Intro to Global Warming

Here is a nice hour video that explains the ins and outs of "global warming". It is by Warren Meyer who runs climate-skeptic.com:



I like the point he makes at 28:00 into this video: In twenty years environmentalists and conservationists are going to look back on this era of "global warming" and see it as a period when that single issue "sucked the air" out of the movement. Put simply, the fanatics have seized one issue and are driving the "green movement" over a cliff with an issue which they over-hyped and which won't pan out. This will undermine legitimate environmental and conservation issues that could have profited from the energy and attention which was stolen by the "global warming" crowd.

Canadian Senate Hearing on Global Warming

Here is testimony by Ross McKitrick on global warming. You should skip to 4:40 in the video to get to the start of his testimony and it ends by 16:00. This is well worth watching:



The various presenters:

• Ross McKitrick, Department of Economics, University of Guelph


• Ian Clark, Department of Earth Science, University of Ottawa


• Jan Veizer, Department of Earth Science, University of Ottawa


• Timothy Patterson, Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University

I find it amusing to see respected senior scientists in Canada giving testimony that the IPCC story of "global warming" is incomplete, misleading, and wrong. Unlike the fanatics who claim "the science is settled", these researchers make it very clear that the science is still very much open to debate and in need of serious research.

In the video at 1:24:00 a senator has laid out the extreme cases and asks the panel "what to do". Ross McKitrick very intelligently replies that under those extremes it is very hard to know what to do. But he does a very clever thing, an economic trick, to force everybody to pay attention to climate and do the right thing:

He proposes a carbon tax that will be moved up or down based on real measurements. That forces corporations and institutions and people who deal with long term planning to build in expectations to their plans. This is the "invisible hand" of economics being used to control people to do the right thing. It is very clever and it should be implemented everywhere.

I sure would like to see governments around the world adopt this kind of stabilizing, automatic economic guidance for "doing the right thing" with respect to climate change. The tax would go down if the data shows no temperature increase, and it would steeply go up if temperatures showed an alarming rate of rise. Perfect.

Two Centuries of Runaway Global "Warming"

Here is a talk from the horse's mouth, Michael Mann a "global warming" climatologist, giving a talk on the "science is settled" global warming...



I find it humourous that he claims:

• We are two centuries into "runaway" global warming and the result is less an 1^oC of temperature rise. But he assures us that in the next 90 years we will get another 4^oC of temperature rise.


• He proudly claims the authorship of the "hockey stick" presentation of global temperatures. This is funny because there is good evidence


• He complains about "criminals" broke into the a university server and "stole" e-mails and "cherry-picked" these to distort the honest science into a conspiracy to "fudge" the data. Well, in fact, the scientists did fudge their data. The release of e-mails was most likely done by an insider who rebelled against the "researchers" who refused to share the data, something that is contrary to real science. (More details at Wikipedia.)


• He closes by doing science by "testimonial". He names lists of people who have signed up to support the global warming crowd as if popularity is a measure of scientific truth. In the end the real science will come out despite the popularity of current support for "warming" that has been bought and sold by big government grants. He confuses his "ethics" with science. That he is a fanatic doomsday pessimist has coloured his science and sadly he can't distinguish real fact from his desired "outcome" of his research.

In short, the above is the propaganda position of the "global warming" crowd. You can understand how it distorts fact only if you know more than what is being said by Mann. The above is a self-serving presentation of "facts". This is what passes for "science" among the global warming crowd.

Mann's presentation is as "scientific" as those infamous slideshow talks by Al Gore that won him a "Nobel Peace Prize" for his activism for "global warming". If you want to understand how politics trumps science you don't have to go any further than meditate on giving a politician a prize for world "peace" for going around scaring people about a supposed "runaway global warming".

If you want to get a sense of how desperately "hot" our world has become, take a look at this graph showing the global sea ice extent (with the anomaly in red). I don't see any "runaway" warming. According to the doomsters, global warming effects are magnified at the polar extremes, but I don't see any critical warming that has melted the polar ice.

Click to Enlarge
There has been a slight melting of arctic ice but none in antarctica. And here is a graph showing a global measure of "warming" from the UAH satellite temperature dataset:

Click to Enlarge
Nothing to panic about in these temperatures. This is just normal variability in global temperatures.

I don't disagree that greenhouse gases can warm the climate, but I don't accept the climate models as accurate (I have a background in computer modeling and know how difficult it is to model something especially if you don't have a thorough understanding of the dynamics). My disagreement with the "global warming" crowd is their politicization of the science and their doomsday cult-like drive for "solutions" that are worse than the problem. They would disrupt the economy on the basis of their bad science. I'm willing to condemn people to an impoverished life, but only if the facts are ironclad without any workaround. But the global warming crowd is like the "overpopulation" crowd of the 1960s or the "limits to growth" crowd of the 1970s. They are fanatics who are over-selling their "science" and pushing a political agenda, an agenda which would be disastrous for most people since it is anti-growth.

If you want an antidote to the global warming malarky, I can recommend this blog by Anthony Watts. It is good on the science. But I should warn you that he is a right wing nut (as are most of the people who are anti "global warming"). I don't buy the right wing politics, but I do agree on the assessment of their attacks on the phony "science" of global warming. Here is a nice bit from a post. This summarizes the failed scares promulgated by the doomsday global warming crowd:

The Antarctic sea ice extent has been at or near record extent in the past few summers and the ice is expanding, the Arctic has rebounded in recent years since the low point in 2007, polar bears are thriving, sea level is not showing acceleration and is actually dropping, Cholera and Malaria are failing to follow global warming predictions, Mount Kilimanjaro melt fears are being made a mockery by gains in snow cover, global temperatures have been holding steady for a decade or more and many scientists are predicting global cooling is ahead, deaths due to extreme weather are radically declining, global tropical cyclone activity is near historic lows, the frequency of major U.S. hurricanes has declined, the oceans are missing their predicted heat content, big tornados have dramatically declined since the 1970s, droughts are not historically unusual nor caused by mankind, there is no evidence we are currently having unusual weather, scandals continue to rock the climate fear movement, the UN IPCC has been exposed as being a hotbed of environmental activists, former Vice President Al Gore is now under siege by his fellow global warming activists for attempting to link every bad weather event to man-made global warming and scientists from around the world continue to dissent from man-made climate fears at a rapid pace.

Go read the original post to get the embedded links that substantiate each of the above.

Heresy and Global Warming

Here is a bit from a talk by Matt Ridley at the RSA:

Using these six lessons, I am now going to plunge into an issue on which almost all the experts are not only confident they can predict the future, but absolutely certain their opponents are pseudoscientists. It is an issue on which I am now a heretic. I think the establishment view is infested with pseudoscience. The issue is climate change.

Now before you all rush for the exits, and I know it is traditional to walk out on speakers who do not toe the line on climate at the RSA – I saw it happen to Bjorn Lomborg last year when he gave the Prince Philip lecture – let me be quite clear. I am not a “denier”. I fully accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the climate has been warming and that man is very likely to be at least partly responsible. When a study was published recently saying that 98% of scientists “believe” in global warming, I looked at the questions they had been asked and realized I was in the 98%, too, by that definition, though I never use the word “believe” about myself. Likewise the recent study from Berkeley, which concluded that the land surface of the continents has indeed been warming at about the rate people thought, changed nothing.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that you can accept all the basic tenets of greenhouse physics and still conclude that the threat of a dangerously large warming is so improbable as to be negligible, while the threat of real harm from climate-mitigation policies is already so high as to be worrying, that the cure is proving far worse than the disease is ever likely to be. Or as I put it once, we may be putting a tourniquet round our necks to stop a nosebleed.

I also think the climate debate is a massive distraction from much more urgent environmental problems like invasive species and overfishing.

I was not always such a “lukewarmer”. In the mid 2000s one image in particular played a big role in making me abandon my doubts about dangerous man-made climate change: the hockey stick*. It clearly showed that something unprecedented was happening. I can remember where I first saw it at a conference and how I thought: aha, now there at last is some really clear data showing that today’s temperatures are unprecedented in both magnitude and rate of change – and it has been published in Nature magazine.

