Coyote Blog

A couple of weeks ago, Newsweek published a front-page article demonizing ExxonMobil for given $10,000 honorariums to researchers likely to publish work skeptical of catastrophic man-made global warming.  If $10,000 is corrupting and justifies such an ad hominem attack, what are we to make of $100 million (pronounced in Dr. Evil voice with pinkie to lips) a year in pro-catastrophe spending:

That's right, $100 million per year. Al Gore,
who seems to think it is sinister for other people to spend money in
order to communicate their ideas about sound public policy is going to
outspend the entire mass of climate policy critics tenfold in order to
spread his message of environmental catastrophism to the public.

Speech:  OK for me, but not for thee.

Postscript:  By the way, I fully support Mr. Gore and his donor's efforts to let their viewpoint be heard.  I just wonder why they don't extend me the same courtesy.

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:

1. We came up with our 1ºC sensitivity empirically.  In other words, we observed a 100ppm past CO2 increase leading to 0.5ºC measured temperature increase which implies 1ºC sensitivity.  But since this is empirical, rather than developed from some set of forcings and computer models, then it should already be net of all feedbacks.  If there are positive feedbacks in the system, then they have been operating and should be part of that 1ºC.
2. There is no good scientific evidence that there is a large net positive feedback loop in climate, or even that the feedback is net positive at all.  There are various studies, hypotheses, models, etc., but no proof at all.  In fact, you can guess this from our empirical data.  History implies that there can't be any large positive feedbacks in the system or else we would have observed higher temperatures historically.  In fact, we can go back in to the distant historical record (in fact, Al Gore showed the chart I am thinking of in An Inconvenient Truth) and find that temperatures have never run away or exhibited any sort of tipping point effect.
3. The notion that a system like climate, which has been reasonably stable for millions of years, is dominated by positive feedback should offend the intuition of any scientist.  Nature is dominated in large part by negative feedback processes.  Positive feedback processes are highly unstable, and tend to run away to a distant endpoint.  Nuclear fission, for example, is a positive feedback process

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.

James Hansen, NASA climate scientist and lead singer in the climate apocalypse choir, responded to his  temperature data revisions a week ago:

What we have here is a case of dogged contrarians who
present results in ways intended to deceive the public into believing
that the changes have greater significance than reality. They aim to
make a mountain out of a mole hill. I believe that these people are not
stupid, instead they seek to create a brouhaha and muddy the waters in
the climate change story. They seem to know exactly what they are doing
and believe they can get away with it, because the public does not have
the time, inclination, and training to discern what is a significant
change with regard to the global warming issue.

The proclamations of the contrarians are a deceit

Um, whatever.  Remember, this is the man who had large errors in his data set, used by nearly every climate scientist in the world, for years, and which were only recently discovered by Steven McIntyre (whom Hansen refuses to even name in his letter).  These errors persisted for years because Mr. Hansen refuses to allow the software and algorithms he uses to "correct" and adjust the data to be scrutinized by anyone else.  He keeps critical methodologies that are paid for by we taxpayers a secret.  But it is his critics who are deceitful? 

In particular, he is bent out of shape that critics' first presented the new data as a revised ranking of the hottest years rather than as a revised line graph.  But it was Hansen and his folks who made a big deal in the press that 1998 was the hottest year in history.  It was he that originally went for this sound byte rather than the more meaningful and data-rich graph when communicating with the press.  But then he calls foul when his critics mimic his actions?  (Oh, and by the way, I showed it both ways).

Hansen has completely ignored the important lessons from this experience, while focusing like a laser on the trivial.  I explained in detail why this event mattered, and it was not mainly because of the new numbers.  In short, finding this mistake was pure accident -- it was a bit like inferring that the furniture in a house is uncomfortable solely by watching the posture of visitors leaving the house.  That's quite an deductive achievement, but how much more would you learn if the homeowners would actually let you in the house to inspect the furniture.  Maybe its ugly too.

So why does Hansen feel he should be able to shield himself from scrutiny and keep the details of his database adjustments and aggregation methodology a secret?  Because he thinks he is the king.    Just read his letter:

The contrarians will be remembered as court jesters. There is no point
to joust with court jesters. "¦ Court jesters serve as a distraction, a
distraction from usufruct. Usufruct is the matter that the captains
wish to deny, the matter that they do not want their children to know
about.

Why do we allow this kind of secrecy and spurning of scrutiny in science?  Is it tolerated in any other discipline?

Steve McIntyre has his response here.  McIntyre still has my favorite comment ever about Hansen and his gang:

While acolytes may call these guys "professionals", the process of
data adjustment is really a matter of statistics and even accounting.
In these fields, Hansen and Mann are not "professionals" - Mann
admitted this to the NAS panel explaining that he was "not a
statistician". As someone who has read their works closely, I do not
regard any of these people as "professional". Much of their reluctance
to provide source code for their methodology arises, in my opinion,
because the methods are essentially trivial and they derive a certain
satisfaction out of making things appear more complicated than they
are, a little like the Wizard of Oz. And like the Wizard of Oz, they
are not necessarily bad men, just not very good wizards.

Update:  If you have a minute, read Hansen's letter, and then ask yourself:  Does this sound like what I would expect of scientific discourse?  Does he sound more like a politician or a scientist?

Chris Horner reports that the next mass-state-AG-tort, modeled after their fairly succesful efforts against tobacco companies, will be against oil companies over global warming:

A little birdie recently chirped about some
usual-suspect state attorneys general preparing a litigation strategy
document for/with environmental pressure groups, providing a roadmap
for cooperatively replicating the tobacco litigation of a decade ago in
the "global warming" context, substituting that projected catastrophe
for cancer and "big energy" for tobacco companies.

The point of
such exercise would not be to litigate the matter to conclusion "” ever
more challenging what with forced corrections of the temperature
record, recent exposure of the woeful reliability of our own world's
most reliable surface measuring network, and of course no global
warming in a decade (or, we now know, since 1900 for that matter) "” but
to extract massive settlements from the energy industry to further fund
the trial lawyers, greens and the greens' pet projects. Just imagine
the anti-energy campaign that this model would yield! And at no cost,
really, except to anyone who uses energy and/or invests in these sleepy
"granny stocks". Oh, and the economy.

He goes on to include a copy of the memo making the rounds of the AG offices.   This will certainly be a circus, and generally an expensive time-waster that will just serve to line the pockets of tort lawyers and the politically connected.  If things turn out like the tobacco settlement, the oil companies may jump on board early, since the tobacco settlement has turned into a state-enforced oligopoly for the major tobacco companies.  On the bright side, this might be an opportunity to subpoena the details of a bunch of climate work that is currently kept secret.

OK, I lied.  I have one more post I want to make on global warming now that Steve McIntyre's site is back up.  I suspect I tend to bury the lede in my warming posts, because I try to be really careful to set up the conclusion in a fact-based way.  However, for this post, I will try a different approach.  Steven McIntyre has reshuffled the data in a study on urbanization and temperature that is relied on by the last IPCC report to get this chart for US Temperature data.

Conclusion?  For this particular set of US temperature data, all the 20th century warming was observed in urban areas, and none was observed in rural areas less affected by urban heat islands, asphalt, cars, air conditioning, etc.

If it can be generalized, this is an amazing conclusion -- it would imply that the sum of US measured warming over the last century could be almost 100% attributed to urban heat islands (a different and more localized effect than CO2 greenhouse gas warming).  Perhaps more importantly, outside of the US nearly all of the historical temperature measurement is in urban areas -- no one has 100 year temperature records for the Chinese countryside.  However much this effect might be over-stating US temperature increases, it would probably be even more pronounced in measurements in other parts of the word.

OK, so how did he get this chart?  Did he cherry-pick the data?  First, a bit of background.

The 2003 Peterson study on urban effects on temperature was adopted as a key study for the last IPCC climate report.  In that report, Peterson concluded:

Contrary to generally accepted wisdom, no statistically significant
impact of urbanization could be found in annual temperatures.

This study (which runs counter to both common sense and the preponderance of past studies) was latched onto by the IPCC to allow them to ignore urban heat island effects on historical temperatures and claim that most all past warming in the last half-century was due to CO2.  Peterson's methodology was to take a list of several hundred US temperature stations (how he picked these is unclear, they are a mix of USHCN and non-USHCN sites) and divide them between "urban" and "rural" using various inputs, including satellite photos of night lights.  Then he compared the temperature changes over the last century for the two groups, and declared them substantially identical.

However, McIntyre found a number of problems with his analysis.  First, looking at Peterson's data set, he saw that the raw temperature measurement did show an urbanization effect of about 0.7C over the last century, a very large number.  It turns out that Peterson never showed these raw numbers in his study, only the numbers after he applied layers of "corrections" to them, many of which appear to McIntyre to be statistically dubious.  I discussed the weakness of this whole "adjustment" issue here.

Further, though, McIntyre found obviously rural sites lurking in the urban data, and vice versa, such that Peterson was really comparing a mixed bag with a mixed bag.  For example, Snoqualmie Falls showed as urban -- I have been to Snoqualmie Falls several times, and while it is fairly close to Seattle, it is not urban.  So McIntyre did a simple sort.  He took from Peterson's urban data set only large cities, which he defined as having a major league sports franchise  (yes, a bit arbitrary, but not bad).  He then compared this narrower urban data set from Peterson against Peterson's rural set and got the chart above.  The chart is entirely from Peterson's data set, with no cherry-picking except to clean up the urban list.

Postscript:  Please don't get carried away.  Satellite measurement of the troposphere, which are fairly immune to these urbanization effects, show the world has been warming, though far less than the amount shown in surface temperature databases.

Update: To reinforce the point about global sites, Brazil apparently only has six (6) sites in the worldwide database.  That is about 1/200 of the number of sites in the continental US, which has about the same land area.  And of those six, McIntyre compares urban vs. rural sites.  Guess what he finds?  And, as a follow up from the postscript, while satellites show the Northern Hemisphere is warming, it shows that the Southern Hemisphere is not.

We all know why Newsweek and many others (like Kevin Drum) choose to use the term "denier" for those of us who are skeptical of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming:  These media folks, who are hesitant to use the word "terrorist" because of its emotional content, want to imply that we skeptics are somehow similar to Holocaust deniers.

But beyond just the issues of false emotional content, the word denier is incorrect as applied to most skeptics, including myself, and helps man-made warming hawks avoid a difficult argument.  I try to be careful to say that I am a skeptic of "catastrophic man-made (or anthropogenic) global warming theory." 

• So, does that mean I think the world is not warming?  In fact, the evidence is pretty clear that it is warming (though perhaps not by as much as shown in current surface temperature databases).
• So does this mean that I think that human activities are not causing some warming?  In fact, I do think man-made CO2 is causing some, but not all the current 20th century warming trend.  I also think that man's land use  (urbanization, irrigated agriculture, etc) has effects on climate.

Where I really get skeptical is the next proposition -- that man's burning of fossil fuels is going to cause warming in the next century that will carry catastrophic impacts, and that these negative effects will justify massive current spending and government interventions (that will have their own negative consequences in terms of lost economic growth, increased poverty, and reduction in freedoms). 

Strong supporters of catastrophic man-made global warming theory do not usually want to argue this last point.  It is much easier to argue points 1 and 2, because the science is pretty good that the earth has warmed (though the magnitude is in question) and that CO2 greenhouse effect does cause warming (though the magnitude is in question).  That is why skeptics are called deniers.  It is in effect a straw man that allows greenhouse supporters to stay on 1 and 2 without getting into the real meat of the question.

Here is a quick example to prove my point.  Follow me for three paragraphs, then ask yourself if you have ever heard any of this in the media or on any RealClimate-type site's FAQ.

Anthropogenic global warming hawks admit that the warming solely from the CO2 greenhouse effect will likely NOT rise to catastrophic levels.  So how do they get such big, scary forecasts?  The answer is positive feedback.

Almost every process you can think of in nature operates by negative
feedback, meaning that an input to a system is damped.  Roll a ball, and eventually friction and wind resistance
bring
it to a stop.    Positive feedback means that an input to the system is multiplied and increased.  Negative feedback is a ball in the bottom of a bowl, always returning to the center; positive feedback is a ball perched precariously at the top of a
mountain that will run faster and faster downhill with a tiny push. Positive feedback
breeds instability, and processes that operate by positive feedback are
dangerous, and usually end up in extreme states -- these processes tend
to
"run away" like the ball rolling down the hill.  Nuclear fission, for
example, is a positive feedback process. 

Current catastrophic man-made global warming theory asserts that our climate is dominated
by positive feedback.  The last UN IPCC report posits that a small increase in
temperature from CO2 is multiplied 2,3,4 times or more by positive
feedbacks like humidity and ice albedo.   So a modest degree or degree and a half of warming from the greenhouse effect becomes a scary five or eight degrees of warming in the next century once any number of hypothesized positive feedbacks are applied.  Add to this exaggerated, sometimes over-the-top visions of possible negative consequences, and that is how global warming hawks justify massive government action.

OK, that is a very brief description of what I consider a sophisticated reason to be skeptical:  Most catastrophic warming forecasts depend on positive feedback loops, feedbacks for which we have little or no evidence and which don't tend to dominate in other stable systems.  So how many times have you seen this issue discussed?  Zero?  Yeah, its so much easier just to call us deniers.

If you are interested, here is slightly longer version of my skeptic's point of view.  Here is my much longer version.  Here is the specific chapter that discusses feedback loops.  Here is Roy Spencer discussing problems with studies trying to measure these feedbacks.

Postscript:  By the way, it is in this context that the discussions about restating temperatures and problems with historical surface temperature measurements are important.  Exaggerated historical warming numbers leave more room to posit positive feedback loops.  Lower historical numbers, or evidence past warming is driven by non-man-made sources (e.g. solar activity), leave less room to justify positive feedback loops.

Update:  RealClimate has posted their six steps to explain catastrophic warming from CO2.  Seems have buried the feedback issue.  Note that forcings mentioned here include feedbacks, they are not from CO2 alone but from CO2 + positive feedback.  Strange they didn't mention this.

I got a lot of traffic this weekend from folks interested in the US historical temperature restatement at NASA-GISS.  I wanted to share to final thoughts and also respond to a post at RealClimate.org (the #1 web cheerleader for catastrophic man-made global warming theory).

1. This restatement does not mean that the folks at GISS are necessarily wrong when they say the world has been warming over the last 20 years.  We know from the independent source of satellite measurements that the Northern Hemisphere has been warming (though not so much in the Southern Hemisphere).  However, surface temperature measurements, particularly as "corrected" and aggregated at the GISS, have always been much higher than the satellite readings.  (GISS vs Satellite)  This incident may start to give us an insight into how to bring those two sources into agreement. 
2. For years, Hansen's group at GISS, as well as other leading climate scientists such as Mann and Briffa (creators of historical temperature reconstructions) have flaunted the rules of science by holding the details of their methodologies and algorithm's secret, making full scrutiny impossible.  The best possible outcome of this incident will be if new pressure is brought to bear on these scientists to stop saying "trust me" and open their work to their peers for review.  This is particularly important for activities such as Hansen's temperature data base at GISS.  While measurement of temperature would seem straight forward, in actual fact the signal to noise ration is really low.  Upward "adjustments" and fudge factors added by Hansen to the actual readings dwarf measured temperature increases, such that, for example, most reported warming in the US is actually from these adjustments, not measured increases.
3. In a week when Newsweek chose to argue that climate skeptics need to shut up, this incident actually proves why two sides are needed for a quality scientific debate.  Hansen and his folks missed this Y2K bug because, as a man-made global warming cheerleader, he expected to see temperatures going up rapidly so he did not think to question the data.  Mr. Hansen is world-famous, is a friend of luminaries like Al Gore, gets grants in quarter million dollar chunks from various global warming believers.  All his outlook and his incentives made him want the higher temperatures to be true.  It took other people with different hypotheses about climate to see the recent temperature jump for what it was: An error.

The general response at RealClimate.org has been:  Nothing to see here, move along.

Among other incorrect stories going around are that the mistake was due
to a Y2K bug or that this had something to do with photographing
weather stations. Again, simply false.

I really, really don't think it matters exactly how the bug was found, except to the extent that RealClimate.org would like to rewrite history and convince everyone this was just a normal adjustment made by the GISS themselves rather than a mistake found by an outsider.  However, just for the record, the GISS, at least for now until they clean up history a bit, admits the bug was spotted by Steven McIntyre.  Whatever the bug turned out to be, McIntyre initially spotted it as a discontinuity that seemed to exist in GISS data around the year 2000.  He therefore hypothesized it was a Y2K bug, but he didn't know for sure because Hansen and the GISS keep all their code as a state secret.  And McIntyre himself says he became aware of the discontinuity during a series of posts that started from a picture of a weather station at Anthony Watts blog.  I know because I was part of the discussion, talking to these folks online in real time.  Here is McIntyre explaining it himself.

In sum, the post on RealClimate says:

Sum total of this change? A couple of hundredths of degrees in the US
rankings and no change in anything that could be considered
climatically important (specifically long term trends).

A bit of background - surface temperature readings have read higher than satellite readings of the troposphere, when the science of greenhouse gases says the opposite should be true.  Global warming hawks like Hansen and the GISS have pounded on the satellite numbers, investigating them 8 ways to Sunday, and have on a number of occasions trumpeted upward corrections to satellite numbers that are far smaller than these downward corrections to surface numbers. 

But yes, IF this is the the only mistake in the data, then this is a mostly correct statement from RealClimate.org..  However, here is my perspective:

• If a mistake of this magnitude can be found by outsiders without access to Hansen's algorithm's or computer code just by inspection of the resulting data, then what would we find if we could actually inspect the code?  And this Y2K bug is by no means the only problem.  I have pointed out several myself, including adjustments for urbanization and station siting that make no sense, and averaging in rather than dropping bad measurement locations. 
• If we know significant problems exist in the US temperature monitoring network, what would we find looking at China? Or Africa?  Or South America.  In the US and a few parts of Europe, we actually have a few temperature measurement points that were rural in 1900 and rural today.  But not one was measuring rural temps in these other continents 100 years ago.  All we have are temperature measurements in urban locations where we can only guess at how to adjust for the urbanization.  The problem in these locations, and why I say this is a low signal to noise ratio measurement, is that small percentage changes in our guesses for how much the urbanization correction should be make enormous changes (even to changing the sign) of historic temperature change measurements.

