by Larry Bell
October 11, 2013, 1:41am
DESPITE rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, global climate temperatures have remained flat for the past 15 years, if not a good deal longer. And the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was last month forced to admit that its own climate models have grossly overestimated climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2.
So why are some European countries, Germany in particular, but also Britain and Denmark, pursuing green policies that are pushing up the cost of energy, and which could prove seriously damaging to their long-term economic health?
Existing policy in Germany already forces households to fork out for the second highest power costs in Europe, often as much as 30 per cent above the levels seen in other European countries. Only the Danes pay more, and residential electricity costs in both countries are roughly 300 per cent higher than in the US. Circumstances in Germany are only likely to worsen following the re-election of Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union. She will continue with policies designed to wean the country off fossil fuels and nuclear power.
But even former proponents are beginning to see the damage being caused. Dr Fritz Vahrenholt, a father of Germany’s environmental movement and former head of the renewable energy division at utility company RWE, has joined the ranks of those now challenging this trend. In his new book, The Neglected Sun Precludes Catastrophe, he concludes that “renewable energies do have a big future, but not like this. It’s been a runaway train and too expensive. We are putting [our] industry in jeopardy.”
Approximately 7.8 per cent of Germany’s electricity comes from wind, 4.5 per cent from solar, 7 per cent from biomass, and 4 per cent from hydro. The government plans to increase the proportion from renewables to 35 per cent by 2020, and 80 per cent by 2050. Since hydro and biomass won’t grow, most of that expansion must come from wind and solar.
Denmark, meanwhile, which produces between 20 to 30 per cent of its electricity from wind and solar, hopes to produce half from those sources by 2020. As Denmark can’t use all the electricity it produces at night, it exports about half of its extra supply to Norway and Sweden. But even with those export sales, government wind subsidies have led Danish consumers to pay the highest electricity rates in Europe.
And what about Britain? In 2011, UK wind turbines produced energy at a meagre 21 per cent of installed capacity (not demand capacity) during good conditions. As in Germany, unreliability in meeting power demands has necessitated importation of nuclear power from France. Also similar to Germany, the government is closing some of its older coal-fired plants, any one of which can produce nearly twice the electricity of Britain’s 3,000 wind turbines combined.
Renewables are unreliable, and power interruptions are adding to buyer’s remorse. This is less of a problem when there are reliable backup sources like hydropower, coal and nuclear plants to meet demand. But most of Europe lacks the former, and is intentionally to its detriment cutting back on both of the latter.
Signs of constructive change are far more apparent in Australia. In September, the right-of-centre Liberal Party’s defeat of the Green Party-backed Labor Party was recognised as a referendum victory for dismantling and consolidating myriad anti-carbon schemes spawned under the previous government. Reining in that sprawling climate machine and eliminating an established energy carbon tax is expected to save the economy more than Au$100m (£57.6m) per week. Australia is seeing sense, there are lessons Europe can learn from its shining example.
And thanks to natural gas, coal and nuclear, the US has excess power-generating capacity, and generally adequate transmission and distribution systems unlike Europe. Today, just over 42 per cent of US electrical power comes from coal, 25 per cent from natural gas, and 19 per cent from nuclear. Only about 3.4 per cent comes from wind, and about 0.11 per cent from solar.
Whether renewable energy will be able to offer substantial cost-competitive alternatives rather than limited niches for US and international energy remains to be seen. But regardless, we can only hope that America learns from the ruinous green energy policies in Germany and other EU nations before such misguided policies wreak further social and economic damage.
Larry Bell is a professor at the University of Houston where he directs the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture.
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An Uncritical View Of EPA: Why I Agree With Obama
By Larry Bell, Forbes
Reprinted with permission from author
Okay, I admit that I’ve been pretty tough on the EPA in the past. Unlike most other Conservatives, I’ve now decided that I really do want clean air, land and water, and somebody’s got to do the dirty work of keeping capitalism from screwing it all up. Let there be no doubt that the agency takes every imaginable action to accomplish that.
Sure, maybe they might be faulted for going a little overboard occasionally in protecting us from ravages of excessive prosperity. Like, for example their regulatory efforts to put an end to many millions of years of climate change.
