CSIRO alarmism more dangerous than CO2

By Cliff Ollier

THE Weekend Australian reported on March 24 that Port Macquarie Hastings Council was recommending the enforcement of a “planned retreat” because of an alleged danger from sea-level rise in the (distant) future.

The controversy has two main aspects: is the alarming rise in sea level projected by CSIRO reliable? And is moving people from near-shore sites the correct response?

The CSIRO projection is extreme, but before explaining why, I would note that the world’s main source of alarmism is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is not really a scientific body but one that adjusts data and subjects it to mathematical modelling before passing its “projections” on to politicians.

The CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, then further adjust data and produce models with even more extreme scenarios.

In The Weekend Australian on November 7, 2009, the director of the National Tidal Centre of the BOM, Bill Mitchell, reported an Australian average sea-level rise of 1.7mm a year. This is a reasonable level accepted by most sea-level watchers outside the IPCC and CSIRO and gives a sea-level rise of about 15cm by 2100. He said the “upper end was 3mm a year”, which gives a 27cm rise by 2100.

At 8.30am on November 18, 2009, ABC Radio National had a program on sea-level changes. National Sea Change Taskforce executive director Alan Stokes said: “The IPCC estimate of rise to 2100 was up to 80cm.” No new data was provided to explain the leap and, in fact, the worst estimate by IPCC in its last report was 59cm.

Note that the IPCC estimates have been falling with each report. In its second assessment report the high-end projection of sea-level rise to 2100 was 92cm, in the third assessment report 88cm, and the fourth 59cm. It is good for the reader to look at sea-level measurements. You can see the sea-level data for the US and a few other countries. Most stations show a rise of sea level of about 2mm a year, but note the considerable variations even within a single state, though these are no cause for alarm.

The CSIRO uses figures far in excess of even the IPCC, which until now were the greatest alarmists. In its 2012 report, State of the Climate, the CSIRO says that since 1993 sea levels have risen up to 10mm a year in the north and west. That means that somewhere has had a 19cm-rise in sea level since 1993. Where is this place? The European satellite says that sea levels have been constant for the past eight years.

How does the CSIRO arrive at its figures? Not from new data but by modelling. Models depend on what is put into them. For example a 2009 report, The Effect of Climate Change on Extreme Sea Levels in Port Phillip Bay, by the CSIRO for the Victorian government’s Future Coasts Program, based its model on temperature projections to 2100 of up to 6.4C. That compares with the most extreme, fuel-intensive scenario of the IPCC and implies unbelievable CO2 concentration levels in 2100 of about 1550 parts per million.

Using all known fossil fuel reserves would achieve only half this and continuing the current rate of increase in concentration levels would result in only 550ppm by 2100. The result is a CSIRO prediction of sea-level rise for Port Phillip Bay by 2100 of 82cm and, with the help of the BOM, a further increase due to wind to 98m. That is well above even the top level projected by the latest IPCC report. This example is from Victoria but sea levels must have roughly the same rises and falls all over the world. So the whole world should be alarmed. Indeed, the IPCC and CSIRO try to alarm the world with stories of the drowning of low islands, such as Tuvalu. But detailed mapping has shown that Tuvalu, and many other coral islands, have actually grown during the past 20 years.

The Netherlands is particularly vulnerable to any large rise of sea levels. It is also a leader in coastal science and engineering, and the Dutch are not alarmed. In the December 11, 2008, issue of NRC/Handelsblad (Rotterdam’s counterpart to The Australian) Wilco Hazeleger, a senior scientist in the global climate research group at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, wrote: “In the past century the sea level has risen 20cm. There is no evidence for accelerated sea-level rise. It is my opinion that there is no need for drastic measures. Fortunately, the time rate of climate change is slow compared to the lifespan of the defence structures along our coast. There is enough time for adaptation.”

This brings us to the second part of the debate. We should adapt to changes in the shoreline, as do the Dutch. We should reject draconian rules to save folk from a remote and dubious peril. If Tim Flannery is allowed to take his chance living on his Hawkesbury property near sea level, Port Macquarie’s retirees should be permitted to do so too. They should not be evicted to “save” them from a dire fate they will never see.

Cliff Ollier is a geologist, geomorphologist, emeritus professor at the University of Western Australia.

Kerry tells us we are winning, but the blames the usual suspect

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Anthony Watts

This just in from The Daily Climate, Kerry tells us we are winning, but the blames the usual suspects rather than the message itself. I love the part about where we “made up our own science”, which is sort of like when Kerry swiftboated the weather back in 2008, except there was really no support for his position in science. Of course that lack of basic understanding couldn’t be the reason “people just turn off” when he’s talking about climate, could it?

Kerry: ‘We have lost the notion of responsible capitalism’

Venting frustration at the lack of progress on environmental issues, U.S. Sen. John Kerry voices the exasperation of a core constituency in President Obama’s re-election bid.

By Doug Struck For the Daily Climate

BOSTON - Massachusetts Democrat Sen. John Kerry, exasperated at what he called “the flat-earth caucus,” on Sunday described the frustrations of working on environmental issues in the U.S. Senate.

Even amid the “Tuesday Group” - a bi-partisan bloc of lawmakers, mostly Democrats, who are interested in energy issues - “you can’t talk about climate now,” Kerry said. “People just turn off. It’s extraordinary. Only for national security and jobs will they open their minds.”

Kerry, in a dinner speech at Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, voiced the exasperation of an environmental movement that had high hopes with the election of President Obama in 2008 but has been disappointed by the administration and largely shut out after the Republican takeover of the House in 2010.

“The irony is that we used to be a nation that valued science. We have become a nation that is now discarding science,” Kerry said. He spoke at a conference on the challenges facing the Arctic, attended by Iceland’s president, Olafur Grimsson.

Iceland temperatures manipulated by government funded NASA/NOAA craftsman.

Opponents to the legislation “made up their own science. They made up their own arguments,” Kerry said. “The Republicans created this idea of (carbon credit) trading because it avoided command and control by the federal government.” Then, “they just decided to pick up and brand this a negative.”

Kerry blamed brothers David and Charles Koch, oil billionaires who have bankrolled attempts to discredit climate change, as well as opposition from energy companies. “You have Peabody Coal. You have MidAmerican. They have these big old cash cows, these old coal-powered plants. It’s just cash coming in, and they want to keep it that way.

Icecap note: And in a few years when the Atlantic follows the Pacific into the cooling mode and the Eddy Grand minimum begins and temperatures globally plummet, you Mr Kerry with your partner in crime, the equally clueless Henry Waxman who have helped the government fund the biggest scam in science in history will be turned on by angry Americans. The public senses the scam and see it is perpetuated by those who have a big D after their name. Sadly I am an independent who used to vote for Ds. No longer if they continue their anti science, anti energy, class warfare, big government ultra progressive campaigns.

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John Coleman opines on the political nature of Global warming

It seems to be 90% politics to most people.  People’s attitudes about the threat to our way of live and our standard of living poised by Global Warming seems to be dictated by their political party affiliations, or least their political leanings, and attitude about the Environmental Green Energy issues than about the scientific issues or debate.  Liberals are generally closed to scientific discussion saying it’s settled science, that 97% of scientists accept the science as settled (both of which are not facts at all) and conservatives support the Global Warming skeptics without doing much or any study of scientific arguments first.  It drives me nuts. 

I support the efforts to come up with alternate (green) energy sources (but I know that there is no viable such green energy alternative to fossil fuels now available and none that seems to be any where near to reality.  I also know that in time we must come up with a replacement for fossil fuels and the internal combustion automobile and jet aircraft engines.  But, that someday is definitely not now.

Thanks to science and engineering our processed fuels (California’s reformulated fuels lead the way) and injection engines with catalytic converters and smoke stack scrubbers and cleaned fossil fuels for power plants, our used of fossil fuel is no longer a significant air pollution issue.  That is unless you subscribe to the outrageous anti-science position of the Environmental Protection Agency and classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant and the primary source of man-made global warming.  That is a totally environmentalist driven, political distortion of science.  It drives me nuts and must be addressed.

One of my heros, William Happer, Ph.D. in Physics, at Princeton has just contributed an item on this topic.  Regardless of your political or environmental position, I hope you will read it.  It is from the Wall Street Journal (see post under Political Climate).

Climate Obstinately Refuses to Cooperate with Global Warming Alarmists

By Larry Bell, For Whom the Bell Tolls on Forbes

Are you worried about global warming during this unusually mild winter? Geeze, who would have expected to see 75 F March temperatures in Chicago? Or those earlier than usual cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C. which hasn’t happened since 1946 (albeit, when atmospheric CO2 concentrations were 310 ppm vs. 385 ppm now)? Even regions of the Southern Hemisphere had a year with practically no winter temperatures.

