From WUWT, a particularly good summary of the gaping holes in Anthropogenic Global Warming theory (hereinafter, "AGW"):
The 22 Inconvenient Truths
1. The Mean Global Temperature has been stable since 1997, despite a continuous increase of the CO2 content of the air: how could one say that the increase of the CO2 content of the air is the cause of the increase of the temperature? (discussion: p. 4)
2. 57% of the cumulative anthropic emissions since the beginning of the Industrial revolution have been emitted since 1997, but the temperature has been stable. How to uphold that anthropic CO2 emissions (or anthropic cumulative emissions) cause an increase of the Mean Global Temperature?
[Note 1: since 1880 the only one period where Global Mean Temperature and CO2 content of the air increased simultaneously has been 1978-1997. From 1910 to 1940, the Global Mean Temperature increased at about the same rate as over 1978-1997, while CO2 anthropic emissions were almost negligible. Over 1950-1978 while CO2 anthropic emissions increased rapidly the Global Mean Temperature dropped. From Vostok and other ice cores we know that it’s the increase of the temperature that drives the subsequent increase of the CO2 content of the air, thanks to ocean out-gassing, and not the opposite. The same process is still at work nowadays] (discussion: p. 7)
3. The amount of CO2 of the air from anthropic emissions is today no more than 6% of the total CO2 in the air (as shown by the isotopic ratios 13C/12C) instead of the 25% to 30% said by IPCC. (discussion: p. 9)
4. The lifetime of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere is about 5 years instead of the 100 years said by IPCC. (discussion: p. 10)
5. The changes of the Mean Global Temperature are more or less sinusoidal with a well defined 60 year period. We are at a maximum of the sinusoid(s) and hence the next years should be cooler as has been observed after 1950. (discussion: p. 12)
6. The absorption of the radiation from the surface by the CO2 of the air is nearly saturated. Measuring with a spectrometer what is left from the radiation of a broadband infrared source (say a black body heated at 1000°C) after crossing the equivalent of some tens or hundreds of meters of the air, shows that the main CO2 bands (4.3 µm and 15 µm) have been replaced by the emission spectrum of the CO2 which is radiated at the temperature of the trace-gas. (discussion: p. 14)
7. In some geological periods the CO2 content of the air has been up to 20 times today’s content, and there has been no runaway temperature increase! Why would our CO2 emissions have a cataclysmic impact? The laws of Nature are the same whatever the place and the time. (discussion: p. 17)
8. The sea level is increasing by about 1.3 mm/year according to the data of the tide-gauges (after correction of the emergence or subsidence of the rock to which the tide gauge is attached, nowadays precisely known thanks to high precision GPS instrumentation); no acceleration has been observed during the last decades; the raw measurements at Brest since 1846 and at Marseille since the 1880s are slightly less than 1.3 mm/year. (discussion: p. 18)
9. The “hot spot” in the inter-tropical high troposphere is, according to all “models” and to the IPCC reports, the indubitable proof of the water vapour feedback amplification of the warming: it has not been observed and does not exist. (discussion: p. 20)
10. The water vapour content of the air has been roughly constant since more than 50 years but the humidity of the upper layers of the troposphere has been decreasing: the IPCC foretold the opposite to assert its “positive water vapour feedback” with increasing CO2. The observed “feedback” is negative. (discussion: p.22)
11. The maximum surface of the Antarctic ice-pack has been increasing every year since we have satellite observations. (discussion: p. 24)
12. The sum of the surfaces of the Arctic and Antarctic icepacks is about constant, their trends are phase-opposite; hence their total albedo is about constant. (discussion: p. 25)
13. The measurements from the 3000 oceanic ARGO buoys since 2003 may suggest a slight decrease of the oceanic heat content between the surface and a depth 700 m with very significant regional differences. (discussion: p. 27)
14. The observed outgoing longwave emission (or thermal infrared) of the globe is increasing, contrary to what models say on a would-be “radiative imbalance”; the “blanket” effect of CO2 or CH4 “greenhouse gases” is not seen. (discussion:p. 29)
15. The Stefan Boltzmann formula does not apply to gases, as they are neither black bodies, nor grey bodies: why does the IPCC community use it for gases ? (discussion: p. 30)
16. The trace gases absorb the radiation of the surface and radiate at the temperature of the air which is, at some height, most of the time slightly lower that of the surface. The trace-gases cannot “heat the surface“, according to the second principle of thermodynamics which prohibits heat transfer from a cooler body to a warmer body. (discussion: p. 32)
17. The temperatures have always driven the CO2 content of the air, never the reverse. Nowadays the net increment of the CO2 content of the air follows very closely the inter-tropical temperature anomaly. (discussion: p. 33)
18. The CLOUD project at the European Center for Nuclear Research is probing the Svensmark-Shaviv hypothesis on the role of cosmic rays modulated by the solar magnetic field on the low cloud coverage; the first and encouraging results have been published in Nature. (discussion: p. 36)
19. Numerical “Climate models” are not consistent regarding cloud coverage which is the main driver of the surface temperatures. Project Earthshine (Earthshine is the ghostly glow of the dark side of the Moon) has been measuring changes of the terrestrial albedo in relation to cloud coverage data; according to cloud coverage data available since 1983, the albedo of the Earth has decreased from 1984 to 1998, then increased up to 2004 in sync with the Mean Global Temperature. (discussion: p. 37)
20. The forecasts of the “climate models” are diverging more and more from the observations. A model is not a scientific proof of a fact and if proven false by observations (or falsified) it must be discarded, or audited and corrected. We are still waiting for the IPCC models to be discarded or revised; but alas IPCC uses the models financed by the taxpayers both to “prove” attributions to greenhouse gas and to support forecasts of doom. (discussion: p. 40)
21. As said by IPCC in its TAR (2001) “we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.” Has this state of affairs changed since 2001? Surely not for scientific reasons. (discussion: p. 43)
22. Last but not least the IPCC is neither a scientific organization nor an independent organization: the summary for policy makers, the only part of the report read by international organizations, politicians and media is written under the very close supervision of the representative of the countries and of the non-governmental pressure groups.
