Barrel Strength

Global warming, wind power and the euro: three fantasies in various stages of decomposition, or exploding into reality. A fine read.

Hats off to Christopher Booker in the Telegraph.

For example:

“Back in the 1970s, when this was first talked of, Sir Donald McDougall, a senior Treasury official, was commissioned by Brussels to produce a report on “The Role of Public Finance in European Integration”. He warned that economic and monetary union could only work if Europe was in effect given an economic government, with the power to dispose of between 25 per cent and 40 per cent of Europe’s GDP. This was because, as he foresaw, one of the core problems would be that if weaker countries were deprived of the power to set their own interest rates or to devalue, they would require a massive injection of resources from richer countries. Which, of course, is just what we now see being acted out in the desperate efforts to bail out Portugal, following in the wake of Greece and Ireland – with Spain, bigger than all three put together, possibly to follow.

“As McDougall and many after him warned, the single currency could only work on conditions which the builders of a united Europe blithely chose to ignore, in pursuit of their make-believe. As a result, its collision with reality is now coming about, threatening a disintegration of the eurozone that could tug much of the European dream after it.”

Almost all measures and predictions of further global warming are derived from models which generate extrapolations. The result is that nothing is disprovable. Change a parameter and you change the outcome. Everything depends on the assumptions you make. So all the outcomes  (we freeze, we roast) are just the mathematical result of what you assumed in the first place.

 So what is the problem, you ask? The problem is that scientists and engineers forget that they are dealing with “models”: stuff that comes straight out of their minds. It is like they preferred watching the weather channel, say, to looking out the window and recording rainfall and wind by actual measures.

 The cumulative effect of this bad habit may have had drastic consequences in Brisbane with the recent floods. See why at:

 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/operator-of-dam-invented-rain-data/story-e6frg6nf-1226028379093

“The claim by SEQWater in its official report that a “one-in-2000-year” rainfall event occurred over the Wivenhoe Dam at a critical stage on January 11 has been widely reported in the media and cited by senior public servants to justify the near loss of control of the dam at the time.

“But no such rainfall event was measured by any rainfall gauges. Instead, the claim was manufactured by SEQWater after it modelled the rapid rise of levels in the dam, repositioned rainfall data to an area immediately upstream of the dam, and then doubled it.

“After extrapolating in this unusual way to achieve an extreme number, the SEQWater report states: “Rainfall of this intensity and duration over the Wivenhoe Dam lake area at such a critical stage of a flood event was unprecedented.”….

“Mr O’Brien, who has mounted a strong case that the devastating floods in and near Brisbane would have been almost completely avoided with better management of the dam, said the one-in-2000-year event was an “invention” that could not be taken seriously.

“He said: “To get the inflow rate, SEQWater had to manufacture an unmetered rainfall event over the dam, which was twice the size of any of the metered rainfall events, and this becomes a rainfall event with a one in 2000.”

“A panel of hydrologists and engineers has categorised the Brisbane River flood as a “dam-release flood”, meaning it was largely the result of massive releases. Official SEQWater data has highlighted concerns the operator held too much water for too long in the dam over a few critical days before the flood, then released extremely large volumes.”

Grey Goose sends me the following from the left coast:

One of the best descriptions of the perversion of science we are witnessing with AGW is found here.

Conclusions first, evidence later. The goal is power, not truth.

Or why the term “climate science” has become an oxymoron.

I am posting something a received from a global warming fanatic. I want you to read it. Why? Because it impresses me with the sincerity and profundity of his fanaticism, that’s why. And the policy outcomes are all based on what happens to the computer models, based on certain assumptions. A lesson there, perhaps?

(What follows is from the AGW doomsayer.)

[Here is an excellent article that puts in stark perspective the
challenges we face with future global warming. The insouciance of
politicians and the public to this imminent threat is startling to
mind, especially in countries like The Netherlands and Australia which
will likely to be the first countries to suffer the disastrous
consequences of climate change in the next few years (not decades, but
years).

We have been lulled into a false sense of security that climate
change will be a gradual process of slightly warmer summers and milder
winters. More importantly economists assure us that minor impositions
such as carbon taxes or cap and trade and some token attempts at
energy efficiency are all we need to address this problem. Nobody is
paying heed to the non-zero possibility of the black swan where we
face a rapid series of global catastrophic tipping points.