Still, we can all appreciate their good intentions. After all, think of all those critters that have frozen their butts off during previous Ice Ages lasting a hundred thousand years or so, then having to adapt to 12,000 to 15,000 years long warmer interglacial periods like our current one, then repeating the process all over again. Think about all those sweaty folks during the Medieval Warm Period a thousand years ago having to endure temperatures hotter than now, followed later by a “Little Ice Age” between about 1400-1859 AD causing Washington’s troops to suffer bitter cold at Valley Forge in 1777-78, as did Napoleon’s during their frigid retreat from Russia in 1812.
Heck, even during the past century alone the planet has had to endure two distinct climate changes...warming between 1900 and 1945 followed by a slight cool-down until 1975 when temperatures rose again at quite a constant rate until 1998.
So what if we humans really can prevent that climate change nuisance after all? Like be able to pick a time when temperatures are really great and there aren’t all those frequent severe weather events that past decades have witnessed?
Good news! It appears that we actually can. According to the UN’s last IPCC report, their scientists now claim they are virtually certain that we humans are primarily responsible for the past 17 years of flat global temperatures thanks to our record high atmospheric CO2 emissions.
Not only that, it seems that we have influenced the lack of increase in the strength or frequency of landfall hurricanes in the world’s five main hurricane basins over the past 50 to 70 years, and a lack of increase in the strength or frequency in tropical Atlantic hurricane development during the past 370 years. We’re also responsible for the longest U.S. period ever recorded without intense Category 3 to 5 hurricane landfall, and for no trend since 1950 of any increased frequency of strong (F3-F5) U.S. tornadoes.
Obviously we’re doing something right.
Then there’s the matter of those rising oceans. Remember when presidential candidate Obama declared during his June 8, 2008 victory speech as Democratic Party nominee that his presidency will be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”?
If you think his red line in Syria was a big deal, you’ve certainly got to give him credit for drawing an ambitious line in the sand on that one. And even without Putin’s help, he’s held to that promise. Just as he said, the sea level rise hasn’t accelerated at all since the time he assumed control. Nope, it’s still increasing at the rate of about seven inches per century, just as it has ever since that Little Ice Age.
Granted, all this climate stuff is really complicated, and appearances of events can be deceiving. Imagine, for example the view from Al Gore’s new $9 million Montecito, California oceanfront villa, or from John Kerry’s yacht. It’s probably very difficult to discern whether the sky is falling, or it’s the ocean that is rising.
Whichever the case, after subtracting subsidence due to human water depletion from coastal water level changes, that lowering in addition to a seven inches-plus per century sea rise difference clearly does present a serious problem in some locations. However, the question is how much help EPA can be expected to afford in solving it.
Here’s a thought. What if the federal government got out of the business of using our taxes to subsidize cheap flood insurance in vulnerable low-lying areas which encourages irresponsible coastal development in the first place?
Yeah, I know. That’s a pretty radical idea.
Regardless, undaunted by reality, the EPA is determined to protect us, come hell and/or high water. It’s termed the “precautionary principle”, where regulatory economic costs and impacts aren’t their concern. Don’t believe me?
In 2011, the American Council for Capital Formation estimated that the new EPA regulations will result in 476,000 to 1,400,000 lost jobs by the end of 2014. Management Information Services, Inc. predicted that up to 2.5 million jobs will be sacrificed, annual household income could decrease by $1,200, and gasoline and residential electricity prices may increase 50% by 2030. The Heritage Foundation projects that the greenhouse gas regulations will cost nearly $7 trillion (2008 dollars) in economic output by 2029.
Yet EPA representatives have maintained that considerations regarding such regulatory economic and employment impacts fall outside the administration’s purview. Responding in a letter to a question raised by Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo), then-EPA Assistant Administrator Gina McCarthy (who now heads the agency) was very clear on this point, stating “Under the Clean Air Act, decisions regarding the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) must be based solely on evaluation of the scientific evidence as it pertains to health and environmental effects. Thus, the agency is prohibited from considering costs in setting the NAAQS.”
The U.S. Government Accounting Office has stated that it can’t figure out what benefits taxpayers are getting from the many billions of dollars spent each year on policies that are purportedly aimed at addressing climate change. Another 2011 GAO report noted that while annual federal funding for such activities has been increasing substantially, there is a lack of shared understanding of strategic priorities among the various responsible agency officials. This assessment agrees with the conclusions of a 2008 Congressional Research Service analysis which found no “overarching policy goal for climate change that guides the programs funded or the priorities among programs.”
