The new federal report on climate change gets a withering critique from Roger Pielke Jr., who says that it misrepresents his own research and that it wrongly concludes that climate change is already responsible for an increase in damages from natural disasters. Dr. Pielke, a professor of
environmental studies at the University of Colorado, asks: [Why] is a report characterized by [White House] Science Advisor John Holdren as being the most up-to-date, authoritative, and comprehensive analysis relying on a secondary, non-peer source citing another non-peer reviewed source from 2000 to support a claim that a large amount of noncited and more recent peer-reviewed literature says the opposite about?

You can check out Dr. Pielke’s blog for a detailed rebuttal of how the report presents science in his area of expertise, the study of trends in natural disasters and their relation to climate change. While the new federal report (prepared by 13 agencies and the White House) paints a dire picture of climate changes impacts, Dr. Pielke says that the authors of this new report, like those of previous reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Stern Review, cherrypick weak evidence that fits their own policy preferences. He faults all these reports for all relying on non-peer reviewed, unsupportable studies rather than the relevant peer-reviewed literature and for featuring non-peer-reviewed work conducted by the authors. Dr. Pielke contrasts these reports conclusions about trends in natural disasters with the some quite different findings last year by the federal Climate Change Science Program. Dr. Pielke summarizes some of its less sensational conclusions:
1. Over the long-term, U.S. hurricane landfalls have been declining.
2. Nationwide there have been no long-term increases in drought.
3. Despite increases in some measures of precipitation . . . there have not been corresponding increases in peak streamflows (high flows above 90th percentile).
4. There have been no observed changes in the occurrence of tornadoes or thunderstorms
5. There have been no long-term increases in strong East Coast winter storms (ECWS), called Nor’easters.
6. There are no long-term trends in either heat waves or cold spells, though there are trends within shorter time periods in the overall record.

Do those benign trends seem surprising to you? What do you think of Dr. Pielke’s arguments? Here’s his overall conclusion about the dangers of hyping the link between natural disasters and climate change: Until the climate science community cleans up its act on this subject it will continue to give legitimate opportunities for opponents to action to criticize the climate science community.

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Imposing $80 billion in new taxes and fees on America’s oil and gas industry will increase our dependence on foreign oil, raise costs to consumers, jeopardize U.S. jobs, and erode our economic competitiveness, according to a new report issued today by the U.S. Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy.

Congress is currently weighing a proposal by the Obama administration to levy new taxes and fees on the oil and natural gas industry as a way to finance significant increases in government spending. “We need more American sources of energy, not less, and that requires a balanced approach that is both fair to producers and provides reliable and affordable energy to American families,” said Karen Harbert, president and CEO of the Energy Institute.  “These new taxes run contrary to those fundamental principles.”

The report, ”Taxing Our Way to Energy Insecurity Again,” reviews the impacts of a similar tax increase in the form of a windfall profits tax that was implemented in the 1980s. According to the Congressional Research Service, those tax increases led to as much as an eight percent decline in domestic production, and a 13 percent increase in oil imports.

New taxes and fees make the United States less attractive for new energy investment as compared to projects outside of the country, according to the report.  Given that America currently imports 60 percent of its oil, discouraging investment in domestic oil and gas resources would increase reliance on foreign energy sources and place foreign government-owned corporations, some of whose operations are largely subsidized, at a competitive advantage.

The report points out that over six million people work in the oil and gas industry in America - a good portion of them in small and medium sized businesses.  If companies are forced to reduce operating expenses to pay new taxes or fees, some of these good paying American jobs will be at risk or companies will shift to lower cost opportunities overseas.

“If Congress enacts these new taxes and fees, the industry is likely to shed American jobs, at the same time the government is spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to create and retain jobs,” Harbert said.  “We think that’s a short-sighted approach to energy security and exactly the opposite of what the American economy needs, especially in these tough economic times.”

The report is available on the Institute’s website, along with a video reviewing its findings featuring Harbert.

The mission of the U.S. Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy is to unify policymakers, regulators, business leaders, and the American public behind a common sense energy strategy to help keep America secure, prosperous, and clean. Through policy development, education, and advocacy, the Institute is building support for meaningful action at the local, state, national, and international levels.

The U.S. Chamber is the world’s largest business federation representing more than 3 million businesses and organizations of every size, sector, and region.

Excerpts of address to The Energy & Commerce Committee of the House of Representatives, March 25, 2009

I am convinced that policies meant to reduce alleged carbon dioxide-induced global warming will be destructive, devising mischief by decree. The best, most recent empirical scientific discoveries have shown that even the mid-range scenarios of the IPCC exaggerate the warming effect of increased CO2 by at least seven times; atmospheric CO2 concentration is rising at a fraction of the rate forecast by the IPCC; and Earth has been cooling for the last seven years at a rate of 3.5F per century.

