EPA’s recently announced regulations on mercury from power plants will, in fact, do nothing substantial about the amount of this element in the global atmosphere. If they were really serious, they would ban volcanoes and forest fires, which are much larger sources.
Total annual releases of mercury to the atmosphere from such natural sources are about 5,200 metric tons per year. The world’s volcanoes tend to concentrate along the Pacific Rim, where the great tectonic plates that define the world’s continents are in flux, and in the mid-Atlantic, where continental drift is expanding the Atlantic ocean, opening up huge rifts that extend far beneath the surface. Forest fires tend to take place where there are forests - especially dry ones like those in the western U.S.
Data published in the refereed scientific journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions indicate that the amount of mercury released into the atmosphere by human activities - mainly from smelting of metals and combustion of coal - is about 2,320 tons, for a total atmospheric increment (natural + anthropogenerated) of a bit over 7,500 tons per year. The human contribution makes up about 31% of the annual total.
Now it gets good, and we can see how absurd EPA’s perseveration on mercury from U.S. power plants is.
The total contribution from all human activity in the United States to the global mercury flux is approximately 120 tons, or about 1.6% of the total. The amount coming from U.S. coal-fired electricity plants is around 48 tons, 0.6% of the global load. But mercury can reside a long time in the atmosphere - up to two years, so, unless it quickly rains out as “wet deposition”, it’s likely to disperse far, far away. In fact, only about 25% of the mercury emitted by our power plants, or 0.2% of global emissions, falls on our soil.
For that we are going to close 68 power plants supplying electricity to about 22 million homes?
Oh, we know, it’s about the children. So just to show how much we care, we present here the relative magnitudes of the sources of atmospheric mercury in the form of babies:
Figure 1. Comparative size of mercury sources given as the area of each of these babies. The biggest baby - the total global annual flux - is about 153 times bigger than the baby representing U.S. power plants. The fact that mercury can reside as long as two years in the atmosphere is why at least well over half of the mercury deposited here is of foreign origin. The almost invisible dot on the extreme right is the amount coming from power plants that winds up on our soil.
Both the EPA and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) used different models to estimate how much of the mercury deposited in the U.S. comes from power plants, and how much comes from foreign sources. They arrived at even lower numbers than we show here. According to EPRI’s 2006 Issue Briefing on mercury:
Analysis of mercury emissions from U.S. sources, including coal-fired power plants, shows that about 2/3 of this emitted mercury leaves the United States. Most of it is assumed to join the global atmospheric pool. Only about 1/15th of the mercury depositing in the U.S. originates from U.S. power plants, even though they account for nearly 40% of U.S. mercury emissions. Mercury deposition occurring over 70% or more of the U.S. surface area originates in other countries, and is often transported thousands of miles before arriving in the U.S. Thus, reducing domestic power plant sources of mercury will not result in proportional reductions in deposition occurring across the U.S.
The fact that the relative numbers are inconstant across the various sources shows how impossible detecting any effects of mercury emissions reductions will be. Further, there is simply no evidence linking mercury from power plants in the U.S. to any single specific case of illness or death.
The fact of the matter is that, in the near term, natural gas is likely to continue to displace coal for electrical generation as it has now become less costly due to the exploitation of the huge amounts of gas and oil lying beneath the nation’s surface in shale rock deposits. There is little doubt that, if this continues, power companies would gradually switch away from coal as plants aged. Unfortunately, the EPA’s activity accelerates this process, inducing unwanted costs and permanently displacing thousands of Appalachian coal workers, for no detectable mercury-related health effect.
References:
Pirrone, N., et al., 2010. Global mercury emissions to the atmosphere from anthropogenic and natural sources. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, 10, 4719-4752
Electric Power Research Institute, 2006. Sources of Mercury Depositing in the United States. Issue Brief. 3pp
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Note from SEPP TWTW:
EPA: The EPA continues to make outrageous statements. It has been brought to light that in testimony to Congress last September, Administrator Lisa Jackson claimed that further controls of soot would be as beneficial to public health as finding a cure for cancer. There is little question that prolonged exposure to high concentrations of soot cause health problems such as in lungs and eyes. However, already soot in the US is tightly controlled. To equate additional benefits of additional controls with finding a cure for cancer is outrageous.
A senior EPA official described his view of enforcement of oil and gas regulations as similar to the practice of Roman soldiers crucifying natives of a village they just occupied. See this WSJ story on the EPA’s outrageous slash and burn policy.
