ICECAP

Apr 13, 2010

Lyin’ for Climate Indoctrination

By Paul Chesser, The Spectator

Last fall I alerted Spectator readers to the start-up nonprofit Alliance for Climate Education, which spreads the global warming alarmism gospel to students one school assembly at a time.

It turns out that the slick ACE lecturers are more than just preachers; they are recruiters too. After they dazzle teens with hip talk, animation and jokes, they work to sign them up for their anti-consumption (Americans are to blame) cause, often collecting cell phone numbers and email addresses without parents’ knowledge.

Earlier this month ACE visited Northampton (Mass.) High School, where a teacher persuaded colleagues to let students skip final period classes in order to attend their assembly. One student reported on the presentation by ACE’s Julian Rodriguez-Drix:

He dealt with issues of climate change in a positive and non-judgmental way by raising students’ awareness of the problem at hand and the methods by which they are actively polluting and contributing to global warming. The presentation explained how climate change has been caused and continued by social influence and our culture of consumption. Students learned how their seemingly minimal consumption is connected to huge companies, large usage of fossil fuels, and incredible amounts of waste. Julian clearly summarized his message in his statement, “We’re all wrapped up in [an] economic cycle that just leads to garbage.” He also discussed “super-sized” American living, excessive use of non-renewable resources, and the results of pollution in an urgent, but humorous, manner.

It all makes for one entertaining guilt trip—for students to lay on others. The Left is so clever in not offending their recruits: “It’s not your ‘minimal consumption’ that’s causing the problem—it’s those large corporations and fat Americans that are the problem!” And then they continue living their own privileged lives.

Of course, they pretend otherwise. ACE trainers like Rodriguez-Drix belch greenhouse gases driving across several state lines to give their talks, when a simple Webcast would deliver the message and serve as a good example of energy efficiency. But when asked how he would “Do One Thing” (an ACE campaign) to fight climate change, he came up with the innovative idea to turn off his lights (video). Wish I’d thought of that one.

Then came the recruitment at Northampton High:

Afterward, Julian roused the audience and urged them to take a stand. He ended the assembly by encouraging students to text ACE to make their own commitment to change, creating both an energetic frenzy to pull out cell phones and an overwhelming explosion of chatter in response to his presentation.

Both high schoolers and sixth graders exited the auditorium full of hope and anticipation to act against climate change. Many high school students attended the question and answer session with Julian Rodriguez-Drix and the Environmental Club, while others provided their email addresses to be contacted with additional information about ACE.

Once in the fold, students are then trained (video) as leaders for ACE. The science they espouse is drawn from the discredited (thanks to Climategate and its children) Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Global Climate Change (IPCC). Works on behalf of ACE include signature collection for their “Declaration of Independence from Fossil Fuels” (to be delivered to Congress and President Obama); learning how to “transform your school;” and “starting an action team.”

How’d you like this guerrilla army (video) of eco-Nazis patrolling your schools, your neighborhood, or even your home? A few parents have contacted me after their children were subjected to this indoctrination effort by ACE, including a father in Connecticut who summarized it well:

So, what’s wrong with this? At one level, it is frustrating to see instruction time spent this way. With constrained budgets, available instruction time could be better spent. Our school’s curriculum barely made time in the first eight years of instruction to educate our children on the history of the United States and its unique form of government, grounded in the principle of limiting centralized power.

At another level, one wonders what the policy is to allow outside groups to come to the school and actively enjoin students to take political action. Can I invite the NRA to a mandatory assembly urging political action in support of the Second Amendment? That would at least have the advantage of actually being in support of our rights as U.S. citizens as enumerated in the Constitution.

The chosen venue of a mandatory school assembly grants it an imprimatur, the legitimacy of authority, under the banner of education. This is at best a thin veneer of “science” over top of a thick wedge of political advocacy, presented as one-sided propaganda. This isn’t education so much as it’s a political pep rally.

In less than two years, ACE has aggressively built a nationwide organization to capture the next generation to promote global warming alarmism. Wind energy entrepreneur Michael Haas reportedly launched ACE with his own seed money (looks like it was more than $2 million, according to tax returns on Guidestar), and also added a family member and a business associate at BP Alternative Energy (which he does not disclose) to its board. The organization now has nine teams in major cities across the country, covering every region.

Polls may show that most Americans today are skeptical about the dangers of global warming, and it’s taken its hits due to Climategate. But Haas and friends are doing their best to protect their vested interests, to make sure this movement has a better future. See post an links here.

Apr 10, 2010

The Comedy Team of Cicerone and Rees in the Financial Post

Letter to the Financial Post, April 9, 2010

From Prof Martin Rees and Dr Ralph J. Cicerone.