Yet it has been utterly debunked by the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. I urge you to read Andrew Montford’s careful and highly readable book The Hockey Stick Illusion*. Here is not the place to go into detail, but briefly the problem is both mathematical and empirical. The graph relies heavily on some flawed data – strip-bark tree rings from bristlecone pines -- and on a particular method of principal component analysis, called short centering, that heavily weights any hockey-stick shaped sample at the expense of any other sample. When I say heavily – I mean 390 times.

This had a big impact on me. This was the moment somebody told me they had made the crop circle the night before.

For, apart from the hockey stick, there is no evidence that climate is changing dangerously or faster than in the past, when it changed naturally.

It was warmer in the Middle ages* and medieval climate change in Greenland was much faster.

Stalagmites*, tree lines and ice cores all confirm that it was significantly warmer 7000 years ago. Evidence from Greenland suggests that the Arctic ocean was probably ice free for part of the late summer at that time.

Sea level* is rising at the unthreatening rate about a foot per century and decelerating.

Greenland is losing ice at the rate of about 150 gigatonnes a year, which is 0.6% per century.

There has been no significant warming in Antarctica*, with the exception of the peninsula.

Methane* has largely stopped increasing.

Tropical storm* intensity and frequency have gone down, not up, in the last 20 years.

Your probability* of dying as a result of a drought, a flood or a storm is 98% lower globally than it was in the 1920s.

Malaria* has retreated not expanded as the world has warmed.

And so on. I’ve looked and looked but I cannot find one piece of data – as opposed to a model – that shows either unprecedented change or change is that is anywhere close to causing real harm.

It is well worth your time reading the whole talk. There is a fine line between pseudoscience and science, and as Ridley points out, many outstanding scientists have simultaneously been on both sides at the same time on different issues.

The problem with fanatics is that they willing change the goal posts and reinterpret everything as support for their viewpoint. Here is Ridley on climate "sensitivity":

Nor is there even any theoretical support for a dangerous future. The central issue is “sensitivity”: the amount of warming that you can expect from a doubling of carbon dioxide levels. On this, there is something close to consensus – at first. It is 1.2 degrees centigrade. Here’s* how the IPCC put it in its latest report.

“In the idealised situation that the climate response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 consisted of a uniform temperature change only, with no feedbacks operating…the global warming from GCMs would be around 1.2°C.” Paragraph 8.6.2.3.

Now the paragraph goes on to argue that large, net positive feedbacks, mostly from water vapour, are likely to amplify this. But whereas there is good consensus about the 1.2 C, there is absolutely no consensus about the net positive feedback, as the IPCC also admits. Water vapour forms clouds and whether clouds in practice amplify or dampen any greenhouse warming remains in doubt.

So to say there is a consensus about some global warming is true; to say there is a consensus about dangerous global warming is false.

The sensitivity of the climate could be a harmless 1.2C, half of which has already been experienced, or it could be less if feedbacks are negative or it could be more if feedbacks are positive. What does the empirical evidence say? Since 1960 we have had roughly one-third of a doubling, so we must have had almost half of the greenhouse warming expected from a doubling – that’s elementary arithmetic, given that the curve is agreed to be logarithmic. Yet if you believe the surface thermometers* (the red and green lines), we have had about 0.6C of warming in that time, at the rate of less than 0.13C per decade – somewhat less if you believe the satellite thermometers (the blue and purple lines).

So we are on track for 1.2C*. We are on the blue line, not the red line*.

Remember Jim Hansen of NASA told us in 1988 to expect 2-4 degrees in 25 years. We are experiencing about one-tenth of that.

We are below even the zero-emission path expected by the IPCC in 1990*.

To be skeptical of the IPCC claims is to be ostracized as a fanatic, somebody tenaciously holding to a disproved view since "the science is settled". But I fully expect to see the IPCC and the "global warming" crowd defrocked and disgraced before my life is over. In the interim, I expect to be pilloried for my unwillingness to be "reasonable" and "accept the facts". As Ridley points out, it is very, very hard to debunk and defeat pseudoscience.

Journalists are fond of saying that the IPCC report is based solely on the peer-reviewed literature. Rajendra Pachauri himself made that claim in 2008, saying*:

“we carry out an assessment of climate change based on peer-reviewed literature, so everything that we look at and take into account in our assessments has to carry [the] credibility of peer-reviewed publications, we don't settle for anything less than that.”

That’s a voodoo claim. The glacier claim was not peer reviewed; nor was the alteration to the sensitivity function Lewis spotted. The journalist Donna Laframboise got volunteers all over the world to help her count the times the IPCC used non-peer reviewed literature. Her conclusion is that*: “Of the 18,531 references in the 2007 Climate Bible we found 5,587 - a full 30% - to be non peer-reviewed.”

Truth will win out. But as Ridley notes:

Yet even to say things like this is to commit heresy. To stand up and say, within a university or within the BBC, that you do not think global warming is dangerous gets you the sort of reaction that standing up in the Vatican and saying you don’t think God is good would get. Believe me, I have tried it.

And this isn't just a quibble of science versus pseudoscience. It is real dollars and cents:

Well here’s why it matters. The alarmists have been handed power over our lives; the heretics have not. Remember Britain’s unilateral climate act is officially expected to cost the hard-pressed UK economy £18.3 billion a year for the next 39 years and achieve an unmeasurably small change in carbon dioxide levels.

At least* sceptics do not cover the hills of Scotland with useless, expensive, duke-subsidising wind turbines whose manufacture causes pollution in Inner Mongolia and which kill rare raptors such as this griffon vulture.

...

At least astrologers have not driven millions of people into real hunger, perhaps killing 192,000 last year according to one conservative estimate, by diverting 5% of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel*.

My personal bête noire is the willingness of these global warming fanatics to condemn the bottom 3 billion to a pauperized future by calling for a halt to economic growth in order to stop what, to me at least, was a phantom problem. These fanatics want to return to the "golden age" of the early 1800s before the growth of fossil fuel. They want to go back to the glorious days of trailing behind horse or ox to plow a field. They days when families huddled in an unheated cottage in the dark because light and fuel were expensive.

There is a bad historical precedent for the current struggle of science vs pseudoscience:

Handing the reins of power to pseudoscience has an unhappy history. Remember eugenics. Around 1910 the vast majority of scientists and other intellectuals agreed that nationalizing reproductive decisions so as to stop poor, disabled and stupid people from having babies was not just a practical but a moral imperative of great urgency.

“There is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact,” said George Bernard Shaw*, “that nothing but a eugenics religion can save our civilization from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilizations.’’ By the skin of its teeth, mainly because of a brave Liberal MP called Josiah Wedgwood, Britain never handed legal power to the eugenics movement. Germany did.

Or remember Trofim Lysenko*, a pseudoscientific crank with a strange idea that crops could be trained to do what you wanted and that Mendelian genetics was bunk. His ideas became the official scientific religion of the Soviet Union and killed millions; his critics, such as the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, ended up dead in prison.

Am I going too far in making these comparisons? I don’t think so. James Hansen of NASA says oil firm executives should be tried for crimes against humanity. (Remember this is the man who is in charge of one of the supposedly impartial data sets about global temperatures.) John Beddington, Britain's chief scientific adviser, said this year that just as we are "grossly intolerant of racism", so we should also be "grossly intolerant of pseudoscience", in which he included all forms of climate-change scepticism.

The irony of course is that much of the green movement began as heretical dissent. Greenpeace went from demanding that the orthodox view of genetically modified crops be challenged, and that the Royal Society was not to be trusted, to demanding that heresy on climate change be ignored and the Royal Society could not be wrong.

Talking of Greenpeace, did you know that the collective annual budget of Greenpeace, WWF and Friends of the Earth was more than a billion dollars globally last year? People sometimes ask me what’s the incentive for scientists to exaggerate climate change. But look at the sums of money available to those who do so, from the pressure groups, from governments and from big companies. It was not the sceptics who hired an ex News of the World deputy editor as a spin doctor after climategate, it was the University of East Anglia.

By contrast scientists and most mainstream journalists risk their careers if they take a skeptical line, so dogmatic is the consensus view. It is left to the blogosphere to keep the flame of heresy alive and do the investigative reporting the media has forgotten how to do. In America*, Anthony Watts who crowd-sourced the errors in the siting of thermometers and runs wattsupwiththat.com;

In Canada*, Steve McIntyre, the mathematician who bit by bit exposed the shocking story of the hockey stick and runs climateaudit.org.

