The mass-production of sturdy, weather-proof buildings … the universal availability of heating and air conditioning … the ability to flee the most vicious storms through modern transportation … the protection from drought through modern irrigation … the protection from disease through modern sanitation–all of these have led to a 99 percent reduction in the number of climate-related deaths over the last century.

Given how obsessed America is about climate change (or some intellectuals/politicians want us to be), these facts should be well-known and incorporated into every discussion of industrial policy. Those who claim to care about a livable climate for the future should strive to understand the mechanisms by which industrial capitalism has already created the most livable climate in history.

If they did so, they would learn from such thinkers as Ayn Rand and Ludwig Von Mises how capitalism, by permitting only voluntary associations among men, unleashes the individual human mind–and that millions of such minds, free to associate and trade however they choose, will engage in stupendously intricate, collaborative planning for everything from how to make sure they can always get groceries to how to account for nearly any conceivable weather contingency.

Armed with an understanding of individual freedom and individual planning, the climate-concerned would suspect that any preventable problem in dealing with weather–such as widespread vulnerability to flooding–is caused by government interference in voluntary trade, such as taxpayer-financed flood insurance that encourages people to live in high-flooding areas.

Center for American Regress?

Unfortunately, an understanding of capitalism and climate is sorely lacking at the Center for America Progress, the hottest left-wing think-tank today. On its blog, ThinkProgress, the Center recently ran a piece by Christian Parenti entitled Climate Action Opponents Are Ensuring the Outcome They Claim to Oppose: Big Government.

A little translation is in order. From an individualistic perspective, “climate action” refers to the actions that free citizens take to make their climate as livable as possible–the kinds of actions that decreased climate vulnerability 99% in the last century.

But from the collectivist, statist perspective of CAP, “Climate Action” refers to dramatic caps on energy generated from hydrocarbons–the energy source that runs the industrial capitalist system that has increased our life expectancy from 30 to 80 years.

How will banning the vast majority of modern energy production help us oppose “Big Government”? Because otherwise we would face so many catastrophic storms, the article argues, that the government would necessarily become a disaster-recovery Leviathan.

After all, Mr. Parenti takes as given, government is the only entity that can adapt to storms: “To adapt to climate change will mean coming together on a large scale and mobilizing society’s full range of resources. In other words, Big Storms require Big Government.”

Big Storms Require Limited Government

In fact, the larger-scale a problem, the more freedom is essential. As economist George Reisman brilliantly explains in his landmark essay on global warming economics,

Even if global warming is a fact, the free citizens of an industrial civilization will have no great difficulty in coping with it—that is, of course, if their ability to use energy and to produce is not crippled by the environmental movement and by government controls otherwise inspired. The seeming difficulties of coping with global warming, or any other large-scale change, arise only when the problem is viewed from the perspective of government central planners.

It would be too great a problem for government bureaucrats to handle (as is the production even of an adequate supply of wheat or nails, as the experience of the whole socialist world has so eloquently shown). But it would certainly not be too great a problem for tens and hundreds of millions of free, thinking individuals living under capitalism to solve. It would be solved by means of each individual being free to decide how best to cope with the particular aspects of global warming that affected him.

Individuals would decide, on the basis of profit-and-loss calculations, what changes they needed to make in their businesses and in their personal lives, in order best to adjust to the situation. They would decide where it was now relatively more desirable to own land, locate farms and businesses, and live and work, and where it was relatively less desirable, and what new comparative advantages each location had for the production of which goods. Factories, stores, and houses all need replacement sooner or later. In the face of a change in the relative desirability of different locations, the pattern of replacement would be different. Perhaps some replacements would have to be made sooner than otherwise. To be sure, some land values would fall and others would rise. Whatever happened, individuals would respond in a way that minimized their losses and maximized their possible gains. The essential thing they would require is the freedom to serve their self-interests by buying land and moving their businesses to the areas rendered relatively more attractive, and the freedom to seek employment and buy or rent housing in those areas.

Given this freedom, the totality of the problem would be overcome. This is because, under capitalism, the actions of the individuals, and the thinking and planning behind those actions, are coordinated and harmonized by the price system (as many former central planners of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have come to learn). As a result, the problem would be solved in exactly the same way that tens and hundreds of millions of free individuals have solved greater problems than global warming, such as redesigning the economic system to deal with the replacement of the horse by the automobile, the settlement of the American West, and the release of the far greater part of the labor of the economic system from agriculture to industry.

Conclusion

We should be thankful that previous generations were not governed by the “ThinkProgress” philosophy of regarding government coercion as the solution to future changes, whether economic or environmental. Had they followed the near religious state-worship of Center for American Progress, we would have had the equivalent of Barack Obama or Christian Parenti dictating to millions of Americans when, how, or if they could transition to automobiles or go West or leave their farms. If we do indeed face worse weather ahead, then nothing is more important in preparing than more industry and more freedom.

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Alex Epstein is a Principal at MasterResource and Founder of the Center for Industrial Progress.

“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.

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(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.

“Lukewarmers” are those scientists (and others) who believe the balance of evidence is middling between “climate alarmists” (who tend to think that the global temperature rise will lie in, or even exceed, the upper half the IPCC’s 1.1°C–6.4°C range of projected temperature rise this century) and ultraskeptics, or “flatliners” (who tend to think that the addition of human-generated carbon dioxide has virtually no impact on global temperatures).

Lukewarmers have found the world to be a lonely place. But favor (think physical processes of global climate) smiled for us in 2011. Several scientific studies produced results, when considered in combination, provide evidence that the general warming of the earth’s climate is proceeding at a rate that lies in the lower half of the IPCC’s projected temperature change during the 21st century.

