Coyote Blog

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. 

I am using my blog as the publishing platform for the HTML version of my book "A Skeptics Guide to Anthropogenic (Man-Made) Global Warming."  As a result, the next 10 posts are going to big and fat, like a pig passing through a snake.  Casual readers have my apologies if you find yourself paging through a lot of stuff.

For those interested in my A Skeptical Layman's Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming, I greatly encourage you to download it for free.  However, I do know that some folks have written about a print version.  I have a print version of my global warming book available now at LuLu.com.  It is $16.98 -- that is my cost -- and I warn you that LuLu's shipping options are not very cheap.  I will try to find a less expensive print option, but no one beats LuLu for getting a book set up quickly and easily for print-to-order.

By the way, for those who have sent me emails with comments or errata, thanks for the help! In particular, my BBC/Channel 4 mixup is fixed.

Update:  The HTML version of this global warming paper is here

James Christopher via Kurt Loder via Cattalarchy:

After marveling at Moore's rosy view of the British health care system
in "Sicko," Christopher wrote, "What he hasn't done is lie in a
corridor all night at the Royal Free [Hospital] watching his severed
toe disintegrate in a plastic cup of melted ice.  I have."

The whole review is worth reading.  Many folks seem to think Michael Moore is brilliant until he makes a film about something with which they are actually familiar.  Which, come to think of it, encapsulates my entire view of the media, not just Michael Moore, as well.  Nothing will reduce your confidence in the media more than reading an article on a topic about which you have intimate knowledge.

Let me try something out on readers.  It strikes me that we are in the midst of what we may look back on as one of the great global economic booms of all time.  Here's my logic:  In the US, let's say that on average our labor is operating with a management and technology factor of "10." As management practices advance, and manufacturing and support technologies are developed, we might move this up to "11" [insert Spinal Tap joke].  We then enjoy the productivity upgrade of going from 10 to 11.  However, as the world invests in places like China and India, we see labor that has plugged along at "1" get brought up quickly towards "10."  What a huge change!  Two billion people with exponentially rising labor productivity -- what an enormous increase in wealth!

I think too many people look at the growth of China through the lens of low labor costs, and assume that as the wages in China begin to rise, the boom will be over.  But the source of wealth creation in China is not taking advantage of low wages, it is raising productivity.  The boom will continue as long as productivity increases by leaps and bounds; rising wages are just a sign that Chinese workers are getting a share of this productivity increase.

One of the most fundamental premises of economics is that in a free society, an exchange or transaction only takes place when it benefits both the parties.  Unfortunately, given how simple this axiom is and how easy it is to prove, it is either not accepted or not understood by a huge number of Americans.  Thus we get any number of variations of the zero-sum wealth fallacy, and we get this, from Overlawyered:

A reader writes: "Am I wrong to believe that businesses and
consumers are natural enemies in that their economic interests are
diametrically opposed?"

Yes, you're wrong. Transactions don't occur unless both parties are
better off. Businesses thus only profit if they can create consumer
surplus"”the ability to sell a product at a price that is less than what
a consumer values the good or service. Businesses' interests are thus
aligned with consumers who seek consumer surplus. Businesses more often
prosper by creating satisfied consumers who become repeat customers who
promote the business's reputation rather than trying to extract every
last ounce of wealth from them in a single transaction. This is why
brand names and advertising are so important, because they are market
signals of long-term commitment to customer satisfaction. It's not
profitable to invest in creating a brand name if one intends on having
a bad reputation. (Note the key word "intends" there; no doubt one can
intend to have good customer service and fail to achieve it, and I'm
looking at you, Comcast.) And one will note that businesses that tend
not to have repeat customers or rely on word of mouth are more likely
businesses that have reputations of indifference about customer
satisfaction: tourist traps, traveling carnivals, etc.

