In the Sunday February 6, 2008 Boston Globe, Bryan Bender wrote an article ”New US military report on global warming raises worry” in which he noted: “New US military report says scientific data on global warming is ‘contradictory’ - Suggests cause remains open question”.

Meteorologist Dave Epstein wrote this excellent letter which he agreed to share with us.

Dear Bryan,

As a meteorologist, I just wanted to comment on your article in Saturday’s Paper. The headline is a good place to start and I will expound from there. Please take the time to read this as I have spent some time thinking this through for you. You stated that ‘New US military report of global warming raises worry’. Why does this raise worry? Let me give you a few facts about global warming that you should have considered before you wrote Saturday’s article. No disrespect, but please read on. I have training in meteorology for over 25 years. I am also an instructor of meteorology at Framingham State and Colby College in Maine. That doesn’t make me an expert in climate per se, but I do know science.

1. Man-Made global warming is a theory. It has not been proven. Models that have been used to come up with the theory that man caused the warming of the 80s/90s are fatally flawed. Believe it or not, it is possible that aspects of the traditional greenhouse gas explanation could be largely wrong, and if you think I am crazy, let’s visit an article just published in the prestigious journal Climate Dynamics. (Compo, G.P. and P.D. Sardeshmukh. 2008. Oceanic influences on recent continental warming. Climate Dynamics, DOI 10.1007/s00382-008-0448-9). Go take a look. Here is but one line from the report. “Evidence is presented that the recent worldwide land warming has occurred largely in response to a worldwide warming of the oceans rather than as a direct response to increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs) over land.”

2. The IPCC is an organization that does NO research, it has never done ANY research and many of the members of the panel have never done any research. The number 90% confident was made-up. Period. If you dig around you will find that to be the case.

3. The data that shows that we are warming is fatally flawed. I could give you many examples too long and boring for this but here is but one. Did you know, for example in October NOAA said that we had just had our warmest October on record but had to retract that from using SEPTEMBER data. That is just because they got caught by a blogger.

4. Did you know that the planet has been COOLING for the past several years. This year is set to be the coolest since 2000, according to a preliminary estimate of global average temperature that is due to be released next week by the Met Office. The global average
for 2008 should come in close to 14.3C, which is 0.14C below the average temperature for 2001-07.

5. CO2, while increasing is acting OPPOSITE to temperature for the past 5 years. See this image.

6. Ice in the arctic is poised to go above long-term averages this year. It has been rapidly increasing all fall and glaciers actually GREW for the first time in 250 years in parts of Alaska. Read rest of letter here. 

Seldom has a politician’s call to action been so rapidly answered. Mr Ed Miliband gives a newspaper interview in which he demands “popular mobilisation” to force the world’s governments to push through an agreement to limit carbon emissions. Within hours, members of the Plane Stupid campaign occupy the runway at Stansted Airport, causing arriving planes to circle for hours before being diverted. Well done, Ed!

In fact the Secretary of State for the Environment’s demand for a “countervailing force” to be applied to the carbon foot-draggers was anticipated: last week, “climate protesters” broke into one of Britain’s biggest power stations, managing to cut almost two per cent of the nation’s power supplies. I imagine that the Secretary of State for Energy will be having stern words with Ed Miliband. This, though, would mean Mr Miliband shouting at himself, like a lunatic on a street-corner, since he is the Secretary of State for Energy, as well. Who says we don’t have joined-up government?

Both of these “mobilisations” were presumably designed, à la Miliband, to put pressure on the world’s environment ministers who are now gathering in the Polish city of Poznan to come up with the outlines of a treaty to succeed the Kyoto Accord, which expires in 2012. The truth, however, is that Kyoto, as a means to reduce carbon emissions, has been like Monty Python’s parrot, long dead, despite all the protestations to the contrary by its salesmen.