Here in Britain,* Andrew Montford, who dissected the shenanigans behind the climategate whitewash enquiries and runs bishop-hill.net.

In Australia*, Joanne Nova, the former television science presenter who has pieced together the enormous sums of money that go to support vested interests in alarm, and runs joannenova.com.au.

The remarkable thing about the heretics I have mentioned is that every single one is doing this in his or her spare time. They work for themselves, they earn a pittance from this work. There is no great fossil-fuel slush fund for sceptics.

As "Deep Throat" in the Watergate scandal advised: "Follow the money."

Go read the full Matt Ridley talk.

Nothing is Obvious

I love the complexity of the natural world. It is utterly amazing to me that scientists ever decoded anything. I remember as a kid "deciding" that I would be a great chemist. But I had no chemicals, so I mixed things that were around me. Mostly I got mud. No brilliant insights, no atomic theory of matter, no complexity about valence electrons. The real world is very complex and very opaque. It takes lots of hard thinking, experimentation, and clever theorizing to make any sense of anything.

Here's a simple example of how counter-intuitive the world is:

The orbit of the Earth’s around the sun is slightly eccentric. The closest point is called the perihelion. On January 4th the Earth is just 147,098,291 km away from the sun. Aphelion occurs July 4th when the Earth is 152,098,233 km away from the sun, a difference of +3.3%. Naturally the power of the sun falls away with distance. Its radiation is 7% weaker in July than in January. Strangely, near surface air temperature for the Earth as a whole is 3.3°C warmer in July than in January. Yes, the surface is warmest when the Earth is furthest from the sun!

I find it funny that the "global warming" crowd is convinced there is a very tight relationship between CO2 and air temperatures. They think CO2 can drive up temperatures. Actually the evidence is mostly the other way around: warmer climate releases more CO2. But don't let such facts cloud the mind of an ideologue!

Climatologists have long wondered why a 1°C increase in temperature at the sea surface relates to as much as a 3° increase in temperature of the upper troposphere. They call this phenomenon ‘amplification’ as if the temperature of the upper troposphere in some way depended on the temperature at the surface and there was a transistor circuit between the two. Hey guys, its the other way round. Turn the telescope round. The presence of a long wave absorber namely ozone, is responsible for this phenomenon. The warming of the upper troposphere results in cloud loss and then, after a little time lag, the surface temperature increases.

In the mid and high zone, cloud is present as highly reflective interlacing micro-crystals of ice that we describe as cirrus and stratus. When the air warms these crystals sublimate. Ice cloud is the dominant cloud of the subtropical region. In IPCC climate science high altitude ice cloud is supposed to warm the surface by enhancing back radiation. But when radiation from the atmosphere increases in winter relative humidity falls. This radiation it is not bounced back by the cloud, the cloud disappears and lets the sun shine through. The surface temperature response is due to the disappearance of the cloud, not back radiation. Oops.

...

The $164,000 question is what is causing cloud cover to rise and fall on decadal and centennial time scales.

The answer to both questions lies in the activity of the coupled circulation of the stratosphere and the troposphere at the poles that feeds ozone into the troposphere. The upper troposphere warms or cools depending upon the feed rate of ozone. The feed rate changes over time.

The ozone content and temperature of the upper stratosphere depends in the first instance upon the activity of the night jet at the poles that introduces NOx from the mesosphere. Less NOx means more ozone. The activity of the night jet depends upon surface pressure and the concentration of NOx in the jet depends upon solar activity. In Antarctica, surface pressure has been falling for sixty years indicating a continuous increase in the ozone feed into the troposphere, the second major influence upon the ozone content of the polar stratosphere.

In that the coupled circulation of the stratosphere and the troposphere over Antarctica changes surface pressure at 60-70° south it changes the strength of the westerly winds in the southern hemisphere, cloud cover and surface temperature on all time scales. Stratospheric ozone is wasted above and below the stratosphere, processes referred to as ‘unknown dynamical influences’ in the more respectable polar ozone studies.

These phenomena are the very essence of the Southern Annular Mode, arguably the fundamental mode of global climate variation on all time scales.

One thing is plain. High altitude ice cloud in the southern hemisphere is plainly a reflector of solar radiation. It does not promote warming (positive feedback). It promotes cooling (negative feedback). It’s presence depends upon the flux in ozone in the upper troposphere as governed by processes in the stratosphere. So the UNIPCC climate models are 180° out of whack.

The above snippets are from an article by Erl Happ, a wine maker:

I am a winemaker and grape-grower with a strong interest in climate. I was interested enough to try and discover the common thermal characteristics that are seen in great vineyard locations and did a lot of work with hourly temperature data from around the world. Climate sets the limit on what can be achieved in the vineyard. I became interested in climate change when I noticed the growing season temperature falling in our part of the world, the south west of Western Australia. That set me on a quest to work out why. Soon, it became apparent that parts of the Southern Hemisphere like Antarctica and Southern Chile had been cooling for fifty years or more. My experience in analyzing temperature dynamics for vine sites and working out just how much heat these plants need to bring their fruit to maturity gave me a focus on sourcing data and figuring out what has been happening on a regional scale, both at the surface and in the upper atmosphere. I think there is room for a subject called historical climatology. We can learn a lot just by looking at what has happened over long periods of time. Good data sets are readily available on the net. All one needs is a little curiosity, a facility with spreadsheets and a lot of determination.

Erl Happ's real "job" is wine...

Global Warming Eyed by a Climatological Maverick

Roger Pielke Sr. would reject the label "maverick". He is a climatologist who accepts "climate change" but rebels at the IPCC "global warming" story as being too simplistic.

Here's a presentation he gave while visiting the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada on September 29, 2011. In amongst his slides are these two which, from my perspective, summarize his message:






From the local Waterloo press, TheRecord.com, here is an article written by Brent Davis summarizing Roger Pielke Sr.'s message:

When it comes to the issue of climate change, one leading researcher believes too much attention is being paid to carbon dioxide.

And that focus — touted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, among others — means that other important factors aren’t being given the consideration they deserve, said Roger Pielke Sr. of the University of Colorado Boulder.

“It’s blinding us to other possibilities,” Pielke told an audience at the University of Waterloo on Thursday night, as he delivered the 2011 TD Walter Bean Lecture in the Environment. “Carbon dioxide shouldn’t be the paramount, overarching variable.”

Now, Pielke is the first to admit that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is a concern. But he says the issue of climate change goes far beyond global warming, and that the negative human impact on climate goes far beyond carbon dioxide.

Land use and changes to land cover, aerosols and nitrogen deposition are key causal factors, or “human climate forcings,” as well, Pielke said.

“The human influence on climate is everywhere.”

Given the complexity of the climate system, global warming isn’t the sole concern. In fact, Pielke argues that various data sets, including upper-ocean heating, don’t show any global warming for the past seven years or so.

And it’s debatable whether extreme weather events are on the rise, he said. Tornado damage in the United States, as a percentage of gross domestic product, is on the way down, and the coastline isn’t being hit any more frequently in the past hundred years by major hurricanes.

Pielke wants to see a different model used for the climate change issue, one that takes global warming and carbon dioxide into account, but recognizes that there are other significant human influences.

He’d like to see key resources such as water, food, energy, human health and ecosystem function used as the basis of an assessment of vulnerability that takes into account the influence of things like population growth, policy and institutional changes and climate variability.

The problems we face in terms of climate are multi-dimensional, Pielke said. All too often, current approaches are a “gross oversimplification of reality,” he said.

And here is an interview of Roger Pielke Sr. on the local Waterloo radio. If you listen you might be surprised at this scientist who is demonized by some as a "climate skeptic". He doesn't fit the simplistic picture that most people have of "the debate" over climate change.

The CIA Declares that Knowledge about "Global Warming" is Classified Intelligence

The American taxpayer foots the bill for the CIA, but when the CIA goes out and digs up information about "global warming", this is stamped "classified" and the taxpayers aren't allowed to see the results.

Just what about "global warming" is so dangerous that leaking anything about it to "America's enemies" would undermine the American republic? I don't see it.