As I have blogged in the past the probability of these threats may be small, but
they are real. In every aspect of society we need to start to plan on
how to survive global warming and do some minimum analysis on the
worst possible outcomes. The Internet may be the critical information
medium for communication and survival in this coming age of climate
uncertainty.

Designing networks to survive climate change is a first
step http://goo.gl/srJGy-- BSA]

http://www.grist.org/article/2011-02-09-smackdown-climate-science-vs-climate-economics

“Climate scientists are becoming increasingly panicked as new
evidence rolls in and just about every bit is worse than the last. The
impacts of climate change are coming faster and harder than most
models predicted, and there’s a real — if maddeningly difficult to
quantify — risk of civilization-threatening scenarios that sound like
bad sci-fi movies.

The standard line among climate hawks is that science recommends “80
percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.” (That’s for
developed world countries; globally, the target is 50 percent by
2050.)

But that recommendation is based on the last IPCC report, which
is by all accounts woefully conservative, especially given that the
science since then has been uniformly grim. There’s good reason to
think these official consensus forums underestimate the severity of
the problem.

To get back below the more ambitious target of 350 ppm of CO2 in the
atmosphere (which we’re already well above), the U.S. and other rich
countries will probably have to get close to zero carbon by 2050, with
the developing world not far behind.

Few people understand how brain-explodingly ambitious that is.
Certainly no one in the U.S. political establishment. Whether you
think it’s necessary and affordable in the grand scheme of things (I
do), there’s no denying it’s a huge honking lift. (Watch the video of
super-nerd Saul Griffith over on the right for a taste. It will change
your life.)

[…]

From what economists tell us, it looks like the worst thing
policymakers risk on climate change is somewhat slower economic
growth. One way or another, we’re getting wealthier.

This represents what is perhaps the foundational faith of modern
economics: a faith in human adaptability and ingenuity. Especially via
the distributed decision making represented by open markets, humans
can master almost any circumstances given time. (For a recent example
of this optimism on Grist, see economist Matthew Kahn.)

Nowhere in these models will you find any hint of Diamond- or
Lovelock-style apocalypse. Instead, future people will be much
wealthier and, because of that, better able to cope with the problem.

[…]

Is climate change truly an existential threat — an immediate danger
and a small but growing risk of substantial societal collapse? Or is
it a creeping change to which humanity needs to make a carefully
calibrated, economically optimized response as it continues to
flourish? How do we fit these two visions in our heads? And more
importantly, what, given these different visions, should we do?

And the winner is …

Of course, economists would tell you that they have reconciled those
stories — that’s what the models do. The damages of climate change
are built right in. The results don’t look like catastrophe because,
dammit, Man Will Overcome.

Anyway, that’s what the models will tell you. But if you talk to the
economists themselves, they’re not quite as gung ho. For one thing,
they will admit that their models aren’t very good at incorporating
large short-term shocks. The “long tail” possibilities in climate
science — the low-probability, high-impact stuff like ice shelves
collapsing or thermohaline circulation shutting down — completely
borks the models. You start seeing wild, arbitrary swings in model
projections based on small adjustments in input assumptions. The
models start saying, in essence, “hell if I know!”

Unfortunately, that leaves the field to economists like William
Nordhaus, whose model tells a soothing story of slowly rising costs,
smoothly offset by a slowly rising carbon tax. The message: don’t
panic. That message is all too welcome in the halls of power.

——

As you can see, if you have read this far, is that models (where all the inputs and fudge factors are human constructs) drive the apocalypse. My models break down under these assumptions! So reduce global GHG emissions by 50% by year “n” because my computer crashes! As Steve McIntyre pointed out in one of his books, we cannot even model a thunderhead, let alone a climate system.

After a month of snow on the ground  in most of Canda,  it is always amusing to hear that astronomical winter begins today.

So Europe staggers under snowfalls that we in Canada assign civic officals to handle. Meanwhile it snowed in the summer solstice in Australia, and George Monbiot finds that colder winters are evidence of global warming. His evidence is quite reasonable, but amidst all the discussion of Atlantic oscillations and recondite matters of climatology, he never asks the essential question  what actually would constitute evidence of global cooling? What is not evidence for global warming?

