By By Paul Homewood, Not a lot of people know that
It is well known that there were many articles in the likes of Time Magazine and Newsweek back in the 70’s, which sensationalised the ice age scare. Warmists tend to write off this episode as just media hype. But what were the scientists saying at the time?
HH Lamb was one of the leading climate scientists at the time and founded the Climatic Research Unit at the UEA. In 1973 he wrote an article, “Is The Earth’s Climate Changing?”, for the UNESCO magazine, “The Courier”. It was a special edition devoted to climate issues and in it, HH Lamb covered a number of issues.
Early 20th Century Warming
Computations in the United States from surface air temperature observations all over the world show that from the 1880s to some time after 1940 the Earth’s climate was becoming generally warmer. The global warming over those years amounted to about half a degree Centigrade, but in the Arctic it was much stronger and amounted to several degrees between 1920 and 1940.
The ice on the Arctic seas decreased in extent by about 10 per cent and decreased in general thickness by about one third. Glaciers in all parts of the world were receding, opening up new pastures and land for cultivation.
The greater warmth increased the length of the growing season by two to three weeks in England. The wild flora and forests, the cultivation of various crops, and the ranges of seasonal migration of birds and fish, all spread to new regions under the increasingly genial conditions.
Moreover, the longest temperature records available in various northern countries from the early eighteenth century (in England from the late seventeenth century) showed that the previous warming had a very long history, traceable from the beginning of the record through various shorter-term ups and downs. This meant that the warming began before the industrial revolution and could not be altogether attributable to the effects of human activity
Post 1940 Cooling
For the past 25 to 30 years the Earth has been getting progressively cooler again. Around 1960 the cooling was particularly sharp. And there is by now widespread evidence of a corresponding reverse in the ranges of birds and fish and the success of crops and forest trees near the poleward and altitudinal limits.
The decline of prevailing temperatures since about 1945 appears to be the longest-continued downward trend since temperature records began. [This period of cooling lasted about 30 years, about 5 years longer than the recent period of warming].
Effects of The Cooling
It is perhaps here that things become most interesting. According to Lamb, among the effects of the changes of climate in recent years, which have given cause for concern are:-
- a renewed increase (especially since 1961) of the Arctic sea ice, which has created difficulties on the northern sea routes in Soviet and Canadian Arctic waters and has produced some bad seasons on the coasts of Iceland and Greenland.
- a substantial rise, also since 1961, in the levels of the great lakes in eastern equatorial Africa and, more recently, of the Great Lakes of North America.
some 200-year extremes of temperature in individual cold winters in various parts of the northern hemisphere (and probably also in the warmth of summer in 1972 in northern European U.S.S.R. and Finland).
The most serious effects, however, have probably been the long-continued droughts and deficient rainfalls in various parts of the world associated with shifts of the world’s anticyclone belts.
The subtropical anticyclones associated with the desert belt were displaced somewhat towards the equator, and the equatorial rainbelt seems to have been restricted in the range of its seasonal migrations. In consequence, rainfall increased in Africa close to the equator, causing the lakes to rise, while drought began to afflict places nearer the fringe of the desert belt, no longer reliably visited in summer by “equatorial” rains.
Rainfall at eight places in northern India, the Sudan and at 16 to 20°N in west Africa averaged 45 per cent less in the years 1968-72 than in the 1950′s. In all these areas people have been driven from their homes by the continued failure of the rains, and in the Cape Verde Islands at the same latitude in the Atlantic an emergency was declared in 1972 because of the last five years of drought.
There are indications that corresponding shifts have taken place in the anticyclone and cyclone belts of the southern hemisphere and that the droughts affecting Zambia, Rhodesia and parts of the Transvaal in recent years are essentially part of the same phenomenon. [An indication that Southern Hemisphere temperatures were also falling].
At the same time, the shifting positions from month to month, and from one year to the next, occupied by the main anticyclone centres in this belt have introduced an abnormal variability of temperature and precipitation. A similar development may explain the sequence of droughts and floods in different parts of Australia in 1972-3.
Drought over Africa
In another article in this issue of The Courier, Jean Dresch, Professor of Geography at the University of Paris and a “leading authority” on the world’s arid zones, writes in more detail about the African drought that Lamb touched on.
Famine threatens millions of villagers and herdsmen with their decimated flocks, today forced into an unprecedented migration in search of food and water, in all the West African countries to the south of the Sahara, from Mauritania to the Sudan. Its cause is drought, a prolonged decline in rainfall that has been recorded as far as central Asia, throughout the periphery of the arid zone, extending from the tropical desert of the Sahara to the continental deserts of temperate Eurasia.