Here are some bits from an article in Wired magazine:

CIA Says Global-Warming Intelligence Is ‘Classified’

Two years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency announced it was creating a center to analyze the geopolitical ramifications of “phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels, population shifts and heightened competition for natural resources.”

But whatever work the Center on Climate Change and National Security has done remains secret.

In response to National Security Archive scholar Jeffrey Richelson’s Freedom of Information Act request, the CIA said all of its work is “classified.”

“We completed a thorough search for records responsive to your request and located material that we determined is currently and properly classified and must be denied in its entirety,” (.pdf) Susan Viscuso, the agency’s information and privacy coordinator, wrote Richelson.

...

The CIA’s position, he said, means all “the center’s work is classified and there is not even a single study, or a single passage in a single study, that could be released without damage to national security. That’s a familiar song, and it became tiresome long ago.”

...

When the center was announced, the CIA said it would become “a powerful asset recognized throughout our government, and beyond, for its knowledge and insight.”

President Barack Obama also promised a transparent administration, which he might not be living up to. For instance, in 2009, the Obama administration played the national security card to hide details of the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that is still being negotiated across the globe.

What’s more, consider the 33-page report the White House issued Friday, “The Obama Administration’s Commitment to Open Government.” (pdf)

So much for promises about "transparency". So much for the sweet light of reason in government. I guess the spies think that information about CO2 levels is a national secret that can be manipulated by "America's enemies" despite the fact that it is public knowledge.

Canadians are Gullible

Here is a graphic that shows that Canadians are more likely to believe the story of "global warming" than Americans or Britons:

Click to Enlarge
I'm shocked. I would have thought that Canadians were more rational and critical. Everybody knows that the US educational system teaches credulous Americans that "creationism" is a science on an equal footing with evolution and that the Bible is literal truth. I would have never thought that Canadians would uncritically accept the codswallop of "overwhelming man-made global warming".

Everybody knows that the late 20th century was an era of globally warmer temperatures. The real argument is over whether that is mostly man-made (greenhouse gases) or mostly normal climate variation.

I'm skeptical. I've done computer modeling, I know how difficult it is to get models correct especially for complex dynamic phenomena. And climate is no only complex, it isn't a "complete science". There are lots of aspects of climate that simply aren't known well enough to model. So putting the numbers in and "running the model" to get "the results" is a bit of a joke. You get what you want by tweaking your model. Nobody's model can be validated by running it over past data to replicate past climate. So why would you accept that it can predict the 21st century climate?

Worse, I'm very suspicious of "the science is settled" crowd. They fiddled the data at the Hadley CRU. They have a very bad habit of reading into the data what they please. Right now they are declaring "global warming is proved because Arctic ice is at the lowest point ever!". Only it isn't. Read this post on the Watt's Up With That? blog.

Oh... and this "lowest ice extent ever" crowd conveniently ignores that Antarctic ice. I sure don't see any disastrous "all the ice is melting" trend in this data from the University of Illinois:

Click to Enlarge
If you want the cleanest data on global temperatues, go look at the global UAH satellite data maintained
by Roy Spencer and read his blog.

Click to Enlarge
Sure there is a rise in temps in the 1990s, but there has also been a flattening out in the 2000s. My best guess is that this variation is a natural trend, not an inexorable exponentially rising heat wave driven by greenhouse gases. I agree that the concentration of greenhouse gases right now are on an exponentially rising trend, but I don't see the equivalent in the actual measured temperatures.

I don't see greenhouse gasses exponentially rising forever. Instead I expect a sigmoid curve, equivalent to a logistic function, used in biological modelling for an invasion of a species into virgin territory with an early explosive growth but as resources are exhausted the growth dies off. I fully expect technology to continue advancing and we will move away from fossil fuels as they get more expensive. The "greenhouse gas" worry will die a death just like the hysteria in the late 1960s of the ZPG people about coming mass famines as humankind hit resource limits in the late 1970s. It didn't happen. Technology redefined the avaiable resources. The "global warming" crowd has the same blinders as the Club of Rome and the ZPG people.

By the way, the Roy Spencer mentioned above is the author of a paper who just underwent the unusual process of being contested, the editor who published the paper was forced to resign, and an "official global warming" response paper was published within a matter of just a few weeks to contest Spencer's paper. See this and this and this. Such unprecedentedly swift response is pretty clear evidence of collusion by the "global warming" crowd to suppress alternative viewpoints.

Reasons to be Skeptical of Doomsday "Global Warming" Claims

Here is one of the better summaries of the skeptical viewpoint on the issue of "global warming" or "climate change" or "climate disruption" or ...

This is from a post by Charlie Martin on the PJ Tattler blog:

“There are few skeptics (I can’t think of any, and I’ve been reporting on this for two solid years and an interested bystander for several years before that) who don’t believe there has been significant warming since the Little Ice Age, or that humans contribute to it, or that additional CO2 or other greenhouse gases aren’t probably part of that contribution.”

Unless one is arguing that humans are the only cause of global warming — in which case I’d have to point to that big glowing thing in the sky during the daytime — what I said explicitly includes a human contribution and even a greenhouse gas contribution.

Now, the IPCC AR4 model is rather stronger than that: it insists that anthropogenic, greenhouse-gas forced warming is the dominant — so dominant that it leads the unthoughtful to turn it into “only” — cause of global warming. For conciseness, call that the AGW model. Reasons I don’t find that hypotheses convincing include:

(1) from the start, it has depended on very sensitive statistical techniques to tease a signal out of an overall warming that has been going on for 500 years. Refer back to the famous “hockey stick” charts and then look for one with actual error bars: even in the papers making the strongest arguments for the AGW hypothesis have very wide error ranges — so wide that the AGW component barely exceeds the limits of the technique.

(2) the specific methods used for some of the dominant studies turn out to be mathematically flawed. in particular, the methods of Mann _et al_ turn out to present a clear hockey stick no matter what the input data is, including pure random numbers.

A method that detects a signal when there is no signal is necessarily suspect. At best.

Other examples of questionable parts of these results include:

the methods used to select data points in the GCHN data sets — examined carefully, it turns out that the selected points used to compute GAST and regional temps are, to a *very* high probability, the points from the raw data set that lead to the most warming. Carefully read, the descriptions of the analysis even say that’s a selection criterion: they’re selecting data points that fit the models well — but then testing the models by how well they fit the data.
actual site locations turn out to very commonly have poor site placement and site changes that would add significant warming. This warming has not been appropriately compensated for. [Note: GHCN3 does handle site changes better, Charlie is probably not aware of it since it is relatively new- Anthony]
odd ad hoc methods to fit together paleoclimate data and actual temperature measurement, including the famous “hide the decline” patching, and contrariwise the exclusion of recent tree ring data that suggests tree rings may not be as strongly correlated with temperature as we think. The explanations for those exclusions end up looking very ad hoc in themselves.

(3) There is actually extensive literature showing anthropogenic components that are not driven by greenhouse gases. These results have been excluded from the IPCC, often in very questionable ways (cf Roger Pielke Sr’s removal from the IPCC editorial board.)

(4) The predictions of further warming are necessarily based on models. Now, it happens I did my PhD work on Federally funded modeling, from which I developed the NBSR Law (named after the group for which I worked): All modeling efforts will inevitably converge on the result most likely to lead to further funding.

Anyone with a unbiased eye who looks into it will find any number of people who have found that a model that predicts more warming gets funded; a model that predicts relatively less warming gets less funding. Pre-tenure researchers in particular are warned away from results that don’t fit orthodoxy.

(5) The models themselves turn out not to be very predictive. Grossly, you could look at Jim Hansen’s prediction from the 80′s that Manhattan Island would be awash by the 2000′s. More technically, there were a number of models that predicted pretty significant warming, and in fact an increased warming rate, increased 2nd derivative, in the span 1990-2010. In fact, the warming was much smaller than predicted, and the second derivative appears even to have turned negative.

These models are often revised so that after the fact that predict what really happened. This isn’t very satisfactory.

In the mean time, actual observation, as eg with Dick Lindzen’s recent paper, simply isn’t fitting the models very well. As Granddaddy used to say “if the bird book and the bird disagree, believe the bird.”

(6) It’s unclear how the AGW hypothesis can be falsified in its current form. Certainly, anecdotally, there are people who predict that unusual warm spells are a sign of global warming, as are unusual cold spells. Should we have a period of unusually small variation, there are people who have suggested that as an effect of global warming. And in any case, simply observing warming doesn’t allow one to infer the truth of AGW as a hypothesis.