Here are my recommendations:

1. NOAA and GISS both need to release their detailed algorithms and computer software code for adjusting and aggregating USHCN and global temperature data.  Period.  There can be no argument.  Folks at RealClimate.org who believe that all is well should be begging for this to happen to shut up the skeptics.  The only possible reason for not releasing this scientific information that was created by government employees with taxpayer money is if there is something to hide.
2. The NOAA and GISS need to acknowledge that their assumptions of station quality in the USHCN network are too high, and that they need to incorporate actual documented station condition (as done at SurfaceStations.org) in their temperature aggregations and corrections.  In some cases, stations like Tucson need to just be thrown out of the USHCN.  Once the US is done, a similar effort needs to be undertaken on a global scale, and the effort needs to include people whose incentives and outlook are not driven by making temperatures read as high as possible.
3. This is the easiest of all.  Someone needs to do empirical work (not simulated, not on the computer, but with real instruments) understanding how various temperature station placements affect measurements.  For example, how do the readings of an instrument in an open rural field compare to an identical instrument surrounded by asphalt a few miles away?  These results can be used for step #2 above.  This is cheap, simple research a couple of graduate students could do, but climatologists all seem focused on building computer models rather than actually doing science.
4. Similar to #3, someone needs to do a definitive urban heat island study, to find out how much temperature readings are affected by urban heat, again to help correct in #2.  Again, I want real research here, with identical instruments placed in various locations and various radii from an urban center  (not goofy proxys like temperature vs. wind speed -- that's some scientist who wants to get a result without ever leaving his computer terminal).  Most studies have shown the number to be large, but a couple of recent studies show smaller effects, though now these studies are under attack not just for sloppiness but outright fabrication.  This can't be that hard to study, if people were willing to actually go into the field and take measurements.  The problem is everyone is trying to do this study with available data rather than by gathering new data.

Postscript:  The RealClimate post says:

However, there is clearly a latent and deeply felt wish in some sectors for the whole problem of global warming to be reduced to a statistical quirk or a mistake.

If catastrophic man-made global warming theory is correct, then man faces a tremendous lose-lose.  Either shut down growth, send us back to the 19th century, making us all substantially poorer and locking a billion people in Asia into poverty they are on the verge of escaping, or face catastrophic and devastating changes in the planet's weather.

Now take two people.  One in his heart really wants this theory not to be true, and hopes we don't have to face this horrible lose-lose tradeoff.  The other has a deeply felt wish that this theory is true, and hopes man does face this horrible future.  Which person do you like better?  And recognize, RealClimate is holding up the latter as the only moral man. 

Update:  Don't miss Steven McIntyre's take from the whole thing.  And McIntyre responds to Hansen here.

Editors-

Oh, the delicious irony.

As a skeptic of catastrophic man-made global warming, I was disturbed to see that Newsweek in its August 13, 2007 issue (The Truth About Denial)
had equated me with a Holocaust denier.  There are so many interesting
scientific issues involved in climate change that it was flabbergasting
to me that Newsweek would waste time on an extended ad hominem
attack against one side in a scientific debate.  I was particularly
amazed that Newsweek would accuse the side of the debate that is
outspent 1000:1 with being tainted by money.  This is roughly
equivalent to arguing that Mike Gravel's spending is corrupting the
2008 presidential election.

However, fate does indeed have a sense of humor.  Skeptics' efforts of the sort Newsweek derided just this week
forced NASA-Goddard (GISS) to revise downward recent US temperature
numbers due to a programming mistake that went unidentified for
years, in part because NASA's taxpayer-paid researchers refuse to
release their temperature adjustment and aggregation methodology to the
public for scrutiny.  The problem was found by a chain of events that
began with amateur volunteers and led ultimately to Steven McIntyre (he
of the Michael Mann hockey stick debunking) calling foul.

The particular irony is that the person who is in charge of this
database, and is responsible for the decision not to allow scientific
scrutiny of his methodologies, is none other than James Hansen, who
Newsweek held up as the shining example of scientific objectivity in
its article.  Newsweek should have been demanding that taxpayer-funded
institutions like NASA should be opening their research to full review,
but instead Newsweek chose to argue that Mr. Hansen should be shielded
from scrutiny.

Warren Meyer

This is really big news, and a fabulous example of why two-way scientific discourse is still valuable, in the same week that both Newsweek and Al Gore tried to make the case that climate skeptics were counter-productive and evil. 

Climate scientist Michael Mann (famous for the hockey stick chart) once made the statement that  the 1990's were the
warmest decade in a millennia and that "there is a 95 to 99% certainty
that 1998 was the hottest year in the last one thousand years." (By
the way, Mann now denies he ever made this claim, though you can watch him say
these exact words in the CBC documentary Global
Warming:  Doomsday Called Off).

Well, it turns out, according to the NASA GISS database, that 1998 was not even the hottest year of the last century.  This is because many temperatures from recent decades that appeared to show substantial warming have been revised downwards.  Here is how that happened (if you want to skip the story, make sure to look at the numbers at the bottom).

One of the most cited and used historical surface temperature databases is that of NASA/Goddard's GISS.  This is not some weird skeptics site.  It is considered one of the premier world temperature data bases, and it is maintained by anthropogenic global warming true believers.  It has consistently shown more warming than any other data base, and is thus a favorite source for folks like Al Gore.  These GISS readings in the US rely mainly on the US Historical Climate Network (USHCN) which is a network of about 1000 weather stations taking temperatures, a number of which have been in place for over 100 years.

Frequent readers will know that I have been a participant in an effort led by Anthony Watts at SurfaceStations.org to photo-document these temperature stations as an aid to scientists in evaluating the measurement quality of each station.  The effort has been eye-opening, as it has uncovered many very poor instrument sitings that would bias temperature measurements upwards, as I found in Tucson and Watts has documented numerous times on his blog.

One photo on Watt's blog got people talking - a station in MN with a huge jump in temperature about the same time some air conditioning units were installed nearby.   Others disagreed, and argued that such a jump could not be from the air conditioners, since a lot of the jump happened with winter temperatures when the AC was dormant.  Steve McIntyre, the Canadian statistician who helped to expose massive holes in Michael Mann's hockey stick methodology, looked into it.  After some poking around, he began to suspect that the GISS data base had a year 2000 bug in one of their data adjustments.

One of the interesting aspects of these temperature data bases is that they do not just use the raw temperature measurements from each station.  Both the NOAA (which maintains the USHCN stations) and the GISS apply many layers of adjustments, which I discussed here.  One of the purposes of Watt's project is to help educate climate scientists that many of the adjustments they make to the data back in the office does not necessarily represent the true condition of the temperature stations.  In particular, GISS adjustments imply instrument sitings are in more natural settings than they were in say 1905, an outrageous assumption on its face that is totally in conflict to the condition of the stations in Watt's data base.  Basically, surface temperature measurements have a low signal to noise ratio, and climate scientists have been overly casual about how they try to tease out the signal.

Anyway, McIntyre suspected that one of these adjustments had a bug, and had had this bug for years.  Unfortunately, it was hard to prove.  Why?  Well, that highlights one of the great travesties of climate science.  Government scientists using taxpayer money to develop the GISS temperature data base at taxpayer expense refuse to publicly release their temperature adjustment algorithms or software (In much the same way Michael Mann refused to release the details for scrutiny of his methodology behind the hockey stick).  Using the data, though, McIntyre made a compelling case that the GISS data base had systematic discontinuities that bore all the hallmarks of a software bug.

Today, the GISS admitted that McIntyre was correct, and has started to republish its data with the bug fixed.  And the numbers are changing a lot.  Before today, GISS would have said 1998 was the hottest year on record (Mann, remember, said with up to 99% certainty it was the hottest year in 1000 years) and that 2006 was the second hottest.  Well, no more.  Here are the new rankings for the 10 hottest years in the US, starting with #1:

1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939

Three of the top 10 are in the last decade.  Four of the top ten are in the 1930's, before either the IPCC or the GISS really think man had any discernible impact on temperatures.  Here is the chart for all the years in the data base:

There are a number of things we need to remember:

• This is not the end but the beginning of the total reexamination that needs to occur of the USHCN and GISS data bases.  The poor correction for site location and urbanization are still huge issues that bias recent numbers upwards.  The GISS also has issues with how it aggregates multiple stations, apparently averaging known good stations with bad stations a process that by no means eliminates biases.  As a first step, we must demand that NOAA and GISS release their methodology and computer algorithms to the general public for detailed scrutiny by other scientists.
• The GISS today makes it clear that these adjustments only affect US data and do not change any of their conclusions about worldwide data.  But consider this:  For all of its faults, the US has the most robust historical climate network in the world.  If we have these problems, what would we find in the data from, say, China?  And the US and parts of Europe are the only major parts of the world that actually have 100 years of data at rural locations.  No one was measuring temperature reliably in rural China or Paraguay or the Congo in 1900.  That means much of the world is relying on urban temperature measurement points that have substantial biases from urban heat.
• All of these necessary revisions to surface temperatures will likely not make warming trends go away completely.  What it may do is bring the warming down to match the much lower satellite measured warming numbers we have, and will make current warming look more like past natural warming trends (e.g. early in this century) rather than a catastrophe created by man.  In my global warming book, I argue that future man-made warming probably will exist, but will be more like a half to one degree over the coming decades than the media-hyped numbers that are ten times higher.

So how is this possible?  How can the global warming numbers used in critical policy decisions and scientific models be so wrong with so basic of an error?  And how can this error have gone undetected for the better part of a decade?  The answer to the latter question is because the global warming  and climate community resist scrutiny.  This weeks Newsweek article and statements by Al Gore are basically aimed at suppressing any scientific criticism or challenge to global warming research.  That is why NASA can keep its temperature algorithms secret, with no outside complaint, something that would cause howls of protest in any other area of scientific inquiry.

As to the first question, I will leave the explanation to Mr. McIntyre:

While acolytes may call these guys "professionals", the process of
data adjustment is really a matter of statistics and even accounting.
In these fields, Hansen and Mann are not "professionals" - Mann
admitted this to the NAS panel explaining that he was "not a
statistician". As someone who has read their works closely, I do not
regard any of these people as "professional". Much of their reluctance
to provide source code for their methodology arises, in my opinion,
because the methods are essentially trivial and they derive a certain
satisfaction out of making things appear more complicated than they
are, a little like the Wizard of Oz. And like the Wizard of Oz, they
are not necessarily bad men, just not very good wizards.

For more, please see my Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming or, if you have less time, my 60-second argument for why one should be skeptical of catastrophic man-made global warming theory.

Update: Nothing new, just thinking about this more, I cannot get over the irony that in the same week Newsweek makes the case that climate science is settled and there is no room for skepticism, skeptics discover a gaping hole and error in the global warming numbers.

Update #2:  I know people get upset when we criticize scientists.  I get a lot of "they are not biased, they just made a mistake."  Fine.  But I have zero sympathy for a group of scientists who refuse to let other scientists review their methodology, and then find that they have been making a dumb methodology mistake for years that has corrupted the data of nearly every climate study in the last decade.

Update #3:  I labeled this "breaking news," but don't expect to see it in the NY Times anytime soon.  We all know this is one of those asymmetric story lines, where if the opposite had occurred (ie things found to be even worse/warmer than thought) it would be on the front page immediately, but a lowered threat will never make the news.

Oh, and by he way.  This is GOOD news.  Though many won't treat it that way.  I understand this point fairly well because, in a somewhat parallel situation, I seem to be the last anti-war guy who treats progress in Iraq as good news.

Update #4: I should have mentioned that the hero of the Newsweek story is catastrophic man-made global warming cheerleader James Hansen, who runs the GISS and is most responsible for the database in question as well as the GISS policy not to release its temperature aggregation and adjustment methodologies.  From IBD, via CNN Money:

Newsweek portrays James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, as untainted by corporate bribery.

Hansen
was once profiled on CBS' "60 Minutes" as the "world's leading
researcher on global warming." Not mentioned by Newsweek was that
Hansen had acted as a consultant to Al Gore's slide-show presentations
on global warming, that he had endorsed John Kerry for president, and
had received a $250,000 grant from the foundation headed by Teresa
Heinz Kerry.

Update #5: My letter to the editor at Newsweek.  For those worried that this is some weird skeptic's fevered dream, Hansen and company kind of sort of recognize the error in the first paragraph under background here.  Their US temperature chart with what appears is the revised data is here.

Update #6: Several posts are calling this a "scandal."  It is not a scandal.  It is a mistake from which we should draw two lessons:

1. We always need to have people of opposing opinions looking at a problem.  Man-made global warming hawks expected to see a lot of warming after the year 2000, so they never questioned the numbers.  It took folks with different hypotheses about climate to see the jump in the numbers for what it was - a programming error.
2. Climate scientists are going to have to get over their need to hold their adjustments, formulas, algorithms and software secret.  It's just not how science is done.  James Hansen saying "trust me, the numbers are right, I don't need to tell you how I got them" reminds me of the mathematician Fermat saying he had a proof of his last theorem, but it wouldn't fit in the margin.  How many man-hours of genius mathematicians was wasted because Fermat refused to show his proof (which was most likely wrong, given how the theorem was eventually proved).

Final Update:  Some parting thoughts, and recommendations, here.

Via the New York Times:

THE term "food miles" "” how far food has traveled before you buy it "” has entered the enlightened lexicon.

Which should tell you all you need to know about the "enlightened."

There are many good reasons for eating local "” freshness, purity,
taste, community cohesion and preserving open space "” but none of these
benefits compares to the much-touted claim that eating local reduces
fossil fuel consumption. In this respect eating local joins recycling,
biking to work and driving a hybrid as a realistic way that we can, as individuals, shrink our carbon footprint and be good stewards of the environment.

Actually, most recycling, with the exception of aluminum which takes tons of electricity to manufacture in the first place, does nothing to reduce our carbon footprint.  And I must say that I often enjoy buying from farmers markets and such.  But does "food miles" mean anything?  And should we really care?  Well, here is an early hint:  The ultimate reduction in food miles, the big winner on this enlightened metric, is subsistence farming.  Anyone ready to go there yet?  These are the economics Ghandi promoted in India, and it set that country back generations.

Well, lets go back to economics 101.  The reason we do not all grow our own food, make our own clothes, etc. is because the global division of labor allows food and clothing and everything else to be produced more efficiently by people who specialize and invest in those activities than by all of us alone in our homes.  So instead of each of us growing our own corn, in whatever quality soil we happen to have around our house, some guy in Iowa grows it for thousands of us, and because he specialized and grows a lot, he invests in equipment and knowledge to do it better every year.  The cost of fuel to move the corn or corn products to Phoenix from Iowa are trivial compared to the difference in efficiency that guy in Iowa has over me trying to grow corn in my back yard.  Back to the New York Times:

On its face, the connection between lowering food miles and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions is a no-brainer.

Sure, if you look at complex systems as single-variable linear equations.  Those of us who don't immediately treated the food mile concept as suspect.  It turns out, for good reason:

It all depends on how you wield the carbon calculator. Instead of
measuring a product's carbon footprint through food miles alone, the
Lincoln University scientists expanded their equations to include other
energy-consuming aspects of production "” what economists call "factor
inputs and externalities" "” like water use, harvesting techniques,
fertilizer outlays, renewable energy applications, means of
transportation (and the kind of fuel used), the amount of carbon
dioxide absorbed during photosynthesis, disposal of packaging, storage
procedures and dozens of other cultivation inputs.

Incorporating
these measurements into their assessments, scientists reached
surprising conclusions. Most notably, they found that lamb raised on
New Zealand's clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat
to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton
while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in
part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In
other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to
buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from
a producer in their backyard. Similar figures were found for dairy
products and fruit.

All I can say is just how frightening it is that the paper of record could find this result "surprising."  The price mechanism does a pretty good job of sorting this stuff out.  If fuel prices rise a lot, then agriculture might move more local, but probably not by much.  The economies to scale and location just dwarf the price of fuel. 

By the way, one reason this food-mile thing is not going away, no matter how stupid it is, has to do with the history of the global warming movement.  Remember all those anti-globalization folks who rampaged in Seattle?  Where did they all go?  Well, they did not get sensible all of a sudden.  They joined the environmental movement.  One reason a core group of folks in the catastrophic man-made global warming camp react so poorly to any criticism of the science is that they need and want it to be true that man is causing catastrophic warming -- anti-corporate and anti-globalization activists jumped into the global warming environmental movement, seeing in it a vehicle to achieve their aims of rolling back economic growth, global trade, and capitalism in general.  Food miles appeals to their disdain for world trade, and global warming and carbon footprints are just a convenient excuse for trying to sell the concept to other people.

A little while back, I posted a similar finding in regards to packaging, that is worth repeating here for comparison.

Contrary to current wisdom, packaging can reduce total rubbish
produced. The average household in the United States generates one
third
less trash each year than does the average household in Mexico,
partly because packaging reduces breakage and food waste. Turning a
live chicken into a meal creates food waste. When chickens are
processed commercially, the waste goes into marketable products
(such as pet food), instead of into a landfill. Commercial processing
of 1,000 chickens requires about 17 pounds of packaging, but it also
recycles at least 2,000 pounds of by-products.

More victories for the worldwide division of labor.  So has the NY Times seen the light and accepted the benefits of capitalism?  Of course not.  With the New Zealand example in hand, the writer ... suggests we need more state action to compel similar situations.

Given these problems, wouldn't it make more sense to stop obsessing
over food miles and work to strengthen comparative geographical
advantages? And what if we did this while streamlining transportation
services according to fuel-efficient standards? Shouldn't we create
development incentives for regional nodes of food production that can
provide sustainable produce for the less sustainable parts of the
nation and the world as a whole? Might it be more logical to
conceptualize a hub-and-spoke system of food production and
distribution, with the hubs in a food system's naturally fertile hot
spots and the spokes, which travel through the arid zones, connecting
them while using hybrid engines and alternative sources of energy?

Does anyone even know what this crap means?  You gotta love technocratic statists -- they just never give up.  Every one of them thinks they are smarter than the the sum of billions of individual minds working together of their own free will to create our current world production patterns.

Postscript: There is one thing the government could do tomorrow to promote even more worldwide agricultural efficiency:  Drop subsidies and protections on agriculture.   You would immediately get more of this kind of activity, for example with Latin America and the Caribbean supplying more/all of the US's sugar and other parts of Asia providing more/all of Japan's rice.

I already discussed Newsweek's happy little ad hominem attack on climate skeptics here.  However, as promised, I wanted to talk about the actual, you know, science for a bit, starting from the Newsweek author's throwaway statement that she felt required no
proof, "The frequency of Atlantic hurricanes has already doubled in the
last century."

