By John Hawkins
Over at the New York Times, Ross Douthat, who’s a true believer in global warming, wrote a surprisingly intriguing piece called, “Why Don’t Republicans Believe in Climate Change?”
The reason I say, “surprisingly intriguing” is because most pieces of the sort that Douthat’s writing are tedious, insult-laden borefests. Pieces like that are so common and repetitive that you can practically recite them in your sleep, “Zzzzzzzz, Republicans hate science, scientific consensus, zzzzzzzz, crazy to suggest otherwise, polar bears, zzzzzzz.”
Douthat, who’s squishy, but thoughtful, takes a different route:
Ron Brownstein and Bill McKibben both have pieces up lamenting the ascendancy of climate change skepticism in the Republican Party. While McKibben ponders the intellectual roots of this phenomenon (a subject I touched on, as he notes, in a column earlier this year), Brownstein points out that the G.O.P. is an outlier among the developed world’s right-of-center parties…
...What’s interesting, though, is that if you look at public opinion on climate change, the U.S. isn’t actually that much of an outlier among the wealthier Western nations. In a 2007-2008 Gallup survey on global views of climate change, for instance, just 49 percent of American told pollsters that human beings are responsible for global warming. But the same figure for Britain (where Rush Limbaugh has relatively few listeners, I believe) was 48 percent, and belief in human-caused climate change was only slightly higher across northern Europe: 52 percent in the Czech Republic, 59 percent in Germany, 49 percent in Denmark, 51 percent in Austria, just 44 percent in the Netherlands, with highs of 63 percent in France and 64 percent in Sweden. (Doubts about anthropogenic global warming are considerably rarer, the study found, in southern Europe, Latin America and the wealthier countries of Asia.)
There’s a reasonably large Western European constituency, in other words, for some sort of climate change skepticism. (And probably a growing one: In Britain, at least, as in the United States, the economic slump has dampened public enthusiasm for anti-emissions regulation.)
...The debate over climate change isn’t unusual in this regard. On issues ranging from the death penalty to (at least until recently) immigration, America’s major political parties generally tend to be more responsive to public opinion, and less constrained by elite sentiment, than their counterparts in Europe.
At the end, Douthat mades a brief nod to a “pretty sturdy scientific consensus,” but that begs a central question that never seems to be answered: Why do supporters of global warming constantly try to convince people with talk of scientific consensus instead of the actual science?
Obviously, a large percentage of the population in the United States and in various Western European nations is unconvinced by the science behind global warming. So, if there is solid science behind that “scientific consensus,” why is it that so many people find it unpersuasive?
There’s a tendency among the elite to simply stick their noses up in the air and haughtily declare that all the bumpkins out there can’t understand the science behind it. However, that’s not a very persuasive argument. After all, it’s not as if most people are rolling their eyes at Einstein’s Theory of Relativity or denying that dark matter exists. So, as a general rule, the public seems to be able to handle scientific concepts just fine.
Could the issue here actually be that people who deny the existence of manmade global warming are simply making a much better scientific case for their views to the public? Certainly, I think that’s the case. In my experience, believers in manmade global warming, even scientists, can’t answer the most basic questions about their beliefs.
This no small matter. You can’t ask people to spend trillions of dollars, dramatically scale back their lifestyle, and roll back progress on a global scale based on an extremely sketchy theory. Well, I shouldn’t say you can’t do it because the climate alarmists are asking us to do exactly that. However, it would be extremely foolish for us to do it until the day comes when they can make their case.
So, long story short: You want to convince people manmade global warming is real? Then take the politics out of the process, stop squealing about doomsday, and start working on proving your case scientifically, with honest, non-doctored results. If that ever happens, convincing Republicans and the rest of the population won’t be much of a problem.
By Zeeya Merali, Nature
When hackers leaked thousands of e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, last year, global-warming sceptics pored over the documents for signs that researchers had manipulated data. No such evidence emerged, but the e-mails did reveal another problem - one described by a CRU employee named “Harry”, who often wrote of his wrestling matches with wonky computer software.
“Yup, my awful programming strikes again,” Harry lamented in one of his notes, as he attempted to correct a code analysing weather-station data from Mexico.
Although Harry’s frustrations did not ultimately compromise CRU’s work, his difficulties will strike a chord with scientists in a wide range of disciplines who do a large amount of coding. Researchers are spending more and more time writing computer software to model biological structures, simulate the early evolution of the Universe and analyse past climate data, among other topics. But programming experts have little faith that most scientists are up to the task.