(7) The arguments against the skeptics turn out to be unscientific, and often unprofessional, in the extreme.

These range from the common — “the consensus is” — to the ad hominem, and even to outright attempts to suppress free inquiry.

“The consensus is” neglects the fact that science isn’t decided by consensus, not permanently at least. (At one time, the consensus was that fire involved a special elemental substance called phlogiston; at another, it was that atoms were indivisible and unchangeable; not so long ago, it was that light was a wave in a literally ethereal substance called the “luminiferous aether.” If consensus precluded further testing, we would still believe those today.)

The ad hominems include the way that anyone who ever received so much at a 10 cents off gas coupon from a service station is accused of being in the pay of Big Oil. Sometimes, the ad hominems are frank lies, but they get out into the AGW enthusiast community and are treated as truth.

And, well, anyone who read the ClimateGate files knows about actual attempts to suppress certain authors and papers. Perhaps it’s not fair to call it “conspiracy”, but the fact is that there is clear and unequivocal evidence of collusion and bullying on authors, reporters, and journal editorial boards.

If the AGW arguments are that strong, they don’t need collusion and bullying.

So, this is a very long piece considering I’m not getting paid to write it; let me summarize.

First of all, what *I* said wasn’t what you supposed I’d said. It would be worth considering what else you _think_ you’ve read recently for other cases.

Second, to the extent that I have a position, as I said, I think warming is unequivocal, a human contribution very probable, and the magnitude of that contribution in the face of feedbacks and homeostasis currently unknown and on the very edge of what we can actually measure.

And third, I don’t think the AGW enthusiasts consider the costs and benefits of AGW amelioration versus the other possibilities. If preventing a sea level rise of one meter means dooming future generations in the Third World to sickness, hunger, and darkness, it’s not worth it.

The sad fact is that skeptics get painted as some howling crazies by the "mainstream". But the reality is that most skeptics are pretty reasonable people. There are a number of very good reasons to not rush off with a wild-eyed look stampeded by some doomsday fear. I've lived long enough to see many, many examples of fanatics drumming up this kind of frenzy that the world is coming to an end unless we act now! Most have a grain of truth in them. But that element of truth is blown out of proportion and a threat is turned into a bogeyman blown up way out of proportion to the real threat.

Personally, I have nothing against conservation and a push to develop alternate energy sources. What I don't like is hue and cry of fanatics who would have us go back to the lifestyles of the late 18th century. That just isn't going to happen with the population of the earth of today. And I'm not going to allow the spoiled offspring of the well-to-do stampede governments and international organizations into preventing the bottom third of the world from attaining decent lifestyles. That simply isn't morally acceptable and you can't scream "doomsday" loud enough to make that acceptable. I'm from the old school that says that if there is a danger, we all hang together and get out together. We don't let the affluent run for the exits and "sacrifice" the rest of us so they can keep their lifestyles while condemning us to go fossil fuel free.

But my real bottom line is that I just don't believe the "science". I've done computer modeling and I know how hard it is to get it right in a complex scenario. And the climate system is not just complex but not fully understood by climatologists, so the models are "premature" as forecasting tools. They may be useful in investigating climate issues, but they are not ready for prime time predictions about the future.

As Charlie Martin points out, yes there has been warming, but the skeptics are fighting over whether that was anthropogenic or something else. I vote for the "mostly something else". Meanwhile, the portion that is anthropogenic can be dealt with without the hysteria of the doomsday crowd.

Global Warming Doomsday Scenarios

I've always taken a jaundiced view of the doomsday prophets claiming that we will all die in a runaway global warming. I've seen too many of these various hysterias sweep over people and be carried to extremes.

Sure there is a kernel of truth in global warming scenarios. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and fossil fuel use has climbed inexorably over the last century and a half. But doomsday scnearios are generally a straight line extrapolation of old trends. In reality the world is more complicated and surprising new developments occur, e.g. world cities did not drown in meters of horse pucky in the early 20th century. Why not? The horses disappeared and internal combustion engines took over.

Here's a bit from a report in Bloomberg News that says that fossil fuel is going the way of horse-drawn transportation:

Solar generators may produce the majority of the world’s power within 50 years, slashing the emissions of greenhouse gases that harm the environment, according to a projection by the International Energy Agency.

Photovoltaic and solar-thermal plants may meet most of the world’s demand for electricity by 2060 -- and half of all energy needs -- with wind, hydropower and biomass plants supplying much of the remaining generation, Cedric Philibert, senior analyst in the renewable energy division at the Paris-based agency, said in an Aug. 26 phone interview.

“Photovoltaic and concentrated solar power together can become the major source of electricity,” Philibert said. “You’ll have a lot more electricity than today but most of it will be produced by solar-electric technologies.”

The solar findings, set to be published in a report later this year, go beyond the IEA’s previous forecast, which envisaged the two technologies meeting about 21 percent of the world’s power needs in 2050. The scenario suggests investors able to pick the industry’s winners may reap significant returns as the global economy shifts away from fossil fuels.

I see a couple of trends that are going to result in the hysteria over "global warming" being misplaced:

• The story of "greenhouse gases" is too simplistic. Weather and climate are much more complex than the story told by the doomsayers.


• The straight line extrapolations will fail because they don't recognize technological revolutions and I expect solar power to be one of those revolutions.


• The trend in power consumption among developed countries changed late in the 20th century. Earlier there was a tight coupling between GDP growth and power use, but this declined as economies moved from manufacturing to post-industrial development


• All hysteria is an overshoot. In order to motivate and drive a generally apathetic audience to the political motivation desired by the fanatics, they have to oversell their ideas. This becomes systemic and feeds on itself until their doomsday scenarios become simply incredible for those with a sophisticated understanding of how the world works. But these over-simplified scare stories are very effective in getting the naive caught up in the hysteria

Call me a cynic, but the "global warming" craze is over. When the fanatics stopped calling it "global warming" and went to "climate change" that was a clue. The climate is always changing so their cause can be validated whether temperatures go up or down. The real issue was always and still is "anthropogenic global warming", i.e. how much is human activity adding on top of any natural cycle of climate warming. The answer is "some" but not nearly as much as the fanatics would convince you it does.

If and when technology changes how human activity affects global warming, say by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, then the hysteria can die down.

Instead of trying to de-industrialize, the global warming fanatics should always have gone for the two winning strategies: energy efficiency and technology change. Instead they went for political solutions that would cap development and tax consumers in a crude attempt to manipulate human activity. It was, and is, a bad strategy. They would have been better off focusing on re-directing human change not stopping it.

Paul Krugman on Global Warming

I like Paul Krugman. I read most of what he writes and find him to be very bright and I generally agree with him. But I part company with him when he puts his "climatologist" cap on and pontificates as he has in his latest NY Times op-ed column:

The second part of Mr. Perry’s statement is, as it happens, just false: the scientific consensus about man-made global warming — which includes 97 percent to 98 percent of researchers in the field, according to the National Academy of Sciences — is getting stronger, not weaker, as the evidence for climate change just keeps mounting.

In fact, if you follow climate science at all you know that the main development over the past few years has been growing concern that projections of future climate are underestimating the likely amount of warming. Warnings that we may face civilization-threatening temperature change by the end of the century, once considered outlandish, are now coming out of mainstream research groups.

But never mind that, Mr. Perry suggests; those scientists are just in it for the money, “manipulating data” to create a fake threat. In his book “Fed Up,” he dismissed climate science as a “contrived phony mess that is falling apart.”

Krugman and I agree on holding Rick Perry in low esteem for his anti-science views. But I disagree with Krugman over global warming.

Take a look at this 130 year record of temperature anomaly data from NASA (note: "anomaly" means deviation from the average over the 130 year baseline):

Click to Enlarge
I don't see any "trend" and certainly no "runaway global warming" in the above graph.