A sequence of dry years is remembered in 1910-1914, when they caused a real famine. 1941 and 1942 were no better; and dry years have been succeeding one another since 1968, whereas the decade 1951-1960 was wetter. But there is no cyclical rhythm from which to predict disasters.
Drought and Floods
Jerome Namias, “one of America’s leading weather scientists”, comments in another article, “Long Range Forecasting of Drought and Floods”:-
We are all aware of the ravages of natural events of the recent past, the devastating Russian drought of 1972; current drought in sub-Saharan countries, especially Mali, Mauritania and the Upper Volta, which seems to have persisted and become aggravated in the last few years; the occasional seasonal droughts in parts of India and Australia and the “Seca” or” drought which occurs in some years in northeast Brazil.
On the wet side, we have the eastern U.S.A. floods in June, 1972, associated, in part, with hurricane Agnes the most costly storm in U.S. history, and we remember the 1966 tragic flood of Florence. These are but a sample of spectacular events from the climatological record.
From time immemorial there have been occasions when nature “goes on a rampage” and makes it appear that the climate is changing. Why does nature do this? Unfortunately man does not yet fully understand the causes of these events, and therefore he is unable to predict them reliably. [He obviously did not know about the all powerful influence of a minor trace gas].
Final Word
Were they worried about what the future would bring? They might not have talked in the apocalyptic language of Time, but there was certainly concern. I will leave the final comment to HH Lamb:-
All these events have raised an anxious demand for ultra-long-range forecasting of climate, which calls for intensified effort towards understanding of the atmosphere (and its interactions with the ocean) and for further reconstruction of the facts of the past climatic record.
That was quite a performance Thursday at Prince George’s Community College when President Obama spoke on energy issues. He repeated so many Big Green energy myths that even the most obsessive environmentalists must surely have been exhilarated. One of those myths deserves particular attention because it is at the core of Obama’s “clean energy” agenda for America’s future. As he so frequently does, Obama repeated the misleading assertion that America has only 2 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves but uses 20 percent of all the oil consumed every year.
That claim is at such variance with the facts that even some liberal mainstream media people are beginning to question it. Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post Fact Checker column, for example, concluded yesterday that, while “on the surface, the president’s numbers are correct, based on official government data,” they are actually “two bits of information that bear little relationship to each other.” Thus, Kessler categorized Obama’s claim as a “non sequitur fact.”
Kessler is right because Obama’s 2 percent figure represents only “proven reserves,” which represent a narrow slice of what is actually underground. According to the federal Energy Information Administration, the 2 percent equals about 22 billion producible barrels. Obama would be more honest with Americans if he instead cited the government’s estimates of “undiscovered technically recoverable oil,” of which there are 140 billion barrels. How much of that becomes available depends mostly on technology. With the development of horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing and other new technologies, however, there is little doubt Americans will get the vast majority of those 140 billion barrels.
But to appreciate the true magnitude of as-yet untapped oil resources in or near the United States, consider these facts: The Institute for Energy Research reported last December that government data puts the total recoverable resources in North America at more than 1.7 trillion barrels. “That is more than the world has used since the first oil well was drilled over 150 years ago in Titusville, Pennsylvania,” according to IER. “To put this in context, Saudi Arabia has about 260 billion barrels of oil in proved reserves. For comparative purposes, the technically recoverable oil in North America could fuel the present needs in the United States of seven billion barrels per year for around 250 years.”
There is comparable data for natural gas. At present, the U.S. has 272.5 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves, but the total for all of North America is 4.7 quadrillion. At the current consumption rate of 24 trillion cubic feet annually, there is enough natural gas under Canada, Mexico and the U.S. to last 175 years. To put that in further perspective, IER estimates that “the United States, Canada and Mexico have more technically recoverable natural gas resources than the combined total proved natural gas reserves found in Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkmenistan.”
Data like these make it clear that America’s biggest problem on these issues isn’t that it’s impossible to “drill, drill, drill,” but rather that the president, his appointees at agencies like EPA and the departments of energy and interior, and his Democratic allies in the Senate refuse to deal with the world as it is instead of how they wish it could be.
By Anne Jolis, Wall Street Journal
The “Hockey Stick” is shorthand for two ways of thinking about global warming. For anti-carbon crusaders, a 1998 paper and its 1999 follow-up showing temperatures over the past 1,000 years demonstrated the terrible and immediate threat that man poses to the planet. (A graph accompanying the paper was nicknamed the “hockey stick,” as it shows a sharp upswing in the 20th century.) For global-warming skeptics, though, the graph and the name are prime examples of the overblown claims and sloppy science behind much of climatology.