The governing body of the IPCC is made of a minority of scientists almost all of them promoters of the environmentalist ideology, and a majority of state representatives and of non-governmental green organizations. (discussion: p. 46)
Do read the entire post along with the explanatory appendix. This is as good a summary as I've seen in some time. The first two facts noted by the author are really the meat of it all. The foundational theory of AGW is that, as more CO2 is pumped into our atmosphere, temperatures will rise proportionately. There is no support for this theory in the historical record predating modern temperature records, nor does the theory find any empirical support in the modern records, given that we have been pumping large amounts of CO2 into the air since 1997 with NO corresponding rise in temperature.
I am always amazed when the left, most of whom seem to embrace the AGW theory, accuse the right of being "anti-science" or "science deniers." It stands reality on its head. In a sane world, the gaping holes in AGW theory would lead scientists to discard the theory and start anew. The reality is that, as more facts show the fatal flaws with AGW theory, the left just becomes more strident in trying to shut down debate and in their claims that "the science is settled."
The truth is that there is much more than science at stake for the AGW crowd. For a very significant number of players, there are hundreds of billions of dollars at play in this scam, whether from carbon credits, renewable energy scams, cushy jobs at foundations, or even outright transfers of wealth from wealthy countries to third world nations (all to be administered by the UN, of course). And there seem to be more than a few watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) pushing this AGW canard for whom the thought of saving Gaia comes with an underlying motivation to do away with capitalism and democracy. Then there are the scientists riding the gravy train of grants and recognition who have, in some cases, falsified or presented deeply misleading research, as well as attempted to severely restrict the voices of any who would raise questions about AGW. And lastly, there are the useful idiots at the bottom who unthinkingly embrace AGW and go to bed thinking themselves not only morally superior for doing so, but as they are constantly told by AGW cheerleaders, much smarter than those on the right who object to AGW on the basis of unreliable and contrary data.
No area of science is more bastardized than "climate science." I have no problems following science experiments wherever they might lead, so long as the scientific method is practiced. But all too often in climate science, there is a complete failure in this regards. It is criminal the number of climate scientists who fail to adhere to the scientific method, trying to claim peer review as the gold standard of reliability rather than a complete posting of their experiment in such detail as to allow for reproduction and verification by other scientists. Even as I write this, the EPA is preparing to issue regulations that will cost our economy tens of billions of dollars, and which regulations are based on "secret science" that has never been made public so as to subject it to reproduction or verification. It is a mockery to call it "science." It is faith being sold as science.
Yet another significant concern I have is with the numerous unexplained changes to the historical record of our temperature data, something that Jim Hansen, then at NASA, started doing in the late 90's and which continues to this day. As it stands, I have no faith whatsoever in the historical temperature record relied upon by the UN IPCC. Though, it should be noted, those records only begin about the 1880's, with the first relatively reliable efforts to collect data from thermometers.
This is not an academic debate about AGW. People's lives across the world are being effected by this scam. Hundreds of billions of dollars that could be used productively are being wasted in this fraud. Economies are being strangled by regulations designed to drive out a trace gas necessary for life on this planet. It is a travesty and, indeed, criminal. A very large number of people need to be jailed over this fraud.
According to EU data, Germany’s average residential electricity rate is 29.8 cents per kilowatt hour. This is approximately double the 14.2 cents and 15.9 cents per kWh paid by residents of Germany’s neighbors Poland and France, respectively, and almost two and a half times the U.S. average of 12 cents per kWh. Germany’s industrial electricity rate of 16 cents per kWh is also much higher than France’s 9.6 cents or Poland’s 8.3 cents. The average German per capita electricity consumption is 0.8 kilowatts. At a composite rate of 24 cents per kWh, this works out to a yearly bill of $1,700 per person, experienced either directly in utility bills or indirectly through increased costs of goods and services. The median household income in Germany is $33,000, so if we assume an average of two people per household, the electricity cost would amount to more than 10 percent of available income. And that is for the median-income household. The amount of electricity that people need does not scale in proportion to their paychecks. For the rich, $1,700 per year in electric bills might be a pittance, or at most a nuisance. But for the poor who are just scraping by, such a burden is simply brutal.
While here at home, we are but a half step behind Germany:
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is preparing to finalize its Clean Power Plan, which aims to reduce power plant carbon dioxide emissions by 30% from 2005 levels over the next 15 years.
Looking at some of the best-case scenarios for CO2 reductions, the plan could potentially cut roughly 300 million tons of CO2 annually.
Because global man-made CO2 emissions reach roughly 30 billion tons annually, it’s estimated that the EPA plan could result in a possible 1% reduction in annual man-made CO2.
Overall, man-made CO2 accounts for only 4% of total atmospheric CO2. So the true atmospheric reduction in CO2 from the EPA plan would be approximately 0.04%.
The cost for this plan is estimated at $50 billion annually, with the loss of roughly 15,000 U.S. jobs each year. Increases in household utility bills could reach $100 billion annually.
Although the warmies fought off total devastation from Climategate, at least some, including notably the MET and CRU, have gotten the message that they need to be practicing real science - not political science - if they value their future. You will recall that, in January, the MET and the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of beleaguered East Anglia Univ. released their latest temperature data showing that there had been no warming for the past 15 years. Now the MET and CRU have announced:
Given the importance of the CRUTEM land temperature analysis for monitoring climate change (e.g. Trenberth et al. 2007), our preference is that the underlying station data, and software to produce the gridded data, be made openly available. This will enhance transparency, and also allow more rapid identification of possible errors or improvements that might be necessary (see e.g. the earlier discussion of homogeneity adjustments in the SH). . . .
As a result of these efforts, we are able to make the station data for all the series in the CRUTEM4 network freely available, together with software to produce the gridded data (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/ and http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/).
Hallelujah. My biggest beef with the warmies has always been that their data, having never gone through the "scientific method," had not an ounce of trustworthiness. What MET and CRU are doing is how science in our modern era should be practiced. My hats off to them. This is a huge step forward for climate science. My faith in the MET / CRU data has taken a giant leap forward. I now await a similar act from NASA'a odious uber-warmie, Jim Hansen. I shall begin holding my breath in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .
Well this is interesting. It turns out that pushing CO2 into our atmosphere could well be the key to feeding our growing population.
A recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Botany by Fereres, Orgaz, and Gonzalez-Dugo looks at the effect of CO2 on food production in a world increasing in population even as water is becoming increasingly scarce. So what major efficiencies need to be introduced to allow food production to match population growth in this scenario?