OK... I cheated a bit. That is the continental US data. I trust that more than the global datasets because the network of stations in the US is thicker and is more likely to be monitored and calibrated better than measurements around the world. Also, the "world" is 3/4 ocean and there really are no stations gathering data there (sure some buoys and radiosondes that are occasionally dropped) like the coverage of the US. Here is the NASA global anomaly data:

Click to Enlarge
I prefer the following satellite temperature observations which uses the same sensor over the whole face of the earth. The only problem with satellites is calibrating the sensor and degradation of the sensor over time. But I trust the satellite more than I trust all the stations in the above "world" datasets (especially the “missing” stations covering 3/4 of the face of the earth, i.e. the oceans which aren't measured but "extrapolated" and sometimes for hundreds and even a thousand miles)

Click to Enlarge
To my eye, the above shows no discernible temperature "trend". Sure you can fit a line through the data and get a slight rise over time, but the signal is lost in the noise. I wouldn't trust that "trend".

The satellite is the most reliable, objective, global measure of "warming" and it doesn't support the purple prose of Paul Krugman:

we may face civilization-threatening temperature change by the end of the century

Neither Krugman nor I are climatologists. When Krugman cites 97% of "researchers in the field" believe in "global warming", I say so what? If you had canvased physicists in 1905 for a "belief" in warped space and time dilation you would have found 99.9% rejected the theory as preposterous. But Einstein's theory is true and is used every day in GPS systems and in the appropriate physics calculations. Science isn't a democracy where you vote on your favourite theory to establish its truth. It is consensus. But not a voting consensus. It is a hard fought consensus arrived at over time by experiment and working with the theory. Global warming isn't anywhere near that kind of "established" science right now.

I believe Paul Krugman is wrong and time will prove it. In the interim, I continue to admire him and agree with most things he says. I simply ignore his pontificating on "climate change". We both agree 100% that climate is changing and has always been changing. Where we disagree is over "anthropocentric global warming". I will admit that CO2 and other green house gases are increasing temperatures but I think he has the basic science corrupted by a reliance on computer modeling. I think the models are misleading. I think the science is incomplete:

• I believe that studies of cloud formation such as Svensmark's theory of sun-cosmic ray-cloud interaction will change "received" opinion


• I believe that Roy Spencer's cloud feedback mechanism will change "received" opinion


• I believe that Richard Lindzen's critique of climate models will change "received" opinion

I'm not a climatologist. I may be completely wrong. But I do read and I don't see the "consensus" that Al Gore, the IPCC, and Paul Krugman claim has "settled the science". I do see ambiguous data. I do see ideas struggling for a hearing. And I'm aware of how the funding agencies are creating a "false consensus" by putting money out there for "global warming" research. For years I've watched senior scientists who are beyond the tyranny of the funding agencies struggle with theories outside the "mainstream" of global warming. They struggle for a hearing. Since science isn't a beauty contest, I believe that eventually these voices will be heard and the simple "greenhouse gas" story will end up extensively revised by a much more sophisticated understanding of climatology.

Oh... and I heartily agree with Krugman's complaint about the anti-intellectualism and anti-science of the Republican party:

Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

How to Destroy a Country

Simple, follow blind ideology and ignore reality.

Here is a bit from an article in the UK's Telegraph newspaper pointing out that the UK is well on its way to transforming itself from a post-industrial country to a de-industrialized impoverished country:

What is the maddest thing going on in Britain today? There may be many competitors for that title, but a front-runner must be what the Government has made the centrepiece of its energy policy, to ensure that our lights stay on and that our now largely computer-dependent economy remains functioning. Last week, the BBC ran a series of reports by its science correspondent, David Shukman, on the Government’s plan to ring our coasts with vast offshore wind farms.

The nearest thing allowed to criticism of this policy came in an interview with the Oxford academic Dieter Helm, who we were told had “done the sums”. What, Shukman asked, had he come up with? The only figures Helm gave were that the Government’s offshore wind farm plans would, by 2020, cost £100 billion – scarcely a state secret, since the Government itself announced this three years ago – plus £40 billion more to connect these windmills to the grid, a figure given us by the National Grid last year.

Helm did not tell us that this £140 billion equates to £5,600 for every household in the country. But he did admit that the plan was “staggeringly expensive”, and that, given the current extent of “fuel poverty” and the state of our economy, he doubted “if it can in fact be afforded”.

...

Compare this with the figures for Britain’s newest gas-fired power station, recently opened in Plymouth. This is capable of generating 882MW at a capital cost of £400 million – just £500,000 for each megawatt. Thus the wind farm is 22 times more expensive, and could only be built because its owners will receive a 200 per cent subsidy: £40 million a year, on top of the £20 million they will get for the electricity itself. This we will all have to pay for through our electricity bills, whereas the unsubsidised cost of power from the gas plant, even including the price of the gas, will be a third as much.

You can't compete economically if you spend far more on energy than your neighbors. You can't compete if you layer huge debts on the population in order to meet a "green" ideology.

The children and grandchildren of this generation will be working to pay off debts of this ideological "splurge". And the cruelest joke will be that those generations will realize that the "global warming" craze was built on an exaggerated threat. People have been stampeded by ideologues and their children and grandchildren will be left picking up the pieces. Sad.

This insanity might be bearable if the cost actually bought the proposed "benefit", but it doesn't:

The insanity does not end here. The Government talks of building 10,000 windmills capable of generating up to 25,000MW of the electricity we need. But when it does so, it – like the BBC – invariably uses that same trick of referring to “capacity”, without explaining that their actual output would be well below 30 per cent. (Last year, onshore turbines generated just 21 per cent of their capacity.) In other words, for all that colossal expenditure – and even if there was the remotest chance that two new giant turbines could be built every day between now and 2020 – we could only hope to generate some 6,000MW. This is not only way below our EU target, it is only a tenth of our peak demand during those cold, windless weeks last winter, when wind power was often providing barely 1 per cent of the power we needed.

To keep the lights on during such times, for every new megawatt of wind capacity we build it will be necessary for to build a megawatt of capacity from gas-fired stations, kept wastefully running 24/7, chucking out carbon dioxide. This will add further billions to the bill we shall all have to pay, while ensuring that wind power does nothing whatever to reduce our overall emission of CO2. But this, again, is another thing that the Government and the BBC are careful never to tell us. Madness is far too polite a word.

Only an ideologue would celebrate buildling a megawatt of wind power and then having to back it up with a megawatt of gas-fired turbine to handle the fact that the wind power isn't sufficiently reliable to be left alone to provide the power. Rather than just building the gas-fired turbine and using it, the green fanatics end up building both and running the gas-fired turbine as "back up"!

The Wild Imaginings of the "Global Warming" Crowd

If you want to understand how hysteria can lead to the craziest behaviour conceivable, here is the latest ravings from the "global warming" crowd. In an article in the UK's Guardian newspaper:

Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists

Rising greenhouse emissions may tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report for Nasa

It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.

Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth's atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain.

This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by scientists at Nasa and Pennsylvania State University that, while considered unlikely, they say could play out were humans and alien life to make contact at some point in the future.

First of all, SETI has been scanning the universe for 50 years with radio telescopes and has uncover no evidence of extraterrestrial life. To say that "scientists" are debating that "global warming" will tip of aliens who will invade and kill us as a pest species is hysterically funny it is so wacko. There is no ET out there. There is no "global warming" discernible from space. And given the laws of physics there will never be a way to travel from star system to star system for any purpose because it is just too damn expensive in energy. At most a civilization can send out a few ounces of "message" on a plaque in a Pioneer satellite. They are not coming as an avenging death mob to punish us for crimes against the temperature gods. This is just nutty ravings of a lunatic fringe, the "global warming" fringe!

The above is hard to swallow, but this "science" was published in Acta Astronautica, 2011, 68(11-12): 2114-2129 as "Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis". (Access a copy of the paper here.) Now that is truly bizarre and nutty. There is no science here. I can see publishing this paper in a fanzine for a science fiction group, but not in a serious journal for science. You might as well publish papers on the "spiritual 'field force effect' of Voodoo incantations on farm workers in Haiti".

What is truly funny is that it is the nutty "global warming" crowd that wants to paint those who are skeptical about this "warming" as the lunatics. But the above should make it clear that the global warming crowd are the unserious, embrace-any-crazy-theory crowd.

An Alternative to Simplistic CO2 Global Warming

Here is an hour documentary on Henrik Svensmark with a presentation of his cosmoclimatology theory. This theory is currently undergoing experimental verification at CERN with the CLOUD experiment.



