“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.

———————————-

(Hansen) The threat of human-made climate change and the urgency of reducing fossil fuel emissions have become increasingly clear to the scientific community during the past few years. 

(Bradley) No! Scientific evidence for anthropogenic global ‘lukewarming’ as an alternative to catastrophic warming is gaining currency in both theory and fact. The science is not settled, much less in favor of alarmism. Notoriously complex feedback effects are where the action is, and to pretend that we know the answers, much less in alarmist form, is not only anti-science but also chilling.

Are you ‘drinking your own whiskey,’ so to speak. ‘Smoking your own dope’? The human influence on climate may well be net beneficial at the lower warming scenarios where we also have the benefits of CO2 fertilization.

Yet, at the same time, the public seems to have become less certain about the situation.  Indeed, many people have begun to wonder whether the climate threat has been concocted or exaggerated.

The public is burnt out on neo-Malthusian (false) alarmism. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb … Stephen Schneider’s global cooling fears. John Holdren’s warming and cooling fears. The running-out-of-resources fears….

If you really feared the future, why not embrace the incredible bread machine of market capitalism as the best way approach? Why energy and climate statism for miniscule climate changes rather than a wealth-is-health approach? Your grandchildren might just thank you!!

Public doubt about the science is not an accident.  People profiting from business-as-usual fossil fuel use are waging a campaign to discredit the science.  Their campaign is effective because the profiteers have learned how to manipulate democracies for their advantage.

Please Sir, there are many of us in this business who are just as well motivated and well intentioned (and intellectually grounded) as you are and who see  the problem quite differently than you do. If you demean your opponents in this way, should some of them demean you as a publicity hound who has grown rich off of the alarmist industry? 

The scientific method requires objective analysis of all data, stating evidence pro and con, before reaching conclusions.  This works well, indeed is necessary, for achieving success in science.  But science is now pitted in public debate against the talk-show method, which consists of selective citation of anecdotal bits that support a predetermined position.

The contrarians questioning climate alarmism have worked hard against politically correct, government-funded science and should be commended, not deprecated.

Why is the public presented results of the scientific method and the talk-show method as if they deserved equal respect?  A few decades ago that did not happen.  In 1981, when I wrote a then controversial paper (http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html) about the impact of CO2 on climate, the science writer Walter Sullivan contacted several of the top relevant scientific experts  in the world for comments.  He did not mislead the public by dredging up and highlighting contrarian opinion for the sake of a forced and unnatural “balance”.

Politicized science deserves a spanking. Climategate 1 and Climategate 2 (and probably more releases to come) show what a sorry state your side of the debate is in. My experiences with ‘moderate’ Gerald North of Texas A&M, a distinguished climate scientist in his own right, gives me more pause to your black-white view of the nature of the climate alarm.

Today most media, even publicly-supported media, are pressured to balance every climate story with opinions of contrarians, climate change deniers, as if they had equal scientific credibility. Media are dependent on advertising revenue of the fossil fuel industry, and in some cases are owned by people with an interest in continuing business as usual.

The media has been very pro-alarmist in years and decades past, but, thankfully, the media reports both sides of the story now. When you keep crying wolf, and the wolf does not show up, expect more and more skepticism, not less. Don’t kill the messenger–look in the mirror and beware of group-think with your group.

Fossil fuel profiteers can readily find a few percent of the scientific community to serve as mouthpieces — all scientists practice skepticism, and it is not hard to find some who are out of their area of expertise, who may enjoy being in the public eye, and who are limited in scientific insight and analytic ability.

By making such statements, you are throwing your support behind the poor behavior re Climategate. Plenty of skeptics exist within the “consensus” community, but their skepticism is shouted down by other community members.

With influential self-appointed gatekeepers of both science and discourse ruling the roost, opposing evidence is suppressed. Despite the best intension of the gatekeepers, such practices slow the advancement of scientific understanding, not enhance it. Closed science is unreliable science.

Distinguished scientific bodies such as national science academies, using the scientific method, can readily separate charlatans and false interpretations from well-reasoned science.  Yet it seems that our governments and the public are not making much use of their authoritative scientific bodies.  Why is that?

As you alluded to earlier, a recent poll shows that “global warming” lies last on a list of 21 potential “top priorities” that American’s think that the Obama Administration ought to be focused on. It should be of little wonder to anyone paying attention that “economy” and “jobs” are at the top of the list.

Fossil-fuel supported global warming “charlatans” are not the reason why, but I can only think the situation would be worse if climate alarmists pushing for tighter controls(taxes) on traditional energy had more influence.

I believe that the answer, and the difficulty in communicating science to the public, is related to the corrosive influence of money in politics and to increased corporate influence on the media. It is a tragic and frustrating situation, because when all the dots in the climate-energy story are connected it becomes clear that a common-sense pathway exists that would solve energy needs, stimulate the economy, and protect the future of young people.

That, sir, is an argument for the separation of government and science, and the separation of economics and politics. How about free-market capitalism rather than political capitalism?

As I discussed in “Storms of My Grandchildren”, a gradually rising carbon fee should be collected from fossil fuel companies, a gradually rising carbon fee should be collected from fossil fuel companies, with the money distributed uniformly to legal residents.  This would stimulate the economy, making it more efficient by putting an honest price on fuels, incorporating their costs to society.

Are you assuming one world government to implement what you see as the solution to a ‘market failure’? Do you see the current political impasse for climate policy as a form of realistic ‘government failure’ that must be compared to ‘market failure’ before advocating climate taxation? 

Remember this:

“We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.”

- James Hansen, “The Threat to the Planet,” New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006.

Is it time for adaptation instead of mitigation by your own reckoning with time running out?

“Captains of industry” told me they would prefer such a course with knowledge of a steadily rising carbon price, which would stimulate innovations in efficiency and clean energies.

Captains of industry–or of crony capitalism?  Ken Lay? James Rogers? T. Boone Pickens? Jeffrey Immelt? Who else?

Despite the obstacles presented by the role of money in politics and by the huge advertising campaigns of the fossil fuel industry, the urgency of addressing the climate-energy issue demands that we do the best that we can to inform the public.

And what about the much larger budgets of anti-market, pro-statism environmental groups that just might not like more lives and better living? Can you question their motivations and results too? What if these same groups funded human needs or the arts and sciences instead of promoting climate alarmism?