The authors posit that our world has become much more efficient in food production in large measure because of the release of carbon dioxide - i.e., plant food - into the air since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
It has significantly increased the leaf photosynthetic rates of our crops, while it has significantly reduced their transpiration rates, which has led to significant increases in leaf water use efficiency, or the amount of biomass produced per unit of water transpired in the process.
The experiments conducted by Fereres, Orgaz and Dugo ultimately verified that CO2 has a significant positive effect on crop production, while showing that theories of negative effects on world crop production from CO2 did not manifest in "real world" tests.
So what does this mean?
Mankind's CO2 emissions may ultimately prove a godsend to humanity, as they just might make the difference between our being able to adequately [feed] . . . our expanding population in the very near future or our failing to do so in a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.
Apparently, we need more coal plants for the good of the environment. Al Gore's head set to explode in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .
Actually, I have been waiting for years for some scientists to confirm this hypothesis, as there had been some limited research a few years ago that showed higher agricultural yields in the presence of increased CO2 concentrations. In a world without the politicized science of Anthropogenic Global Warming, this study would be the impetus for a great deal more research to disprove or prove and extend the findings of the above study. But what I suspect will happen is that this study will be at best ignored, or at worst suppressed, and that we will learn of a conspiracy to delegitimize this study in a decade when the Climategate 7.0 e-mails are released.
I. How does the global warming canard stay alive? It does so with wholly biased reporting and cynical manipulation of public opinon through programming such as:
III. At Watts Up With That, a scientist attempts to reverse engineer one of the computer models relied upon to claim that our climate will turn into a man-made inferno but a century or so into the future. He finds it simplistic indeed. But why is he having to reverse engineer a computer model being relied upon to drive public policy you might ask? Because, even a year on from Climategate, none of the entities involved in pushing climate change have taken to releasing their facts, figures, math and programming that would allow the world to actually check them. The scientific method is looked upon as a distraction to these people, who brook no interference with their narrative. This really is criminal. As I have said before, government employees who do this should be fired. Academics who do it as part of studies undertaken on the public dime should be excluded by law from receiving any more public funding.
IV. The latest apocalyptic warmie nonsense: "The Oceans Are Acidifying!!! We are D-O-O-M-E-D." David Middleton investigates, asking three questions: One, is atmospheric CO2 acidifying the oceans? Two, is there any evidence that reefs and other marine calcifers have been damaged by CO2-driven ocean acidification and/or global warming? And three, does the geological record support the oceanic acidification hypothesis? Answers: No, no and no.
V. It is always worthwhile to listen when MIT's Dr. Richard Lindzen speaks, and he does so in this instance opining that the AGW theory is, in the paraphrase of Q&O, driven by money, politics and dubious science:
The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well. . . .
Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th Century these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat.
For small changes in climate associated with tenths of a degree, there is no need for any external cause. The earth is never exactly in equilibrium. The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface provides variability on time scales from years to centuries. Recent work (Tsonis et al, 2007), suggests that this variability is enough to account for all climate change since the 19th Century. . . .
With all this at stake, one can readily suspect that there might be a sense of urgency provoked by the possibility that warming may have ceased and that the case for such warming as was seen being due in significant measure to man, disintegrating. For those committed to the more venal agendas, the need to act soon, before the public appreciates the situation, is real indeed. However, for more serious leaders, the need to courageously resist hysteria is clear. Wasting resources on symbolically fighting ever present climate change is no substitute for prudence. Nor is the assumption that the earth’s climate reached a point of perfection in the middle of the twentieth century a sign of intelligence.
VI. All of the malignant illnesses that plagued climate science pre-Climate Gate are still very much in evidence a year on from that scandal. William Esenbach discusses this travesty in an Open Letter To Dr. Trenberth, posted at WUWT, responding to Trenberth's recent outrageous claim that, given that the canard of man-made global warming is subject to overwhelming proof, it now falls to its critics to disprove the theory. As I stated a few weeks ago, a question that should be asked of every warmie is what evidence needs to be proven that would show that the theory of man-made global warming is false.
VII. If you think you're being fleeced by the warmies - you are more right than you know. Probably the most galling part of all of this is that they are doing it on our tax dime - billions of our tax dimes, to be precise, taken from us at the point of the IRS gun. PJM has the facts and figures.
Climategate continues it convulsions. Der Spiegel covers it in a long article, explaining why belief in global warming in Germany is plummeting. Yet left-wing politicians continue to pretend that nothing has changed. Various attempts to whitewash this greatest scientific scandal of our time are made, including the ridiculous findings of a House of Commons inquiry. AGW scientists continue to make claims that simply defy logic, yet many AGW scientists are running scared, and it seems to me at least that contrary science is now being truly heard. Moreover, in but the past few days, another major development has occurred in the spirit of Climategate. After years of scaremongering as to how the ice in the arctic was receding and would soon disappear, causing massive changes to our climate, sea ice in the arctic is now all but completely recovered.
Der Spiegel has a good article, A Superstorm For Global Warming Research, on Climategate and its reverberations. It is too long to condense, but it looks at many aspects of Climategate and its fallout, finding politicization and sloppy work exposed and public confidence in AGW theory waning. But while the majority of the article is quite good, it goes off the rails when it comes to dealing with computer modeling. The Der Spiegel authors assume that, despite it all, AGW is real and the computer models used to predict AGW still valid. But as I have pointed out here, the computer models relied upon by the IPCC are fundamentally and fataly flawed. They assume that the primary driver of temperature is CO2 and they have failed over the past decade as the earth has cooled while CO2 has risen. Dr. Doug Hoffman makes much the same point in a recent post in his blog, The Resilliant Earth. He looks at numerous computer models, concluding:
[M]ore pernicious are the lies generated by climate models, models held up to be oracles of scientific truth—and nothing could be farther from the truth. The models lie because they are built on faulty assumptions, calibrated with inaccurate data and are, by their very nature, incapable of calculating “correct” answers.
Nonetheless, politicians continue to ignore Climategate, acting as if it never occurred, and that AGW theory is reality. Thus do we have Obama now 'pivoting' to his cap and trade legislation ostensibly to combat global warming. And in Britian, an utterly laughable House of Commons inquiry into Climategate found, after one day of hearings, that the issues arising out of Climategate were but smoke and mirrors. And of course, many AGW scientists attempt much the same. For example, Goddard has published a temperature map based on adjusted temperatures that, if it is to believed, has the arctic and antarctic with temperatures rising starkly. Yet, as meteorologist Joe Bistardi points out, that is impossible. Arctic sea ice is growing significantly.