You don’t have to be a “climate change sceptic” to assert this unwelcome fact. Professor Gwyn Prins, Director of the LSE’s Mackinder Centre for the Study of Long Wave Events, has been advocating measures to reduce what he sees as man-made climate change since 1986. He was a lead author on the Third and Fourth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and on the Advisory Board of Friends of the Earth UK. For some years now, Prof Prins has been warning that the Kyoto approach is hopelessly flawed - and his unpopularity in the environment ministries of Europe has grown, precisely as his criticisms of their approach have been vindicated.

As for the host nation Poland, it produces 94 per cent of its energy from its own supplies of coal – the devil’s fuel, according to the Kyoto process. Other European countries have, in effect, attempted to bribe the Poles to agree to take Russian gas instead of using their own coal to keep the country going. If they understood anything about the history of Poland, they would surely realise that there is not a chance that the Poles would voluntarily make themselves reliant on Russia to keep the lights on. I wonder if the hosts might suddenly arrange to have the delegates’ hotel heating turned off in freezing Poznan, just to get the point across.

I tuned in to the BBC’s Today programme yesterday morning to hear someone expostulating passionately on this general issue. He exclaimed: “I really can not believe that the EU will not come up with a deal [in Poznan]. The EU can not afford to fail on this. Our credibility will be absolutely nil.” I wondered which member of Plane Stupid was talking; but then the presenter said: “Thank you, Roger Harrabin,” and I realised that I had been listening to the BBC’s “Environment Analyst”.  Mr Harrabin’s evident panic at the idea that the EU might appear to fail to keep the “Kyoto process” alive is, in a way, understandable: the Corporation’s coverage of this issue has been at all times based on the idea that the Kyoto Treaty is A Good Thing: as that rare subversive, Jeremy Paxman, said last year, “The BBC’s coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago.” This is why you won’t be hearing Prof Prins being interviewed by Mr Harrabin. Never mind. As with Monty Python’s rigid Norwegian Blue, it doesn’t matter how desperately convincing the salesman is: in the end, the public knows a dead parrot when it sees one. Read much more here.

We’ve been waiting for the UC web page to be updated with the most recent sea level data. It finally has been updated for 2008. It looks like the steady upward trend of sea level as measured by satellite has stumbled since 2005. The 60 day line in blue tells the story.

Source: University of Colorado, Boulder

From the University of Colorado web page: “Since August 1992 the satellite altimeters have been measuring sea level on a global basis with unprecedented accuracy. The TOPEX/POSEIDON (T/P) satellite mission provided observations of sea level change from 1992 until 2005. Jason-1, launched in late 2001 as the successor to T/P, continues this record by providing an estimate of global mean sea level every 10 days with an uncertainty of 3-4 mm.”

They also say: “Long-term mean sea level change is a variable of considerable interest in the studies of global climate change. The measurement of long-term changes in global mean sea level can provide an important corroboration of predictions by climate models of global warming. Long term sea level variations are primarily determined with two different methods.”

Yes, I would agree, it is indeed a variable of considerable interest. The question now is, how is it linked to global climate change (aka global warming) if CO2 continues to increase, and sea level does not? See post and comments here.

Icecap note: Sea level varies due to changes in ice locked in glaciers and icecaps and due to expansion and contraction of the seas due to warming and cooling;. The cessation of sea level rises since 2005 implies what Josh Willis originally cponcluded from Argo buoys that the global oceans were cooling slightly was right. He was pressured by NOAA and others to change his tune and help them find some instrumental reasons why his findings were wrong. Another example of how politics trumps science in this new sorry era.

Roger Helmer MEP, Chairman of The Freedom Association, has led the growing opposition to the EU’s plans to destroy jobs through its draconian attempts to reduce CO2 emissions.  Here is the speech he made in the European Parliament today:

“I have no doubt that we are facing the greatest threat we have seen in my lifetime. That threat is posed not by global warming, but our policy responses to it.

The world has certainly been warming, slightly and intermittently, for the last 150 years. But that warming is entirely consistent with well established, natural, long-term climate cycles established over thousands of years.