One of the things we can do is try to expose how the public and our democracies are being manipulated for the benefit of those profiting from the public’s fossil fuel addiction.

History, anyone? Can you take the time to appreciate how the world’s “fossil fuel addiction” enabled the industrial revolution to allow the quality and quantity of human life to reach undreamt levels?

What is your real agenda if it is not affordable, reliable energy for the masses to tame nature and live better lives? And might you have your own addiction … to yourself as Scientist-King?

For that purpose I provided the witness statement below in support of an effort to reveal the name of the seed funder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) in the UK. GWPF is “successful” in casting doubt on the reality and significance of human-made climate change.

The newsletters of Benny Peiser, Director of GWPF, can be quite entertaining and sometimes include useful references.  He pings the impracticality and costliness of an energy approach that relies excessively on renewable energies.  But ultimately his purpose seems to be to persuade the public that climate science is flawed.

I don’t know if GWPF is supported by the fossil fuel industry, but it seems to me that the public has the right to know.  Ultimately, I hope and believe, the public will be able to appreciate how our democracies are being twisted by people with money for their own purposes.  But that requires freedom of information.

If your agenda is supported by wind or solar companies, or by anti-growth neo-Malthusian monied foundations, would that be just as bad?

And remember Enron. Enron was the leading U.S. company behind climate alarmism. Was this a good thing–or maybe not?

Finally, does a business have a right to fight against government coercion that interferes with its profitability, particularly when the supposed bad is carbon dioxide?

One final thought, Sir. Alarms in the mission of restricting economic and personal freedom deserve critical scrutiny–please don’t kill the messenger.

(1) Previous posts on James Hansen at MasterResource can be found here.

But notice that the narrative is optimal to two generations of media members steeped in “green” ideology: an innocent prodigy, influenced by the beauty and wisdom of nature, imposes natural order on brute technology to prove the viability of green energy. And so those media members, lacking any particular expertise on solar panels, ran with it.

Aidan Dwyer would never have received the same acclaim had he, say, conducted an experiment in his family’s garage leading him to claim the discovery of a new chemical agent for fracking. Can anyone imagine that the most prominent natural history museum in the country would then give him an award and the media would trumpet the arrival of a budding genius in the field of energy research? Of course not.

This episode is important because it shows, in microcosm, how much of what passes for common knowledge comes to be. From the vast well of concrete events and ideas in science and technology, certain ones are picked up and amplified while others are discarded by the network of influencers and disseminators—from government bureaucrats awarding the grants that academic science lives on, to the mainstream media publishing what it regards as the most important findings.

The vast, vast majority of the network is by necessity non-expert on any given topic. In an advanced, division-of-labor society, there is a division of scientific expertise. That is a good thing, as it enables a staggering total of knowledge to be discovered and applied throughout society. But there is an ever-present hazard of loud or numerous non-experts promoting views as certainties because those views fit their political ideologies.

Case 2: Michael Mann’s ”Hockey Stick”

And that is exactly what has happened with global warming. For example, when we hear of vast numbers of scientists endorsing Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph—the rhetorical star of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”—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 these have been 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.

From the perspective of those among the green-leaning media who actually are equipped by this point to verify reports of serious flaws in Mann’s approach, why exert all that effort with the hope of merely confirming what is already an ideological pillar, when a positive result would be superfluous and a negative one would be, at best, ominously confusing? This attitude is in fact embraced by climatologists at the highest levels.

After a critic asked renowned climatologist Phil Jones to release the raw data from which he has generated one of the primary historical records of global temperature, Jones’s famous response was “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

It is now generally acknowledged that Michael Mann’s original claims about a precipitous acceleration in global warming around the advent of industrialization were founded on a broken methodology. As shown originally by two Canadian researchers, and verified by a U.S. Senate-appointed expert panel of independent statisticians, the technique indicates precipitous warming, whether fed with actual climate data or with simulated data designed to lack any underlying trend at all.

Yet it was not until five years after Mann’s original publication—and after the hockey stick graph was immortalized by the ostensible cream of international climate expertise at the IPCC—that the broken parts under its hood were first identified in a scientific journal. And this was accomplished not by any of Mann’s colleagues at Penn State, nor any of his many co-authors, peer-reviewers, or IPCC editors. It was accomplished by a mathematically savvy mining consultant, Steve McIntyre, and an economist, Ross McKitrick, who both took it up essentially as a hobby, receiving not one of the billions of dollars in government climatology funding funneled to academic researchers.

The same basic mechanism that made Aidan Dwyer a star has, on a different level, made Michael Mann a star. The primary difference is the level of technical sophistication—a level in the latter case just high enough to be dangerous in a realm where even expert statisticians (which climatologists are not) have to be on guard against inconspicuous but critical errors.

Enthralling your average climatologist requires something subtler than the mathematics of branch growth patterns, something more like Michael Mann’s novel statistical technique to extract imperceptible trends from a hodgepodge of tree ring and ice core measurements that seem to imply a dangerous acceleration in warming circa 1900 (the “hockey stick” graph), hence an ideologically convenient fatal flaw in industrial capitalism.

Note that this is especially dangerous in a field such as climatology, where there are zero experts who can accurately predict how various important but poorly understood factors will come together to drive the climate. This is a field ripe for ideological grant-givers to make superstars out of intellectually immodest mediocrities.

And just as Aidan Dwyer’s celebrity carries on despite clear technical refutation, so the global warming movement carries on despite the hockey stick having been split asunder by clear proof of the inherent hockey-stick bias in Mann’s statistical technique.

Disseminating Good Science

None of this implies any cognitive determinism for climatologists or pop-science consumers sharing a common world-view. Each one is free to think for himself, to gather new data perhaps through alternative networks, and to assess the totality of evidence available to him. But such tasks require an effort whose mark many want to display without going to the trouble of exerting it, as is demonstrably the case with the denizens of the global warming movement. So arises the wide-spread belief that we’re facing a climate crisis, that the “green” technology is out there to replace fossil fuels, and that it’s just a matter of getting the right set of bright young kids working in the right direction.

To some extent the intellectual division of labor will always mean that there is no guarantee against large-scale, ideologically driven mistakes gaining wide currency. However this is especially probable in the present, monolithic system of government-funded basic research, where bureaucrats carelessly appropriate money they didn’t earn on projects whose benefits they won’t receive, inspired by ideology-laden fads whose underlying accuracy they are not particularly concerned with.