Sir,

We were stimulated by your editorial “Cooler on warming” (April 5). There has undoubtedly been a shift in public and media perceptions of climate change - a consequence of, at least in part, leaked e-mails from some climate scientists and the publication of errors in the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

However, as your editorial acknowledges, neither recent controversies, nor the recent cold weather, negate the consensus among scientists: something unprecedented is now happening. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising and climate change is occurring, both due to human actions. If we continue to depend heavily on fossil fuels, by mid-century CO 2 concentrations will reach double pre-industrial levels. Straightforward physics tells us that this rise is warming the planet. Calculations demonstrate that this effect is very likely responsible for the gradual warming observed over the past 30 years and that global temperatures will continue to rise - superimposing a warming on all the other effects that make climate fluctuate. Uncertainties in the future rate of this rise, stemming largely from the “feedback” effects on water vapour and clouds, are topics of current research.
It is the responsibility of scientific organisations like ours to present the public and politicians with a balanced assessment of the evidence - and, importantly, to indicate the level of confidence and the range of uncertainties attached to them.

Our two science academies have long contributed critical, objective and open reports on climate change. We intend to draw upon the efforts of leading scientists everywhere to make our future reports more accessible and valuable and, by fostering scientific research, we hope to do a better job of reducing inherent uncertainties. We must also promote best scientific practice, especially with regard to the sharing of data. But policymakers and the public must realise that, even if scientific uncertainties could be reduced to zero, formulating effective political responses would still be controversial and challenging. Our academies will provide the scientific backdrop for the political and business leaders who must create effective policies to steer the world toward a low-carbon economy.

Martin Rees,
President of the Royal Society

Ralph J Cicerone,
President of the US National Academy of Sciences

Apr 09, 2010

Regulating CO2 Emissions for Local Air Quality: Another EPA Bad Idea

By Chip Knappenberger

As more state and other interested parties line-up to contest the EPA’s Endangerment Finding, the EPA is becoming creative in trying to come up with other strategies to justify restricting carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gas) emissions. One new strategy is to use the Clean Water Act to justify curbing CO2 emissions because they lead to ocean acidification (an impact which itself seems to be overblown). Another is to explore seeking greenhouse gas emissions controls at a local level, under the guise that concentrated local CO2 emissions (i.e. in cities) change the local environment in such a way as to elevate human mortality there.

Never mind that such an impact will never be detectable. My colleague Pat Michaels refers to this as the EPA’s “whack-a-mole” strategy - while effort is concentrated on trying to beat down one of its pesky and ill-founded CO2-regulating proposals, the EPA pops up another and another and another. The EPA hopes that after a while, one mole sneaks through unnoticed and manages to grab the prized (CO2-enriched) carrot.

Currently most of the whacking is aimed at trying to halt EPA’s use of the Clean Air Act as a mechanism for sweeping CO2 regulation. The ocean acidification issue is just starting to get some attention. We have briefly touched on ocean acidification here at MasterResource, and found it to be an issue in which it seems that the more that is known the less of a problem it appears to be (i.e. the real world is a pretty adaptable and responsive place). Hopefully, the EPA’s recently announced solicitation of public comment “on what considerations EPA should take into account when deciding how to address listing of waters as threatened or impaired for ocean acidification” will garner some deserved response before the May 21, 2010 deadline.

In this post, I want to take a look at a novel mole that needs attention: the idea that local CO2 produces any sort of impact on local mortality that could be detectably reduced by local CO2 restrictions.

Background

In taking questions from the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee last year, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson insisted that that EPA needed to retain certain performance based standards setting for new and existing power plants in order to address local pollution. Senator Arlen Specter was amazed, saying there is no localized impact from CO2.

But apparently Jackson knew something that Senator Specter didn’t - the EPA was funding a study that was to conclude that, indeed, local CO2 emissions do raise local mortality in the U.S. - by three one-hundredths of one percent - or by about 792 deaths out of 2,700,000 deaths annually (from these numbers it would seem that Senator Specter wasn’t that far off).

The information that Administrator Jackson probably had in her back pocket has now been formalized in the just-published paper by Stanford’s Mark Jacobson in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, titled “Enhancement of Local Air Pollution by Urban CO2 Domes.” In this paper, Jacobson concludes that local CO2 emissions raise the local level of low-level ozone and fine particulate matter, PM2.5, which, in turn, raise the rate of local mortality. This finding prompted Jacobson to remark “This study establishes a basis for controlling CO2 based on local health impacts.” No doubt just what the EPA wanted to hear.

Nowhere did anyone mention that the results of this study were, for all intents and purposes, known a priori, virtually guaranteed by the methodology employed by Jacobson. After all, climate models (like the one used by Jacobson) produce higher temperatures and higher water vapor content when they are driven with higher CO2 emissions, and air pollution models (like the ones used by Jacobson) produce more low-level ozone and PM2.5 with higher temperature and moisture, and epidemiological models (like the ones used by Jacobson) produce more deaths with higher levels of ozone (O3) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5). So, the result - more CO2=more deaths - is assured.