For me, the most interesting parts are from 30:00 thru 38:00 when Israeli Nir Shaviv talks about the relationship of cosmic rays, the transit of the solar system through arms of the Milky Way galaxy, and Ice Ages. This is a wonderful theoretical and experimental basis for evaluating Svensmark's cloud thesis.

The bits at 48:00 and 49:30 where the difficulty Svensmark has faced in getting his research published is a burning indictment of the politicization of climate science and the repression carried out by the fanatics who model CO2 and have declared "the science is settled". It isn't settled. The models are flawed. CO2 can't account for past hot house and ice house phases of climate and the models can't post-dict recent and well know climate. They are fatally flawed. But rather than accept this and broaden the search to understand climate, the fanatics have hunkered down and refused to do science. They have turned "global warming" into a belief system, a test of them-versus-us of political correctness. Shame!

Update 2011sep07: Here is a Wall Street Journal article by Anne Jolis on Svensmark's work and the CERN experiment.

Scientists have been speculating on the relationship among cosmic rays, solar activity and clouds since at least the 1970s. But the notion didn't get a workout until 1995, when Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark came across a 1991 paper by Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen. Those Danes had charted a close relationship between solar variations and changes in the earth's surface temperature since 1860.

"I had this idea that the real link could be between cloud cover and cosmic rays, and I wanted to try to figure out if it was a good idea or a bad idea," Mr. Svensmark told me from Copenhagen, where he leads sun-climate research at the Danish National Space Institute.

He wasn't the first scientist to have the idea, but he was the first to try and demonstrate it. He got in touch with Mr. Friis-Christensen and they used satellite data to show a close correlation among solar activity, cloud cover and cosmic-ray levels since 1979.

They announced their findings and the possible climatic implications in 1996 at a space conference in Birmingham, England. At which point, Mr. Svensmark recalls, "everything went completely crazy. . . . it turned out it was very, very sensitive to say these things already at that time." He returned to Copenhagen to find his local daily leading with a quote from the chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at the time: "I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naïve and irresponsible."

Mr. Svensmark had been, at the very least, politically naïve. "Before 1995 I was doing things related to quantum fluctuations. Nobody was interested, it was just me sitting in my office. It was really an eye-opener, that baptism into climate science." He says his work was "very much ignored" by the climate-science establishment—but not by CERN physicist Jasper Kirkby, who is leading today's ongoing cloud-chamber experiment.

...

And then, he waited. It took six years for CERN to greenlight and fund the experiment. Mr. Kirkby cites financial pressures for the delay and says "it wasn't political."

...

Mr. Kirkby's CERN experiment was finally approved in 2006 and has been under way since 2009. So far, it has not proved Mr. Svensmark wrong. "The result simply leaves open the possibility that cosmic rays could influence the climate," stresses Mr. Kirkby, quick to tamp down any interpretation that would make for a good headline.

This seems wise: In July, CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer told Die Welt that he was asking his researchers to make the forthcoming cloud-chamber results "clear, however, not to interpret them. This would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate-change debate."

But while the cosmic-ray theory has been ridiculed from the start by those who subscribe to the anthropogenic-warming theory, both Mr. Kirkby and Mr. Svensmark hold that human activity is contributing to climate change. All they question is its importance relative to other, natural factors.

The last bit is the most critical. The climate warming "skeptics" don't deny that there has been warming (and cooling) of the climate and they don't deny that there isn't an element of human-caused warming. What they debate is the fundamental science, i.e. how much, by what mechanism. The "global warming" crowd starts and ends with models. The skeptics are trying to widen the science to look at all factors.

A Global Warming Debate

Here is the Australian National Press Club debate between Christopher Monckton v Richard Denniss on July 19, 2011. I would suggest you skip the Denniss presentation and go directly to Monckton at 12:40 in the video:



The debate is over whether it is prudent to put in place a carbon tax to rein in the use of fossil fuels. The Monckton response is that the cost of reining is far exceeds the benefit. And on top of that, it isn't clear that the science can identify much real warming and Monckton makes that point at 25:00 into the video.

Portrait of a Climate Skeptic

The "global warming" crowd wants to convince you that any skeptic about "global warming" is some kind of fire-breathing monster, funded by the dirtiest of fossil fuels, and hell-bent to destroy civilization as we know it.

So it is useful when a newspaper prints an article that gives an honest presentation of a climate skeptic. Here is a NY Times article about MIT's Richard Lindzen:

In the 1970s, he developed a mathematical analysis that disproved much of the accepted scientific theories about how "tides" in the Earth's atmosphere move heat around the planet. For that, he won a number of prestigious awards and was invited to become a member of the National Academy of Sciences at the tender age of 37.

In the 1990s, when a group of climate scientists using computer-driven climate models and environmental groups asserted that climate change caused by man-made greenhouse gases would dangerously warm the Earth, Lindzen set out to disprove them. He lost that battle. The message of the computer modelers is now the prevailing wisdom of the National Academy and other distinguished scientific bodies around the world.

But Lindzen hasn't given up. He became a major force in the political war that raged within the incoming George W. Bush Administration over what to do about global warming. After holding seminars with leading climate scientists, Bush rejected U.S. participation in the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Lindzen's message in these tutorials -- that man-caused global warming was real, but would hardly cause any change at all -- was the one that Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney appeared to favor the most. U.S. climate policy hasn't been the same since.

...

Rahmstorf, a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) most recent report in 2007, had plenty to say about Lindzen in dueling academic papers they exchanged in 2005.

Rahmstorf predicted an average global mean surface temperature rise of 3 degrees Celsius, "plus or minus a degree," by 2100. He noted that this means impacts in terms of sea level rise and soaring temperatures that are unprecedented in the last 100,000 years. "Virtually every climatologist around the world, many who were initially skeptical, agree that it's a reality. We have to deal with it."

Lindzen rejected it, arguing that the answer that emerges from most climate models is wrong because they assume the Earth's clouds and water will amplify the rising heat. According to Lindzen's calculations, the clouds should have the opposite effect, minimizing the warming effect.

In his paper, Rahmstorf added a "Personal Postscript": "Can Lindzen seriously believe that a vast conspiracy of thousands of climatologists worldwide is misleading the public for personal gain? All this seems completely out of touch with the world of climate science as I know it and, to be frank, simply ludicrous."

In a reply, Lindzen skewered Rahmstorf in a footnote, arguing that the German scientist was "addicted to the use of words like 'entirely,' 'fact,' 'irrefutable,' etc. Such words are inappropriate to a primitive and immature science -- which is what climate science is at present."

Richard Goody, 90, who taught meteorology to Lindzen at Harvard, says the critics of his former pupil are "focusing on his propensity to debate. He [Lindzen] loves debating. He absorbs an enormous amount of information, and he loves arguing with you about it. Since he's so well-informed and so smart, he usually wins. This doesn't endear you to a lot of people."

Goody is quick to add: "But science is not about gentility. It's about discussing the facts. He's just doing what he should do."

Goody doesn't always agree with Lindzen, but he does share Lindzen's suspicions about computer-driven climate models.

"This machine turns out a number for something that will happen 100 years in the future. Science doesn't usually work that way. There's not much evidence about the behavior of these climate models," he said.

Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado, specializes in studying the scientific process. He sees the rough-and-tumble of the climate debate as an unstable brew of science and politics. "If we were to view science as a field where a lot of conflicts happen, then Lindzen is an expected part of the scenery. But if science is a community where there is only one acceptable view, then Lindzen stands out."

Pielke blames environmental groups for making climate a two-sided debate. Scientists like Lindzen who opposed their position "were immediately perceived as threats." The end result of this, he asserts, is public confusion. "It is a rare scientific topic where the public has it sorted out the way the experts think it ought to be viewed," he said.

Here's what Lindzen believes:

In a paper he wrote earlier this year, he managed to lash out at his scientific critics, bureaucrats, politicians -- including former Vice President Al Gore -- and environmental groups before training his rhetoric on the public. "And finally, there are the numerous well-meaning individuals who have allowed propagandists to convince them that in accepting the alarmist view of anthropogenic climate change, they are displaying intelligence and virtue. For them, their psychic welfare is at stake," he wrote.