This is really a very interesting topic, much more interesting than following $10,000 of skeptics' money around in a global warming industry spending billions on research.  One would think the answer to this hurricane question is simple.  Can we just look up the numbers?  Well, let's start there.  Total number of Atlantic hurricanes form the HURDAT data base, first and last half of the last century:

1905-1955 = 366
1956-2006 = 458

First, you can see nothing like a doubling.  This is an increase of 25%.  So already, we see that in an effort to discredit skeptics for fooling America about the facts, Newsweek threw out a whopper that absolutely no one in climate science, warming skeptic or true believer, would agree with.

But let's go further, because there is much more to the story.  Because 25% is a lot, and could be damning in and of itself.  But there are problems with this data.  If you think about storm tracking technology in 1905 vs. 2005, you might see the problem.  To make it really clear, I want to talk about tornadoes for a moment.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore and company said that global warming was increasing the number of tornadoes in the US.  He claimed 2004 was the highest year ever for tornadoes in the US.  In his PowerPoint slide deck (on which the movie was based) he sometimes uses this chart (form the NOAA):

Whoa, that's scary.  Any moron can see there is a trend there.  Its like a silver bullet against skeptics or something.  But wait.  Hasn't tornado detection technology changed over the last 50 years?  Today, we have doppler radar, so we can detect even smaller size 1 tornadoes, even if no one on the ground actually spots them (which happens fairly often).  But how did they measure smaller tornadoes in 1955 if no one spotted them?  Answer:  They didn't.  In effect, this graph is measuring apples and oranges.  It is measuring all the tornadoes we spotted by human eye in 1955 with all the tornadoes we spotted with doppler radar in 2000.   The NOAA tries to make this problem clear on their web site.

With increased national doppler
radar coverage, increasing population, and greater attention to tornado
reporting, there has been an increase in the number of tornado reports over the
past several decades. This can create a misleading appearance of an increasing
trend in tornado frequency. To better understand the true variability and trend
in tornado frequency in the US, the total number of strong to violent tornadoes
(F3 to F5 category on the Fujita scale) can be analyzed. These are the
tornadoes that would have likely been reported even during the decades before
Dopplar radar use became widespread and practices resulted in increasing
tornado reports. The bar chart below indicates there has been little trend in
the strongest tornadoes over the past 55 years.

So itt turns out there is a decent way to correct for this.  We don't think that folks in 1955 were missing many of the larger class 3-5 tornadoes, so comparing 1955 and 2000 data for these larger tornadoes should be more apples to apples (via NOAA).

Well, that certainly is different (note 2004 in particular, given the movie claim).  No upward trend at all when you get the data right.  I wonder if Al Gore knows this?  I am sure he is anxious to set the record straight.

OK, back to hurricanes.  Generally, whether in 1905 or 2005, we know if a hurricane hits land in the US.  However, what about all the hurricanes that don't hit land or hit land in some undeveloped area?  Might it be that we can detect these better in 2006 with satellites than we could in 1905?  Just like the tornadoes?

Well, one metric we have is US landfall.  Here is that graph  (data form the National Weather Service -- I have just extrapolated the current decade based on the first several years).

Not much of a trend there, though the current decade is high, in part due to the fact that it does not incorporate the light 2006 season nor the light-so-far 2007 season.  The second half of the 20th century is actually lower than the first half, and certainly not "twice as large".  But again, this is only a proxy.  There may be reasons more storms are formed but don't make landfall (though I would argue most Americans only care about the latter).

But what about hurricane damages?  Everyone knows that the dollar damages from hurricanes is way up.  Well, yes.  But the amount of valuable real estate on the United State's coast is also way up.  Roger Pielke and Chris Landsea (you gotta love a guy studying hurricane strikes named Landsea) took a shot at correcting hurricane damages for inflation and the increased real estate value on the coasts.  This is what they got:

Anyway, back to our very first data, several scientists are trying to correct the data for missing storms, particularly in earlier periods.  There is an active debate here about corrections I won't get into, but suffice it to say the difference between the first half of the 20th century to the latter half in terms of Atlantic hurricane formations is probably either none or perhaps a percentage increase in the single digits (but nowhere near 100% increase as reported by Newsweek).

Debate continues, because there was a spike in hurricanes from 1995-2005 over the previous 20 years.  Is this anomalous, or is it similar to the spike that occurred in the thirties and forties?  No one is sure, but isn't this a lot more interesting than figuring out how the least funded side of a debate gets their money?  And by the way, congratulations again to MSM fact-checkers.

My layman's guide to skepticism of catastrophic man-made global warming is here.  A shorter, 60-second version of the best climate skeptic's arguments is here.

Update:  If the author bothered to have a source for her statement, it would probably be Holland and Webster, a recent study that pretty much everyone disagrees with and many think was sloppy.  And even they didn't say activity had doubled.  Note the only way to get a doubling is to cherry-pick a low decade in the first half of the century and a high decade in the last half of the century and compare just those two decades -- you can see this in third paragraph of the Scientific American article.  This study bears all the hallmarks -- cherry picking data, ignoring scientific consensus, massaging results to fit an agenda -- that the Newsweek authors were accusing skeptics of.

Update #2:  The best metric for hurricane activity is not strikes or numbers but accumulated cyclonic energy.  Here is the ACE trend, as measured by Florida State.  As you can see, no upward trend.

Update:  My post on breaking news about downward revisions to US temperature numbers is here.

Well, I finally read Newsweek's long ad hominem attack on climate skeptics in the recent issue.  It is basically yet another take on the global-warming-skeptics-are-all-funded-by-Exxon meme.  The authors breathlessly "follow the money to show how certain scientists have taken as much as $10,000 (gasp) from fossil-fuel related companies to publish skeptical work.  Further, despite years of hand-wringing about using emotionally charged words like "terrorist" in their news articles, Newsweek happily latches onto "denier" as a label for skeptics, a word chosen to parallel the term "Holocaust denier" -- nope, no emotional content there.

I'm not even going to get into it again, except to make the same observation I have made in the past:  Arguing that the global warming debate is "tainted" by money from skeptics is like saying the 2008 presidential election is tainted by Mike Gravel's spending.  Money from skeptics is so trivial, by orders of magnitude, compared to spending by catastrophic warming believers that it is absolutely amazing folks like Newsweek could feel so threatened by it.  In my Layman's Guide To Man-Made Global Warming Skepticism, I estimated skeptics were being outspent 1000:1.  I have no way to check his figures, but Senator Inhofe's office estimated skeptics were being outspent $50 billion to 19 million, which is about the same order of magnitude as my estimate.

Given this skew in spending, and the fact that most of the major media accepts catastrophic man-made  global warming as a given, this was incredible:

Look for the next round of debate to center on what Americans are
willing to pay and do to stave off the worst of global warming. So far
the answer seems to be, not much. The NEWSWEEK Poll finds less than half in favor of requiring high-mileage cars or energy-efficient appliances and buildings....

Although the figure is less than in earlier polls, A new NEWSWEEK Poll finds that the influence of the denial machine remains strong.39
percent of those asked say there is "a lot of disagreement among
climate scientists" on the basic question of whether the planet is
warming; 42 percent say there is a lot of disagreement that human
activities are a major cause of global warming. Only 46 percent say the
greenhouse effect is being felt today.

It has to be the "denial machine" at fault, right?  I can't possibly be because Americans think for themselves, or that they tend to reject micro-managing government regulations.  The author sounds so much like an exasperated parent "I kept telling my kids what's good for them and they just don't listen."

Yes, I could easily turn the tables here, and talk about the financial incentives in academia for producing headlines-grabbing results, or discuss the political motivations behind Marxist groups who have latched onto man-made global warming for their own ends.  But this does not really solve the interesting science questions, and ignores the fact that many catastrophic climate change believers are well meaning and thoughtful, just as many skeptics are.  The article did not even take the opportunity to thoughtfully discuss the range of skeptic's positions.  Some reject warming entirely, while others, like myself, recognize the impact man can have on climate, but see man's impact being well below catastrophic levels (explained here in 60 seconds).  Anyway, I don't have the energy to fisk it piece by piece, but Noel Sheppard does.

For those of you who are interested, I have a follow-up post on the science itself, which is so much more interesting that this garbage.  I use as a starting point the Newsweek author's throwaway statement that she felt required no proof, "The frequency of Atlantic hurricanes has already doubled in the last century."  (Hint:  the answer turns out to be closer to +5% than +100%)

On several occasions, I have discussed how much of the reported temperature increases worldwide in the last century are actually the results of adjustments to the actual gauge measurements.  These upward adjustments in the numbers by climate scientists actually dwarf measured increases.

Thanks to reader Scott Brooks, here is another such example except this time with measurement of sea level increases.  Dr. Nils-Axel Morner is the head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden.  He has studied sea-level changes for 35 years (emphasis added).

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

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

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

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

I have
been the expert reviewer for the IPCC, both in 2000 and last year. The
first time I read it, I was exceptionally surprised. First of all, it
had 22 authors, but none of them  none were sea-level specialists. They
were given this mission, because they promised to answer the right
thing. Again, it was a computer issue. This is the typical thing: The meteorological community works with computers, simple computers.

Geologists
don't do that! We go out in the field and observe, and then we can try
to make a model with computerization; but it's not the first thing.

I am working on my next version of a layman's guide to skeptics arguments against catastrophic man-made global warming, which you can find here.

On several occasions, I have discussed how much of the reported temperature increases worldwide in the last century are actually the results of adjustments to the actual gauge measurements.  These upward adjustments in the numbers by climate scientists actually dwarf measured increases.

Thanks to reader Scott Brooks, here is another such example except this time with measurement of sea level increases.  Dr. Nils-Axel Morner is the head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden.  He has studied sea-level changes for 35 years (emphasis added).

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

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

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

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

I have
been the expert reviewer for the IPCC, both in 2000 and last year. The
first time I read it, I was exceptionally surprised. First of all, it
had 22 authors, but none of them  none were sea-level specialists. They
were given this mission, because they promised to answer the right
thing. Again, it was a computer issue. This is the typical thing: The meteorological community works with computers, simple computers.

Geologists
don't do that! We go out in the field and observe, and then we can try
to make a model with computerization; but it's not the first thing.

I am working on my next version of a layman's guide to skeptics arguments against catastrophic man-made global warming, which you can find here.

Finally, the blinders are coming off and the media is starting to
wake up to the absolute travesty that is the Congress's promotion of
ethanol.  From Rolling Stone(!) emphasis added.

This is not just hype -- it's dangerous, delusional bullshit.  Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it
cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of
our gasoline consumption -- yet it consumes twenty percent of the
entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last
two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the
increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for
other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to
carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and
stave off global warming.

So why bother? Because the whole
point of corn ethanol is not to solve America's energy crisis, but to
generate one of the great political boondoggles of our time. Corn is
already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51
billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 -- twice as much as
wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is
propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon
tax allowance for refiners. And a study by the International Institute
for Sustainable Development found that ethanol subsidies amount to as
much as $1.38 per gallon -- about half of ethanol's wholesale market
price.

Hurrah!  Unfortunately, I fear we may be waking up too late.  Already, billions of dollars are being invested by politically connected companies
on the promises of subsidies and promotion of ethanol extending out to
the end of the universe.  At this point, ethanol may be as entrenched
as agriculture subsidies, the education department, and depression-era
alcohol regulation.  The government has no problem reneging on contracts with oil companies, but God forbid anyone deny Archer Daniels Midland the right to infinite subsidies.

The US Historical Climate Network (USHCN) reports about a 0.6C temperature increase in the lower 48 states since about 1940.  There are two steps to reporting these historic temperature numbers.  First, actual measurements are taken.  Second, adjustments are made after the fact by scientists to the data.  Would you like to guess how much of the 0.6C temperature rise is from actual measured temperature increases and how much is due to adjustments of various levels of arbitrariness?  Here it is, for the period from 1940 to present in the US:

Yes, that is correct.  Nearly all the reported warming in the USHCN data base, which is used for nearly all global warming studies and models, is from human-added fudge factors, guesstimates, and corrections.

I know what you are thinking - this is some weird skeptic's urban legend.  Well, actually it comes right from the NOAA web page which describes how they maintain the USHCN data set.  Below is the key chart from that site showing the sum of all the plug factors and corrections they add to the raw USHCN measurements:

I hope you can see this significance.  Before we get into whether these measurements are right or wrong or accurate or guesses, it is very useful to understand that almost all the reported warming in the US over the last 70 years is attributable to the plug figures and corrections a few government scientists add to the data in the back room.  It kind of reduces one's confidence, does it not, in the basic conclusion about catastrophic warming? 

Anyway, lets look at the specific adjustments.  The lines in the chart below should add to the overall adjustment line in the chart above.

• Black line is a time of observation adjustment, adding about 0.3C since 1940
• Light Blue line is a missing data adjustment that does not affect the data much since 1940
• Red line is an adjustment for measurement technologies, adding about 0.05C since 1940
• Yellow line is station location quality adjustment, adding about 0.2C since 1940
• Purple line is an urban heat island adjustment, subtracting about 0.05C since 1950.

Let's take each of these in turn.  The time of observation adjustment is defined as follows:

The Time of Observation Bias (TOB) arises when the 24-hour daily
summary period at a station begins and ends at an hour other than local
midnight. When the summary period ends at an hour other than midnight,
monthly mean temperatures exhibit a systematic bias relative to the
local midnight standard

0.3C seems absurdly high for this adjustment, but I can't prove it.  However, if I understand the problem, a month might be picking up a few extra hours from the next month and losing a few hours to the previous month.  How is a few hour time shift really biasing a 720+ hour month by so large a number? I will look to see if I can find a study digging into this. 

I will skip over the missing data and measurement technology adjustments, since they are small.

The other two adjustments are fascinating.  The yellow line says that siting has improved on USHCN sites such that, since 1900, their locations average 0.2C cooler due to being near more grass and less asphalt today than in 1900. 

During this time, many sites were relocated from city locations to
airports and from roof tops to grassy areas. This often resulted in
cooler readings than were observed at the previous sites.

OK, without a bit of data, does that make a lick of sense?  Siting today in our modern world has GOT to be worse than it was in 1900 or even 1940.  In particular, the very short cable length of the newer MMTS sensors that are standard for USHCN temperature measurement guarantee that readings today are going to be close to buildings and paving.  Now, go to SurfaceStations.org and look at pictures of actual installations, or look at the couple of installations in the Phoenix area I have taken pictures of here.  Do these look more grassy and natural than measurement sites were likely to be in 1900?  Or go to Anthony Watts blog and scroll down his posts on horrible USHCN sites.

The fact is that not only is NOAA getting this correction wrong, but it probably has the SIGN wrong.  The NOAA has never conducted the site by site survey that we discussed above.  Their statement that locations are improving is basically a leap of faith, rather than a fact-based conclusion.  In fact, NOAA scientists who believe that global warming is a problem tend to overlay this bias on the correction process.  Note the quote above -- temperatures that don't increase as they expect are treated as an error to be corrected, rather than a measurement that disputes their hypothesis.

Finally, lets look the urban heat island adjustment.  The NOAA is claiming that the sum total of urban heat island effects on its network since 1900 is just 0.1C, and less than 0.05C since 1940.  We're are talking about the difference between a rural America with horses and dirt roads and a modern urban society with asphalt and air conditioning and cars.  This rediculously small adjustment reflects two biases among anthropogenic global warming advocates:  1)  That urban heat island effects are negligible and 2) That the USHCN network is all rural.  Both are absurd.  Study after study has show urban heat island effects as high as 6-10 degrees.  Just watch you local news if you live in a city --  you will see actual temperatures and forecasts lower by several degrees in the outlying areas than in the center of town.  As to the locations all being rural, you just have to go to surfacestations.org and see where these stations are.  Many of these sites might have been rural in 1940, but they have been engulfed by cities and towns since.

To illustrate both these points, lets take the case of the Tucson site I visited.  In 1900, Tucson was a dusty one-horse town (Arizona was not even a state yet).  In 1940, it was still pretty small.  Today, it is a city of over one million people and the USHCN station is dead in the center of town, located right on an asphalt parking lot.  The adjustment NOAA makes for all these changes?  Less than one degree.  I don't think this is fraud, but it is willful blindness.

So, let's play around with numbers.  Let's say that instead of a 0.2C site quality adjustment we instead used a -0.1C adjustment, which is still probably generous.  Let's assume that instead of a -0.05C urban adjustment we instead used -0.2C.  The resulting total adjustment from 1940 to date would be +0.05 and the total measurement temperature increase in the US would fall from 0.6C to 0.15C.  And this is without even changing the very large time of observation adjustment, and is using some pretty conservative assumptions on my part.  Wow!  This would put US warming more in the range of what satellite data would imply, and would make it virtually negligible. It means that the full amount of reported US warming may well be within the error bars for the measurement network and the correction factors.

While anthropogenic global warming enthusiasts are quick to analyze the reliability of any temperature measurement that shows lower global warming numbers (e.g. satellite), they have historically resisted calls to face up to the poor quality of surface temperature measurement and the arbitrariness of current surface temperature correction factors.  As the NOAA tellingly states:

The U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN, Karl et al. 1990)
is a high-quality moderate sized data set of monthly averaged maximum,
minimum, and mean temperature and total monthly precipitation developed
to assist in the detection of regional climate change. The USHCN is
comprised of 1221 high-quality stations from the U.S. Cooperative
Observing Network within the 48 contiguous United States.

Does it sound defensive to anyone else when they use "high-quality" in both of the first two sentences?  Does anyone think this is high quality?  Or this?  Or this?  Its time to better understand what this network as well as its limitations.

My 60-second climate skepticism argument is here.  The much longer paper explaining the breath of skeptic's issues with catastrophic man-made global warming is available for free here.

PS- This analysis focuses only on the US.  However, is there anyone out there who thinks that measurement in China and India and Russia and Africa is less bad?

Update-  This pdf has an overview of urban heat islands, including this analysis showing the magnitude of the Phoenix nighttime UHI as well as the fact that this UHI has grown substantially over the last 30 years.

Update2: Steve McIntyre looks at temperature adjustments for a couple of California Stations.  In one case he finds a station that has not moves for over one hundred years getting an adjustment that implies a urban heat island reduction over the past 100 years.

Yep, I admit it, air conditioning may indeed be causing us to measure higher temperatures.  Here is the historic temperature plot of Detroit Lake, MN, one of the thousand or so measurement points in the data base that is used to compute historical warming in the US.

Look at that jump in the last 10 years.  It must be global warming!  Can't possibly be due to these air conditioning units installed around 2000 and venting hot gas on the temperature instrument (in that round louvered thing on the post).