The elimination of the profit-motive does not banish individuals’ pursuit of their own interests; it redirects that pursuit away from honest value creation and into a distorted, unspoken realm of indirect benefits and cynical power bartering among appropriators whose one common goal is the expansion of their appropriation stream.

What we need is to restore the profit-motive in a system of free individuals, pursuing their own goals openly with their own wealth. It is said that such a system will stifle visionary thinkers whose ideas are too long-range to make a quick buck. But this is just a smokescreen obscuring what profit-and-loss in a system of well-defined property rights—profits whose range is much longer than the next election—are uniquely capable of factoring into such investment decisions: the inescapable trade-off between the revolutionary power of basic research and the probability of concrete benefits flowing from it.

Large Stakes

What’s at stake is the lives of billions of people in the present and future. Their lives depend on access to industrial technology that scientifically illiterate politicians around the world are subjecting to the ransom of their regulations and controls. Ransom letters are delivered to us daily in the op-eds, the articles, the talking heads educating us about thousands of experts that have all verified the coming of an apocalypse against which our only savior, conveniently, is more climatology research funding and more concentrated political power.

—————————-

Eric Dennis, who hold a PhD in physics from UC Santa Barbara, is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Industrial Progress. For related posts, see “Go Industrial, Not ‘Green’” by Alex Epstein (Parts 1 and 2).

“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:

Climategate Etc.

Pat Michaels is rightfully incensed over emails from Tom Wigley, including this snippet:

“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, PhD needs re-assessing?”

Wigley is big on reputation–I supposedly damaged his back when I was at Enron. My MasterResource post of February 6, 2009, on L’affaire Wigley told this story (reproduced below).

I had a spat back in 1999 with Dr. Tom (T.M.) Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

As director of public policy analysis at Enron, I had engaged about a dozen climate scientists to try to ferret out the middle ground between the “alarmists” and the “skeptics.” I had great cooperation from both sides. The alarmists liked me because of Enron’s “progressive” views; the skeptics liked me because of my affiliation with Cato and other free-market groups.

Dr. Wigley was the most alarmist of the bunch that I engaged. He was quite unimpressed with my arguments that the enhanced greenhouse effect was not the peril oft-described.  Before long he likened me to a “terrier yapping and snapping around my feet.” 

So, after warning him about wanting a little peer review (yes, I have that email still), I distributed our exchange to the scientists and asked them for a grade: How well did I do against Tom?

Shortly thereafter, Enron chairman Ken Lay received a a scathing communication from Dr. Wigley dated August 26, 1999. It complained about my “appalling behavior” in distributing our lengthy exchange. The letter read in part:

I would like to bring to your attention the behavior of one of your employees, Mr. Rob Bradley, which I consider to be highly unethical and deeply disturbing to me personally…. [U]sing his Enron email address … he appears to be acting as a representative of Enron…. From my knowledge of your company’s open-minded, balanced, and, indeed, innovative stance on this issue, I judge Mr. Bradley as being singularly misrepresentative of the Enron position.

Indeed, ex-Greenpeace official Jeremy Leggett identified Enron as “the company most responsible for sparking off the greenhouse civil war in the hydrocarbon business” (The Carbon War, Penguin, 1999, p. 204).

The letter, which hinted at legal action, closed:

I consider this to be an extremely serious matter. Mr. Bradley is acting like a “loose cannon,” and he may further damage both my personal and your company’s reputation if he continues in this way. It would not be adequate for Mr. Bradley simply to issue an apology. The damage has been done, and it cannot be redressed by mere words.

Well, how does the story end? I showed Lay a copy of the email I wrote Tom telling him of the peer review to come. I detailed this in a memo, from which Lay responded.

I also shared some examples of Wigley’s less-than-stellar reputation among his peers. One comment was from Dr. Jerry North, head of the Meteorology Department at Texas A&M, who had this to say about Wigley in a different context:

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).”

The last of it was when I sent Dr. Wigley an email on September 24, 1999, telling him I was sorry about his distress, adding,

I am most surprised about your concern over your reputation from the distribution. I assumed you were happy with your answers to my questions–at least your criticisms of my positions (and me personally) had a very confident and emphatic tone…. As for me, I am still happy with my analysis and opinions ….

I ended the communication by asking him some more hard questions about climate alarmism and warned:

But as before, expect peer review given that I am a nonspecialist working with many other scientists whom I also respect.

I never received a response, so that was the end of L’affaire Wigley.

There are a number of other Wigley emails that are part of Climategate 2.0, but add this to the historical record.

APPENDIX: Michaels’s Open Letter to Roger Wakimoto (NCAR)

To: Dr. Roger Wakimoto, Director, National Center for Atmospheric Research: Boulder, Colorado

Roger, you are the head of what is perhaps the most prestigious atmospheric science laboratory on the planet, and, as such, I presume that you will always go the extra mile to protect the reputation of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and its related University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR).

I’m sure you have seen and discussed with your staff many of the “Climategate” emails released first in November, 2009, and then more recently, earlier this month.

Everyone agrees that the tone and content of many of them is a bit shrill and occasionally intolerant (kind of like University faculty meetings), but there is one repeating thread, by one of your most prestigious employees, Dr. Tom Wigley, that is far beyond the pale of most academic backbiting.

The revoking of my doctorate, the clear objective of Tom’s email, is the professional equivalent of the death penalty. I think it needs to be brought to your attention, because the basic premise underlying his machinations is patently and completely false. Dr Wigley is known as a careful scientist, but he certainly was careless here.

The global circulation of this email has caused unknown damage to my reputation. Also, please note that all communications from Dr. Wigley to his colleagues on this matter were on the NCAR/UCAR server.

The relevant email was sent to Rick Piltz, a UCAR employee at the time, and copied to Michael Mann, Pennsylvania State University, James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Benjamin Santer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the late Steven Schneider, Stanford University, and several other very prominent climate scientists. The influence of these individuals is manifest and evidence of a very serious attempt to destroy my credential.

What Dr. Wigley wrote to this group of individuals was:

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, PhD needs re-assessing?

