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Newsletter (February 19, 2010)
In this issue
Featured- Carbon Dioxide: The Breath of Life
- The End of the IPCC
- How the Greens Went Red
Debate- Is It 'Snowmageddon' or Climategate?
- Administration Proposes New Agency to Study Climate Change
- IPCC Scaremongering Is Destroying Its Credibility
- What to Say to a Global Warming Alarmist
Science- Evidence for Natural Climate Cycles in the IPCC Climate Models’ 20th Century Temperature Reconstructions
- Some Thoughts on the Warm January 2010
Economics- Solarize Your Home and Save Money?
Briefly Noted
Featuredby Sherwood B. Idso
President, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change; Former USDA Research Physicist; Fromer Adjunct Professor of Geology, Botany, and Microbiology, Arizona State University; Author, Carbon Dioxide and Global Change
December 4, 2009
Back to top by S. Fred Singer
Founder and President, Science & Environmental Policy Project; Co-author, NIPCC's Climate Change Reconsidered
American Thinker, February 10, 2010
Almost daily, we learn about new problems with the formerly respected UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): In their 2001 report, they claimed that the 20th century was "unusual" and blamed it on human-released greenhouse gases. Their infamous temperature graph shown there, shaped like a hockey stick, did away with the well-established Medieval Warm Period (around 1000AD, when Vikings were able to settle in Southern Greenland and grow crops there) and the following Little Ice Age (around 1400 to 1800AD). Two Canadians exposed the bad data used by the IPCC and the statistical errors in their analysis.
The most recent IPCC report of 2007 predicted the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers within 25 years; the imminent death of nearly half the Amazon rain forest; and major damage from stronger hurricanes -- all in contradiction to expert opinions offered by its appointed reviewers, but ignored by IPCC editors for mostly ideological reasons. More scandalous even, the IPCC based their lurid predictions on anecdotal, non-peer-reviewed sources -- not at all in accord with its solemnly announced principles and scientific standards.
These events showed not only a general sloppiness of IPCC procedures but also an extreme bias -- quite inappropriate to a supposedly impartial scientific survey. By themselves, they do not invalidate the basic IPCC conclusion -- that a warming in the latter half of the 20th century was human-caused, presumably by the rise of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. Yet all of these missteps pale in comparison to ClimateGate, which calls into question the very temperature data used by the IPCC's main policy result.
As the leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia (UK) reveal, this IPCC conclusion -- that Global Warming is anthropogenic -- is based on manipulated data and therefore flawed -- as are demands for the control of CO2 emissions, like the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Accord. In my opinion, ClimateGate is a much more serious issue than simply sloppiness and ideological distortion; ClimateGate suggests conspiracy to commit fraud. . . .
Read the rest.
Related items:
How to Reform the IPCC
by David Adam and Suzanne Goldenberg
Guardian, February 10, 2010
Scientists Say IPCC Should Be Overhauled or Scrapped
by Leigh Dayton
Science Writer, The Australian
February 11, 2010
India Supports a Toothless IPCC
by Barun S. Mitra
Director, Liberty Institute
Wall Street Journal, February 9, 2010Back to top by Randal O'Toole
Contributing Editor, Liberty; Senior Economist, Thoreau Institute; Senior Fellow, Cato Institute; Author, Gridlock: Why We're Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It and The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future
January-February, 2010
As many supporters of the free market have observed, the mainstream environmental movement firmly supports big government. Yet this wasn’t always true, and it is conceivable that it won’t always be true in the future.
I worked as a free-market environmentalist within the environmental movement for many years, and I still have many friends within the movement who support free-market ideas. I’ve found that the environmental movement is really many different movements, although they mostly fall into two categories. My friend John Baden likes to call them “romance and sludge.” I worked mostly in the romance area — forests, parks, wilderness, and wildlife — and only peripherally in the sludge area — air and water pollution, solid waste, and toxic chemicals. So my view may be a bit skewed, but my experiences should still be useful to those who want to promote free-market solutions to environmental problems.
“In wildness is the preservation of the world,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in 1862. But he also wrote, “that government is best that governs not at all.” Unlike many environmentalists today, Thoreau did not view government as the best, or even an appropriate, way to preserve the wildness that he valued so highly.
