ICECAP

Oct 23, 2010

On Climate Change, Most Tea Partiers Get It

By Chris Horner

The New York Times has just published another in a series of establishment press missives seeking to marginalize - from the perspective of establishment press-types - tea party activists and politicians who embrace or are embraced by them.

This latest entry is an embarrassment, if a rather typical one as I detail on Chapter 1 of Red Hot Lies, “Media on a Mission.” Here are some problems with the article:

“Climate change is real, and man is causing it,” [Dem. Congressman and pro-cap-and-trade voter Baron] Hill said, echoing most climate scientists.

The author does not point to any survey of “most climate scientists,” challenge or even inquire about the source for or other evidence to support that claim. That is because there is no such survey or collective assertion by the critical masses of “climate scientists.” Period. It’s a talking point. But he’s a reporter. If he wanted to be straight about the issue he would at the very least turn to the very inconvenient statement by the Association of State Climatologists. But, again, it’s inconvenient.

When pressed, those who scribble or utter this shibboleth generally expand the universe of “climate scientist” to include anyone who is willing to go on record agreeing in return for being called one of the world’s leading climate scientists. Even if they are anthropology teaching assistants. Read on.

That is, they revert to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a collection of (as its name indicates) representatives appointed by governments, which itself appoints anthropology TAs, instructors in “the human dimension of environmental change” (bring own incense, please) and transport policy instructors, for example, to achieve great if still exaggerated (why is that necessary?) numbers of supporters who supposedly (but didn’t) write its proclamations? The IPCC’s “chief climate scientist” and chief “climatologist,” according to outlets like the New York Times and USA Today is, just for the record, actually a...railway engineer.

The piece continued quoting the Member of Congress it sought to defend:

“That is indisputable. And we have to do something about it.”

Except that it is highly disputed, so it must be disputable. Stop and ask: have I not heard great vitriol tossed at scientists who dispute, sign petitions arguing against - and even resign their lifelong membership in professional societies over - this indisputable truth? Have you heard about the Wikipedia gatekeeper now topic-banned from the site for his years of work altering the truth and smearing the many scientists and papers disputing its supposedly indisputable opposite (WSJ notes it nicely, here, subscription required)?

Why would these things be if the argument about man-made global warming isn’t disputable? Or, possibly, is that just a talking point to avoid dispute which, as the years have shown, the alarmists cannot make the case serially stated as fact throughout articles such as this one?

Also unremarked was the salient point that nothing this congressman has ever voted for or voiced support for - meaning, not Kyoto, not cap-and-trade, not ‘green jobs’...nothing - would according to anyone ‘do something’, meaning, detectably impact the climate. So, frankly, it is rather unreasonable to conclude that the prescribed ‘do something’ remedies are in fact about the climate. See “ideological groups,” below.

The piece then adopted a different sort of advocacy, biased and selective characterization:

Groups that help support Tea Party candidates include climate change skepticism in their core message. Americans for Prosperity, a group founded and largely financed by oil industry interests.

Of course, solar, wind and related industries underwrote the public affairs, lobbying and smear campaigns. In fact, they even teamed up with left-wing ideological groups who love the prescription (Team Soros over at Center for American Progress, plus the Rockefeller and other foundations). Oh, and oil and utility interests, who lead author Ed Markey (D-MA) even publicly thanked for dragging his bill over the finish line in the House. The article continued:

The oil, coal and utility industries have collectively spent $500 million just since the beginning of 2009 to lobby against legislation to address climate change and to defeat candidates, like Mr. Hill, who support it, according to a new analysis from the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a left-leaning advocacy group in Washington.

That’s as far as the reporter got into raising Team Soros, oddly. As a source for its information. But in fact, most of the money spent by such groups appears to have been spent writing and lobbying to pass their favored bill - quick, name an oil company which fought the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill? You’d be wrong, and the utilities’ trade association Edison Electric Institute claimed to have helped craft the bill, which they helped pass the House. But that doesn’t fit the template of activist-journalists who channel “most climate scientists.”

Just as some do not understand that it’s the spending, stupid, largely driving public disgust with the political class, our media friends’ decline is largely attributable to such knee-jerk, unthoughtful bias, preening advocacy shrouded in the aura of objectivity.

Washington appears - appears - to be on its way to reform. Possibly the media can be fixed, too. Most Tea Partiers agree. Of course, I didn’t talk to most Tea Partiers, but I read a lot of my peers saying that. So it must be an indisputable truth. Post here.