A quarter of a century ago, most of the computing work done by scientists was relatively straightforward. But as computers and programming tools have grown more complex, scientists have hit a “steep learning curve”, says James Hack, director of the US National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. “The level of effort and skills needed to keep up aren’t in the wheelhouse of the average scientist.”
As a general rule, researchers do not test or document their programs rigorously, and they rarely release their codes, making it almost impossible to reproduce and verify published results generated by scientific software, say computer scientists. At best, poorly written programs cause researchers such as Harry to waste valuable time and energy. But the coding problems can sometimes cause substantial harm, and have forced some scientists to retract papers.
As recognition of these issues has grown, software experts and scientists have started exploring ways to improve the codes used in science. Some efforts teach researchers important programming skills, whereas others encourage collaboration between scientists and software engineers, and teach researchers to be more open about their code.
A proper education
Greg Wilson, a computer scientist in Toronto, Canada, who heads Software Carpentry - an online course aimed at improving the computing skills of scientists - says that he woke up to the problem in the 1980s, when he was working at a physics supercomputing facility at the University of Edinburgh, UK. After a series of small mishaps, he realized that, without formal training in programming, it was easy for scientists trying to address some of the Universe’s biggest questions to inadvertently introduce errors into their codes, potentially “doing more harm than good”.
After decades griping about the poor coding skills of scientists he knew, Wilson decided to see how widespread the problem was. In 2008, he and his colleagues conducted an online survey of almost 2,000 researchers, from students to senior academics, who were working with computers in a range of sciences. What he found was worse than he had anticipated (see ‘Scientists and their software’). “There are terrifying statistics showing that almost all of what scientists know about coding is self-taught,” says Wilson. “They just don’t know how bad they are.”
As a result, codes may be riddled with tiny errors that do not cause the program to break down, but may drastically change the scientific results that it spits out. One such error tripped up a structural-biology group led by Geoffrey Chang of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. In 2006, the team realized that a computer program supplied by another lab had flipped a minus sign, which in turn reversed two columns of input data, causing protein crystal structures that the group had derived to be inverted. Chang says that the other lab provided the code with the best intentions, and “you just trust the code to do the right job”. His group was forced to retract five papers published in Science, the Journal of Molecular Biology and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and now triple checks everything, he says. Read much more here.
By Joe Barton
Letter to the Editor, Washington Post
Michael E. Mann’s Oct. 8 Washington Forum commentary, “Science isn’t a political experiment,” explained clearly how his ideas on climate science are superior to any accumulation of countervailing facts, and it showed that he’s plainly still annoyed that I questioned some of those ideas by holding a public hearing to evaluate them in 2006.
The reality is that the two-day hearing made it clear that Mr. Mann’s global warming projections were rooted in fundamental errors of methodology that had been cemented in place as “consensus” by a closed network of friends. The hearing strengthened science because it was informed by various expert work, including that of the National Research Council, which corroborated our central concerns. Mr. Mann’s miscalculations would persist today except that they were identified and discussed in public.
Mr. Mann, however, wants to return to the bad old days when nobody was permitted to question the research that drives public policy. He insists that Congress simply do what he says because free debate is troublesome and because anyone who wonders if Mr. Mann got it right can be silenced with derision. I think Mr. Mann is entitled to make up his own mind, but not his own truth.Joe Barton, Washington
The writer, who represents Texas’s 6th District in the U.S. House of Representatives, is the ranking Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee.
Barton, Burgess and Blackburn Introduce Bill To Repeal Light Bulb Ban
Reps. Joe Barton, R-Ennis/.Arlington, ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Michael Burgess, R-Lewisville, ranking member of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., today introduced H.R. 6144, the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act.
The BULB Act repeals Subtitle B of Title III of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which is a de facto ban on the incandescent light bulb that has its origins in Thomas Alva Edison’s laboratory. “The unanticipated consequence of the ‘07 act - Washington-mandated layoffs in the middle of a desperate recession - is one of many examples of what happens when politicians and activists think they know better than consumers and workers,” Barton said. “From the health insurance you’re allowed to have, to the car you can drive, to the light bulbs you can buy, Washington is making too many decisions that are better left to people who work for their own paychecks and earn their own living.”
“Thousands of American jobs have been shipped overseas as a direct consequence of this light bulb provision in the Democrats’ 2007 energy bill,” Burgess said. “Further, I have stated all along that exposing our citizens to the harmful effects of the mercury contained in CFL light bulbs, which are being manufactured in China, is likely to pose a hazard for years to come. This light bulb issue is just the latest example of Republicans attempting to correct the mistakes of Nancy Pelosi’s misguided Democrat-controlled Congress.”
