Global Climate Change: is it worth brushing off?

Snouts in the Carbon Trough


Mr Rudd accuses opponents of his Ration-N-Tax Scheme of “bowing to vested interests” (The Australian, 6/11/09).

That is the pot calling the kettle black.

The biggest vested interest is the ALP itself, hoping to harvest Green preference votes from their green posturing.

Supporting the alarmists are the gaggle of green industries already reaping dividends from the Rudd subsidies and market protection rackets.

Mr Rudd also tells us that his big business mates want the “certainty” of Emissions Trading.

A roll call of these people reveals domination by big firms of auditors and accountants, bankers and brokers, speculators and solicitors, touts and traders - all longing to get into the biggest trading lottery the world has ever seen - more snouts in the carbon trough.

The rest of big business merely wants the “certainty” of free emission permits or other special exemptions denied to Joe the Plumber and Fred the Farmer.

Sceptics on the other hand do not have a mercenary army of academics, bureaucrats and publicists who can be bribed or bullied to produce scary climate forecasts or doomsdays ads on demand.

http://carbon-sense.com/2009/11/08/snout...

Snouts in the Carbon Trough


Mr Rudd accuses opponents of his Ration-N-Tax Scheme of “bowing to vested interests” (The Australian, 6/11/09).

That is the pot calling the kettle black.

The biggest vested interest is the ALP itself, hoping to harvest Green preference votes from their green posturing.

Supporting the alarmists are the gaggle of green industries already reaping dividends from the Rudd subsidies and market protection rackets.

Mr Rudd also tells us that his big business mates want the “certainty” of Emissions Trading.

A roll call of these people reveals domination by big firms of auditors and accountants, bankers and brokers, speculators and solicitors, touts and traders - all longing to get into the biggest trading lottery the world has ever seen - more snouts in the carbon trough.

The rest of big business merely wants the “certainty” of free emission permits or other special exemptions denied to Joe the Plumber and Fred the Farmer.

Sceptics on the other hand do not have a mercenary army of academics, bureaucrats and publicists who can be bribed or bullied to produce scary climate forecasts or doomsdays ads on demand.

http://carbon-sense.com/2009/11/08/snout...

Dr. John Christy, a University of Alabama in Huntsville climate scientist

* The data being used to predict catastrophic warming is suspect.

* Models generated from that data "overstate the warming" actually taking place. The earth is warming, but not that much, and it has warmed and cooled for eons.

* The Earth's atmosphere is nowhere near as sensitive to carbon dioxide as some environmentalists believe.

* Any "solution" to perceived global warming must balance the growing worldwide demand for energy against cutting carbon dioxide output.

Fleet mileage requirements now proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency "would reduce global temperatures by about 1/100th of a degree," Christy said.

You would need to replace 1,000 coal-fired power plants with 1,000 nuclear plants to change global climate even .15 of a degree, he said.

"This is the scale (of global climate) we are talking about," Christy said.

* One cost of mandating harsh energy controls is the migration of industry to areas where requirements are less, Christy said.

In his talk, Christy also took aim at several other widely discussed pronouncements.

* Temperatures in the Arctic have increased over the last 100 years, he agreed, but that's only because 100 years ago "was the coldest it's been in a long time."

* Arctic ice has melted, but ice has grown in Anartica. Between the two, there's about as much ice as always.

* There are more polar bears now, not fewer. Canada issues 800 bear-hunting permits each year, he pointed out.

* Temperatures may be warmer in Greenland, but scientific experiments with ice fields show "that 4,000 years ago, it was warmer in Greenland than it is today.

"Greenland did not melt," Christy said.

Why is the apocalyptic view of climate change so widespread?

"Funding comes if you have an alarming story," Christy said.

He also cited "group think" and said scientists revel in the attention their views about climate brings.

"It's almost a drug," Christy said.

http://blog.al.com/breaking/2009/11/glob...

http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/1648-Global-Warming-SCAM-HackLeak-FLASH.html

Denninger posted information suggesting that data was intentionally falsified to "show" man-made global warming:

"Apparently a "Global Climate Center" was hacked and the contents have been posted to the Internet.  A ZIP file exceeding 60MB and containing a huge number of emails and other documents has been posted worldwide.

Original speculation as to whether the files posted were legitimate or some sort of spoof appears to now be confirmed as legitimate:

“It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.”

I have not had time to read all of the material yet (there are over a thousand files involved!) but what I have skimmed looks VERY damning.  Contained within the documents are what appear to be admissions of intentional tampering with data as well as intentional falsification of results to "show" man-made global warming.

One of the emails says:

"I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline."

That is, to hide a decline in global temperatures.