So was Al Gore right after all? Perhaps you heard...he’s been off to Antarctica watching the ice melt along with NASA’s famous climate alarmist James Hansen, featured ClimateGate figure Kevin Trenberth, billionaire Richard Branson and about 100 other panicky pals. Their timing is perfect, offering a lot for them to observe. The Antarctic Peninsula sea ice expanse is nearly 200% greater now than usual.

For those of you here who would have preferred more typical sub-zero temperatures and rampaging tag team blizzards, I’ve also got some great news. While these conditions bypassed the continental U.S. this year for other locations, don’t discard those flannel long johns just yet. There’s every indication that you are going to need them over the next many years.

First, for a bit of background perspective, let’s realize that climate change is very real, and has been going on for a very long time...dating back to always. It actually began to occur even before the advent of flatulent dinosaurs, industrial smoke stacks and SUVs. And although temperatures have been generally mild over about the past 150 years (since the end of the last “Little Ice Age”...not a true Ice Age), we should remember that significant fluctuations are normal. In fact the past century has witnessed two distinct periods of warming.

The first warming period occurred between 1900 and 1945. Since CO2 levels were relatively low then compared with now, and didn’t change much, they couldn’t have been the cause before 1950. The second, following a slight cool-down, began in 1975 and rose at quite a constant rate until 1998, a strong Pacific Ocean El Nino year. Yet U.K. Hadley Center and U.S. NOAA balloon instrument analyses fail to show any evidence, whatsoever, of a human CO2 emission-influenced warming telltale “signature” in the upper troposphere over the equator as predicted by all U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) global circulation models.

Temperatures have been essentially flat since 1998, with the exception of another brief 2010 El Nino spike immediately followed by a dramatic 2011 La Nina decline. About half of all estimated warming since 1900 occurred before the mid-1940s despite continuously rising CO2 levels since that time.

Our warm 2011/2012 U.S. winter would have been a very welcome difference from what much of world experienced. A European cold spell killed more than 500. More than 140 perished in the Ukraine, along with hundreds of others in France, Serbia and the Czech Republic. Europe’s 2,860-kilometer Danube that is crucial for transport, power, industry and fishing froze over, as did nearly all rivers in the Balkans. More than 130 villages in Bulgaria went without electricity.

Closer to those of us in the lower forty-eight, Fairbanks, Alaska reported the coldest January temperatures since 1971, with temperatures reaching -24 F. The coldest January average temperature there occurred in 1906 (-36.4 F).

Recent readings taken from more than 30,000 measuring stations that were quietly released by the U.K.’s Met Office and the University of East Anglia University Climate Research Unit show that world temperatures haven’t warmed over the past 15 years. Nor are they likely to for quite awhile. Many scientific studies indicate that the global climate will soon enter a substantial cooling phase attributable to a weak new solar cycle. This is predicted due to important modulating cloud-forming influences of cosmic rays throughout periods of reduced sunspot activity. More clouds tend to make conditions cooler, while fewer often cause warming.

Solar output typically goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak. We are currently approaching the peak of “Cycle-24”, yet sunspot numbers are running at less than half of those observed during other 20th century peaks. A paper released by the Met Office projected a 92% chance that both Cycle-25, and those taking place in following decades, will be as weak, or weaker than, a “Dalton minimum” of 1790 to 1830, when average European temperatures fell by 2 Celsius.

Nicola Scafetta, a climate scientist at Duke University and the Active Cavity Radiometer Solar Irradiance Monitor Lab (ACRIM), told me that doesn’t think that we will see a severe “Maunder minimum”, or even Dalton minimum-like conditions because the Sun is presently at the maximum of its 1,000-year cycle, a condition similar to that which produced the two century-long Medieval Warm Period. However, the Sun is now entering into a grand minimum most likely described by a strong 60-year cycle, with maxima occurring around 2000 and 2060. Scafetta predicts that there will be steady but moderate cooling over the next 20 to 30 years (more or less). His new paper which discusses this… published last week in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar Terrestrial Physics… is based upon a solar data reconstruction since 10,000 BC.

The Met Office claims that the greenhouse effects of man-made carbon dioxide are far stronger than the Sun’s influences, sufficiently so not only to overwhelm potential solar cooling, but to produce net warming. These findings are fiercely disputed by solar experts. They point out that the Met’s assessment is based upon highly theoretical climate models that exaggerate CO2 influence, while failing to account for numerous other important contributing factors. For example, as CO2 levels have continued to rise, the Met Office claimed in 2007 that global warming was about to “come roaring back”, predicting an overall 0.3º C temperature increase between 2004 and 2014. Then, in 2009, it predicted that at least three of the years between 2009 and 2014 would break the previous 1998 temperature record. That doesn’t appear very likely.

Since they couldn’t directly emulate the global surface temperature, the Met’s 2009 prediction is based instead upon a simple “energy balance model” (EBM) they used to emulate a fully coupled atmospheric ocean “general circulation model” (GCM). However, the GCM they applied to calibrate their EBM (the “HadCM3"), didn’t contain any solar climate amplification factors (such as cosmic ray/cloud feedback influences)…hence, showed very limited climate sensitivity to solar variations. This is a novel and very creative example of “garbage in-garbage out” modeling wizardry, where a climate model, used to model another climate model, is claimed to have realistic predictive validity.

Judith Curry, a well-known climatologist who chairs the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, finds the Met’s confident prediction of a “negligible” solar impact “difficult to understand”. She has stated that “The responsible thing to do would be to accept the fact that the models may have severe shortcomings when it comes to the influence of the Sun”. As for a predicted warming pause, she said that many scientists “are not surprised.”

Curry also notes important contributions of 60-year Pacific and Atlantic Ocean temperature cycles, observing that they have been “insufficiently appreciated in terms of global climate”. When both oceans were cold in the past, such as from 1940 to 1970, the climate cooled. The Pacific “flipped” back from a warm to a cold mode in 2008, and the Atlantic is also thought likely to flip back in the next few years.

Habibullo Abdussamatov, a scientist at the Pulkovo Observatory at the Russian Academy of Science in St. Petersburg, predicts that our planet is now entering a very cold and protracted climate phase. He believes that “after the maximum of solar Cycle-24, from approximately 2014, we can expect the start of the next bicentennial cycle of deep cooling with a Little Ice Age in 2055 plus or minus 11 years” (the 19th to occur in the past 7,500 years).

Another Little Ice Age? If you have been worried about man-made global warming, just think about that! While improbable, let’s really hope the Met Office is actually right for a change, and that good ol’ plant-nourishing CO2 will rescue us from such a truly chilling prospect.

Reprinted with permission of author

Could Arctic Sea Ice Decline be Caused by the Arctic Oscillation?

By Dr Roy Spencer

March 22nd, 2012

While the IPCC claims that recent Arctic sea ice declines are the result of human-caused warming, there is also convincing observational evidence that natural cycles in atmospheric circulation patterns might also be involved.

And unless we know how much of the decline is natural, I maintain we cannot know how much is human-caused.

In 2002, a paper was published in the Journal of Climate entitled Response of Sea Ice to the Arctic Oscillation, where the authors (one of whom, Mike Wallace, was a co-discoverer of the AO) shows that changing wind patterns associated with the AO contributed to Arctic sea ice declines from one decade to the next: from 1979-1988 to 1989-1998.

The Arctic Oscillation involves sea level pressure patterns over the Arctic Ocean, North Atlantic, and North Pacific. Since sea ice moves around with the wind (see this movie example), sea level pressure patterns can either expose or cover various sections of the Arctic Ocean.

When there are many winters in a row with high (or low) pressure, it can affect sea ice cover on decadal time scales. Over time, ice can become more extensive and thicker, or less extensive and thinner.

There is a time lag involved in all of this, as discussed in the above paper. So, to examine the potential cumulative effect of the AO, I made the following plot of cumulative values of the winter (December-January-February) AO (actually, their departures from the long-term average) since 1900. I’ve attached a spreadsheet with the data for those interested, updated through this past winter.

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Consistent with the analysis in the above-cited paper, the sea ice decline since satellite monitoring began in 1979 was during a period of persistent positive values of the AO index (note the reversed vertical scale). Since the satellite period started toward the end of a prolonged period of negative AO values, this raises the question of whether we just happened to start monitoring Arctic sea ice when it was near peak coverage.

Note that back in the 1920’s, when there were reports of declining sea ice, record warmth, and disappearing glaciers, there was similar AO behavior to the last couple of decades. Obviously, that was before humans could have influenced the climate system in any substantial way.

I won’t go into what might be causing the cyclic pattern in the AO over several decades. My only point is that there is published evidence to support the view that some (or even most?) of the ~20 year sea ice decline up until the 2007 minimum was part of a natural cycle, related to multi-decadal changes in average wind patterns.