As noted by H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), “The EPA is in the process of codifying a whole slate of new air quality rules, the sheer number and economic impact of which have not been seen at any time in the EPA’s history.”
EPA’s relentless regulatory war is centrally targeted against fossil energy, applying permitting authority claimed through an “Endangerment Finding” under auspices of its Clean Air Act. That finding found that current and projected atmospheric concentrations of six greenhouse gases (including CO2) “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”
And how was that finding determined? Perhaps you correctly guessed that it was based upon global warming crisis projections put forth by the UN’s IPCC.
Yet that IPCC alarmism which Administrator Lisa Jackson admitted the agency’s finding was based upon was refuted at the time by EPA’s own “Internal Study on Climate” report conclusions. That report, authored by my friend Alan Carlin, a senior research analyst at EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics, stated: “...given the downward trend in temperatures since 1998 (which some think will continue until at least 2030), there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based upon a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”
The EPA’s latest climate battle plan is to prohibit construction of new coal-fired power plants that can’t achieve 1,100 pound per megawatt hour carbon emission limits. To accomplish this will require plant operators to capture and store ("sequester") excess CO2, something that cannot be accomplished through affordable means, if at all. The Institute for Energy Research has estimated that this “regulatory assault” will eliminate 35 gigawatts of electrical generating capacity...10% of all U.S. power. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute observes, “If the carbon dioxide emissions standard for power plants proposed by the EPA today is enacted, the United States will have built its final coal-fired power plant.”
On September 18, Lisa Jackson’s replacement Gina McCarthy was invited to explain President Obama’s “Climate Plan” war on CO2 to members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. I recently wrote about a notable exchange that took place between McCarthy and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) who asked her if EPA greenhouse gas regulations would be expected to impact any of 26 outcome indicators defined on their website.
At one point Pompeo asked: “Do you think it would be reasonable to take the regulations you promulgated and link them to those 26 indicators that you have on your website? That this is how they impacted us?”
McCarthy responded: “It is unlikely that any specific one step is going to be seen as having a visible impact on any of those impacts - a visible change in any of those impacts. What I’m suggesting is that climate change [policy] has to be a broader array of actions that the U.S. and other folks in the international community take that make significant effort towards reducing greenhouse gases and mitigating the impacts of climate change.”
In other words, the plan is to lead other nations off the same economic cliff America is rapidly approaching, with EPA heading the charge.
Oh, I nearly forgot. You’re probably wondering at this point where it is that I agree with President Obama regarding an uncritical view of EPA. Well, didn’t his administration determine with regard to the federal government shutdown that 93% of EPA employees weren’t critical...classified as non-essential?
So when the Big Fed starts up again, as I fear it will, let’s apply that precautionary principle to avoid further economic damage and just retain the 7% of the EPA that we apparently really need to keep our air, land and water clean, and sequester the rest? Isn’t that a huge national debt we owe to ourselves?
James Delingpole, the Telegraph
The story so far: with the release of its Fifth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has proved beyond reasonable doubt that it cannot be taken seriously.
Here are a few reasons why: IPCC lead author Dr Richard Lindzen has accused it of having “sunk to a level of hilarious incoherence.” Nigel Lawson has called it “not science but mumbo jumbo”. The Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Dr David Whitehouse has described the IPCC’s panel as “evasive and inaccurate” in the way it tried dodge the key issue of the 15-year (at least) pause in global warming; Donna Laframboise notes that is either riddled with errors or horribly politically manipulated – or both; Paul Matthews has found a very silly graph; Steve McIntyre has exposed how the IPCC appears deliberately to have tried to obfuscate the unhelpful discrepancy between its models and the real world data; and at Bishop Hill the excellent Katabasis has unearthed another gem: that, in jarring contrast to the alarmist message being put out at IPCC press conferences and in the Summary For Policymakers, the body of the report tells a different story that almost all the scary scenarios we’ve been warned about this last two decades (from permafrost melt to ice sheet collapse) are now been graded by scientists somewhere between “low confidence” to “exceptionally unlikely;” and this latest from the Mighty Booker.