These findings, opposite the expectations of the IPCC, are consistent with the Biblical world view. The naturalist, atheistic world view sees Earth and all its ecosystems as the result of chance processes and therefore inherently unstable and fragile, vulnerable to enormous harm from tiny causes. The Biblical world view sees Earth and its ecosystems as the effect of a wise God’s creation and providential preservation and therefore robust, resilient, and self-regulating-like the product of any good engineer who ensures that the systems he designs have positive and negative feedback mechanisms to balance each other and prevent small perturbations from setting off a catastrophic cascade of reactions.

What concerns me most at present, however, is not the impact of climate policy on the economy generally, but its impact on America’s and the world’s poor. Any policy that forces us to switch from lower-cost fuels to higher-cost fuels - no matter which ones they are, and no matter what their real or alleged effect on global temperature might be - is a policy to harm the poor.  If we tax CO2 emissions, whether directly or via cap-and-trade, we raise the price of energy and so the prices of all things made and transported by energy - which is essentially everything.

Written to Congressman Henry Waxman, May 6, 2009

. . . We heard from other panelists that justice dictates the United States do something for the harm caused by its CO2 emissions. What did the U.S. produce with these emissions, and did that bring any benefit to the world, and the world’s poor? . . .
. . . In my judgment, no persuasive case can be made that the U.S. and other advanced nations have imposed harm on others by emitting CO2 into the atmosphere, and indeed a more credible case can be made in the opposite direction, namely, that CO2 emissions from the use of energy have benefitted the world, and will continue to benefit it, both directly through the goods and services produced through the use of the energy and indirectly through the plant growth enhancement (including increased agricultural crop yields) driven by increased atmospheric CO2 - the latter benefiting not only the human community but also all the rest of life on Earth, since all animal life depends on plant life, and since increased crop yields diminish the amount of land that must be cultivated to feed the human population, leaving more land available for natural species. . . .

. . . If we are concerned that there will be catastrophic man-made global warming, is a cap-and-trade scheme the best way to deal with the problem? . . .
. . . a cap-and-trade scheme not only has proved a dismal failure in Europe but also endangers future generations both by raising the price of energy and so depressing economic production and growth but also by putting all our eggs in one basket. On the former score, cap-and-trade (and with it all other means of mandatory reductions in CO2 emissions) will raise the price of energy, thus raising the overall cost of living, depressing economic production, and slowing economic development, harming people in both the present and the future.

. . . We hear a lot about the cost of “inaction.” What is the most cost-effective action when it comes to addressing the risk of climate change?
. . . The most cost-effective action to address climate change is to refrain from attempting to mitigate (control, diminish) it, the costs of which action will greatly exceed the benefits, and instead to pursue economic development partly through abundant and affordable energy to enable us to adapt to whatever climate change is ahead.

Read the rest here.

When we drive on a long bridge over a river or fly in a passenger aircraft, we expect the bridge and the plane to have been designed and built in ways that are consistent with proven scientific principles. Should we expect similar standards to apply to forecasts that are intended to help policymakers make important decisions that will affect people’s jobs and even their lives? Of course we should. Such standards exist. But are they being followed?

The Financial Post asked us to look at a report last month from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, titled “Probabilistic Forecast for 21st Century Climate based on uncertainties in emissions (without policy) and climate parameters.” The MIT report authors predicted that, without massive government action, global warming could be twice as severe as previously forecast, and more severe than the official projections of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The MIT authors said their report is based in part on 400 runs of a computer model of the global climate and economic activity.

While the MIT group espouses lofty-sounding objectives to provide leadership with “independent policy analysis and public education in global environmental change,” we found their procedures inconsistent with important forecasting principles. No more than 30% of forecasting principles were properly applied by the MIT modellers and 49 principles were violated. For an important problem such as this, we do not think it is defensible to violate a single principle.

For example, MIT forecasters should have shrunk forecasts of change in the face of uncertainty about predictions of the explanatory variables; in this case the variables postulated to influence temperatures. More generally, they should also have been conservative in this situation of high uncertainty and instability. They were not. We recognize that judgement is required in rating forecasting procedures. Evidence for our principles, however, is in the form of findings from scientific experiments comparing reasonable alternative methods, and accepted practice (see our site).

So what’s really wrong with the MIT report? The phrase “global environmental change” provides a clue. The group’s objective implicitly rejects the possibility of no or unimportant change or, despite mention of uncertainties, the possibility of unpredictable change. People who do research on forecasting know that a forecast of “no change” can be hard, if not impossible, to beat in many circumstances. A forecast of no change does not mean that one should necessarily expect things not to vary. Such a forecast can be appropriate even when a great deal of change is possible but the direction, extent or duration is uncertain.

