By Roger Pielke Jr.

A new paper is out in a journal getting a reputation for silly science that predicts that climate change will lead to a massive influx of Mexicans across the border to the United States. Here is how the LA Times breathlessly opened its news story on the PNAS paper:

Climbing temperatures are expected to raise sea levels and increase droughts, floods, heat waves and wildfires.

Now, scientists are predicting another consequence of climate change: mass migration to the United States.

Between 1.4 million and 6.7 million Mexicans could migrate to the U.S. by 2080 as climate change reduces crop yields and agricultural production in Mexico, according to a study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The number could amount to 10% of the current population of Mexicans ages 15 to 65.

A reporter emailed me an embargoed copy last week asking for my reactions. Here is how I responded (and I pulled no punches):

To be blunt, the paper is guesswork piled on top of “what ifs” built on a foundation of tenuous assumptions. The authors seem to want to have things both ways—they readily acknowledge the many and important limitations of their study, but then go on to assert that “it is nevertheless instructive to predict future migrant flows for Mexico using the estimates at hand to assess the possible magnitude of climate change-related emigration.” It can’t be both—if the paper has many important limitations, then this means that that it is not particularly instructive. With respect to predicting immigration in 2080 (!), admitting limitations is no serious flaw.

To use this paper as a prediction of anything would be a mistake. It is a tentative sensitivity study of the effects of one variable on another, where the relationship between the two is itself questionable but more importantly, dependent upon many other far more important factors. The authors admit this when they write, “It is important to note that our projections should be interpreted in a ceteris paribus manner, as many other factors besides climate could potentially influence migration from Mexico to the United States.” but then right after they assert, “Our projections are informative, nevertheless, in quantifying the potential magnitude of impacts of climate change on out-migration.” It is almost as if the paper is written to be misinterpreted.

Climate change is real and worthy of our attention. Putting forward research claims that cannot be supported by the underlying analysis will not help the credibility of the climate science community. Even with the voluminous caveats in the paper, to conclude that “climate change is estimated to induce 1.4 to 6.7 million adult Mexicans (or 2% to 10% of the current population aged 15-65 y) to emigrate as a result of declines in agricultural productivity alone” is just not credible. The paper reflects a common pattern in the climate impacts literature of trying to pin negative outcomes on climate change using overly simplistic methods and ignoring those factors other than climate which have far more effect.

One of the paper’s authors, Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton professor and lead author of the forthcoming IPCC report on extremes explains his motivation with the paper:

Our primary objectives were, No. 1, to give policymakers something to think about and, No. 2, to give researchers a spur to start answering some of the more complicated questions

One of the climate impacts scholars whose work was relied on in the PNAS paper was critical:

Diana Liverman, a University of Arizona climate researcher, criticized the new study for basing its forecasts in part on research that she worked on in the early 1990s that looked at crop yields in only two central Mexico sites.

In reply, Oppenheimer said the Princeton study found similar results in a second crop-yield study, and the crop reductions predicted for Mexico are typical of what has been predicted for other countries in that latitude.

Liverman said that while she believes climate change could cause widespread migration, she has seen no study documenting it. Having studied the problems of Mexican farmers for two decades, she said she has found that a bad economy, the government’s withdrawal of agricultural subsidies and the North American Free Trade Agreement have caused problems far greater than climate change.

Nature also has a set of critical reactions. The LA Times article recovered from its breathless opening with a well-buried lede:

Philip Martin, an expert in agricultural economics at UC Davis, said that he hadn’t read the study but that making estimates based solely on climate change was virtually impossible.

“It is just awfully hard to separate climate change from the many, many other factors that affect people’s decisions whether to stay in agriculture or move,” he said.

In silly science however, nothing is impossible.  Read more here. H/t Marc Morano, Climate Depot.

By Marc Morano, Climate Depot

Physicist Dr. Denis Rancourt, a former professor and environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa, has officially bailed out of the man-made global warming movement.

In a hard-hitting and exclusive new exclusive video just released by Climate Depot, Dr. Rancourt declares that the entire man-made global warming movement is nothing more than a “corrupt social phenomenon.” “It is as much psychological and social phenomenon as anything else,” Rancourt, who has published peer-reviewed research, explained in a June 8, 2010 essay.

Watch Rancourt video here.

‘I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized,” Rancourt said.

“Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass,” he asserted.

Rancourt’s dissent on man-made climate fears has not set well with many of his fellow green friends. “When I tell environmental activists that global warming is not something to be concerned about, they attack me—they shun me, they do not allow me to have my materials published in their magazines, editors,” Rancourt explained to Climate Depot.