Good news for corporations and our future energy costs - Mississippi Court Ends Global-Warming Suit

A federal judge in Mississippi has ended a long-running suit that attempted to hold a selection of U.S. utilities and coal and oil companies responsible for flooding damage caused by Hurricane Katrina.

U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola Jr., in a decision released yesterday, dismissed Comer vs. Murphy Oil with prejudice, meaning it can’t be refiled or reconstituted. The decision should serve to preclude, other similar lawsuits accusing companies of emitting global-warming gases that cause damaging weather patterns.

Guirola dismissed the case for legal reasons - he’d already dismissed it once before, and he said the plaintiffs were barred by various legal doctrines from reviving it - but “out of an abundance of caution” he reiterated why the case shouldn’t be allowed to proceed.

Those reasons are becoming familiar in global-warming cases: Guirola ruled the case invalid because the underlying issue of global warming is a political question, best left to the legislative branch and regulators to decide. And because existing tort law requires plaintiffs to prove a more solid connection between their injuries and the actions of those they are suing than a scientifically plausible argument that one contributed to the other.

Plaintiff lawyers have tried various ways to fit global warming into conventional tort law, where they can construct a case showing industry executives were aware of the threat of CO2 emissions and did nothing about it. That would allow them to make the argument that the industry exposed others to “unreasonable” risks. The evidence would be memos and other material showing they were aware of scientific links between CO2 and global warming, regardless of whether they believed them, much as the states pursued lawsuits against the tobacco industry by uncovering evidence executives were aware of research showing links to cancer and addiction.

Guirina wasn’t buying it, saying global warming was too complex an issue to ask a court to decide: “The plaintiffs are asking the Court, or more specifically a jury, to determine without the benefit of legislative or administrative regulation, whether the defendants’ emissions are “reasonable,’” he said.

The case followed an odd route after dismissal up to the Fifth Circuit, where a three-judge panel reinstated some of the claims, then an en banc panel agreed to rehear the appeal, only to dismiss the case when it couldn’t form a quorum of nine judges. The plaintiffs declined to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The decision helps close the door on global-warming litigation by private plaintiffs. The U.S. Supreme Court offered some hope to plaintiffs in 2007 when it held that Massachusetts could sue the E.P.A. for failing to enact rules to control CO2 emissions that threatened the state’s coastline. That seemed to affirm the basic idea that CO2 was a pollutant covered by the Clean Air Act. But the Supreme Court eased that door shut last year with Conn. v. AEP, where it said Connecticut must wait until or unless the EPA issues regulations before suing individual companies over emissions. The Ninth Circuit also dismissed a lawsuit by Inuit villagers against ExxonMobil and other companies, citing the political question doctrine.

The judge refused a request for sanctions against attorney F. Gerald Maples for refiling the case after it had been dismissed, saying he acted in “good faith” under a Mississippi law that might have, but didn’t, offer an extension of the statute of limitations.

CRU’s new HadCRUT4, hiding the decline yet again

By Anthony Watts with additions by Joe D’Aleo

Over at JunkScience.com Steve Milloy writes:

Skeptic Setback? ;New’ CRU data says world has warmed since 1998 But not in a statistically significant way.

Gerard Wynn writes at Reuters:

Britain’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which for years maintained that 1998 was the hottest year, has published new data showing warmer years since, further undermining a sceptic view of stalled global warming.

The findings could helpfully move the focus from whether the world is warming due to human activities - it almost certainly is - to more pressing research areas, especially about the scale and urgency of human impacts.

After adding new data, the CRU team working alongside Britain’s Met Office Hadley Centre said on Monday that the hottest two years in a 150-year data record were 2005 and 2010 - previously they had said the record was 1998.

None of these findings are statistically significant given the temperature differences between the three years were and remain far smaller than the uncertainties in temperature readings…

And Louise Gray writes in the Telegraph: Met Office: World warmed even more in last ten years than previously thought when Arctic data added

Some of the change had to do with adding Arctic stations, but much of it has to do with adjustment. Observe the decline of temperatures of the past in the new CRU dataset:


Enlarged

Data plotted by Kahlbaum/Wolff. This plot has saved versions (thanks to Craig Loehle) from 2001, 2008, downloaded versions from 2010, 20111 and the new HADCRUv4. Each iteration increases the trend by cooling the past and warming the present. Of course, this is just “business as usual” for the Phil Jones team.

Here is a close-up on more recent years, see how much warmer CRU3 and CRU4 in 2011, 2012 are than CRU3 in 2010. The 2011 and 2012 may be land only compilations. ironically they track well with the 2010 version until 1997 then diverge. More updates to follow.

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On the other side of the pond, here’s the NASA GISS 1980 data set compared with the 2010 version. More cooling of the past.


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And of course there’s this famous animation where the middle 20th century got cooler as if by magic. Watch how 1934 and 1998 change places as the warmest year of the last century. This is after GISS applied adjustments to a new data set (2004) compared with the one in 1999

Hansen, before he became an advocate for protest movements and getting himself arrested said:

The U.S. has warmed during the past century, but the warming hardly exceeds year-to-year variability. Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934. 

Source: Whither U.S. Climate?, By James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Jay Glascoe and Makiko Sato - August 1999

In the private sector, doing what we see above would cost you your job, or at worst (if it were stock data monitored by the SEC) land you in jail for securities fraud. But hey, this is climate science. No worries.

And then there’s the cumulative adjustments to the US Historical Climatological Network (USHCN)

Source.

The result is a cooling of the past and a warming of recent data and thus an enhanced apparent warming trend.

Enlarged

All up these adjustments increase the trend in the last century. We have yet to witness a new dataset release where a cooling adjustment has been applied. The likelihood that all adjustments to data need to be positive is nil. This is partly why they argue so fervently against a UHI effect and other land use effects which would require a cooling adjustment.

As for the Arctic stations, we’ve demonstrated recently how those individual stations have been adjusted as well: Another GISS miss: warming in the Arctic - the adjustments are key

Enlarged

The two graphs from GISS, overlaid with a hue shift to delineate the “after adjustment” graph. By cooling the past, the century scale trend of warming is increased - making it “worse than we thought”.

And here is a summary of all Arctic stations where they cooled the past: The values are for 1940. and show how climate history was rewritten:

Enlarged

CRU uses the same base data as GISS, all rooted in the GHCN, from NCDC managed by Dr. Thomas Peterson, who I have come to call “patient zero” when it comes to adjustments. His revisions of USHCN and GHCN make it into every global data set.

Watching this happen again and again, it seems like we have a case of:

Those who cool the past are condemned to repeat it.

Rewriting the Academic Literature

By Roger Pielke Jr, Roger Pielke Jr.’s Blog

Writing in the popular meteorology magazine Weatherwise on disasters and climate change, Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground has decided to rewrite what the academic literature says to be more favorable to what he would like it to have said.

Masters (mis)characterizes a 2011 literature review by Laurens Bouwer as follows:

A 2010 paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society by Netherlands researcher Laurens Bouwer titled, “Have Disaster Losses Increased Due to Anthropogenic Climate Change?”, looked at 22 disaster-loss studies worldwide, published between 2001 and 2010 All of the studies showed an increase in damages from weather-related disasters in recent decades. Fourteen of the 22 studies concluded that there were no trends in damage after correcting for increases in wealth and population, while eight of the studies did find upward trends even after such corrections, implying that climate change could be responsible for the increased disaster losses.
Does Bouwer conclude that eight of those studies actually “[imply] that climate change could be responsible for the increased disaster losses”?  Actually, no. Bouwer concludes exactly the opposite to what Masters attributes to his paper.

And here is what Bouwer actually says (here in PDF):

Studies that did find increases after normalization did not fully correct for wealth and population increases, or they identified other sources of exposure increases or vulnerability changes or changing environmental conditions. No study identified changes in extreme weather due to anthropogenic climate change as the main driver for any remaining trend.

Here is what Bouwer concludes on the full set of 22 papers that he reviewed :

The studies show no trends in losses, corrected for changes (increases) in population and capital at risk, that could be attributed to anthropogenic climate change. Therefore, it can be concluded that anthropogenic climate change so far has not had a significant impact on losses from natural disasters.

It is of course perfectly acceptable for people to challenge data and analyses on the possible relationship of human-caused climate change and disaster losses, and ideally they will do so in the academic literature. But when existing peer-reviewed studies are fundamentally misrepresented in popular discussions, no one’s interests are served.