And with a low-end temperature rise comes along low-end impacts. Seemingly good news for all!

2011 Temperatures

First, let’s review the global average temperature, both at the surface, and in the lower atmosphere since 1979—the year that satellite observations of the temperature from the lower atmosphere become reliably available, and pretty near the beginning of the second warming episode of the 20th century.

Fig. 1 shows the temperature data from one surface dataset (from the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) and one satellite dataset of observations from the lower atmosphere (from the University of Alabama in Huntsville). There are other data compilations besides these two, but they are somewhat similar and the differences are not what I am interested in discussing here (although it is by no means an uninteresting topic).

Figure 1. Annual average global temperature anomalies from the surface (red) and from the lower atmosphere (blue), 1979-2011 (the value for 2011 in the surface record is based on only 11 months of data).

It is pretty obvious that the global temperature in 2011 have done little to hasten the observed temperature increase, but rather has acted to further ensconce the established trend (if not add a tiny bit of downward pressure on it). As the trend in global temperature rise continues to be rather low, the amount of scientific scrutiny it is subject to grows, for it pushes at the envelope of our understanding of climate change and variability under rapidly increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

Observed Trend Less Than Climate Model Simulations

A prominent paper examining the issue was published in 2011 by Dr. Benjamin Santer and a long list of colleagues including some of the bigger names in climate science. These researchers set out to see just how unusual the rather low warming rate in the lower atmosphere is when compared with climate model expectations of the evolution of the temperatures when run with a combination of the observed (through the year ~2000) and projected (through 2010: from the IPCC’s SRES A1B scenario) anthropogenic enhancements to the atmosphere’s chemical and physical composition.

What the researchers found was that the observed temperature trends calculated from periods ranging from 10 to 32 years all lie below the average trend of the same length projected by a large family of climate models (Fig. 2). Each climate model includes some representation of some of the processes which lead to “natural” (random) variability (processes such as El Niño/La Niña, volcanic eruptions, solar variability—note that not all models include all of these processes throughout the entire 1979-2010 period of study). As the time period over which the temperature trend is calculated increases, the impact of natural variability on the magnitude (and even the sign) of the trend decreases as the short-term temperature deviations caused by random variability tend to cancel out.

Therefore, the envelope of model expected trends shrinks as the period of time over which the trend is determined expands (yellow area in Fig. 2). What this means is that the observed trends in this figure begin to become much more unusual compared with model expectations as the trend lengthens.

By the time you get to trend lengths of 30 or so years, the observed trend is threatening the lower limit of the 95% confidence range of climate model expectations. Such mounting evidence begins to start to make you wonder whether there is some fundamental problem between climate models and reality.

Figure 2. A comparison between modeled and observed trends in the average temperature of the lower atmosphere, for periods ranging from 10 to 32 years (during the period 1979 through 2010). The yellow is the 5-95 percentile range of individual model projections, the green is the model average, the red and blue are the average of the observations, as compiled by Remote Sensing Systems and University of Alabama in Huntsville respectively (adapted from Santer et al., 2011).

Over the full record (1979-2010) the real world has only warmed about two-thirds as much as models indicate that it should have. If this continues to the end of the century, the IPCC’s 21st century warming range of 1.1°C to 6.4°C becomes about 0.75°C to 4.25°C —with a central value of 2.5°C. But what’s worse is that a model/observation disparity could indicate that the climate models are not faithfully reproducing reality, which would mean that they are not particularly valuable as predictive tools.

My conclusion (which, is different from that of the authors) based upon the research presented by Santer et al.—that the models are on the verge of failing—is further strengthened by the results of another paper published in 2011 by Foster and Rahmstorf.

These researchers sought to identify the magnitude of the natural signals present in the observed trends of surface and lower atmospheric temperatures and to see whether the recent slowdown in the rate of global average temperature rise could be explained by the combination of the timing of natural influences (again, solar, El Niño/La Niña, volcanoes). Ultimately, they concluded that, in fact, it could be. And when the natural signals were removed from the global temperature record, global warming was alive and well and proceeding at a remarkable steady rate since the beginning of their period of study, 1979-2010 (Fig. 3).

According to the authors “[t]here is no indication of any slowdown or acceleration of global warming, beyond the variability induced by these known natural factors.”

Figure 3. Global temperatures (from various compilations of the surface (GISS, NCDC, CRU) and the lower atmosphere (RSS, UAH)) after the natural signals have been removed, 1979-2010 (from Foster and Rahmstorf, 2011).

What makes the Foster and Rahmstorf work particularly encouraging for lukewarmers is that the authors find that for periods of 30 years or so, the removal of natural variability makes little difference on the magnitude of the observed trend in the lower atmosphere.

However, thinking back upon the results from Santer et al., the same is probably is not entirely true for all of the climate model runs for the 1979-2010 time period. Almost certainly, the combination of random variability has added some amount of noise to the trend distribution even at time frames of 30 years or so.

What this means, is that if the modeled temperatures were also stripped of their natural variability, then the 95% range of uncertainty (the yellow area depicted in Fig. 2) would contract inwards towards the model mean (green line). The net effect of which would be to make the observed trends (red and blue lines in Fig. 2) over the past 30 years or so lie even closer to (if not completely outside of) the lower bound of the 95% confidence range from the model simulations. Such a result further weakens our confidence in the models and further strengthens our confidence that future warming may well proceed at a modest rate, somewhat similar to that characteristic of the last three decades.