As I said, revoking the doctorate of a scientist is the equivalent of imposing a professional death penalty. Unfortunately, Wigley’s rationale for organizing this effort was based upon a pure fabrication.

Wigley’s call for a “re-assessing” of my dissertation stems from his contention that I either misled my academic committee or my committee was guilty of professional malfeasance, both very serious charges. (His email is reproduced in its entirety at the end of this note.)

My 1979 dissertation was a model relating interannual and interseasonal variations in the shape of the atmosphere, as reflected by the surface barometric pressure field, to variations crop yields across the United States.

In this type of model, one usually factors out the technological component of crop yields (which, incidentally, explains much more variation than any climate component) and then models the remaining variation in yield with the climate factor, in order to “isolate” the climate component. The explained variance of this residual yield by climate is generally about 50%, which is very close to the average I found for corn, soybeans, and winter wheat.

Wigley said in his email that I claimed to have explained 95% of the variation in crop yield, which he said “would have been a remarkable results” [sic]. In fact, there is no such statement, nor anything related to that, in my dissertation. He went on to state that I did this by simultaneously modelling the technological, spatial and climate components of agricultural yield, instead of separating out technological components first.

Despite his claimed familiarity with my dissertation, I did no such thing. Table 2, beginning on page 154 of the dissertation, is labelled “DETRENDING FUNCTIONS”, and gives the equations that were used to remove the technological component. All subsequent analyses were on the detrended data.

Wigley then alleged that either I lied to my examination committee, or that they were buffoons. It is worth noting that the committee included the famously tough Reid Bryson, father of the modern notion that human beings could change the climate.

“Apparently, none of Michaels’ thesis examiners noticed this. We are left with wondering whether this was deliberate misrepresentation by Michaels, or whether it was simply ignorance.”

This came to my attention with the release of the first East Anglia emails in November, 2009. This email and other, new statements by him about my dissertation have surfaced with the recent release of additional emails, and his letter about my dissertation is again being circulated around the web.

I think you will agree that it is time for Dr. Wigley to state that his attempt to generate a movement to remove my doctorate was based upon clear errors on his part, errors that he should have known about, and yet he has let the record stand for over two years. What he “discovered years ago” was certainly not in my dissertation.

Roger, I don’t think you would put up with this, and I think Wigley must be compelled to come forth. Remember that he did this on NCAR’s (and the taxpayer’s) dime.

Thank you very much.

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.

And of course there is John Holdren, now science advisor to President Obama, who graciously rejoined as follows when I asked him to critically review my essay evaluating his 2003 criticism of Bjorn Lomborg, “The Heated Energy Debate.”  Holdren responded:

What exactly entitles you to the evidently self-applied label of ‘energy expert’?  …. You are of course entitled to (verbally) attack me in any legal way you like, but please don’t then pretend in personal notes to me that we are colleagues, each doing our best to get at the truth…. [Y]ou appear to be … lacking both discernible qualifications in the real world and the ability to tell a good argument from a bad one. I want nothing further to do with you.

A strange intellectual dude.

Remember Julian Simon

Today’s Climategate is predictable with some of the same players at work–and many new ones as well. Remember how Paul R. Ehrlich treated his intellectual rival Julian Simon? The Stanford University biologist refused to debate Simon or even meet him in person. He insulted Simon repeatedly in print. Ehrlich even scolded Science magazine for publishing Simon’s 1980 breakthrough essay “Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of Bad News,” with the words: “Could the editors have found someone to review Simon’s manuscript who had to take off this shoes to count to 20?” (quoted in Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource II, 1996, p. 612).

Here is the full story from chapter 11 of my Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy (pp. 272–73):

Science magazine in mid-1980 published an essay by Julian Simon that “raised the blood pressure of the scientific community a good twenty points,” one Malthusian environmentalist recalled. “Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of False Bad News” presented official statistics to refute high-profile media scare stories. In so doing, Simon challenged the interrelated notions of a fixed supply of land, fixed and depleting resources, a growing inadequacy of food supply, an inverse relationship between population and progress, and a worsening environment.

Simon’s cherry-on-top was answering, Why do we hear phony bad news? Part of his explanation was “bad news sells books, newspapers, and magazines: good news is not half so interesting.” He asked, “Is it a wonder that there are lots of bad-news best-sellers warning about pollution, population growth, and natural-resource depletion but none telling us the facts about improvement?”

The provocative essay, published on the home turf of the neo-Malthusians, put Simon’s ideas in play. Princeton University Press rushed ahead to publish what became Simon’s signature book, The Ultimate Resource. The sustainability debate was finally joined.

A flood of dissent filled the offices of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in response to Simon’s cannon shot. Paul Ehrlich asked: “Could the editors have found someone to review Simon’s manuscript who had to take off his shoes to count to 20?” Paul and Anne Ehrlich, John Holdren, and John Harte in a reply challenged Simon’s contention that oil was not becoming permanently scarcer. “The fact is that OPEC’s price hikes and the ‘improved market power’ of coal and uranium both reflected a new reality based on emerging scarcity of oil and natural gas.” Record oil prices gave at least superficial credence to their depletionism, but Simon, like M.A. Adelman, would soon have the upper hand.

Simon designed The Ultimate Resource (1981) to irresistibly engage his opponents. Using The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith as his model, Simon sought to write a popular book that would influence academia via the general public. Thus Simon turned over his trump cards in the introduction.

Hold your hat—our supplies of natural resources are not finite in any economic sense…. If the past is any guide, natural resources will progressively become less scarce, and less costly, and will constitute a smaller proportion of our expenses in future years. And population growth is likely to have a long-run beneficial impact on the natural-resource environment.

Energy. Grab your hat again—the long-run future of our energy supply is at least as bright as that of other natural resources, though political maneuvering can temporarily boost prices from time to time. Finiteness is no problem here either. And the long-run impact of additional people is likely to speed the development of a cheap energy supply that is almost inexhaustible.

Twenty-three chapters and thousands of data points later, his book ended: “The ultimate resource is people—skilled, spirited, and hopeful people who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit, and so, inevitably, for the benefit of us all.” This was Erich Zimmermann resurrected—but backed by a much richer empirical record within a wider framework. It was Zimmermann who had written decades earlier, “Freedom and wisdom, the fruits of knowledge, are the fountainhead of resources.” A science of expansionism, and the integration of “depletable resources” in the corpus of general economics, was at hand.