A while back a made a purchase of a number of modular cabins for one of the campgrounds we operate.  After the delivery, the sales person called me to thank me for my business.  My reaction was "Thank me?  I should be thanking you."  The cabins are a huge boost to my business -- already I am getting great customer feedback -- and the modular technology saved me a ton of money on construction.  See?  Both the buyer and the seller were thrilled, because we were both better off.

I am releasing version 1.0 of my Skeptical Layman's Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming.  You may download the pdf (about 2.7 mb) from the link above or by clicking on the cover photo below.  In the next few days, I will also be posting an online HTML version as well as offering a printed version at cost.

Update:  The HTML version is here, and the book can be purchased at cost through this link

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.

An outline of the paper is as follows:

Forward: What Are My Goals For This Paper

Chapter
1: Management Summary

Chapter
2: Is It OK to be a Skeptic?

Charges
of Bias

The
Climate Trojan Horse

The
Need to Exaggerate

Chapter
3: The Basics of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) Theory

Chapter
4: The historical evidence

The
long view (650,000 years)

The medium view (1000 years)

The
short view (100 years)

Sulfates,
Aerosols, and Dimming

The
Troposphere Dilemma and Urban heat islands

Using
Computer Models to Explain the Past

Chapter
5: The computer models and predicting
the future

The
Dangers in Modeling Complex Systems

Do
Model Outputs Constitute Scientific Proof?

Econometrics and CO2 Forecasts

Climate
Sensitivity and the Role of Positive Feedbacks

Climate
Models had to be aggressively tweaked to match history

Chapter
6: Alternate explanations and models

Solar
Irradiance

Cosmic
Rays

Man's
Land Use

Chapter
7: The effects of global warming

Why
only bad stuff?

Ice
melting / ocean rising

Hurricanes
& Tornados

Temperature
Extremes

Extinction
and Disease

Collapse
of the Gulf Stream and Freezing of Europe

Non-warming
Effects of CO2

Chapter
8:  Kyoto and Policy Alternatives

Kyoto

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

Chapter
9: Rebuttals by AGW Supporters

Please feel free to download and share.  If you find errors, omissions, mistakes, gaps or anything else you would like to comment on, please email me at the address on the cover.  In particular, I have tried to be careful with copyrighted material, but if I have used any of your material without your consent, let me know ASAP and I will remove it.

. 68

This is so wildly out of character for me that I have a hard time believing I am posting on it, but I have come to like many of the more casual shirts made by Robert Talbott.  He also seems to have a lot of nice dress shirts and ties, but since I don't wear suits and ties any more, I do not pay them much attention.

Anyway, when we were on the Monterrey peninsula last week, my wife and I found the Robert Talbott outlet in Carmel Valley Village (inland of Carmel).  Most all the $250 shirts were $49 and the ties seemed similarly discounted.  Cool.  Also, they have a large selection of fabrics in the back that you can get shirts custom made.   I don't care for wine much, but my wife is also a fan of his Chardonnay, which he makes a few blocks away.

By the way, here are a couple of Monterrey pix:

Previously, I posted how my book BMOC foresaw a new business model in giving product placements to the most popular high school kids as opinion leaders who would drive adoption by their fellow teens.

This week, TJIC points out that the New York Times is starting to sniff around another business model in the book, that of fountain coin harvesting.  They are starting to see the market:

In all these babbling places, the story is the same: Coins pile up, Mr.
Mendez removes them and people's fascination with tossing pocket change
into water continues, unexplained"¦

But miss the real business model (from the book):

On
the basis of this market research and his quirky insight, Preston Marsh founded
3Coins, Inc, and began an intensive six month research and development
program. He hired engineers from several
hot tub and spa companies that had developed the modular spa, a design where
all the necessary pumps and plumbing were integrated with the tub into a single
portable unit. His designers worked long
weeks coming up with three modular fountain designs, driving down the estimated
manufacturing cost to just $350 per unit. 

