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Newsletter (August 27, 2010)
In This Issue
Featured- The Catastrophe That Wasn't
- Response to the Climategate Inquiries
Science & Ecology- Are Surface Temperature Reconstructions Reliable?
- Socioeconomic Patterns in Climate Data
Economics & Energy- Wind Power Won't Cool Down the Planet
- Talking Green in Yellowstone
- "Extreme Weather"? Not Yet!
Religion & Ethics- LIES: You Can't Legislate Morality
- End Environmental Experiments On Africans!
Politics & Debate- Laputans In Retreat
Briefly Noted
Meet the Critics: William M. Gray, Ph.D
Landmark Documents from the Cornwall Alliance
Featuredby Paul Schwennesen
Author, MasterResource
August 25, 2010
Picture your neighbor’s pool. Unless you live in Malibu, it’ll contain about 6,000 gallons. That’s the “Gulf” for purposes of discussion. Now go to your garage, get a quart of oil and pour it in when he’s not looking. Pretty good sense of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, right?
Nope, not even close. Put a drop of that oil onto a sheet of paper and carefully cut it in half. Now do it again and toss that quarter of a drop into the deep end. Even this quarter droplet (about the size of the comma in this sentence) is about 10% too large, but NOW you have a sense of what 4.9 million barrels of oil in the Gulf looks like. . . .
Environmental issues are not “so important” that they must be left in the hands of the state to manage. Mistakes happen and errors in judgment arise in both the private and the public sector. The difference is that when they occur with backing from the state, they generally happen faster and more forcefully. As a responsible society we need to demand a sense of perspective in our calls for “action” while simultaneously maintaining a healthy respect for the world we live in.
Read the rest.Back to top by Ross McKitrick
Associate Professor of Environmental Economics, University of Guelph; Co-author, Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy, and Politics of Global Warming
August 9, 2010
Summary: Where do matters now stand? Returning to the five issues raised at the start, we can say that the evidence points to some clear conclusions.
1. The scientists involved in the email exchanges manipulated evidence in IPCC and WMO reports with the effect of misleading readers, including policymakers. The divergence problem was concealed by deleting data to “hide the decline.” Even the Muir Russell panel concurred, as was fitting, since the evidence was clear. The ridiculous attempt by the Penn State Inquiry to defend an instance of deleting data and splicing in other data to conceal a divergence problem only
discredits their claims to have investigated the issue.
2. Phil Jones admitted deleting emails in order to prevent disclosure of information subject to Freedom of Information laws, and asked his colleagues to do the same. But the inquiries have largely fumbled this question, or averted their eyes. Despite being asked by Parliament to conclusively resolve this issue, Sir Muir Russell did not attend the interviews with Jones and, as reported in UK media, his inquiry did not ask Jones if he had deleted emails.
3. The scientists privately expressed greater doubts or uncertainties about the science in their own professional writings and in their interactions with one another than they allowed to be stated in reports of the IPCC or WMO that were intended for policymakers. Rather than criticise the scientists for this, the inquiries (particularly the House of Commons and Oxburgh inquiries) took the astonishing view that as long as scientists expressed doubts and uncertainties in their academic papers and among themselves, it was acceptable for them to conceal those uncertainties in documents prepared for policy makers.
4. The scientists took steps individually or in collusion to block access to data or methodologies in order to prevent external examination of their work. This point was accepted by the Commons Inquiry and Muir Russell, and the authors were given gentle admonitions and encouragements to do somewhat better in the future.
5. The inquiries were largely unable to deal with the issue of blocking publication of papers, or intimidating journals. These get into subjective, he-said-she-said disputes, and in some cases the documentation was too sparse. But academics reading the emails could see quite clearly the tribalism at work, and in comparison to other fields, climatology comes off looking juvenile, corrupt and in the grip of a handful of self-appointed gatekeepers and bullies. The public uproar over the climategate revelations has abated: people cannot stay angry forever. But public suspicions about what they are being told regarding global warming have not been alleviated. Thus far four inquiries have failed to put the issues properly to rest. Scientists working on climate issues should take no comfort from these events. Until a real inquiry is formed that is prepared to tackle the real questions, hear all the evidence, properly cross-examine witnesses and follow the evidence wherever it leads, climategate will remain unresolved and the public will continue to look upon climate science with mistrust and suspicion.