More from Anthony Watts, who is leading the effort to document all these stations. You too can help.  The odds are you live less than an hour from one of these stations -- take your camera and add it to the data base.  Its fun!

Incredibly, the global warming community still argues that documenting the quality of the installations used in the official global warming numbers is unnecessary.  More air conditioners blowing on official temperature measurements here.  Worst temperature installation found to date here, "coincidently" at the site with the highest measured 20th century warming.

I got to make a real contribution to science this weekend, and I will explain below how you can too.  First, some background.

A while back, Steve McIntyre was playing around with graphing temperature data form the US Historical Climate Network (USHCN).  This is the data that is used in most global warming studies and initializes most climate models.  Every climate station is not in this data base - in fact, only about 20 per state are in the data base, with locations supposedly selected in rural areas less subject to biases over time from urban development (urban areas are hotter, due to pavement and energy use, for reasons unrelated to the greenhouse effect).  The crosses below on the map show each station.

He showed this graph, of the USHCN data for temperature change since 1900 (data corrected for time of day of measurement).  Redder shows measured temperatures have increased since 1900, bluer means they have decreased.

He mentioned that Tucson was the number one warming site -- you can see it in the deepest red.  My first thought was, "wow, that is right next door to me."   My second thought was "how can Tucson, with a million people, count as rural?"   Scientists who study global warming apply all kinds of computer and statistical tricks to this data, supposedly to weed out measurement biases and problems.  However, a number of folks have been arguing that scientists really need to evaluate biases site by site.  Anthony Watts has taken this idea and created SurfaceStations.org, a site dedicated to surveying and photographing these official USHCN stations.

So, with his guidance, I went down to Tucson to see for myself.  My full report is here, but this is what I found:

The measurement station is in the middle of an asphalt parking lot!  This is against all best practices, and even a layman can see how that would bias measurements high.  Watts finds other problems with the installation from my pictures that I missed, and comments here that it is the worst station he has seen yet.  That, by the way, is the great part about this exercise.  Amateurs like me don't need to be able to judge the installation, they just need to take good pictures that the experts can use to analyze problems.

As a final note on Tucson, during the time period between 1950 and today, when Tucson saw most of this measured temperature increase, the population of Tucson increased from under 200,000 to over 1,000,000.  That's a lot of extra urban heat, in addition to the local effects of this parking lot.

The way that scientists test for anomalies without actually visiting or looking at the sites is to do some statistical checks against other nearby sites.  Two such sites are Mesa and Wickenburg.  Mesa immediately set off alarm bells for me.  Mesa is a suburb of Phoenix, and is often listed among the fastest growing cities in the country.  Sure enough, the Mesa temperature measurements were discontinued in the late 1980's, but surely were biased upwards by urban growth up to that time.

So, I then went to visit Wickenburg.  Though is has been growing of late, Wickenburg would still be considered by most to be a small town.  So perhaps the Wickenburg measurement is without bias?  Well, here is the site:

That white coffee can looking thing on a pole in the center is the temperature instrument.  Again, we have it surrounded by a sea of black asphalt, but we also have two building walls that reflect heat onto the instrument.  Specs for the USHCN say that instruments should be installed in an open area away from buildings and on natural ground.  Oops.  Oh, and by the way, lets look the other direction...

What are those silver things just behind the unit?  They are the cooling fans for the building's AC.  Basically, all the heat from the building removed by the AC gets dumped out about 25 feet from this temperature measurement.

Remember, these are the few select stations being used to determine how much global warming the US is experiencing.  Pretty scary.  Another example is 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.  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.

For those interested, my paper on the skeptics' arguments against catastrophic man-made global warming is here.  If that is too long, the 60-second climate skeptic pitch is here.

I was trying to think about what I wanted to do for my last post in my recent orgy of global warming writing.  My original attempt to outline the state of the climate skeptic's case ballooned into 80+ pages, so there may be many people who rationally just have no desire to tackle that much material.  So I decided for this last post to try to select the one argument I would use if I had only 60 seconds to make the climate skeptic's case. But how do you boil down 80 pages to a few simple statements?

I'm not that interested in the Sun or cosmic rays -- they are interesting topics, but its dumb to try to argue we overestimate our understanding of man's impact on climate only to counter with topics we understand even less.  One of the reasons I wrote the paper in the first place was because I thought recent skeptical documentaries spent too much time on this subject.  And I would not get into tree rings or ice cores or other historic proxy data, though there is a lot happening in these areas.  I wouldn't even delve into the hysterical treatment of skeptics by man-made climate advocates  -- these are ad hominem issues that are useful to understand in a more comprehensive view but don't make for strong stand-alone arguments.

Anyway, here goes, in a logic chain of 8 steps.

1. CO2 does indeed absorb reflected sunlight returning to space from earth, having a warming effect.  However, this effect is a diminishing return -- each successive increment of CO2 concentrations will have a much smaller effect on temperatures than the previous increment.  Eventually, CO2 becomes nearly saturated in its ability to absorb radiation.  The effect is much like painting a red room with white paint.  The first coat covers a lot of red but some still shows through.  Each additional coat will make the room progressively whiter, but each successive coat will have a less noticeable effects than the previous coat, until the room is just white and can't get any whiter.
2. In the 20th century, the UN IPCC claims Earth's surface temperatures have increased by about a 0.6 degree Celsius (though there are some good reasons to think that biases in the installation of temperature instruments have exaggerated this apparent increase).  To be simple (and generous), let's assume all this 0.6C increase is due to man-made greenhouse gasses.  Some may in fact have been due to natural effects, but some may also have been masked by man-made sulfate aerosols, so lets just call man-made warming to be 0.6C. 
3. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, it is thought that man has increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations from 0.028% of the atmosphere to 0.038% of the atmosphere.  Since scientists often talk about the effect of a doubling of CO2, this historic rise in CO2 is 36% of a doubling.
4. Using simple math, we see that if temperatures have risen 0.6C due to 36% of a doubling, we might expect them to rise by 1.67C for a full doubling to 0.056% of the atmosphere.  But this assumes that the rise is linear -- and we already said (and no one denies) that it is in fact a diminishing return relationship.  Using a truer form of the curve, a 0.6C historic rise for 36% of a doubling implies a full doubling would raise temperatures by about 1.2C, or about 0.6C more than we have seen to date (see chart below).   This means that the magnitude of global warming in the next century might be about what we have seen (and apparently survived) since 1900.



5. Obviously, there is some kind of disconnect here.  The IPCC predicts temperature increases in the next century of 4-8 degrees C.  Big difference.  In fact, the IPCC predicts we will get a 0.5C rise in just 20 years, not 70-100.  Whereas we derived a climate sensitivity of 1.2 from empirical data, they arrive at numbers between 3 and 4 or even higher for sensitivity.  The chart below shows that to believe sensitivity is 3, we would have to have seen temperature rises due to man historically of 1.5C, which nobody believes. 

   

   So how do they get accelerating temperatures from what they admit to be a diminishing return relation between CO2 concentration and temperature? And for which there is no empirical evidence?  Answer:  Positive feedback.

6. Almost every process you can think of in nature operates by negative
   feedback.  Roll a ball, and eventually friction and wind resistance bring
   it to a stop.  Negative feedback is a ball in the bottom of a bowl; positive feedback is a ball perched precariously at the time of a mountain. Positive feedback
   breeds instability, and processes that operate by positive feedback are
   dangerous, and usually end up in extreme states -- these processes tend to
   "run away" like the ball rolling down the hill.  Nuclear fission, for example, is a positive feedback process.  We should be happy there are not more positive feedback
   processes on our planet.  Current man-made global warming theory, however, asserts that our climate is dominated by positive feedback.  The IPCC posits that a small increase in temperature from CO2 is multiplied 2,3,4 times or more by positive feedbacks like humidity and ice albedo.
7. There are three problems with these assumptions about positive feedback.  One, there is no empirical evidence at all that positive feedbacks in climate dominate negative feedbacks.   The 20th century temperature numbers we discussed above show no evidence of these feedbacks.  Two, the long-term temperature record demonstrates that positive feedbacks can't dominate, because past increases in temperature and CO2 have not run away.  And three, characterizations of stable natural processes as being dominated by positive feedback should offend the intuition and common sense of any scientist.
8. An expected 21st century increase of 0.5 or even 1 degree C does not justify the massive imposed government interventions that will be costly both in dollars and lost freedoms.  In particular, the developing world will be far better off hotter by a degree and richer than it would be cooler and poorer.  This is particularly true since sources like an Inconvenient Truth wildly exaggerate the negative effects of global warming.  There is no evidence tornadoes or hurricanes or disease or extinction are increasing as the world warms, and man-made warming advocates generally ignore any potential positive effects of warming.  As to rising sea levels, the IPCC predicts only a foot and a half of sea level rise even with 4 or more degrees of warming.  Sea level rise from a half to one degree of warming would be measured at most in inches.

OK, so that was more than 60 seconds.  But it is a lot less than 80 pages.  There is a lot of complexity behind every one of these statements.  If you are intrigued, or at least before you accuse me of missing something critical, see my longer paper on global warming skepticism first, where all these issues and much more (yes, including tree rings and cosmic rays) are discussed in more depth.

I don't think that government action on greenhouse gasses is justified.  That's not to say that man is not helping nature warm the planet some, its that the man-made warming, when you strip away the exaggerations, does not justify the cost of preventing it.  Since I wrote 80+ pages on it here, I won't delve much further into it. 

However, if we are going to take action, a carbon tax is way, way better than cap and trade.  I used to think that cap and trade made more sense, but I have changed my mind.  Cap and trade systems have a lot of potential for error and abuse, but there is one issue that is not adequately discussed:  They are also a huge subsidy and protection for current businesses, effectively penalizing new entrants.

Why?  Because most cap and trade systems begin by giving out emissions credits to current industry incumbents.  These are credits that new entrants will have to purchase, tilting the playing field in favor of current industry leaders.  This is the kind of thing Europeans love, because their largest business interests effectively control the government and keep out new competition, causing their economies to stagnate.  Steven Milloy is one of the few folks raising the red flag on this issue:

Under
the LCEA, the federal government would annually issue rights or
"allowances" to emit GHGs. In the first year of the bill, slated as
2012, allowances would be issued for approximately 6.65 billion metric
tons of GHGs. The amount of allowances slightly decreases every year "“
for example, 6.59 billion metric tons in 2013, 6.53 billion metric tons
in 2014, etc. "“ until it finally levels out at 4.82 billion metric tons
in 2030 and beyond.

These allowances have monetary value "“ a lot.

Owners
of allowances can either use them to pay for their GHG emissions or
they can sell them to other emitters who need allowances. Emitters can
also simply pay the federal government directly to emit GHGs at a cost
of $12 per metric ton of carbon dioxide starting in 2012. This price is
slated to increase annually by the inflation rate plus 5 percent. By
2030 "“ and unrealistically assuming that no inflation occurs "“ the
pay-to-emit price would be about $27.50 per metric ton of carbon
dioxide.

Using the pay-to-emit price, the GHG emissions
allowances issued by the federal government in 2012 will have a
potential market value of $80 billion. The annual market value of these
government-issued allowances will rise to over $100 billion by 2018 and
hit $130 billion in 2030. It will only take about 10 years "“ exclusive
of any inflation "“ for value of the allowances issued by the government
to exceed $1 trillion.

And incredible as it sounds, the bulk of
these allowances "“ 76 percent for the first five years, declining to 47
percent by 2030 "“ will be given away at no charge to special interests
including private industry, farmers and states. This global warming
giveaway works out to a total of $1.34 trillion of free money "“ not
adjusted for inflation "“ that would be handed out to global warming
special interests from 2012-2030. After 2030, the annual amount of free
money handed out is about $65 billion, increasing by 5 percent per
year, exclusive of inflation.

Unfortunately, politicians will always favor an indirect tax over a direct tax because they are gutless and entirely free of any nagging principles.  Cap and trade systems would raise consumer prices at least as much as a carbon tax, but the price increase would appear to be made by industry and not due to a visible government tax.  Congress can point the finger at industry and say, it's not our fault, it's those greedy guys in industry driving up prices.

Further, the carbon tax is hard to game.  Everybody pays.  But cap and trade - Oh the beautiful potential to milk various constituencies for donations!  If the government sets up a program where some groups get credits for free, and some have to pay for them, well of course every industry is going to pour millions upon millions into politician's hands trying to make sure they are in the favored group. 

What a mess.  We are already seeing the huge distortions coming from nutty ethanol subsidies, and that is due to the pressure of just one industry (farmers and ADM).  Just think of the distortions form this program.  There may be a good chance that misguided attempts to manage greenhouse gasses may well be the largest threat to the American economy and free marketplace, well, ever.  Which, by the way, is why every Marxist and socialist on the face of the earth are right at the forefront of the global warming movement.

If you suspect that the world may be warming, but not nearly enough to justify such costs in terms of both dollars and lost freedom, you might want to read this.

I turned off comments on the published HTML version of my Skeptical Layman's Guide to Man-made Global Warming    (pdf here) to avoid spam problems.  However, it was not my intention to forgo the ability of readers to comment.  So I am going to link this comment thread from the bottom of each chapter.

I have gotten several comments back similar to what Steven Dutch says here:

So You Still Don't Believe In Global Warming?

Fine. Here's what you have to do....

• Show conclusively that an increase in carbon dioxide will
  not result in global warming. Pointing to flaws in the climate models,
  possible alternative explanations, and unanswered questions won't cut it. We
  know carbon dioxide traps infrared and we know climate is
  getting warmer. There's a plausible cause and effect relationship there. You
  have to show there is not a causal link. You can do that either by
  identifying what is the cause ("might be" or "possible alternative"
  isn't good enough) or by showing that somehow extra carbon dioxide does
  not trap solar heat.

This might be correct if we were in a college debating society, where the question at hand was "does man contribute to global warming?"  However, we are in a real world policy debate, where the question is instead "Is man causing enough warming and thereby contributing to sufficiently dire consequences to justify massive interventions into the world economy, carrying enormous costs and demonstrable erosions in individual freedoms."  Remember, we know monetary and liberty costs of abatement with a fair amount of cerntainty, so in fact the burden of proof is on man-made global warming advocates, not skeptics, who need to prove the dangers from the man-made component of global warming outweigh the costs of these abatements.

That is why the premise for my paper is as follows:

There is no doubt that CO2 is a
greenhouse gas, and it is pretty clear that CO2 produced by man has an
incremental impact on warming the Earth's surface. 

However, recent
warming is the result of many natural and man-made factors, and it is
extraordinarily difficult to assign all the blame for current warming to
man. 

In turn, there are very good reasons to suspect that climate
modelers may be greatly exaggerating future warming due to man.  Poor
economic forecasting, faulty assumptions about past and current conditions, and
a belief that climate is driven by runaway positive feedback effects all
contribute to this exaggeration. 

As a result, warming due to man's
impacts over the next 100 years may well be closer to one degree C than the
forecasted six to eight.  In either case, since AGW supporters tend to grossly
underestimate the cost of CO2 abatement, particularly in lost wealth creation
in poorer nations, there are good arguments that a warmer but richer world,
where aggressive CO2 abatement is not pursued, may be the better end state than
a poor but cooler world.

Interventionists understand that their job is not to prove that man is causing some global warming, but to prove that man is doing enough damage to justify massive economic interventions.  That is why Al Gore says tornadoes are increasing when they are not, or why he says sea levels will rise 20 feet when even the IPCC says a foot and a half.  And I will leave you with this quote
from National Center for Atmospheric Research (NOAA) climate researcher and
global warming action promoter, Steven Schneider:

We have to
offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little
mention of any doubts we have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance
is between being effective and being honest.

Comment away.  I don't edit or delete comments, except in the cases of obvious spam.

Update:  Here is another reason why there is an important difference between "man causes any warming at all" and "man causes most of the warming."

The table of contents for the rest of this paper, . 4A Layman's Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is here.  Free pdf of this Climate Skepticism paper is here and print version is sold at cost here

We know the temperature of the Earth has increased over the
last half of the 19^th century and most of the 20^th
century as the world has exited a particularly cold period called the Little
Ice Age.  One of the odd coincidences that colors our judgment about
climate trends is that man began systematically measuring temperatures in the
early to mid-nineteenth century just as the world was beginning to exit what
was perhaps the coldest period of the last millennia.  Throughout their
study of climate trends, scientists have to try to parse warming that is a
natural result of exiting this cyclical cold period from warming that is
perhaps due to man's influence.

We know further, from laboratory work, that CO2, and more
importantly water vapor, in the atmosphere serves to keep the Earth warmer than
it would be in their absence.  What we don't know, in fact what we have no
empirical proof for, is if rising CO2 levels over the last century (caused in
part by man's combustion of fossil fuels) has caused some or all of the 20^th
century warming.  The fact that we have no empirical evidence for this
man-made effect on climate doesn't mean it is not true, but it is something we
should not forget in all this debate.  What we have instead are historical
correlations in the data, far from perfect, that seem to show some relationship
over history between CO2 and temperature.  Some find this data to be
compelling evidence of cause and effect, and others do not. 

Before we start, since this paper is by definition somewhat
in opposition to the core of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory, it
would be useful to state in simple terms just what that theory is.
  The strong AGW hypothesis is roughly as follows:

1. The
world has been warming for a century, and this warming is beyond any cyclical
variation we have seen over the last 1000 or more years, and beyond the range
of what we might expect from natural climate variations.

2. Almost
all of the warming in the second half of the 20^th century, perhaps a
half a degree Celsius, is due to man-made greenhouse gasses, particularly CO2

3. In
the next 100 years, CO2 produced by man will cause a lot more warming, from as
low as three degrees C to as high as 8 or 10 degrees C.

4. Positive
feedbacks in the climate, like increased humidity, will act to triple the
warming from CO2, leading to these higher forecasts and perhaps even a tipping
point into climactic disaster

5. The
bad effects of warming greatly outweigh the positive effects, and we are
already seeing the front end of these bad effects today (polar bears dying,
glaciers melting, etc)

6. These
bad effects, or even a small risk of them, easily justify massive intervention
today in reducing economic activity and greenhouse gas production

In the rest of this paper, we will focus on potential weaknesses
in this hypothesis. Specifically, I will argue that:

There is no doubt that CO2 is a
greenhouse gas, and it is pretty clear that CO2 produced by man has an
incremental impact on warming the Earth's surface. 

However, recent
warming is the result of many natural and man-made factors, and it is
extraordinarily difficult to assign all the blame for current warming to
man. 

In turn, there are very good reasons to suspect that climate
modelers may be greatly exaggerating future warming due to man.  Poor
economic forecasting, faulty assumptions about past and current conditions, and
a belief that climate is driven by runaway positive feedback effects all
contribute to this exaggeration. 