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EPA’s ‘Crucifixion’ of Energy Sector Exposed
Posted By Rich Trzupek On April 27, 2012 @ 12:44 am In Daily Mailer, FrontPage
For those of us in industry who have watched the agency grow in power and arrogance over the decades, there wasn’t anything all that surprising about somebody suggesting that the EPA uses threats and intimidation against the regulated community. We all know, from long and bitter experience, that’s how the EPA works. What was remarkable is that it was an EPA official admitting it.
Al Armendariz, EPA Region 6 administrator, was caught on tape urging the troops attending a 2010 meeting to be ruthless in their dogged pursuit of dirty rotten polluters (aka: anybody in the private sector). “You make examples out of people who are in this case not complying with the law...and you hit them as hard as you can,” he said. But it was the spectacularly inappropriate analogy Almenadariz utilized to underline the point that really caught the public’s attention:
“It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean,” he said. “They’d go in to a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they’d crucify them. And then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”
Yet, as spectacularly inappropriate as that analogy was, it was also dead-on accurate. When the EPA undertakes an enforcement initiative against one industry sector or another, it goes for the jugular. We’e seen it time and time again. The initial “crucifixions” take the form of crushing fines against a handful of supposed bad actors, which serves to send a singular message to the rest of the companies in a particular industry sector: resistance is futile. It doesn’t matter whether the administration in power is Republican or Democrat. It’s an EPA thing. Congress has handed the EPA a tremendous amount of power over the years and the Agency isn’t at all shy about wielding it.
Consider the Clean Air Act, for example. Under the Clean Air Act the EPA has the authority to levy fines of up to $25,000 per day for each violation. Those violations don’t have to (and frequently don’t) have anything to do with emitting more pollutants into the air than are allowed by applicable regulations. If the EPA finds that a company didn’t file the right paperwork at the right time, or failed to keep a required record in exactly the right form, or committed a host of other environmental sins that don’t have anything to do with protecting the environment, they can wield their $25,000 per day per violation cudgel to get what they want. And what they want is revenue, both as an end for its own sake, and as a tangible means to “prove” to enviro-activists and Congress that they are doing their job. As I detailed in my book Regulators Gone Wild: How the EPA is Ruining American Industry, the more complex regulations become, the more opportunity the EPA has to pick meaningless nits and jack up enforcement revenue.
It’s all about the price point, as is the case with any protection racket. If the target is a big corporation, you have to load up a lot of alleged violations such that the possible penalty is huge, and then hit them with a settlement offer that makes just a little more fiscal sense than the company deciding to lawyer-up.
The little guys are easier marks. There’s not as much money to be made of course, since one can only squeeze so much juice out of a turnip, but all the Agency has to do is point at the monster settlement it made with the big boys in the target industry and the rest of the peasants are as sure to fall in line as any ancient Turk facing the might of Roman legions.
Need an example? Consider the electric power industry. Starting in 1999 and continuing through present day, the EPA went after coal-fired power plants for allegedly violating certain portions of the Clean Air Act. These complex cases were, in many ways, without real merit in my opinion but it was easier for the big guys to pay what amounted to a tax for daring to operate a coal-fired power plant than engaging in a long, costly legal battle. These cases affected large utilities who operate plants that generate hundreds and thousands of megawatts of electricity.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are the little guys - the local co-ops and municipal utilities that operate small power plants that generate a couple dozen or so megawatts per facility. Some of these local players burn coal. The Obama administration doesn’t like coal. And so, like the heavy in 1930s gangster movie, EPA officials have been calling on these small, environmentally insignificant coal-fired power plants and presenting them with a simple choice: shut down or switch to another fuel, because if you don’t we’re going to come after you, and you’ve already seen what we can do to the big guys. It’s like one of Capone’s boys showing up and darkly observing: “nice power plant you got there pal - it would be a shame if anything happened to it.”
Almost none of this racket is about actual environmental protection. The United States is one of the most environmentally pristine nations in the world and continues to get cleaner every year. No matter. The more we reduce pollution, the more outrageous EPA enforcement becomes. How can it be otherwise? The Agency, the environmental groups whom it answers to and their leftist supporters in Congress use enforcement activity as the primary metric by which the EPA’s successes and failures are judged. As a result, to bastardize Churchill, never in history have so many been fined so much for so little.