Read the rest.Back to top Science & Ecologyby Blakeley B. McShane and Abraham J. Wyner.
Faculty member in the Marketing Department of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University (McShane); Associate Professor of Statistics at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (Wyner)
August, 2010
Predicting historic temperatures based on tree rings, ice cores, and other natural proxies is a difficult endeavor. The relationship between proxies and temperature is weak and the number of proxies is far larger than the number of target data points. Furthermore, the data contain complex spatial and temporal dependence structures which are not easily captured with simple models.
In this paper, we assess the reliability of such reconstructions and their statistical significance against various null models. We find that the proxies do not predict temperature significantly better than random series generated independently of temperature. Furthermore, various model specifications that perform similarly at predicting temperature produce extremely different historical backcasts. Finally, the proxies seem unable to forecast the high levels of and sharp run-up in temperature in the 1990s either in-sample or from contiguous holdout blocks, thus casting doubt on their ability to predict such phenomena if in fact they occurred several hundred years ago.
We propose our own reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere average annual land temperature over the last millenium, assess its reliability, and compare it to those from the climate science literature. Our model provides a similar reconstruction but has much wider standard errors, reflecting the weak signal and large uncertainty encountered in this setting.
. . . .
6. Conclusion. Research on multi-proxy temperature reconstructions of the earth’s temperature is now entering its second decade. While the literature is large, there has been very little collaboration with university level, professional statisticians (Wegman et al., 2006; Wegman, 2006). Our paper is an effort to apply some modern statistical methods to these problems. While our results agree with the climate scientists findings in some respects, our methods of estimating model uncertainty and accuracy are in sharp disagreement.
On the one hand, we conclude unequivocally that the evidence for a ”long-handled” hockey stick (where the shaft of the hockey stick extends to the year 1000 AD) is lacking in the data. . . .
Climate scientists have greatly underestimated the uncertainty of proxybased reconstructions and hence have been overconfident in their models. . . .
Natural climate variability is not well understood and is probably quite large. It is not clear that the proxies currently used to predict temperature are even predictive of it at the scale of several decades let alone over many centuries. Nonetheless, paleoclimatoligical reconstructions constitute only one source of evidence in the AGW debate.
Our work stands entirely on the shoulders of those environmental scientists who labored untold years to assemble the vast network of natural proxies. Although we assume the reliability of their data for our purposes here, there still remains a considerable number of outstanding questions that can only be answered with a free and open inquiry and a great deal of replication.
Read the rest.
Related item:
The McShane and Wyner Gordie Howe Treatment Of Mann
by William M. Briggs
Statistician
August 17, 2010Back to top by Ross McKitrick and Nicolas NierenbergAssociate Professor of Environmental Economics, University of Guelph; Co-author, Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy, and Politics of Global Warming (McKitrick); Nierenberg Foundation. (Nierenberg)
July 13, 2010
Summary: To generate a climate data set, temperature data collected at the Earth’s surface must be adjusted to remove non-climatic effects such as urbanization and measurement discontinuities. Some studies have shown that the post-1980 spatial pattern of temperature trends over land in prominent climate data sets is strongly correlated with the spatial pattern of socioeconomic development, implying that the adjustments are inadequate, leaving a residual warm bias. This evidence has been disputed on three grounds: spatial autocorrelation of the temperature field undermines significance of test results; counterfactual experiments using model-generated data suggest such correlations have an innocuous interpretation; and different satellite covariates yield unstable results. Somewhat surprisingly, these claims have not been put into a coherent framework for the purpose of statistical testing. We combine economic and climatological data sets from various teams with trend estimates from global climate models and we use spatial regressions to test the competing hypotheses. Overall we find that the evidence for contamination of climatic data is robust across numerous data sets, it is not undermined by controlling for spatial autocorrelation, and the patterns are not explained by climate models. Consequently we conclude that important data products used for the analysis of climate change over global land surfaces may be contaminated with socioeconomic patterns related to urbanization and other socioeconomic processes. . . .
