Coyote Blog

Apparently, a
video by Greg Craven called "How the World Ends" has been getting a
lot of attention, supposedly because it prevents an irrefutable argument for immediately taking massive action to fight global
warming.  A newspaper asked me for my response, and I thought I would share it
here as well.  You can find my response posted at Climate Skeptic today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Zero Sum Fallacy

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

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

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

Wealth Benefits the Environment

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

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

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

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

Growth / Climate Tradeoffs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Zero Sum Fallacy

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

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

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

Wealth Benefits the Environment

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

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

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

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

Growth / Climate Tradeoffs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Zero Sum Fallacy

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

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

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

Wealth Benefits the Environment

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

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

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

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

Growth / Climate Tradeoffs

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

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

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

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

The Question, as asked (surprisingly) by a global warming believer:

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

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

Much more here at Climate Skeptic

Yesterday, I noted Al Gore bragging that he played a critical role in passing current biofuel mandates, making him the father of ethanol, not just the Internet.  The great goddess of irony is having a field day:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All I can say is:

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. 

I will be on the All American Blogger podcast tonight, live here at 10PM, or of course any time after that through miracle of MP3 here.  Never tried this format before with call-in questions and stuff, so it should be interesting.  I will be discussing climate and catastrophic man-made global warming theory.

The Arizona Republic had a stealth hit piece on skeptics in the paper today and, unfortunately, I inadvertently helped.  My kids woke me up at 7:00 this morning (Yuk!) to tell me I was on the front page of the Arizona Republic.  I was quoted a couple of times in an article on climate change skeptics.   I have a couple of thoughts about an article that really has me depressed today.  If you want to know what I really think about climate, see my book and in my movie (both free online).

• After interviews, I am always surprised at what the writers chose to quote, and this article is no exception. 
• I spent most of the article trying to explain this simple data exercise, but I guess newspapers today are science-phobic and would rather write he-said-she-said articles than actually get into the numbers.  Unfortunately, the article leaves the impressions that we skeptics have problems with catastrophic global warming theory  "just because."
• The article is not about the skeptics' position, because it is not really stated.  In fact, more space is spent on refuting skeptics than is even given to skeptics themselves.  Here is the best test:  The skeptic's position would have been better served by not publishing this mess at all.
• Almost my entire discussion with the reporter was about the forecasts.  I said man is causing some warming, but there are simple tests to show it likely won't be catastrophic.  I even said that it was the catastrophists tactic not to argue this point, but to shift the debate to whether warming exists at all, where they have a much stronger argument. Despite this whole discussion with the reporter, the reporter allowed the catastrophists to shift the debate again.  They want to argue whether things are warmer, where they are on strong ground, and not about how much it will warming the future and whether this will justify massive government intervention, where they are on weak ground.

This article really frustrates me, and may pretty much spell the end for my ever giving an interview on the subject again (I will do a podcast on Monday, which I will link soon, but that is different because they can't edit me).  Despite it being an article about skeptics, the catastrophists are the only one that get any empirical evidence whatsoever into the article (however lame it may be).  This really ticked me off in particular:  I spent an hour giving specific empirical reasons why there were problems with forecasts and the theory.  The reporter then just printed a few quotes from me that made me look like an uninformed idiot, saying "just because."  Then they print this:

"There is clearly a group of thought that says because we're not seeing
debate now, it never happened in the scientific community," Huxman
said. "That is simply wrong. It did happen, and it's over. The debate
now is over the idiosyncrasies, the internal workings."

Incredibly, they also credulously reprint the absurd Newsweek ad hominem attacks on skeptics. 

What also got my attention was the companion article on an ASU professor who is a climate skeptic.  Incredibly, in the whole article, not one sentence is dedicated to explaining why the professor is a skeptic.  What is the empirical evidence he relies on, or the analysis he finds most compelling?  We never find out.  All we get is an article on dueling motivations.  For example, the Republic writes:

Despite his notoriety as a hero of the skeptic crowd, Balling's research and lifestyle contain some surprising contradictions.

He is in charge of climate studies at the Decision Center for a Desert
City, an ambitious ASU program that looks at how drought will affect
the Valley.

He's a registered independent and lives a lifestyle that the hardiest environmental activist would recognize as green....

If there was a competition for living green, "put the cards on the
table, and I'll beat 99 percent of the faculty here," Balling said.

He avoids driving and  doesn't own a cellphone.