Since Thoreau’s time, conservationists and environmentalists have had a love-hate relationship with government. Some have pursued preservation using entirely private means. Others have focused on government programs — but almost invariably have been disappointed with the results. Only in recent years have environmentalists tied themselves almost exclusively to big-government programs. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top DebateInterview of E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
Wilberforce Forum, February 15, 2010
What impact if any, will be wrought from unscrupulous scientists desiring to preserve their own self interests and research in an attempt to shape the debate and influence global public policy focusing on the climate? This Monday, February 15th we once again welcome Dr. E. Calvin Beisner founder of and the National Spokesman for, the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, to the Forum as our guest. Dr. Beisner attended the Copenhagen Conference and we will be discussing this as well as Christian Creation Stewardship and our response as Christians, to environmentalism.
Related item:
Creation: Environmentalist Versus Environmentalism
Interview of E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
Wilberforce Forum, September 7, 2009Back to top Fox News and Associated Press, February 8, 2010
The Obama administration on Monday proposed a new agency to study and report on the changing climate, which has drawn concern among many scientists in recent years.
Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, announced NOAA will set up the new Climate Service to operate in tandem with NOAA's National Weather Service and National Ocean Service.
"Whether we like it or not, climate change represents a real threat," Locke said Monday at a news conference. . . .
The new agency will initially be led by Thomas Karl, director of the current National Climatic Data Center. The Climate Service will be headquartered in Washington and will have six regional directors across the country. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Bjorn Lomborg
Director, Copenhagen Consensus; Associate Professor, University of Aarhus, Denmark; Author, Lomborg.com; Author, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming
The Australian, February 17, 2010
. . . recent surveys show the public is growing steadily less trusting of the scientific consensus on global warming.
The biggest headlines about IPCC errors concern a claim about melting Himalayan glaciers that it made in its 2007 report on the likely impacts of climate change. "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world," the report noted, adding that "if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high". As it happens, this prediction was not based on any peer-reviewed scientific research but was lifted from a report by the World Wildlife Fund, which was repeating unproven speculation by a single researcher.
This lack of scientific basis did not stop countless global-warming activists from citing the glacier prediction at every opportunity. When the Indian government suggested last year that the Himalayan glaciers were in better shape than the IPCC claimed, the IPCC's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, dismissed India's objections as being based on "voodoo science". . . .
There are numerous other examples of similar shenanigans by Working Group II. Yet, aside from a grudging admission that its predictions about Himalayan glaciers were "poorly substantiated", the IPCC has yet to acknowledge, much less apologise for, any of the lapses.
If the IPCC is to do its job properly, it must own up to all of its missteps and clean house. Nobody expects it to be infallible. But neither should we tolerate its attempts to scare policymakers rather than inform them.
Read the rest.Back to top by Mark Landsbaum
Editorial Writer and Columnist, Orange County Register
February 12, 2010
ClimateGate: This scandal began the latest round of revelations when thousands of leaked documents from Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit showed systematic suppression and discrediting of climate skeptics' views and discarding of temperature data, suggesting a bias for making the case for warming. Why do such a thing if, as global warming defenders contend, the "science is settled?"
FOIGate:The British government has since determined someone at East Anglia committed a crime by refusing to release global warming documents sought in 95 Freedom of Information Act requests. The CRU is one of three international agencies compiling global temperature data. If their stuff's so solid, why the secrecy?
ChinaGate: An investigation by the U.K.'s left-leaning Guardian newspaper found evidence that Chinese weather station measurements not only were seriously flawed, but couldn't be located. "Where exactly are 42 weather monitoring stations in remote parts of rural China?" the paper asked. The paper's investigation also couldn't find corroboration of what Chinese scientists turned over to American scientists, leaving unanswered, "how much of the warming seen in recent decades is due to the local effects of spreading cities, rather than global warming?" The Guardian contends that researchers covered up the missing data for years.
HimalayaGate . . . PachauriGate . . . PachauriGate II . . . SternGate . . . SternGate II . . . AmazonGate . . . PeerReviewGate . . . RussiaGate . . . RussiaGate II . . . U.S.Gate . . . IceGate . . . ResearchGate . . . ReefGate . . . AfricaGate . . . DutchGate . . . AlaskaGate . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Scienceby Roy W. Spencer
Principal Research Scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville; Author, DrRoySpencer.com; Author, Climate Confusion
January 27, 2010
What can we learn from the IPCC climate models based upon their ability to reconstruct the global average surface temperature variations during the 20th Century?