Republican Senator James Inhofe announced that he’s launching an investigation into EPA abuse as a result of Armendariz’s all-too-honest comments. Here’s hoping that something comes of the senator’s efforts. There are a few million of us in the private sector ready, willing and able to bear witness to what has been going on, and the nation will be far better off if Inhofe can help rein in this out-of-control agency.
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EPA Administrator resignation not enough. The entire EPA needs to resign
Washington, D.C. - Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, commented on the resignation of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region VI Administrator Al Armendariz in the wake of the release of a video in which Armendariz is caught on tape admitting that EPA’s “general philosophy” is to “crucify” and “make examples” of oil and gas companies so that others are “really easy to manage.”
“After his revelation that EPA’s ‘general philosophy’ is to ‘crucify’ oil and gas companies, it was only right for Administrator Armendariz to resign today - but his resignation in no way solves the problem of President Obama and his EPA’s crucifixion philosophy,” Senator Inhofe said. “In his letter to Administrator Jackson, Armendariz again pointed to his ‘poor choice of words’ as the reason for his resignation - but Armendariz was just being honest: his choice of words revealed the truth about the war that EPA has been waging on American energy producers under President Obama.
“We will continue our investigation into the situations surrounding EPA’s apparent crucifixion victims: the American people deserve to know why, in at least three separate cases, EPA tarnished the reputation of companies by accusing them of water contamination; then when the results of their study did not turn out the way they hoped, and they had no definitive evidence to make that link, they quietly walked back their accusations. We will get to the bottom of this - and we will continue looking into EPA’s actions on hydraulic fracturing beyond these three cases as well.
“Especially as Region VI holds some of the most immense oil and gas resources in the country - including in my home state of Oklahoma - I will be watching who President Obama appoints to replace Armendariz very closely.”
Monday, April 23, 2012 By Marc Morano - Climate Depot
Alert: ‘Gaia’ scientist James Lovelock reverses himself: I was ‘alarmist’ about climate change & so was Gore! ‘The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago’
Climate Shocker: In 2007, Lovelock Predicted Global Warming Doom: ‘Billions of us will die; few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in Arctic’
MSNBC, perhaps the most unlikely of news sources, reports on what may be seen as the official end of the man-made global warming fear movement.
MSNBC April 23, 2012: ‘Gaia’ scientist James Lovelock reverses himself: I was ‘alarmist’ about climate change & so was Gore! ‘The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago’
Contrast Lovelock’s 2012 skeptical climate views with his 2007 beliefs during the height of the man-made climate fear movement. [ Flashback 2007: Lovelock Predicts Global Warming Doom: ‘Billions of us will die; few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in Arctic’ ]
How fitting that a major organ of the man-made climate fear promotion, MSNBC, would deliver one of the final and most dramatic death knells to the climate movement.
More MSNBC article excerpts:
Lovelock pointed to Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and Tim Flannery’s “The Weather Makers” as other examples of “alarmist” forecasts of the future..."The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books - mine included - because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said. “The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said. “The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising—carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added...Asked if he was now a climate skeptic, Lovelock told msnbc.com: “It depends what you mean by a skeptic. I’m not a denier.” He said human-caused carbon dioxide emissions were driving an increase in the global temperature, but added that the effect of the oceans was not well enough understood and could have a key role. “It (the sea) could make all the difference between a hot age and an ice age,” he said. ‘I made a mistake’ As “an independent and a loner,” he said he did not mind saying “All right, I made a mistake.” He claimed a university or government scientist might fear an admission of a mistake would lead to the loss of funding.”
End MSNBC article excerpt.
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Climate Depot began reporting on Lovelock’s conversion away from climate fears in 2010 as he began reconsidering the alleged “settled science.” See below for Climate Depot’s reporting on the evolution of James Lovelock’s climate views.
