Category — Climate debate issues

“The forcings that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change.”

- James Hansen, “Climate Forcings in the Industrial Era,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 1998, p. 12753.

“In view of the immense power of natural weather and climate fluctuations and the great buffering capacity of the Earth, especially the ocean, it is easy to be skeptical about whether small anthropogenic changes of atmospheric composition can have important practical impacts.”

- James Hansen et al., “How Sensitive Is the World’s Climate?,” National Geographic Research & Exploration, 9(2): 1993, p. 157.

“Climate is always changing. Climate would fluctuate without any change of climate forcings. The chaotic aspect of climate is an innate characteristic of the coupled fundamental equations describing climate system dynamics.”

- James Hansen et al., “How Sensitive Is the World’s Climate?,” National Geographic Research & Exploration, 9(2): 1993, p. 143.

James Hansen has been at the forefront of the alarmist wing of climate scientists regarding the human influence on global climate from 1988 until today. But at least earlier in his career he showed some humility in the face of the enormous complexity of his subject–and the limitations of his own mind. The above three quotations from the 1990s indicate as much. (1)

Humility is out. This NASA scientist has taken a ‘Greenpeace’ approach to the environment. He KNOWS both the problem and the answer to the problem, bringing to mind F. A. Hayek’s warnings about intellectuals who claim to know social problems so well that WE (the world) must adapt their coercive solutions. Beware of what Hayek called The Fatal Conceit.

Dr. James Hansen’s latest communication, Cowards in Our Democracies: Part 1 (January 27, 2012), (parsed in red below) is interspersed by my comments (in green). My critique will continue with Hansen’s just published Part II in the near future. [Read more →]

“When we hear of vast numbers of scientists endorsing Michael Mann’s famous ‘hockey stick’ graph… What we don’t hear is that the vast, vast majority of them never sought access to the specific data and algorithms claimed to support it (much of which was actively withheld from the scientific community at large). They did not independently evaluate either Mann’s claims or the specific, technical objections raised against them by a few critics who were able to wrest those data and algorithms from Mann’s clenched fist over a period of years. Neither had the scientific media performed any independent, critical review when reporting on such issues for over a decade, most of them simply not being equipped to do so.”

“You may be interesting [sic] in this snippet of information about Pat Michaels. Perhaps the University of Wisconsin ought to open up a public comment period to decide whether Pat Michaels, [sic] PhD needs re-assessing?”

- Tom Wigley to ‘Folks’, October 14, 2009.

“I consider this to be an extremely serious matter. [The actions and climate views of] Mr. Bradley … may further damage both my personal and your company’s reputation.”

- Tom Wigley to Kenneth L. Lay (Enron), August 26, 1999.

“We sent [our paper] to Journal of Climate. I sent out about 10 copies–one to Wigley. But I requested that he not be used as a referee ‘because of an inexplicable hostility towards us (and possibly everyone else)’.”

- Gerald North to Robert Bradley (Enron), September 1999.

Climate scientist Patrick Michaels is mad–plenty mad (see his letter to Roger Wakimoto, Director, National Center for Atmospheric Research below). Among the Climategate 2.0 email sewage is a blatant attempt by Thomas Wigley, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR),  to undercut Michaels’s academic base by challenging the latter’s doctoral dissertation as inaccurate and deceitful.

If Michaels’s dissertation was purposely deceitful, not only flawed, then Wigley would have his ground. But if not, what does this say about the accuser in the highly politicized climate-change debate?

Climate scientist Judith Curry weighted in as follows: [Read more →]

Michael Mann: “I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause.”

Phil Jones: “I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process.”

The above emails are representative of the sickly fare of a group of physical scientists who set out to change the world from one of open-ended economic growth to one of economic constraint via international carbon planning. The good news is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gatekeepers have once again been exposed by the e-mail release of last week, now known the world over as Climategate 2.0.

Having conversations like this is way beyond the bounds of scholarship or decent inquiry. We have heard of market failure and government failure–we need the term academic failure to describe scientists behaving badly.

For students of neo-Malthusianism (alarmism in different dimensions that began with Robert Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on Population in 1798), Climategate 1.0 and 2.0 continue a trend line. To really appreciate the desperation of climate alarmists in the face of contimuing anomolies, theoretical and empirical, context is required. That context is the failed worldview of modern neo-Malthusianism, which has promoted fear after fear with an intolerant, smartest-guys-in-the-room, above-the-rules mentality.

Remember the “population bomb” where many millions would die in food riots? Well, obesity turned out to be the real problem.

Remember the Club of Rome’s resource scare? In 1972, 57 predictions of exhaustion were made regarding 19 different minerals. All either have been falsified or will be.

Remember the global-cooling scare promoted by, among others, the Obama administration’s science czar, John Holdren? (Yes, global cooling was a big deal, although it was not a “consensus.”)

And all of the above doom merchants were uber-confident and still are loath to admit they were ever wrong. Holdren, for example, has not disowned his prediction that as many as one billion people could die by 2020 from (man-made) climate change. That’s nine years, folks.