As a result, warming due to man's
impacts over the next 100 years may well be closer to one degree C than the
forecasted six to eight.  In either case, since AGW supporters tend to grossly
underestimate the cost of CO2 abatement, particularly in lost wealth creation
in poorer nations, there are good arguments that a warmer but richer world,
where aggressive CO2 abatement is not pursued, may be the better end state than
a poor but cooler world.

In Chapter 2, we will address whether it is even appropriate
to be a skeptic.  Of late, several AGW supporters have declared the
science "settled," and skeptics the equivalent of tobacco lawyers or holocaust
deniers.  We will also look at the issue of bias, not just for skeptics
but for AGW supporters as well.

In Chapter 3, we will cover a bit of background on
Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory.  We  will learn some
things about the CO2 greenhouse effect you have probably never heard in the
media, such as the fact that warming from CO2 is actually a diminishing return
phenomenon whose effect is asymptotic or essentially capped, making it hard to
understand the prevalence of wild, open-ended temperature runaway scenarios.

In Chapter 4, we will review the historic empirical evidence
for AGW theory.  We will find that the science of historic climate
reconstruction is still in its infancy, and a lot of uncertainty exists in the
data.  We will see that over the last several years, while correlations
between CO2 and temperature exist in the data, much of the historical
circumstantial evidence for AGW theory has gotten weaker, and we will cover
"global dimming" and see if this effect makes the case for AGW stronger.

In Chapter 5 we will cover the absolutely fascinating topic
of climate models.  Most of what you have seen in the media is the output
of complex climate models.  We will find that there is a lot less here
than meets the eye.

In Chapter 6 we will study several alternate explanations
for recent warming that don't involve man-made greenhouse gasses.  Most
prominent in these theories is the changing output of the sun.

In Chapter 7 we take on the scare stories "“ the lions and
tigers and bears of climate reporting.  In the movie An Inconvenient
Truth, Al Gore caught the world's attention with prophecies of seas rising
twenty feet, hurricanes and tornados running rampant, and species dying.
We will find that most of these claims are thought to be wild exaggerations
even by scientists who support AGW theory.

In Chapter 8 we finally get to the Kyoto Treaty, explain its
origins and shortcomings, and briefly discuss some policy alternatives.
We'll seriously consider whether a cooler but poorer world is really superior
to a warmer but richer world.

Finally, in Chapter 9, we will consider AGW supporter's
rebuttals of some of these arguments.  For this version, we will use the New
Scientist's recent 26 Global Warming Myths as a platform for this
discussion.

My Goals
For This Paper

The purpose of this paper is to provide a layman's critique
of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory, and in particular to
challenge the fairly widespread notion that the science and projected
consequences of AGW currently justify massive spending and government
intervention into the world's economies.  This paper will show that
despite good evidence that global temperatures are rising and that CO2 can act
as a greenhouse gas and help to warm the Earth, we are a long way from
attributing all or much of current warming to man-made CO2.  We are even
further away from being able to accurately project man's impact on future
climate, and it is a very debatable question whether interventions today to
reduce CO2 emissions will substantially improve the world 50 or 100 years from
now.

I am not a trained expert on the climate.  I studied
physics at Princeton University before switching my major to mechanical
engineering, where I specialized in control theory and feedback loops, a topic
that will be important when we get into the details of climate change
modeling.  For over ten years, my business specialty was market prediction
and sales forecasting using modeling approaches similar to (if far less complex
than) those used in climate.

My goal for this paper is not to materially advance climate
science.  However, I have found that the global warming skeptic's case is
seldom reported well or in any depth, and I wanted to have a try at producing a
fair reporting of the skeptic's position.   I have been unhappy with
several of the recent documentaries outlining the skeptic's case, either
because they skipped over a number of critical issues, or because they
over-sold alternate warming hypotheses that are not yet well understood.
To the inevitable charge that as a non-practitioner, I am not qualified
to write this paper --I believe that I am able to present the current state of
the science, with a particular emphasis on the skeptic's case, at least as well
as a good reporter might, and far better than most reporters actually portray
the state of the science.  Through this paper I will try to cite sources
as often as possible and provide links for those who are reading this online,
this report is best read as journalism, not as a scientific, meticulously
footnoted paper.

Years ago, another man not trained in climate started a
PowerPoint presentation of what he knew about Global Warming.  Over time,
he used it both as a vehicle for communication as well as a living document
that would evolve over time to reflect his improving knowledge.  A lot of
people saw Al Gore's PowerPoint presentation, and it became the backbone for
the movie An Inconvenient Truth.  I hope to use this paper the same
way, as an evolving document to reflect my evolving knowledge.  To this
end, each version will get a software-like version number and date.

Before proceeding, I want to make one note on
nomenclature.  The terms global warming and climate change are often used
interchangeably, and generally are used in a way that imply man-made
causes.  For example, when many people speak of global warming, they are
actually talking about anthropogenic global warming, meaning warming of the
Earth from man-made causes, generally the release of greenhouse gasses
including CO2.  Of course the climate can, and does, change without man's
help and the Earth can warm without man-made gasses.  I will try to be
precise in my terminology.  I will use global warming to mean literally an
increase in Earth's surface temperatures, no matter what the cause.  I
will use anthropogenic global warming, or AGW, to mean the theory that man is
causing some or all of the current warming.

Finally, any abuse of copyrighted material or mistakes in
attribution are entirely unintentional.  Such problems, as well as any
comments, should be sent to the author at the email address on the cover.

The table of contents for the rest of this paper, . 4A Layman's Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is here.  Free pdf of this Climate Skepticism paper is here and print version is sold at cost here

The open comment thread for this paper can be found here. 

The table of contents for the rest of this paper, . 4A Layman's Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is here.  Free pdf of this Climate Skepticism paper is here and print version is sold at cost here

 For the first time since the Catholic Church
dominated western man's affairs, it has suddenly become a sin again to be
labeled a "skeptic."  For most of my lifetime, "skepticism" was considered
an essential element in the makeup of any good scientist (or journalist, for
that matter).   However, leading world figures are declaring
skepticism to be immoral.  Take one example, from this UPI
story:

A former chief of the U.N. World
Health Organization who also is a former prime minister of Norway and a medical
doctor has declared an end to the climate-change debate.

Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, one of U.N.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's three new special envoys on climate change, also headed up the 1987 U.N. World
Commission on Environment and Development where the concept of sustainable
development was first floated.

"This discussion is behind us. It's
over," she told reporters. "The diagnosis is clear, the science is
unequivocal -- it's completely immoral, even, to question now, on the basis of
what we know, the reports that are out, to question the issue and to question
whether we need to move forward at a much stronger pace as humankind to address
the issues."

In its most extreme form, this approach has AGW supporters
labeling skeptics as equivalent to "holocaust deniers" and "tobacco
lawyers."  Efforts have been made in several quarters to decertify
climatologists or meteorologists who show any skepticism for AGW theory, making
public adherence to the theory a minimum qualification for publication and
professional standing.  Enormous efforts are made to squelch skeptical
speech.  Just as one example, the BBC has run a zillion shows and specials
sympathetic to AGW.  When Channel 4 ran one single show (called the
"Global Warming Swindle") which outlined parts of the skeptics' position, 37 scientists attempted to have it
suppressed by the government.

This is all the more incredible given that AGW theory has
only really been researched seriously and with any critical mass for about 20
years.  Anyone who has studied the history of science will understand what
incredible hubris it is to declare any new scientific theory, particularly one
that concerns the unbelievably chaotic climate, as "done" after just 20 years
work. 

Let me give two quick examples of just how unsettled the
science of climate change is.  Both of these will be reviewed in more
depth later in this paper, and both analyses figured prominently in the third
IPCC report (2001) as well as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.  The
first is a 100,000 year temperature and CO2-level reconstruction from ice-core
data.  Anyone who saw Gore's movie will remember the data in one of his
Really Big Charts.  And it looks compelling "“ in fact, when I first saw
the chart five years ago, it was compelling to me.  It shows CO2 levels
and temperature moving in lock-step for 100,000 years.  When CO2 is up,
temperature is up and vice-versa, the clear implication being that CO2 seems to
be a key, maybe the key, driver of climate   However, since
that chart was first prepared, laboratory procedure has improved, and
scientists have found (and there is very little disagreement about this, even
among strong AGW supporters) that temperature increases occur on average 800
years before the CO2 starts to increase.  Huh.  There is a lot
of debate about what this means, but in the last five years, this formerly definitive
analysis is clearly no longer definitive, since it is hard to cause something
after the fact.

The other example is the very famous Mann hockey stick
chart, prominently featured in Gore's movie and a key part of the IPCC report
in 2001.  I will go into the details later, but since 2001 this analysis
has been effectively discredited, so much so it was almost entirely missing
from the fourth IPCC report in 2007.  In 2003 or so, Al Gore and many AGW
supporters would have called the Mann hockey stick chart the single most
important analysis "proving" AGW, and Gore treated it as such in his PowerPoint
deck and his movie.  Then, in 2007, it is repudiated and expunged from the
record.  Is this really what any reasonable person would call a "settled"
science?

It is a true perversion of the scientific process to find
that skepticism is no longer welcome or accepted in scientific debate.
Which is one reason that AGW is sometimes called a secular religion.
Because it is religion, not science, that burns skeptics at the stake.  Climate
Scientists Garth Paltridge wrote:

A colleague of mine put it rather
well. The IPCC, he said, has developed a highly successful immune system. Its
climate scientists have become the equivalent of white blood cells which rush
in overwhelming numbers to repel infection by ideas and results which do not
support the basic thesis that global warming is perhaps the greatest of the
modern threats to mankind.

Charges of Bias

A funny thing has happened in climate science to scientific inquiry:
the usual ethics of free discussion and fact-based criticism have been
discarded in favor of ad hominem attacks on critics of AGW theory.
The usual approach is to find some connection (even an imagined one) between
any researcher who raises the smallest doubts about AGW theory and an oil or
power company and then declare that the research is tainted by the bias of
these companies that have a strong economic reliance on fossil fuel combustion
(and thus the production of CO2).  A good example can be found in a Boston
Globe article on MIT's Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology Richard
Lindzen.  Mr. Lindzen has become the bete noir of AGW supporters,
since his skepticism is harder to dismiss given his scientific pedigree and his
co-lead author status on the first IPCC climate change report.

"We do not understand the natural internal
variability of climate change" is one of Lindzen's many heresies, along
with such zingers as `"the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940,"
"the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually
growing on average," and "Alpine glaciers have been retreating since
the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that.
Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now
advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why."

When Lindzen published similar views in The Wall
Street Journal this spring, environmentalist Laurie David, the wife of comedian
Larry David, immediately branded him a "shill." She resurrected a
shopworn slur first directed against Lindzen by former Globe writer Ross
Gelbspan, who called Lindzen a "hood ornament" for the fossil fuels
industry in a 1995 article in Harper's Magazine....

For no apparent reason, the state of California,
Environmental Defense, and the Natural Resources Defense Council have dragged
Lindzen and about 15 other global- warming skeptics into a lawsuit over auto-
emissions standards. California et al. have asked the auto companies to cough
up any and all communications they have had with Lindzen and his colleagues,
whose research has been cited in court documents.

"We know that General Motors has been paying
for this fake science exactly as the tobacco companies did," says ED
attorney Jim Marston. If Marston has a scintilla of evidence that Lindzen has
been trafficking in fake science, he should present it to the MIT provost's
office. Otherwise, he should shut up.

"This is the criminalization of opposition to
global warming," says Lindzen, who adds he has never communicated with the
auto companies involved in the lawsuit.

While I have no doubt that corporations are heavily
influenced by their own economic interests, it is more of stretch to argue that
anyone who has ever taken money from them or had any connection with them would
purposely bias their research.  When I learned to debate, I was taught
that understanding biases was useful in knowing when to apply more or less
skepticism, but one still has to refute the opposing position by meaningful
critique of procedures or data.   For example, one might say "given
their strong desire to buttress the case for AGW, the researchers cherry-picked
only the most extreme data, which I will demonstrate by showing the data they
included and the data they chose to exclude."  However, many modern AGW
supporters believe that insinuating possible sources of bias is sufficient to
exempt one from having to actually critique their opponents' methods and
findings. 

This is particularly odd given that public funding for AGW
projects absolutely dwarfs any funding coming from private sources whose
incentive might be to disprove AGW.  In fact, just this year, President
Bush declared that the US Government alone spent more money on AGW research
than on AIDS research, and the US is actually late in the climate funding
game. 

Recently, Greenpeace criticized ExxonMobil for exercising
its free speech rights and giving
about $2 million to global warming skeptics. 

Still, the Greenpeace report is already receiving
scrutiny in Washington, where Rep. Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat, has
joined the environmentalist group in calling for Exxon to release its plans for
contributions during the current year.

"The support of climate skeptics, many of whom
have no real grounding in climate science, appears to be an effort to distort
public discussion about global warming," Miller said. "So long as
popular discussion could be about whether warming was occurring or not, so long
as doubt was widespread, consensus for action could be postponed."

Incredibly, at these spending rates, skeptics are getting outspent by AGW
supporters something like 1000:1 or more.  It is astounding that AGW
supporters, with such a huge funding and publication advantage, still feel
threatened by critics.

Climate research, once a sleepy academic backwater, is now a
multi-billion dollar industry.  This boom in spending is because of fears
of AGW, and should AGW theory be discredited, this funding will quickly dry
up.  So funding for climate researchers exists only as long as climate
researchers beat the drum that AGW is a large threat.   It strikes me
that this is at least as large an incentive for bias as that of any
Exxon-funded skeptic.   Here's another way to look at it:  If
AGW theory is proven correct, the likely political response might cut Shell's
revenues by 20-30%, at most.  If AGW theory is proven incorrect, then
university climate research funding might be cut by 100%.
  Directionally, all the incentives in academia are to inflate global
warming projections.  No one is going to make the news, or even continue
to get funding, if they argue that warming will only be a degree or two in the
next century.  The guys that get the fame and the grants are those pushing
the numbers higher and higher.

Certainly AGW supporters claim that academic researchers are
only concerned about the science and are not concerned about the funding
incentives.  This may be true (though a bit naïve, for anyone who has been
in a university environment and sought research funding), but if pro-AGW
researchers are not swayed by the funding, then it should be equally true that
AGW skeptics are not swayed by much smaller amounts of money flowing to
them.    Any argument that tries to claim that these situations
are somehow different just ends up being circular, i.e. "it's OK if our guys do
it because our guys are right."

One of the mistakes the IPCC process has systematically made
is to make the lead author's and reviewers of many of its report sections a
scientist whose research is mostly in that area.  While this makes a
certain sense, as these people will be expert in their particular area of
review, it presents them with a huge conflict of interest.  For example,
Michael Mann used his own historical temperature reconstructions as the lead
analysis in the section of the third IPCC report for which he was lead
author.  Clearly, one wouldn't expect him to be (nor was he) open to any
research or issues or criticisms aimed at his own work.  In the fourth
report, the new lead author who replaced Mann on this section (Biffra) did the
exact same thing Mann did "“ used his own work as centerpiece of the section,
and has refused to even consider criticisms about that work. 

Just to avoid future argument, I
will outline my potential biases.  I own a small recreation business which
depends on people traveling to beautiful, natural settings.  I lose
business when the climate changes (e.g. when lakes dry up next to my
facilities, which has happened to me).  I generally gain business when gas
prices increase, as they might under various anti-global warming mandates,
since my facilities tend to be short-drive weekend destinations rather than cross-country
destinations.  I grew up in Houston, Texas, so most of my family has
worked in the oil industry at one time or another, and I worked for the Great
Satan Exxon as my first job for three years out of college.  I am a
libertarian blogger at CoyoteBlog.com, and am suspicious of government
interventions but have historically supported emissions limits where they make
sense.  No one has contributed any money to me for this paper or for the
operation of my blog.

The Climate Trojan
Horse

To fully understand the passionate, almost dogmatic
dedication so many people have to AGW theory, it is a bit useful to look at a
little history.  After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, there were a
lot of Marxists, socialists, anti-corporatists and anti-capitalists who were
looking for a new way to package and reinvent themselves, given that the vast
majority of people (at least in the West) considered socialism failed and no
longer wanted to hear about it any more.  For a while, many of these folks
latched onto the anti-globalization cause.  Every interview I ever saw of
one of these anti-globalization guys was a real mess of disorganized beliefs,
but one could tell the movement was the new home for anyone who wanted to stop
the spread of capitalism and privately-owned business. 

Then, along came anthropogenic global warming.  Here
was a theory and movement that united many disparate interests:

• Socialists, communists, and Marxists
• Anti-capitalists
• Anti-consumerists
• Those opposed to large corporations
• Those opposed to global free trade
• Those opposed to economic development and growth, longing
       for simplicity
• "Buy local" movements
• People who just hate oil companies

Suddenly, here was a big tent for all of these causes.
I highly encourage you to view a global warming rally.  Don't just watch
the snippets on the evening news, those usually highlight the most reasonable
speakers at the rally.  Actually go and watch the whole event.  What
you will see is far more anti-corporate, anti-oil company, anti-capitalist
rhetoric than you will hear climate science and discussion.  The two
rallies I have seen with my own eyes were Marxist rallies under a climate
banner.  As an admittedly extreme example, I will refer you to the words of
Paul
Watson, Founder and President of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, who
offers his group's vision.  While this particular vision pre-dated most
discussions of AGW, I hope you can see how AGW fear-mongering provides quite a
useful vehicle for groups of this type:

"We need to radically and
intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.... We need to
stop burning fossil fuels and utilize only wind, water, and solar power with
all generation of power coming from individual or small community units like
windmills, waterwheels, and solar panels. Sea transportation should be by
sail.... Air transportation should be by solar powered blimps when air
transportation is necessary. All consumption should be local. No food products
need to be transported over hundreds of miles to market. All commercial fishing
should be abolished. If local communities need to fish the fish should be
caught individually by hand. Preferably vegan and vegetarian diets can be
adopted.... We need to remove and destroy all fences and barriers that bar
wildlife from moving freely across the land.... We need to stop flying, stop
driving cars, and jetting around on marine recreational vehicles.... Who should
have children? Those who are responsible and completely dedicated to the
responsibility which is actually a very small percentage of humans...."

Of course what he doesn't say, but is an explicit outcome of
this vision, is that we can all go back to being dirt poor and having a life
expectancy of about 40 years.