Next,
Preston Marsh took these fountain designs to mall owners, architects, building
managers, landscapers and anyone who designed or owned public spaces. In every case, the deal was the same: Preston Marsh would give the client one or
more free fountains to adorn their public spaces, and would even provide the
labor to clean and treat the fountains once a week. In return, Preston Marsh literally "kept the
change". Preston Marsh paid local
entrepreneurs 25% of the change drop to clean the fountains and empty and
deposit the change. The rest was pure
profit.

The
resulting economics were startling. For
each installation, Preston Marsh had up-front investments of about $750,
including the $350 tub plus delivery and installation. In return, Preston Marsh gained about $50 a
week in revenue, or $37.50 after the servicing agent took his 25%. Over a year, the fountain would produce
$1,950 in revenue, with virtually no expenses or overhead. 

After
five years, 3Coins had nearly 10,000 fountains in place, generating almost $20
million in annual revenue, over half of which was profit. And Preston Marsh owned 100% of the company.

You can still buy BMOC at Amazon, which has had a bit of a sales resurgence of late after a couple of press mentions.   Servers are standing by.

Previously, I posted how my book BMOC foresaw a new business model in giving product placements to the most popular high school kids as opinion leaders who would drive adoption by their fellow teens.

This week, TJIC points out that the New York Times is starting to sniff around another business model in the book, that of fountain coin harvesting.  They are starting to see the market:

In all these babbling places, the story is the same: Coins pile up, Mr.
Mendez removes them and people's fascination with tossing pocket change
into water continues, unexplained"¦

But miss the real business model (from the book):

On
the basis of this market research and his quirky insight, Preston Marsh founded
3Coins, Inc, and began an intensive six month research and development
program. He hired engineers from several
hot tub and spa companies that had developed the modular spa, a design where
all the necessary pumps and plumbing were integrated with the tub into a single
portable unit. His designers worked long
weeks coming up with three modular fountain designs, driving down the estimated
manufacturing cost to just $350 per unit. 

Next,
Preston Marsh took these fountain designs to mall owners, architects, building
managers, landscapers and anyone who designed or owned public spaces. In every case, the deal was the same: Preston Marsh would give the client one or
more free fountains to adorn their public spaces, and would even provide the
labor to clean and treat the fountains once a week. In return, Preston Marsh literally "kept the
change". Preston Marsh paid local
entrepreneurs 25% of the change drop to clean the fountains and empty and
deposit the change. The rest was pure
profit.

The
resulting economics were startling. For
each installation, Preston Marsh had up-front investments of about $750,
including the $350 tub plus delivery and installation. In return, Preston Marsh gained about $50 a
week in revenue, or $37.50 after the servicing agent took his 25%. Over a year, the fountain would produce
$1,950 in revenue, with virtually no expenses or overhead. 

After
five years, 3Coins had nearly 10,000 fountains in place, generating almost $20
million in annual revenue, over half of which was profit. And Preston Marsh owned 100% of the company.

You can still buy BMOC at Amazon, which has had a bit of a sales resurgence of late after a couple of press mentions.   Servers are standing by.

From a WSJ online article on the iPone:

Aaron Rheingold, an intern at Universal Music, said his boss sent him
to wait in line. "I got stuck on iPhone detail," he said. "I'm not
getting anything out of this, except maybe a pat on the back and free
lunch." He says his boss postponed his flight to Puerto Rico today to
be back in the office when Mr. Rheingold returns with the goods.

Perhaps I am just a modern, soft, girly-man, oprah-fied manager, but I could not in a million years imagine asking one of my employees to go wait overnight in line for me so I could get an iPhone before my peers.  And that is in a private company where my employees' salary comes out of my pocket.  I would be even less likely to send out an employee whose salary is paid by the shareholders of a publicly-traded company.

A while back, I discussed an effort by Anthony Watts to create a pictorial data base of the US Historical Climate Network, the 1000 or so temperature and weather sensors whose data are used in historical climate numbers, including IPCC and NOAA and GISS global warming data bases. 