Climategate/Climate McCarthyism

Intolerance rules in the global warming scare. Read the new flaming emails from the principals of Climategate. Read about Joseph “Climate McCarthyism” Romm by his critics on the Left.  Read the words of (non-Climategater) Michael Schlesinger, who lost his cool against New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin. [Read more →]

Robert Bryce of Austin, Texas, as he himself will tell you, is a reformed Leftie/greenie. The solar array he installed on his roof was a bust, and he followed the logic of energy density to conclude that wind, solar, water, crops, plants, and wood would not allow energy to be mankind’s master resource.

And as did Julian Simon in his day, Bryce looks at the data and science before he makes up his mind. And like Simon, he changed his mind away from neo-Malthusian notions of resource depletion and climate pessimism.

Energy Views

Bryce’s views took shape on the oil/transportation side with Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence” (2008) and on electricity with Power Hungry: The Myths of ‘Green’ Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future (2010). His encapsulated worldview about energy and energy policy can be read in his Washington Post op-ed, “Five Myths About Green Energy.”

MasterResource has profiled Bryce’s message under the title, Energy Density: Robert Bryce’s Powerful Energy Message. His is a very powerful message, beginning and ending with basic physics. It all gets back to W. S. Jevons, and it continues with Vaclav Smil, Robert Bryce, and others.

Reformed Populist

Bryce is also a reformed populist, having seen too much business in government and government in business. His book on Enron, Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron, chronicled a political company in action, although he did not then quite have the developed worldview to see how political capitalism, not market capitalism, was to blame.

Then came his second book, Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate (2004), where he stated on the opening page: “I’m all for business, I’m all for government. I just don’t want them to be the same thing.”

Today, Robert Bryce is the most erudite and influential energy journalist in America, with opinion-page editorials in publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the Huffington Post. Morphing into a bona fide energy scholar, Bryce has respect on both sides of the political aisle and is a reason why politically correct renewable energy is now encountering a hard relook by grass-root environmentalists and open-minded Leftists. And he has the Hard Left mad! [Read more →]

[Ed. note: This is Bradley's final statement to: "This house believes that subsidising renewable energy is a good way to wean the world off fossil fuels." After nine days and thousands of votes cast from around the world, the opposition is polling very close.]

“A reliable and affordable supply of energy is absolutely critical to maintaining and expanding economic prosperity where such prosperity already exists and to creating it where it does not.” – John Holdren (2000)

“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” – James Hansen (2011)

Energy density (think energy efficiency) is the most important concept for the House Proposition. Dense energy, carbon-based energy, was an important enabler of the Industrial Revolution and has fueled rapid economic progress and population growth ever since. There is no going back to mankind’s poverty era, when renewable energy had a 100 percent market share.

Diluteness and intermittency explain why wind and solar miscarry economically, operationally, and environmentally as primary energies. These market-rejected energies require government favor to enter the grid and fossil-fuel blending/firming to leave the grid. Industrial wind parks and solar complexes are energy sprawl writ large, with service roads on one end and long-distance transmission lines on the other, all superfluous. [Read more →]

[Ed. note: This post complements that of Ken Green earlier this week, Five Climate Questions for Richard Muller (Temperature findings begin, not end, the real debate)]

The recent announcement of the results of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) Project by project chairman Richard Muller has caused quite a stir. True believers in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) have greeted it as the final nail in the coffin of dissent. Why? Because it concludes—take a deep breath, now—that “Global warming is real.”

Jumping to Conclusions

At the Washington Post, for example, opinion writer Eugene Robinson states:

For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there.

The latest icy blast of reality comes from an eminent scientist whom the climate-change skeptics once lauded as one of their own. Richard Muller, a respected physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, used to dismiss alarmist climate research as being “polluted by political and activist frenzy.” Frustrated at what he considered shoddy science, Muller launched his own comprehensive study to set the record straight. Instead, the record set him straight….

[B]lowhards such as Perry, Cain and Bachmann, who, out of ignorance or perceived self-interest, are willing to play politics with the Earth’s future. (emphasis added)

The only thing more stunning and frightening than the idiocy of equating “global warming” with “CAGW” is the failure of so much not only of the public, and not only of the media, but especially of the scientific community—well, okay, the already committed, true-believer “scientific community”—to recognize (admit? expose?) the rhetorical sleight of hand.

I will put the point bluntly, if a little technically: BEST is a classic case of ignoratio elenchi, the logical fallacy of arguing for a point other than the one contended, and pretending that by arguing for the one one has answered the other. Other ways of putting ignoratio elenchiare “irrelevant conclusion” and “irrelevant thesis.” [Read more →]

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism, California Berkeley physicist Richard A. Muller describes the results from a recent re-examination of climate records and declares the debate is finally, really, truly over.

Skepticism, Muller explains, may have been warranted before (how generous of him!), but now that the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project folks have worked over the temperature data again, there’s no more cause for skepticism about whether or not the globe has warmed.

Warming Red Herring–and Five Real Questions

Muller is right about the globe warming, but his framing of the debate is a red herring: arguments over climate change are not about whether one accepts or “denies” that the climate has warmed in recent years.