We have seen the Holocene Maxima, the Roman Optimum, the Mediaeval Warm Period. We now seem to be entering a new 21st Century Climate Optimum.

The fact is that sea level is rising no faster than it has done for centuries. The fact is that total global ice mass is broadly constant. The fact is that extreme weather events are no more common now than they were a century ago.

The Polar Bear, far from facing extinction, has seen a massive population increase in recent decades.
It is true that CO2 is a greenhouse gas - but a less important greenhouse gas than water vapour.

The climate forcing effect of CO2 is not linear. It is a law of diminishing returns. From current level of around 380 ppm, further CO2 increases will have a trivial effect.

Meantime our emissions policies are having a devastating effect. They are doing vast economic damage. Our unachievable renewables targets, especially with regard to wind power, threaten widespread black-outs and power shortages.

These measures will fail, just as Kyoto has failed. Even if the West cuts emissions, China and India will not. CO2 levels will keep rising for at least half a century.

The fact is that 1998 was the hottest year in living memory. Since then, we have seen ten years of global cooling. In that context, the climate policies we are debating today represent an unprecedented collective flight from reality.” See more here. Read also how there are Grim Faces at the Posnam Conference in Poland here and how the EU Ministers remained deadlocked in Brussels here. (H/T Benny Peiser)

Last year, during an interview with Vaclav Smil, I asked the distinguished professor of geography at the University of Manitoba why there was such a paucity of informed discussion about energy issues. He replied “There has never been such a depth of scientific illiteracy and basic innumeracy as we see today.”

That line comes to mind amid the continuing calls for phasing out coal in the U.S. In July, Al Gore, the former vice president and recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, declared that the U.S. should “commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.” In November, in an op-ed in the New York Times, Gore insisted that the U.S. must replace “dangerous and expensive carbon-based fuels with 21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth.”

Gore’s calls have been seconded by groups like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace as well as by the International Energy Agency. On November 25, the I.E.A.’s executive director, Nobuo Tanaka, said that “Preventing irreversible damage to the global climate ultimately requires a major decarbonisation of world energy sources.” While Tanaka, Gore, and others may agree on the need to phase out coal, the world is heading the other direction. On November 12, the I.E.A. released its World Energy Outlook, and the second page of the agency’s briefing slides show that coal is gaining - not losing - market share. Between 2000 and 2007, global coal use increased by 4.8 percent. That’s three times the growth rate seen in oil consumption (which grew by 1.6 percent) and nearly twice the rate in natural gas use (which climbed by 2.6 percent.) Further, the I.E.A. expects that through 2030, about 60 percent of incremental energy demand in non-O.E.C.D. countries will be met with coal. (In the O.E.C.D., coal will likely provide less than 10 percent of incremental new demand over that same time period.)

None of this is to argue that coal is good or bad. Rather, it is to provide a bit of numeracy. If the U.S. and the rest of the world really want to replace coal with some other form of energy, then it is essential to understand the size of the challenge.  Let’s look at the U.S., second only to China in terms of total coal consumption. In 2007, the U.S. used about 1.1 billion tons of coal. That’s the energy equivalent of about 4.2 billion barrels of oil per year or about 11.5 million barrels of oil per day. Here’s the key comparison: America’s daily coal ration contains more energy than Saudi Arabia’s daily oil production.

Indeed, the scale of U.S. coal consumption boggles the mind. In 2007, the amount of energy America used in the form of coal exceeded the total energy consumption - from all sources, coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear - of all of the countries of Central and South America combined. Just as important as the scale of America’s coal consumption is this fact: U.S. coal use has increased faster in recent decades than has oil or natural gas consumption. Between 1973 and 2007, U.S. coal consumption jumped by 75.5 percent. During that same time period, U.S. oil consumption increased by 15.2 percent and natural gas consumption increased by just 5 percent. Read more here.