This growth in Arctic sea ice despite the continued growth in human CO2 contribution is of great import as to the validity of AGW theory. Dr. North at EU Referendum has up a must read post on this, A Death Spiral For Warmists:
Jonathan Leake in The Sunday Times picks up on the news that the size of the Arctic ice cap has increased sharply to levels not seen since 2001, putting the ice extent two days ago almost at the average level for 1979-2000.
Given the enthusiasm the media have shown for reporting Armageddon claims about the retreat of the ice, it is significant that his is the only such report in today's batch of newspapers – although The Daily Mail covered it briefly yesterday. Hitherto, the only detailed report had been on Watts up with that?.
But what is especially significant about the Leake report is his interview with Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Colorado. He is said to be "surprised" by the Arctic’s recovery from the great melt of 2007 when summer ice shrank to its smallest recorded extent. "In retrospect," he says, "the reactions to the 2007 melt were overstated. The lesson is that we must be more careful in not reading too much into one event."
In making this declaration, Serreze is getting away extraordinarily lightly. It was he, after all, who was pre-eminent in stoking up the alarm over the Arctic ice melt, providing fuel for the warmists and driving much of the global warming scare as the ice extent became a poster child for the activists. . . .
Do read the entire post. Dr. North methodically covers the litany of claims made by the AGW crowd on the basis of arctic sea ice melt. But AGW is proven now not to be the cause of the Arctic ice melt. This is very significant news indeed.
Related Posts Below The Fold:
(in descending order from earliest to most recent)
The theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) has gone, in a short period of a few months, from "settled" to "suspect." The reputation of the IPCC, dedicated as it is to propagandizing the AGW theory, has likewise seriously suffered. No need to take my word for it - you can take Hitler's:
The WSJ weighs in on the state of AGW and the reputation of the IPCC in the wake of what seems to be a tsunami (man caused) of negative revelations in the past few weeks. This from the WSJ:
It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the "settled science" of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.
First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.
Since the climategate email story broke in November, the standard defense is that while the scandal may have revealed some all-too-human behavior by a handful of leading climatologists, it made no difference to the underlying science. We think the science is still disputable. But there's no doubt that climategate has spurred at least some reporters to scrutinize the IPCC's headline-grabbing claims in a way they had rarely done previously. . . .
All of this matters because the IPCC has been advertised as the last and definitive word on climate science. Its reports are the basis on which Al Gore, President Obama and others have claimed that climate ruin is inevitable unless the world reorganizes its economies with huge new taxes on carbon. Now we are discovering the U.N. reports are sloppy political documents intended to drive the climate lobby's regulatory agenda.
The lesson of climategate and now the IPCC's shoddy sourcing is that the claims of the global warming lobby need far more rigorous scrutiny.
Over the weekend came a series of revelations and admissions by one of AGW's most influential figures, the current head of East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit (CRU), Phil Jones (technically, he is on leave). His bombshells concerning paleoclimatalogical data, the Medieval Warming Period and its ramifications, and the current period of alleged global warming are a dagger in the heart of AGW. Also over the weekend, yet another major research paper documented that modern climate records are untrustworthy and have been significantly manipulated.
To prove the theory of AGW, climate scientists had to show that global warming is occurring at a historically unprecedented rate and that such warming is caused by human emissions of carbon dioxide. Yet, in light of Climategate and revelations both before and since, it would appear that the "unequivocal" and "settled" theory of AGW is anything but.
. . .The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.
Let’s be perfectly clear. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and other things being equal, the more carbon dioxide in the air, the warmer the planet. Every bit of carbon dioxide that we emit warms the planet. But the issue is not whether carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much.
Most scientists, on both sides, also agree on how much a given increase in the level of carbon dioxide raises the planet’s temperature, if just the extra carbon dioxide is considered. These calculations come from laboratory experiments; the basic physics have been well known for a century.
The disagreement comes about what happens next.
The planet reacts to that extra carbon dioxide, which changes everything. Most critically, the extra warmth causes more water to evaporate from the oceans. But does the water hang around and increase the height of moist air in the atmosphere, or does it simply create more clouds and rain? Back in 1980, when the carbon dioxide theory started, no one knew. The alarmists guessed that it would increase the height of moist air around the planet, which would warm the planet even further, because the moist air is also a greenhouse gas.
This is the core idea of every official climate model: For each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three — so two-thirds of their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors); only one-third is due to extra carbon dioxide.
That’s the core of the issue. All the disagreements and misunderstandings spring from this. The alarmist case is based on this guess about moisture in the atmosphere, and there is simply no evidence for the amplification that is at the core of their alarmism.
Weather balloons had been measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. The climate models all predict that as the planet warms, a hot spot of moist air will develop over the tropics about 10 kilometres up, as the layer of moist air expands upwards into the cool dry air above. During the warming of the late 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the weather balloons found no hot spot. None at all. Not even a small one. This evidence proves that the climate models are fundamentally flawed, that they greatly overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide.
This evidence first became clear around the mid-1990s.
At this point, official “climate science” stopped being a science. In science, empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory — that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters.
There are now several independent pieces of evidence showing that the earth responds to the warming due to extra carbon dioxide by dampening the warming. Every long-lived natural system behaves this way, counteracting any disturbance. Otherwise the system would be unstable. The climate system is no exception, and now we can prove it.
But the alarmists say the exact opposite, that the climate system amplifies any warming due to extra carbon dioxide, and is potentially unstable. It is no surprise that their predictions of planetary temperature made in 1988 to the U.S. Congress, and again in 1990, 1995, and 2001, have all proved much higher than reality.
They keep lowering the temperature increases they expect, from 0.30C per decade in 1990, to 0.20C per decade in 2001, and now 0.15C per decade — yet they have the gall to tell us “it’s worse than expected.” These people are not scientists. They overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide, selectively deny evidence, and now they conceal the truth.
One way they conceal is in the way they measure temperature.
The official thermometers are often located in the warm exhaust of air conditioning outlets, over hot tarmac at airports where they get blasts of hot air from jet engines, at waste-water plants where they get warmth from decomposing sewage, or in hot cities choked with cars and buildings. Global warming is measured in 10ths of a degree, so any extra heating nudge is important. In the United States, nearly 90% of official thermometers surveyed by volunteers violate official siting requirements that they not be too close to an artificial heating source.
