By Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science

The use of Arctic sea ice coverage as a climate metric has received wide science and media coverage.  This issue is motivated by the recent large reduction in late summer areal coverage (e.g. see the data on the excellent website The Cryosphere Today).

There is another sea ice metric to look at, however, and that is the date of the year of the minimum and maximum sea ice coverage. With the addition of well-mixed greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we should expect the start of the freeze-up in the late summer/early fall to be later and the start of the melt in the late winter/early spring to be earlier.

Indeed, this is what is claimed in a recent talk by Mark C Serreze of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences/National Snow and Ice Data Center (CIRES/NSIDC) at the University of Colorado Boulder (November 10 2008 - titled “The Emergence of Arctic Amplification"), where his abstract reads:"The concept of Arctic amplification is that rises in surface air temperature in response to increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations will be larger in the Arctic compared to the Northern Hemisphere as a whole. Model-projected Arctic amplification is focused over the Arctic Ocean. As the climate warms, the summer melt season lengthens and intensifies, leading to less sea ice at summer’s end. Summertime absorption of solar energy in expanding open water areas increases the sensible heat content of the ocean. Ice formation in autumn and winter, important for insulating the warm ocean from the cooling atmosphere is delayed.”

The abstact includes the statement “As the climate warms, the summer melt season lengthens” In order to explore this issue further William Chapman, author of The Cryosphere Today website, graciously prepared an analysis of the dates of the minimum and maximum Arctic sea ice coverage since 1979. The plot of this data and the individual values in fraction of the year are presented below.

See larger size image here

The finding in this data is that there is no clear evidence of a delay in the start of the later summer/early fall freeze up or the start of the late winter/early spring melt despite the well below average areal sea ice coverage.

A priority in the climate modeling community should be an examination of their predictions of trends in the start of freeze up and start of melt dates, in order to see how they conform to the observational data.  Also, the reason that the added atmospheric concentrations of well-mixed greenhouse gases are not changing the dates as expected needs to be provided. Read full post here.

Investors Business Daily

Stimulating the economy with massive new investments in “green” infrastructure seems to be a popular idea, and President-elect Obama has made it a centerpiece of his program. Will it work? We doubt it. Both Obama and congressional Democrats believe we can move to a new carbon-free future by “investing” in “green” technologies and infrastructure, while creating millions of new jobs.

As it stands, Obama is eyeing $100 billion in “green stimulus” as part of a much bigger package - as much as $700 billion or more - of conventional stimulus. He reckons this will create up to five million “green-collar jobs” and “jolt” the economy back to life. “Clean energy is going to be a foundation for rebuilding the American economy,” says Bracken Hendricks of the liberal Center for American Progress and a member of Obama’s transition team.

How will the money be spent? “School repairs,” according to a Bloomberg report, “could be required to meet green building standards, including low-energy boilers and weatherization. Transportation spending could emphasize public transit, and support for new power sources such as wind . . . could go hand in hand with spending on an efficient electricity superhighway.”

Sounds great. But it’ll take money - plus new regulations that will make it more expensive to do anything with oil, even if there are no reasonable alternatives. Nowhere is it mentioned that these “green-collar jobs” would be terribly costly, and that the planned “investments” are really just subsidies. And, as we know, things that require subsidies aren’t competitive in the market, and thus aren’t profitable. Claims that such “investments” will create five million jobs are false. It’s likely more jobs will be killed than created due to higher costs and increased inefficiency of the U.S. economy. A recent report from the Center for Data Analysis at the Heritage Foundation found that limiting CO2 emissions under recent proposed legislation would destroy 900,000
net jobs. 

Spending money on projects where costs exceed benefits simply to “create jobs” is a bad idea. Taking capital from productive uses and redeploying it to politically popular but nonproductive uses lowers productivity by paying those with “green jobs” more than their output is worth. It’s not welfare, it’s “greenfare.” This, by the way, was the make-work model followed during the Great Depression. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now. These ideas aren’t new - they were thoroughly debunked 158 years ago by pioneering French economist Frederic Bastiat, who wrote about the “broken window fallacy.”

It goes like this: Most people agree that when someone breaks a store window, it’s a tragedy for the shopkeeper. But many also believe the overall economy actually benefits, because the shopkeeper now must buy a new window, a kind of “stimulus.” This logic, of course, makes no sense. Yet it’s the basic idea behind all government stimulus plans. The money for the window comes out of the shopkeeper’s pocket. Instead of carrying more stock in his store, or hiring a clerk, he must spend his money instead on a window. So the “stimulus” is really zero - or negative. “The ‘broken windows’ in this case,” notes American Enterprise Institute analyst Kenneth Green, “would be lost jobs and lost capital in the coal, oil, gas, nuclear and automobile industries.” They together employ more than 1 million people. But millions of other jobs would also be at risk because, as with the shopkeeper, money spent on green projects can’t be spent elsewhere. What was true in Bastiat’s time is certainly true today. The weak productivity report Wednesday, showing a tepid 1.3% gain in nonfarm output per hour, should be warning enough. See report here.

The ANPR is one of the steps EPA has taken in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts vs. EPA. The ANPR record will set the stage for the debate on climate policy/science in the Obama Administration and in the new Congress.

EPA sought comment on the best available science for purposes of the “endangerment” discussion including the more recent findings of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, and the most recent IPCC report (AR4).

Here are some of the many responses submitted during the first step after comments were requested on the first step, the CCSP Unified Synthesis Product in August here, here, here, here and here.

Here is a small sampling of some of the responses to the ANPR, the third and final phase of the EPA process of evaluation.

* Why the EPA should find against “Endangerment” by World Climate Report

* Major Issues with IPCC Report by John McLean

* Series of detailed responses catalogued at the Heartland Institute.

* Detailed Response from Dr. Pat Michaels

* NIPCC excerpts as a Rebuttal by Dr. Fred Singer

* Challenging Endangerment by Dr. Fred Singer

* Challenging the Appropriateness of the CCSP and Adequacy of the Scientific Literature used by Ross McKitrick

* Detailed Response by CEI

* The Economic Costs of the EPA’s ANPR Regulations by Heritage Foundation by David Kreutzer, Ph.D. and Karen Campbell, Ph.D. Center for Data Analysis

* A geologist’s response by Dr. Don Easterbrook

* Global warming as a response to cloud changes due to the PDO by Dr. Roy Spencer

* In-depth analysis from Craig Idso

* Response by American Environmental Coalition

* Response reiterating CCSP responses

* Response on the failure of models to replicate observed changes and the neglecting of natural factors, most notably here Ocean Multidecadal cycles

* Response by American Environmental Coalition is here.