The Ultimate Resource, condensing and building upon Simon’s 1977 book, The Economics of Population Growth, offered a new way to view the world. Science historian Thomas Kuhn, two decades before, had explained the whirlwind that Simon now found himself in. In Kuhnian terms, Simon’s time-series data revealed a gaping anomaly in an entrenched neo-Malthusian paradigm. The process of normal science had now to give way to extraordinary science, a scientific revolution whereby a new gestalt came forth. Not surprisingly, the establishment, viewing the world in a preformed and relatively inflexible box, was intolerant of the new theory.

Paradigm shifts, Kuhn explained, overturn the established order. Emotions run high. The process begins with scientists … behav[ing] differently and continues with pronounced professional insecurity where years and perhaps lifetimes of work and writing are put at risk. If the paradigm is powerful and useful, with open questions answered, it prevails until only a few elderly hold-outs remain.

Simon’s shift of vision was not verifiable as in the laboratory sciences, where experimentation under controlled conditions can objectively settle matters. While taking into account physical laws, social science issues such as the costs and benefits of population growth offered plenty of wiggle room for scientists to interpret the data differently or hold out for new data. Julian Simon would practically have to go it alone until economists—a few, more, then many—joined him against an entrenched core of largely environmental scientists wed to Malthusian notions.

Is there a paradigm crisis with exaggerated climate science? Is this why, in Kuhnian terms, so many–far too many–scientists are behaving strangely and badly?

——————–

This post is slightly revised from December 8, 2009, given the respark of Climategate with the new release of emails.

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!

Mad Dog Critics

The energy/climate statists have realized that they have another Bjorn Lomborg on their hands. And so there are hit-and-run attacks against Bryce. One ploy is to seize upon small factual or interpretive matters and insinuate that Bryce is wrong about the big picture. The other is grotesque ad hominem argumentation.

“The author of the op-ed is climate change denier and long time fossil fuel cheerleader Robert Bryce,” huffs Matt Wasson in the Huffington Post. Joe Romm at Climate Progress disses Bryce as being bought-and-paid for, a part of the vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

Media Matters, a Left advocacy group, dismisses Bryce as follows:

Media outlets have turned to the Manhattan Institute’s Robert Bryce at least 39 times this year to comment on energy issues without disclosing that the Manhattan Institute is partly funded by oil interests. Bryce, who often promotes fossil fuels while disparaging renewable energy, has been criticized for making misleading claims.

The good news about the above bad news is that the sensible middle is turned off by such unscholarly invective. And Romm et al. are increasingly mad at everyone, and using such terms as “these new Dark Ages“  and put-head-in-vice to vent their frustration and even hate.

Being at war with reality where the truth comes out and the public and media is catching on is, indeed, to use Romm’s term, “head exploding“!

Bryce’s Latest: Deactivate on Climate

Bryce really got under the skin of the Hate Brigade Alarmists with his op-ed, “Five Truths About Climate Change,” published in the Wall Street Journal, last month. Bryce argued:

1) The carbon taxers/limiters have lost…. During the same decade that Mr. Gore and the IPCC dominated the environmental debate, global carbon-dioxide emissions rose by 28.5%.

2) Regardless of whether it’s getting hotter or colder—or both—we are going to need to produce a lot more energy in order to remain productive and comfortable.

3) The carbon-dioxide issue is not about the United States anymore…. China’s emissions jumped by 123% over the past decade and now exceed those of the U.S. by more than two billion tons per year.

4) We have to get better—and we are—at turning energy into useful power….

5) The science is not settled, not by a long shot….

Bryce’s conclusion: “It’s time to move the debate past the dogmatic view that carbon dioxide is evil and toward a world view that accepts the need for energy that is cheap, abundant and reliable.”

This op-ed is very important, for the physics of greenhouse-gas forcing point to an ever decreasing effect of carbon-based energy on global climate at any level of climate sensitivity. Adaptation, not mitigation, is the future.

Conclusion

Robert Bryce is a game changer who has shown the intellectual fortitude and courage to change his mind. He has journeyed from energy hyperbole and the politically correct to espousing energy reality with facts, figures, and logic.

Just as the future belongs to the energy efficient (energy dense!), the future belongs to the energy realists whose heroic effort will stand the test of time.

“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.

This debate, which harks back to W. S. Jevons, revolves around basic energy physics. The case for the opposition is that dense is less, and less is more.

Fossil Fuel Sustainability

Renewables fail as substitutes for fossil fuels with electricity and for transportation (ethanol, anyone?). As such, the premise of the House Proposition becomes the real debating point.

Simply put, we cannot “wean the world off fossil fuels” without compromising the global economy and risking mass energy poverty—and worse. Nor is there the need to, thankfully.

Oil, gas, and coal have become more sustainable over time, not less. The limits-to-growth argument has been refuted, as current shale resource revolution has pushed “peak oil” and “peak gas” concerns into a distant era when renewable energy technologies might take entirely new forms. Meanwhile, there has been a multi-decade correlation between rising energy usage and improving air/water quality. Hail to Julian Simon’s ultimate resource of human ingenuity applied to the master resourceof energy.

As discussed in my prior rebuttal, real-world warming from increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHG) has significantly lagged model-predicted warming. The microphysics of climate (which is beyond the capability of models to incorporate) may well hold the secret of why the climate seems to be less sensitive to GHG forcing than computed by model equations.

Anthropogenic warming at or below the lower end of the (disputed) IPCC range reverses the sign of the carbon dioxide (CO₂) externality from negative to positive, based on the cost/benefit analysis of Robert Mendelsohn and other climate economists (Bradley, 2003: 86–90). A moderately warmer and wetter world, natural or man-made, is arguably a better world. And an estimated fifty-five benefits of enriched atmospheric CO₂must be considered alongside the negative external effects of the enhanced greenhouse effect.

The logarithmic (less than linear) relationship between GHG forcing and global climate means that such emissions have less and less of a warming effect over time at any level of sensitivity. This is both a reason for market adaptation rather than not forced mitigation in the short run, and a reason to discount fears of distant fossil-fuel emissions.

Only by assuming anthropogenic climate disruption—and only by postulating away all analytic failure and government failure in addressing the alleged market failure—can a case be made for government intervention. Without those assumptions, present costs are too high and the future benefits (properly discounted) are too low. Good public-policy intentions are not enough (think Enron then and Solyndranow).