Global temperature is also measured by satellites, which measure nearly the whole planet 24/7 without bias. The satellites say the hottest recent year was 1998, and that since 2001 the global temperature has levelled off. Why does official science track only the surface thermometer results and not mention the satellite results?
The Earth has been in a warming trend since the depth of the Little Ice Age around 1680. Human emissions of carbon dioxide were negligible before 1850 and have nearly all come after the Second World War, so human carbon dioxide cannot possibly have caused the trend. Within the trend, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation causes alternating global warming and cooling for 25 to 30 years at a go in each direction. We have just finished a warming phase, so expect mild global cooling for the next two decades.
We are now at an extraordinary juncture. Official climate science, which is funded and directed entirely by government, promotes a theory that is based on a guess about moist air that is now a known falsehood. Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only ways to curb emissions are to impose taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world government — how exciting for the political class!
Even if we stopped emitting all carbon dioxide tomorrow, completely shut up shop and went back to the Stone Age, according to the official government climate models it would be cooler in 2050 by about 0.015 degrees. But their models exaggerate 10-fold — in fact our sacrifices would make the planet in 2050 a mere 0.0015 degrees cooler! . . .
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1. The Medieval Warm Period, Recent Heating Spikes, and the Hockey Stick
The Medieval Warm Period, lasting from abut 900 A.D. to 1300 A.D., saw a significant jump in temperature to levels higher than today. For example, during the MWP, the British were growing grapes for wine along Hadrian's Wall, indicating that Britain at the time was hotter than it is today. The MWP occurred during a period when human contribution to carbon dioxide was negligible. Thus, if one accepts the reality of the Medieval Warm Period, then there is nothing unusual about increases in temperature we have supposedly seen in recent years. The theory of AGW loses its validity as there is nothing to distinguish it from natural cycles of heating and cooling that occurred in the absence of any human contribution to CO2 levels.
In 1990, the recently formed UN IPCC ran the following graph in their report. It shows both a robust MWP - hotter than today - and a Little Ice Age lasting through 1600 A.D., after which, in fits and starts, our climate is warming back up.
In the mid-1990's, the use of boreholes as a means to determine past climate history was validated, leading, in 1997 to an incredibly extensive worldwide study by Huang, et. al, the results of which are shown in the following graph:
The similarity to the UN IPCC's own 1990 graph is striking. But then, in 1997, Michael Mann published his hockey stick - a study that purported to do away with both the MWP and the Little Ice Age, writing them out of the historical record while making recent temperature increases appear to be without precedent.
To understand how Mann accomplished this amazing feat of erasure, the most understandable explanation comes from Ross McKitrick in his article, “What is the Hockey Stick Debate About?" It should be required reading for everyone debating AGW. In it, Mr. McKitrick itemizes the faulty math, the fundamentally flawed choice of proxy data Mann used to rewrite climate history, and Mann's stonewalling against making public disclosure of all his data, meta data, and computer programs that would allow scientists to verify his work.
Regardless, given Mann's Hockey Stick's utter centrality to the validity of AGW, the global warming crowd has stood by Mann's graph ever since - and indeed, replicated it with the now infamous Yamal Tree Ring study - a study based on possibly the worst case of cherry picking so far seen in AGW. Regardless, the hockey stick just got invalidated by Dr. Phil Jones in a BBC interview yesterday.
BBC: There is a debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global or not. If it were to be conclusively shown that it was a global phenomenon, would you accept that this would undermine the premise that mean surface atmospheric temperatures during the latter part of the 20th Century were unprecedented?
Jones: There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.
Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented. . . .
Jones admits that the validity of AGW theory rests on proof that the MWP was not a worldwide phenomena. Then he puts the stake in the heart of the "unequivocal" and "settled" theory of AGW. Jones admits that the MWP is well documented in the Northern hemisphere and he claims that there is simply not enough data in the Southern Hemisphere to prove or disprove that the MWP was a worldwide phenomena. Mann's hockey stick - and Yamal, which purport to establish that the MWP did not occur or, in the alternative, was not global with finality, is dead. They are in fatal contradiction with Jones's pronouncements. At a minimum, this means that AGW is unproven.
But Jones goes beyond that. In his interview, he admitted that there have been similar warming spikes in just the past two centuries that are not any larger than the most recent spike through 1998:
Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?
... Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).
I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.
So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other. . . .
This too would mean that there is nothing anomalous about our current warming. And, as Powerline notes, it is "completely at odds with the UN's 2007 IPCC report."
But going back to the MWP, the truth may be that there is in fact enough paleoclimatalogical data to establish the world-wide phenomena of the MWP. Unless someone challenges the validity of the borehole study, that would seem to provide sufficient evidence. But there have been many reports of recent vintage that also establish a robust MWP as a reality. Here is a graphic showing peer reviewed studies and their conclusions regarding the degree to which temperatures were higher (red) or lower (blue) during the MWP than they are today:
But its not just the MWP that calls into question the validity of AGW. To the extent that climate can be traced back into the distant past, such as from unadjusted data derived from Greenland's ice core, it shows repeated periods of rapid warming and cooling and that we are in a prolonged period of global warming far predating the industrial period:.
2. Whether Modern Day Temperature Data Showing Global Warming Is Trustworthy?
One would think that measuring modern temperatures would be straightforward. The truth is that it is anything but. And indeed, this difficulty in agreement on a common measurement protocol coupled with manipulation of raw data to add "corrections" calls into question the validity of AGW every bit as much as the MWP.
As a threshold matter, no less a person than NASA's James Hansen explains in detail that there is no agreement on how to measure Surface Air Temperature(SAT), that temperatures measured at the same station can vary widely depending on the method used, and that SAT can change from the ground to just a few feet above ground. In other words, the precision claimed by the climate scientists in measuring temperature to tenths or hundredths of degrees over the entire globe is simply smoke and mirrors.
. . . The global surface-station data is seriously compromised. First, there is a major station dropout and increase in missing data in stations that remained which occurred suddenly around 1990; about the time the global warming issue was being elevated to importance in political and environmental circles. A clear bias was found towards removing cooler higher elevation, higher latitude, and rural stations during this culling process though leaving their data in the base periods from which ‘averages’ and anomalies are computed.
