºC plus 2ºC in feedback equals 3ºC.
But there is a problem with that. In fact, there are three problems with this. Here they are:
Do aerosols and dimming imply a higher sensitivity?
Finally, the last argument that climate hawks would employ is that anthropogenic effects, specifically emission of SO2 aerosols and carbon black, have been reflecting sunlight and offsetting the global warming effect. But, they caution, once we eliminate these pollutants, which we have done in the West (only to be offset in China and Asia) temperatures will no longer be suppressed and we will see the full extent of warming.
First, again, no one really has any clue the magnitude of this effect, or even if it is an effect at all. Second, its reach will tend to be localized over industrial areas (since their presence in the atmosphere is relatively short-lived), whereas CO2 acts worldwide. If these aerosols and carbon black are concentrated say over 20% of the land surface of the world, this means they are only affecting the temperature over 5% of the total earth' s surface. So its hard to argue they are that significant.
However, let's say for a moment this effect does exist. How large would it have to be to argue that a 3.0ºC climate sensitivity is justified by historical data? Well, taking 3.0ºC and dividing by our derived extrapolation multiplier of 1.9, we get required historic warming due to man's efforts of 1.6ºC. This means that even if all past 0.6ºC of warming is due to man (a stretch), then aerosols must be suppressing a full 1ºC of warming. I can't say this is impossible, but it is highly unlikely and certainly absolutely no empirical evidence exists to support any number like this. Particularly since dimming effects probably are localized, you would need as much as 20ºC suppression in these local areas to get a 1ºC global effect. Not very likely.
Why the number might even be less
Remember that when we calculated sensitivity, we needed the historical warming due to man's CO2. A simple equation for arriving at this number is:
Warming due to Man's CO2 = Total Historic Measured Warming - Measurement Biases - Warming from other Sources + Warming suppressed by Aerosols
This is why most skeptics care if surface temperature measurements are biased upwards or if the sun is increasing in intensity. Global warming advocates scoff and say that these effects don't undermine greenhouse gas theory. And they don't. I accept greenhouse gases cause some warming. BUT, the more surface temperature measurements are biased upwards and the more warming is being driven by non-anthropogenic sources, the less that is being caused by man. And, as you have seen in this post, the less warming caused by man historically means less that we will see in the future. And while global warming hawks want to paint skeptics as "deniers", we skeptics want to argue the much more interesting question "Yes, but how much is the world warming, and does this amount of warming really justify the costs of abatement, which are enormous."
As always, you can find my Layman's Guide to Skepticism about Man-made Global Warming here. It is available for free in HTML or pdf download, or you can order the printed book that I sell at cost. My other recent posts about climate are here.
I thought it was kind of silly how often I have seen blogs commenting on the story about Bette Midler cutting down her own trees in Hawaii. We should be supporting her property rights, not searching around for trivial examples of supposed hypocrisy. However, I did note this line from Midler's spokesman:
"The whole idea with cutting the trees down was with the idea of
improving the lot with native species" instead of the nonnative,
invasive species that had grown there, Graham said. "It's unfortunate
that a mistake was made."
Given that the island rose out of the sea as volcanic molten lava, my wild guess, without having a degree in botany, is that most all the plants and animals in Hawaii are non-native. For example, the Big Island only rose out of the sea less than 500,000 years ago. I am pretty sure no trees came up with the lava.
This strikes me as a common form of environmental anthropomorphism -- "Normal" is defined as the condition in which man has observed things over the last 200 or so years, a blink of the eye in geologic time. So the only allowable plants and animals are those that existed at the moment man started to observe a certain location. In the same way, "normal" for world temperatures is defined as what we observed them to be in about 1950. Climate and nature and geology follow multiple cycles and trend lines, some of which stretch for millions of years. It is hubris to say that we know what "normal" is.
Sorry for the slew of climate-related posts. I really don't want to turn this into a climate blog, but over the last 6 or 7 days I have been getting tons of climate-related traffic from a number of links. I am going back to working on the next version of my climate book, and will try to put most of my material there and get this blog back to finance and economics topics.
Of course if something comes up....