The average person, say in America, wants little to do with
any of this.  But fear of AGW provides a way to engage everyone in the
movement.  Socialists of all stripes no longer have to spew Marxist
notions that turn most people off; now, they can talk the science of global
warming and hurricanes and massive floods and such, and, using fear, trample
the average guy into their socialist goals of stifling capitalism, growth, and
having the government take over the economy through this environmental
back-door.

The Need to
Exaggerate

One of the hardest parts of really trying to understand what is going on in
the AGW scientific debate is separating the scientists doing real science from
the political advocates, who sometimes carry quasi-scientific titles.  A
very, very small number of vocal climate scientists and a somewhat larger group
of what I would call advocates and bureaucrats really determine what you hear
in the media about AGW science.   A great example is the UN IPCC
reports.  Unless you have gone online and dug into the detailed reports
themselves, likely all you have seen from these reports is taken out of the
management summaries "for policy-makers".  These summaries are written by
bureaucrats and advocates, not so much by scientists, and tend to wildly
mis-characterize the true state of the science.   Careful language in
the heart of the reports expressing uncertainty and low understanding of
certain phenomena are cast aside in the summaries, in favor of a comforting
certainty and absolutes.  In earlier IPCC reports, this caused notable
disconnects between the summaries and the detailed science.  More
recently, the UN has "fixed" this problem by having their non-scientists write the
conclusions in the management summaries first, and then telling authors of the
individual sections of the report to conform their writing, and their science,
to the summary.  So, for the Fourth IPCC report, the summary was published
over a half year before the science!

As a result, while the IPCC reports claim to be the consensus of 5000
scientists, actually less than half would willingly sign their name to the
management summaries of their work that you see in the press.  The
management summaries and related press releases have become more political
advocacy than science, as UN bureaucrats use AGW-fear-mongering to increase
their prestige and power.  Generally, these summaries and press releases
are taken more seriously by the press than they are climate scientists.
You can get an insight on the IPCC process just by looking at how they select
their co-lead authors on certain sections.  A logical way to choose these
authors would be to find scientists who bring a different scientific perspective
"“ maybe a leading astronomer who studies the sun, maybe someone who studies
hurricanes, or perhaps even, gasp, a skeptic or two.  This is not how the
IPCC makes the selection.  Instead, they focus on including scientists,
often with limited experience or expertise, who bring geographic or ethnic
diversity to the panel.  Nothing better demonstrates that the IPCC is
first and foremost a political entity, and a scientific body second (at best).

If I seem too hard on the climate science community, then consider this quote
from National Center for Atmospheric Research (NOAA) climate researcher and
global warming action promoter, Steven Schneider:

We have to
offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little
mention of any doubts we have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance
is between being effective and being honest.

Is that how you learned science in high school "“ that lying
about the science was OK if it makes you more politically effective?  Der
Spiegel, a magazine historically sympathetic to the AGW cause, published
this analysis:

This doesn't mean that Gore should necessarily be
taken to task for his statements. He is a politician. But it is odd to hear
IPCC Chairman Pachauri, when asked what he thinks about Gore's film,
responding: "I liked it. It does emotionalize the debate, but it seems
that it has to do that." And when Pachauri comments on the publication of
the first SPM by saying, "I hope that this will shock the governments so
much that they take action," this doesn't exactly allay doubts as to his
objectivity. When Renate Christ, the secretary of the IPCC, is asked about her
opinion of reporting on climate change, she refers to articles that mention
"climate catastrophe" and calls them "rather refreshing." .
. .

The problem is that the IPCC is not a political
group whose goal is to exert pressure, but a scientific institution and panel
of experts. Its members ought to present their results and analyses
dispassionately, the way pathologists or psychiatrists do when serving as
expert witnesses in court, no matter how horrible the victim's injuries and how
deviant the perpetrator's psyche are.

I will end this section on an admittedly extreme example
of a headline taken from the Canadian, a "progressive" magazine up in
the Great White North.  In the great race to one-up other media outlets in
creating a panic, and not happy with just a few more hurricanes or some melted
icebergs, the Canadian has taken the prize.  Get ready for it"¦

"Over 4.5 Billion people could die
from Global Warming-related causes by 2012"

In case you are struggling with the math, that means that they believe
Global Warming could kill three quarters of the world's population in the next
five years.  And the media treats these people with total respect, and we
skeptics are considered loony?

The table of contents for the rest of this paper, . 4A Layman's Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is here.  Free pdf of this Climate Skepticism paper is here and print version is sold at cost here

The open comment thread for this paper can be found here. 

The table of contents for the rest of this paper, . 4A Layman's Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is here.  Free pdf of this Climate Skepticism paper is here and print version is sold at cost here

Kyoto Treaty

In the mid-1990's, a number of western nations crafted a CO2-reduction
treated named Kyoto for the city in which the key conference was held.
The treaty called for signatory nations to roll back their CO2 emissions to
below 1990 levels by a target date of 2012.  Japan, Russia, and many
European nations signed the treaty; the United States did not.  In fact,
the pact was ratified by 141 nations, but only calls for CO2 limits in 35 of
these (so the other 106 were really going out on a limb signing it).
China, India, Brazil and most of the third world are exempt from its limits.

We will discuss the costs and benefits of CO2 reduction a bit later.
However, it is instructive to look at why Kyoto was crafted the way it was, and
why the United States refused to sign, even when Al Gore was vice-president.

The most obvious flaw is that the entire developing world, including China,
SE Asia, and India, are exempt. These countries account for 80% of the world's
population and the great majority of growth in CO2 emissions over the next few
decades, and they are not even included. If you doubt this at all, just look at
what the economic recovery in China over the past months has done to oil
prices. China's growth in
hydrocarbon consumption will skyrocket over the coming years, and China is
predicted to have higher CO2 production than the United States by 2009.

The second major flaw with the treaty is that European nations cleverly
crafted the treaty so that the targets were relatively easy for them to make,
and very difficult for the United States to meet.  Rather than freezing
emissions at current levels at the time of the treaty, or limiting carbon
emission growth rates, the treaty called for emissions to be rolled back to
below 1990 levels. Why 1990? Well, a couple of important things have happened
since 1990, including:

a. European (and Japanese) economic growth has stagnated since 1990, while
the US economy has grown like crazy. By setting the target date back to 1990,
rather than just starting from day the treaty was signed, the treaty
effectively called for a roll-back of economic growth in the US that other
major world economies did not enjoy.

b. In 1990, Germany was reunified, and Germany inherited a whole country
full of polluting inefficient factories from the old Soviet days. Most of the
dirty and inefficient Soviet-era factories have been closed since 1990, giving
Germany an instant one-time leg up in meeting the treaty targets, but only if
the date was set back to 1990, rather than starting at the time of treaty
signing.

c. Since 1990, the British have had a similar effect from the closing of a
number of old dirty Midlands coal mines and switching fuels from very dirty
coal burned inefficiently to more modern gas and oil furnaces and nuclear
power.

d. Since 1990, the Russians have an even greater such effect, given low
economic growth and the closure of thousands of atrociously inefficient
communist-era industries.

It is flabbergasting that US representatives could allow the US to get so
thoroughly out-manuevered in these negotiations. Does anyone in the US really
want to roll back the economic gains of the nineties, while giving the rest of
the world a free pass? Anyway, as a result of these flaws, and again having
little to do with the global warming argument itself, the Senate
voted 95-0 in 1997 not to sign or ratify the treaty unless these flaws (which
still exist in the treaty) were fixed.  Then-Vice-President Al Gore
agreed that the treaty should not be signed without modifications, which were
never made and which Europeans were never going to make.

By the way, enough time has elapsed that we have data on the
progress of various countries in meeting these targets.  And if you leave
out various accounting games with offsets of dubious value, most all the
European nations, despite all the advantages described above, are still missing
their targets.  The political will simply does not exist to hamstring
their economies to the extent necessary to roll back CO2 growth.  Actual
growth rates for CO2 emissions have been (source UN):

You can see that the Europeans positioned themselves well in
the 1990's to make their targets.  Realize that as the treaty was negotiated,
they already had a good idea of these numbers for 1990-1995 and even a few
years beyond.  They knew that by selecting a 1990 baseline, they were
already on target to meet the goals and the US would be far behind.
Again, realize that the 1990-2000 EU performance on CO2 production had nothing
to do with post-Kyoto regulatory responses and everything to do with the
economic fundamentals we outlined above that would have existed with or without
the treaty.

Since 2000, however, it has been a different story.
European emissions have increased as their economies have recovered, at the
same time the US experienced a post-9/11 slowdown.

By the way, the US is generally the great Satan in AGW
circles because its per capita CO2 production is the highest in the
world.  But this is in part because our economic output per capita is
close to the highest in the world.  The US is about in
the middle of the pack in efficiency, though behind many European countries
which have much higher fuel taxes and heavier nuclear investments.

As an interesting side note, the US per capita CO2
emissions, as show below, have actually been flat to down since the early
1970's.  To the extent that Europe is doing better at CO2 reduction than
the US, it may actually be more of an artifact of their declining populations
vs. America's continued growth.

Finally, if you get really tired of the US-bashing, you can
take some comfort that though the US is the #1 per capita producer of CO2, of
which we are uncertain is even harmful, we have done a fabulous job reducing
many other pollutants we are much more certain are harmful.  For example,
the US has much lower SO2
production than most European nations and the
water quality is better.  One could argue that the US has spent its
abatement dollars on things that really matter.

Cost of the
Solutions vs. the Benefits:  Why Warmer but Richer may be Better than
Colder and Poorer

If you get beyond the hard core of near religious believers in the massive
warming scenarios, the average global warming supporter would answer this paper
by saying: "Yes there is a lot of uncertainty, but though the doomsday
warming scenarios via runaway positive feedback in the climate can't be proven,
they are so bad that we need to cut back on CO2 production just to be on the
safe side."

This would be a perfectly reasonable approach if cutting back on CO2
production was nearly cost-free.  But it is not.  The burning of
hydrocarbons that create CO2 is an entrenched part of our lives and our
economies. Forty years ago we might have had an easier time of it, as we were
on a path to dramatically cut back on CO2 production via what is still the only
viable technology to massively replace fossil fuel consumption -- nuclear
power.  Ironically, it was environmentalists that shut down this effort,
and power industries around the world replaced capacity that would have gone
nuclear mostly with coal, the worst fossil fuel in terms of CO2 production (per
BTU of power, Nuclear and hydrogen produce no CO2, natural gas produces some,
gasoline produces more, and coal produces the most).

Just halting CO2 production at current levels (not even rolling it back)
would knock several points off of world economic growth.  Every point of
economic growth you knock off guarantees you that you will get more poverty,
more disease, more early death.  If you could, politically, even make such
a freeze stick, you would lock China and India, nearly 2 billion people, into
continued poverty just when they were about to escape it.  You would in
the process make the world less secure, because growing wealth is always the
best way to maintain peace.  Right now, China can become wealthier from
peaceful internal growth than it can from trying to loot its neighbors.
But in a zero sum world created by a CO2 freeze, countries like China would
have much more incentive to create trouble outside its borders.  This
tradeoff is often referred to as a cooler but poorer world vs. a richer but
warmer world.  Its not at all clear which is better. 

What impact, warming?

We've already discussed just how much the popular media has overblown the
effect of warming.  Sea levels may rise, but only by 15 inches in one
hundred years, and even that based on arguably over-inflated IPCC models.
There is no evidence that weather patterns will be more severe, or that
diseases will spread, or that species will be threatened by warming.  And,
since most of the warming has been and will be concentrated in winter and
nights, we will see rising temperatures more in a narrowing of temperature
variability rather than a drastic increase in summer high temperatures.
Growing seasons, in turn, will be longer and deaths from cold, which tend to
outnumber heat-related deaths, will decline. 

What impact, Intervention?

While the Kyoto treaty was a massively-flawed document, with current
technologies a Kyoto type cap and trade approach is about the only way we have
available to slow or halt CO2 emissions.  And, unlike the impact of
warming on the world, the impact of such a intervention is very well understood
by the world's economists and seldom in fact disputed by global warming
advocates.  Capping world CO2 production would by definition cap world
economic growth at the rate of energy efficiency growth, a number at least two
points below projected real economic growth.  In addition, investment
would shift from microprocessors and consumer products and new drug research
and even other types of pollution control to energy. The effects of two points
or more lower economic growth over 50-100 years can be devastating:

• Remember the power of compounded growth rates we discussed earlier.  A world real economic growth rate of 4% yields income fifty times higher in a hundred years.  A world real economic growth rate two points lower yields income only 7 times higher in 100 years.  So a two point reduction in growth rates reduces incomes in 100 years by a factor of seven!  This is enormous.  It means, literally, that on average everyone in a cooler world would make 1/7 what they would make in a warmer world.
• Currently, there are perhaps a billion people, mostly in Asia, poised to exit millennia of subsistence poverty and reach the middle class.  Global warming intervention will likely consign these folks to continued poverty.  Does anyone remember that old ethics problem, the one about having a button that every time you pushed it, you got a thousand dollars but someone in China died.  Global warming intervention strikes me as a similar issue - intellectuals in the west
       feel better about man being in harmony with the Earth but a billion Asians get locked into poverty.
• Lower world economic growth will in turn considerably
  shorten the lives of billions of the world's poor
• A poorer
  world is more vulnerable to natural disasters.  While AGW
  advocates worry (needlessly) about hurricanes and tornados in a warmer
  world, what we can be certain of is that these storms will be more devastating and kill more people in a poorer world than a richer one.
• The unprecedented progress the world is experiencing in
  slowing birth rates, due entirely to rising wealth, will likely be
  reversed.  A cooler world will not only be poorer, but likely more populous as well.  It will also be a hungrier world, particularly if
  a cooler world does indeed result in lower food production than a warmer
  world
• A transformation to a prosperous middle class in Asia will
  make the world a much safer and more stable place, particularly vs. a cooler world with a billion Asian poor people who know that their march to progress was halted by western meddling.
• A cooler world would ironically likely be an
  environmentally messier world.  While anti-growth folks blame all
  environmental messes on progress, the fact is that environmental impact is
       a sort of inverted parabola when plotted against growth.  Early
  industrial growth tends to pollute things up, but further growth and
  wealth provides the resources and technology to clean things up.  The
       US was a cleaner place in 1970 than in 1900, and a cleaner place today
  than in 1970.  Stopping or drastically slowing worldwide growth would
  lock much of the developing world, countries like Brazil and China and
  Indonesia, into the top end of the parabola.  Is Brazil, for example, more likely to burn up its rain forest if it is poor or rich?

The Commons Blog
links to this
study by Indur Goklany on just this topic:

If global warming is real and its effects will one
day be as devastating as some believe is likely, then greater economic growth
would, by increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, sooner or later lead to
greater damages from climate change. On the other hand, by increasing wealth,
technological development and human capital, economic growth would broadly
increase human well-being, and society's capacity to reduce climate change
damages via adaptation or mitigation. Hence, the conundrum: at what point in
the future would the benefits of a richer and more technologically advanced
world be canceled out by the costs of a warmer world?

Indur Goklany attempted to shed light on this
conundrum in a recent paper presented at the 25th Annual North American
Conference of the US Association for Energy Economics, in Denver (Sept. 21,
2005). His paper "” "Is a
richer-but-warmer world better than poorer-but-cooler worlds?" "” which can
be found here,
draws upon the results of a series of UK Government-sponsored studies which
employed the IPCC's emissions scenarios to project future climate change
between 1990 and 2100 and its global impacts on various climate-sensitive
determinants of human and environmental well-being (such as malaria, hunger,
water shortage, coastal flooding, and habitat loss). The results indicate that
notwithstanding climate change, through much of this century, human well-being
is likely to be highest in the richest-but-warmest world and lower in
poorer-but-cooler worlds. With respect to environmental well-being, matters may
be best under the former world for some critical environmental indicators through
2085-2100, but not necessarily for others.

This conclusion casts doubt on a key premise
implicit in all calls to take actions now that would go beyond "no-regret"
policies in order to reduce GHG emissions in the near term, namely, a
richer-but-warmer world will, before too long, necessarily be worse for the
globe than a poorer-but-cooler world. But the above analysis suggests this is
unlikely to happen, at least until after the 2085-2100 period.

Policy Alternatives

Above, we looked at the effect of a cap and trade scheme, which would have
about the same effect as some type of carbon tax.  This is the best
possible approach, if an interventionist approach is taken.  Any other is
worse.

The primary other alternative bandied about by scientists is some type of
alternative energy Manhattan project.  This can only be a disaster.
Many scientists are technocratic
fascists at heart, and are convinced that if only they could run the
economy or some part of it, instead of relying on this messy bottom-up
spontaneous order we call the marketplace, things, well, would be better.
The problem is that scientists, no
matter how smart they are, miss with their bets because the economy, and
thus the lowest cost approach to less CO2 production, is too complicated for
anyone to understand or manage.  And even if the scientists stumbled on
the right approaches, the political process would just screw the solution
up.  Probably the number one alternative energy program in the US is
ethanol subsidies, which are scientifically insane since ethanol
actually increases rather than reduces fossil fuel consumption.
Political subsidies almost always lead to investments tailored just to capture
the subsidy, that do little to solve the underlying problem.  In Arizona,
we have thousands of cars with subsidized conversions to engines that burn
multiple fuels but never burn anything but gasoline.  In California, there
are hundreds of massive windmills that never turn, having already served their
purpose to capture a subsidy.  In California, the state bent over
backwards to encourage electric cars, but in fact a different technology, the
hybrid, has taken off.

Besides, when has this government led technology revolution approach ever
worked?  I would say twice - once for the Atomic bomb and the second time
to get to the moon.  And what did either get us?  The first got us
something I am not sure we even should want, with very little carryover into
the civilian world.  The second got us a big scientific dead end, and
probably set back our space efforts by getting us to the moon 30 years or so
before we were really ready to do something about it or follow up the efforts.

If we must intervene to limit CO2, we should jack up the price of fossil
fuels with taxes, or institute a cap and trade scheme which will result in
about the same price increase, and the market through millions of individual
efforts will find the lowest cost net way to reach whatever energy consumption
level you want with the least possible cost.  (The only real current
alternative that is rapidly deploy-able to reduce CO2 emissions anyway is nuclear
power, which could be a solution but was killed by...the very people now
wailing about global warming.)

The table of contents for the rest of this paper, . 4A Layman's Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is here.  Free pdf of this Climate Skepticism paper is here and print version is sold at cost here

The open comment thread for this paper can be found here. 