Arctic winds, snow and frosts have come in such a blast this winter that the bookmakers report record numbers of bets on a white Christmas so early in December. The Met Office has issued a blizzard of severe weather warnings, telling us to wrap up warm, take care on the roads, generally scaring the living daylights out of everyone about the perils of cold.

Suddenly we seem to be facing a Siberian freeze, which may come as shock because, yes, winter can be cold. This is what a British winter is supposed to be like, but for many years autumn has almost slipped seamlessly into springtime with hardly a pause for winter. But we should be more chilled out about the cold because it actually does a power of good.

Cold is Nature’s clock, telling plants and animals that it’s time to pack up and go to sleep, go away or fatten up. Without the cold, living things don’t know when winter has come and gone, or when to get going again in springtime. Recent winters have been so mild that they have left Nature thoroughly confused. Birds didn’t know whether to migrate, hedgehogs and bats wake up too early from hibernation. Plants such as the white deadnettle carry on flowering all year and the grass carries on growing, so the nation has reverberated to the sound of lawnmowers all winter long.

This cold snap is reminiscent of the savage freezes of long ago. The winter of 1962-63 is now a hazy memory, but it was so cold that pneumatic drills were used to dig up turnips in frozen fields, ice floes bobbed around in the Channel and cars were driven over the frozen Thames at Oxford. People were geared up to big freezes in those days. They wore balaclavas and thick coats, made roaring fires and stoked up on bowls of proper porridge. Now we have central heating at the flip of a switch, heated cars, artificial ice rinks and fake frost on windows at Christmas. It’s all too namby-pamby.

Although we moan, the cold could do us the power of good. In Siberia they swim outdoors in minus 40C to stay immune, they claim, from pneumonia and colds. The Finns jump stark naked from steaming sauna to freezing lakes. In Britain we drop like flies at the first sniff of a cold snap. We are so helplessly unprepared, that it’s a wonder we know what snow looks like. The Met Office has even launched a health forecasting service tailored to warn vulnerable patients of expected drops in temperatures. And even if the cold is too much to bear, there could still be some good news. The Met Office is sticking to its forecast of a milder than average winter. See more here.

They will tell you when the skies might rain or snow in fickle Northeast Ohio, when to bundle up the kids in a cold snap and when to make weekend plans if steady sunshine spans the five-day forecast.  They also will tell you that human-caused global warming is hogwash.  They’re your local TV meteorologists. 

Andre Bernier “This cry that ‘We’re all going to die’ is an overreaction and just not good science,” said Andre Bernier, a meteorologist at WJW Channel 8. “I don’t think I personally know any meteorologists—here in Cleveland or anywhere else I’ve worked—who agree with the hype over human-induced warming.” The local TV weatherscape is indeed populated with on-air personalities who are pushing hard against the prevailing winds of climate science.  That prevailing thought—supported by the United Nations’ 1,200-member Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Meteorological Society and others—is this:

The Earth’s climate overall is warming and the human burning of fossil fuels in cars and industry—which release carbon dioxide—is helping to accelerate that change.  Further, climate experts say, there could be dire consequences if humanity doesn’t quickly lessen the accumulation of greenhouse gases and adequately adapt to a warming globe.

The American Meteorological Society has strongly affirmed that stance, but accredits even the on-air meteorologists who rail against it. “Our stance is pretty clear on this and we’re in agreement with the global warming scenario as set out by the international panel,” said Keith Seitter, AMS executive director. “Still, we think they should research all that they can,” he said. “And really, there should be less and less skepticism out there as the science improves each year—not more.”

But, there are doubters—all AMS certified—in prominent on-air positions at each of the four Cleveland television stations. Bernier and Dick Goddard—the patriarch of Cleveland weather forecasters—predict the weather at WJW Channel 8. Both cite natural fluctuations in the Earth’s climate and dismiss the industrialization of the 20th century and the subsequent spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide as the cause for warming.