Oct 21, 2010

The National Science Foundation Funds Multi-Decadal Climate Predictions Without An Ability To Verify

By Roger Pielke Sr, Climate Science

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research [UCAR] has released a press statement titled

Climate change: Drought may threaten much of globe within decades [h/t to Marcel Crok]

The press release starts with the text [highlight added]

The United States and many other heavily populated countries face a growing threat of severe and prolonged drought in coming decades, according to a new study by National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientist Aiguo Dai. The detailed analysis concludes that warming temperatures associated with climate change will likely create increasingly dry conditions across much of the globe in the next 30 years, possibly reaching a scale in some regions by the end of the century that has rarely, if ever, been observed in modern times.

Using an ensemble of 22 computer climate models and a comprehensive index of drought conditions, as well as analyses of previously published studies, the paper finds most of the Western Hemisphere, along with large parts of Eurasia, Africa, and Australia, may be at threat of extreme drought this century.

In contrast, higher-latitude regions from Alaska to Scandinavia are likely to become more moist.

Dai cautioned that the findings are based on the best current projections of greenhouse gas emissions. What actually happens in coming decades will depend on many factors, including actual future emissions of greenhouse gases as well as natural climate cycles such as El Nino.

The new findings appear this week as part of a longer review article in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change. The study was supported by the National Science Foundation, NCAR’s sponsor.

The press release is based on the paper

Aiguo Dai, 2010: Drought under global warming: a review. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change. DOI: 10.1002/wcc.81

with the abstract [highlight added]

“This article reviews recent literature on drought of the last millennium, followed by an update on global aridity changes from 1950 to 2008. Projected future aridity is presented based on recent studies and our analysis of model simulations. Dry periods lasting for years to decades have occurred many times during the last millennium over, for example, North America, West Africa, and East Asia. These droughts were likely triggered by anomalous tropical sea surface temperatures (SSTs), with La Niña-like SST anomalies leading to drought in North America, and El-Niño-like SSTs causing drought in East China. Over Africa, the southward shift of the warmest SSTs in the Atlantic and warming in the Indian Ocean are responsible for the recent Sahel droughts. Local feedbacks may enhance and prolong drought. Global aridity has increased substantially since the 1970s due to recent drying over Africa, southern Europe, East and South Asia, and eastern Australia. Although El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), tropical Atlantic SSTs, and Asian monsoons have played a large role in the recent drying, recent warming has increased atmospheric moisture demand and likely altered atmospheric circulation patterns, both contributing to the drying. Climate models project increased aridity in the 21st century over most of Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East, most of the Americas, Australia, and Southeast Asia. Regions like the United States have avoided prolonged droughts during the last 50 years due to natural climate variations, but might see persistent droughts in the next 20–50 years. Future efforts to predict drought will depend on models’ ability to predict tropical SSTs.”

This UCAR press release and the article itself are not scientifically robust. Buried within this material are the significant cavaets:

1. “Dai cautioned that the findings are based on the best current projections of greenhouse gas emissions. What actually happens in coming decades will depend on many factors, including actual future emissions of greenhouse gases as well as natural climate cycles such as El Nino.”

2. “Future efforts to predict drought will depend on models’ ability to predict tropical SSTs.’

In other words, there is NO way to assess the skill of these models are predicting drought as they have not yet shown any skill in SST predictions on time scales longer than a season, nor natural climate cycles such as El Nino [or the PDO, the NAO, ect].

Funding of multi-decadal regional climate predictions by the National Science Foundation which cannot be verified in terms of accuracy is not only a poor use of tax payer funds, but is misleading policymakers and others on the actual skill that exists in predicting changes in the frequency of drought in the future. See post here. See also Roger’s post on “Very Important New Paper “A Comparison Of Local And Aggregated Climate Model Outputs With Observed Data” By Anagnostopoulos Et Al 2010” here. Roger concludes: If the Anagnostopoulos et al conclusions are robust, it raises the question on the value of spending so much money on providing regional climate predictions decades into the future

Excellent post Roger. You have expresed the exasperation of many scientists over the NSF advocacy actions in recent years.

Oct 20, 2010

Who’s ‘In Climate Denial, Again’? The New York Times -(Elitism unleashed)

By Jim Lakely

Last Sunday’s editorial in The New York Times laments that every GOP Senate candidate (with the exception of Mark Kirk here The Heartland Institute’s home state of Illinois) declines to worship in the Church of Global Warming.