The table of contents for the rest of this paper, . 4A Layman's Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is here.  Free pdf of this Climate Skepticism paper is here and print version is sold at cost here

As stated in the introduction, the purpose of this paper has
not been to provide a balanced portrayal of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory; its purpose instead is to
provide a comprehensive overview of skeptic's concerns with AGW theory.
However, the issues raised here are not necessarily new, and AGW supporters
have attempted to address many of them. 

The New
Scientist, a fairly strong and reliable voice for advocacy of anthropogenic
global warming theory, recently published its response to what it calls 26
myths about global warming, many of these "myths" being correlated loosely with
skeptics concerns about AGW theory as outlined in this paper.  Walking
through their points seems a reasonable way to entertain a rebuttal to the
skeptic's position.  Each of these has a link to the New Scientist article
in question.  I have tried to summarize the position with a quote, shown
in italics.  My response to each then follows.

Before I get into these 20 myths, note that many of the key
skeptic's questions are neatly avoided.   While the magazine gives
itself certain softball questions, it does not attempt to take on skeptics
questions such as:

• Isn't warming from CO2 a diminishing return, such that each 10ppm of CO2
  has less warming effect than the last 10 ppm?
• Isn't warming from CO2 asymptotic, such that total warming from CO2 is
  capped?
• Isn't 2/3 or more of the future warming in IPCC forecasts due to
  positive feedback effects that tend to be rare in stable systems and that even
  the IPCC admits are poorly understood?
• Aren't there a lot of problems with ground-based temperature measurements?
• Aren't the historical proxies for temperature diverging from
  measurements, such that the IPCC actually dropped many of the recent proxy
  measurements to hide this result?

There are many others, but we can get at them tangentially
through dealing with the 20 "myths" below

"¢ Human
CO₂ emissions are too tiny to matter

So what's going on? It is true that human
emissions of CO₂ are small compared with natural sources. But the
fact that CO₂ levels have remained steady until very recently shows
that natural emissions are usually balanced by natural absorptions. Now
slightly more CO₂ must be entering the atmosphere than is being
soaked up by carbon "sinks".

Though I do know that some skeptics will claim that man can't be changing
world CO2 levels, I don't believe I even tried to make that claim in this paper.

The more salient point in
asking whether human CO2 emissions are too tiny to matter is to ask whether the
change in composition of the atmosphere of 0.009% by human activities is
substantial enough to affect world climate in any important way, particularly
when the portion being increased, CO2, is a relatively weak greenhouse gas vs.
other portions.

"¢ We
can't do anything about climate change

It is true that the action taken
so far, such as the Kyoto Protocol, will only have a marginal effect. The
protocol's authors have always described it as a first step. But even before it
came into effect in 2005, the protocol has triggered some profound thinking
among governments, corporations and citizens about their carbon footprint and
how to reduce it. Industrialized countries such as the UK are planning for
emissions reductions of 60% or more by mid-century.

This is a bit of a straw man.  Certainly to the extent
that man is causing climate change, men with enough will can do something about
it.  The question is whether the costs justify the avoided change "“ this
is a question that I have addressed sufficiently and won't revisit here.
However, I would like to comment on this:

We may find that once the
process has begun, the world loses its addiction to carbon fuels surprisingly quickly.
Natural scientists fear "tipping points" in the climate system. But there are
also tipping points in social, economic and political systems. Once under way,
things can happen fast"¦

This is a statement to which I both agree and disagree.  I am a technological
optimist, and so generally accept that world-changing technologies will
continue to spring from man's mind, and that the introduction of these changes
can be fast and their impact dramatic.  The only reason that I am a tad
skeptical about this statement is that the vast majority of strong AGW
adherents are technology pessimists, so it would be uncharacteristic for them
to take such a position.  Absent unimagined new technologies, change of
the type AGW supporters are hoping for is actually not a positive
feedback process as implied in this statement. Why is it that climate
scientists see so many positive feedback processes, when these are actually so
rare? In fact, most investment decisions, for example investments to reduce CO2
emissions, follow a diminishing return relationship.  Early investors
capture the low-hanging fruit, while each successive wave of investment offers
a lower return (here, in CO2 reduction) for each incremental dollar invested.

"¢ The
'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong

Most researchers would agree that while the
original hockey stick can "“ and has "“ been improved in a number of ways, it was
not far off the mark. Most later temperature reconstructions fall within the
error bars of the original hockey stick. Some show far more variability leading
up to the 20^th century than the hockey stick, but none suggest that
it has been warmer at any time in the past 1000 years than in the last part of
the 20^th century.

No one statement by AGW supporters would do more to build my confidence in
their findings than to actually have someone say "the Mann hockey stick was a
deeply flawed analysis, and we have taken great pains to make sure the flaws identified
in Mann are not present in other historical reconstructions."  However,
when I see the statement above, I am left to wonder if any of the flaws in Mann
have actually been corrected in other works, or if systematic errors still
exist.  Since AGW supporters refuse to acknowledge flaws in Mann, it is
almost certain that these flaws still exist in the other analyses (therefore
making it unsurprising that new analyses show roughly the same results).
Remember that Mann was replaced by Biffra as lead author of this section of the
Fourth IPCC report, and it was Biffra who dropped 20-30 years of recent data
from his historical reconstruction when it did not show the result that he
wanted it to.

"¢ Chaotic
systems are not predictable

Getting reasonably accurate
predictions is a matter of choosing the right timescale: days in the case of
weather, decades in the case of climate.

Climate scientists sometimes
refer to the effects of chaos as intrinsic or unforced variability: the
unpredictable changes that arise from the dynamic interactions between the
oceans and atmosphere rather than being a result of "forcings" such
as changes in solar irradiance or greenhouse gases.

The crucial point is that
unforced variability occurs within a relatively narrow range. It is constrained
by the major factors influencing climate: it might make some winters bit a
warmer, for instance, but it cannot make winters warmer than summers

There are systems people who would both agree and disagree
with this statement.  The real study of chaotic systems is barely older
than the study of global warming, and most mathematicians would say that the
issue of long-term predictability of macro trends in chaotic systems is not
settled science.

However, one issue the statement overlooks is that even if
chaotic systems have some long-term order, at least when "viewed from a
distance," this does not mean that the drivers of those long-term trends can be
discerned by those of us standing in the chaos.  So while it may be
theoretically possible to predict long-scale climate changes, it may still be
impossible to discern the true drivers of these climate systems amidst the
chaos, making the long-term prediction problem moot.

Remember, no one has a thermometer that provides two readings "“ temperature
due to "natural" causes and temperature due to man-made forcings. 
The only argument one can make outside of a laboratory is to try to correlate
temperature changes to certain other variables, like CO2 level.  But in a
chaotic system, when thousands of variables may matter, and there are all kinds
of cross-dependencies between variables, definitively showing direct
correlation, much less causation, is very hard, possibly impossible. 
Remember, outside lab experiments, climate scientists main argument that CO2 is
causing current warming is "We have checked everything else it possibly could
be, and it wasn't those things, so it must be CO2."  In a chaotic system,
such a statement borders on hubris.

"¢ We
can't trust computer models of climate

Climate is average weather, and it can vary unpredictably
only within the limits set by major influences like the Sun and levels of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We might not be able to say whether it will
rain at noon in a week's time, but we can be confident that the summers will be
hotter than winters for as long as the Earth's axis remains tilted.

The validity of models can be tested against
climate history. If they can predict the past (which the best models are pretty
good at) they are probably on the right track for predicting the future "“ and
indeed have successfully done so.

I hope that if you have learned anything from this paper, you already know
how to refute the statement above.  Climate models match history because
they have been tuned and tweaked and overridden to do so.  The fact that
they then can reproduce history is meaningless.  Even more, you should run
away quickly from anyone who makes this statement, because they are either
ignorant of what they are talking about or they are trying to sell you the
Brooklyn Bridge.

Finally, the claim is sometimes
made that if computer models were any good, people would be using them to
predict the stock market. Well, they are!

A lot of trading in the
financial markets is already carried out by computers. Many base their
decisions on fairly simple algorithms designed to exploit tiny profit margins,
but others rely on more sophisticated long-term models.

Sorry, but this is a facile and ignorant mis-interpretation of what
financial models are doing.  Yes, people are running long-term financial
models as part of a trading strategy, but these models feed into very
short-term trading decisions.  If you looked at the output from these long-term
models, you would see that they are changing constantly as new data flows
in.  There is an old joke about two campers who see a bear growling at
them.  One of them starts putting his tennis shoes on.  The other one
says to him "Why are you putting your shoes on?  You can't outrun that
bear."   His friend replied "I don't have to outrun the bear.  I
just have to outrun you."  Traders' long-term models work the same.
They don't actually expect them to be right, they just want them to be better,
based on current conditions, than other traders' models, then they can make
money.

"¢ They
predicted global cooling in the 1970s

Indeed they did"¦. However, Schneider soon
realised he had overestimated the cooling effect of aerosol pollution and
underestimated the effect of CO₂, meaning warming was more likely
than cooling in the long run"¦.

The calls for action to prevent further
human-induced global warming, by contrast, are based on an enormous body of
research by thousands of scientists over more than a century that has been
subjected to intense "“ and sometimes ferocious "“ scrutiny. According to the
latest IPCC report, it is more than
90% certain that the world is already warming as a result of human activity

We have already dealt with aerosols, and unlike many skeptics I have not
really held the 1970's global cooling panic against the climate
community.  The last paragraph is just circular.  Saying the IPCC is
90% sure does not answer the arguments about what skeptics feel the IPCC is
ignoring.

"¢ It's
been far warmer in the past, what's the big deal?

First of all, it is worth bearing in mind that
any data on global temperatures before about 150 years ago is an estimate, a
reconstruction based on second-hand evidence such as ice cores and isotopic
ratios. The evidence becomes sparser the further back we look, and its
interpretation often involves a set of assumptions. In other words, a fair
amount of guesswork.

This is hilarious.  What happened to their confidence in Mann and
1000-year temperature reconstructions just a few myths back?  But to
continue, the answer is basically yes, but:

The important question is what
is causing the current, rapid warming? We cannot dismiss it as natural
variation just because the planet has been warmer at various times in the past.
Many studies suggest it can only be explained by taking into account human
activity.

Nor does the fact that it has
been warmer in the past mean that future warming is nothing to worry about. The
sea level has been tens of metres higher during past warm periods, enough to
submerge most major cities around the world.

Here is why it matters "“ beyond the laboratory evidence of the greenhouse
effect, which tells us merely that there is an affect and not how strong it is,
the main evidence cited by AGW supporters for current warming being man-made is
to try to show that current warming is somehow unprecedented, and therefore
unlikely to be natural.  So it is odd here that AGW supporters simply
shrug their shoulders here and say that it is not important that current
warming be unprecedented.

"¢ It's
too cold where I live - warming will be great

This does not sound too bad, and for many people
it won't be. Wealthy individuals and countries will be able to adapt to most
short-term changes, whether it means buying an air conditioner or switching to
crops better suited to the changing climate. Rainfall will fall in
mid-latitudes but rise in high latitudes, and initially agricultural yields
will probably.  Some regions will suffer, though. Africa could be hardest
hit, with yields predicted to halve in some countries as early as 2020.

As global temperature climbs to 3°C above
present levels - which is likely
to happen before the end of this century if greenhouse emissions continue
unabated - the consequences will become increasingly severe. More than a third
of species face extinction. Agricultural yields will start to fall in many
parts of the world. Millions of people will be at risk from coastal flooding.
Heatwaves, droughts, floods and wildfires will take an ever greater toll.

I hope readers will accept that I am not exaggerating or constructing straw
men when I talk about the dire predictions by AGW supporters.  There is
nothing here that we have not dealt with earlier, except perhaps the
rainfall.  Of late, AGW supporters seem to have shifted to rainfall
(rather than sea level rise) as their lead scary topic.  Note, however,
that even the IPCC admits that it and all of its modelers really do not
understand (even a little bit) the effect of global warming on rainfall and
drought.  Logic says that with more water evaporated, while global warming
may cause now local draughts, overall rainfall should increase.  I would
bet any amount of money that lower economic growth due to aggressive CO2 abatement
will have a far more deleterious effect on worldwide agricultural yields than
global warming.

"¢ Global
warming is down to the Sun, not humans

So what role, if any, have solar fluctuations
had in recent temperature changes? While we can work out how Earth's orbit has
changed going back many millions of years, we have no first-hand record of the
changes in solar output associated with sunspots before the 20^th century.

It is true that sunspot records go back to the
17^th century, but sunspots actually block the Sun's radiation. It is
the smaller bright spots (faculae) that increase the Sun's output and these
were not recorded until more recently. The correlation between sunspots and
bright faculae is not perfect, so estimates of solar activity based on sunspot
records may be out by as much as 30%.

The other method of working out past solar
activity is to measure levels of carbon-14 and beryllium-10 in tree rings and
ice cores. These isotopes are formed when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere, and
higher sunspot activity is associated with increases in the solar wind that
deflect more galactic cosmic rays away from Earth. Yet again, though, the
correlation is not perfect. What is more, recent evidence suggests that the
deposition of beryllium-10 can
be affected by climate changes, making it even less reliable as a measure
of past solar activity.

This is again a pretty hilarious statement.  One could easily argue
that temperature and CO2 proxies have at least as much
uncertainty.  One wonders why AGW advocates do not seem as concerned about
the errors in the proxies they hold dear.  But anyway, to continue:

But even if solar forcing in the past was more
important than this estimate suggests, as some scientists think, there is no
correlation between solar activity and the strong warming during the past 40
years. Claims that this is the case have not stood up to scrutiny (pdf document).

Direct measurements of solar output since 1978
show a steady rise and fall over the 11-year sunspot cycle, but no upwards or downward trend .

Similarly, there is no trend in direct
measurements of the Sun's ultraviolet output and in cosmic rays. So for the
period for which we have direct, reliable records, the Earth has warmed
dramatically even though there has been no corresponding rise in any kind of
solar activity.

This is another you-study-my-study pissing match.  I am happy to admit
that our knowledge of the sun's changing impact on climate is poor, and that it
is hard to separate out this one effect in a chaotic system.  I refuse to
fall into the same scientific hubris as AGW supporters.  However, those
who think the sun has some contribution to warming are buttressed by the
knowledge that they are working with the main driver of climate, rather than a
secondary variable.

"¢ It's
all down to cosmic rays

There is no convincing evidence
that cosmic rays are a major factor determining cloud cover. The ionising of
air by cosmic rays will impart an electric charge to aerosols, which in theory
could encourage them to clump together to form particles large enough for cloud
droplets to form around, called "cloud condensation nuclei".

But cloud physicists say it has
yet to be shown that such clumping occurs. And even if it does, it seems
far-fetched to expect any great effect on the amount of clouds in the atmosphere.
Most of the atmosphere, even relatively clean marine air, has plenty of cloud
condensation nuclei already.

A series of attempts by
Svensmark to show an effect have come unstuck. Initially, Svensmark claimed
there was a correlation between cosmic ray intensity and satellite measurements
of total cloud cover since the 1980s "“ yet a correlation does not prove cause
and effect. It could equally well reflect changes in solar irradiance, which
inversely correlate with cosmic ray intensity.

I am starting to notice a trend here of making statements about competing
that could be applied equally well to AGW theory.  And what about all
those points they made above, reminding us over and over that CO2 greenhouse
theory works in the lab.  Now the lab is not good enough?

However, I would accept that the cosmic ray theory is pretty undeveloped and
not acceptably proven.  It has had a number of fits and starts.  Just
like CO2 greenhouse theory, the cosmic ray effect on climate can be reproduced
in the lab, but it is really hard to parse out its effects in the chaotic
climate.

"¢ CO₂
isn't the most important greenhouse gas

At some of these overlaps, the
atmosphere already absorbs 100% of radiation, meaning that adding more
greenhouse gases cannot increase absorption at these specific frequencies. For
other frequencies, only a small proportion is currently absorbed, so higher
levels of greenhouse gases do make a difference.

This means that when it comes to
the greenhouse effect, two plus two does not equal four.

Wow!  An AGW supporter actually said this in public.  This is to
our point that there is a diminishing return from incremental CO2 in the
atmosphere.  Of course, they say this in the context of trying to show why
water isn't as important as it might seem, but still, it's there

But the overall quantities of these other gases
are tiny. Even allowing for the relative strength of the effects, CO₂
is still responsible for two-thirds
of the additional warming caused by all the greenhouse gases emitted as a
result of human activity.

Water vapour will play a huge role in the
centuries to come, though. Climate models, backed by satellite
measurements, suggest that the amount of water vapour in the upper
troposphere (about 5 to 10 kilometres up) will double by the end of this
century as temperatures rise.

This will result in roughly twice as much
warming than if water vapour remained constant. Changes in clouds could lead to
even greater amplification of the warming or reduce it "“ there is great uncertainty
about this. What is certain is that, in the jargon of climate science, water
vapour is a feedback, but not a forcing.

Again, I am not getting into this, we covered it plenty in the paper.
When they say "CO2 is still responsible for two-thirds of the additional
warming" (and remember this is an output of their models, not any other
analysis)  what they really mean is that "our models that were programmed
to have CO2 drive the climate show that CO2 drives the climate."
Note that in a three paragraph answer about the effect of water vapor as
a climate feedback, only three words "“ "or reduce it" "“ acknowledge that it
might actually have a negative feedback effect, despite the fact that even the
IPCC includes cloud cover as a negative feedback.  They just don't want to
admit a negative feedback might even exist.

"¢ The
lower atmosphere is cooling, not warming

One study in Science
revealed errors in the way satellite data had been collected and interpreted.
For instance, the orbit of satellites gradually slows, which has to be taken
into account because it affects the time of day at which temperature recording
are taken. This problem was always recognised, but the corrections were given
the wrong sign (negative instead positive and vice versa).

A second study, also
in Science, looked at the weather balloon data. Measurements of the air
temperature during the day can be skewed if the instruments are heated by
sunlight. Over the years the makers of weather balloons had come up with better
methods of preventing or correcting for this effect, but because no one had
taken these improvements into account, the more accurate measurements appeared
to show daytime temperatures getting cooler.

The corrected temperature records show that
tropospheric temperatures are indeed rising at roughly the same rate as surface
temperatures. Or, as a 2006 report by the US Climate Change Science Program (pdf) puts
it: "For recent decades, all current atmospheric data sets now show
global-average warming that is similar to the surface warming." This one
appears settled.

There is still some ambiguity in the tropics,
where most measurements show the surface warming faster than the upper
troposphere, whereas the models predict faster warming of the atmosphere.
However, this is a minor discrepancy compared with cooling of the entire
troposphere and could just be due to the errors of margin inherent in both the
observations and the models.