We have shown that a coefficient pattern connecting temperature trends to indicators of industrialization is robust across a wide range of data configurations in the surface and lower troposphere, but is absent in climate mode-generated data. The failure to reproduce this pattern in models indicates that it is not a natural feature of the climate system nor a response to greenhouse gas-induced forcing. . . .
Therefore, our overall finding is that the strong explanatory influence of socioeconomic effects on the pattern of climatic trends over land cannot be explained away as spurious effects due to spatial autocorrelation, data selection or fluke correspondence with known atmospheric circulation patterns. In the absence of any alternative explanation we conclude with some confidence that the temperature data being used for most modern analysis of climate change is inadequately filtered to remove known contamination patterns related to urbanization and other socioeconomic influences. . . . [C]ontamination yields an overall warm bias over land.
Read the rest.
Related item:
Conflicted Reviewers Distort Literature
by Steven McIntyre
Author, ClimateAudit.org
August 10, 2010Back to top Economics & Energyby Robert Bryce
Managing Editor, Energy Tribune; Author, Gusher of Lies and Power Hungry
August 23, 2010
The wind industry has achieved remarkable growth largely due to the claim that it will provide major reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. There's just one problem: It's not true. A slew of recent studies show that wind-generated electricity likely won't result in any reduction in carbon emissions—or that they'll be so small as to be almost meaningless.
This issue is especially important now that states are mandating that utilities produce arbitrary amounts of their electricity from renewable sources. By 2020, for example, California will require utilities to obtain 33% of their electricity from renewables. About 30 states, including Connecticut, Minnesota and Hawaii, are requiring major increases in the production of renewable electricity over the coming years.
Wind—not solar or geothermal sources—must provide most of this electricity. It's the only renewable source that can rapidly scale up to meet the requirements of the mandates. This means billions more in taxpayer subsidies for the wind industry and higher electricity costs for consumers. . . .
"Wind energy gives people a nice warm fuzzy feeling that we're taking action on climate change." Yet when it comes to CO2 emissions, "the reality is that it's not doing much of anything."
Read the rest.Back to top by Roger Meiners
Senior fellow at the Property and Environmental Center in Bozeman, Mont., and Professor of economics at the University of Texas, Arlington
August 21, 2010
. . . Not far down the road from Bozeman is the village of Ennis, home to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Ennis National Fish Hatchery. The hatchery received $179,000 in stimulus money for solar panels, its share of last year's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
The fish hatchery uses about 34,000 kilowatt hours (kwh) of electricity annually. At 10 cents per kwh, that means a bill of $3,400. The solar panels, we are assured, will generate 75% of the hatchery's electricity, at zero cents per kwh. Assuming so, the annual electric bill will fall by $2,550. Applying that sum to the cost, the recovery period for the solar panels (ignoring interest rates) is 70 years. . . .
But since the feds are footing the bill, no one will walk away from this turkey. Nevertheless, we will pay for it. Or, more accurately, our great grandchildren will pay for it, since this piddly little project is part of the trillion-dollar deficit that we are unloading on future generations. There is no reason to think that other stimulus money is spent better than the money at the Ennis National Fish Hatchery.
That's the problem with stimulus spending for green jobs: It's a financial loser. The $179,000 spent on the solar panels means that some people at a panel factory got paid, as did the folks who installed the panels. But the bang for those bucks is less than the bang you get for your buck. When you spend your money, you choose what you want. When politicos spend your money, or your grandchildren's, there is less value. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Dennis T. Avery, Director
Center for Global Food Issues; Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute and Heartland Institute; Scientific Advisor, American Council on Science and Health; Co-Author, Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years
August 23, 2010
. . . civilizations collapsed around the world, simultaneously, 4200 years ago—in southern Green, Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, and China. The nomads on the Asian steppes gave up their seasonal farming, put their huts on wheels, and simply followed their herds seeking ever-scarcer grass. This massive drought—driven by a “little ice age”— lasted 300 years!
Egypt had more food security through its early history than anyplace else, but it collapsed in famine and political chaos three times between 4200 and 1000 BC—all of them during “little ice ages.” The Nile floods were also far below normal during the cold Dark Ages (450-950 AD) and during our recent Little Ice Age. . . .