It gets better.  Another message, this one allegedly from 2000:

It was good to see you again yesterday - if briefly. One particular thing you said - and we agreed - was about the IPCC reports and the broader climate negotiations were working to the globalisation agenda driven by organisations like the WTO. So my first question is do you have anything written or published, or know of anything particularly on this subject, which talks about this in more detail?

Oh, so it's not about the planet getting warmer, but rather is a convenient means of advancing an agenda that has already been pre-determined?

Then there's this:

In my (perhaps too
> > harsh)
> > view, there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model
> > results by individual authors and by IPCC. This is why I still use
> > results from MAGICC to compare with observed temperatures. At least
> > here I can assess how sensitive matches are to sensitivity and
> > forcing assumptions/uncertainties.

(Pardon the formatting, it's text-mode email 'yanno.)

Guess who that was addressed to?  Michael Mann.  You know, the (infamous and now discredited) "Mann Hockey Stick"?

Guess where that email originated?  NASA.

Yes, I have the file.  So do a few million other people.

There's enough evidence in there, in my opinion, of outrageously fraudulent conduct to make this the scandal of the 20th and 21st century.

Sorry folks, there's no science here - this is, from what I see, a massive and outrageous fraud, and now that the documents have been confirmed as authentic it is time to pull the curtain down on this crap and start locking up all of the proponents - starting with AL GORE.

Here are some interesting "meta statistics" on the documents, and the number of times the words referenced appear:

• Fraud: 79
• Falsify: 6
• Inflate: 14
• Conceal: 5
• Hide: 19

Just for starters.

If you think that's bad, you might like this - from the file "ipcc-tar-master.rtf":

General Comments

The idea that climate without human intervention can only undergo “natural variability”, and that “climate change” can only result from human activity is false and fallacious. It is in conflict with all that we know of evolution and geology. It is simply wrong to assume that “ climate change” automatically implies human influence on the climate.

 

This fallacy is embraced by the Framework Convention on Climate Change, but the IPCC (Footnote to “Summary for Policymakers. Page 1) claim that they are prepared to accept “natural variability” as “climate change”. They are, however, unwilling to accept the truth, which is that climate can change without human intervention.

 

....

 

47 out of 91 models listed in Chapter 9 assume that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing at the rate of 1% a year when the measured rate of increase, for the past 33 years, has been 0.4% a year. The assumption of false figures in models in order to boost future projections is  fraudulent. What other figures are falsely exaggerated in the same way?

Update 12:58 - Oh oh.... From Phil Jones... and its recent:

From: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>
To: "Michael E. Mann" <mann@meteo.psu.edu>, "raymond s. bradley" <rbradley@geo.umass.edu>
Subject: A couple of things
Date: Fri May  9 09:53:41 2008
Cc: "Caspar Ammann" <ammann@ucar.edu>

....

 2. You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person who is putting in FOI requests for all emails Keith and Tim have written and received re Ch 6 of AR4. We think we've found a way around this.

And then there's this...

From: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>
To: "Michael E. Mann" <mann@meteo.psu.edu>
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

Mike,

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same?  I don't have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!
    Cheers
    Phil

One has to wonder: was the "way around it" (the FOI) mentioned in the first correspondence to intentionally destroy the emails requested?"

Skeptics and conspiracy buffs need to understand that even without any CRU data nor the publications of it scientists, there are MULTIPLE lines of evidence for AGW:

1)  UAH, RSS, and GISS show warming
2)  Rapidly warming Arctic
3)  Rapidly decreasing sea ice extent
4)  Rapidly thinning sea ice
5)  Rising ocean heat content
6)  Cooling stratosphere
7)  Net increase in downwelling LW
8 ) Net decreasing TOA LW emission
9)  Increased species migrations/extinctions
10)  Increased severe weather occurrences
11)  Glacier mass loss and retreats increasing
12)  Rising sea levels
13)  Most importantly: rapidly rising human emissions of GHGs that have not been seen in millions of years.

None of these things read emails and have decided to play along in a massive international conspiracy.

Scott A. Mandia, Professor - Meteorology
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/

And yet another affirmation that the opposition to climate change science is political, not scientific:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=climate-change-cover-up-you-better-2009-11-24  H/T M.W. and DD

Nothing here is new for those who have followed the science.

Doug

What a load of nonsense.....  The Greens are not even going to vote for the ETS in the Senate, and rightly so!  The only reason the Greens give their preferences (which is a compulsory part of our Australian system) is because, frankly, there's nobody elese that they could "prefer".

Now read this.....:

http://www.grist.org/article/climate-deniers-hold-your-fire/

We're with you. Really.

Climate deniers, hold your fire!
Posted 1:19 PM on 28 Nov 2009
by Andre Zaleska

I went through a tough half-hour of disbelief this week, when I encountered a very ordinary story in the Boston Globe. It was about the revised
estimates of sea-level rise for the next thirty years and how they will affect our city (guess what? -more of it will be underwater!) The article
was short, unremarkable, grim and based on peer-reviewed science.