Climate Sensitivity

Another popular lukewarmer paper in 2011 was published by a research team led by Andreas Schmittner from Oregon State University and concerned an estimate of the earth’s climate sensitivity (and the uncertainty about that estimate) derived from some recently published determinations of land and sea surface temperatures during the Last Ice Age based on a collection of climate proxies.

Schmittner and colleagues found that when using these newly available proxies from both land and ocean areas, not only was their central estimate of climate sensitivity (how much the earth’s temperature will change with a doubling of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide) a bit lower than the IPCC central estimate, but more importantly, Schmittner et al.’s determination of the uncertainty about their estimate virtually rules out climate sensitivities above 6°C. This finding is in stark contrast to the IPCC entertaining the possibility of a “fat right-hand tail” to the distribution of potential values including climate sensitivity values as high as 10°C or greater. In their Abstract, Schmittner et al. summarized their findings:

Assessing impacts of future anthropogenic carbon emissions is currently impeded by uncertainties in our knowledge of equilibrium climate sensitivity to atmospheric carbon dioxide doubling. Previous studies suggest 3 K as best estimate, 2–4.5 K as the 66% probability range, and non-zero probabilities for much higher values, the latter implying a small but significant chance of high-impact climate changes that would be difficult to avoid. Here, combining extensive sea and land surface temperature reconstructions from the Last Glacial Maximum with climate model simulations we estimate a lower median (2.3 K) and reduced uncertainty (1.7–2.6 K 66% probability). Assuming paleoclimatic constraints apply to the future as predicted by our model, these results imply lower probability of imminent extreme climatic change than previously thought.

Anther paper with a warm reception from the lukewarmers was published by Gillett et al. (in actuality, this paper was published during the first week of 2012, but was accepted for publication in late 2011, so I’ll go ahead and include it here). Gillett and colleagues used the character and evolution of the global average temperature from 1851 through 2010 to bend the output of a climate model to best fit reality (or at least reality as captured by the Hadley Centre/Climate Research Unit global average temperature compilation).

In doing so, Gillett and colleagues concluded that the temperature rise over the course of the 21st century is probably going to be considerably less than their raw climate model projections suggest. In fact, they write in their paper titled “Improved constraints on 21st-century warming derived using 160 years of temperature observations” that:

“Our analysis also leads to a relatively low and tightly-constrained estimate of Transient Climate Response of 1.3–1.8°C, and relatively low projections of 21st-century warming under the Representative Concentration Pathways.”

Basically, they found that when their climate model is constrained by reality over the past 160 years, that the temperature projections for the end of the 21st century are reduced by about 33%. This is a result of a similar magnitude as determined by Santer et al.

2011 (Dis)Honorable Mention

I would be remiss is my review of the climate stories of 2011 if I failed to mention the release of another round of Climategate emails. The so-called Climategate 2.0 emails further many of the storylines that ran throughout the original Climategate releases back in November 2009—rampant gatekeeping, data hoarding, and general misbehavior.

To me, the most significant thing that the Climategate emails show is that the deck is stacked against the publication of research results that are critical of the established scientific consensus and that the skids are greased for papers that run in support. It is little wonder why the literature is as one-sided as it is on the issue. The folks who are responsible for establishing the consensus have also taken it upon themselves to be the protectors of it. Not a good situation for the advancement of science.

All of which goes double to show that the papers which do make it through to publication and which chink away at the icon of alarming climate change quite likely are actually on to something.

Bottom Line

So what I have documented is a collection of observations and analyses that together is telling a story of relatively modest climate changes to come. Not that temperatures won’t rise at all over the course of this century, but rather than our climate becoming extremely toasty, it looks like we’ll have to settle (thankfully) for it becoming only lukewarm.

My guess is that 2012 will hold more good news for lukewarmers, both in terms of supportive scientific findings, and also in a migration of folks towards the middle of this issue. As being lukewarm becomes a bit more comfortable, I imagine that more folks will join the happy middle–and maybe my lunch calendar will start to fill up!

References:

Foster, G., and S. Rahmstorf, 2011. Global temperature evolution 1979-2010. Environmental Research Letters, 6, 044022, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/6/4/044022

Gillett, N.P., et al., 2012. Improved constraints on 21st-century warming derived using 160 years of temperature observations. Geophysical Research Letters, 39, L01704, doi:10.1029/2011GL050226.

Santer, B.D., et al., 2011. Separating Signal and Noise in Atmospheric Temperature Changes: The Importance of Timescale. Journal of Geophysical Research, doi:10.1029/2011JD016263.

Schmittner, A., et al., 2011. Climate sensitivity estimated from temperature reconstructions of the Last Glacial Maximum. Science, 334, 1385-1388, doi:10.1126/science.1203513 .

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).

Reconstructing Climate Policy: Beyond Kyoto By Richard B. Stewart and Jonathan B. Wiener 193 pp., Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute Press, 2003. This review was published in Regulation magazine (Cato Institute). MasterResource revisits Mr. Singer’s book review and asks: how does it read today?

What is it about academic economists that makes them salivate like Pavlovian dogs whenever they hear the magic words “market solution”? Sure, market-based solutions are always more efficient and less liable to be politically influenced than those based on command-and-control. But before we apply solutions, should we not first ask if there is a problem that needs to be solved?

And so it is with this book. The authors confidently assert the existence of a future climate problem more or less on faith, but they also see many difficulties with the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that is supposed to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. So they propose a clever alternative to Kyoto — yet another solution to a non-problem.