When one looks at long series of Earth’s temperatures, one finds that they have gone up and down irregularly, over long and short periods, on all time scales from years to millennia. Moreover, science has not been able to tell us why. There is much uncertainty about past climate changes and about the strength and even direction of causal relationships. To wit, do warming temperatures result in more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or is it the other way round - or maybe a bit of both? Does warming of the atmosphere result in negative or positive feedback from clouds? There are many more such questions without answers. All this strongly suggests that a no-change forecast is the appropriate benchmark long-term forecast.

With Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, we found that simply predicting that global mean temperatures will not change results in quite small forecast errors. In our validation study that covered the period 1851 to 2007, we compared the no-change forecast with the IPCC global warming forecast that temperatures will climb at a rate of 0.03C per year. We compared the IPCC projection of 0.03C per year with what actually happened after 1850. The errors from the IPCC projection were 12 times larger than no-change benchmark. Consider the accuracy of the no-change model: On average the 50-years ahead forecasts differed by only 0.24C from the global mean temperature as measured by the Hadley Centre in the U.K.

Based on our analysis, we expect the annual global mean temperature for every year for the rest of the 21st Century to be within plus-or-minus 0.5C of the 2008 mean. The MIT approach to forecasting is in substance the same as the approach adopted by the IPCC. Our forecasting audit of the IPCC approach and its conclusion therefore applies as well to the MIT forecasting effort: The forecasting procedures were not valid and there is no reason for policymakers to take their forecasts seriously. It also leads to the conclusion that the MIT forecast errors will be much larger even than the IPCC’s forecast errors.

Policymakers and the public should be made aware that the forecasts from the MIT modellers, as well as those used by the IPCC, are merely the opinions of some scientists and computer modellers. It is not proper to claim that these are truly scientific forecasts. Read more here.

See Dr. Roy Spencer’s take on the model here. See a larger version of his version of their wheel of misfortune here. Small version below.

A consortium of U.N. bureaucracies, together with an assortment of left-leaning nongovernmental organizations, is releasing a June 10 report claiming global warming will cause massive waves of human refugees in the very near future.

Heartland Institute Senior Fellow James M. Taylor observes the report is based on flawed assumptions that have been soundly refuted by scientific facts.

“When U.N. bureaucracies team up with such notorious left-wing operations as the Rockefeller Foundation and Germanwatch, any resulting ‘study’ is about as objective and newsworthy as an asbestos industry study claiming that breathing asbestos is good for you.

“The theme of this report - that global warming is causing more extreme environmental conditions that are causing, and will continue to cause, massive waves of human refugees - has a credibility factor somewhere between Pinocchio and The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

“For example, the report claims that drought, especially in Africa, is a major cause of human refugees - without bothering to mention that twentieth century global warming has caused a decline in worldwide drought, especially in Africa.

“Similarly, the report claims hurricanes are a major cause of human refugees - without bothering to acknowledge that there has been no increase in global hurricanes this past century, that the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society reports global warming should reduce the number of global hurricanes, and that global hurricane activity is actually at a 30-year low.

See large image here.

“What this ‘study’ boils down to is a self-serving piece of propaganda that thumbs its nose at scientific facts and uses fear, lies, and alarmism in an attempt to raise money and raise the power base for U.N. bureaucracies and their left-wing allies.” Read post here.

Myron Ebell (Cooler Heads Coalition) reports on June 12: “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) are making mighty efforts to get the Waxman-Markey energy-rationing bill to the House floor before the Fourth-of-July recess, which is scheduled to begin on 26th June. The main obstacle to passage appears to be a group of moderate Democrats centered in the Agriculture Committee and led by Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), the Committee’s Chairman. Peterson claimed to have forty-five votes as he started horse trading with Pelosi and Waxman. I expect that the Democratic leadership will come up with enough votes to pass H. R. 2454 narrowly, and with only a handful of Republican votes. They are rushing because they realize that the bill could implode at any time.

Should you care to tell your Representative whether to vote Yes or No on H. R. 2454, the Capitol switchboard number is (202) 225-3121. Live operators will connect you to your Member even if you don’t know his name—if you give your zip code.”

“California, the world leader in energy rationing (after North Korea, Cuba, etc.), now looks likely to go bankrupt by end of July. Californians Pelosi, Waxman, and Boxer are actively promoting at the federal level the policies that are contributing to the decline of the once-Golden State.” Congressional Budget Office cost estimates for HR 2454 for HR 2454 are likely too low. Independent analyses by Charles River Associates Inc. and the National Association of Manufacturers predict the Waxman-Markey bill will cost millions of domestic jobs as manufacturers relocate plants to countries with less draconian environmental regulations. Meanwhile, electricity rates under a ‘cap-and-tax’ system would, as President Barack Obama said in January 2008, “necessarily skyrocket,”—by some estimates up to $4,300 each year.