Already, this effort has identified numerous egregious installations that call into question the quality of historical temperature measurement.  Note here and here and here and here.  The whole data base is at SurfaceStations.org and my humble contributions are here and here.  Was 2006 the second warmest of all time, or did 2006 have the most hot exhaust blowing on measurement instruments?

Roger Pielke, a climate scientist in Colorado, reports on an odd response by the NOAA to this effort:

Recently, Anthony Watts has established a website [www.surfacestations.org] to record these photographs. He has worked to assure that the photographs are obtained appropriately.

As a result of this effort, NOAA has removed location information
from their website as to where they are located. This information has
been available there for years.

There are a few USHCN stations at people's homes, so in some cases there may be privacy concerns, but most all of the ones I have seen are at public locations, from fire houses to ranger stations to water plants.  Pielke offers up a logical solution for where there are privacy issues:

"over 4 years ago there was a big push in the Cooperative Observer
program to make sure that all 7000+ sites across the country were
photodocumented. All 120 Data Acquisition Programs were equipped with
high quality digital cameras. Most took photos. However, at the higher
levels where they were developing the upload and archive system for the
photos the issue of observer privacy was raised and as best we can tell
the result was that those photos were not archived and certainly are
not available."

This is a very disturbing development, as individuals in NOAA's
leadership have used their authority to prevent the scientific
community and the public access to critical information that is being
used as part of establishing climate and energy policy in the United
States.

The solution to this issue is, of course, straightforward. Either
make the photographs where datasets are being used in research (i.e.
the HCN sites), available, or permit others to take them. Privacy
rules, such as not publishing the names and addresses of the observers,
should be made, however, the photographs themselves, viewing the site,
and views in the four orthogonal directions must be public. Volunteers
who are HCN Cooperative Observers need to either grant this permission
or not volunteer.

If you observe the state of climate science at all, you will know that any measurement (e.g. satellite or radiosonde temperature measurements) that conflict even the slightest with the main story line of anthropogenic global warming are subjected to intense and withering scrutiny.  Even the tiniest source of error or methodological sloppiness in these conflicting data sets cause global warming zealots to throw out the data as flawed.  It is instructive that perhaps the sloppiest data set of all is the surface climate measurement system they use primarily to support their case, and it is one they show absolutely no interest in scrutinizing, or letting anyone else scrutinize.

I am sitting in the airport now about to fly back to Phoenix.  I generally fly America West / US Airways, because they have a hub in Phoenix and doing so maximizes my chance both of getting non-stop flights as well as accumulating a meaningful frequent flier balance with a singe airline.

After way too many round trips, I have the following observation:  I am much more likely to get an elite upgrade returning home than on the outbound leg.   I have seen this effect both flying the hub airline out of Phoenix and previously flying United out of Denver.   Now, as a hub city, Phoenix has a disproportionate number of US Airways elite members, just as Denver has a disproportionate number of United elite members.  So competing with a lot of other elite members for limited upgrade seats is understandable out of Phoenix, but shouldn't it be symmetric coming back?  I have three theories:

• Observer error, though I will say I have a fairly large number of observation points to many different cities from two different hub cities
• I am flying when the Elite's like to fly outbound, but I tend to take unpopular flights back.  Possible.  Most business travelers tend to fly outbound in the morning on the first flight, but they may all come back different times of day depending on their business.  This is one potential asymmetry.
• The airlines give preference on upgrades to through passengers.  I have never heard this, but it might explain it.  Outbound from a hub, many of the people on my flight are on the second flight, having just changed planes.  Going home, towards a hub, everyone is in the same boat as me, on their first leg.  I don't think the airlines differentiate, but this is the only other asymmetry I can come up with.

Today, the price of gasoline at the pump before taxes is about $2.50 a gallon.  The price of milk per gallon is about $3.50 a gallon, and may rise to $5.00 by the fall. 