Jeff Masters graciously responded to my email invitation to comment with this reply just received by email:

Hi Roger, thanks for the note. As you point out, my discussion of Bouwer’s excellent paper was too short and potentially misleading. When I discuss his paper in the future, I will include the sentence,

“Studies that did find increases after normalization did not fully correct for wealth and population increases, or they identified other sources of exposure increases or vulnerability changes or changing environmental conditions. No study identified changes in extreme weather due to anthropogenic climate change as the main driver for any remaining trend.”

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Oue biggest objections to Master’s 9 page story are his implications that the Fujita scale must be wrong because it doesn’t show an increase in severe (F3-F5) tornadoes and the fact he never mentions La Nina or the PDO/AMO, each of which played a key role in the extremes. In fact it was the second strongest La Nina on record and inspired Icecap contributing author Art Horn to write an article for the Energy Tribune in late 2010 predicting a super La Nina and the classic effects, heavy snow and cold west and north, spring floods, major tornado outbreaks, southern droughts and heat waves and late summer and fall hurricanes with improved landfall chances for the east. Stan Changnon had written an artilce for BAMS discussing the benefits exceeding losses for El Ninos but not La Ninas.

Icecap reaches milestone - 30 million page views

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5960 stories have been posted and 120,259 members listed. When we monitored origins of contact, we were getting hits from 25 different countries but especially, the US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Europe.

Icecap is a one man band with one valued part time contributor. We run far short of the top climate science web site, Watts Up With That. Deservedly so. Anthony Watts and his team do an excellent job and many authors contribute meaningful content. The comments section, something I could not manage alone because unfortunately it requires full time moderation makes a huge difference. Only Anthony, Climate Audit and Judith Curry’s site really allow free commenting. Anthony has passed the 106 million mark this month.

Climate realist blogs and skeptics are accused by the clueless alarmists and their toadies of being lavishly supported by big oil and big government. I can assure you, we barely recover enough from small very much appreciated donations to cover the costs of maintaining the servers and internet to keep these sites going. We both have outside businesses that pay our personal bills and sometimes subsidize the sites. Gleickgate proved the hypocrisy of the left and the alarmist community. While ignoring climategate as a crime, they treated Gleick as a martyr for the cause and Heartland as a villain. They criticiize the Koch brothers who unlike so many leftist foundations give their money to many different and worthwhile causes. The $200,000 initially reported turned out to be $20,000 given not for climate but for health care. Only 1/4th of the Heartland’s small budget goes to climate and most was spent on international conferences to which scientists from both sides of the issue were invited.

Anthony Watts posted a story yesterday that sums up very well how I and other skeptics must feel at times.

UPDATE: 3/17/12 Thanks to everyone for all the support, kind words, and well wishes. Today I found myself taking another long nap, and I awoke feeling much better than yesterday. Stress is an insidious thing, and until it catches up with you, you don’t realize what impact it has.  - Anthony

It has been an exhausting month since Fakegate hit the scene, and tonight when I came home from work, I crashed hard, taking a nap. I even missed dinner. My children tried to wake me up apparently to no avail. At the moment I feel like I have a hangover.

Behind the scenes, I’m dealing with a lot of things related to WUWT and the legal fight building with the Pacific Institute and Gleick, plus other things. Today for example I’m wrestling with starting the blog all over again on another platform because my wordpress.com free hosting keeps messing under the hood with the production code and they’d broken something yet again (some readers can’t comment any more thanks to a new security feature) just after we got the mess with adwords fixed last week. So yeah, I’m pretty toasted all in all at the moment. Then I read this comment from a reader on the DeSmog Blog headed back to obscurity thread.

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Ally E. says:

March 16, 2012 at 2:10 pm

I found WUWT barely a month before Fakegate happened. Prior to finding this site, I was a head-in-the-sand kind of person. I knew the whole fry-and-die alarmism was wrong, the claims were getting very stupid, as was the panic.

Getting fed up with ever increasing nonsense scare tactics, I pushed back from news outlets. I didn’t want to hear anymore. I also felt very alone. It was Ian Plimer’s “How to get expelled from school” that opened my eyes to the growing fight back to rational thinking. I bought the book (and there were only two left on the shelf, so I know it’s popular) and read it in a day.

Encouraged, I got online and found WUWT and others. I cannot express how wonderful it felt to learn that REAL scientists out there are practicing REAL science and presenting it properly.

Point is, for those years I had my head in the sand, I didn’t know just what a tangled mess this had all become. I didn’t know what a horrible world was developing right under our noses.

I come here every day. This is my home page. I love the science, I love the way it is presented and I love reading the comments and thoughts from so many very intelligent people. But I also devour any news on the political front. I crave and seek out every snippet of good news, and believe me, this is good news.

Anthony, I want to see these dastards go down. I came in at a most exciting time and I want to watch every step of the alarmists fall from grace. Thank you for providing the whole picture, the wide picture, science, politics and all.

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Thanks, Ally. That made my week.

Thanks Anthony and Ally, you illustrate why we both continue this effort.  Anthony and to some degree Icecap have made a difference. Thank you all for your loyalty and support over the years.

This post I wrote years ago sums up why our job won’t be easy. It will take the cycle 24 cooling that should accelerate with both oceans cold to unequivocally falsify the AGW theory and depose the profiteers and polically driven phonies. The media has not reported on the 15 years of lack of warming (Trenberth’s travesty) and falling sea levels or lack of ocean warming.

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Don’t expect them to go down easy. They will try and find reasons why man is responsible (e.g China’s burning of coal) and why their efforts and their gravy trains of grants should continue. Just this week we had Andrew Weaver arguing the record snows and cold in Alaska and four straight banner year for skiing at Whistler was due to global warming and Jeff Masters who named his company after Ayers and Dorn’s radical weather underground, who last few years claimed the cold and snow was due to diminished arctic ice and colder winter might continue, was arguing in this warm winter and recent record warm March temperatures that this was not the same climate of his father. Masters of course is wrong on both counts. His father likely grew up in the crazy decades of the 1940s to 1970s when cold, snow, heat and drought, floods, tornadoes and hurricanes were always in the news. Cold PDO, warm AMO and in the 1960s and 1970s reduced solar drives those extremes. We are exactly in the climate of his father and my father (whose years extended back through the dust bowl and heat and cold extremes of the 1930s) and could become like the years that Charles Dickens wrote about in the early 1800s if the solar cycles head like many solar scientists feel. 

By the way the strong warm push north into Canada is the counter of the strong cold push south in the west all the way into Mexico. This is how weather normally works. Usually when the cold is pushing well south in the east, they sunning on the beaches and surfing in the water of California.


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Australia’s worst alarmists link recent rains to climate change

by Simon, Australian Climate Madness

Yep, climate change

Following hot on the heels of the BoM/CSIRO climate report yesterday, today we have yet more scaremongering and alarmism.

David Karoly, Matthew England and Will Steffen are probably Australia’s three most hysterical climate alarmists. They have all featured regularly in these pages, and Will Steffen is one of the Labor government’s climate advisers.

And as we all know, any weather event, floods, drought, more cyclones, fewer cyclones, excessive heat, excessive cold, you name it, can be attributed to climate change. As has been said so many times, it is an unfalsifiable hypothesis - no event can disprove it - and therefore falls into the realm of pseudoscience. Bummer.

So when confronted with real world events which contradict their previous predictions, instead of admitting that there might be more to learn about the effects of climate on our weather, our three alarmists dig their heels in even further and make yet more extreme claims.

Put all those factors together, and you get this:

THREE of the nation’s leading climate scientists have linked the past two years of record wet weather to climate change in their strongest findings yet on the impact of global warming on the nation’s climate.

Professors Will Steffen, Matthew England and David Karoly, in a paper to be released today by the Climate Commission, find global warming may have contributed to the strength of the La Nina event and the heavy rainfall and flooding.

They also contend that the heavy rains do not contradict the trend towards drier weather for southern and eastern areas of Australia and find that despite two years of above average rains, southeast Australia continues to suffer from a cumulative rainfall deficit.

They reiterate warnings that global warming will produce longer dry spells, punctuated by heavier rainfall events, in southern and southwest Australia.

The release of the paper comes as Climate Commission chairman Tim Flannery faces increasing ridicule over his earlier predictions of water shortages in major capital cities due to drier weather resulting from global warming. (source)

Top three alarmists

And from the report itself, right on cue comes the now hackneyed “consistent with” excuse:

The wetter conditions experienced in southeastern Australia in the last two years are consistent with scientists’ knowledge and understanding of how the climate is changing in the long term.

Because everything and anything is “consistent with” climate change, right boys? Here’s a challenge for our three heroes: what weather event would not be “consistent with” climate change? Answers on a postcard.

If you were a truly impartial scientist you would say, we don’t actually know how any changes in our climate will affect us, but these kind of events really help our understanding. Not spout yet more of the kind of alarmist nonsense that those three are all too famous for.