The Waxman-Markey climate bill amounts to a $9 trillion tax that will reduce personal consumption by up to $2 trillion by mid-century, according to an analysis presented yesterday by the left-leaning Brookings Institution. Implementing a cap-and-trade system similar to the one being considered by Congress will likely decrease U.S. gross domestic product more than 2 percent by mid-century and increase unemployment. No effort was made to estimate the benefits of the bill, apparently because of the difficulty of such an estimation, according to a report on June 9, 2009.

Looks like public hospitals in British Columbia, Canada, will have to cut patient services in order to comply with global warming laws established by the provincial government. The Surrey Leader reports:

The Lower Mainland’s health authorities will have to dig more than $4 million a year out of their already stretched budgets to pay B.C.’s carbon tax and offset their carbon footprints. Critics say the payments mean the government’s strategy to fight climate change will further exacerbate a crisis in health funding.

“You have public hospitals cutting services to pay a tax that goes to another 100 per cent government-owned agency,” NDP health critic Adrian Dix said. “That just doesn’t make sense.” The Fraser Health Authority will pay $616,000 in carbon tax this year, rising to $821,000 next year, officials there said.

And by 2010 Fraser will also be paying $1.3 million a year to the province’s Pacific Carbon Trust to offset its projected 52,600 tonnes of carbon emissions release. Vancouver Coastal Health Authority also expects its costs will be close to $2 million next year in combined carbon tax and offset payments.

And while human life is threatened, of course, the stated objective of global warming kooks is once again undermined:

Dix warned that some of the potential cuts - such as closing the ER at Mission Memorial Hospital - would actually increase carbon emissions by sending patients further afield. “Obviously when you shut down regional centres it makes people travel farther to get to their health care facility,” he said. Meanwhile a hospital executive states his greater concern for plant life than heartbeats:

Vancouver Coastal chief financial officer Duncan Campbell said his health authority believes the payments are appropriate and isn’t asking for any exemption from Victoria. “For us to go back and ask for an exemption wouldn’t fit in well with our green care plans,” he said. 

Did they hire this guy away from Planned Parenthood? See post here.

700 scientists say the Middle Ages were warmer than today

SPPI’s authoritative Monthly CO2 Report for May 2009 reveals that more than 700 scientists from 400 institutions in 40 countries have contributed to peer-reviewed papers providing evidence that the Medieval Warm Period, which the IPCC has tried to deny, was real, global, and warmer than the present. Editorial, page 3.

All the facts and data that expose the climate scare - in one place. Marc Sheppard’s remarkable report from the Third Heartland International Climate Conference, in Washington DC, is the best eight-page summary of the current state of the science and politics of “global warming” that you’ll find anywhere. Pages 4-11.

The IPCC assumes CO2 concentration will reach 836 ppmv by 2100, but, for seven years, CO2 concentration has headed straight for only 575 ppmv by 2100. This alone halves all of the IPCC’s temperature projections. Pages 12-13.

See larger image here.

Since 1980 temperature has risen at only 2.5F (1.5C)/century, not the 7 F (3.9 C) the IPCC imagines. Cooling for the past 8 1/2 years has been at a rate of 3.4F (1.9C) per century. Pages 14-15.

See larger image here.

Sea level rose just 8 inches in the 20th century and has been rising at just 1 ft/century since 1993. Though James Hansen of NASA says sea level will rise 246 feet, sea level has scarcely risen since the beginning of 2006. Page 16.

See larger image here.

Arctic sea-ice extent is about the same as it has been at this time of year in the past decade. In the Antarctic, sea ice extent - on a 30-year rising trend - reached a record high in 2007. Global sea ice extent shows little trend for 30 years. Pages 17-19.

See larger image here.

The Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index is a 2-year running monthly sum of activity in all hurricanes, typhoons and tropical cyclones. It shows that there is now less severe tropical-storm activity than for 30 years. Page 20.

See larger image here.

Arctic sea-ice extent is about the same as it has been at this time of year in the past decade. In the Antarctic, sea ice extent - on a 30-year rising trend - reached a record high in 2007. Global sea ice extent shows little trend for 30 years. Pages 17-19.

See larger image here.

Solar activity at last shows signs of recovery. Will global cooling be replaced by global warming? Page 22.

The (very few) benefits and the (very large) costs of the Waxman/Markey Bill are illustrated at Pages 23-24.

Science Focus this month studies painting the world white to Save The Planet - another dumb idea. Page 25.

Finally, there’s our “global warming” ready reckoner, and our monthly selection of scientific papers. Pages 26-29. See full report here.