Higher quality, less expensive energy enhances living and avoids unnecessary money (resources) going to wind/solar crony capitalists. This fossil-fuel dividend, if you will, enables a variety of lifestyle enhancements, including those for better health. Wealth is health, and human health should be at the core of environmentalism.

Conclusion

Consumers and taxpayers (not to mention grassroot environmentalists revolting against the heavy footprint of renewable-energy infrastructure) are increasingly uniting against the political/intellectual/business elite responsible for the (artificial) wind/solar industrial boom. Energy sustainability revolves around availability, affordability, and reliability for the masses, and particularly the estimated 1.3 billion people without modern forms of energy. Defined in this way, the major threat to energy sustainability is the statism that makes energy scarcer, less reliable, and/or more expensive. Subsidies to energy losers should be eliminated.[1]

Surrendering personal and economic freedom to a (highly fallible) intellectual/political/business elite is a final reason to reject both the House Proposition and the premise of the House Proposition.

The best energy future belongs to the efficient and to the free.

[1] The International Energy Agency’s estimate of fossil-fuel subsidies—$409 billion in 2010—are mainly developing countries providing below-cost fuel to their citizens. Such welfare transfers can and should be eliminated along with industry-enabling forms of energy subsidies.

[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.”

The Real Debate

Here’s the situation. Thousands of brilliant scientists—physicists and chemists (atmospheric, solar, cosmic, and more specialists), geologists, meteorologists, climatologists, statisticians, economists, and more have been debating for about a quarter of a century whether the warming all agreed had occurred since the end of the Little Ice Age (roughly the mid-nineteenth century) was largely natural or largely manmade.

• They’ve been debating how much of that warming should be attributed to rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
• They’ve been debating “climate sensitivity”—how much global average temperature will rise, after feedbacks, in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration, and whether that amount of warming will be, on balance, beneficial or harmful to humanity and the rest of life on Earth.
• They’ve been debating the rate at which the world’s economy would grow in the future, and how much of the energy used to spur that growth would come from CO2-emitting sources, and how much warming would come from that growth.
• They’ve been debating whether more money and lives would be saved than lost by trying to reduce that warming by shifting from carbon-based to non-carbon-based energy sources.
• They’ve even been debating the nature of scientific inquiry itself—the role of modeling versus that of empirical observation, and the growth (lauded by some, condemned by others) of post-normal science.

And then, voila! In the midst of all that debate, over all those different questions that, together, constitute the debate over CAGW, the vaunted University of California, Berkeley, Professor Richard A. Muller stands up and says, “Global warming is real. End of debate.”

And people—I’ll list them again: the public, the press, and the true-believer scientific community—take him seriously!

Nothing heretofore in the CAGW debate has been more discouraging to advocates of reason than this. Forget about all the flaws inherent in BEST’s methodology, flaws pointed out by a large number of CAGW skeptics. Forget about the fact that Muller announced BEST’s results before the papers issuing from it went through peer review—a strategy environmental journalists by now should recognize for the stunt it is.

Forget about those things. The most stunning and disheartening thing is the demonstration this gives of the widespread incapacity to recognize when someone has conveniently changed the subject and then proclaimed victory.

Conclusion

Ignoratio elenchi. Okay, so it’s a Latin term. Get over it. Comprehend it, make it a normal part of your vocabulary, and be on guard for it.

And if, despite knowing that BEST is simply irrelevant to the CAGW debate, you’re still interested in its detailed errors (warming is a hard thing to quantify), see critiques by–among others–Roger Pielke Sr., Anthony Watts (here and here), William Briggs (here and here), Douglas Keenan, Luboš Motl, and Richard Lindzen and David Douglass.

——

E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D. is the founder and national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance.

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?

Q4: How will those predicted changes affect people in the future?

Q5: What should we do today in response to Q1–Q4?

Question 1: A Warmer World?

Muller and others have addressed Q1, which is the stuff of hard data, adjusting it for various discrepancies, and plotting it out. That’s real hard-science, and I agree, that’s about as real as we can hope to get with scientific thinking.

Still, expect debate over a number of points of the analysis from different quarters, including Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit. After all, the magnitude of actual/factual warming is a theory-driver about the sensitivity of greenhouse-gas forcing on climate.

For questions 2 through 5, however, you depart the realm of hard science for the Assumption Zone.

Question 2: Anthropogenic Warming

So, for question 2, you have to start making assumptions about how the climate works, and what is “natural,” and by comparing that to observations, estimate how much change you can attribute to human activity. You then need more assumptions and estimates to tell you which human activity contributes to the observed change, and how strongly.

These are not simple questions, as the drivers of the climate are many, and some of those are non-linear. Skepticism on attribution of change is reasonable.

Question 3: Future Climate Change

Question 3 is even tougher than question 2, as making projections of the future requires highly advanced computer modeling. Current computer models have very little skill at predicting future states of the climate even in the big picture, much less at regional levels and over discrete actionable time periods of say, a decade at a time.

And, as you’re trying to predict future greenhouse gas emissions, you have to start throwing economic assumptions into the models on top of the physical assumptions you threw in for question 2. I’d say skepticism at this level is obligatory if anyone has paid attention to the limitations of computer models in recent years.

Question 4: Good or Bad Consequences?

Question 4, not surprisingly, entails yet more assumptions about how humans will react to future changes in the climate at both global and regional levels. It also entails assumptions about human technological development, economic activity, the population level, advances in medicine, agriculture, transportation, and so on.

I’d say a lack of skepticism at this level is actually a sign of irrational belief in the ability to predict what can’t be predicted.

Question 5: Policy Choices

And with question 5, you inject a bunch of values on top of your assumptions, since the question of “what do do” has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with values: how much do I save for retirement, versus putting toward my car loan today? How much do I put aside for my kid’s college education versus buying them a new baseball glove today?

These are not science questions at all.

Conclusion

Climate activists would like to conflate five questions that are partly hard science, partly soft-science, and entirely non-scientific and suggest that they all point to one answer: the immediate reordering of civilization based on carbon controls. This may let them defame anyone who disagrees with them as a “denier” of scientific reasoning, but it is an inaccurate characterization of the arguments over climate change.