So I will present you with a heresy:  Gasoline is an absolutely screaming deal.  Having worked a brief stint in the oil industry, it is incredible what has to happen and the investments that are in place to get gas into your car.  Offshore oil platforms, dealing with unstable governments, thousand mile long pipelines, fleets of supertankers, huge complex refineries, and massive distribution networks are required to get gas to your car.  And yet, it's a buck cheaper than milk, which in comparison is nearly trivial to produce.  Sure, the milk needs a little processing and transportation, but compare this to oil, where processing involves reforming the very molecules in the oil to perfect the gas, and where transportation is across distances one to two orders of magnitude greater than for milk.  And don't even get me started on production:  a) cow  b) offshore oil platform in 1000 foot deep water.

It is perhaps even more instructive to see how the government regulates these two commodities.  Oil companies are constantly harassed by government as the world's great Satans, with windfall profits taxes and price gouging regulations, all on an industry that barely makes a 10% profit on sales in the best of times.  Milk, on the other hand, gets huge government subsidies and handouts, including a price support system that is both arcane and incredibly costly.  So Oil:  windfall profits taxes.  Milk, which is pricier but easier to produce: price supports.  Does anyone really want to argue that regulation is a result of real market realities rather than just populist pandering for and against favored and unfavored groups?

Michael Canon has proposed for principles of an anti-universal health care coverage club:

1. Health policy should focus on making health care of ever-increasing quality available to an ever-increasing number of people.
2. To
   achieve "universal coverage" would require either having the government
   provide health insurance to everyone or forcing everyone to buy it.  Government provision is undesirable, because government does a poor job of improving quality or efficiency.  Forcing
   people to get insurance would lead to a worse health-care system for
   everyone, because it would necessitate so much more government
   intervention.
3. In a free country, people should have the right to refuse health insurance.
4. If governments must subsidize those who cannot afford medical care,
   they should be free to experiment with different types of subsidies
   (cash, vouchers, insurance, public clinics & hospitals,
   uncompensated care payments, etc.) and tax exemptions, rather than be
   forced by a policy of "universal coverage" to subsidize people via
   "insurance."

You know I'm in;  after all, I am the one that has said that "universal coverage is as if, in the Great Society public housing programs, everyone in the country, not just the poor, had been required to tear down their current houses and enter monolithic public housing structures."

However, I would have added a fifth principle:  Health care decision-making and tradeoffs amongst cost, quality, and
content of care should belong to the individual, except when an
individual delegates this decision in some way by his own choice (say
by joining a very structured HMO program).

I wrote about the joys of actually shopping for health care under a high-deductible policy here and here.  Michael Canon also has a new post on shopping and HSA's here.

Michael Canon has proposed for principles of an anti-universal health care coverage club:

1. Health policy should focus on making health care of ever-increasing quality available to an ever-increasing number of people.
2. To
   achieve "universal coverage" would require either having the government
   provide health insurance to everyone or forcing everyone to buy it.  Government provision is undesirable, because government does a poor job of improving quality or efficiency.  Forcing
   people to get insurance would lead to a worse health-care system for
   everyone, because it would necessitate so much more government
   intervention.
3. In a free country, people should have the right to refuse health insurance.
4. If governments must subsidize those who cannot afford medical care,
   they should be free to experiment with different types of subsidies
   (cash, vouchers, insurance, public clinics & hospitals,
   uncompensated care payments, etc.) and tax exemptions, rather than be
   forced by a policy of "universal coverage" to subsidize people via
   "insurance."

You know I'm in;  after all, I am the one that has said that "universal coverage is as if, in the Great Society public housing programs, everyone in the country, not just the poor, had been required to tear down their current houses and enter monolithic public housing structures."

However, I would have added a fifth principle:  Health care decision-making and tradeoffs amongst cost, quality, and
content of care should belong to the individual, except when an
individual delegates this decision in some way by his own choice (say
by joining a very structured HMO program).

I wrote about the joys of actually shopping for health care under a high-deductible policy here and here.  Michael Canon also has a new post on shopping and HSA's here.