They visualize a U.S.-China bilateral deal to limit emissions (mainly of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning) that would operate in parallel with the Kyoto Protocol (which neither country plans to ratify). In their plan, the United States buys emission rights from an arbitrary excess quota allotted to China. The authors call it “headroom” but I call it a subsidy. The United States pays, China gets, and the atmosphere does not benefit because emissions continue essentially unabated.

Eventually and somehow, this U.S.-China deal is supposed to merge with Kyoto. Every nation in the world would then actually limit its emissions, and thereby save the climate, humanity, and Lord knows what else. What a pious hope!

Gentlemen’s Agreement

What else is wrong with the Stewart-Wiener scheme? Plenty, although it may be no worse than another dozen or so clever schemes thought up by other lawyers, economists, and policy analysts that are duly referenced in this volume but never critically discussed. Is there some kind of gentlemen’s agreement here?

All emission trading depends on having a “cap” – whether sectorial, national, regional, or global. Then, as emissions rise with population growth and economic prosperity, this kind of rationing creates a scarcity and imparts increasing value to emission permits.

The Pew Center keeps coming up with emission-trading schemes, and so do any number of academics in the United States and Europe. Resources for the Future published a cap-and-trade scheme with “soft” caps: whenever the price of permits becomes too high, the cap is relaxed and — Presto! — the price moderates.

In other words, the regulatory body can arbitrarily limit the value of the permits. And with political price control in place, why would anyone buy such permits?

Solution Without a Problem?

But enough of belittling esoteric schemes cooked up by would-be energy planners. Do we need to limit the emission of greenhouse gases at all?

First, there may not be a global warming problem. The climate history of the past century does not seem to be consistent with the greenhouse theory, throwing doubt on the predictions of appreciable future warming. And even if the climate were to warm, the consequences are more likely to be beneficial.

With the estimated cost of the Kyoto Protocol ranging from high to huge to ruinous (depending on the analyst), the cost-benefit analysis becomes pretty simple.

In any case, it is agreed by all that the Kyoto Protocol — even if punctiliously obeyed by all adherent (industrialized) nations — would have a negligible effect on reducing future warming. The reduction in calculated temperature by 2050 is only 0.02 C. If the United States were to participate, the reduction would rise to 0.05 C, which is also essentially unmeasurable. And of course, if adhering nations buy emission rights instead of reducing emissions, there would be no effect at all on the atmosphere and temperatures. Zilch.

Even supporters agree that the Kyoto Protocol is only a “first step” and that much more drastic reductions are required by all nations, developed and developing, to keep greenhouse gas levels from rising much further. A 60 to 80 percent cut is required instead of the five percent called for by Kyoto. (I could not find any reference to those facts in the book.)

Finally, it is not even clear that we should be reducing the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is not a pollutant and does not produce any adverse physiological effects. On the contrary, it is basic plant food and makes crops and forests grow faster with less water. (The American Enterprise Institute, publisher of the Stewart-Wiener book, earlier issued a study by Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn that documents the benefits of a warmer climate.)

So why reduce carbon dioxide levels? What does the Climate Treaty itself have to say? The 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) is strangely uninformed about this question. Article 2 of the FCCC states only that “the ultimate objective is to achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”

The concern here seems to be with the stability of the climate against sudden and possibly irreversible changes. But the FCCC gives no indication what the greenhouse gas level should be, or even whether it should be lower or higher than the present level. Empirically, we do know that the climate underwent many abrupt changes during the recent ice age and has been relatively stable during the Holocene (the warm interglacial period of the last 10,000 years). I have argued, in a Hoover Institution essay and elsewhere, that the FCCC (properly interpreted) actually favors a warmer climate and therefore higher carbon dioxide levels.

All of the foregoing suggests that the Kyoto Protocol is not only ineffective but also counterproductive. Nevertheless, diplomats and technical experts from 180 nations have been meeting endlessly for the past decade to argue about minutiae like the specifications of “sinks” for carbon dioxide and, of course, about the desirability and procedures of “emission trading.”

Convergence

A historical footnote is in order here. We need to remember the mind-set of the Clinton/Gore White House that engineered adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. Recall, for example, Under Secretary of State Timothy Wirth repeating Gore’s claim that “the science is settled” on global warming. And former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, in a speech at Stanford University in 1996, announcing that global warming was the single most important threat facing the United States in the 21^stcentury.

Clinton/Gore never submitted the Kyoto Protocol to the Senate for ratification. (They were well aware that the Senate’s Byrd-Hagel resolution against any Kyoto-like protocol had just passed unanimously in July 1997.) But they tried to make ratification more palatable by proposing unlimited emission trading that would have allowed the United States to continue more or less in a business-as-usual fashion while buying surplus emission permits from Russia. This fudge was, of course, opposed by Greens and by many Europeans who wanted to see the United States undertake actual emission cuts and feel the consequent economic pain.

The whole matter came to a head at the sixth Conference of the Parties (to the Kyoto Protocol) in The Hague in November of 2000. But as the U.S. position softened and the United Kingdom, true believers in the Kyoto process, tried to broker a deal, the position of “Old Europe” hardened. French President Jacques Chirac, in particular, took a radical stance, telling delegates, “France proposes that we set as our ultimate objective the convergence of per-capita emissions.”

Convergence is based on the idea that everyone in the world should have the right to emit carbon in equal amounts — so requiring a vast decrease in the amount emitted by industrialized nations and a massive increase in the amount emitted by the Third World. Chirac admitted that Kyoto therefore represented “the first component of an authentic global governance.”