Questions 2, 3, 4, and 5 anyone?

[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:

Obviously our wealth, improved living conditions, and improved medical technology make the impact of extreme weather events less dangerous than the 1920s. We live in a different world than then.

Right, which means that, with respect to extreme weather, despite several decades of global warming, the world is becoming a safer place. There is no crisis, no planetary emergency. As Indur Goklany explains, moreover, these tremendous gains in safety are not in spite of mankind’s reliance on carbon-emitting fossil fuels, but in large measure because of it.

• Historically, drought was the deadliest extreme weather event. Deaths from drought are lower today than ever before in history because food production is higher. Fossil fuels are used to power farm machinery and produce fertilizers and pesticides. The CO2 aerial fertilization effect further boosts farm yields. Fossil fuels enable food to be transported affordably over long distances from food surplus areas to food deficit areas.
• Improvements in disaster preparedness and early warning systems also make us safer than earlier generations. And, as Goklany notes, the success of such capabilities “hinges on the availability of fossil fuels to move people, food, medicine and critical humanitarian supplies before and after events strike.”
• Finally, economic development creates surpluses enabling richer nations or communities to come to the aid of poorer nations or communities after a natural disaster strikes. Like it or not, fossil fuels have played, and continue to play, a central role in economic development.

The Day After Tomorrow?

Appell then says the historic decline in weather-related mortality risk is beside the point, because:

The real problems of global warming and other climate change lie in the future, which we are only now beginning to glimpse.

Well, as just noted, we are not glimpsing an impending crisis in mortality data related to extreme weather. As also mentioned in my post, heat-related mortality has been going down, there has been no long-term increase in properly adjusted hurricane-related economic damages, and the rate of sea-level rise has not changed much over the past 80 years.

How likely is it that global warming will become a “planetary emergency” in future decades? All the relevant technical disciplines that have brought down deaths and death rates — agriculture, medicine, communications, transport, weather forecasting, emergency response, architecture and engineering — are bound to keep improving. Assuming, of course, that politicians don’t sabotage the wealth creation that supports such advances.

Appell says “No reasonable person, scientist or otherwise, expects anyone to decrease their standard of living to solve global warming.” Well then, not all global warming advocates are “reasonable” when it comes to the sacrifices they think Americans should make to “save the planet.” Al Gore and others demand that we “repower America” with “zero-carbon” energy technologies “in 10 years.” I’m not making this up.

Less radical versions of the de-carbonization agenda (Waxman-Markey, Obama’s Clean Energy Standard, Kyoto-Copenhagen) would be less destructive. Nonetheless, those policies would place substantial burdens on our ailing economy, impeding progress to a better world.

Hobgoblins

Appell says that more CO2 emissions will undoubtedly lead to “more changes” — a requirement of “simple physics.” Yes, but whether those turn out to be more harmful to human health and welfare than the regulatory burdens required to avert them cannot be deduced from “simple physics.”

Only a few years ago, Al Gore issued a dire warning about “moulins” (vertical water tunnels) on the Greenland ice sheet. By lubricating the ice sheet, he claimed, moulins would accelerate its breakup and slide into the sea, potentially raising sea levels as much as 10 feet within our children’s lifetime if not ours. Gore’s scenario was implausible even then, and has only become more so in light of subsequent research (see here and here).

Now, take away the prospect of sudden, multi-meter sea-level rise, and the biggest, baddest part of the “planetary emergency” goes poof! In assessing the risks of climate change, “simple physics” is not enough.

Carbon Taxes without Tears?

Appell’s concluding comment is conflicted. On the one hand, he says: “Progress requires more energy use, not less.” But then he calls for a “carbon tax.” Since most of our energy (about 85%) comes from carbon-based fuels, how is energy production going increase under a carbon tax? And, recalling how “unreasonable” it is to expect people to support reductions in their standard of living, how could a carbon tax not penalize households and firms that buy coal- or gas-fired electricity, home heating oil, natural gas, gasoline, or any of the thousands of goods and services made or delivered with fossil energy?

In addition, as a political matter, how likely is it that if Congress enacts a carbon tax, Sierra Club will stop litigating against coal power plants and NRDC will stop campaigning against the Keystone XL Pipeline? In all likelihood, a carbon tax would just embolden opponents of affordable energy to ratchet up their demands.

Appell thinks it’s possible to tax carbon without harming the economy because Congress could enact offsetting reductions in income taxes. I’m all for cutting taxes. But seriously, Obama viewed cap-and-trade as a means of augmenting income tax revenues, not replacing them (see here). In the current fiscal crisis, Democrats from Obama on down are pushing for “revenue enhancements.” In today’s political climate, there is zero constituency for a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

And no, this does not mean that in an ideal world I would favor substituting carbon taxes for income taxes. That would still be using the tax code as a tool of social engineering or industrial policy rather than for its proper purpose, which is to raise revenue. In my ideal world, we’d replace the income tax with a broad-based consumption tax. No household would ever again have to fear an IRS audit. People would pay taxes only on a ‘voluntary’ basis — when they choose to buy goods and services. Everybody’s tax rate would be the same, and it would be visible in every sales receipt. That way everybody would have the same incentive to keep it low. But I digress.

Green Tech Boondoggles

As for ‘clean tech’ subsidies, which Appell advocates along with carbon taxes, they are great at enriching special interests, poor at creating wealth. Obama once hailed Spain’s renewable energy subsidies as a model for the USA. Spain has committed to spend more than $100 billion on alternative energy subsidies. This turned out to be an unsustainable boondoggle. Each renewable energy job cost the Spanish taxpayer between $752,000 and $800,000, destroying 2.2 jobs for every job created.

Ah, but we can learn from Europe’s mistakes; we can do it better! Nope. Since July, three large U.S. solar firms filed for Chapter 11, including Obama’s clean-tech poster child, Solyndra, leaving 1,100 people out of work and taxpayers liable for $535 million in federal loans. Obama had so much egg on his face he did not even mention “green jobs” or “energy” in his Labor Day jobs speech.

Conclusion

The tautology that greenhouse gas emissions have a greenhouse effect does not even begin to “settle” the core scientific issue in the global warming debate, namely, the issue of climate sensitivity. The notion that one must question or reject a human contribution to global warming to challenge climate scaremongering, or to oppose regulatory assaults on affordable energy, is false. It is a rhetorical trick that activists like Al Gore use to distract the public from the real issues in the climate science and climate policy debates.