The data also suffers contamination by urbanization and other local factors such as land-use/land-cover changes and improper siting. There are uncertainties in ocean temperatures; no small issue, as oceans cover 71% of the earth's surface. These factors all lead to significant uncertainty and a tendency for overestimation of century-scale temperature trends. A conclusion from all findings suggest that global data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or rankings or validate model forecasts. And, consequently, such surface data should be ignored for decision making.
One of the major facets to which D'Aleo refers is the so called "heat island" effect. Many of man's activities generate heat that, if picked up by a station, then shows a false warming. Rather than make an effort to resite the vast number of stations that today are subject to the heat island effect, entities that collect this data have applied "corrections." But as D'Aleo points out, "numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone" and that "cherry-picking of observing sites combined with interpolation to vacant data grids may make heat-island bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming."
The findings of Professor Christy are similar and were summed up in a Times article the other day:
“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.
The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.
These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.
Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.
“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”
So there is a real question the validity about surface temperature data. That is an independant basis that establishes that the supposed "unequivocal" and "settled" science of the AGW theory is anything but.
On a different issue, one of the points of contention has been whether there has been any warming shown in the past ten to fifteen years - a period that, if AGW theory was valid - should have shown temperatures increasing hand in glove with rises in man-made CO2 emissions. Responding to criticism in the wake of Climategate, the AGW cabal pushed the fiction - duly published by the Washington Post - that the world was still warming and that "nine of the world's hottest years occurred this decade."
This contradicts the UN's lead IPCC scientist, Kevin Trenberth, who, in an e-mail released as part of the CRU tranche, noted:
The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.
Enter Phil Jones in the BBC interview with another bombshell admission, Jones "admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming . . ."
3. AGW & The UN IPCC's Climate Computer Models
The AGW movement has relied upon computer modeling to pose nightmare scenarios and drive policy. For example, it was in 2008 that, acting in response to a legal action brought by Center for Biological Diversity and other green organizations to have polar bears declared endangered under the Endangered Species Act, that the Bush Interior Dept. actually made such a finding. The head of the Interior Dept., Dirk Kempthorne, made his decision based on climate computer modeling showing that arctic sea ice, which even then was rebounding from its 2007 low, would disappear 45 years into the future due to AGW. He made this decision even though the polar bear population had exploded in the Arctic and was deemed at or near optimum levels.
Yet there is a problem. All of the computer models relied upon by the IPCC to posit AGW far into the future suffer a fatal flaw. All are built on the presumption that as more man-made carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere, global temperatures will rise. And as the quotes from both Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth in the above section prove, the world stopped warming in 1995. This means that AGW proponents have not established that there is a direct relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and temperature.
But the problems of the computer models go even beyond that, as explained by MIT Professor of Meterology Richard S. Lindz:
. . . The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn't reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.
Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false.
The fact that the IPCC's computer models did not anticipate and could not account for the current lack of warming is significant proof that the AGW theory is neither "unequivocal" nor "settled."
4. Peer Review, IPCC, Scientific Method and Climategate
The validity of AGW has been pushed on the oft repeated claim that all of the work of AGW proponents has been subject to the gold standard of reliability - peer review. But in light of Climategate - the scandal arising in the wake of the unauthorized release of a vast tranche of internal e-mails and other data from East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit - probably few things were so much called into question as the peer review process and the bastardization of the scientific method by AGW proponents.
For anything to be called science, others need to be able to access the raw data, the meta data, and the calculations or computer progams and then either verify or disprove the experiment. That is the "scientific method" as practiced across all sciences. But it stopped happening in climate science over a decade ago. What climate scientists began doing, beginning with Michael Mann's hockey stick graph in the late 1990's, was to refuse to provide the information necessary to reproduce their experiments. Indeed, it took over 7 years and literally an act of Congress to force Mann to post his data.
Probably no one has more experience with the repeated and continuous stonewalling by AGW scientists to every request for data than Climate Audit's Steve McIntyre. He has devoted an entire section of his blog to his litany of posts on this topic. You can find it here. The Climategate e-mails make crystal clear how determined the top level of climate scientists - Phil Jones, Michael Mann, etc. - were to keep their data and methods out of the public domain, even at the risk of violating the law of FOIA.
.. . . What has been noticeably absent so far in the ClimateGate discussion is a public reaffirmation by climate researchers of our basic research values: the rigors of the scientific method (including reproducibility), research integrity and ethics, open minds, and critical thinking. Under no circumstances should we ever sacrifice any of these values; the CRU emails, however, appear to violate them.
Dr. Carter added in a seperate essay that climate scientists needed to start acting like . . . real scientists:
Climate data needs to be publicly available and well documented. This includes metadata that explains how the data were treated and manipulated, what assumptions were made in assembling the data sets, and what data was omitted and why. This would seem to be an obvious and simple requirement, but the need for such transparency has only been voiced recently as the policy relevance of climate data has increased. The HADCRU surface climate dataset and the paleoclimate dataset that has gone into the various “hockeystick” analyses stand out as lacking such transparency. Much of the paleoclimate data and metadata has become available only because of continued public pressure from Steve McIntyre. Datasets that were processed and developed decades ago and that are now regarded as essential elements of the climate data record often contain elements whose raw data or metadata were not preserved (this appears to be the case with HADCRUT). The HADCRU surface climate dataset needs public documentation that details the time period and location of individual station measurements used in the data set, statistical adjustments to the data, how the data were analyzed to produce the climatology, and what measurements were omitted and why. If these data and metadata are unavailable, I would argue that the data set needs to be reprocessed.
There is no reason whatsoever that any of the climate science community should not, on all occaisions, act in accordance with Dr. Carter's advice. For a climate scientist to have to counsel others in her field on this issue gives some idea of just how far the AGW crowd has strayed from the practice of science. In the absence of this level of transparency and reproducability, there is not a single thing about AGW that can be called "unequivocal" or "settled."
The IPCC and AGW supporters attempt to sidestep this fundamental malfeasance by claiming that their experiments were verified by the peer review process. It is a neat trick - and amounts to asking the rest of the world to take their word - and the word of a few reviewers - on faith. That is not science, it's theology.
The IPCC and AGW crowd hold up peer review as the gold standard of reliability. But if the Climategate e-mails exposed anything, it was the degree to which the peer review process has been bastardized by climate scientists. This from Mark Steyn, summing up the situation:
The more frantically [the IPCC and AGW scientists] talked up "peer review" as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: "How To Forge A Consensus." Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That's "peer review," climate-style. The more their echo chamber shriveled, the more Mann and Jones insisted that they and only they represent the "peer-reviewed" "consensus." And gullible types like Ed Begley Jr. and Andrew Revkin of the New York Times fell for it hook, line and tree-ring.