Rancourt bluntly examines why his fellow environmentalists are wrapped up in promoting climate alarm. (Note: Rancourt also ridicules environmental concern over acid rain and the ozone hole. See below)

“They look for comfortable lies that they can settle into and alleviate the guilt they feel about being on privileged end of the planet—a kind of survivors guilt. A lot of these environmentalists are guilt laden individuals who need to alleviate the guilt without taking risks,” he said. “They are weekend activists...looking for lies to hitch onto.”

“The modern environmental move has hijacked itself by looking for an excuse to stay comfortable and stay away from actual battle. Ward Churchill has called this pacifism as pathology,” he explained. “If you are really concerned about saving world’s forests or habitat destruction, then fight against habitat destruction, don’t go off in tenuous thing about co2 concentration in the atmosphere. Actually address the question; otherwise you are weakening your effect as an activist.”

Rancourt openly expresses his hostility for former Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

“I felt I’ll walking out of the theatre. It’s terrible. It does not respect the intelligence the viewer. The film does not acknowledge people can think for themselves at all,” Rancourt said.

Rancourt lamented how “environmentalists could just gobble this up and agree with [Gore’s film] in a non critical fashion.”

Gore “strikes me as someone working for someone—as someone who will financially benefit from this. He does not give me impression of someone who genuinely cares about environmental or social justice.”

Rancourt spared no mercy for the embattled UN IPCC. The scientists are “named by governments, they are scientists who accept to serve a political role. Their mission is to write a report” that “is meant to be used by government. Their goal is find a conclusion...it is a political process.” [Editor’s Note: Climate Depot’s Executive Editor Marc Morano appeared on Dr. Denis Rancourt’s Radio Show for One Hour in May 2010: Morano: The global warming narrative...was total bunko, it was a con job...a scientific scandal of the highest order’]

Rancourt is also very critical of proposed global warming carbon trading or cap and trade.

“Someone is going to make a lot of money from these schemes. I have great distrust for it. It is not motivated by true concern for social justice and the environment. It can only be about powerful financiers. I see it as an horrendous scam,” Rancourt said, adding he “I completely agree” with UK environmental guru James Lovelock who called carbon trading “verging on a gigantic scam.”

But it is his fellow University professors that Rancourt has the least amount of patience with.

“They are all virtually all service intellectuals. They will not truly critique, in a way that could threaten the power interests that keep them in their jobs. The tenure track is just a process to make docile and obedient intellectuals that will then train other intellectuals,” Rancourt said.

“You have this army of university scientists and they have to pretend like they are doing important research without ever criticizing the powerful interests in a real way. So what do they look for, they look for elusive sanitized things like acid rain, global warming,” he added. This entire process “helps to neutralize any kind of dissent,” according to Rancourt.

“When you do find something bad, you quickly learn and are told you better toe the line on this—your career depends on it,” Rancourt said.

Some Key Excerpts from Denis Rancourt:

Left-wing Env. Scientist & Physicist Dr. Denis Rancourt: Some Big Lies of Science - June 2010

Rancourt Excerpt: Environmental scientists naively and knowingly work hand in hand with finance-corporate shysters, mainstream media, politicians, and state and international bureaucrats to mask real problems and to create profit opportunities for select power elites...I exposed the global warming cooptation scam in an essay that Alexander Cockburn writing in The Nation called ‘one of the best essays on greenhouse myth-making from a left perspective.’ [...]

My essay prompted David F. Noble to research the question and write The Corporate Climate Coup to expose how the media embrace followed the finance sector’s realization of the unprecedented potential for revenues that going green could represent. [...] I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized.”

“Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass.”

Rancourt Ridicules Ozone Hole Claims: ‘Do you know of anyone who has been killed by the ozone hole?’

Rancourt Mocks Acid Rain Claims: As a physicist and Earth scientist turned environmental scientist, I could not find an example of a demonstrated negative impact on lakes or forests from acid rain. In my opinion, contrary to the repeated claims of the scientist authors, the research on acid rain demonstrates that acid rain could not possibly have been the problem’ - I concluded it had been a fake problem. [...] Acid rain very, very similar to global warming. A Sanitized problem. What I found, researched from the 1950’s on and I concluded that is had been a fake problem. The effect on lake acidity from acid rain was so subtle so difficult to measure—virtually impossible to measure [hype about acid rain was] at a period when forests being destroyed by real things.

See more here.