SHOCK 2010: UK Green Guru James Lovelock Reconsiders Warming Views?!: Lovelock: Man-made Carbon Emissions ‘Have Saved Us from A New Ice Age’—Lovelock: ‘I hate all this business about feeling guilty about what we’re doing. We’re not guilty’—‘We haven’t learned the lessons of the ozone-hole debate. It’s important to know just how much you have got to be careful’—‘According to Dr Lovelock’s Gaia theory, the earth is capable of curing itself. A planet that is effectively alive can regulate itself and its composition and climate,” he said’
2010 Shock: Green Guru Lovelock warms to skeptics! ‘The skeptics have kept us sane...They have kept us from regarding climate science as a religion. It had gone too far that way’
Enviro Guru James Lovelock Admits Obvious: ‘Peer-review process can be exceedingly prejudiced and exert censorship even’
Green Guru James Lovelock Admits the Obvious: ‘Everybody might be wrong. Climate change may not happen as fast as we thought, and we may have 1,000 years to sort it out’
James Lovelock on Ozone hole science: ‘We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science in that was so bad...’ ‘Something like 80% of the measurements being made during that time were either faked, or incompetently done’
Lovelock: ‘We haven’t got the physics worked out yet...I think the public are right. That’s why I’m soft on the sceptics. Science has got overblown’
2010: Green Guru Lovelock Says Warmists ‘Scared Stiff’: ‘The great climate science centers around the world are more than well aware how weak their science is’
Green Guru James Lovelock: Humans are too stupid to prevent global warming—Urges ‘putting democracy on hold for a while’ to battle warming—Lovelock on Climategate: Scandal left him feeling ‘utterly disgusted’—‘Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science’
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McIntyre Tires of the Science - Mann and the broader enabling opportunistic community
I had also spent some time considering a response to Mann’s book. It amazes me that a reputable scientific community would take this sort of diatribe seriously. Mann’s world is populated by demons and bogey-men. People like Anthony Watts, Jeff Id, Lucia, Andrew Montford and myself are believed to be instruments of a massive fossil fuel disinformation campaign and our readers are said to be “ground troops” of disinformation. The book is an extended ad hominem attack, culminating in salivation in the trumped up plagiarism campaign against Wegman, arising out of copying of trivial “boilerplate” by students (not Wegman himself). Wegman’s name nearly 200 times in the book (more, I think, than anyone else’s).
Virtually nothing in its discussion of our criticism can be taken at face value. Mann begins his account by re-cycling his original outright lie that we had asked him for an “excel spreadsheet”. Mann’s lies on this point had been a controversy back in November 2003. The incident was revived by the Penn State Investigation Committee, which had (anomalously on this point) asked Mann about an actual incident. Instead of “forgetting”, as any prudent person would have done, Mann brazenly repeated his earlier lie to the Penn State Investigation Committee. Needless to say, the “Investigation” Committee didn’t actually investigate the lie by crosschecking evidence, but accepted Mann’s testimony as ending the matter. In the book, instead of leaving well enough alone, Mann once again re-iterated the lie.
Or to pick another example, Mann noted the controversy about the contaminated Korttajarvi sediments (Tiljander), but conceded nothing. Mann said that there was no “upside down” in their “objective” methods and asserted that his results were “insensitive to whether or not these records were used”, a statement contradicted in the SI to Mann et al 2009. In any sane world, Mann would have issued a retraction of the many claims of Mann et al 2008 that depended on the contaminated Korttajarvi sediments. But instead, more attacks on critics.
Picking all the spitballs off the wall is laborious, to say the least.
Perhaps because I was sick, perhaps because I was tired, but, for whatever reason, one day I woke up and I was sick and tired both of the Team and the broader “climate community” that enables them and in which they thrive. I sense that the wider public has a similar attitude.
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ABC Reporter Mocks Global Warming ‘Denialists,’ Calls for More Alarmist Advocacy
ABC reporter and global warming enthusiast Bill Blakemore on Sunday condescendingly dismissed climate change skeptics as “denialists.” In a piece on ABCNews.com, he called for yet more advocacy on the part of journalists.
After noting that confidence in the science of climate change has varied from year to year, Blakemore huffed that these beliefs “don’t seem to be responding all that much, [Professor Jon Krosnick] says, to whatever the global warming denialist campaigns may have been doing.”
Blakemore then lectured meteorologists for not being biased enough:
A number of America’s TV meteorologists and other broadcast weatherpersons have been accused by peer-reviewed climate scientists either of being greatly uninformed about the science of the basics of manmade global warming, or, at the very least, of shying away from any mention of it during broadcasts for fear of losing ratings by driving their audience away with worrisome news.
Instead, complain these scientists, U.S. TV weather journalists, feeling the need to provide some explanation for the unusual weather, often escape into a simplistic nearest-cause answer, blaming the extreme weather on “the jet stream,” while avoiding the science that connects the jet stream’s behavior to manmade global warming … as well as ignoring other larger global patterns that also project such extremes.
Of course, as a recent MRC analysis found out, this isn’t true. ABC so called weatherman Sam Champion in 2008 wondered, “Could global warming one day force us into space to live?”