Goddard compared the current anxiety over warming with the global cooling concerns of the 1970s, which have since dissipated. He and Bernier both point to solar cycles as the key ingredient in climate change.  Bernier also said he believes the climate is no longer warming—but, rather, cooling again.  “I have a hunch that in 10 years we’re all going to be longing for global warming because it will be so cold,” Bernier said. His Web site, andrebernier.com, links to a Canadian documentary that suggests the same. 

Others in the skeptic camp include meteorologists Jon Loufman at WOIO Channel 19, Mark Johnson at WEWS Channel 5 and Mark Nolan at WKYC Channel 3. Nolan has since moved to the news desk, but he said he still gets questions about his skeptic’s stance. “Climate records also show that long before industrialization, the Vikings had settled in Greenland because it was warm enough,” said Loufman, who has taught meteorology courses at both Case Western Reserve University and Lakeland Community College. “I think the jury is still out on this.” So what in the name of the National Weather Service is going on here?

The most notable example of dissent among meteorologists has been the Weather Channel’s founder, John Coleman, now a TV forecaster in San Diego.  Coleman—whom Seitter quickly points out remained with the Weather Channel for only a year in the early 1980s—has said human-induced warming is “the greatest scam in history.” There have been others, from the longtime director of the National Hurricane Center to Accu-Weather.com’s long-range forecaster, who told The Plain Dealer that “global warming is being forced down the throats of the public.” Source of dissent So what’s behind all of this?  Dick Goddard said the answer is that weather forecasters appreciate better the lack of reliable records.  “There’s only one constant, and that’s change,” he said. “We’ve only got accurate weather records back to 1874 and things have been changing back and forth since long before that.” Bernier said local meteorologists “are just more practical” and not swayed by the opportunity for more grant money to do more research proving climate change.  Read more here. Read my response to the AMS on their comments here.

The comment period for the Environmental Protection Agency’s exploration of greenhouse gas regulation ended last Friday, with farmers lobbying furiously against the notion of a “cow tax” on methane, a potent greenhouse gas emitted by livestock. The New York Farm Bureau issued a statement last week (PDF) saying it feared that a tax could reach $175 per cow, $87.50 per head of beef cattle and upward of $20 for each hog.

Such a tax would represent a “massive hit on our industry here in New York,” said Peter Gregg, a spokesman for the farm bureau, in an interview. “You could take all of our cows together and they probably wouldn’t have the same effect on the atmosphere than the average traffic jam on the Tappan Zee Bridge,” he added. Farm officials from Texas to Alabama also sounded the alarm, and Mr. Gregg said that the response in New York among farmers was “almost a panic.”

The hysteria may be premature, however. The E.P.A. indeed issued an “advanced notice of proposed rulemaking” this summer that called for public comments on the idea of regulating greenhouse gas emissions from cars, as well as “stationary sources” - which, yes, would include cows and other livestock. The Department of Agriculture commented on the ease with which even small farms and ranches would run up against a proposed 100-ton limit on emissions:

Even very small agricultural operations would meet a 100-tons-per-year emissions threshold. For example, dairy facilities with over 25 cows, beef cattle operations of over 50 cattle, swine operations with over 200 hogs, and farms with over 500 acres of corn may need to get a … permit. It is neither efficient nor practical to require permitting and reporting of [greenhouse] emissions from farms of this size. Excluding only the 200,000 largest commercial farms, our agricultural landscape is comprised of 1.9 million farms with an average value of production of $25,589 on 271 acres. These operations simply could not bear the regulatory compliance costs that would be involved.

The idea of a cow tax aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions has been tried elsewhere - with similar reactions from the agricultural community. Plenty magazine notes, for example, that such taxes were proposed in New Zealand and Estonia, but were eventually shouted down.

But the E.P.A. may find new impetus for the idea with the arrival of a new administration that seems determined to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Methane has more than 20 times the heat-trapping potential of carbon dioxide, according to the E.P.A. (though it stays in the atmosphere for a shorter period). Read more here.