The e-mails of "Andy" (as his CRU chums fondly know him) are especially pitiful. Confronted by serious questions from Stephen McIntyre, the dogged Ontario retiree whose "Climate Audit" Web site exposed the fraud of Dr. Mann's global-warming "hockey stick" graph, "Andy" writes to Dr. Mann to say not to worry, he's going to "cover" the story from a more oblique angle:
"I'm going to blog on this as it relates to the value of the peer review process and not on the merits of the mcintyre et al attacks.
"peer review, for all its imperfections, is where the herky-jerky process of knowledge building happens, would you agree?"
And, amazingly, Dr. Mann does!
"Re, your point at the end – you've taken the words out of my mouth."
And that's what Andrew Revkin did, week in, week out: He took the words out of Michael Mann's mouth and served them up to impressionable readers of the New York Times and opportunist politicians around the world champing at the bit to inaugurate a vast global regulatory body to confiscate trillions of dollars of your hard-earned wealth in the cause of "saving the planet" from an imaginary crisis concocted by a few dozen thuggish ideologues. If you fall for this after the revelations of the past week, you're as big a dupe as Begley or Revkin.
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" wondered Juvenal: Who watches the watchmen? But the beauty of the climate-change tree-ring circus is that you never need to ask "Who peer-reviews the peer-reviewers?" Mann peer-reviewed Jones, and Jones peer-reviewed Mann, and anyone who questioned their theories got exiled to the unwarmed wastes of Siberia. The "consensus" warm-mongers could have declared it only counts as "peer-reviewed" if it's published in Peer-Reviewed Studies published by Mann & Jones Publishing Inc. (Peermate of the Month: Al Gore, reclining naked, draped in dead polar bear fur, on a melting ice floe), and Ed Begley Jr. and "Andy" Revkin would still have wandered out, glassy-eyed, into the streets droning "Peer-reviewed studies. Cannot question. Peer-reviewed studies. The science is settled."
This bastardization of the peer review process largely shut out both criticism of AGW and alternative theories. Thus is it any wonder that AGW proponents should claim, in true Orwellian fashion, a "scientific consensus" that the science of global warming is "unequivocable" and "settled" because there are no substantive body of peer reviewed studies to the contrary? It is a variant on the old saw about the boy who killed his parents then asked for mercy from the court because he was an orphan.
There is one last systemic issue on the peer review as it relates to climate science. Shannon Love has written an insightful article regarding peer review in the context of climate science where so much now relies on complex computer programs to arrive at finished data. Peer reviewers do not have the time to review the programs and, in any case, are never provided with them. This effectively negates any claim that peer review provides any standard for the reliability of the data and conclusions in the article. Ms. Love's solution is very practical:
Eric S. Raymond, the famous computer scientist and writer, has called for open source science. I think this is the way we should go. In the past, it cost too much to print out all a study’s data and records on paper and ship that paper all over the world. With the internet, we have no such limitations. All scientific studies should upon publication put online all of their raw data, all of their protocols, all of their procedures, all of their records and the code for all of their custom-written software. There is no practical reason anymore why only a summary of a scientist’s work should be made public.
Scientific software has grown too large and complex to be maintained and verified by a handful of individuals. Only by marshaling a scientific “Army of Davids” can we hope to verify the accuracy and precision of the software we are increasingly using to make major public decisions.
In the short term, we need to aggressively challenge those who assert that studies that use complex custom software have been “peer reviewed” in any meaningful way. In the long term, we have a lot of scientific work to do over again.
Summary
It is incumbant on those championing the theory of AGW to establish that the globe is warming in unprecedented fashion and that the cause of this warming is man via emissions of carbon dioxide. To this end, AGW proponents have written the Medieval Warm Period out of the historical record, relied on fundamentally untrustworthy Surface Air Temperature data, they have often refused to make public their data and methods and they have wholly corrupted the peer review process - all the while relying on peer review to stand in as a proxy for the scientific method as a means to establish the validity of AGW.
Between Climategate, the subsequent revelations by CRU head Phil Jones, and recent studies, it is apparent that the AGW crowd has not proven their theory. Dr. Jones admitted that the Medieval Warm Period existed in the northern hemisphere, and further admitted that, if it was shown to be global in scope, than it could well mean that our current warming trend is nothing more than a natural cycle of the earth. He also admitted that the MWP has not been contradicted, but merely that there is not enough data from the Southern Hemisphere to confirm or deny the MWP. This explodes the hockey stick graph which purported to show the MWP never occurred. Likewise, Jones admitted that the current rate of warming is not statistically different than in other warming spikes over the past 200 years. This contradicts the claim that our most recent spike in temperatures was itself anamolous.
The Surface Air Temperature (SAT) data, upon which the historical record rests since the advent of mechanical weather readings circa 1800, is not subject to any sort of precision in identification that would provide any confidence in the fine calculations being made in determining the historical data. Moreover, as two recent studies indicate, there are very fundamental flaws in our current system - from the vast decrease in monitoring stations over the past two decades to insufficient and improper manipulation of SAT data in light of the "heat island" effects. This also calls into question the accuracy of the AGW theory.
The IPCC's climate computer modeling shows a relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and rising temperatures. Each of the models fails to account for increasing levels of carbon dioxide, yet a plateau of temperatures since 1995. Thus the relationship between global warming and carbon dioxide is called directly into question.
Lastly, the AGW proponents have sufficiently bastardized the peer review process that it in no way can be considered an indicator of reliability for published reports, nor an indicator of unreliability for rejected reports attacking AGW or proposing alternative theories. In conjunction with the AGW scientists refusal to partake in the normal practice of the "scientific method," it means they have turned AGW from a "science" requiring reproducability into a theology requiring faith.
The sum of all this is that AGW, at a minimum and in all of its aspects, is unproven. Claims that the science of AGW is "unequivocal" and "settled" are ludicrous. Indeed, in many respects, there is no science even involved.
Scientific arguments, too, are problematic. In a conference call arranged Thursday by the liberal Center for American Progress to refute the snow antics of Inhofe et al., the center's Joe Romm made the well-worn statements that "the overwhelming weight of the scientific literature" points to human-caused warming and that doubters "don't understand the science."