That is my thesis. David Appell has not refuted it.

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.

Several weeks after we submitted our contribution (included as PNASsubmission.pdf) we received the following email.

To: rlindzen@mit.edu
Subject: PNAS: 2010-15738 (On the observational determination of cl…)
Cc: ekavanagh@nas.edu
From: mpiotrowski@nas.edu
X-Brightmail-Tracker: AAAAAQCq+Kk=

MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=”_———-=_129546032497941″
X-Mailer: MIME::Lite 3.027 (F2.74; T1.28; A2.05; B3.07; Q3.07)
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2011 13:05:24 -0500
Message-Id: <44129546032491@ejpweb15>

Full Email Recipient List:
TO: rlindzen@mit.edu
CC: ekavanagh@nas.edu

Dear Dr. Lindzen,

I am contacting you regarding your contributed paper. Attached is a letter from Randy Schekman.

Sincerely,
May Piotrowski
Editorial Manager
PNAS

Attach1.pdf
Attach2.pdf

Attachment1.pdf is, as already noted, simply a statement of the policy of PNAS. The actual letter concerning our submission is Attachment2.pdf. This attachment begins with what we regard as a libelous description of our choice of reviewers. Will Happer, though a physicist, was in charge of research at DOE including pioneering climate research. Moreover, he has, in fact, published professionally on atmospheric turbulence. He is also a member of the NAS. M.-D. Chou and I have not collaborated in over 5 years, and Chou had absolutely nothing to do with the present manuscript. There then followed a list of other reviewers that we felt were all inappropriate.

Our response was the following. Attached was a letter to Schekman.

Dear Ms. Piotrowski,

I would like to contact Dr. Scheckman directly. His characterization of Drs. Happer and Chou is hardly accurate. My last collaboration with Dr. Chou was over 7 years ago, and he has had no connection with the present research. Dr. Happer, although not a climate scientist (as, for example, is also the case with Anderson), is deeply involved in general spectroscopic issues. Four of the suggested reviewers are well known proponents of global warming alarm, and I don’t think it likely that they would provide a fair assessment. An alternative reviewer with a long and neutral record in this field is Albert Arking (of Johns Hopkins) who would be far more suitable. Of those mentioned by Scheckman, Ramanathan is the most likely to be fair.

Best wishes,

Dick Lindzen

The actual letter, Lindzen-Schekman.pdf, is attached.

The following was the response.

From: “Piotrowski, May B.”
To: “‘Richard S. Lindzen’”
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2010 10:11:24 -0500
Subject: RE: PNAS: 2010-15738 (On the observational determination of cl…)

Dear Dr. Lindzen,

Thank you for your email, which has been forwarded to Randy Schekman.

Best,
May Piotrowski

There then followed another email from May.

From: “Piotrowski, May B.”
To: “‘Richard S. Lindzen’”
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2010 16:07:57 -0500
Subject: RE: PNAS: 2010-15738 (On the observational determination of cl…)

Dear Dr. Lindzen,

Randy has read your letter. We will seek the advice of one of the experts you approved.

Best,
May

I then received the following somewhat cryptic response from May.

From: “Piotrowski, May B.”
To: “‘Richard S. Lindzen’”
Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2010 09:24:22 -0500
Subject: RE: PNAS: 2010-15738 (On the observational determination of cl…)

Dear Dr. Lindzen,

We secured the services of one of the experts you approved, but that person suggested we also consult Drs. Bruce Wielicki or Dennis Hartmann to help evaluate the radiation budget data upon which he relies. Please let us know if you have specific concerns with us consulting either of these two experts.

Thanks very much for your time.

Best,
May

As best as I could determine, none of my suggested reviewers would have made such a recommendation. I can only speculate that Schekman considered Ramanathan as one of my suggested reviewers; I have not checked with Ramanathan. In any event, my response was the following.

Actually, yes. Both are outspoken public advocates of alarm, and Wielicki has gone so far as to retract results once they were shown to contradict alarm.

Dick

I followed this with the following recommendation.

Dear May,

Dr. Patrick Minnis, one of Wielicki’s collaborators at Langley, is agnostic on the issue, and would be a much better choice.

Best,

Dick

Apparently, Minnis was indeed asked to review the manuscript. We finally received a decision letter from Schekman (attached to the following email). There were 4 reviews. One was from Minnis. Another may have been by Ramanathan. The other two were from those recommended by the board.

To: rlindzen@mit.edu
Subject: PNAS: 2010-15738 (On the observational determination of cl…)
Cc: ekavanagh@nas.edu
From: mpiotrowski@nas.edu
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2011 13:05:24 -0500
Message-Id: <44129546032491@ejpweb15>

Dear Dr. Lindzen,

I am contacting you regarding your contributed paper. Attached is a letter from Randy Schekman.

Sincerely,
May Piotrowski
Editorial Manager
PNAS

Attach3.pdf

The attachment was a polite rejection of our paper. Included were the complete reviews. Although some of the points in the reviews were, in fact, addressed in our paper, we thought it advisable to respond to the reviews in detail, and to revise our paper in order to clarify matters. It was, however, clear, that the revised paper would no longer satisfy the space constraints of PNAS – especially since the reviewers made clear that important material should not be relegated to ‘supplementary material’.

Although Schekman’s rejection could be interpreted as mildly encouraging, our experience has been that any attempt to resubmit a revised paper simply leads to further delay culminating in re-rejection. Our final letter to Schekman (Letter_to_Schekman.pdf) is attached. As already noted, we chose to respond in detail to each review, and these responses are attached (Response.pdf). The revised paper (as well as the original version submitted to the PNAS: Lindzen-Choi-PNASSubmission.pdf) is also attached (Lindzen-Choi-APJAS.pdf). The final version is accepted (following review) by the Asian Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences.

If one reads the paper, one sees that it is hardly likely to represent the last word on the matter. One is working with data that is far from what one might wish for. Moreover, the complexity of the situation tends to defeat simple analyses. Nonetheless, certain things are clear: models are at great variance with observations, the simple regressions between outgoing radiation and surface temperature will severely misrepresent climate sensitivity, and the observations suggest negative rather than positive feedbacks.