By Thomas L. Friedman

When I first heard on Thursday that Senate Democrats were abandoning the effort to pass an energy/climate bill that would begin to cap greenhouse gases that cause global warming and promote renewable energy that could diminish our addiction to oil, I remembered something that Joe Romm, the climateprogress.org blogger, once said: The best thing about improvements in health care is that all the climate-change deniers are now going to live long enough to see how wrong they were.

Alas, so are the rest of us. I could blame Republicans for the fact that not one G.O.P. senator indicated a willingness to vote for a bill that would put the slightest price on carbon. I could blame the Democratic senators who were also waffling. I could blame President Obama for his disappearing act on energy and spending more time reading the polls than changing the polls. I could blame the Chamber of Commerce and the fossil-fuel lobby for spending bags of money to subvert this bill. But the truth is, the public, confused and stressed by the last two years, never got mobilized to press for this legislation. We will regret it.

We’ve basically decided to keep pumping greenhouse gases into Mother Nature’s operating system and take our chances that the results will be benign - even though a vast majority of scientists warn that this will not be so. Fasten your seat belts. As the environmentalist Rob Watson likes to say: “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is.” You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. You cannot tell her that the oil companies say climate change is a hoax. No, Mother Nature is going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate, and “Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats 1.000,” says Watson. Do not mess with Mother Nature. But that is just what we’re doing.

Since I don’t have anything else to say, I will just fill out this column with a few news stories and e-mails that came across my desk in the past few days:

Just as the U.S. Senate was abandoning plans for a U.S. cap-and-trade system, this article ran in The China Daily: “BEIJING - The country is set to begin domestic carbon trading programs during its 12th Five-Year Plan period (2011-2015) to help it meet its 2020 carbon intensity target. The decision was made at a closed-door meeting chaired by Xie Zhenhua, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission ... Putting a price on carbon is a crucial step for the country to employ the market to reduce its carbon emissions and genuinely shift to a low-carbon economy, industry analysts said.”

As we East Coasters know, it’s been extremely hot here this summer, with records broken. But, hey, you could be living in Russia, where ABC News recently reported that a “heat wave, which has lasted for weeks, has Russia suffering its worst drought in 130 years. In some parts of the country, temperatures have reached 105 degrees.” Moscow’s high the other day was 93 degrees. The average temperature in July for the city is 76 degrees. The BBC reported that to keep cool “at lakes and rivers around Moscow, groups of revelers can be seen knocking back vodka and then plunging into the water. The result is predictable - 233 people have drowned in the last week alone.”

Icecap Note: last winter when Siberia had the COLDEST winter EVER and heavy snow and frigid temperatures blanketed Russia, China, Europe and the United States, setting a new record for the Northern Hemisphere, you were strangely silent and your compatriots in the media were explaining that was weather not climate.

A day before the climate bill went down, Lew Hay, the C.E.O. of NextEra Energy, which owns Florida Power & Light, one of the nation’s biggest utilities, e-mailed to say that if the Senate would set a price on carbon and requirements for renewal energy, utilities like his would have the price certainty they need to make the big next-generation investments, including nuclear. ‘If we invest an additional $3 billion a year or so on clean energy, that’s roughly 50,000 jobs over the next five years,’ said Hay. (Say goodbye to that.) No Mr globalist Friedman - look at how Green Jobs proved to be a myth all across Europe, contributing to significant job losses and increased energy costs hurting the economies at the worst possible times

Making our country more energy efficient is not some green feel-good thing. Retired Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson, who was Gen. David Petraeus’s senior logistician in Iraq, e-mailed to say that “over 1,000 Americans have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan hauling fuel to air-condition tents and buildings. If our military would simply insulate their structures, it would save billions of dollars and, more importantly, save lives of truck drivers and escorts. ... And will take lots of big fuel trucks (a k a Taliban Targets) off the road, expediting the end of the conflict.”

The last word goes to the contrarian hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham, who in his July letter to investors, noted: “Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for ... what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs and by right-wing politicians and think tanks? I have a much simpler but plausible ‘conspiracy theory’: the fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: “Have they no grandchildren?”

Read another foolish NYT post here.

Icecap Note: Mr. Grantham, I have three wonderful grandchildren and like most Americans I worry about the debt your wacky, loser green enviro agenda will have on their future. I know climate change is mainly natural and small and manageable by adaption. A green economy would leave us deeper and deeper in the red. It would make funds like Grantham’s very rich. As the cooling that started this new century resumes this winter as La Nina strengthens, you and Mr. Friedman will look the fool and we will remind the world how much. And it will come on quickly enough that even the elder now threatened by a shortened lifespan by Obamacare will see the theory fail miserably.