The paper gives the essence of his argument, which is that, while man-caused warming certainly exists, by itself it is small. It was roughly 0.7 degree Celsius in the 20th century. If the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles, which many scientists predict that it will by the end of this century, that will increase global mean temperatures by a little more than 1 degree, he thinks.

"A hundred years from now, I don't really know, but I don't think it [the climate] will be radically different. The climate is always changing. It's natural variability," he said in an interview.

And I like this bit about his background:

Lindzen is no stranger to fights. He grew up in a rough Irish-Catholic neighborhood in the Bronx. The son of a shoemaker, he rose in the academic world by winning scholarships. Since 1988, when he first challenged climate change orthodoxy, he has shifted from a being a moderate Democrat to a conservative.

I'm on the political left, but I have a great deal of respect for Lindzen. He has a high dedication to truth. I find that a lot of people who mouth "global warming" as a shibboleth don't know what they are talking about and are knee-jerk leftists.

I don't have the time of day for unthinking "belief" on either left or right. You have to find the truth for yourself and that is hard work. If you simply "subscribe" to a laundry list of "beliefs" because they supposedly represent the "right" viewpoint for a particular political persuasion, then you are fundamentally non-serious and dangerous. It is far better to say "I do not know" or "I am unsure" than to take a position because somebody told you it was the "right" position to take. You have become a follower and the 20th century's mass movements showed just how dangerous "followers" can be. They support madmen in power.

When you are a "true believer" about "global warming" you end up like self-contradictory idiocy like the following:

Click to Enlarge
Obviously this "believer" is so deep into blind ideology that he doesn't notice that the headline contradicts the body of the press release. This is the kind of "science" behind the "global warming" view that "the science is settled". Sure it is settled if you have no respect for truth or even consistency!

If you would like to see Lindzen talk about global warming, here is an interview on an Australian TV program asking about whether a "carbon tax" will save the climate. The Lindzen interview starts at 4:00 minutes into the video:



The "global warming" crowd would tell you that Lindzen is a hair-on-fire crazy who has sold his soul to the devil, aka "big coal", and that only lies come out of his mouth. Judge for yourself.

The Argument for Climate Skepticism

This is a fairly good presentation of the case for skepticism about alarmism over "global warming":



My only criticism is the crazy belief expressed at the end of the video that "free enterprise" will solve all our problems. That is silly. Free enterprise has no direction. It is as happy to provide hula hoops as it is to provide penicillin. There is no morality to "free enterprise". If there is a real global issue, you will need to use the political system to mobilize a response, not "free enterprise".

The point I like seeing emphasized in the above video is that the "global warming" crowd is anti-modernism and anti-science and effectively they would reduce us back to huddling around an open fire circa 1700. That is crazy. I prefer my solutions to come from technology not from a "green" agenda that treats Mother Earth as sacred and any modern innovation just a way of raping and pillaging our poor Mother. If you truly care about people, you don't want to undo technology. You want more science and more technology to deal with any current problems. But the "green" luddites want to destroy, not develop.

I find the above video a good solid presentation of skepticism about claims of climage gloom-and-doom.

How to Sell Global Warming

For those who think "global warming" is an academic debate, and especially for those who think it is "settled science", they should look back to the origins of the debate in June 1988 when the Senator who set up the issue with a Congressional hearing laid his thumb heavily on the scale to "sell" his side:



The above is from a post on the blog Watts Up With That?. Go read the whole post.

This isn't how an honest debate is staged. This is manipulation and lies with a goal of "winning" and not of getting at the truth.

Update 2011jun26: Here is yet more about Senator Wirth on the Watts Up With That? blog:

...I realized that the former Senator is mentally incapable of addressing the issue of global warming on a factual level, and there would never be a response to my challenge and offer.

“We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy. ” – Timothy Wirth quoted in Science Under Siege by Michael Fumento, 1993

That’s true religion. Wirth’s quote makes Dr. Phil Jones look almost reasonable by comparison.

Skewering "Global Warming"

Here is a bit from an article by Rex Murphy in Canada's National Post newspaper. He uses a bit of humour to lay into the IPCC and the "global warming" crowd with this cynical misuse of information to sell this so-called "science" of global warming. Here is one example from the article:

Now we have an even more telling illustration of this same sad, vicious circle. It was first reported on by Steven McIntyre on his blog, Climate Audit (and was run on the FP Comment page of Friday’s National Post). McIntyre revealed that the IPCC used a Greenpeace campaigner to write a key part of its report on renewable energy and to make the astonishing claim that “close to 80% of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies.” He further revealed that the claim arose from a “joint publication of Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council (EREC).” And it turns out that while working for the IPCC, the Greenpeace campaigner approvingly cited a Greenpeace report that he himself was the lead author of. He peer-reviewed himself.

A report on renewables, by the Renewable Energy Council of Europe, and Greenpeace, peer-reviewd by the man who wrote it. All they need add is a citation from the Suzuki Foundation and an endorsement from Elizabeth May and “the science will be settled” forever.

This is not just letting the fox into the hen house. This is giving him the keys, passing him the barbeque sauce and pointing his way to the broiler. Or, as McIntyre put it in plainer terms: “A lead author of the IPCC report, and of the hyped 80% scenario, is Sven Teske of Greenpeace International, whose official contribution is essentially based on a Greenpeace report cooked up with Europe’s renewable energy industry.”

Go read the whole article to get other examples of lies and deceit by the "global warming" crowd.

The "Yes Men" of Academia

Here is a bit from a post by Dean Baker on his Beat the Press blog that takes Ezra Klein to task for misunderstanding the point of a documentary about the financial crisis of 2008:

I always enjoy reading Ezra Klein’s blog. He’s an excellent writer and he does his homework. However, he really missed the story in his review of Inside Job (even though I do appreciate the favorable mention).

Ezra criticizes the movie for making the story one of corrupt economists blessing the evil doers of Wall Street:

“What’s remarkable about the financial crisis isn’t just how many people got it wrong, but how many people who got it wrong had an incentive to get it right. Journalists. Hedge funds. Independent investors. Academics. Regulators. Even traders, many of whom had most of their money tied up in their soon-to-be-worthless firms.”

This is the right point, but I think Ezra takes it in the wrong direction. Certainly all of these people were not on the take in the same way as some of the film’s heroes (i.e. former Federal Reserve Board Governor Frederick Mishkin who got paid six figures to write a report praising Iceland to the sky in 2006). However, it does not follow that they had incentive to “get it right.”

Getting it right meant that you had to say that the honchos were wrong. You had to say that Martin Feldstein, Gregory Mankiw, Larry Summers, Alan Blinder, Ben Bernanke, and the Maestro, Alan Greenspan, were missing the largest asset bubble in the history of the world right in front of their eyes.

This would really put you on the firing line if you were an economist at the Fed, the IMF, or even an academic economist hoping to advance in the field. After all, you could be wrong, in which case you might as well spend the rest of your working career wearing a tin foil hat.

On the other hand, what is the cost of going along? It turns out that economists are a remarkably forgiving lot – not in respect to workers in workers in the United States or retirees in Greece – but certainly when it comes to each other. The mantra “who could have known?” has provided a pretty much blanket amnesty. Next to no one got fired and very few people even missed a scheduled promotion for missing the housing bubble; the collapse of which may wreck the economy for a decade. In fact, even Daniel Mudd and Richard Fuld, the men who bankrupted Fannie Mae and Lehman respectively, have both found their way back into very high-paying jobs in finance.

What I particulary enjoy about Baker's comments is the inner workings of academia, i.e. you are allowed to be stupid and get things wrong so long as you go with the crowd, but if you get things right while being out of step with the majority, your career is ruined. This is precisely the problem with the "global warming" crowd. This is a cabal of academics who have truth by the tail and they will sabotage your career if you don't toe "party line".

This kind of "group think" means that real academic progress is slow (and in economics, it means that like in Orwell's 1984, the past gets rewritten and whole chunks of economics is forgotten). The joke is that academics preen themselves over their "reputation" for open-mindedness and diversity of opinion. But reality is something else. The academic career is a treadmill with a pecking order and you have to pay your dues as a grad student and even when you get your credentials you still must maintain party line. Of course this kind of careerism is worse in some fields than others. From my perspective the two worst fields right now are economics and climatology and the reason is that both have been politicized and politics controls the flow of funds.