But that’s what happens when you are driven by an agenda - to prop up “The Cause” at all costs.

Don’t forget, the Climate Commission was set up by a government that has swallowed the IPCC line and wishes to enact a carbon tax, based on the threat of dangerous global warming… it would be highly inconvenient if dangerous global warming really wasn’t happening…

The full PDF report is here.

Despite a snow drought in US, the northern hemisphere had another snowy winter

UPDATE: Daily Kos: Michael Mann is a Modern Hero and we need to acknowledge that!  Vote in poll

Here is the encouraging news on the poll results this evening. Even Daily Kos readers think he is a fraud it appears.

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By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM

In the markets, technical traders look to see if prices stay above or below key trendlines to determine if the trends are in tact.

The Rutger’s snow lab winter average is in and down as expected from last two years but stil is above the “‘trendline”. it is the 5th highest in 26 years and 14 highest in 35 years. Remember 4 of the 5 greatest snow years have occured in the last decade. 1977/78 was #1, 2009/10 #2, 2010/11 #3. 2007/08 #4 and 2002/03 #5. Three El Ninos and 2 La Ninas. All had negative AO/NAO.

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See the extensive coverage across Canada and Asia.

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See how except in the mountains of the west and northern parts of the northeast, snow is mainly absent in the lower 48 9or in Obama land the lower 55).

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Despite the snow drought here in the US, in southern Alaska, snowfall has been amazing. In the snow season since July 1, in Valdez, 426 inches has fallen compared to a normal 276.1 inches. that is 149.9 inches ABOVE NORMAL and compares to 176.9 inches last year when the lower 48 was hard hit. Nearby Anchorage has had nearly double their normal snowfall so far.

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Despite the early spring in the US, the hemispheric snowpack is well above the average. The below average period from Mid December to early January prevented us from ranking among the top again.

In other parts of the world like Italy, their winter resembled our in the US cities in recent years. This is from Italy.

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Winter came in bursts in the lower 48. There was the Halloween snowstorm in the northeast. the january snowstorm in the Pacific Northwest and today another:

Historic March Snowstorms Along Oregon Coastline and in the Cascades

Steve Pierce, President, Oregon Chapter of the American Meteorological Society

Vancouver, Washington (March 13th 2012) - “Many residents along the coastline of Oregon awoke Tuesday morning to no power, downed trees, closed roads and as much as 8” of snow in a rare one-two punch. This storm will likely go down in the record books as one of the largest coastal snowstorms in the month of March ever recorded at some locations. Records date back to the late 1800’s along the Oregon coast. The last coastal snowstorm of this size in the month of March was in 1951 when between 4” and 8” inches of snow fell. What is even more rare about this storm is the fact that within 12 hours bewildered coastal residents went from 50 degrees with hurricane force wind gusts to 32 degrees and 6” of snow. All of this taking place just a week before the official start of spring.”

“A strong Pacific storm raced ashore Monday morning bringing wind gusts to nearly 90 mph along the Oregon coast line. By sunset Monday, near record setting snows were falling along nearly the entire coastline of Oregon including the the shoreline beaches. Areas that were hit especially hard included Pacific City, Tillamook, Lincoln City, Newport and Florence, Oregon. This area spans about 100 miles. Hwy 101 near Cape Foulweather (just north of Newport, OR) was closed in both directions due to downed trees and stranded cars as snow fell on freshly fallen timber overnight. Here is a look at the snow totals as of Tuesday morning.” Special thanks to the Portland office of the National Weather Service for this information ---

OREGON COAST

TILLAMOOK, OR = 8.5”
NEWPORT, OR = 6.0”
FLORENCE, OR = 5.0”

WILLAMETTE VALLEY

LIVINGSTON MTN - CAMAS, WA = 5.5”
HAPPY VALLEY, OR = 5.0”
BORING, OR = 4.0”
CANBY, OR = 2.5”
LONGVIEW, WA = 2.0”
CAMAS, WA = 2.0”
WASHOUGAL, WA = 2.0”
MILWAUKIE, OR = 1.2”
WILSONVILLE, OR = 1.1”
SALEM, OR = 1.0”
GRESHAM, OR = 1.0”

CASCADE MOUNTAINS

JUNE LAKE, WA = 21.0”
SPENCER MEADOWS, WA = 19.0”
SHEEP CANYON, WA = 17.0”
SURPRISE LAKES, WA = 15.0”
BENNETT PASS, MT HOOD, OR = 9.0”
MT HOOD MEADOWS, OR = 7.0”
GOVERNMENT CAMP, OR = 7.0”
TIMBERLINE LODGE, OR = 6.0”
MCKENZIE, OR = 6.0”
ROARING RIVER, OR = 6.0”
WILLAMETTE PASS, OR = 6.0”
TOMBSTONE, OR. = 3.0”

And as of Friday, March 16, 2012, Mark Albright reported:

It has been a week to remember in the North Cascades for those who like snow.  In the past week ending 11 AM today (16 March 2012) Mt Baker (BAK42) has reported measurable precipitation on 160 out of a possible 168 hours totaling 10.2 inches of water equivalent precipitation while the snow pack has increased 65 inches from 193 to 258 inches.  The snow pack now stands at about 155% of normal (164 inches) for 15 March.  The ski area is reporting 308 inches (nearly 26 feet!) on top at an elevation near 5000 ft.

Quote from a skier after spending yesterday at Mt Baker:
“so deeep so sick ridiculous”

I wonder if Marys Peak above Corvallis will be bare of snow by April 1 this year?  At noon today it is 31 degrees up on top of Marys Peak, but I don’t know how much snow there is.  If you remember, the global warming experts (Phil Mote) at OSU have proclaimed that snow on Marys Peak on 1 April has become a rare event.  In spite of that proclamation, last year Marys Peak still had snow on 1 July 2011, some 3 months after 1 April.

-mark albright

Hey Hansen - where’s the beef?

Update: See Monckton dismantle college environmentalists and professors at Union College in NYS covered by Anthony here and in video below.

Video streaming by Ustream

See in this story how the liberal environmental professors afterwards met hurriedly with their brainwashed and shattered students afterwards to try and reclaim their credibility. That’s how the Nazi’s did it.

Also see the aurora from Lapland in this extended video.

Powerful Aurora borealis over Abisko National Park. 03-12-2012 from Lights Over Lapland on Vimeo.

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By Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That

In June 1986, Dr. James Hansen made a prediction to a newspaper reporter in Oxnard, CA of a 2 degree temperature rise by 2006. This was two years before, almost to the day before he and Senator Tim Wirth duped a bunch of Washington legislators with stagecraft on a hot June day by turning off the a/c in the hearing room while complaining about global warming and urging the need for “immediate action” (translation: cash).

Like Dr. Hansen’s 20 year sea level prediction, it hasn’t come true. In honor of the 80s, when a popular TV commercial for a fast food restaurant had inspired a whole nation to say the catch phrase, I ask Dr. James Hansen, regarding your claims of global warming, “Where’s the Beef”?!

Let’s have a look at Exhibit A:  Hansens’ GISTEMP graph, distributed worldwide from the GISS headquarters above Jerry Seinfeld’s favorite Monk’s Restaurant in New York City. Annotations in blue mine.

Source.

Exhibit B: The GISS Data, available here. Let’s do the math.

Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index (C)
(Anomaly with Base: 1951-1980)
----------------------------------
Year Annual_Mean 5-year_Mean
----------------------------------
1986 0.13 0.18
1987 0.28 0.20
1988 0.33 0.26
1989 0.21 0.31
1990 0.36 0.28
1991 0.35 0.24
1992 0.13 0.24
1993 0.14 0.25
1994 0.24 0.24
1995 0.39 0.30
1996 0.30 0.39
1997 0.41 0.40
1998 0.58 0.40
1999 0.33 0.43
2000 0.35 0.46
2001 0.48 0.46
2002 0.56 0.49
2003 0.55 0.54
2004 0.48 0.55
2005 0.62 0.56
2006 0.55 0.53
Finding the difference: 0.55C – 0.13C = 0.42C

Predicted change 2.0C compared to Actual change 0.42C = Climate Fail

Exhibit C: Where’s the Beef?!

Note: I realize that I could have placed the top prediction at 2.13C, but why pile on? What’s 0.13C between friends? Besides he said “nearly” and it is near well enough.

Don’t believe me? Read for yourself. The Press-Courier - Google News Archive Search

Big h/t to Steve Goddard at Real-Science for finding this one.

UPDATE: Some commenters suggested Hansen may have given the 2 degree number in Fahrenheit rather than Celsius. Another article on the same day suggests he did.