In fact, as I’ve been explaining to some colleagues and friends today, the proponents of urgent action on climate change like to conflate five separate questions into one question in order to tag their opponents as being “unscientific,” “deniers,” “flat-earthers,” etc.

Here are the five key questions that Muller and any critic of so-called climate skepticism must confront:

Q1: How has the global average temperature changed in recent history?

Q2: How much of that change is attributable to human activities, and how much to a given activity?

Q3: What can we expect to happen to the climate in the future? [Read more →]

[Editor note: Marlo Lewis's extensive rebuttal to Scientific American writer David Appell in the comments section to yesterday's post (Andrew Dessler Challenges Rick Perry: How Should Perry Respond?) is presented as a full post today.]

Yesterday, Rob Bradley excerpted portions of a post I wrote last Friday on whether Gov. Rick Perry’s remarks about global warming at the GOP candidates forum in California were “anti-science.” My objective was to immunize the candidates — and the public generally – against a rhetorical trick that Al Gore and other alarmists have been using to great effect for years.

Alarmists would have us believe that all they have to do is establish that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet, and then everything else they say follows as night follows day. If mankind is mainly or even partly responsible for the warmth of recent decades, then, supposedly, we are in the midst of a “planetary emergency” that “threatens the survival of civilization and the habitability of the Earth” (Al Gore’s phrase). From which it follows in turn that global warming is a “moral issue” (again, Gore’s phrase). In other words, we have no moral choice but to support their agenda of cap-and-trade, renewable energy mandates, and ‘clean-tech’ subsidies.

It’s a bit weird. Earlier generations of “progressive” thinkers proclaimed that “facts” are separate from “values” and that “ought” cannot be derived from “is.” Yet today’s progressives preach moral imperatives in the name of “the science.”

In any event, alarmists have been so successful in fostering the illusion that the key question is whether mankind is having an influence on global climate that some on the political Right feel they cannot effectively challenge the Al Gore-Greenpeace-EPA climate policy agenda unless they deny that, or at least question whether, greenhouse gases actually have a greenhouse (warming) effect.

This, alas, is exactly what alarmists want their opponents to say, not only because it makes them look “anti-science,” but also because it tacitly confirms the alarmist narrative. As if all we have to do is assent to a tautology (greenhouse gas emissions have a greenhouse effect) and we are compelled to concede every important scientific, political, and moral point in a very complex debate.

In my brief post, I tried to explain in soundbite-sized chunks how candidates should challenge both the planetary emergency thesis and the alleged moral necessity for Kyoto-style eco-energy planning.

David Appell’s Comments

Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, bombards us with so many images of droughts, floods, wild fires, and storms, that you might suppose the world is becoming a more dangerous place. My post noted that the data tell a different story. Deaths and death rates related to extreme weather have declined by 93% and 98%, respectively, since the 1920s. The 93% decline in total deaths is quite remarkable, given that global population is more than  three times larger than it was in the 1920s. Global warming, where is thy sting?

David Appell says “It’s easy to refute Lewis,” commenting: [Read more →]

[Editor’s note: The following material was supplied to us by Dr. Richard Lindzen as an example of how research that counters climate-change alarm receives special treatment in the scientific publication process as compared with results that reinforce the consensus view. In this case, Lindzen's submission to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was subjected to unusual procedures and eventually rejected (in a rare move), only to be accepted for publication in the Asian Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences.

 

I, too, have firsthand knowledge about receiving special treatment. Ross McKitrick has documented similar experiences, as have John Christy and David Douglass and Roy Spencer, and I am sure others. The unfortunate side-effect of this differential treatment is that a self-generating consensus slows the forward progress of scientific knowledge—a situation well-described by Thomas Kuhn is his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. –Chip Knappenberger]

The following is the reproduction of the email exchanges involved in the contribution of our paper (Lindzen and Choi, “On the observational determination of climate sensitivity and its implications”) to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The editor of the PNAS follows the procedure of having his assistant, May Piotrowski, communicate his letters as pdf attachments.

These attachments are part of the present package. Attachment1.pdf is simply a statement of PNAS procedure. Note that members of the NAS are permitted to communicate up to 4 papers per year. The members are responsible for obtaining two reviews of their own papers and to report the reviews and their responses to the reviews. Note, as well, that rejection of such contributions by the Board of PNAS is a rare event, involving approximately 2% of all contributions.

The rejection of the present paper required some extraordinary violations of accepted practice. We feel that making such procedures public will help clarify the peculiar road blocks that have been created in order to prevent adequate discussion of fundamental issues. It is hoped, moreover, that the material presented here can offer the interested public some insight into what is involved in the somewhat mysterious though widely (if inappropriately) respected process of peer review.

This situation is compounded, in the present example, by the absurdly lax standards applied to papers supportive of climate alarm. In the present example, there existed an earlier paper (Lindzen and Choi, 2009) [we covered that paper here -CK], that had been subjected to extensive criticism. The fact that no opportunity was provided to us to respond to such criticism was, itself, unusual and disturbing. The paper we had submitted to the PNAS was essentially our response which included the use of additional data and the improvement and correction of our methodology. [Read more →]