French intransigence killed the UK-brokered deal to allow progress on Kyoto. British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott blamed continental European politicians in no uncertain terms: European ministers should have taken a chance and made the change, he said. “That’s what I decided to do and everyone was with us until we got into those Euro-ministers and they split.” He was especially critical and even insulting to the French environment minister.

The irony of it all is that the Europeans made all those concessions to Russia and Japan at the 2001 Conference of the Parties in Marrakesh, hoping to induce them to ratify Kyoto. Japan did so, but Russia continued to hold out. By then it was too late to get the United States aboard; George W. Bush had been elected president on a platform that included opposition to the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, which he pronounced as “fatally flawed.” In September of 2003, Russia refused to ratify, with President Putin terming the Protocol “scientifically flawed,” an even more accurate description. And without the US or Russia, Kyoto cannot reach the magic 55 percent threshold needed to go into effect.

Social Engineering

We have now come full circle. The Stewart-Wiener scheme is really a variant of the concept of convergence. And as is well recognized, the concept depends crucially on whether it sets a national quota or a per-capita quota for rapidly developing nations, where population policies are often enforced by their governments. The authors do not spell out the political and social consequences of the two alternatives, nor do they specify the choice of carbon-dioxide limits or the political path for making that choice. It does not require much imagination to recognize the risks inherent in giving authoritarian governments the incentive to control their populations’ fertility and access to energy. We are no longer talking about climate policy, but about international social engineering.

——————-

S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and president of the non-profit Science & Environmental Policy Project in Arlington, Va. He is the author of Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate (Oakland, Calif.: The Independent Institute, 1999). Singer can be contacted by e-mail at singer@sepp.org.

“Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is going to cost a lot (both in terms of dollars and effort), and it is going to produce few if any demonstrable climate results for decades to come (if ever).” 

The scientific community—or especially that part of it which holds the opinion that not enough is being done to mitigate potential climate change—is struggling with why the general public (and hence policymakers) are not heeding their call to action on global warming.

In a recent post, I pointed to one reason: the fast diminishing role that any U.S.-side mitigation would have in curbing greenhouse gas emissions enough to measurably affect global climate. This is a classic bang-for-the-buck evaluation. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is going to cost a lot (both in terms of dollars and effort), and it is going to produce few if any demonstrable climate results for decades to come (if ever).

In short, a mitigation (versus a wealth-is-health adaptation strategy) is a tough sell given even the most alarming climate change projections, and becomes nearly impossible under more modest climate change scenarios.

The role of climate change science has been, and continues to be, in arbitrating between the potential climate outcomes. And although there are some who argue that the science no longer matters as far the politics go, a lot of other scientists who make at least a partial living studying climate and climate change (including myself) would like to think otherwise.

And many of us have taken the additional step of not only producing science, but also translating our results (and that of others) into more layman’s terms, describing what implications the results have on the bigger picture of climate change, and then suggesting what, if anything, should be done about it. With mixed success (depending on who you ask).

AGU Confab: Curry’s Voice of Moderation

During the annual fall meeting last week of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), several talks and sessions were focused on this theme of (climate) science communications, exploring how scientists could better get their ideas across to the public at large. The general idea being that if the public were better informed and better educated about the issue, the better would be their decisions.

Most of the AGU talks were aimed at addressing the perceived failure of climate change communications—a failure gauged by the lack of political action on the issue. After all, if the science were being effectively communicated, then the perils of climate change would be obvious, and surely the general public would be imploring their elected officials to do something about it.

Climate science researcher-cum-climate science communicator Judith Curry was in attendance of many of the AGU presentations on this topic, as well as being a presenter herself. But her take on the issue was quite a bit different than most of the presenters.

Over at her blog Climate Etc., Curry gives her opinion about many of the climate communications talks at the AGU, and also makes available her presentation.

The main gist of her talk concerns the distinction between the “linear” approach to science communication and that of a more “circular” approach. The former is more akin to preaching, the latter with engaging.

In the linear approach, the communicator is basically telling the audience what to think about a topic of the communicator’s choosing. Basically, here are our results, here is what (we think) they mean, and here are the actions that (we think) should be taken.

In the circular approach, the interests of the audience feed back to the communicator, and each takes part in the discussion. As Judith Curry describes it:

Unlike the linear model that focuses on the messenger, the circular model views the receiver as an equal partner in the communication and focuses on the process of engagement (which includes dialogue and feedback).

With the benefit being:

When a messenger actually makes the effort to understand why an individual is unconvinced, this inevitably leads to both deepening and broadening the discussion to address complexity and uncertainties. The end result can be raising the level of the public dialogue.

Judith has embraced the circular approach over the past couple of years after coming to the conclusion (with the help of insight gained from the revelations contained in the climategate emails) that her previous linear presentations backed by IPCC science weren’t nearly as clear cut as she had thought.

Her switch from preaching to engaging has not been well-received by those more inclined towards establishing a storyline and sticking to it. Said one: “Judith decided a while back that the judgment of the community on what was interesting and what was not, was not itself to be trusted.”

But as someone who has spent much of my scientific communications effort trying to illuminate things that the “community” may have not found to be “interesting,” I applaud Judith for her new-found pursuit.

Below is reproduced the narrative from Judith Curry’s AGU presentation, titled “Engaging the Public on Climate Change” (the accompanying slide set is available here), in which she explains why she chooses to tackle the issue the way that she has. It is well worth rereading. She is history-in-the-making, her’s being a courageous voice at a time when the climate profession has been going hard toward alarmism/policy activism.