So at 4F we have 2.2 C If the reporter in the first story took the middle between 2-4F as 3F we have 1.67C or “nearly 2 degrees higher in 20 years” as the reporter from Oxnard states.

The 2010 Annual Mean Temperature anomaly from GISS is 0.63 C

So, no matter how you look at it, Hansen’s 1986 prediction has not come true.

Climate Change Impacts In The USA is Already [NOT] Happening

Dr Craig Loehle on Watts Up With That

Many government reports by NASA, NOAA, EPA, USFWS, USFS, USDA and other agencies mention that climate change impacts are already observable in the USA. This is discussed in the context of endangered species conservation, forest resource assessment, future water availability, disaster planning, agriculture policy, etc. I have read many of these reports, which often refer back to the IPCC or the US Global Change Research Program. But they are usually vague on details of what bad things are expected to happen, generally referring to increases in extreme events. Nevertheless, these vague bad things are being used to guide policy.

The USA has some of the best data and is a large country. Are bad effects of climate change really visible already? In what follows, I address the evidence often put forward to support these claims and compare these to the literature. The true story is far from alarming.

Ocean Acidification

One government draft report indicated that ocean pH has increased (become more acid) by 0.1 units, and that this represents a 30% increase in acidity since 1750. Because pH is a log scale, estimating percent increases in acidity is problematic and a change of 0.1 units could not represent a 30% change in acidity as stated. A serious issue not addressed by the report is that a global time series of pH data for the oceans does not exist. Thus, the provenance of the 0.1 unit change in value is dubious, and the confidence intervals on such an estimate would no doubt be large. Furthermore, daily, seasonal, and between year pH fluctuations at any given location are on the order of ±0.3 pH units or more (Middelboe and Hansen 2007; Pelejero et al. 2005).

Sea Level Rise

Some reports state that sea level rise poses a threat to United States natural habitats, with other reports focusing on risks to developed areas. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) temperatures due to human activity began to rise after 1980, but estimates of sea level show a rise from about 1870 (earliest records) at a nearly linear rate and with no sign of acceleration. Sea level rise from 1870 to 1980 is not likely due to human activity. One report indicates that IPCC has projected a sea level rise of 0.4 to 2 m by 2090, but the fourth IPCC report does not make such a claim, instead giving a best estimate of 0.28 to 0.43 m. Recent levels of rise (http://sealevel.colorado.edu), at 3.1 mm/year long-term trend or 0.31 m in 100 years with no indication of “acceleration,” are only consistent with the lowest IPCC projections. In fact, recent deceleration of the rate of rise (Houston and Dean 2011) has been detected. Examples of papers that projected sea level increases lower than the range discussed in the fourth IPCC report are Bouwer (2011), Chu et al. (2010), Czymzik et al. (2010), and Xie et al. (2010).

Temperature Increases

Government assessment reports note that US temperatures have risen 2F since 1961. However, conclusions about the extent of temperature increase depend heavily upon the start date for the calculation. Perhaps by coincidence, a start date of 1961 gives the most alarming rise. In contrast, there is almost no rise from 1938 to 2011 in the US. The same is true for sea surface temperature changes. This is because natural climate oscillations (e.g., Wyatt et al. 2011) produced a warm period in the mid-twentieth century with a cool period in the 1960s.

Floods

Reports assert that floods are increasing, but data do not bear this out. Hirsh and Ryberg (2011) showed that there is no trend toward increasing flood magnitudes in any region of the US, and a small decrease in the Southwest. Arrigoni et al. (2010) showed that climate change in the northern Rocky Mountains over 59 years has not significantly affected basin flows, although human habitat modifications have reduced the difference between minimum and maximum flows. Kundezewicz et al. (2005), in a global analysis of 195 long series of daily flow records, rejected the hypothesis of a growth in maximum daily flows. Increasing trends in flood damage can be fully accounted for by rising population and wealth.

Regional Drought Frequency

According to assessment reports, regional droughts are increasing in frequency and severity. However, they typically do not support this contention with any reliable data. Droughts are difficult to characterize and methods for doing so have become more sophisticated over time. The actual quantification of the “area” of a drought is also extremely subjective and no standard methods exist, nor do long-term standardized data.

Data related to precipitation and drought activity do not appear to support the contention of increasing drought frequency and severity and suggest that drought patterns are complex. For example, there has been a 5% increase in overall precipitation in the US rather than increasing drought. Sheffield et al. (2009) found that large-scale droughts follow ENSO and northern Pacific and Atlantic SSTs. This relation to ENSO activity is confirmed in a study in the US Southwest (McCabe et al. 2010). Globally, the mid 1950s had the highest drought activity and the mid 1970s to mid 1980s had the lowest, rather than a simple increasing trend. Again, picking the mid-1970s as a start date will give a false appearance of an increasing trend.

Extreme Storm Events

Assessment reports allege that extreme storm events are increasing even though storm severity per se is not reported or documented in any government archives. A “storm” is not even a well-defined object in climatology. There is an apparent increase in the number of tornados over time. However, improvements in radar quality and coverage over the past decades cause a detection bias trend, with more, smaller tornados being detected and recorded over time. Furthermore, increases in available disaster assistance aid have encouraged more frequent reporting of smaller storms in efforts to get disaster aid. Counting only category F4 and F5 events, which are relatively consistently detectable and recorded, there is no trend over the past 100 years (Balling and Cerveny 2003).

Hurricanes

Hurricane strength is said to be increasing. This can likely be attributed to increasing satellite coverage and resolution, which tends over time to more accurately capture the hours when a storm is at maximum strength. A study that corrects for storm detection ability over time (Vecchi and Knutson 2011) finds no trend in Atlantic hurricanes over the period of 1878 to 2008. Studies of landfall hurricanes (Balling and Cerveny 2003) also show no trend. The last landfall hurricane to hit (i.e., with the hurricane eye) the continental US was Katrina in 2005.

Fires

Reports suggest that warmer temperatures and changing precipitation patterns will cause more fires and affect the seasonality of fires. Indians and early European settlers both used fire extensively. Areas converted to agriculture (e.g., the Great Plains) now see almost no fire. Some western forests have higher fuel loads than 200 years ago. In the context of these and other large landscape changes, no one has documented a change in fire regimes in the US that can be attributed to climate change. In fact, the largest historical fires were in the West around 100 years ago. Human activities (changes in fuel loads, increased ignition sources, arson) have on the other hand been clearly documented effects on fire extent, as have “let burn” policies in the West, which have only been implemented in the past few decades..

Algal Blooms

Reports indicate that harmful algal blooms in aquatic ecosystems have become more frequent, intense, and widespread. Climate change is only one factor potentially causing harmful algal blooms, with increasing nutrient runoff a clearly important factor. There is no basis for ascribing trends in blooms to climate change. There is also an increasing ability to detect them as satellite imagery improves over time.

Changes in Ecosystems

There are studies showing responses to biota that are “consistent with” warming, but most of these are actually positive, whereas negative effects are hypothetical (e.g., phenology “might” be disrupted). For example, changes in bird migration and nesting dates indicate adaptation to changes rather than an alarming situation. The clearest data pertain to long-term trends in plant growth. These studies, with a few local exceptions, show regional to global net primary productivity (NPP) to have been increasing in the past 50 to 100 years (Alcaraz-Segura et al. 2010; Bellassen et al. 2011; Jia et al. 2009; Kohler et al. 2010; Lin et al. 2010; Nemani et al. 2003; Tian et al. 2010) due to both rising CO2 levels and increasing temperatures. If warming since the Little Ice Age is leading to increased NPP, this is difficult to construe as problematic.

Conclusions

Within the United States, the claim that bad climate effects can “already” be detected is a totally subjective and unsupported hypothetical.

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How Can I Get Some of That Anti-Global Warming Big Oil Money?

By Larry Bell, Forbes reprinted with author permission

It seems we keep hearing that scientists who challenge claims that our planet is on fire fueled by fossil energy are lackeys of a heavily funded disinformation campaign underwritten by Big Oil, Big Coal, and other Big Spenders. Notable authority on this conspiracy, Internet pioneer, Academy Award Oscar winner and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Albert Arnold Gore warned about this last year in a Rolling Stone article: “Polluters and Ideologues are financing pseudoscientists whose job it is to manufacture doubt about what is true and false [and] ...spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year on misleading advertisements in the mass media.”

Given that the mercenary climate skeptic cadre appears to be awash in ill-gotten carbon footprint-stained gains, I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that such evil organizations have never seen fit to offer me gobs of money. After all, I frequently write articles arguing that there is no basis for climate alarm and critical of charities essential to support otherwise unsustainable “green” energy fantasies. Why should I, alone, miss out on those pay offs? Sure, I have repeatedly opposed subsidies for all other energy providers as well. Still, it just hasn’t seemed fair to be passed over with such harsh neglect.