First, observe absolutely ruthless efforts to apply corrections and
adjustments to any measurement that does not fit their theory, while blithely
accepting the surface temperature measurements that we showed can be really
unreliable.  Given the choice of focusing on managing satellite
temperatures up or surface temperature down, you can see which they
chose.   Second, note that this is another narrow one study
conclusion.  AGW supporters frequently cite single studies (conducted by
AGW supporters) that overturn skeptics arguments as having "settled" the
issue.  There are still many reasons to think that troposphere temperature
increases are less than surface increases.  Finally, even temperature
increases that were the same between the surface and the troposphere would be a
real problem for AGW theory.  The authors here act like this
surface-troposphere issue is a minor deal, but in fact if AGW theory is right,
the troposphere has to warm more, because that is where the extra heat
is being absorbed.  This is not at all settled. 

"¢ Antarctica
is getting cooler, not warmer, disproving global warming

It is clear that the Antarctic Peninsula, which juts
out from the mainland of Antarctica towards South America, has warmed
significantly. The continent's interior was thought to have warmed too, but in
2002 a new analysis of
records from 1966 to 2000 concluded that it has cooled overall"¦.

Climate models do not predict an evenly spread
warming of the whole planet: changes in wind patterns and ocean currents can
change the distribution of heat, leading to some parts warming much faster than
average, while others cool at first.

Agreed

"¢ The
oceans are cooling

Now the authors of the 2006 study have submitted a
correction (pdf format). It turns out that a fault in the software on some
of the floats led to some temperature measurements being associated with the
wrong depth.

Meanwhile, work by other teams suggests that the
past warmth of the oceans has been overestimated. The problem was due to
expendable sensors that are thrown overboard and take measurements as they
sink.

I never had heard the claim that the oceans were cooling, so it does not
surprise me that they are not.  However, it is again interesting the
amount of due diligence that AGW supporter put in to the correction of any
temperature measurement the might refute global warming, while blithely
accepting the atrocious condition and biases in ground-based temperature
measurement because, well, because these instruments are telling the story they
want to hear.

"¢ The
cooling after 1940 shows CO₂ does not cause warming

The mid-century cooling appears to have been
largely due to a high concentration of sulphate aerosols in the atmosphere,
emitted by industrial activities and volcanic
eruptions. Sulphate aerosols have a cooling effect on the climate because
they scatter light from the Sun, reflecting its
energy back out into space.

The rise in sulphate aerosols was largely due to
the increase in industrial activities at the end of the second world war. In
addition, the large eruption of Mount Agung in 1963 produced aerosols which cooled the
lower atmosphere by about 0.5°C, while solar activity levelled off after
increasing at the beginning of the century

I think I was pretty fair in discussing the aerosol cooling hypothesis in
this paper, though many would disagree with the above statement's certainty.

Climate models that take into account only
natural factors, such as solar activity and volcanic eruptions, do not
reproduce 20th century temperatures very well. If, however, the models include
human emissions, including greenhouse gases and aerosols, they accurately reproduce
the 1940 to 1970 dip in temperatures.

I hope readers who have made it this far can supply the refutation of this
point:  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  Climate models initially matched
history poorly.  Today they match well because they have been tweaked and
adjusted and forced to match.  They match because they are programmed to
match.  And, as we discussed, they match only because they make
ridiculously low assumptions for natural forcings, and assume all natural
forcings causing temperatures to rise in the first half of the century
magically reversed in 1950, though there is no good evidence for it. 

"¢ It
was warmer during the Medieval period, with vineyards in England

In the southern hemisphere, the picture is even
more mixed, with evidence of both warm and cool periods around this time. The
Medieval Warm Period may have been partly a regional phenomenon, with the
extremes reflecting a redistribution of heat around the planet rather than a
big overall rise in the average global temperature.

What is clear, both from the temperature
reconstructions and from independent evidence "“ such as the extent of the
recent melting of mountain glaciers "“ is that the planet has been warmer in the
past few decades than at any time during the medieval period. In fact, the
world may not have been so warm for 6000 or even 125,000 years (see Climate myths: It has been warmer in the past,
what's the big deal?).

What really matters, though, is not how warm it
is now, but how warm it is going to get in the future. Even the temperature
reconstructions that show the greatest variations in the past 1000 years suggest
up until the 1980s, average temperature changes remained within a narrow band
spanning 1ºC at most. Now we are climbing out of that band, and the latest IPCC report (pdf format) predicts a further rise of
0.5ºC by 2030 and a whopping 6.4ºC by 2100 in the worst case scenario.

We have covered this pretty well in this paper, so again I won't go back
into it, except to highlight a couple of things we can learn from this
statement.  First, note the hubris again "“ it is warmer today than in the
last 125,000 years.  I sure wish there was a way to bet on this "“ I would
have only a one in 125,000 chance of being wrong in betting against this
statement.  Second, note the use of the worst case scenarios.  For
2100, we don't get the best case or even the average case, we get the worst
case.  Can you name another branch of science where people do this?
Can you imagine, say, a group out to measure the speed of light.  They are
going to get some middle figure with an error band of some range.
Wouldn't you expect them to day that they found the speed of light to be
so-and-so, plus or minus an error of such-and-such size?  If they were
climate scientists, they would instead announce that they have found the speed
of light could be as large as Z, that being the highest possible figure in
their error band.

"¢ We
are simply recovering from the Little Ice Age

Yet while there is some evidence of cold
intervals in parts of the southern hemisphere during this time, they do not appear to
coincide with those in the northern hemisphere. Such findings suggest the Little
Ice Age may have been more of a regional phenomenon than a global one.

Solar radiation was probably lower at times
during this period, especially during a dip in solar activity called the
Maunder minimum around 1700, but models and temperature reconstructions suggest
this would have reduced average global temperatures by 0.4ºC at most.

The larger falls in temperature in Europe and
North American may have been due to changes in atmospheric circulation over the
North Atlantic, or in the Gulf Stream, or both, reducing heat transport from
the tropics (see Climate
change sceptics lose vital argument).

The warming after the so-called Little Ice Age
may reflect both an increase in solar activity and a redistribution of heat
around the planet. In particular, the increase in global temperature in the
first half of the 20^th century may have been largely due to an increase
in solar activity. The continued warming in recent decades, however, cannot be
explained by increases in solar radiation alone

Remember the graphs we showed earlier "“ the arctic proxies look like the
current warming is a straight linear increase from the 1700s to today.  In
fact, in the IPCC spaghetti graph showing all those historic reconstructions,
they all show a natural warming from the 18^th and 19^th
century through the 20^th.  Again, AGW supporters really need to
explain why they are so confident that this natural warming trend stopped in
1945 or so, exactly and coincidently at the exact same moment that man-made
forcings caused the world to continue to warm, coincidently at about the same
rate it was warming naturally earlier in the century.

"¢ Warming
will cause an ice age in Europe

Few scientists think there will
be a rapid shutdown of circulation. Most ocean models predict no more than a
slowdown, probably towards the end of the century. This could slow or even
reverse some of the warming due to human emissions of greenhouse gases, which
might even be welcome in an overheated Europe, but the continent is not likely
to get colder than it is at present.

A slowdown in circulation would
affect many parts of the world by disrupting global rainfall patterns. But
these effects will be insignificant compared with the much greater changes
global warming will cause

I already mentioned that this had been refuted pretty well

"¢ Ice
cores show CO₂ increases lag behind temperature rises, disproving
the link to global warming

It takes about 5000 years for an
ice age to end and, after the initial 800 year lag, temperature and CO₂
concentrations in the atmosphere rise together for a further 4200 years.

What seems to have happened at
the end of the recent ice ages is that some factor "“ most probably orbital
changes "“ caused a rise in temperature. This led to an increase in CO₂,
resulting in further warming that caused more CO₂ to be released and
so on: a positive feedback that amplified a small change in temperature. At
some point, the shrinking of the ice sheets further amplified the warming.

Models suggest that rising
greenhouse gases, including CO₂, explains about 40% of the warming
as the ice ages ended. The figure is uncertain because it depends on how the
extent of ice coverage changed over time, and there is no way to pin this down
precisely.

I was extremely happy to see that they at least tried to
address the issue I raised, ie is it really realistic to have a process
dominated by positive feedback, and if so, why doesn't it run away.  Their
answer:

Finally, if higher temperatures lead
to more CO₂ and more CO₂ leads to higher temperatures,
why doesn't this positive feedback lead to a runaway greenhouse effect? There
are various limiting factors that kick in, the most important being that
infrared radiation emitted by Earth increases exponentially with temperature,
so as long as some infrared can escape from the atmosphere, at some point heat
loss catches up with heat retention.

Which might make sense EXCEPT that they are claiming that
today's temperature and level of CO2 are higher than these historical levels,
so we are already higher than the level where they claim "heat loss catches up
with heat retention."  So either their answer is right, and there is a
strong compensating process which is not built into their models, or they are
wrong and they still need to explain what keeps a positive feedback dominated
process from running away.

"¢ Ice
cores show CO₂ rising as temperatures fell

There are some mismatches though. Besides lags
at the end of ice ages, cores taken from the ice overlying the famous
lake below Vostok in Antarctica seemed to show that about 120,000 years
ago, the temperature plummeted sharply while CO₂ levels remained high
for many thousands of years.

The question is whether this is real or just a
reflection of the problems with working out the age of the trapped air and with
deuterium as a temperature indicator. Many researchers are working on ways to
independently date the air and the ice, and to improve temperature
reconstructions based on relative deuterium content. One involves working out
what is called the deuterium excess by comparing the relative amounts of
deuterium and oxygen-18 in the ice.

The deuterium excess reflects the temperature at
the sea surface where the water that later fell as snow evaporated, rather than
the surface temperature where the snow fell. It helps to reveal whether
variations in the relative deuterium content of the ice are a result of water
coming from a different source region rather than changes in local temperature.

In 2001, researchers used the deuterium excess to correct for some of the
problems with the temperature record of the Vostok ice core. Their results produce
a much closer fit between temperature and CO₂ levels and reduces the
mismatch around 120,000 years ago to a few thousand years.

I did not really raise this issue, as even the most enthusiastic AGW
supporter does not tend to claim that CO2 drives all historic temperature
changes.  However, again, note the pattern "“ any historic data that does
not fit with AGW data typically is scrutinized and "corrected." 
Articles discussing flaws in methodology in gathering such data are quickly published.
Contrast this with the difficulty scientists have in questioning any data that
supports AGW theory.  As we saw earlier, the New Scientist still can't
bring itself to utter the words "the Mann hockey stick was flawed."
Neither could the IPCC, they just sort of dropped it, or buried it in the midst
of 12 others, without even saying why the analysis that was the centerpiece of
their last report was strangely missing.

"¢ Mars
and Pluto are warming too

The Sun's energy output has not increased since
direct measurements began in 1978. If increased solar output really was
responsible, we should be seeing warming on all the planets and their moons,
not just Mars and Pluto.

Our solar system has eight planets, three dwarf
planets and quite a few moons with at least a rudimentary atmosphere, and thus
a climate of sorts. Their climates will be affected by local factors such as
orbital variations, changes in reflectance (albedo) and even volcanic
eruptions, so it would not be surprising if several planets and moons turn out
to be warming at any one time.

I agree we have a lot to learn about this, and nothing at all is
settled.  However, we now have evidence from at least 5 other terrestrial bodies
that are warming at the same time the Earth is warming.  Why do AGW
supporters resist at least investigating further?

"¢ Many
leading scientists question climate change

Climate change sceptics sometimes claim that
many leading scientists question climate change. Well, it all depends on what
you mean by "many" and "leading". For instance, in April
2006, 60 "leading scientists" signed a letter urging Canada's
new prime minister to review his country's commitment to the Kyoto protocol.

This appears to be the biggest recent list of
sceptics. Yet many, if not most, of the 60 signatories are not actively engaged
in studying climate change: some are not scientists at all and at least 15 are
retired.

Compare that with the dozens of statements on
climate change from various scientific organisations around the world
representing tens of thousands of scientists, the consensus position
represented by the IPCC reports and the 11,000 signatories to a petition condemning the Bush administration's
stance on climate science.

I have carefully avoided the game of dueling scientific numbers.  As to
the claim that the skeptic list "are not actively engaged in studying
climate change: some are not scientists at all and at least 15 are retired" I
would be thrilled if AGW supporters held to this standard in making their own
numbers.  But, they manage to abandon this standard by the next paragraph,
when they claim the pro-AGW numbers, like the 11,000, are open to the same
criticism (since there are only 500-600 true climate scientists in the world,
vs. physicist, meteorologists, etc). 

"¢ It's
all a conspiracy

Now that there is a consensus, those whose
findings challenge the orthodoxy are always going have a tougher time
convincing their peers, as in any field of science. For this reason, there will
inevitably be pressure on scientists who challenge the consensus. But findings
or ideas that clash with the idea of human-induced global warming have not been
suppressed or ignored "“ far from it.

Journalists do have an interest in promoting
themselves (and their books), while their employers want to boost their
audience and sell advertising. Publicity helps with all these aims, but you get
far more publicity by challenging the mainstream view than by promoting it.
Which helps explain why so many sections of the media continue to publish or
broadcast the claims of deniers, regardless of their merit.

The notion of a "conspiracy" of course, is a useful straw man, implying
devious villains in the SPECTRE conference room planning the overthrow of the
world.   I won't argue the point again, except to encourage you to
watch the news with a critical eye, and decide for yourself.  However, just
to get you started, ask yourself if these events are signs of healthy, unbiased
science:

· A
group of AGW supporters are trying to get the British government to use force
to block the publication of a skeptical movie (the Global Warming Swindle)

· AGW
supporters in California have included skeptical scientists such as MIT's Dr.
Richard Lindzen as defendants in a law suit, asking that damages be paid by
people and companies whose public speech doesn't conform to AGW theory

· Many
AGW skeptics have been unable to get scientists who have published publicly
funded research to reveal their data and methodology for critique.
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have become a necessary tool of
climate skeptics.

· When
a group began photographing temperature measurement points to document the
shortcomings in historical surface temperature measurements, the NOAA pulled
the locations of its measurement stations off the Internet so that these US
citizens could no longer take pictures of and critique US government
installations.

· Scientists
who question AGW theory are equated by AGW supporters with Holocaust deniers.

"¢ Hurricane
Katrina was caused by global warming

More data is needed settle the issue. Some are
looking to natural records of past
hurricane activity in stalagmites, lake deposits and coral rubble. Others
are re-analysing existing databases. In February 2007, one such re-analysis
concluded that over the past two decades, hurricane intensity has increased
in the Atlantic but not in other parts of the world (pdf format).

Yet another complicating factor is that changes
in climate can also change the paths that tropical cyclones tend to take,
determining whether they remain over oceans or strike land.

What every one agrees on is that over the past
few decades there has been a huge rise in the number of people being killed or
injured by hurricanes, and in damage to infrastructure, and this trend looks
set to continue. The main reason for this, however, is that more and more
people are living and building in hurricane zones.

Most of these three paragraphs is entirely correct "“ there is no evidence
that hurricane numbers or intensity are effected by global warming, and if they
are, whether they are increased or decreased.  However, Hurricane Katrina
was most certainly NOT caused by global warming.  Why can't they just say
that?   It may have been made stronger or weaker.  Its course
may have been altered.   But it was not created by warming.  By
the way, the year after Katrina saw a much smaller than average Atlantic
hurricane season.

"¢ Higher
CO₂ levels will boost plant growth and food production

But it is extremely difficult to generalise
about the overall impact on plant growth. Numerous groups around the world have
been conducting experiments in which plots of land
are supplied with enhanced CO₂, while comparable nearby plots remain
at normal levels.

While these experiments typically have found
initial elevations in the rate of plant growth, these have tended to level off
within a few years. In most cases this has been found to be the result of some
other limiting factor, such as the availability of nitrogen or water.

So the answer is yes, but there is a diminishing return at some point.
Isn't that the same as can be said for the CO2 greenhouse effect?

Predicting the world's overall changes in food
production in response to elevated CO₂ is virtually impossible.
Global production is expected to rise until the increase in local average
temperatures exceeds 3°C, but then start to fall. In tropical and dry regions
increases of just 1 to 2°C are expected to lead to falls in production. In
marginal lands where water is the greatest constraint, which includes much of
the developing world but also regions such as the western US, the losses may
greatly exceed the gains.

Have you noticed yet that things that might hurt the AGW-interventionist's
case always seem "impossible to predict" while the climate is well within our
prediction capabilities?

As for food crops, the factors are more complex.
The crops most widely used in the world for food in many cases depend on
particular combinations of soil type, climate, moisture, weather patterns and
the infrastructure of equipment, experience and distribution systems. If the
climate warms so much that crops no longer thrive in their traditional settings,
farming of some crops may be able to shift to adjacent areas, but others may
not. Rich farmers and countries will be able to adapt more easily than poorer
ones.

I love the rich-poor language.  The leftish New Scientist simply can't
help itself.  But I will accept this statement, and go further:  This
is the reason that aggressive actions to reduce CO2 that reduce economic
growth, particularly in the developing world, may not make sense.  To the
extent that some climate change will occur no matter what, or is already
programmed by our past actions, then a richer world can deal with it better
than a poorer one.

"¢ Polar
bear numbers are increasing

Yet recently there have been
claims that polar bear populations are increasing. So what's going on? There
are thought to be between 20,000 and 25,000 polar bears in 19 population groups
around the Arctic. While polar bear numbers are increasing in two of these
populations, two others are definitely in decline. We don't really know how the
rest of the populations are faring, so the truth is that no one can say for
sure how overall numbers are changing.

Again, I love this.  We can know the global temperature
increase over a century to a tenth of a degree but it is impossible to count
polar bears.

A comprehensive review (pdf) by the US Fish and Wildlife Service
concluded that shrinking sea ice is the primary cause for the decline seen in
these populations, and it recently proposed listing
polar bears as threatened (pdf) under the Endangered Species Act. The
International Conservation Union projects the bears' numbers will drop by 30% by 2050
(pdf) due to continued loss of Arctic sea ice.

Note that down 30% (which coming from an environmental
advocacy ground has got to be considered the most extreme possible estimate) is
not "extinct."  The article fails to address at all the issue that polar
bears have survived through eras when Arctic sea ice melted completely in the
summers.  And there are many reasons for threats to polar bear numbers "“
most experts would say that hunting and threats to habitat are much more
important factors than global temperatures.

The table of contents for the rest of this paper, . 4A Layman's Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is here.  Free pdf of this Climate Skepticism paper is here and print version is sold at cost here

The open comment thread for this paper can be found here.