Then there were the comments.

Dave Pomerantz from Greenpeace had emailed the story to a group of Boston 350 activists, noting that the deniers were going wild and we needed to counter by posting something.

As I scrolled down through some 50 replies, I found nothing but rage and denial at the scientists' findings, with a lot of righteous citing of the
recent ClimateGate "scandal" around the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia. Here's a few typical quotes:

"There is absolutely no truth to this whatsoever". "Go to www.telegraph.co.uk/news/James Delingpole or www.jamesdelingpole.com".
"The scam is just the tip of the iceberg." "Global warming is a conspiracy by left wing loonier scientists looking for $$$ and nothing else from all Gov'ts".

and

"Climate change is a proven, coordinated fraud that's been foisted upon the masses by politicans and corporations". "The NY Times, Fox and others are reporting on the recently uncovered shenanigans of the climate researchers, - yet the Globe is still pounding the drum of hypothetical hysteria. $463B worth of damage here in Boston? When?"

Ridiculous.I wanted to help out, but by the time I got to the end of the multi-author screed, I was nauseous and had nothing to say. But I've got
something to say now, and I will address it to the deniers themselves. I want to make it clear to those of you who doubt the science that tells you
our world is warming dangerously due to human burning of fossil fuels - much so that civilization itself, and up to half of the earth's species are
threatened by a cataclysm that we may have little power left to effect - that we agree with you. I am speaking for the activists, the scientists,
the writers and pundits who keep throwing this climate change thing in your faces. We are absolutely, 100% with you, and though you perceive a conflict of interests, political or existential or otherwise, there is NO conflict. We do not want this, we do not want to believe this, and we would give anything in the world to be wrong. If you see (correctly) that there are big egos invested in promoting the idea of climate change, then be assured that they are only there, puffed up all out of proportion, to counter the big egos of the opposition (coal and oil industry CEOs' egos, what?).

There is nothing we want more than to be wrong - to go home, forget it all happened, and retreat, shamefaced, to live out our ordinary lives. Every climate activist I have ever met is being eaten up from within: Every fiber of our being tells us that this shouldn't happen, that it's inconsistent with a loving God, or with a theory of evolution that states that a species wants above all to survive, or just with the basic horse-sense that people will never do anything to endanger themselves and their children. Even those of us who are bona-fide tree-huggers, militant vegetarians, or radical-simplicity wackos, still do not wish this on anyone. Everyone is a denier. (Okay, maybe not Adam Sacks!) We all read every scrap of science with the same hope that there will be new evidence of a cooling trend, or a colossal mathematical error that proves that carbon isn't trapped in the atmosphere at all, it's all benignly wafting out into space. We wait for that breaking story that the ocean is full of healthy coral and fish, and the dead pine forests of Canada will awaken and flourish again, because this just isn't possible! The planet can't die - who would let that happen? Some of us differ only in our incapacity to turn our heads away.

For whatever reason, we have lost the ability to believe that we are somehow protected, whether it be by a benevolent creator, the intelligence
of our species, the government, the positive, life-affirming forces of market capitalism, what have you. It may be a different process for others, but I think most of us who stare directly into the bright sun of climate change are convinced that the scientific method rigorous, peer-reviewed, replicable data if not - the scientists themselves, is sound and leads to the truth, however hard it may be.

Science is bigger than the will or desire of any scientist, and though not infallible, it is ethical. It is worthy of our faith and our humility, and it repeatedly reveals the persistent will of the earth to follow its own laws, and not ours. I can let the scientists and the activists speak for
themselves, and they have done so already. I'm only weighing in here to make one point, and that is that there is no conflict. We should call off
any battles we think we are waging. Activists - remember your own fear and denial. Deniers - please note that no one on earth could possibly want this - and then consider the facts.

Professor Scott - (hey you went to school, you did the work, you deserve the honorific )

I have no debate with 1-12 but I do have a question about 13.

How does the human piece of GHG emission stack up against natural causes of GHG buildup/emission?

Seems to me like most of the politicized debate hinges on the causes of 1-12.  From what I have read and studied, I just don't know that human factors are the predominant cause - contributing no doubt, but not the primary causal effect.

Would appreciate your thoughts on this.