The only thing that was really missing in this chain of reasoning was whether local CO2 emissions lead to higher local CO2 concentrations (CO2 is often described as being “well-mixed”, that is, evenly distributed in the atmosphere). But, local CO2 “domes” have been documented for more than a decade, so it is a wonder that it has taken so long for the local-CO2-emissions-lead-to-more-local-deaths meme to be hoisted. Seems like a missed opportunity for all these years!

Main Problems of the Jacobson Study

Here is how the Stanford University press release sums up the import of Jacobson’s findings:

In the first study ever done on the local health effects of the domes of carbon dioxide that develop above cities, Stanford researcher Mark Jacobson found that the domes increase the local death rate. The result provides a scientific basis for regulating CO2 emissions at the local level and points out a significant oversight in the carbon dioxide “cap-and-trade” proposal that was passed by the House of Representatives in June 2009 and is awaiting definitive action by the Senate. But is a relationship between local CO2 emissions and local enhanced mortality in the real world demonstrable, universal, or even detectable?

No, no, and no.

The signal is far too small and the noise is far too great. Thus, the effect of local CO2 on local mortality is simply undetectable and thus, it is impossible to determine whether or not it even exists, much less whether it could be altered by regulating local CO2 emissions. Take, for instance, the impact of local CO2 emissions on local temperature. CO2 “domes” can and do form over large cities as the CO2 emissions generated from within, under some meteorological conditions, enhance the local atmospheric CO2 concentration faster than it is mixed away. Early work to try to quantify this effect was performed by Robert Balling and colleagues for the city of Phoenix, AZ. They found that under certain meteorological conditions, urban CO2 concentrations could be as high as 550-600 ppm (some 200ppm higher than the surrounding countryside). Running this CO2 enhancement though a radiation model, Balling et al. calculated that local CO2 emissions raised the local temperature by a bit more than one-tenth of one degree Celsius - a very small amount. In fact, Balling et al. commented on just how insignificant this temperature rise is by comparing it to the overall urban heat island in Phoenix which typically adds 5 to 10 degrees C to the urban temperatures, “[w]e conclude that the majority of the surface heating associated with the urban heat island effect is due to forcing by phenomena other than the urban CO2 dome. We suggest that the absorption of solar energy by surface materials and lower soil moisture levels in the urban core would be likely factors in explaining most of the observed surface heating.”

In other words, other processes associated with urbanization are 50 to 100 times more influential than local CO2 emissions. And not to mention that the atmospheric conditions aren’t always conducive to a big local CO2 build-up.

The situation is little different in Los Angeles, the city that Jacobson most intently examined with his climate model and determined that the peak air temperature increase from local CO2 emissions was about 0.1C - about the same as in Phoenix. But the climatalogical conditions in L.A. are much different than those in Phoenix and Jacobson’s climate model indicated an increase in atmospheric moisture to accompany the temperature rise, something the Balling et al. did not document in Phoenix. However, as with the temperature increase, the moisture increase was small as well. Typical values of atmospheric water content are measured in terms of kilograms/m2 and can vary by several tens of kilograms on a daily basis - Jacobson reports changes resulting from local CO2 emissions to be in tens of grams/m2 - a thousand times less than daily variability. This renders such changes observationally undetectable.

Virtually undetectable, too, are all of the knock on air-pollution impacts in the L.A. basin predicted by Jacobson’s models: higher low-level ozone (projected to increase by 0.1 to 0.2 ppbv), more fine air particulates, PM2.5, (projected to increase by less than 1 microgram/m^3), and enhanced peroxyacetyl nitrate, PAN, (projected to increase by less than 0.02ppbv).

But, the beauty of the mortality models is that no matter how small the changes in air pollutants like O3, PM2.5 and PAN, they will produce fractionally more mortality. Sum these fractional changes over a large enough population and you start to produce whole numbers.

For instance, for L.A., summing over the population of 17.3 million people, Jacobson gets about 14 extra deaths/yr from the O3 enhancement and 81 extra deaths/yr from the PM2.5 enhancement. So, according to the models, that is 95 extra deaths as a result of local CO2 emissions out of the approximately 144,109 deaths that occur in L.A. every year. Try finding that in the observations.

Which is the overall problem in a nutshell. All of Jacobson’s reported changes, with the exception of the transient existence of the CO2 dome itself, are only detectable in computer-model world, where all other factors are controlled for and each model in each step is presumed correct. In the real world, it is impossible to find these extra deaths, even if they did occur exactly as Jacobson describes - there are just too many other confounding factors.

Further, all throughout the Jacobson analysis, the changes are so small that tiny tweaks to any of the employed models - climate, air pollution, or epidemiology - will have the potential to significantly alter the results as currently reported. And such tweaks are always occurring as none of these model-types are set in stone and each is an active and evolving field of scientific study.