The climate industry is costing taxpayers $79 billion and counting! The Science and Public Policy Institute announces the publication of Climate Money, a study by Joanne Nova revealing that the federal Government has a near-monopsony on climate science funding. This distorts the science towards self-serving alarmism.
Key findings:
The US Government has spent more than $79 billion of taxpayers’ money since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, propaganda campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks. Most of this spending was unnecessary.
Despite the billions wasted, audits of the science are left to unpaid volunteers. A dedicated but largely uncoordinated grassroots movement of scientists has sprung up around the globe to test the integrity of “global warming” theory and to compete with a lavishly-funded, highly organized climate monopsony. Major errors have been exposed again and again.
Carbon trading worldwide reached $126 billion in 2008. Banks, which profit most, are calling for more. Experts are predicting the carbon market will reach $2 - $10 trillion in the near future. Hot air will soon be the largest single commodity traded on global exchanges.
Meanwhile, in a distracting sideshow, Exxon-Mobil Corp is repeatedly attacked for paying just $23 million to skeptics - less than a thousandth of what the US government spends on alarmists, and less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in 2008 alone.
The large expenditure designed to prove the non-existent connection between carbon and climate has created a powerful alliance of self-serving vested interests.
By pouring so much money into pushing a single, scientifically-baseless agenda, the Government has created not an unbiased investigation but a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Sound science cannot easily survive the vice-like grip of politics and finance. Says Nova, “For the first time, the numbers from government documents have been compiled in one place. It’s time to start talking of “Monopolistic Science”. It’s time to expose the lie that those who claim “to save the planet” are the underdogs. And it’s time to get serious about auditing science, especially when it comes to pronouncements that are used to justify giant
government programs and massive movements of money.”
Robert Ferguson, SPPI’s president, says: “This study counts the cost of years of wasted Federal spending on the ‘global warming’ non-problem. Government bodies, big businesses and environmental NGOs have behaved like big tobacco: recruiting, controlling and rewarding their own “group-think” scientists who bend climate modeling to justify the State’s near-maniacal quest for power, control, wealth and forced population reduction.“ Joanne Nova, who wrote our study, speaks for thousands of scientists in questioning whether a clique of taxpayer-funded climate modelers are getting the data right, or just getting the “right” data. Are politicians paying out billions of our dollars for evidence-driven policy-making, or policy-driven evidence-making? The truth is more crucial than ever, because American lives, property and constitutional liberties are at risk.”
Read Joanne Nova’s important paper Climate Money here.
Contact Robert Ferguson at SPPI or email here.
Henry Lampman, reporter for The New American interviews Joanne Nova, author of “The Skeptic’s Handbook”. Joanne Nova ... believed in manmade warming by carbon dioxide emissions from 1990-2007.
The Environmental Protection Agency is pushing the greatest regulatory intervention in US history, seeking to declare that carbon dioxide poses an “endangerment” under the Clean Air Act, threatening human health and the environment. To hear the EPA tell it, CO2 - which nonetheless remains indispensible to life on earth and without which plants die, more of which produces higher crop yields, etc. - will kill us all.
This proposal is a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s attempt to bring the energy sector of the economy under state control just as it seeks to do with health care, essentially ruining something in order to take it over in the name of cleaning up capitalism’s mess. It’s an old play, which the statists have run for decades, certain that every now and then it will break for a big gain. But an inconvenient EPA career professional just doing his job assessed the premise and informed his superiors, in the sole substantive report presented in the Agency’s internal deliberations, that upon scrutiny CO2 clearly does not drive temperatures or climate but oddly enough, the sun and oceans do. His boss told him to shut up, that nothing good could come to their office by injecting this analysis into the process, as the decision had been made.
One problem with that, of course, is that the decision is not allowed to be made before the process has run its course. That is the entire purpose of an internal debate which, internal documents now prove, was truncated and in fact illusory.