Michael Mann, a Penn State professor, was the lead author of those studies, which became famous in 2001 when they were included in an assessment report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has since become one of the loudest advocates of the anti-carbon agenda, energetically blogging and tweeting about the need for urgent U.S. emissions reduction and global cap-and-trade. It’s not surprising that he is also a prime target for global-warming skeptics, who argue that establishing statistically significant temperature trends from proxy data is tricky and that Mr. Mann’s certainties involve, at best, debatable speculations and questionable math.
“The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars” is the story of both Mr. Mann and his graph. But rather than a chronicle of research and discovery, it’s a score-settling with anyone who has ever doubted his integrity or work: free-market think tanks, industrialists, “scientists for hire,” “the corruptive influence of industry,” the “uninformed” media and public. So, a long list.
The trouble, as Mr. Mann sees it, is that while his own errors have been honest and minor, his detractors’ amount to “disinformation.” “Given the complexities,” he writes, “it’s easy enough to make mistakes. For those with an agenda, it is even easier to overlook them or, worse, exploit them intentionally.” He writes that the legitimate scientific and mathematical quibbles are compounded by “the here-and-now incentive” of the media. “Incremental refinements may seem dull and uninspiring to the lay public, but controversy sells… It is not difficult to see why confused observers attempting to follow scientific developments would throw up their hands, resigned to the notion that all we can safely conclude is that ‘the scientists don’t agree.’ “
Thus through the combination of fossil-fueled machinations and a public that can’t handle the nuance, Mr. Mann and the truth have become victims of the “most malicious of the assaults on climate science.”
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, By Michael E. Mann, (Columbia, 395 pages, $28.95)
Yet in its treatment of the actual science, “The Hockey Stick” is structured not unlike IPCC reports. Mr. Mann synthesizes selected work in the field and carefully accounts for uncertainties - the shortcomings of climate modeling, the statistical pitfalls of paleoclimatology, the unknowns surrounding the role of clouds - before lapsing into sound bites: “The key question is, can the model be shown to be useful? Can it make successful predictions? Climate models had passed that test with flying colors by the mid-1990s.”
And like IPCC reports, checking endnotes and references is crucial. In his chapter “Climate Science Comes of Age,” Mr. Mann writes that there was “increasing recognition by the mid-1990s” that another 1.5C (2.5F) warming beyond current levels “could represent a serious threat to our welfare.” It turns out that “increasing recognition” refers to a benchmark agreed to by a group of EU ministers in 1996, which Mr. Mann cites along with his own 2009 paper.
The book’s climax is a recounting of the 2009 leak or hack of emails and other documents written by Mr. Mann and his associates (and funneled through the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit). The correspondence, along with a second trove released in 2011, highlighted the patchwork behind IPCC science. The leading lights of publicly funded climatology appeared to be brainstorming to pressure journals and review boards to suppress work that challenged their theories, trading tips on how to avoid public-information requests and planning how to present their findings so as to best further “the cause.”
In his book, Mr. Mann dubs the unauthorized release of his emails a “crime” and claims that the ensuing “witch hunt” constituted “the most malicious” of “attack after vitriolic attack against us” by the “corporate-funded denial machine.”
Yet for all his caviling about “smear campaigns,” “conspiracy theorists” and “character assassination,” Mr. Mann is happy to employ similar tactics against his opponents. Patrick Michaels, former president of the American Association of State Climatologists and a past program chair of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Applied Climatology, is introduced as “a prominent climate change contrarian at the University of Virginia primarily known for his advocacy for the fossil fuel industry.” (Nowhere does Mr. Mann explain why a scientist might be more easily corrupted by a check from, say, a coal company than by one from a politically controlled institution.)
Just this February, Mr. Mann took to the Daily Kos to praise the theft of internal documents from the free-market Heartland Institute for offering “a peek behind the curtain of industry-funded climate change denial.” It was revelatory, but not in the way he thought. Hours after Mr. Mann posted his online musings, the much-decorated hydroclimatologist Peter Gleick (2003 MacArthur fellow, adviser to the EPA and, until recently, chairman of the American Geophysical Union’s task force on scientific ethics) confessed to the Heartland theft. Apologizing for his actions, he wrote that he had been “blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts - often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated - to attack climate science and scientists.”
Mr. Mann closes “The Hockey Stick” with a passionate call for more scientists to join him “on the front lines of the climate wars.” “Scientific truth alone,” Mr. Mann writes, “is not enough to carry the day in the court of public opinion.” It would be “irresponsible,” he says, “for us to silently stand by while industry-funded climate change deniers succeed in confusing and distracting the public and dissuading our policy makers from taking appropriate actions.” These are unfortunate conclusions for a scientist-turned-climate-warrior whose greatest weakness has always been a low estimation of the public intellect.
Miss Jolis is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.