In a prior post, I asked the left if they were uncomfortable with liberal judges being on the wrong side of free speech in the recent BCRA-related decision.  As equal time, in the spirit of the heinous Fairness Doctrine again raising its ugly head, I will ask the right if they are comfortable with conservative justices being on the wrong side of property rights and government power in Wilkie v. Robbins.

By the way, speaking of the Fairness Doctrine, its instructive that the incumbent political parties consider fairness to mean equal time for all the ... incumbent political parties.  Its interesting that no one in Congress takes the law to mean equal time for Greens or Libertarians or White Supremacists.

I know a number of readers are tired of my writing about climate, so I am instead taking a shot at writing a comprehensive skeptic's argument on Anthropogenic Global Warming.  A free pdf will be available for download next week, with a bound copy available for purchase at manufacturing cost.

In the mean time, Luboš Motl presents one of the core skeptics arguments, that CO2 heat absorption is a diminishing return relationship to concentration, making frequent predictions of runaway climate scenarios a real head-scratcher.

In terms of numbers, we have already completed 40% of the task to
double the CO2 concentration from 0.028% to 0.056% in the atmosphere.
However, these 40% of the task have already realized about 2/3 of the
warming effect attributable to the CO2 doubling. So regardless of the
sign and magnitude of the feedback effects, you can see that physics
predicts that the greenhouse warming between 2007 and 2100 is predicted
to be one half (1/3 over 2/3) of the warming that we have seen between
the beginning of industrialization and this year. For example, if the
greenhouse warming has been 0.6 Celsius degrees, we will see 0.3
Celsius degrees of extra warming before the carbon dioxide
concentration doubles around 2100.

It's just like when you want
your bedroom to be white. You paint it once, twice, thrice. But when
you're painting it for the sixteenth time, you may start to realize
that the improvement after the sixteenth round is no longer that
impressive.

If CO2 is not responsible for all the 0.6C of historic warming (a proposition for which there are good arguments) then future warming is even less.  Read it all for more detail, or look for my paper next week which covers this topic and many, many others in more depth.  There are lots of complications - aerosols, dimming, feedbacks - that are discussed in the paper.

A while back, writing about charges of discrimination by white referees against blacks in NBA foul calls, I said:

My sense is that we make snap decisions about other people based on a
wide range of physical attributes, including height, attractiveness,
clothing, tattoos, piercings as well as visible racial characteristics
(e.g. skin color) and race-related appearance choices (e.g. cornrows).
It would be interesting to see where skin color falls against these
other visible differentiators as a driver of third party decisions
(e.g. whether to call a foul).   My sense is that 60 years ago, skin
color would be factor #1 and all these others would be orders of
magnitude behind.  Today?  I don't know.  While skin color hasn't gone
away as an influencer, it may be falling into what we might call the
"background level", less than or equal to some of these other effects.
It would be interesting, for example, to make the same study on level
of visible tattooing and the effect on foul calls.  My sense is that
this might be of the same order of magnitude today as skin color in
affecting such snap decisions.

I may have been on to something:

Russell says in the last two months he's applied for over 100 jobs. In
almost half of them, he says he was denied because of his tattoos. He
says that's discrimination.

I know that no one seems to really give a crap about due process for accountants nowadays, perhaps an over-swing of the pendulum from the days when no one really cared much about prosecuting white collar crime, but some of the Justice Departments prosecutorial abuses are finally coming back to haunt them.

The Justice Department's case against 16 former KPMG partners for tax
evasion continues to unravel, with prosecutors themselves conceding
late last week that federal Judge Lewis Kaplan has little choice but to
dismiss the charges against most of the defendants.

Judge Kaplan ruled
last year that Justice had violated the defendants' Constitutional
rights by pressuring KPMG not to pay their legal fees. He is now
considering a defense motion to dismiss. Prosecutors continue to
protest the judge's ruling but on Friday they admitted in a court
filing that dismissal is the only remedy for the rights violations. The
more honorable route would have been for prosecutors to acknowledge
their mistakes and dismiss the charges themselves.