And there’s plenty more where that came from.
Now, of course, I fully appreciate how the climate alarmists are going to respond to these criticisms: same way they always do with a barrage of lies, ad homs, cover-ups, rank-closings, blustering threats, straw men, and delusion-bubble conferences like the one they’ve just staged at the Royal Society in which one warmist pseudo-scientist after another mounts the podium to reassure his amen corner that everything’s going just fine and that those evil denialists couldn’t be more wrong.
Well, if that’s how they want to play it ‘ fighting to the bitter end for their lost cause like Werewolves in Northern Europe in ‘45 or those fanatical Japanese hold outs on remote Pacific islands - I guess that’s their problem.
But what I really don’t think we should be doing at this stage in the game is allowing it to be our problem too. As I argued here the other week, there is more than enough solid evidence now to demonstrate to any neutral party prepared to cast half an eye over it that the doomsday prognostications the warmist establishment has been trying to frighten us with these last two decades are a nonsense. The man-made global warming scare story has not a shred of scientific credibility. It’s over. And while I don’t expect the alarmists to admit this any time soon, I do think the rest of us should stop indulging them in their poisonous fantasy.
I’m thinking, for example, of this line from the Spectator’s otherwise superb, accurate and fair editorial summarising the state of play on climate:
Global warming is still a monumental challenge…
Is it? More of a “monumental” challenge than global cooling? And the evidence for that statement can be found where exactly? Please. I’d love to see it. Where’s the data that proves the modest 0.8 degrees C warming in the last 150 years has done more harm than good?
It may seem unduly picky to quibble over just seven errant words from an otherwise immaculate 800 word editorial. But it’s precisely intellectually lazy concessions like this that are serving only to prolong a propaganda war that really should have ended long ago.
I feel the same way when I read one of those on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other think pieces from someone on the “sceptical” side of the argument or an editorial in a newspaper trying to position itself as the voice of reasonable authority on the climate issue. You know the sort I mean: where, in order to make his case seem more balanced and sympathetic the author concedes at the beginning that there are faults and extremists on both sides of the argument and that it’s time we all met in the middle and found a sensible solution. (I call this the Dog Poo Yoghurt Fallacy)
This is absurd, dishonest, inaccurate and counterproductive. It’s as if, after a long, long game of cat and mouse between a few maverick, out-on-a-limb private investigators and an enormous Mafia cartel, an outside arbitrator steps in and says: “Well there’s fault on both sides. You Mafia people have been really quite naughty with your multi-billion dollar crime spree. But you private investigators, you deserve a rap on the knuckles too because some of that language you’ve been using to describe the Mafia cartel is really quite offensive and hurtful. Why, you’ve actually been calling them “thieving criminals.”
“But they are thieving criminals,” the investigators protest. “And do you have any idea what it has cost us pursuing this case? Do you realise how hard the cartel worked to vilify us, marginalise us, make us seem like crazed extremists? These people have stolen billions, they’ve lied, they’ve cheated, they’re responsible for numerous deaths, and you’re, what, you’re going to buy into the specious argument of their bullshitting consigliere Roberto “Mad Dog” Ward that they deserve special favours because their tender feelings have been hurt with unkind language?”
It’s time we took the gloves off in this fight - not to escalate it but to stop it being prolonged with this ludicrous diplomatic game where we have to pretend that there’s fault on both sides – not because it’s in any way true, but because the climate scam is so vast and all-encompassing that there are just too many people in positions of power or authority who need to be indulged by being allowed to save face.
Why?
To give you but one example, last week two warmists were given space to have a go at DEFRA Secretary of State Owen Paterson.
Professor Kevin Anderson, of Manchester University, told the Independent: “His view that we can muddle through climate change is a colonial, arrogant, rich person’s view.”
And Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University, one of the authors of the report, said: “I find it very worrying that this person is charged with adapting [Britain] to climate change. I do think it is a good idea for whoever is planning for adaptation to have a realistic understanding of what the science is saying.”
This rightly taxed the patience of even the scrupulously non-combative Bishop Hill:
One can’t help but think that politicians’ understanding of the science might be helped if scientists, including Professor Allen, had tried to write a clear explanation of it rather than trying to obfuscate any difficulty that might distract from the message of doom.