He would even have liked to see Al Gore win the presidency in 2000.

So?  Why is this surprising?  Should we all naturally expect that skeptics all eat children for dinner?  And, of course, an article on a leading skeptic would not be complete without this:

Critics have assailed Balling's ties to industries.

Balling received more than $679,000 in research funding from
fossil-fuel-industry organizations between 1989 and 2002, according to
figures provided by ASU. He served as a scientific adviser to the
Greening Earth Society, a public-relations organization founded by the
Western Fuels Association to promote the benefits of global warming.

Uh, OK.  Here is a Coyote Blog challenge:  Find me one article in a mainstream newspaper or news weekly that even once checks the sources of funding for climate catastrophists.  This focus on funding and motivation and political affiliation for skeptics only is scandalously asymmetric.  But take a quick look at the article - 85% of it is related to motivation, either how good his green credentials are or how much money he gets from oil companies - and not any discussion of what he actually thinks. 

This final bit is especially funny.  Think of all the wacko professors out there that are warmly accepted by their universities and the academic community.  We're talking about folks all the way up to and including men who have gone to prison for torturing and murdering women.  But apparently having a climate skeptic on the faculty is just too much:

But his climate work has garnered the most national attention, which bothers some colleagues at ASU.

"For ASU, having Balling as such a prominent figure in the climate
debate has been awkward, not so much because of his positions but
because we have lacked scientists of similar stature whose work
supports more widely held, opposing views," Jonathan Fink, director of
ASU's Global Institute of Sustainability, wrote in an e-mail. "Hence we
have been viewed as somewhat of a fringe institution in the world of
climate-change research."

Wow, its terrible to see such ill-repute brought to America's #1 Party School.  And by the way, what the hell kind of strategy is this?  We want to make a name for ourselves in climate research, so to do so we think we should be just like all the other schools -- that's the way to differentiate ourselves!

I will post links to my podcast that is coming up Monday night.  After that, I am not sure.  I am pretty depressed about the state of the media on this issue.  I have a lot of interests and more than enough to do with my time that I may take a break from climate for a while.

Over at Climate Skeptic, I post my single best argument why you shouldn't be panicked about anthropogenic global warming.

Please check back Monday morning, as I will be releasing my new video, "What is Normal:  A Critique of Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming Theory."  As with my global warming book, which began as a ten page summary and ended up as an 85-page manuscript, the video started at a goal of 15 minutes and eventually ended up at 50 minutes.  However, unlike other global warming-related videos I will not name, it is all climate science, with no self-congratulatory segments on my childhood.

"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.

Anthony Watt has a pointer to a nice presentation in four parts on YouTube by Bob Carter made at a public forum in Australia.  He walks through some of the skeptics' issues with catastrophic man-made global warming theory.

What caught my attention, though, were the pictures Mr. Carter shows in his presentation about about 1:30 into part 4.  Because I took the pictures he shows, down at the University of Arizona, as part of Mr. Watts project to document temperature measurement stations.  Kind of cool to see someone I don't know in a country I have (sadly) never visited using a small bit of my work.  Part 4 is below, but you can find links to all four parts here.

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.

From
Megan McArdle:

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.

While we can argue about the projected impacts of man-made global warming (my skeptics site here), it is almost certain than any solution that puts a real dent in CO2 production will bar from the middle class about a billion people who are just climbing out of subsistence poverty.  TJIC notes a particularly odious proposal by environmental groups to encourage human power over industrialization in the third world:

See, first world Volvo-driving environmentalists!  We can help
the Third World! All we need to do is build them human hamster wheels,
so that they can set their children to work pumping water, instead of
using nasty diesel pumps (like we do here in the First World, while our
children attend soccer practice or piano lessons).

Don't miss the really awful animation from the environmentalist's site.

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 am often asked, "why, if the threat of global warming is really so overstated, does the issue have such legs with politicians, media, and activists?"

Answer:  Because it is the perfect political bludgeon.  One of the reasons I felt like high school debate really was broken (I don't know if it has been fixed since) was because every single debate eventually devolved into which side was more likely to cause a nuclear war.  It didn't matter if you were arguing about energy policy or the presidential primary system, no good debate case stopped short of blaming the other side for nuclear war.