“If the American people needed another example of why it is time to roll back the hyper-regulation of the past four years, this is it,” Blackburn said. “Washington banned a perfectly good product and fired hard working Americans based on little more than their own whim and the silly notion that they know better than the American consumer. Now, hundreds more Americans are looking for work while assembly lines in China are churning out fluorescent bulbs for the US market. Tell me how that makes any sense at all.”
Alternatives to traditional incandescent bulbs have many drawbacks. They are all considerably more expensive. The most common alternative, compact florescent light bulbs have a number of problems:
Most CFLs are not manufactured in the United States. A recent Washington Post story reported that GE is shuttering a plant in Winchester, Va., killing 200 jobs in the process.
CFLs contain mercury and have to be disposed of carefully. The amount of mercury in one bulb is enough to contaminate up to 6,000 gallons of water beyond safe drinking levels. The EPA recommends an elaborate cleanup ritual, including throwing away any clothes or bedding that has come in direct contact with the mercury from the bulb.
CFLs are not designed to be turned off and on frequently; the lifespan of a CFL may be reduced by up to 85 percent if you switch it off and on a lot.
CFLs can raise your heating bills. They’re not great for interior use in a cold climate, because they produce less heat than incandescent bulbs. So you save on electricity, but have to pay more in heating costs.
People with certain health conditions can be harmed by CFLs. Reactions range from disabling eczema-like reactions, to light sensitivities that can lead to skin cancer.
The Energy Star program warns that CFLs can overheat and smoke.
See post here.
Energy Information Administration (EIA)
The October 2010 Short-Term Energy Outlook, released today by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), forecasts a modest rise in heating bills for many U.S. consumers.
“EIA expects household bills for space-heating fuels will be about 3 percent higher than a year ago, with the average household spending $986 in the October through March winter heating season, an increase of $24 from last winter,” said EIA Administrator Richard Newell.
The higher bills primarily reflect higher fuel prices, although expected colder weather than last winter in the Northeast will also contribute to more fuel use. EIA expects the largest increases in fuel expenses to be in households using propane and heating oil. Households using electricity for space heating, particularly in the South, should see lower average fuel bills, in part due to expected warmer weather.
These average forecasts provide a broad guide to changes from last winter, but fuel expenditures for individual households are highly dependent on local weather conditions, the size and efficiency of individual homes, their heating equipment, and thermostat settings.
Key points:
EIA expects the lower-48 States to be 3 percent warmer during the October through March winter heating season compared with last winter and 1 percent warmer than the 30-year average (1971-2000), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s most recent projections of heating degree-days. Regional heating degree-day projections vary widely.
EIA expects households heating primarily with natural gas to spend an average of $27 (4 percent) more this winter than last winter. The 4-percent increase in natural gas expenditures reflects a 6-percent increase in prices and a 2-percent decrease in consumption. About 52 percent of all U.S. households depend on natural gas as their primary heating fuel.
EIA expects households heating primarily with heating oil to spend an average of about $220 (12 percent) more this winter. The Northeast accounts for 80 percent of U.S. heating oil consumption. EIA forecasts the average Northeast household will spend 13 percent more ($259) than last winter as a result of a 5-percent increase in consumption and 8 percent higher regional prices than last winter.
Households heating primarily with electricity can expect to spend an average of $18 (2 percent) less this winter. The 2-percent decline in electricity expenditures reflects a 2-percent increase in prices and a 4-percent decline in consumption. About 37 percent of all U.S. households rely on electricity as their primary heating fuel, ranging from 13 percent in the Northeast to 61 percent in the South.
EIA expects households heating primarily with propane to spend an average of $136 (8 percent) more this winter, but that increase varies across regions. About 6 percent of all U.S. households heat with propane.
Energy prices remain volatile, reflecting uncertainty, or risk, in the market. To measure this uncertainty, the Outlook reports confidence intervals around the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) crude oil and natural gas futures prices using a measure of implied volatility derived from the NYMEX options markets (see Energy Price Volatility and Forecast Uncertainty ).
Short-Term Energy Outlook can be found here.
The product described in this press release was prepared by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the statistical and analytical agency within the U.S. Department of Energy. By law, EIA’s data, analysis, and forecasts are independent of approval by any other officer or employee of the United States Government. The views in the product and press release therefore should not be construed as representing those of the Department of Energy or other Federal agencies.