We should take full advantage of the favorable climate we have been granted to increase research on high-yield agriculture, biotechnology, water conservation and other advances now only dreamt of. We must make true improvements in energy technology (not erratic windmills and solar panels that will be even less effective in a cloudy little ice age than today).The greatest danger to the future population is to be unaware that the good period will not last. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Religion & Ethicsby Coral Ridge Ministries
August 29, 2010
Cornwall Alliance founder Dr. Cal Beisner is among experts featured in this new video by Coral Ridge Ministries refuting the myth that "you can't legislate morality."
For a listing of stations and times where the full program will be broadcast, Click here: Coral Ridge Hour Television Station Listings.
View the video.Back to top by Fiona Kobusingye
Co-chair of the Congress of Racial Equality Uganda and Kill Malarial Mosquitoes Now coalition
August 24, 2010
I wish I had a shilling for every time someone told me spraying homes with DDT to prevent
malaria is like using Africans in evil experiments. I would be a rich woman.
That claim is a blatant falsehood. Even worse, it hides the many ways poor Africans really are being used in environmental experiments that cause increased poverty, disease and death.
If any people were ever used in DDT experiments, it was Americans and Europeans. During World War II, this insecticide and mosquito repellant was sprayed on tents and around camps to keep American and British soldiers from getting malaria. After the war, millions of concentration camp survivors, and millions of German and Italian citizens were sprayed with DDT (right on their bodies) to prevent typhus. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Politics & Debateby Ray Evans
Secretary of Lavoisier Group
August, 2010
Bob Carter is a member of a small group of Australian scientists (although he was born in the UK and mostly educated in New Zealand) who, having attained a distinguished position in their disciplines (he is a paleo-climatologist), were willing to put their reputations on the line by speaking out against the most extraordinary fraud in the history of Western science: the fantasy that by controlling anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, mankind can control global temperatures; a miraculous global thermostat.
This fantasy is so bizarre that Jonathan Swift could, using statements from today’s Royal Society without embellishment, write them into his account of the kingdom of Laputa. The citizens of Laputa lived on a cloud and threw rocks at rebellious surface cities beneath them. Using Laputa as a satire on the Royal Society, Swift portrayed the ruin brought about by the attempts by the scientists living in the clouds to impose their will on the helpless people living below them.
Bob Carter’s book is a well written account of the deep corruption of our scientific inheritance which has been central to the spread of this fantasy. It is a fantasy which has spread throughout the intellectual, political and religious elites of the English-speaking world, and which has infected key Australian institutions, notably the CSIRO, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, and virtually all our universities.
The foundation arguments on which this entire nonsense-structure is built are very simple. First, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide control the sun’s energy flow to and from the Earth and thus control global temperatures in particular and global climate generally. Second, anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide are driving atmospheric concentrations of this gas inexorably higher and higher, and the consequence will be climate catastrophe. . . .
Read the rest.Back to topBack to top Briefly NotedLowe: The Economic Costs of an Offshore Drilling Moratorium: A Summary of the Mason Study
Bradley, Jr: Latest on the Death Spiral of Climate AlarmismBack to top Meet the CriticsMeet the Critics gives you basic information on 64 of the leading critics of dangerous manmade global warming. Today's critic:
William M. Gray, Ph.D
Previously an Air Force weather forecaster and a meteorology researcher at the University of Chicago, award-winning hurricane forecaster William Gray serves as emeritus professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University and as head of their Tropical Meteorology Project. Asked in an interview whether global warming causes increasing hurricanes, Gray answered "No" and remarked, "Nearly all of my colleagues who have been around 40 or 50 years are skeptical . . . about this whole global-warming thing. But no one asks us." Along with another interview, some pieces of interest by Gray are his Senate testimony, his (2008 and 2009 International Conference on Climate Change presentations) Oceans, Not Carbon Dioxide, Are Driving Climate and Climate Change Is Primarily Driven by Salinity-Induced Deep Ocean Circulation Changes, and his article Get Off Warming Bandwagon.
Back to top Landmark Documents from the Cornwall Alliance
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., National Spokesman
Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
Information in this newsletter is for scholarly and educational use only and may not be copied or reproduced for any other purposes without prior permission of the copyright holders .
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