During another Champion segment in 2007, Good Morning America wondered if “billions” will die from global warming.
Is that “shying away” from global warming disaster talk?
Blakemore himself has a history of climate change alarmism:
“Life around the globe now appears to be under non-stop stress from the heat. NASA scientists say no natural climate cycles can explain it. The heat must be caused in large measure at least by greenhouse gas emissions.... NASA scientists now calculate, Robin, that the planet has at most ten years during which serious greenhouse gas emission cuts have to get well underway, or else by the time today’s kids are reaching middle age, turning about 40, they say the Earth will start to experience temperatures higher than it has known in half a million years.”
- ABC’s Bill Blakemore, Good Morning America, Dec. 15, 2006.
“Many scientists say that it [the Western wildfires] fits exactly into the pattern predicted for global warming....[San Bernadino Fire Chief Mat Fratus] told me he also worries about how all the carbon from the fires only contributes to global warming. That fact about forest fires is something that Al Gore also points out in his new book, and that book is now near the top of the bestseller list. It seems that people are really starting to pay attention to global warming.”
- ABC’s Bill Blakemore, Good Morning America, June 20, 2006.
A previous Blakemore article from April 1st featured these leading headlines:
Global Warming Denialism ‘Just Foolishness,’ Scientist Peter Raven Says U.S. prestige falling as world has ‘pretty well given up’ on any American leadership facing climate change.
Clearly, Blakemore is doing his part for climate change alarmism.
ICECAP NOTE: I attended a Society of Environmental Journalist meeting in BTV in 2007 in which Blakemore was on a panel of advocacy journalists. He remarked he used to pal around with Dr. Bill Gray and laugh about the bad global warming science. Then Hansen and other alarmists educated him and he never spoke to another skeptic again and never would. He said he decided Bill was an old fool based on what his new friends told him. Don’t expect honest unbiased science from ABC’s Blakemore as we saw this week from Lovelock.
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Last Days of the Global Warming Scam
Is the Pope Catholic? What would people say if he were to come out and admit he might be wrong about the divinity of Christ?
That is essentially what has occurred in the Church of the Green Goddess; James Lovelock, father of the Gaia hypothesis, Defender of the Environmentalist Faith, most radical of Global Warming alarmists, has recanted!
Well, he has retreated, at any rate. Much like the legend of Galileo he has mumbled under his breath “and yet it still moves” (an unproven comment attributed to Galileo at his heresy trial.) Lovelock has stated that, while he was “alarmist” still there is Global Warming, but we just can’t seem to find it. We’ve checked all the usual places; in the oceans, in the troposphere, in the ice caps, in the dryer, under the couch, under the pile of junk mail, and the missing heat just isn’t to be found. That tricky Gaia! She likes to play with us so!In an interview with MSNBC Lovelock made such statements as:
“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books - mine included - because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,”
“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,”
“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising—carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that....”
Lovelock was wise to walk this back; too much of the evidence simply fails to justify the catastrophic vision of Global Warming theory.
There is the matter of the missing heat which alarmists theorize is hiding at the bottom of the oceans. But they have no mechanism for this heat moving downward, something heat does not normally do, and cannot find it through deep-sea probes. While Arctic ice has been weak, it has reached a new high for recent years. Himalayan glaciers have stubbornly failed to melt and some have even grown. Worldwide precipitation has stubbornly failed to increase in a statistically meaningful way . There is no solid evidence that sea level rise has accelerated in recent years . Oh, and it hasn’t warmed since Bill Clinton’s first term in office.
The next few years should be fun, as Alarmist scientists, desperate to disassociate themselves from this failed theory, run for the tall grass. The Alpha Male of the pack has just retreated.
I’ve talked about the slimy “Forecast the Facts” campaign before, where they are attempting to label your local TV weatherperson/meteorologist as a “denier” and pressure TV station management into making that person “toe the line” by having a bunch of fake form letters sent by “local viewers”. It is simply paid astroturfing.
For example, look how they label KOAA-TV’s Brad Sowder for not even wanting to take a position because it is a “political issue”:
Political is right, because today, those flailing PR geniuses at The Center for American Progress aka Think Progress, a front organization for all things left and “progressive” with a now $30 million+ annual budget (From 2008: CAP, which has 180 staffers and a $27 million budget, devotes as much as half of its resources to promoting its ideas through blogs, events, publications and media outreach. Source: Bloomberg ) let it slip (whether by design or accident we don’t know) that THEY are behind this “Forecast The Facts” outfit.