Michael Coren with Dr. Tim Ball
An hour with Dr. Tim Ball and the truth about climate change, in five parts:
Tim mistakenly identified Eric Holder instead of John Holdren as Obama’s science advisor.
By P Gosselin
That’s the amazing thing warmist and alarmist Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber has recently admitted, according to Der Spiegel here (read the last paragraph).
And again they are asserting that the public is just too stupid to have a say in this important public issue. They are itching to cast the principles of a democratic society aside. Schellnhuber is even so arrogant that he compares himself and his fellow “climate scientists” to Albert Einstein! - read below.
More on that in just a bit, but first during the night, Anthony Watts posted news that prominent scientist Hal Lewis is resigning from the American Physical Society. Anthony asked other bloggers to spread the news. Anthony feels so strongly about this that he even equated it to Martin Luther: This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door.
Dr. Lewis has had enough of the charlatans and frauds infesting climate science all over the world. Read his complete resignation letter here. In it he writes about Climategate’s aftermath and climate science: “It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.” - Hal Lewis
Schellnhuber and Der Spiegel
All this comes on the heels of one of the nastiest hit pieces I’ve seen in a long time appearing two days ago on the online Der Spiegel called: Crusade Against Science - The Charlatans of Climate Science.
After reading the Der Spiegel piece, the first thing that popped into my head was: “No wonder Fred Singer left Germany in 1940! Wow!” Der Spiegel singled out Fred Singer and attacked every aspect about him, rehashing all the old tobacco and merchant-of-doubt stuff. Naomi Oreskes’s fingerprints were everywhere here. Face it, she’s hopelessly infatuated with Fred Singer. If only Fred were 10 years younger, i.e. in Oreskes’s age group (not that he’d be interested in such a frustrated hag to begin with).
Der Spiegel calls Singer “one of the most influential climate deniers worldwide” and a lead denier in the NIPCC, which it describes: “Sounds impressive, but is actually just a collection of like-minded scientists that have gathered around him. Also one German is in it: Gerd Weber. a meteorologist who for 25 years was at the service of the German coal industry.”
Der Spiegel also goes after Pat Michaels and Myron Ebell, writing that spreading doubt in USA has been easier than in Europe, but that Singer and the “deniers” are working on that too, and have teamed up with the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE). Der Spiegel: “Behind the impressively sounding name is hardly anything more than a post office box in Jena. President Holger Thuss is a local CDU politician [conservative party].”
Indeed it is so. There is simply no funding for them and so this small but committed group is forced to operate on a shoestring. EIKE is not showered with tens of millions of euros like activist groups and warmists are. Yet, notice how fearful Der Spiegel and the Science Establishment in Germany are. Even Der Spiegel feels it has to mobilise and slap down the EIKE shoestring operation.
Schellnhuber and debate
Der Spiegel writes that Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research has nothing against having a discussion with serious scientists, but refuses to debate with whom he considers “amateurs”. Der Spiegel: “In the end, the science has gotten so complex that the large part of the population is not able to follow it. The climate sceptics, on the other hand, are content with “a need for simple truths"."
And that’s where Schellnhuber sees the sceptic’s secret to success. Unfortunaely a public debate would not help: “Imagine if Einstein had to defend his theory of relativity on talkshow Maybritt Illner. He wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.”
What Schellnhuber is saying here is amazing. He’s saying that his climate science would not stand a chance in a public debate. How right you are Herr Schellnhuber. But here it is so because your science is lightyears away from Einstein’s when it comes to quality. And so he accepts having a discussion only with people who agree with him. Read post here.
By Alan Caruba
The Gallup Organization has just released the results of a poll that, for the fourth straight year, reveals that the “majority of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. The 57% who now say this is a record high by one percentage point.”
Those that do express trust in the media (43%) tie a record low. “Nearly half of Americans (48%) say the media are too liberal...Overall, perceptions of bias have remained quite steady over this tumultuous period of change for the media, marked by the growth of cable and Internet news sources.”
A perfect example of the reason for this mistrust is an October 3rd article in The Washington Post by staff writer, Juliet Eilperin. “Threat of global warming sparks U.S. interest in geoengineering.”
There is no threat of global warming. The Earth has been a cooling cycle for a decade.
Unless Washington Post editors and this reporter have been living in complete isolation for a while, it would have been impossible to ignore the fact that we are coming up on a one-year anniversary of the leak of thousands of emails between the handful of scientists responsible for the global warming hoax. These were the men who provided misleading and false data to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The leaked emails led to the complete collapse of last year’s Copenhagen international climate conference.