The science is overwhelming -- but not definitive. Romm's claim was inadvertently shot down by his partner on the call, the Weather Underground's Jeff Masters, who confessed that "there's a huge amount of natural variability in the climate system" and not enough years of measurements to know exactly what's going on. "Unfortunately we don't have that data so we are forced to make decisions based on inadequate data."
Kudos to Mr. Masters for something approaching intellectual honesty as to the state of AGW science.
Update: Robert Avrech of Seraphic Secret has been kind enough to link to this post. There is an interesting debate going on in the comments section of Robert's post with an AGW proponent who, among other things, finds fault with my/this post. Do feel free to click over and have a read.
Jack Cafferty goes nuclear on Pelosi and the left again. A few days ago, he was calling for everyone to remember the hypocrisy of the Obama administration when they went to the polls. Today . . . . he seems to want a pound of flesh . . .
Cafferty is of course correct in all he says. I had marked off Cafferty years ago as just another far left ideologue with no intellectual honesty. I was wrong.
It seems a bit of insanity to be writing a post on global warming as the world suffers record low temperatures and snow fall. Indeed, I had to put an extra piece of coal on the fire to keep my extremities warm enough to type this post. But the AGW crowd will not be slowed by reality or revelations of highly politicized science. [And indeed, MSNBC posts an AP report today warning us not to be fooled, all of the experts say "despite" the "cold snap," earth "still warming." I find it somewhat mystifying that they couldn't find a dissenting expert, since we have had a decade of slight cooling, followed now by some significant cooling indeed.]
One would think that the implications and ramifications of Climategate for the theory of anthropogenic global warming would slow down Obama's push to reduce carbon emissions through a variety of taxes and a carbon trading market. But that Climategate hasn't caused Obama or the left to so much as blink is proof that this isn't about science. Its about power and money.
To see where Obama would lead us, just look at the UK. They are a decade into the push towards a green nirvana and five years into the carbon trading market. Their energy prices have doubled in five years and portend to grow exponentially over the next decade. This from the Daily Mail:
Household gas and electricity bills are expected to rocket fourfold to nearly £5,000 [$8,000 at the current exchange rate] a year by the end of the decade to meet Government-imposed green targets.
And the price heavy industry will have to pay by 2020 is so high that energy-dependent firms could be wiped out, causing thousands of job losses, said an industry spokesman." . . .
Already energy bills are loaded up by five separate charges to help fund the battle to combat climate change and become greener. They are the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target, the Renewables Obligation, the Community Energy Saving Programme and shortly there will be a levy on investing in clean coal projects.
Although householders will be badly hit, the damage to industrial energy users will be even more dramatic. These companies, which range from steel and chemical plants to industrial gas companies, are dependent on reasonable energy prices that can, in some cases, account for 70 per cent of their entire costs.
Jeremy Nicholson, spokesman for the Energy Intensive Users' Group, said the Government's own figures showed that the price of electricity would go up by up to 70 per cent and the price of gas by a further 50 per cent as a direct result of meeting its renewable energy targets.
And there are, as I have pointed out many times, a whole host of secondary costs to the economy that ripple out from these acts of insanity. As Dr. North points out at EU Referendum in commenting on this article:
But, if the £5,000 figure shocks, it is only part of the equation. Higher energy costs feed through into the price of every home-produced commodity and service, while the added costs of benefits paid to redundant workers, the loss of tax income as firms close down, and the fall-off in economic activity will impose their own substantial costs.
Tied in with the way we are miss-managing our energy supplies and we are looking at a slow-motion economic catastrophe far greater than the economic crisis we are weathering, the overall costs of which are set to exceed the entire tax bill for the average household.
We are only on the edge of imposing the extremely burdensome taxes that will come with EPA regulation or the insane WaxmanMarkey climate change legislation. But we are already well underway to miss-managing our energy supplies.
Coal fired plants account for over half of all electricity production in the U.S. It is estimated that we have over 25% of the world's coal. Yet Obama, for once true to his word, has declared war on coal. His EPA is refusing mining and plant creation permits at every turn, and even in some cases revoking previously issued permits. What he will have us replace it with - and how much more it will cost - is very much an unknown at this point. Given the centrality of coal to U.S. energy production, it will most certainly be steep indeed.
But that's not Obama's only war on our energy supplies. You will recall his promise during the campaign to open up our coasts for oil exploration and to allow for more drilling. That didn't survive his swearing in. We now import 57% of our oil. It is not because we don't have huge oil/natural gas reserves - we do. It is just that the far left, from Obama on down, is bound and determined that we won't touch them. And today brings news from the WSJ that the Obama administration is about to make it even tougher to drill:
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is expected to announce Wednesday that his agency will require oil and natural-gas companies to clear more regulatory hurdles before they are allowed to drill on federal lands.
Mr. Salazar's action is likely to make it more difficult for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to fast-track the permitting of oil and gas projects on federal land. BLM field staffers would be required to seek additional approvals from their supervisors and to undertake more visits to areas where energy companies are seeking access, according to people familiar with the matter.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, shown in December, is expected to make it more difficult to speed oil and gas projects on federal land. The BLM manages more than 260 million acres of federal land, and with it, a significant chunk of U.S. energy supplies. Domestic production from federal onshore oil and gas wells accounts for 11% of U.S. natural-gas supplies and 5% of the nation's oil.
The Obama administration is already locked in a bitter fight with the oil and gas industry over proposals to raise billions of dollars in additional taxes from energy companies, and to cap the emissions of gases caused by burning fossil fuels, which have been linked to global warming. . . .
This is just so wrong. One, oil is a national security issue. We could be moving towards self sufficiency from domestic supplies over the coming decades if the left did not oppose every new well, every new mine, every new energy plant. Instead, the left has us moving to ever more dependence on oil with many of the oil production centers being in countries who are not America's friends.
And of equal importance is the cost of oil and how that will effect our economy. The massive rise in fuel prices from 2006 to 2008 was hardly an anomaly. It came about because of world demand - a demand we can expect to see return if and when we come out of the Frank-Dodd-Clinton caused depression. If we do nothing else, T. Boone Pickens estimates we will see $300 a barrel oil in a decade. If that happens, it will be a dagger in the heart of our economy. Something must be done, but on both sides of the Atlantic, the left is bound and determined to head down the path to economic Armageddon.
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