While the title of this article suggests I’ve found evidence of natural climate cycles in the IPCC models, it’s actually the temperature variability the models CANNOT explain that ends up being related to known climate cycles. After an empirical adjustment for that unexplained temperature variability, it is shown that the models are producing too much global warming since 1970, the period of most rapid growth in atmospheric carbon dioxide. This suggests that the models are too sensitive, in which case they are forecasting too much future warming, too. . . .
We begin with the IPCC’s best estimate of observed global average surface temperature variations over the 20th Century, from the “HadCRUT3″ dataset. . . .
There are a couple of notable features in the above chart. First, the average warming trend across all 17 climate models (+0.64 deg C per century) exactly matches the observed trend...I didn’t plot the trend lines, which lie on top of each other. This agreement might be expected since the models have been adjusted by the various modeling groups to best explain the 20th Century climate.
The more interesting feature, though, is the inability of the models to mimic the rapid warming before 1940, and the lack of warming from the 1940s to the 1970s. These two periods of inconvenient temperature variability are well known: (1) the pre-1940 warming was before atmospheric CO2 had increased very much; and (2) the lack of warming from the 1940s to the 1970s was during a time of rapid growth in CO2. In other words, the stronger warming period should have been after 1940, not before, based upon the CO2 warming effect alone. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Roy W. Spencer
Principal Research Scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville; Author, DrRoySpencer.com; Author, Climate Confusion
February 8, 2010
I continue to get lots of e-mails asking how global average tropospheric temperatures for January, 2010 could be at a record high (for January, anyway, in the 32 year satellite record) when it seems like it was such a cold January where people actually live.
I followed up with a short sea surface temperature analysis from AMSR-E data which ended up being consistent with the AMSU tropospheric temperatures.
I’m sure part of the reason is warm El Nino conditions in the Pacific. Less certain is my guess that when the Northern Hemisphere continents are unusually cold in winter, then ocean surface temperatures, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, should be unusually warm. But this is just speculation on my part, based on the idea that cold continental air masses can intensify when they get land-locked, with less flow of maritime air masses over the continents, and less flow of cold air masses over the ocean. Maybe the Arctic Oscillation is an index of this, as a few of you have suggested, but I really don’t know.
Also, remember that there are always quasi-monthly oscillations in the amount of heat flux from the ocean to the atmosphere, primarily in the tropics, which is why a monthly up-tick in tropospheric temperatures is usually followed by a down-tick the next month, and vice-versa.
So, it could be that all factors simply conspired to give an unusually warm spike in January…only time will tell. . . .
Read the rest.
Related items by Roy W. Spencer:
January 2010 UAH Global Temperature Update +0.72 Deg. C
February 4, 2010
January 2010 Global Tropospheric Temperature Map
February 9, 2010Back to top Economicsby E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
February 13, 2010
The ill effects of financial illiteracy crop up in many ways. One of them is in boasts about saving money by solarizing homes.
An enthusiastic report about green energy in Hawaii tells of a couple there who have "been scorned for making the switch to clean energy. The couple spent $23,000 to put solar panels on their house . . . . Some neighbors sniffed that only rich people could afford such a luxury." But "The family's utility bill dropped from $110 a month to about $23."
The couple saved $87 a month on electricity. Fabulous!
Or maybe not. At that rate, they'd break even on their investment in slightly over 22 years--before adding the high maintenance costs to keep the solar panels clean and functioning at peak capacity, without which the energy savings will decline.
But there's more that's wrong. True financial management will consider the opportunity cost of the $23,000 initial purchase--what else could have been done with that money.
Suppose they had put that money into an investment that returned them even as little as 4%, compounding. In those 22 years their investment would have grown to over $54,508, a gain of $31,508, or an average of $119.35 a month.
In other words, rather than saving $87 a month, the couple is losing $32.35 a month. That means their investment will never pay off. It will impoverish them increasingly, year after year. Forty years down the line, they'll have forgone $87,423.50 in potential earnings--an average of $182.13 a month.
It may be, as the "neighbors sniffed," that "only rich people could afford such a luxury." But those who acquire it thinking it's going to save them money won't get rich--they won't even stay rich for long.Back to top Briefly NotedRoosevelt: Effort Underway to Suspend California's Global-Warming Law
Chesser: PSU Investigators Don't Inspire Confidence
Macrae: How Being Vegetarian Does More Harm to the Environment than Eating Meat
Watts: Inconvenient Truth in Britain--Scepticism on the Rise
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., National Spokesman
Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, http://www.cornwallalliance.org/
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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