Why, then, is the reporter referencing global warming as if it had any basis in fact? Perhaps because, on October 6th, in Washington, D.C., the Woodrow Wilson Center will be the site of a presentation by James Roger Fleming, a professor of science, technology and society at Colby College and author of “Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control.”
If, as the Washington Post article suggests, there is an interest in geoengineering, Fleming writes that “Geoengineering is in fact untested and dangerous. We don’t understand it, we can’t test it on smaller than planetary scales, and we don’t have the political capital, wisdom, or will to govern it.”
The key words here are “political capital” as clearly, without it, geoengineering cannot garner the billions equivalent to those squandered on the many scientists who received taxpayer funding for utterly bogus research to demonstrate that everything and anything was caused by global warming.
Ms. Eilperin covers herself nicely by noting that “For years it was considered downright wacky in official Washington to discuss geoengineering; altering the climate by reflecting sunlight back into the sky, sucking carbon dioxide from the air or a host of gee-whiz schemes.”
The reason for this is that it is wacky. That, however, did not deter Secretary of Energy, Dr. Steven Chu, from suggesting that global warming could be deterred by painting roofs and highways white!
The primary method put forth to stop a non-existent global warming is to limit “greenhouse gas emissions”, especially carbon dioxide (CO2). Ms. Eilperin cited the fact that the British government will spend $4.5 million over the next three years on geoengineering research, but neglected to mention that the Royal Society just backed off its support for global warming, sending a small shock wave through the international scientific community.
The bad news for Americans is that a Cap-and-Trade bill to control CO2 emissions awaits a Senate vote and, failing that, the EPA intends to exert control.
This article and all the thousands that preceded it, claiming a global warming threat, is nothing more than journalistic misfeasance. It is deceptive. It picks and chooses the information it imparts but neglects to mention that the Earth is cooling, not warming.
Little wonder that the public holds U.S. media in such low esteem. The so-called mainstream media has earned it.
Happily, people seeking to make sense of the news and issues of the day turn to Internet news and opinion sites they do trust.
Read more here.
By Thomas Cheplick, Heartland Envrionment
Rising amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide are benefitting tree growth, with forests in the Chesapeake Bay region growing two to four times faster than expected, scientists report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Greatly Accelerated Tree Growth
Scientists at the Smithsonian Environment Research Center tracked tree growth in stands of Chesapeake Bay hardwoods over a 22-year period. Higher than expected circumference measurements showed the trees were growing much faster and producing much more biomass than expected as atmospheric CO2 levels rose
“Using a unique dataset of tree biomass collected over the past 22 years from 55 temperate forest plots with known land-use histories and stand ages ranging from 5 to 250 years, we found that recent biomass accumulation greatly exceeded the expected growth caused by natural recovery,” the study explained.
“We have also collected over 100 years of local weather measurements and 17 years of on-site atmospheric CO2 measurements that show consistent increases in line with globally observed climate-change patterns. Combined, these observations show that changes in temperature and CO2 that have been observed worldwide can fundamentally alter the rate of critical natural processes, which is predicted by biogeochemical models,” the study observed.
Other Factors Ruled Out
A Smithsonian press release accompanying the study emphasized the scientists wanted to know not just how quickly trees are growing but also what factors are causing the unexpectedly strong growth rates.
“It was not enough to document the faster growth rate; Parker and McMahon wanted to know why it might be happening. ‘We made a list of reasons these forests could be growing faster and then ruled half of them out,’ said Parker. The ones that remained included increased temperature, a longer growing season and increased levels of atmospheric CO2,” the Smithsonian press release explained.
CO2 Assists Plant Growth
Craig Loehle, an expert in tree growth at the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement, is not surprised by the tree growth findings in the Proceedings study and new data from the U.S. Forest Service. “If it gets warmer and wetter, trees will be happy,” Loehle notes. “More carbon dioxide will also increase tree growth.”
See example above - enlarged here.
Loehle notes most projections show there will be more trees and fewer droughts in North America in the next 100 years. “The Forest Service’s models show a generally greener and more productive North America over the next 100 years, with a few drought spots,” he said.
Loehle noted satellite imagery shows world tree growth is increasing worldwide. Rising carbon dioxide levels will also help with global food production, Loehle observed. “Globally, net primary productivity is up 6 percent over the past 25 years,” said Loehle. “This is noticeable in the Amazon, Boreal [an extensive forest area ringing the Northern Hemisphere], and in Northeastern America, all based on satellite data. The same applies to agriculture.”
Thomas Cheplick writes from Cambridge, Massachusetts