Today, with nuclear weapons mostly forgotten (unfortunately not gone), global warming is the new nuclear war. It doesn't matter what you are arguing about:

There was Clare Short, a member of the British Parliament and Secretary
for International Development under Prime Minister Tony Blair until she
resigned in 2003 over the Iraq war. Claiming that Israel is actually
"much worse than the original apartheid state" and accusing it of
"killing (Palestinian) political leaders," Ms. Short charged the Jewish
state with the ultimate crime: Israel "undermines the international
community's reaction to global warming." According to Ms. Short, the
Middle East conflict distracts the world from the real problem:
man-made climate change. If extreme weather will lead to the "end of
the human race," as Ms. Short warned it could, add this to the list of
the crimes of Israel.

My photo survey of the Tucson USHCN climate station is still creating a lot of discussion.  Discussion, for example, is here, here, and here.

And you too can have the satisfaction of contributing to science.  All
you need is a camera (a GPS of some sort is also helpful).  I wrote a
post with instructions on how to find temperature stations near you and how to document them for science here.  Believe it or not, for all the work and money spent on global warming,
this is something that no one had done -- actually go document these
sites to check their quality and potential biases.

OK, I understand that perhaps my worst flaw in trying to make a point is in being too loquacious.  In a previous post, I showed why estimates of climate catastrophe were overblown by using the earth's experience over the last 100 years as an empirical guide.  Today, I shall try to make the same point with fewer words and just two charts instead.

Scientists have a concept called climate sensitivity which refers to the amount of global warming in degrees Celsius we might expect from a doubling of CO2 concentrations from a pre-industrial 280ppm to 560ppm  (we are currently at about 380ppm today and will reach 560ppm between 2065 and 2100, depending on how aggressive a forecast you want to adopt).

A simple way to estimate sensitivity is from experience over the past century.  At the same time CO2 has gone up by 100ppm, global temperatures have gone up by at most 0.6 Celsius (from the 4th IPCC report).  I actually believe this number is over-stated due to uncorrected urban effects and other surface temperature measurement issues, but let's assume 0.6ºC.  Only a part of that 0.6ºC is due to man - some is likely do to natural cyclical effects, but again to avoid argument, let's assume man's CO2 has heated the earth 0.6 Celsius.  From these data points, we can project forward:

As you can see, the projection is actually a diminishing curve.  For reasons I will not go into again (you can read much more in my original post) this relationship HAS to be a diminishing curve.  It's a fact accepted by everyone.  True climate consensus.  We can argue about the slope and exact shape, but I have chosen midpoint values from a reasonable range.  The answer is not that sensitive to different assumptions anyway.  Even a linear extrapolation, which is clearly wrong scientifically, would only yield a sensitivity projection a few tenths of a degree higher.

What we arrive at is a sensitivity of about 1.2 degrees Celsius for a CO2 doubling (where the blue line crosses 560ppm).  In other words, we can expect another 0.6ºC increase over the next century, about the same amount we experienced (and most of us failed to notice) over the last century.

But, you are saying, global warming catastrophists get so much higher numbers.  Yes they do, with warming as high as 9-10C in the next century.  In fact, most global warming catastrophists believe the climate sensitivity is at least 3ºC per doubling, and many use estimates as high as 5ºC or 6ºC.  Do these numbers make sense?  Well, let's draw the same curve for a sensitivity of 3ºC, the low end of the catastrophists' estimates, this time in red:

To get a sensitivity of 3.0ºC, one has to assume that global warming due solely to man's CO2 (nothing else) would have to be 1.5ºC to date (where the red line intersects the current concentration of 380ppm).  But no one, not the IPCC or anyone else, believes measured past warming has been anywhere near this high.  So to believe the catastrophic man-made global warming case, you have to accept a sensitivity three or more times higher than historical empirical data would support.  Rather than fighting against climate consensus, which is how we are so often portrayed, skeptics in fact have history and empirical data on our side.  For me, this second chart is the smoking gun of climate skepticism.  We have a lot of other issues -- measurement biases, problems with historical reconstructions, role of the sun, etc -- but this chart highlights the central problem -- that catastrophic warming forecasts make no sense based on the last 100+ years of actual data.

Global warming catastrophists in fact have to argue against historical data, and say it is flawed in two ways:  First, they argue there are positive feedbacks in climate that will take hold in the future and accelerate warming; and second, they argue there are other anthropogenic effects, specifically sulphate aerosols, that are masking man-made warming.  Rather than just repeat myself (and in the interest in proving I can actually be succinct) I will point you to my original post, the second half of which deals in depth with these two issues. 

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.