Engaging the Public on Climate Change

- by Judith Curry

In his talk yesterday Michael Mann summed up the frustrations of communicating climate change in three words: WHY NO ACTION? Opinion polls show that many people are unconcerned by climate change. And there has been a failure of the public to act on the risks perceived by the climate scientists.

So what is the solution to the climate communication problem? At this Conference and in this session, we are hearing a number of ideas re improving communication:

• Better messengers?
• Clearer message?
• More exciting presentations?
• Better educated populace?
• Squashing skepticism?

These ideas for improving communication are consistent with the linear model of communication, whereby science plus communication and translation of the science, should lead to action. The current buzzword for this is “actionable science.” The communication part of the linear model generally include simplified message, appeal to consensus, effective presentation, and translation for relevance. The focus of the linear model is on the message and messenger, as a disseminator of information.

In spite of substantial efforts in communication, many people remain unconvinced.

There is another model of communication, which is the circular model of communication. Unlike the linear model that focuses on the messenger, the circular model views the receiver as an equal partner in the communication and focuses on the process of engagement (which includes dialogue and feedback).

When a messenger actually makes the effort to understand why an individual is unconvinced, this inevitably leads to both deepening and broadening the discussion to address complexity and uncertainties. The end result can be raising the level of the public dialogue.

To engage effectively with the public on the issue of climate change, we need to recognize that the public salience of climate science is intimately connected with perceived risks and the costs of potential solutions, which are filtered through an individual’s world view and politics.

The goal of engagement is not just to inform, but to enable, motivate and educate the public regarding the technical, political, and social dimensions of climate change.

In the context of a circular process, experts and decision-makers seek input and learn from the public about preferences, needs, insights, and ideas relative to scientific topics, climate change impacts, vulnerabilities, solutions, and policy options.

There is a growing community of people that is demanding such engagement, not only on the policy issues but the scientific issues as well. The idea of the extended peer community has been around since the 1990’s, from the work of Funtowicz and Ravetz. When stakes are high and uncertainties are large, there is a public demand to participate and assess the quality of the data and research. There is a segment of the unconvinced public that consists of technically educated people who want to think for themselves. They are not prepared to cede judgment on this issue to the consensus authority.Further there is a growing number of scientists and other academics from an increasingly broad range of disciplines want to bring their expertise to climate research

The size of the extended peer community associated with climate change has grown substantially in the wake of climategate, which made many lose trust in the judgement of the IPCC experts.

New information technology and the open knowledge movement is enabling extended peer communities. These new technologies facilitate the rapid diffusion of information and sharing of expertise. This newfound power has challenged the politics of expertise. Climategate illustrated the importance of the blogosphere as an empowerment of the extended peer community.

My communication efforts have targeted the technically educated scientifically literate non-experts, many of whom are unconvinced by the IPCC’s arguments. The people that I have been engaging with include engineers, statisticians, physicists, chemists, medical doctors, lawyers, and economists.

Why am I targeting this group? In terms of absolute numbers, there are a small fraction of a percent of the population. However, this group includes many opinion leaders. Failure to pay attention to this group (particular engineers interested in data quality and statistical analysis) arguably led to Climategate Further, these experts from diverse fields have much to contribute to the research, communication and the public debate.

The forum for my engagement with this group is my blog Climate Etc. at judithcurry.com. My blog is a forum for engagement of technically educated people. My role is lead with topics for discussion, many of which are suggested by participants. Sometimes I make my personal opinion known and sometimes I do not. I most definitely do not try to tell people what to think. My blog is unmoderated, where the discussion is for the most part unconstrained. I’ve tried to establish a fair place for an open debate.

The end result has been thousands of interested bloggers, laypeople and scientists interacting, arguing, disagreeing, and learning. I often feature papers that are skeptical of aspects of the consensus science. In addition to responding the concern that skeptical papers are discriminated against by the mainstream community, I find that very interesting discussions can be provoked by considering a skeptical paper.

About a month ago, I received an email from a scientist who wanted to do a guest post on two papers that he recently had published on the topic of surface temperature data. I agreed to host his post, since his papers were relevant to the discussion we had been having on the analysis of the Berkeley surface temperature data. This particular scientist was a prominent member of the German skeptic group EIKE.

One of the first comments on this thread was from an IPCC lead author who thought that these papers were deeply flawed, and thought I was irresponsible and peddling disinformation by hosting this post.

This controversy was picked up by a number of different blogs, and there was a particularly good discussion on this at collide-a-scape. The argument on this topic was a classic clash between the linear and circular models of communication: scientists as gatekeepers of information to be disseminated to the public, versus scientists as facilitators of a free-wheeling dialogue.

A well known climate scientist and blogger wrote this statement on the collide-a-scape:

“Judith decided a while back that the judgment of the community on what was interesting and what was not, was not itself to be trusted.”

My judgment on what is interesting to the broader community has been formed by actually listening to them and trying to address issues of their concern. The community that I am interacting with on my blog is interested in these issues:

• Natural climate variability and nonlinear dynamics
• Climate model verification and validation
• Data quality
• Statistical analysis, uncertainty, logic of arguments
• Scientific method and responsible conduct of research
• IPCC
• Skeptical arguments

This is a different list of issues than the climate establishment has decided are interesting. 3 years ago, I wasn’t focusing my attention on any of these issues. Over the past 2 years, I have focused extensively on these issues on my blog, and increasingly in my published academic research.

This is the difference between linear and circular communication.