For his troubles, this physics graduate of Cal Tech and MIT PhD economist - which are why he had his job - was subjected to the ritual smear job as unqualified by the thugs running the global warming industry. The nicest thing said about him was “He’s not a climate scientist!” shrieked by legions of non-scientists nonetheless cocksure of their own wisdom, insight and informed judgment on the matter.
Left unmentioned were the scientific credentials of the EPA administrator, President Obama, and the 535 members of Congress who are tasked with deciding the issue. “He’s just an economist!” the non-scientists’ line continued, ignoring that whole physics-degree thing and that, ah, well, the UN’s “chief climate scientist” is “just an economist.” Again, as the whistleblower Dr. Alan Carlin learned, facts have little weight in this debate. Still, one key truth that Carlin brought to the fore exposes how - assuming that sanity prevails in the Senate and Congress is unable to impose “cap-and-trade” energy rationing - his exposé will carry the day in court.
This is man-made warming theory’s missing link. The global warming industry and its political enablers have been getting away with an amazing stunt of backing out from the equation inconvenient things which your lying eyes might tell you. Amid the cries of “warming proceeding even faster than predicted” - an actual, common claim among alarmists, politicians and the media - observations reveal that the recent cooling has brought us to the average of the entire 30-year history of the satellite temperature record. Read full story here.
In a number of posts this last year, we have addressed the unusually long and quiet solar cycles. A few weeks back, we noted the sunspot minimum seemed at hand as the month of June started with a series of cycle 24 sunspots and it appeared we would exceed the monthly sunspot number of 3.3 necessary to make the sunspot minimum (the lowest value in 13 month average) November 2008.
Well June despite numerous other small microdots characteristic of this cycle ended up with a monthly average of 2.6 which allowed December to drop from the 1.8 to 1.7 making December the earliest candidate for solar minimum. July would have to average below 3.5 in order for the minimum to move to January. It is unlikely to move to February as the month August would have to average below 0.5, the number in the month it will replace.
December had a 13 month average sunspot number of 1.7. Only three minima since 1750 had official minima below 1.7 (1913 1.5, 1810 0, 1823 0.1). Of course modern measurement technologies are better than older technologies so there is some uncertainty as to whether microdots back then would have been seen.
In a post Mt, Redoubt, a Quiet Sun and Your Morning Coffee, we showed how the solar cycle seems to have an influence on world production and spot market prices of coffee likely by influencing weather in the tropical growing areas. This year it may be enhanced by a developing El Nino which has similar results (all three favor an erratic monsoon season). Of course, the clueless Heidi Cullen no longer with The Weather Channel has already blamed that on global warming. We (WSI) have forecast that monsoon disruption for our ag clients since April with affects on coffee, rice, and cotton.
SOME OTHER INFLUENCES
ARGENTINA DROUGHT
Lower solar activity has a significant correlation with drought in Argentina. The last two years have seen a devastating drought in that country with major impact on winter wheat, corn and beans. This year’s drought is expected to produce lowest winter wheat yields in two decades. You can see the drought reflected in the satellite derived vegetation index (NDVI) (Source USDA Spot NDVI) which is a measure of the health of vegetation. The recent NDVI for South America is shown below. Note how the drought has extended into southern Brazil at times (Rio Grande do Sul) although recent rains have helped recharge soil moisture there. You can compare the NDVI with the correlation of precipitation rate with solar flux (Source NOAA CDC).
Hydrologist Dr. Will Alexander found in a multi-author study in the Journal of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering, a strong correlation of rainfall and river flow in the Vaal River. He showed a deficit in the three years leading up the minimum and heavy rainfall in the three years following.
In all but one sequence (Vaal River 1965/66, data not available), the three-year totals after the minima of both river flow and sunspot numbers, are substantially greater than the three-year totals before the minima. This information demonstrates the close association between major variations in river flow and corresponding variations in sunspot activity, with a high degree of confidence.