The truth is that
this tax shelter case should never have been brought. Both KPMG and its
partners believed the shelters they marketed were legal, and no tax
court had ruled against the shelters before Justice brought its
criminal charges. Then prosecutors used the threat of criminal
indictment against all of KPMG to extort an admission of guilt from the
firm and force it to stop paying the legal bills of individual partners.

David Boaz:

Maybe libertarians should try to describe their philosophy by saying
"libertarians believe in the free speech that liberals used to believe
in, and the economic freedom that conservatives used to believe in."

I found this when I went to Pandora today (one of those applications that makes the Internet so entirely cool and worth all the spam and flame wars).  I found this message:

Hi, it's Tim from Pandora,

I'm sorry to say that
today Pandora, along with most Internet radio sites, is going off the
air in observance of a Day Of Silence. We are doing this to bring to
your attention a disastrous turn of events that threatens the existence
of Pandora and all of internet radio. We need your help.

Ignoring all rationality and responding only to the
lobbying of the RIAA, an arbitration committee in Washington DC has
drastically increased the licensing fees Internet radio sites must pay
to stream songs. Pandora's fees will triple, and are retroactive for
eighteen months! Left unchanged by Congress, every day will be like
today as internet radio sites start shutting down and the music dies.

A bill called the "Internet Radio Equality Act" has already
been introduced in both the Senate (S. 1353) and House of
Representatives (H.R. 2060) to fix the problem and save Internet
radio--and Pandora--from obliteration.

I'd like to ask you to call your Congressional
representatives today and ask them to become co-sponsors of the bill.
It will only take a few minutes and you can find your Congresspersons and their phone numbers by entering your zip code here.

Your opinion matters to your representatives - so please take just a minute to call.

Visit www.savenetradio.org to continue following the fight to Save Internet Radio.

As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support.

 

  -Tim Westergren
  (Pandora founder)

Jane Galt takes on some of the more common anti-immigration talking points.  Just for example:

5. There were ethnic newspapers, but nothing like today's ethnic media.

This is just ridiculous. Immigrants in 1900 could get all the
entertainment that was then available in their own language; for
example, by 1918, New York City boasted 20 Yiddish theaters.
The idea that Latin American immigrants are somehow uniquely unable to
assimilate because they can now watch soap operas and the Venezuelan
version of Eurovision in their very own language seems to me
self-evidently absurd; an immigrant at home watching television in
Spanish is immersed in her own culture no more thoroughly than was the
typical resident of an ethnic neighbourhood who shopped, worked, went
to services, and partied entirely with their compatriots.

I am working on some research right now -- immigration opponents are claiming that "yes, immigration may have been OK in the past, but its different now."  I am in the process of putting together anti-immigration quotes from the late 19th and early 20th century that cover all of the same ground -- they're lazy, they breed too fast, they have disease, they don't integrate, they have divided loyalties -- but aimed at Irish and Italians.

On the positive side, the Supreme Court has struck down portions of the BCRA, also known as McCain-Feingold:

The Court concluded that Wisconsin Right to Life's ads, which urged
people to contact their senators (including one who was up for
re-election) about the confirmation of judicial nominees, did not
constitute either. The majority said "a court should find that an ad is
the functional equivalent of express advocacy only if the ad is
susceptible of no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to
vote for or against a specific candidate." To put it another way,
BCRA's pre-election blackout cannot be constitutionally applied to a
spot that reasonably can be viewed as an issue ad, which means interest
groups are once again free to engage in public policy debates on the
air, no matter what time of year it is.

By the way, does anyone on the left feel at all worried that the four liberal judges were on the "limit speech" side of this issue?