Dogs

I'm not Prof. Mandia, but I posted this elsewhere.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/the-lag-between-temp-and-co2/

Quote:

The record of temperature shown in the ice core is not a global record. It is a record of local Antarctic temperature change. The rest of the globe does indeed parallel the polar changes closely, but the global mean temperature changes are smaller. While we don’t know precisely why the CO₂ changes occur on long timescales, (the mechanisms are well understood; the details are not), we do know that explaining the magnitude of global temperature change requires including CO₂. This is a critical point. We cannot explain the temperature observations without CO₂. But CO₂ does not explain all of the change, and the relationship between temperature and CO₂ is therefore by no means linear. That is, a given amount of CO₂ increase as measured in the ice cores need not necessarily correspond with a certain amount of temperature increase. Gore shows the strong parallel relationship between the temperature and CO₂ data from the ice cores, and then illustrates where the CO₂ is now (384 ppm), leaving the viewer’s eye to extrapolate the temperature curve upwards in parallel with the rising CO₂. Gore doesn’t actually make the mistake of drawing the temperature curve, but the implication is obvious: temperatures are going to go up a lot. But as illustrated in the figure below, simply extrapolating this correlation forward in time puts the Antarctic temperature in the near future somewhere upwards of 10 degrees Celsius warmer than present — rather at the extreme end of the vast majority of projections (as we have discussed here).

 

Global average temperature is lower during glacial periods for two primary reasons:
1) there was only about 190 ppm CO₂ in the atmosphere, and other major greenhouse gases (CH4 and N2O) were also lower
2) the earth surface was more reflective, due to the presence of lots of ice and snow on land, and lots more sea ice than today (that is, the albedo was higher).
As very nicely discussed by Jim Hansen in his recent Scientific American article, the second of these two influences is the larger, accounting for about 2/3 of the total radiative forcing. CO₂ and other greenhouse gases account for the other 1/3. Again, this was all pretty well known in 1990, at the time of the Lorius et al. paper cited above.

Basically methane and CO2 are off the charts compared to any time in the last half million years.  There is no explanation that I'm aware of for the relatively sudden spike in methane and CO2 other than human related discharges.  While correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation, there is no scientific doubt that both gases are greenhouse gases, so absent some other demonstrated intervening factor, you could reasonably expect temperatures to go up.  The scientists have pretty much eliminated any other explanation.

This is my opinion, but I'll toss it out anyway.  As has been repeatedly harped on by the denialists, solar activity has been very quiet for much of the past decade.  Further, there hasn't been a significant el nino during the same period.  Both of those phenomena are expected to be more active soon, thereby adding their forcings to the mix.  When they are added to the forcings of ghg's, the result could be quite significant.  It'll be an interesting decade for more than one reason.

Doug

by Pablo Paster, San Francisco  on 11.24.09

From a 1962 edition of Life Magazine available on Google Books

With 2 People on Board (Unlike Photo Above)
//

Last week many of us derived some pleasure from the irony of a Humble Oil Company advertisement in a 1962 edition of Life Magazine. It was rediscovered recently by a Grist reader, and subsequently covered by TreeHugger.

Humble Oil Company became Standard Oil before becoming Exxon. We know that Exxon spends more money on lobbying than the entire clean energy industry combined, much of it on framing climate change as a myth, was fined $1 billion dollars for sabotaging its own oil wells, pled guilty to killing protected birds, and who could forget (or forgive) the Exxon Valdez?

With such a long history of egregious offenses against the environment and a seeming disregard for what anyone thinks about it, it would hardly be a surprise if Exxon were to print this add today, as part of some climate change denial campaign. But what would the ad say today?

The original ad says:

Each day Humble supplies enough energy to melt 7 million tons of glacier!
The giant glacier has remained unmelted for centuries. Yet the petroleum energy Humble supplies -- if converted into heat -- could melt it at the rate of 80 tons each second. To meet the nation's growing energy needs for energy, Humble has applied science to nature's resources to become America's Leading Energy Company. Working wonders with oil through research Humble provides energy in many forms -- to help heat our homes, power our transportation, and to furnish industry with a great variety of versatile chemicals. Stop at a Humble station for new Enco Extra gasoline, and see why the "Happy Motoring" Sign is the World's First Choice!

Today ExxonMobil extracts 3.921 million barrels of oil per day, or about 3% of global oil production. A barrel contains 6.1 gigajoules (GJ) of chemical potential energy and it takes 333.55 joules to melt one gram of ice. Exxon's daily extraction rate translates into 23.9181 million GJ, enough to melt 79 million tons or 914 tons per second!

Of course what the Humble Oil Company neglected to include in their 1962 advertisement was the lasting gift from burning their oil. Not only can oil melt the ice directly with heat, but also indirectly though climate change. Unlike direct heat, which gets used up in melting the ice, the carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuel persists in the atmosphere for many years. So ExxonMobil's modern-day contribution is not just equivalent to 79 million tons per day of ice-melting potential but also the climate change contributions from all of the past combustion of its oil.

By the way, the glacier in the original ad is the Taku Glacier in Alaska. It would have added to the irony to include a photo of a severely atrophied Taku Glacier today but it appears that Taku Glacier isn't doing too bad, unlike so many other glaciers around the world. You can read more about the research that has been done on the Taku Glacier here.