We always wondered who was funding this hate campaign against your local TV meteorologist, now we know, here’s the screencap with the proof:
Even though there is no hint of this association on the “Forecast The Facts” about page. Pants on fire and all that.
For those who don’t know, Brad Johnson of Think Progress, is one of the worst offenders of political climate alarm hype on the planet. He’s paid to make up stuff like blaming the people who like in Oklahoma for their political views, and bad weather is the punishment:
Obviously Johnson has learned nothing in a year, because what he says today is the same brand of irrational ugliness and hate, bold mine:
Countless lives were saved this weekend by vigilant government officials who warned of deadly tornadoes in Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska - states whose politics are dominated by anti-government, anti-science ideologues.Over 100 tornadoes struck down in 24 hours, but only six people died in Oklahoma, Sen. Jim Inhofe’s home state, thanks to warnings from the National Weather Service scientists he has worked to discredit
Wichita, Kansas, the headquarters of Koch Industries, suffered $280 million in damage from a ferocious twister, but the “ever-increasing government” demonized by the Koch brothers prevented any loss of life.
Support your local TV weathercaster and meteorologist, don’t let them be cowed by well funded political sliming coming from The Center For American Progress.
And the next time someone tells you that “skeptics are well funded”, remind them of how much money CAP gets and how they put it to use.
Big news last week was that new findings published in Nature magazine showed that human emissions of aerosols (primarily from fossil fuel use) have been largely responsible for the multi-decadal patterns of sea surface temperature variability in the Atlantic ocean that have been observed over the past 150 years or so. This variability - commonly referred to as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or AMO - has been linked to several socially significant climate phenomena including the ebb and flow of active Atlantic hurricane periods and drought in the African Sahel.
This paper marks, in my opinion, the death of credibility for Nature on global warming. The first symptoms showed up in 1996 when they published a paper by Ben Santer and 13 coauthors that was so obviously cherry-picked that it took me and my colleagues about three hours to completely destroy it. Things have gone steadily downhill, from a crazy screamer by Jonathan Patz on mortality from warming that didn’t even bother to examine whether fossil fuels were associated with extended lifespan (they are), to the recent Shakun debacle. But the latest whopper, by Ben Booth and his colleagues at the UK Met Office indeed signals the death of Nature in this field.
The U.K. Met Office issued a press release touting the findings by several of their researchers, and didn’t pull any punches as to the study’s significance. The headline read “Industrial pollution linked to ‘natural’’disasters” and included things like:
These shifts in ocean temperature, known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation or AMO, are believed to affect rainfall patterns in Africa, South America and India, as well as hurricane activity in the North Atlantic - in extreme cases leading to humanitarian disasters.
Ben Booth, a Met Office climate processes scientist and lead author of the research, said: “Until now, no-one has been able to demonstrate a physical link to what is causing these observed Atlantic Ocean fluctuations, so it was assumed they must be caused by natural variability.
Our research implies that far from being natural, these changes could have been largely driven by dirty pollution and volcanoes. If so, this means a number of natural disasters linked to these ocean fluctuations, such as persistent African drought during the 1970’s and 80’s, may not be so natural after all.”
An accompanying “News and Views” piece in Nature put the findings of Booth and colleagues in climatological perspective:
If Booth and colleagues’ results can be corroborated, then they suggest that multidecadal temperature fluctuations of the North Atlantic are dominated by human activity, with natural variability taking a secondary role. This has many implications. Foremost among them is that the AMO does not exist, in the sense that the temperature variations concerned are neither intrinsically oscillatory nor purely multidecadal.
But not everyone was so impressed with the conclusions of Booth et al.
For instance, Judith Curry had this to say at her blog, “Climate Etc.,”
Color me unconvinced by this paper. I suspect that if this paper had been submitted to J. Geophysical Research or J. Climate, it would have been rejected. In any event, a much more lengthy manuscript would have been submitted with more details, allowing people to more critically assess this. By publishing this, Nature seems to be looking for headlines, rather than promoting good science.
And Curry has good reason to be skeptical.
“In press” at the journal Geophysical Research Letters is a paper titled “Greenland ice core evidence for spatial and temporal variability of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation” by Petr Chylek and colleagues, including Chris Folland of the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office.