Frankly, this didn’t really bother me all that much until I recently read that the Heartland Institute received “shocking” contributions from nefarious donors. This was revealed in confidential information illegally obtained and distributed by renowned “mainstream” climate scientist Peter Gleick who received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” and chaired the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Task force on Scientific Ethics. It seems he had a simultaneous lapse of both attributes. And by the way, that’s the same AGU that released a famous conclusion based on Ouija board survey methodology that 97% of all scientists believe that global warming is a serious, human-caused curse.

At first, it appeared that Heartland’s fossil industry-funded debauchery was much worse than many of us could have possibly imagined....an astounding gift of $25,000 from the Koch Foundation alone… over a short period of just ten years! Well okay, that money was actually earmarked for a health care newsletter rather than to advance their insidiously skeptical positions regarding a looming climate catastrophe. Nevertheless, that suspected salacious liaison was titillating enough to get some prominent press pundits panting.

If that wasn’t bad enough, another forensically and factually flawed document in the batch, which was falsely attributed to Heartland, put the contribution amount at $200,000. But then, why quibble over what amounts to little more than an innocently misplaced decimal point? And as warminista sensationalists apparently believe: numbers, schlumbers…what does it matter so long as you get the big message across?

Think rising oceans for example. In a December 6, 2005 presentation to the AGU, NASA Goddard Space Institute head and long-time Gore advisor James Hansen predicted that the Earth’s climate was reaching a human-caused tipping point that will cause sea levels to rise as much as 80 feet during this century. Not one to understate scary probabilities, this was more than 40 times higher than even the upper worst case end of what the most recent alarmist U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summary report has projected.

ICECAP ADDITION:

Enlarged. Last 4 years of global sea level - oh my Al and James you have soem ‘splaining to do’.

Absent any known basis for this, I’m unaware of any criticism of that remarkable assertion from the AGU or any other of those self-proclaimed mainstream climate organizations. Also, what about unsupportable claims regarding imperiled polar bears, a human CO2 -caused Himalayan glacier retreat, and increasing global warming-induced hurricane threats...to name only a few examples? Have you heard any vociferous rebuttals from established bastions of scientific authority?

Didn’t think so.

Maybe that’s because there’s no record that the sources received any money from ExxonMobil or their conspiratorial ilk. No, it all came from us through tax money we generously provided to “get the truth”.

Perhaps you can imagine my relief to learn that Heartland didn’t get any ExxonMobil money after all...that I wasn’t the only one they overlooked. In fact it turned out that most of Heartland’s budget was provided by innocuous and rather boring private donations and grant sources. You gotta admit that it’s pretty chintzy for Exxon not to give at least something to them...an organization that according to the Associated Press is “one of the loudest voices denying human-caused global warming, hosting the largest international scientific conferences on climate change.”

Wouldn’t you expect Exxon and other fossil confederates to be at least a little charitable to a not-for-profit entity that has been dubbed “the ideological center of the denial movement”? Geeze, they sure are providing a great deal of bang for the buck in what ...as Al claims to be...manufacturing a lot of doubt about what is true and what is false.

Consider that about one-quarter of their total $4.4 million 2011 budget that Heartland devoted to climate research dissemination activities is barely a rounding error in what other opposing-view non-profits spend. For example, compare this with Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection which reportedly netted more than $88 million in 2008, the Natural Resources Defense Council, which reportedly took in more than $95 million in 2011 operating revenues, and the World Wildlife Fund that raised more than $238 million last year.

Then there’s also many other international philanthropic organizations that copiously support climate-frenzy causes. Consider, for example, the European Climate Foundation (ECF) which “aims to promote climate and energy policies that greatly reduce Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions and help Europe play an even stronger international leadership role in mitigating climate change.” ECF partners include the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which awarded a $460,800,000 donation to another partner, the ClimateWorks Foundation in 2008…plus $100 million more to them this year. ClimateWorks presents itself as “a global family of affiliated organizations that support public policies that prevent climate change and catalyze sustainable global prosperity.” ("Prevent climate change”? Understandably, that alone will really cost a bunch!)

Also, lest we forget, there’s a whole lot of other money available for those who will carry water for climate crisis and renewable energy promotion. The IPCC costs Western taxpayers about $6.5 million annually, and that’s but a drop in the bucket compared with the $2.6 billion the White House plans to spend on research into “the global changes that have resulted primarily from global over-dependence on fossil fuels.” (Is it just me, or does this possibly constitute a somewhat biased premise for science funding?)

That ain’t nearly all. Data compiled by Joanne Nova at the Science and Policy Institute indicates that the U.S. Government spent more than $32.5 billion in climate studies between 1989 and 2009. This doesn’t count about $79 billion more spent for climate change technology research, foreign aid and tax breaks for “green energy”.

According to the GAO, annual federal climate spending has increased from $4.6 billion in 2003 to $8.8 billion in 2010, amounting to $106.7 billion over that period. The money was spent in four general categories: technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, science to understand climate changes, international assistance for developing countries, and wildlife adaptation to respond to actual or expected changes. Technology spending, the largest category, grew from $2.56 billion to $5.5 billion over this period, increasingly advancing over others in total share.

OMB pointed out that their previously noted agency budget compilations didn’t include revenues lost for the special deductions and tax credits intended to encourage greenhouse gas emission reductions. They attributed those subsidies to costing $7.2 billion in federal revenue losses during 2010 alone, ($16.1 billion since 1993), bringing the total since 2003 to $122.8 billion. Then there’s also still another $26.1 billion earmarked for climate change programs and related activities within the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (or “Stimulus Bill").

Climate change spending won’t slow any time soon...not so long as current Obama policies prevail. A proposed $1.328 billion FY 2012 budget presented last June for its Global Climate Change Initiative (GCCI) aimed at helping developing countries address man-made global warming problems we have allegedly caused represents a 557% increase since FY 2008 ($202 million). Implemented through programs sponsored by the Department of State, Treasury, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), it is funded by the administration’s executive budget.

As stated, “The President’s FY2012 budget request follows on the December 2010 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) negotiations in Cancun, Mexico, which formulated a package of ‘nationally appropriate’ measures toward the goal of avoiding dangerous climate change.” This is part of “...a commitment to near-term and long-term climate financing for the least developed countries amounting to nearly $30 billion for the period 2010-2012, and $100 billion annually by 2020.”

So if climate crisis and “green energy” skeptics expect to make any money, we’ve obviously joined the wrong side of the funding divide. Yup, sadly, I’ve pretty much abandoned any expectations that the Koch brothers or Exxon are going to send me a gratitude check any time soon. Like a large number of others who share my concerns about America’s current scientifically unjustified, economically disastrous climate and energy policies, I guess I’ll just have to continue plugging along, tilting at windmills and warm-mongers, solely because it’s important to do so. That’s plenty of reason enough.

But, hey, just in case, my bank deposit account routing number is available upon request.

No Faith With Skeptics

By Marlo Lewis, Global Warming.org

Donna Laframboise asks the key question about Fakegate: ”Where do Gleick Apologists Draw the Line?”

In a recent post on her Web site, No Frakking Consensus, she provides excerpts from scientists, ethicists, and activists who excuse or even lionize Peter Gleick for stealing Heartland Institute budget documents, impersonating a Heartland board member, misrepresenting himself to bloggers as an anonymous “Heartland insider,” and palming off as genuine - maybe also authoring - a fake climate strategy document in which Koch supposedly funds Heartland to keep opposing voices out of Forbes magazine, sell doubt as their product, and dissuade teachers from teaching science.

Laframboise comments: “Climate change is a strange beast. When it enters the room, even ethicists lose the ability to think straight.”

At the end of her post, she asks Gleick’s apologists what other unlawful actions they believe would be justified if necessary to advance their cause:

I get it. Lying and stealing and misleading are OK so long as they help advance a good cause. What else is acceptable? Old fashioned burglary? Arson? Car bombs?

Where is the line?

There is no moral equivalence between Gleick’s theft of Heartland’s budget documents and the release of Climate Research Unit (CRU) emails - quite possibly by a whistle blower - that triggered the Climategate scandal.

The CRU is a tax-funded organization; thus, its research and work-related emails are subject to freedom of information laws. Heartland is a privately-funded organization; thus, its planning documents are not subject to such laws. As we know from the Climategate emails, CRU scientists stonewalled FOIA requests for years to prevent independent researchers from checking their data and methods. That was a bona fide scandal, not only because evading FOIA is unlawful, but also because scientists who deny independent researchers the opportunity to reproduce (invalidate) their results attack the very heart of the scientific enterprise.