So where do I see all this going? I think that social media, particularly the blogosphere, has enormous unrealized potential to:

• facilitate understanding of complex issues
• provide transparency
• identify the best contributions
• increase the signal and filter out the noise
• drive public policy innovation
• reduce polarization

Climate scientists are increasingly experimenting with the climate blogosphere, in a variety of different ways. It is something that I have found to be enormously rewarding and educational on a personal level. I will leave the impact of my efforts to be judged by others.

In closing, I will state that I hope to see many more climate scientists developing their voices and communicating publicly in the blogosphere. To quote Chris Mooney: you have nothing to lose but your irrelevance.

“[T]he impact that emissions reduction efforts in the U.S. will have on global emissions totals–and by extension, global climate–is quickly diminishing.”

The just-released numbers for last year’s carbon dioxide emissions (not including land-use changes) show why forcing large cuts in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is not very high on the priority list of the U.S. powers-that-be (including voters).

In 2010, the total global CO2 emissions were the highest on record, ~9.1 PgC (33,400 million metric tons). The U.S. contribution was ~1.50PgC, about 16% of the global total—percentage-wise the lowest on record (since 1959) and falling rapidly.

Unilateral U.S. CO2 mitigation strategies, in other words, are doomed to increasing irrelevance–and even unintended consequences should carbon rationing at home result in industrial transfers to less regulated areas.

A picture’s worth a 1,000 words

Fig. 1 shows how the picture has evolved since the late 1950s. An increasing amount of the global carbon dioxide emissions are being produced from outside of the U.S. Since about the turn of the 21st century, this divergence has picked up pace as global emissions have steeply increased while U.S emissions have been rather flat.

Figure 1. Annual carbon dioxide emissions, 1959-2010 (data source: Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center)

Fig. 1 is pretty good at illustrating why, despite the clamor raised by some prominent clamorers, the U.S. people and government aren’t particularly motivated at trying overly hard to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to any large degree. When it comes to pressing issues, getting a lot of bang for the buck is what plays the best. And what the chart above shows is that no amount of twiddling with the type of fuel used to run our country (and the expense that will result from it) is going to produce any meaningful impact on the growth of global CO2 emissions.

When “global warming” first came en vogue, back in the late 1980s, the U.S. was annually contributing about 22% of the global CO2 emissions, by 2010, our contribution has dipped to 16% and continues to decline (Fig. 2). This means that the impact that emissions reduction efforts in the U.S. will have on global emissions totals (and by extension, global climate) is quickly diminishing.

Figure 2. Percentage contribution of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to the annual global total, 1959-2010.

In fact, the only meaningful contribution from any large U.S. CO2 emissions reductions will come from exporting our solutions/technologies to those countries which are becoming the primary drivers of the upward CO2 emissions trends. I say this because, as can be seen in Fig. 1, global emissions have increased by an amount greater than the total annual U.S. emissions in just that last 6.5 years. So at best, completely eliminating all U.S. CO2 emissions now and forever would only set back global emissions by a bit more than half a decade.

In the bang vs. buck tally, this is little of the former for a lot of the latter.

The U.S. recession has certainly played a role in the dip in U.S. CO2 emissions during the past several years (Fig. 3), but the recent decline in the U.S. percentage of global emissions (Fig. 1)—after being steady through the 1980s and 1990s—started about a decade ago. This was several years prior to the U.S. economic slowdown, evidence that the declining contribution from the U.S. is not just a temporary condition that will reverse with a domestic economic recovery, but one that is being driven by the energy appetite of the rest of the world—primarily from the developing countries like China and India.

Expect this appetite to continue to expand. Again, when it comes to bangs and bucks for energy, fossil fuels produces the most for the least—but has the consequence of driving up global emissions totals. So, it seems highly improbable that the U.S. will ever again be a dominant driver in global CO2 emissions trends.

Figure 3. U.S. annual carbon dioxide emissions (data source: Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center).

Bottom Line

Ten to twenty years from now, long past the latest estimates of the point of no return for avoiding climate catastrophe (for those who buy into such pronouncments), an updated Fig. 1 will look little different than the current Fig. 1. This is not to say that interested parties should not pursue new technologies in energy production, or that someday the primary energy production for the world will take the form of something other than net CO2-releasing methods, but that “someday” is not upon us anytime soon.

In fact, a large gap in time stands between us and the wide dispersal of such technologies. Fig. 1 will retain its character into the foreseeable future, with or without, any actions in the U.S. aimed at reducing domestic emissions. Consequently, the drive to reduce emissions, especially forcefully, will most likely wait until we’ve dealt with a great many more immediate concerns. It is only in times of relative luxury that we can pursue actions whose results are far greater in the future (several generations hence) than they are in the present. Unfortunately, those times are not upon us now.

“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.

[Ed. note: This week marks the 10th anniversary of Enron's bankruptcy filing (December 2, 2001). Enron's view of energy sustainability drives the Obama Administration's "green 'dream' team" today, so such a look back at Enron's crony capitalism is merited.]

Beginning in the late 1980s, global warming became a bread-and-butter issue for Ken Lay, Enron’s leader and up-and-coming industry visionary. Enron in the 1990s became a full-fledged “green” company, practicing “energy sustainability” with its investments in solar power, wind power, energy-efficiency services, and environmental services.

No U.S.-based company sounded the tocsin over climate change more than Enron. What John Browne did as head of the international energy major BP, Ken Lay did in the United States, working with interest groups and political leaders to push the energy industry and public toward carbon dioxide (CO₂) regulation.