Quite. What Paterson said about the current state of climate change is both demonstrably true and wholly unexceptionable:
“People get very emotional about this subject and I think we should just accept that the climate has been changing for centuries”, he said.
“Remember that for humans, the biggest cause of death is cold in winter, far bigger than heat in summer. It would also lead to longer growing seasons and you could extend growing a little further north into some of the colder areas.”
If shyster professors with cushy sinecures in state-funded seats of academe wish to counter such reasonable statements of the glaringly obvious – statements, furthermore, which are actually supported by the body of the new IPCC report (see above) – then the onus is on them to do so using verifiable facts rather than vague, emotive smears.
To return to my favourite field of analogy – World War II - the situation we’re in now is analogous to the dog days of 1945 when the allied advance was held up by small pockets of fanatical resistance. The Allies had a choice: either painstakingly take each village at the cost of numerous infantry or simply stand back and give those villages an ultimatum – you have an hour to surrender and if you don’t we’re going to obliterate you with our artillery.
We have to take a stand on this issue. One side is right; one side is quite simply wrong and deserves to be humiliated and crushingly defeated. And the sooner – for all those of us who believe in truth, decency and liberty – the better.
By Meteorologist Art Horn
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released their 5th assessment (big report) on how human activity (using fossil fuels to make energy) is causing global warming (that’s not happening). Actually the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) has been “leaked” for months. The SPM is a watered down version of the big report so that even politicians can sort of understand what it says.
The new report states clearly that with 95% confidence, humans are the “dominant cause” of global warming. The only difference in the percent of confidence from the previous reports is that the 95% figure is higher than all the other reports. This higher level of confidence is rather odd since they state that the climate systems sensitivity to forcing from greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide is unknown! The report states that “No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies”. Without a solid understanding of what the climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide and other forcings is, the whole “dominant cause” statement has no meaning. It’s a statement designed to inspire confidence in what they admittedly don’t understand.
What they are saying is that they are 95% sure that humans are the dominant cause of global warming but that they are so unsure of how the climate system reacts to increases in carbon dioxide, they can’t give us an “estimate” of how much global warming it causes. Yea, that inspires confidence for sure. Based on that “high level of confidence” we should abandon what works (fossil fuels) and gamble our future and prosperity on so called “renewables” that can’t survive without massive government support.
To further inspire this 95% confidence level we have the musings of the IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri. In October of 2008 he stated that “We’re at a stage where warming is taking place at a much faster rate”. A glance at the actual temperature data at that time shows that there was no such thing occurring. Even earlier in 2007 he said “If there is no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.” Gee, here it is 2013 and we’ve had no warming since 1998, no increase in the number or strength of hurricanes, the fewest number of tornadoes since reliable measurements began, and despite forecast of a “very active” hurricane season we’ve had only two category 1 hurricanes to date and sea-level rise has not accelerated. Oh, and those predictions of an ice free Arctic Ocean never happened either. Is this a defining moment?
Then to add to the confusion Dr. Pachauri finally saw the light in February 2013. He admitted that there has been a pause in global warming but it would have to last 30 to 40 years before we could say the upward trend in temperature was broken. By the way, we are four years away from being two thirds to 30 years. He also said that “The climate is changing because of natural factors and the impact of human actions (translation: using fossil fuels)” Excuse me? did he say “natural factors?” I thought the use of fossil fuels was the “dominant cause” of climate change. Don’t tell me there could be something other than carbon dioxide changing the climate. You’re shaking my 95% confidence.
I wonder what those natural factors could be. Could it possibly have something to do with the oceans that contain 1,000 times more heat than the atmosphere? In a recent paper titled “Recent global warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific cooling” (In other words the shift of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) to its cooler phase) the authors basically said just that. “Our results say the current hiatus (of global warming) is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La Nina like decadal cooling.” Meaning that the PDO shift to its cooler phase stopped the warming of the late 1970s through the late 1990s. This is rather shocking. If this is true it punches a massive hole in the “humans are the dominate cause of global warming” argument. It seems the authors are saying that carbon dioxide has been dethroned!