There are several interesting features in this table. There is an almost three-fold, sudden increase in the annual flows in the Vaal River from the three previous years to the three subsequent years. This is directly associated with a six-fold increase in sunspot numbers. The second important point is the consistency in the range of sunspot numbers before and after the reversal. The totals for the three prior years varied between 25 and 60, and the totals of the three immediately subsequent years varied between 250 and 400. It is very clear that these are systematic changes associated with the sunspot minima, and are not random events. (Journal of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering - Volume 49 Number 2 June 2007)
Given this study, one should expect the upcoming three years to be wet as we come off the protracted minimum although perhaps not as wet as some periods if the upcoming cycle is a dud. See much more with correlations with the upper atmosphere and with high latitude blocking (the arctic oscillation has been the lowest of the recent record for the June to mid-July period) in the full post here. Next week’s post is on the El Nino, now official (preview here).
Scientists Claim Earth Is Undergoing Natural Climate Shift.
The bitter cold and record snowfalls from two wicked winters are causing people to ask if the global climate is truly changing.
The climate is known to be variable and, in recent years, more scientific thought and research has been focused on the global temperature and how humanity might be influencing it.
However, a new study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee could turn the climate change world upside down.
Scientists at the university used a math application known as synchronized chaos and applied it to climate data taken over the past 100 years.
“Imagine that you have four synchronized swimmers and they are not holding hands and they do their program and everything is fine; now, if they begin to hold hands and hold hands tightly, most likely a slight error will destroy the synchronization. Well, we applied the same analogy to climate,” researcher Dr. Anastasios Tsonis said.
Scientists said that the air and ocean systems of the earth are now showing signs of synchronizing with each other. Eventually, the systems begin to couple and the synchronous state is destroyed, leading to a climate shift.
“In climate, when this happens, the climate state changes. You go from a cooling regime to a warming regime or a warming regime to a cooling regime. This way we were able to explain all the fluctuations in the global temperature trend in the past century,” Tsonis said. “The research team has found the warming trend of the past 30 years has stopped and in fact global temperatures have leveled off since 2001.”
The most recent climate shift probably occurred at about the year 2000. Now the question is how has warming slowed and how much influence does human activity have?
“But if we don’t understand what is natural, I don’t think we can say much about what the humans are doing. So our interest is to understand—first the natural variability of climate—and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,” Tsonis said.
Tsonis said he thinks the current trend of steady or even cooling earth temps may last a couple of decades or until the next climate shift occurs. Read more here.
See how well the annual US temperatures (USHCNv2) synchronously changes with both the oceans (PDO + AMO) and sun (Hoyt Schatten Willson Total Solar Irradiance or TSI calibrated to ACRIM). Enlarged here. Similarities exist with the early 1960s.
****************
Longest streak of negative PDO since the Moon Landing By Alexandre Aguiar, MetSul Weather Center, Porto Alegre - Brazil
The new released data by the University of Washington indicates another negative month for the PDO. The value for the month of June was -0.31. According to the data from the University of Washington, the current streak of negative PDO is one of the longest in one hundred years. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation is negative for 22 consecutive months. The last time the PDO had a positive monthly value was in August 2007.
Prior to that, since 1900, there were very few periods with so many consecutive months presenting negative values: 20 months from July 1998 to February 2000; 19 months from December 1974 to June 1976; 20 months from December 1972 to July 1974; 23 months from August 1966 to June 1968; 28 months from May 1961 to August 1963; 25 months from February 1955 to February 1957; and 36 months from July 1948 to June 1951. In other words, this is the longest period of consecutive months of negative PDO in four decades. The last time the PDO stayed negative for some many months in a row was just before the man landed in the Moon, a milestone the world will remember this July 20th 2009.
As cap-and-trade advocates tie their knickers in knots over so-called “global warming,” Mother Nature refuses to cooperate. Earth’s temperatures continue a chill that began 11 years ago. As global cooling accelerates, global-warmists kick, scream, and push their pet theory—just like little kids who cover their ears and stomp their feet when older children tell them not to bother waiting up for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.