But at the same time, the Supreme Court upheld speech limitations against High School students based on the content of the speech.  The rights of non-adults is a complicated issue, but precedent has been set that student speech is generally protected unless it is significantly disruptive of the school's functioning.  Except, it appears, when it is related to drugs.  This is part of a disturbing trend where an increasing number of topics, from "hate" speech to drug legalization speech are considered to be exceptions to the First Amendment.  However, almost everyone on the court seemed to have a different view on this, so it may be hard to generalize here.  Even the concurring opinions ranged the gamut from "this is narrowly aimed only at speech about narcotics" to "there is no free speech right in schools for minors."

And, speaking of hate speech, out in wacky Oakland, the world leader in Ebonics studies,

Marriage is the foundation of the natural family and sustains family
values. That sentence is inflammatory, perhaps even a hate crime.

At least it is in Oakland, Calif. That city's government says those
words, italicized here, constitute something akin to hate speech and
can be proscribed from the government's open e-mail system and employee
bulletin board. ...

Some African American Christian women working for Oakland's
government organized the Good News Employee Association (GNEA), which
they announced with a flier describing their group as "a forum for
people of Faith to express their views on the contemporary issues of
the day. With respect for the Natural Family, Marriage and Family
Values."

The flier was distributed after other employees' groups, including
those advocating gay rights, had advertised their political views and
activities on the city's e-mail system and bulletin board. When the
GNEA asked for equal opportunity to communicate by that system and that
board, it was denied. Furthermore, the flier they posted was taken down
and destroyed by city officials, who declared it "homophobic" and
disruptive.

The city government said the flier was "determined" to promote
harassment based on sexual orientation. The city warned that the flier
and communications like it could result in disciplinary action "up to
and including termination."

We might as well just repeal the First Amendment now and save time if we continue to believe that the government should ban any speech that offends someone.

Oh, and while we were talking about kids and drugs, check out this awesome rant by Mayor Cory Booker of Newark.

He wants to reserve prison cells for those who do violence and
divert the nonviolent drug offenders into treatment programs and
halfway houses.

He wants to change the New Jersey laws that
bar many ex-cons from getting a driver's license. He wants a black kid
from Newark who sells marijuana to clear his record as easily as the
white kid from the suburbs who buys it.

He wants to stop banning ex-cons from such a long list of jobs, including warehouse jobs at the nearby airport.

The scale of the problem is staggering: About 1,500 convicts are
released from state prison to Newark each year, and 1,000 of them will
likely be arrested again within three years -- mostly for drug crimes.

"The drug war is causing crime," Booker says. "It is just chewing up young black men. And it's killing Newark."

Good, its about time.  Not to be misunderstood, I would kick my kid's asses from here to the moon if I found them doing hard drugs.  But I want the responsibility to mold and repair their behavior to be mine, an option that is cut off if they get thrown in jail (which they probably wouldn't, since my kids are well off and white).  It is fine and fairly rational that we have determined as a society that kids can mess up their life doing drugs.  It is insane -- totally insane -- that our response is that we will respond by ... messing their life up even worse by throwing them in jail.

Though it is nominally called an "energy" bill, the Senate just passed the largest farm-subsidy bill in history:

The legislation would require ethanol production for motor fuels to
grow to at least 36 billion gallons a year by 2022, a sevenfold
increase over the amount of ethanol processed last year. It also calls
for boosting auto fuel economy to a fleet average of 35 miles per
gallon by 2020, a 40 percent increase over current requirements for
cars, SUVs, vans and pickup trucks.

The evidence is absolutely unequivocal that corn-based ethanol doesn't reduce net energy use, since it takes at least as much energy to grow and produce as it provides.  It is even worse as environmental policy, since it almost certainly increases total pollution and CO2 production, particularly as ethanol is produced with Midwestern coal-powered electricity.   In addition, it is going to cause marginal lands and open space to be brought into corn production, reversing a 70-year trend in the US towards increases in wilderness and forested land.  It is going to increase fuel costs to no real purpose.  This is dumb, dumb, dumb.  So stupid that I can't even get the energy to criticize the new CAFE standards.  If they really wanted to meet their goals, a carbon tax would have been cheaper and more effective, but that would have taken political guts.