Monbiot complains:

“Sod all that, my correspondents insist: just look out of the window. No explanation of the numbers, no description of the North Atlantic Oscillation or the Arctic Dipole, no reminder of current temperatures in other parts of the world, can compete with the observation than there’s a foot of snow outside. We are simple, earthy creatures, governed by our senses. What we see and taste and feel overrides analysis. The cold has reason in a deathly grip.”

It is not reason which in a deathly grip, it is Monbiot. He keeps waiting for the equivalent of the Second Coming of Christ, unaware that his view is religion dressed up as science.

If everything constitutes evidence of global warming: if it is cooler, or warmer, or dryer, or wetter, then AGW is not a scientific theory, because it cannot be disproven. But we knew it was a religion (for the true believers) and a scam (for the bureacrats seeking power over everyone else).

A quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein may be apposite.

He (Ludwig Wittgenstein) once greeted me with the question: “Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went around the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?” I replied: “I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went around the earth”. “Well,” he asked, “what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?”

To wit, get the wrong idea in your head and everything seems to be evidence for it.

By the way, the person making the most accurate predictions of weather lately is Piers Corbin, who is a follower of solar cycles, something that readers of this blog will have noticed me going on about for as long as this blog has existed.

“He looks at the flow of particles from the Sun, and how they interact with the upper atmosphere, especially air currents such as the jet stream, and he looks at how the Moon and other factors influence those streaming particles.

“He takes a snapshot of what the Sun is doing at any given moment, and then he looks back at the record to see when it last did something similar. Then he checks what the weather was like on Earth at the time – and he makes a prophecy.

“I have not a clue whether his methods are sound or not. But when so many of his forecasts seem to come true, and when he seems to be so consistently ahead of the Met Office, I feel I want to know more. Piers Corbyn believes that the last three winters could be the harbinger of a mini ice age that could be upon us by 2035, and that it could start to be colder than at any time in the last 200 years. He goes on to speculate that a genuine ice age might then settle in, since an ice age is now cyclically overdue.”

_____________________________________________

 I would like now to sing the praises of our snow removers.

Have you ever thought of the coordination required to do all of the following: arrange to notify people on the street to get their parked cars to move in time, get a grader to push the ice and snow into rows, a sidewalk snow clearer to push the stuff into the street, a snow blower, and fifty dump trucks to show up in proper sequence to get the snow into the street, thrown into the dump trucks, and carted off to the snow dump in sequence so that the snow blower has a continuous supply of dump trucks to feed? Yet we seem to manage it every winter, because we have to and because we have had practice.

I once saw a dump truck driver reading a book on electrical engineering as he waited for his next assignment, high up in the cab. He may be exceptional, but the average level of capability of a snow removal crew is at least equal to a mechanized brigade in the army.

Practice makes perfect.

Hard to tell, as the author attempts to slag the Harper government with this:

Mr. Baird’s aggressive message – a classic instance of throwing stones at glass houses – was designed entirely for Canadian consumption, since Canada long ago lost any shred of credibility on the world stage for climate change.

Wouldn’t  throwing stones at glass houses — rather than from within one — actually be a very effective aggressive strategy? As opposed to sloppy crafting of metaphors?

The other Simpson, however, got it right:

Why make 31 flavors when you can’t get vanilla right?

In England the current two-week period is the coldest since they started keeping records in 1659.  That is 350-years of record keeping.  Just imagine how much colder it would be over there without global warming!

Is it safe to say that next 10 years will be much hotter thus confirming the trend to further global warming?

We are deluged with insanities; indeed it can be argued we are drowning in them. They are  vast, powerful, and comprehensive. They derive from the inability to face facts, and to face facts, we would have to give up the precious ruling insanity (RI) of Western society since World War 2. First the symptoms, then the cause.

Here are three of the manifestations currently at work:

1. Airport searches, of an increasingly intrusive nature,  are predicated on a terrorist threat the source and nature of which -Islam – is not faced, discussed,or allowed to be spoken about in public discourse.