Lay had his reasons—seven in terms of company profit centers, all of which stood to gain from government restrictions on carbon emissions. They involved:

· Natural gas production (relative to oil and coal),

· Natural gas transmission (relative to oil and coal),

· Natural gas-fired electric generation (relative to oil and coal),

· Energy outsourcing (a/k/a energy efficiency) services,

· Renewable energy generation (wind and solar),

· CO₂ emissions trading (joining company trading in sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide), and

· Environmental outsourcing (a/k/a environmental services).

Of these, Enron’s natural gas activities were core, profitable activities (and “win, win” economically and environmentally, in their important applications). But the last four areas were problematic from the start and never profitable, even with special government favor. In retrospect, almost no amount of government subsidy would have been enough for these nascent businesses.

Kyoto Protocol To “Monetize” Enron ‘s Agenda

But there was always hope.

In late 1997, an elated Enron climate lobbyist reported that a climate-change accord was reached in Kyoto, Japan, among 38 Annex 1 countries (the developed world) to reduce their collective greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2 percent by 2008–12 compared to base 1990 levels. The United States, itself committed to a 7 percent decrease, at least in principle, would need new waves of government intervention to reduce its emissions, which meant more subsidies and new mandates for politically correct renewable energies (wind and solar, not hydropower) and energy conservation programs.

Thus Enron’s John Palmisano infamously wrote from Kyoto:

If implemented [the Kyoto Protocol] will do more to promote Enron’s business than will almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring of the [electricity] and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States…. The endorsement of emissions trading was another victory for us…. This agreement will be good for Enron stock!!

It was time to turn deeds into dollars, he added:

Enron now has excellent credentials with many ‘green’ interests including Greenpeace, WWF [World Wildlife Fund], NRDC [Natural Resources Defense Council], GermanWatch, The US Climate Action Network, the European Climate Action Network, Ozone Action, WRI [World Resources Institute], and Worldwatch [Institute],” reported Palmisano. “This position should be increasingly cultivated and capitalized on (monetized).

Enron was popular at Kyoto. Palmisano spoke on panels and received an award from the Climate Institute on behalf of Ken Lay and Enron. And the praise continued. Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 1998 identified Lay’s company as a key player in a coming “energy revolution.” The authors explained: “Enron, originally a large Texas-based natural gas company, has made a strong move in the renewables field with its acquisition of Zond, the largest wind power company in the United States, and its investment in Solarex, the second largest U. S. manufacturer of photovoltaic cells.”

While closely associated with both Bush Administrations, Lay was ideologically closer to another political figure on the issue of climate change. “In Earth in the Balance, Senator Al Gore stated: ‘Higher taxes on fossil fuels … is one of the logical first steps in changing our policies in a manner consistent with a more responsible approach to the environment’,” stated Lay. “I agree.”

————–

This post is taken from Robert Bradley, Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy (2009), pp. 306–308.

 “If the models are as flawed as critics say … you have to ask yourself, ‘How come they work?’”

- Gavin Schmidt [NASA], quoted in David Fahrenhold, “Scientists’ Use of Computer Models to Predict Climate Change is Under Attack,” Washington Post, April 6, 2010.

 “[Model results] could also be sociological: getting the socially acceptable answer.”

 - Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), June 20, 1998.

 The above quotation by NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt suggests that quite remarkable progress has been made with climate models in recent years. Such must be the case given the verdict by leading climate scientists that climate models were not nearly ready for prime time just a decade ago.

But what do climate scientists really believe behind closed doors? Will they no longer express their innermost thoughts in emails or in fear that ‘the cause’ of climate alarm/forced energy transformation will be compromised?

Climategate 2.0: Model Quotations

<0850> [Tim] Barnett:  “[IPCC AR5 models] clearly, some tuning or very good luck involved.  I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer.”

<5066> [Gabriele] Hegerl: “[IPCC AR5 models] So using the 20th c for tuning is just doing what some people have long suspected us of doing [...] and what the nonpublished diagram from NCAR showing correlation between aerosol forcing and sensitivity also suggested.”

<4443> [Phil] Jones: “Basic problem is that all models are wrong – not got enough middle and low level clouds.”

<1982> [Ben] Santer:  “There is no individual model that does well in all of the SST and water vapor tests we’ve applied.”

[Jagadish] Shukla/IGES: ["Future of the IPCC", 2008] It is inconceivable that policymakers will be  willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.

Gerald North Quotations

Here are some quotations from Dr. Gerald North of Texas A&M, certainly a distinguished climate scientist, made during his consulting era with Enron Corp.

“We do not know much about modeling climate. It is as though we are modeling a human being. Models are in position at last to tell us the creature has two arms and two legs, but we are being asked to cure cancer.”

     – Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), November 12, 1999.

“[Model results] could also be sociological: getting the socially acceptable answer.”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), June 20, 1998.

“There is a good reason for a lack of consensus on the science. It is simply too early. The problem is difficult, and there are pitifully few ways to test climate models.”

     – Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), July 13, 1998.

“One has to fill in what goes on between 5 km and the surface. The standard way is through atmospheric models. I cannot make a better excuse.”

     – Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), October 2, 1998.

“The ocean lag effect can always be used to explain the ‘underwarming’….

The different models couple to the oceans differently. There is quite a bit of slack here (undetermined fudge factors). If a model is too sensitive, one can just couple in a little more ocean to make it agree with the record. This is why models with different sensitivities all seem to mock the record about equally well. (Modelers would be insulted by my explanation, but I think it is correct.)”

    – Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), August 17, 1998.

Yet climate models are being taken seriously as guides to public policy. Some humility is in order when coercion and massive wealth redistribution/destruction is needed on Day 1 (forward) for a hypothetical problem calculated for some distant year.