Leaking the CRU emails was the only way to (a) produce documents responsive to valid FOIA requests, (b) expose CRU’s willful evasion of FOIA, and (c) subject CRU research products to the indispensable scientific test of reproducibility. Gleick’s theft of the Heartland documents served no legal or scientific-integrity objective. The Heartland documents reveal no breach of professional ethics or law, which is why somebody (Gleick?) had to fabricate a ‘confidential climate strategy memo’ to make Heartland look bad.

Nonetheless, warmistas such as DeSmog Blog, which published the purloined Heartland documents, applaud Gleick as a whistle blower, and stubbornly insist the fake strategy memo is genuine, loudly denounced Climategate as the work of an “illegal hack” of emails “stolen” from the CRU server.

The Gleick affair thus brings into sharp focus what has been apparent for some time, namely, the warmist movement is imbued with a ‘one law for me, another for thee‘ mentality. Such a mindset is toxic to democracy and scientific integrity alike.

As DeSmog Blog sees the world, those who espouse Gorthodoxy have a moral right to (1) flout FOIA and the rules of scientific discourse, and (2) violate the legal rights of climate alarm skeptics. DeSmog and its allies fancy themselves cutting-edge defenders of “the science.’ In fact, their mentality is thoroughly medieval.

In Europe’s wars of religion, sectarians often tried to justify unconscienable behavior on the grounds that they had no ethical or legal obligation to “heretics” (i.e., anyone who believed differently than they did). John Locke excoriated this pious fraud in his Letter Concerning Toleration:

Another more secret evil, but more dangerous to the commonwealth, is when men arrogate to themselves, and to those of their own sect, some peculiar prerogative covered over with a specious show of deceitful words, but in effect opposite to the civil right of the community. For example: we cannot find any sect that teaches, expressly and openly, that men are not obliged to keep their promise; that princes may be dethroned by those that differ from them in religion; or that the dominion of all things belongs only to themselves. For these things, proposed thus nakedly and plainly, would soon draw on them the eye and hand of the magistrate and awaken all the care of the commonwealth to a watchfulness against the spreading of so dangerous an evil. But, nevertheless, we find those that say the same things in other words. What else do they mean who teach that faith is not to be kept with heretics? Their meaning, forsooth, is that the privilege of breaking faith belongs unto themselves; for they declare all that are not of their communion to be heretics, or at least may declare them so whensoever they think fit [emphasis added].

DeSmoggers adhere to a similar doctrine: No faith with skeptics. Those preaching “no faith with heretics” rejected the civil and religious equality essential to a free society. Locke urged magistrates not to tolerate anyone preaching such intolerance.

Thomas Jefferson improved on Locke, arguing that the best way to deal with intolerant sects is to let them discredit themselves in the marketplace of ideas. Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom concludes by affirming:

. . .that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

Gleick and his apologists have discredited themselves far more than any Heartland Institute climate science report, climate conference, or global warming curriculum could accomplish.

Fortunately, nothing I say here will make them wise up.

EPA has lost its way on warming

Craig Rucker

Legal challenges by states and industry groups over the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases could and should be decided in the challengers’ favor. Whether that will happen in this highly politicized, semi-scientific matter of “dangerous manmade global warming and climate change” remains to be seen. Regardless of what the DC Court of Appeals decides, the case will almost assuredly return to the Supreme Court, where the outcome is equally uncertain.

In Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court said EPA had the authority (but not the obligation) to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act’s “capacious definition of air pollutant.” EPA could do so, the court ruled, if its administrator concluded that GHG emissions “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” In other words, the administrators opinion was not sufficient. The agency must conduct a scientific study and make a convincing scientific case for taking action.
Not surprisingly, Administrator Lisa Jackson decided that CO2 does endanger public health and welfare, and signaled her intention to regulate these emissions. However, there are serious problems with this.

First, EPA conducted no original research of its own. Relying on work by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other agencies, it merely selected existing studies and reports that supported its predetermined outcome - and ignored numerous studies that contradicted its decision.

Second, scientific opinion is sharply divided on the extent to which these gases might contribute to climate change. EPA chose to disregard this inconvenient truth – and continue the shoddy practice begun by the IPCC and alarmist climate scientists of refusing to discuss or debate the validity of computer models, assertions of imminent disaster, and evidence for and against the catastrophic AGW hypothesis.

Third, carbon dioxide simply is not a “pollutant” within the meaning of the Clean Air act. It is not an agent that fouls or contaminates the air, making it harmful to human health. In fact, CO2 is a natural component of Earth’s atmosphere and a key ingredient in photosynthesis. Without carbon dioxide all life on Earth would cease to exist.

Fourth, both the 2007 Supreme Court decision and the IPCC studies relied on by EPA predate the Climategate emails and other scandals that have revealed how contrived, questionable and perhaps even fraudulent global warming disaster “science” actually is. Had those documents surfaced prior to its 2007 deliberations, the Court’s decision might well have been very different.

Fifth, allowing EPA to impose its CO2/GHG regulatory regime would effectively put the agency in charge of every aspect of Americans’ energy use, economic activities and lives. EPA’s unprecedented and exorbitantly expensive rules will severely and adversely affect hydrocarbon use, energy prices, food production, manufacturing, transportation, jobs, home and office heating and cooling, hospital and school operations - and thus human health and welfare.

Finally, and most absurd of all, even eliminating every source of carbon dioxide in the USA - electricity generation, vehicles, industries, humans and animals - would do nothing to reduce other emission sources worldwide. While US carbon dioxide emissions are declining, those sources continue to raise atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Thus, despite their devastating impacts on America’s economy and living standards, EPA’s rules would do virtually nothing to forestall the harms that its pseudo-science predicts.

Into this legal, scientific and regulatory cesspool now comes yet another element, which may yet go down as a key turning point in the debate - more important even than Climategate: Peter Gleick’s February 14 transmission of several stolen documents and a forged memorandum to 15 environmental activists in the United States and possibly abroad.

The stolen documents were taken from The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank that has received increasing attention for challenging IPCC and EPA global warming doom and gloom dogma, misinformation and propaganda. (Among the documents stolen were lists of HI donors and its entire 2012 budget.) The left and its mainstream media lapdogs had a field day with the information, but focused almost exclusively on the forged memo, which purported to reveal Heartland’s secret “climate strategy” - to make school children, citizens and legislators better informed about actual climate science.

Six days later Gleick, president and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, confessed to the crime. Virtually everyone now agrees the memo is a poor forgery, probably written by Gleick, although he still denies having done so.

Gleick is a prominent member of the global warming clique. His take-down is big news, and one reason this scandal could overshadow Climategate in its impact on global warming debates. Despite all the Sturm und Drang caused by Climategate, no one really paid a price for the gross misbehavior revealed by the leaked emails - even though the actions were funded with taxpayer money and used to promote bogus science, harmful public policies, and massive changes in energy use and living standards.

Gleick has been forced to step down from several positions, including as president of the Pacific Institute, and will likely face civil and criminal charges. His is likely to be only the first scalp that global warming “realists” collect from this incident. Heartland has indicated it will also go after Gleick’s accomplices in major environmental organizations and even in the drive-by media.

The criminal and civil cases will drag out for years, and discovery could uncover even more misbehavior in the alarmist camp than did Climategate. Heartland may also face discovery, but the stolen documents suggest that it has little or nothing to hide.

Why did Gleick target Heartland? As HI president Joseph Bast wrote to climate scientist Judith Curry in a message posted on her blog, Climate Etc: “I suspect he targeted us because we have done so much to document and rebut the assumptions and exaggerations of the global warming alarmists.” He then mentioned Heartland’s monthly publication, Environment & Climate News, its persuasive multi-volume response to the IPCC, Climate Change Reconsidered, and its six international climate conferences. (See http://judithcurry.com/2012/02/24/why-target-heartland)

Climategate caught the global warming establishment off-guard, but it soon regained its footing, aided immensely by the billions of dollars that governments are pouring into the “climate crisis” industry. Fakegate is rocking their world again, revealing the alarmists’ increasing desperation that the debate they don’t want to have will cost them their credibility, prestige, power and funding. This time, Fakegate may sweep some of them off their feet.

Who knew what Gleick was up to, and when did they know it? Who was Gleick trying to impress by this theft and forgery, and what did he and his accomplices seek to gain?

In the digital era, every email and every PDF document leaves a digital trail. There will be no cover up this time, no white-wash investigations by friendly IPCC and university colleagues. The perpetrator can’t take the Fifth Amendment in a civil suit, and the prospect of time in jail has been known to loosen lips. The whole global warming cabal is wondering when the next shoe will drop, and drop it shall.

The truth will finally come out, and the world will be better for it. 
_______

Craig Rucker is a co-founder of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and serves as its executive director.

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