2. Canada is letting in 250,000 immigrants a year for the purpose of keeping our population from shrinking and maintaining the tax base to save our pensions, yet each succeeding generation of immigrants is less well-intergrated and less well-paid than its predecessor. Each immigrant subsequently brings in a host of relatives, whose presence largely or wholly negates the economic value of the productive immigrant Canada originally allowed in. Immigrants are increasingly deriving from societies whose goals, mores and political cultures are antithetical to our own. (see point one above)

3. We are raising electricity prices to favour renewable energy, and shutting down efficient fossil-fuel generating plants,wrecking the landscape with enormous bird-killing windmills, on the basis of a (man-caused) global warming hypothesis whose foundations have been shown to be fraudulent.

Perhaps you have your own set of insanities. Why, for instance, were the police required to suspend the rule of law in Caledon, Ontario to allow rebel Indians to run amok terrorizing the white citizens of Caledon in the enforcement of Indian land-claims?

I will tell you. They are related phenomena. The doctrine of racial, social, religious equality has been pushed to the point where different racial, social, religious or other group outcomes has been ruled presumptively illegal and immoral. This, I submit, is the ruling insanity of Western society. It seems that only the collision with something as huge, implacable, intolerant, and intrusive as Islam will force us to wake up from this delusion. If only we wake up in time.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/sep/30/10-10-no-pressure-film

The short film, No Pressure, which may have been vacuumed from the Internet by the time your read this, depicts students, workers and football players being obliterated at the push of a button for declining to reduce their “carbon footprints”, the new term for eco-sin.

The bright, cheery and casual manner in which this is done – and accepted as right – shows you that that Dalwhinnie’s Second Law of Human Behaviour is correct:

There is a fixed amount of intolerance; its targets are periodically dispersed, concentrated and re-assembled.

A move that showed gassing Jews or beheading Christians might be seen as equally funny by these kinds of people, if Jews and Christians were the favoured targets of the righteous bigots who constitute the Green movement. For the moment, they are not.

Lawrence Solomon cites,

“The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider.  The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.”

“Climate science” has become one of those words you cannot hear without airquotes. Like “Study shows”.

The volcanic ash cloud that stopped airtraffic for several days was less than one twentieth the level that would have caused damage to aircraft engines, report’s The Daily Mail.  Junk science in the service of alarmists. Where have we heard this before?

The airplane that could have accurately determined what the level of ash was, was in the shop for a paint job. So they turned to computer models, you know, the kind that determine whether the planet is warming.

“The National Air Traffic Control Service decision to ban flights was based on Met Office computer models which painted a picture of a cloud of ash being blown south from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano.”

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1268794/Remember-ash-cloud-It-didnt-exist-says-new-evidence.html#ixzz0mDh8Ijzu

When the Climategate scandal erupted, do you recall that Google listed far fewer references to it than did Bing and other search engines?

The attached interview with Dan Reicher, chief of energy plans for Google, and a former Assistant Secretary for Energy in the US government, explains why.

“Turns out, the answer is technology. Reicher — a former Department of Energy assistant secretary who now directs Google’s investments in clean energy — believes that exposing the hidden costs of dirty fuels will set off a rush of investment in new energy innovations. He says carbon pricing is an “essential signal we have to get to.” Right now, “money is sitting there to make significant investments,” he says, but the cash flow is sidelined because the incentives aren’t there.”

Let us deconstruct carbon pricing. According to Google it is “the true price of carbon combustion.”

What is the true price? Clearly it is not the price you currenly pay. On the contrary, it is the price you would pay if Google and its minions manage to add all the taxes they think you should pay to deal with the effect of using fuels. Guess what they are? Taxes for global warming caused by using carbon-based fuels.

What global warming?

“As Reicher puts it, “putting a serious price of carbon will both get us closer to the serious energy reductions we need to make but also accelerate the domestic development and adoption of these technologies.” It’s that last part that’s good for business. When government holds up its side of the “triangle of technology, policy, and finance” that Reicher says is essential for green development, it spurs the private investment and innovation that keeps businesses strong.

That’s where Congress comes in. The most important policy is carbon pricing. That’s what will change the economic fundamentals, augmented by other programs — like energy efficiency standards and government revolving loans to bring new ideas to the market. The technology and finance sides are ready and able; but we’ve been waiting for too long for the policy piece that can complete the puzzle.