In so doing, those candidates are lining up with what for at least 2.5 years has been the prevailing public opinion - that planetary forces, not human activity, is the source of any warming of the planet. Indeed, according to an October Rasmussen Reports poll, 37 percent of Americans “are not very concerned about global warming, if at all.”

And to what evil force does The Times attribute this stubborn refusal to destroy America’s economy for a hoax? Why, Darth Cheney, of course. Some villains in the eyes of liberals really do die harder than others.

In the editorial titled ”In Climate Denial, Again,” the editors of America’s most unhinged newspaper leads off with the sentence: “Former Vice President Dick Cheney has to be smiling.” That’s right. Under his evil helmet, the former vice president is still pulling the strings.

They are re-running the strategy of denial perfected by Mr. Cheney a decade ago, repudiating years of peer-reviewed findings about global warming and creating an alternative reality in which climate change is a hoax or conspiracy.

Some candidates are emphatic in their denial, like the Nevada Republican Sharron Angle, who flatly rejects “the man-caused climate change mantra of the left.” Others are merely wiggly, like California’s Carly Fiorina, who says, “I’m not sure.” Yet, over all (the exception being Mark Kirk in Illinois), the Republicans are huddled around an amazingly dismissive view of climate change.

There is good reason to be dismissive of the theory of man-caused climate change. I shared The Times’ ridiculous editorial with Heartland’s Science Director Jay Lehr the other day, and - after he stopped laughing - he emailed me some facts that put the “dis” in “dismissive.”

Carbon Dioxide is not a pollutant. On the contrary it makes crops and forests grow faster. Mapping by satellite shows that the earth has become about 6% greener overall in the past two decades, with forests expanding into arid regions. The Amazon rain forest was the biggest gainer, with two tons of additional biomass per acre per year. Certainly climate change does not help every region equally, but careful studies predict overall benefit, fewer storms, more rain, better crop yields, longer growing seasons, milder winters and decreasing heating costs in colder climates. The news is certainly not bad and on balance may be rather good.

Someday the world will wake up and laugh when they finally understand that the entire pursuit of economic ruin in the name of saving the planet from increasing carbon dioxide is in fact a terrible joke. You see it is an unarguable fact that the portion of the Earth’s greenhouse gas envelope contributed by man is barely one tenth of one per cent of the total. Do the numbers your self. CO2 is no more than 4% of the total (with water vapor being over 90% followed by methane and sulpher and nitrous oxides). Of that 4% man contributes only a little over 3%. Elementary school arithmetic says that 3% of 4% is .12% and for that we are sentencing the planet to a wealth of damaging economic impacts.

If greenhouse gases were responsible for increases in global temperature of recent decades then atmospheric physics shows that higher levels of our atmosphere would show greater warming than lower levels. This was not found to be true during the 1978 to 1998 period of 0.3 degrees centigrade warming.

Some 900,000 years of ice core temperature records and carbon dioxide content records show that CO2 increases follow rather than lead increases in Earth temperature which is logical because the oceans are the primary source of CO2 and they hold more CO2 when cool than when warm, so warming causes the oceans to release more CO2.

While temperatures have fluctuated over the past 5000 years, today’s earth temperature is below average for the past 5000 years.

Click here to read all of Lehr’s easy to digest points, on both the science and economics of the climate change debate - which is far from over, despite what The New York Times says. I encourage you to read the whole editorial, if you’re up for a good laugh. But a couple more excerpts before we close:

A few (Republican Senate candidates) may genuinely believe global warming is a left-wing plot. Others may be singing the tune of corporate benefactors. And many Republicans have seized on the cap-and-trade climate bill as another way to paint Democrats as out-of-control taxers.

Considering what the “global community” is aiming to do in the name of a crisis [man-caused global warming] that doesn’t exist, and the conspiracy uncovered in the “Climategate” emails to keep the scam going despite inconvenient evidence… well, yeah...one might call that a “left-wing plot.” And can we dispense with this “only those who are in the pocket of ‘corporate benefactors’ believe the science is not settled” garbage? The “denier” side has collected an infinitesimal amount of funding compared to the “alarmist” side - and for decades, now.

Also, Big Energy got on the green bandwagon long ago, funneling money toward those who would mandate a “green economy,” which they are in best position to exploit. British Petroleum - before it officially changed its name to just “BP” and had a bit of bad press from that little oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico - made its logo green, and launched the slogan “beyond petroleum.” Enough, already.