This idea that the PDO shift to cooler is responsible for the end of global warming (at least for now) got me to thinking about the other side of the PDO, the warm phase. Now get ready for this radical thought. If the PDO shift to cooler stopped the warming, is it possible that perhaps much of the increase in temperature from the late 1970s to the late 1990s was from the warm phase of the PDO? Ouch, that’s not going to go over very big! And, not to pile it on, but is it also possible that the cooling of earth’s average temperature from the mid 1940s to the late 1970s was caused by the previous cool phase of the PDO? I’m looking out my window to see if “Big Brother” is targeting me with a drone.
The IPCC is confused and desperate. Thomas Stocker, co-chair of the science working group said that the current hiatus in warming could not be predicted because “There are not sufficient observations on the uptake of heat, particularly into the deep ocean.” What he’s saying is that they think global warming is hiding in the deep ocean but they can’t prove it. I wonder if the boogeyman and the tooth fairy are there too? Remarkably, after saying they could not have predicted the current and ongoing cessation of global warming he boldly and confidently predicts “Heat waves are very likely to occur more frequently and last longer. As the earth warms, we expect to see currently wet regions receiving more rainfall and dry regions receiving less, although there are exceptions.”
So although the IPCC admits they don’t know what the sensitivity of the climate system is to increases in carbon dioxide and they could not have predicted the current pause in global warming nor how long it will last, they are 95% sure that it is caused by use of fossil fuels and they know how to fix it. Well now I feel much better! For a while there I was worried that the United Nations plan to take one hundred billion dollars a year from the western counties, you know the ones that caused global warming, and give it to whoever they want was gong to fail. Now I feel 95% confident that the UN IPCC has all the answers and has our best interests at heart.
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IPCC’s Artful Bias
The Washington Pest
Every trial lawyer will tell you that the key to presenting a strong case lies in carefully omitting the evidence against you. This is not lying, it is artful bias. Advocacy is the heart of our adversarial judicial system. Each side presents its case in the strongest possible terms, as though the other side’s case did not exist. The jury hears both sides, puts the whole story together, then decides.
Anyone who doubts that the new IPCC Summary for Policy Makers is an advocacy document is ineligible for duty on the jury of reason. So what ain’t they saying? Unfortunately the other side does not seem to be represented. We have looked in vain for the minority report. You would think that for $18 million they could afford one, but that just measures the advocationality of the thing. One side fits all.
Here is just a graphic peek at the missing side to give you the flavor of the game. Figure 2 shows a bunch of bars. Each represents one of the factors that is thought to have influenced global temperature. We see at once that all but one of these bars is human. Most are pretty big, especially the really big red one labeled CO2. There is one tiny natural bar labeled Solar.
There it is. Case closed. The jury can go home, no need to hear from the other side, it will only confuse them. We did it. The prosecution rests, let the persecution begin.
Well not really, as always in these proceedings. A big pile of contrary science is missing here. Good science, interesting science, being carried on by a whole lot of real scientists.
For simplicity let’s divide this mountain of contrary science into three high heaps.
The first heap has to do with this little bitty solar bar. This bar is based on the relatively small amount of variable, direct radiant energy coming from the sun. What is omitted is a huge amount of research going on into indirect and amplified solar mechanisms. The reason for this research is the close correlation between solar variation and global temperature, seen over a lot of time scales. Something is going on but we don’t know what and there are a lot of theories. Google Scholar lists over 500,000 scientific papers on solar variability. The IPCC omits this research because it does not help their case.
The second heap includes little things like the ocean, earth wobbles, etc., that are also thought to heavily influence climate. They get no bar at all, because we can’t measure their influence either, even though we know it is there.
The third heap is ugly but very real. It is research into natural climate variability per se, something that has received a lot of attention. We now know that climate varies all the time, for reasons we do not understand. It has varied quite naturally a lot more than the little bit we are fussing with today. So today’s warming may well be simply the emergence of mother earth from the famous Little Ice Age. But you can’t put a bar on the LIA because we don’t know what causes it. Looking at the IPCC bar chart you would never know there was a LIA, just a lot of human stuff and a bitty bit of sun. That is the truly artful part of their bias, simply ignore what we don’t understand, like it did not exist.
In short, it is easy to argue that humans control climate, if you omit nature. That is just what the IPCC does, and it is very good advocacy. It’s just not good science.