Google hopes the Senate will act quickly to jumpstart what it thinks will be an economic bright spot in the current downturn. Reicher doesn’t really care how it’s done, saying there are “various ways to get to a carbon price.” Whatever packaging it comes in, a price on carbon will ultimately be good for that company and many others.

British Information Commissioner forces the hand-over of tree-ring data to “arch-skeptic”, and part time climate analyst, Doug Keenan. Professor Mike Baillie claims the decision is a “staggering injustice”.

The article concludes:

Keenan, who admits he has no expertise in tree-ring analysis, says that whatever the data may or may not reveal, the university has no right to keep the data secret. The deputy information commissioner agrees.

The finding, combined with Smith’s earlier strictures against the University of East Anglia, could have widespread repercussions for academic research. Baillie calls the ruling “a direct, and unpleasant, off-shoot of the information revolution. It now appears that research data can be demanded, and indeed obtained, by anyone.”

Keenan, meanwhile, has upped the ante. Following the ruling, he this week asked the university to supply emails between Baillie and the head of the university’s centre for climate, environment and chronology, Paula Reimer over the past three years. He told the Guardian they could reveal a conspiracy to prevent him getting Baillie’s data. “The university has obviously not understood how things changed in the wake of climategate,” he said. “They still think they can act with impunity.”

Why do we live in Canada? Canada is Huron for “post-glacial scrape”. It is cold three-quarters of the time. If your woodpile is gone by the end of March, you still have all of April and a good deal of May left in which to heat your house. Yes I know that the thaw begins in earnest most years in early April. This year it began in mid-March. Whoopee-doo! It is so close to an ice age here,  every month of the year except June, July, August, and September, and even in September you have the stove on some nights to keep the cabin warm.

I sat outside tonight smoking a cigar, which I recommend as a contemplative activity, seated on my deck, in the lee of my cabin.  I watched pine trees sway 15 degrees off-centre in a relentless ongoing blast of cold wind. The temperature, which had attained a freakish 30 degrees centigrade last weekend,  seven days ago (not seen since 1966), was officially 8 degrees tonight. I sat outside in a thick sweater, a windbreaker over it, with a toque (wool hat to Yanks) and gloves, wondering how any creature could live tonight. Every bird must be huddled in the woods, and any mammal must be in a burrow or a barn.

I once hear a Sudanese taxi driver describe what it was like to go home. Everyone slept outdoors on cots in the hot season (11 months of the year, I suppose), so that everyone was rather like in summer camp: the night was filled with the sound of people chatting amiably into the late hours. The night was a social and hospitable time.  Nor does the house in a hot climate  function  as it does in Canada. Here, one’s house is a heat conservation device. There, one’s house is a place to store property, or fend of an attack.  The kitchen is separated so that the house does not absorb the heat of cooking. Too hot inside? Take your bed out into the starry night, where everyone else is out on their cots  talking in low voices.

As the wind blasted outside tonight, I thought of the Dominican Republic, where we were a month ago.  There, you stick a cut wooden pole into the ground, and half the time it sprouts roots and turns into a tree.  And our trees! The weather invited them to sprout leaves last week, as if this place were the Dominican Republic. But the trees were too wise. They are programmed not to be deceived by warmth coming too early on the season, possibly because they work according to the warmth of the earth, not the sun.

And colour! Here every colour is found on a camouflage suit: grey-brown, grey, dark green, reddish-brown, and maybe black.  The northern eye longs for the yellows, blues, oranges and reds of flowers, and gets them for four months a year.

It seems I am always cutting wood, splitting, stacking and drying it for two years, so that when it meets its destiny in a cast-iron stove , it will burn well. So that, when I come in from the cold, I feel the palpable warmth of the cabin, and know that, though I live in an oven for three-quarters of the year, it is a safe place, where we can comfortably endure the dreadful climate we live in. Where the glass of wine is on the table, and great music on the horn.

I know this is no more than the adapted northen mind speaking, but life in the Canadian house-oven is quite comfortable. It has to be so. Everyplace else in post-glacial scrape is miserable. If you don’t believe me, just stand outside tonight in the wind.