Consider how the globe cooled last month:
-- June in Manhattan averaged 67.5 degrees Fahrenheit, 3.7 degrees below normal—the coldest average since 1958. The National Weather Service stated July 1: “The last time that Central Park hit 85 in May...but not in June was back in 1903.” Icecap Note: The Weather Channel reported that New York City has experienced the 2nd coolest June 1 to July 13 period with an average temperature of just 68.4F. The coolest occurred in 1881 with an average temperature of 67.8F.
-- In Phoenix, June’s high temperatures were below 100 degrees for 15 days straight, the first such June since 1913. In California’s desert, Yucca Valley’s June average was 83.5, 8.5 degrees below normal. Downtown Los Angeles averaged 74.5 degrees, five below normal.
-- Boston saw temperatures 4.7 degrees below normal. “This is the second coldest average high temp since 1872,” veteran meteorologist and Weather Channel alumnus Joseph D’Aleo reports at Icecap.com. “It has been so cool and so cloudy that trees in northern New England are starting to show colors that normally first appear in September.” Looking abroad, D’Aleo noted: “Southern Brazil had one of the coldest Junes in decades, and New Zealand has had unusual cold and snow again this year.”
-- New Zealand’s National Climate Centre issued a June 2 press release headlined, “TEMPERATURE: LOWEST EVER FOR MAY FOR MANY AREAS, COLDER THAN NORMAL FOR ALL.”
-- South African officials say cold weather killed two vagrants in the Eastern Cape. Both slept outdoors June 26 and froze to death.
”FREAK SUMMER STORM DUMPS SNOW (HAIL) ON YONKERS,” the New York Post blared after a July 8 storm brought acccumulating hail to that city just north of Gotham. That same day, the high temperature reached 65 degrees at O’Hare International Airport, making it Chicago’s coldest July 8 since 1891. Meanwhile, in Melbourne, Australia, temperatures have been 10 degrees below average, while frost has covered lawns and windshields. On July 13, Albert Gore will appear in Melbourne to explain to Australians that they are shivering due to warming.
Simmer down, global-warmists retort. These are mere anecdotes, hand-picked to make them look silly.
Well, one would be foolish to challenge space-born satellites that gauge Earth’s mean temperatures ---cold, hot, and average. Here again, evidence of global cooling accumulates like snow drifts.
“There has been no significant global warming since 1995, no warming since 1998, and global cooling for the past few years,” former U.S. Senate Environment Committee spokesman Marc Morano writes at ClimateDepot.com. Citing metrics gathered by University of Alabama, Huntsville’s Dr. Roy Spencer, Morano adds: “The latest global averaged satellite temperature data for June 2009 reveal yet another drop in Earth’s temperature ... Despite his dire warnings, the Earth has cooled 0.74 degrees F since former Vice President Al Gore released ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in 2006.”
Earth’s temperatures fall even as the planet spins within what global-warmists consider a thickening cloud of toxic carbon dioxide.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory at Mauna Loa, Hawaii consistently and reliably has measured CO2 for the last 50 years. CO2 concentrations have risen steadily for a half-century.
For December 1958, the Laboratory reported an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 314.67 parts per million (PPM). Flash forward to December 1998, about when global cooling reappeared. CO2 already had increased to 366.87 PPM. By December 2008, CO2 had advanced to 385.54 PPM, a significant 5.088 percent growth in one decade.
This capsizes the carbon-phobic global-warmist argument. For Earth’s temperatures to sink while CO2 rises contradicts global warming as thoroughly as learning that firefighters can battle blazes by spraying them with gasoline.
So, to defeat so-called “global warming,” there is no need for the $864 billion Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, the Kyoto Protocols, elaborate new regulations, or United Nations guidelines. Instead, let the cold times roll.
It is one thing to have a national debate about a serious problem, with adults differing over which solution might work best. Reasonable people, for instance, can dispute whether growing federal involvement would heal or inflame our healthcare system’s serious maladies.
But as so-called “global warming” proves fictional, those who would shackle the economy with taxes and regulations to fight mythology increasingly resemble deinstitutionalized derelicts on an urban street corner, wildly swatting at their own imaginary monsters.
Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.