In this paper, Chylek et al. examine evidence of the AMO that is contained in several ice core records distributed across Greenland. The researchers were looking to see whether there were changes in the character of the AMO over different climatological periods in the past, such as the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period - periods that long preceded large-scale human aerosol emissions. And indeed they found some. The AMO during the Little Ice Age was characterized by a quasi-periodicity of about 20 years, while the during the Medieval Warm Period the AMO oscillated with a period of about 45 to 65 years.
And Chylek and colleagues had this to say about the mechanisms involved:
The observed intermittency of these modes over the last 4000 years supports the view that these are internal ocean-atmosphere modes, with little or no external forcing.
Better read that again. “...with little or no external forcing.”
Chylek’s conclusion is vastly different from the one reached by Booth et al., which in an Editorial, Nature touted as [emphasis added]:
[B]ecause the AMO has been implicated in global processes, such as the frequency of Atlantic hurricanes and drought in the Sahel region of Africa in the 1980s, the findings greatly extend the possible reach of human activity on global climate. Moreover, if correct, the study effectively does away with the AMO as it is currently posited, in that the multidecadal oscillation is neither truly oscillatory nor multidecadal.
Funny how the ice core records analyzed by Chylek (as opposed to the largely climate model exercise of Booth et al.) and show the AMO to be both oscillatory and multidecadal - and to be exhibiting such characteristics long before any possible human influence.
Judith Curry’s words “By publishing this, Nature seems to be looking for headlines, rather than promoting good science” seem to ring loud and true in light of further observation-based research.
As a climate scientist, I am quite familiar with the background facts that Prof Michael E. Mann (now at Penn State U) so shamelessly distorts in his new book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.
First, the scientific background:
Mann’s claim to fame derives from his contentious (and now thoroughly discredited) “hockeystick” research papers (in Nature 1998 and Geophysical Research Letters 1999). His idiosyncratic analysis of proxy (non-thermometer) data from sources like tree rings, ice cores, ocean sediments, etc. did away with the well-documented Medieval Warm Period (MWP - 900-1200AD) and Little Ice Age (LIA - 1400-1800AD)—documented by Prof. H.H. Lamb, the founding director of the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia U (CRU-EAU). Mann then asserted that the 20th century was the warmest in 1,000 years. His temperature graph, shaped like a hockeystick (on its side) immediately became the poster child of Al Gore and the IPCC, the U.N. science panel, to support their claim of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
Two Canadian statisticians, Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, soon found serious errors in Mann’s analysis; they even showed that random data fed into Mann’s algorithm would produce “hockeysticks.” To add insult to injury, while the 2001 IPCC report used Mann’s result to bolster its AGW claim, the most recent 2007 IPCC report no longer relies on it. Mann still defends it—sort of—and so do some of his uncritical supporters. We have had no word yet from Al Gore.
In his book, Mann distorts the e-mail record from the “Climategate” leak; those e-mails have not been altered or edited in any way. They document a conspiracy among a clique of British and U.S. climate scientists to control what goes into IPCC reports, and to keep contrary views by skeptics from being published in recognized science journals by manipulating the peer-review process.
The most complete discussion of the Climategate e-mails can be found in The Hockeystick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science by Andrew W. Montford. A more technical discussion has been ongoing in McIntyre’s blog at www.climateaudit.org.
Mike Mann also attempts to mislead readers by citing “facts.” He does this by mixing up temperature level (measured in degrees C) with temperature trends (degC per decade)—hoping no one would notice. While current levels are high (since the climate is still recovering from the LIA), the trend has been essentially zero for more than a decade—in spite of rapidly rising CO2 concentrations.
In reading Mann’s original papers, I noticed something very strange: his temperature record (blue curve in the IPCC report) based on proxy data suddenly stops in 1978 and is joined smoothly to the thermometer record from weather stations (red curve), which shows a steep rise in temperature. By contrast, atmospheric temperatures measured from weather satellites show only insignificant warming between 1978 and 1997—as do the independent data from weather balloons around the world.
Puzzled by this disparity, I e-mailed Mann (then at the U. of Virginia) and politely asked about his post-1978 proxy temperatures. All I got in return was a nasty reply—which only served to confirm my suspicion that Mann was hiding the data because they disagreed with the widely accepted thermometer record, which had suggested the existence of global warming. I believe that this is the true meaning of the phrase “Mike’s Nature trick,” used in the leaked Climategate e-mails—in conjunction with “hide the decline.” It all suggests manipulation of crucial data.
Naturally, I am anxious to learn if Mann’s suppressed post-1978 data show a warming. If they don’t, then the U.N.-IPCC’s case for AGW collapses—and so do all policies to control the greenhouse gas CO2. These policies include emission trading ("cap & trade"), carbon sequestration from power plants, and various costly schemes for developing alternative, “green” forms of energy. We may have already wasted hundreds of billions of dollars—for no good purpose. If so, then Mann and his supporters have much to answer for.
The Legal Phase
In 1999, Mann joined the U. of Virginia faculty as an assistant professor and left for Penn State six years later after failing to gain tenure. In fact, he was a member of my Department of Environmental Sciences, although we did not overlap.
In 2010, Virginia’s newly elected Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli, following Virginia FATA (Fraud Against Taxpayer Act) law, issued a Civil Investigative Demand on the university for Mann’s e-mails, work notes, and other documentation. The university, a state-supported institution, has resisted this demand, citing “academic freedom” and similar excuses. They have employed a private law firm and spent about $1 million so far.
I am quite disappointed by my university’s opposition to releasing Mann’s e-mails to Virginia’s AG. Those e-mails could clear up the mystery of “Mike’s Nature trick” and reveal hidden data. I am told that no objection was raised by UVa when Greenpeace requested the e-mails of skeptical faculty—including mine—under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). So much for the university’s “principled defense” of academic freedom.
Virginia’s Supreme Court has now turned down AG Cuccinelli’s demand, based on a technicality in the interpretation of the Virginia law. But the American Tradition Institute is trying to extract Mann’s e-mails from UVa, using the FOIA. Their chance for success is good—particularly since not only does the university now admits that some 12,000 e-mails exist (previously claimed to have been deleted)—but it has also released these e-mails to Michael Mann, even though he is no longer a faculty member.
As Tom Jackman reports (Wash Post, March 21):
The ATI case began quietly in January 2011, with a FOIA request to UVa for e-mails to and from Mann and 39 people, involving five grant programs. Seven months later, UVa produced almost 1,800 e-mails, but said it was withholding another 12,000, which they argued were not public record, or were exempt under Virginia FOIA law 2.2-3705.4(4). The case is scheduled for argument on April 16 in Manassas (in Prince William County, Virginia), in suburban Washington, DC. From there, the case will likely begin its ascent up the appeals court ladder and is poised to make law on how Virginia institutions may use FOIA to withhold from some and give to others. Not to mention create an international stink—if Mann’s e-mails show he has manipulated climate change data, an accusation for which he claims to have been cleared.
As Jackman further reports, Mann said his shared interest, with UVa, in his e-mails means that the e-mails can be released to him, but not to climate skeptics. The American Tradition Institute, the conservative group hoping to show that climate change scientists like Mann manipulated their data, argues that UVa can’t give the e-mails to one person and not another. By giving the e-mails to Mann, the university has waived any exemptions it’s claiming from the state Freedom of Information Act, ATI’s lawyer David Schnare argues.
Schnare then cited a Virginia attorney general’s opinion from 1983 that once a public body disseminates any record, “those records lose the exemption accorded by” FOIA. Federal case law appears to be clearer that “selective disclosure ... is offensive to the purposes underlying the FOIA and intolerable as a matter of policy.”
Meanwhile, a new angle has developed in Vancouver, BC. Canadian climatologist Tim Ball jokingly wrote that “Mann should not be at Penn State but in a State Pen[itentiary].” Mann then improvidently sued Ball for libel. But this now leaves Mann open for the pre-trial discovery process, including a deposition under oath. We shall see how this case develops. Tim Ball has many ways to make his case in his defense. I am hoping he will focus on the suppressed post-1978 data. It would be fitting if Mann’s data are used to destroy the IPCC’s case for AGW.
One way or another, the truth will come out. And when it does, we will witness a major earthquake that will encompass IPCC scientists, politicians in America and Europe, and the U.N. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait too long for this to happen.
S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project. His specialty is atmospheric and space physics. An expert in remote sensing and satellites, he served as the founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service and, more recently, as vice chair of the US National Advisory Committee on Oceans & Atmosphere. He is a senior fellow of the Heartland Institute and the Independent Institute. In 2007, he founded and chaired NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change). For recent writings, see and also Google Scholar. With about 2,000 other scientists who participated in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including Michael Mann, he jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
