Barrel Strength

Declan McCullagh at CBSNews.com may be the only mainstream journalist covering the only real climate story – fortunately, he is excellent.

Nothing like a little betrayal for that second morning hangover.

In his letter from Copenhagen, Michael M’Gonigle, formerly a lawyer for Greenpeace, argues that the Copenhagen Treaty should fail, essentially because it cannot go far enough:

“The only outcome that matters in the end is on how we can redirect this new energy to where it actually needs to be — from the partial restraints of Copenhagen to full blown eco-conversion. Copenhagen is a story of many contradictions, but the need to “lose” at Copenhagen in order to expand the momentum for this conversion is the biggest of the bunch.”

M’Gonigle argues that the proposed treaty will set minimums (reductions of CO2 emissions)  that will inevitably become maximums, so that the lowest common denominator of all countries becomes the maximum that any one of them is bound by treaty to achieve.

“One last lesson: even minimal targets are meant to be missed. We have seen this with the Kyoto Protocol.”

M’Gonigle continues:

“If you were to pass around a single piece of information at Copenhagen, it should be the two pages of graphs at the beginning of an interesting book written by Gus Speth, this generation’s leading environmental bureaucrat in Washington D.C. The book is The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. Speth sets out 16 hockey stick graphs that portray increases in water use, in the damning of rivers, in CO2 concentrations, ozone depletion (hopefully now slowing down), rates of increase in average surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, the rising frequency of great floods, depletion of ocean ecosystems, loss of rainforests, biodiversity decline, increases in fertilizer and paper consumption, and the explosion in the number of motor vehicles.

“And three others: growth in the size of the global economy (GDP), foreign direct investment, and population.

“Together, these graphs — all hockey sticks — provide a single message. We are killing the earth in every way imaginable, getting rich in the process, and providing a model for a growing world population to join in on.”

You can agree or disagree with the observation that “we are killing the earth in every way imaginable”. The points I am making about this letter from Copenhagen are that:

1) no sooner is the CO2 scandal exposed than the topic changes; and

2) not all of these problems are imaginary. Some, in fact, are based on real events, such as ocean fish depletion, deforestation, and riverine pollution. Do you remember cod?

But to the extent that public attention shifts to possibly real problems and away from certainly unreal ones, we might  all, just possibly, benefit.

Last night’s Munk debates saw George Monbiot and the leader of Canada’s Green Party, Elizabeth May, debate Bjorn Lomborg and Nigel Lawson on “Resolved: Climate change is mankind’s defining crisis and demands a commensurate response”. After the event, the crowd gave the vote to the May-Monbiot side by 56%-44%. The debate had caused a five point move towards  Lawson-Lomborg.

The debate never got to the main issue: that man-caused global warming is a complete fraud.

This is what I would have said.

Man-caused global warming is the issue. Does it exist and can we stop it?

Natural variations in climate are not the issue. Antarctica could melt tomorrow and it would be a disaster, but it would not be our fault, or caused by us, if it were the result of natural forces.  Polar bears could drown, hurricanes intensify, and spring might come to central Canada in March instead of April, and it would not prove a  thing.

We have been relentlessly assaulted by stories of melting ice-shelves and stranded polar bears, and we have been told we are responsible. But this would be true only if increases of atmospheric carbon dioxide increased global temperature. Apparently it does not, and the whole cap and trade scam goes out the window in consequence.

 The global warming argument is simple, and rational. It may not be defended by reasonable people acting in a proper scientific way but it is at least a rational argument.

1. Increases of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere cause global warming. No other cause is relevant: not the position and tilt of the earth, the shape of our orbit, the output of the sun, not clouds, not cosmic rays, not continental drift, not volcanoes, not anything that acts on the earth naturally. We, and we alone, are the cause of global warming.
2. The proportion of the atmosphere made up of carbon dioxide continues to increase . All observers agree to this.
3. We are causing that increase of carbon dioxide, so global warming is our responsibility.
4. Drastic action is needed to reduce our carbon footprints to save the earth from runaway global warming caused by man’s pollutive activities.
5. Those who disagree are in bad faith and should be silenced.

But wait! Global CO2 is increasing, but global temperature has not increased for ten years.

“The fact is we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it’s a travesty that we can’t” – Kevin Trenberth.

This is the central fact that the warmist ideologues at the East Anglia Climate Research Centre and elsewhere sought to explain, deny or avoid. Why did their models fail to explain why, when atmospheric CO2 was increasing, global temperature did not? They, at least, understood the key logical link in their own argument. This failure of the fundamental causal link in their theory is what they attempted to cover up, by a variety of thuggish and deceitful measures.

This is not a story about science, or about nasty scientists. It is about the colossal failure of a prediction based on a flawed premise. CO2 does not drive global temperature.

The fact that CO2 does not appear to control global temperature is the logical fault at the core of the warmist argument. Say it again: CO2 is increasing in the atmosphere, but global temperature is not.

Obviously, the theory is wrong. Atmospheric carbon dioxide does not drive global temperature. Since we are not causing the problem, the warmist case fails.

All the rest is just shouting at the bar. 

_____________________________________________

Lomborg maintained a brilliant debating style. His take is that, of many pressing world problems, global warming is nearly last on the list, and fixing it will take trillions and prevent the solution of other, readily soluble problems. Elizabeth May was so enraged at Lomborg – and so filled with rage generally – that she had to be silenced by the cutting off of her microphone for several minutes. (I have started to notice a bunch of unhappy women of a certain age turn into scolds: May is in a large company of people, disproportionately female, who feel they have the sovereign right to tell people how to live, feel, think and believe).

In case anyone thinks we skeptics tend to exaggerate the extent to which the AGW crowd has gone completely over the top into a frenzy of self righteousness and exaggeration, please go to  http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/, which is produced by Bill St. Arnaud, chief technologist for Canada’s backbone university computing network.

Amidst many interesting and possibly quite useful notions for making energy consumption more efficient – no objections here – we find the two excerpts below and the absence of any mention, however disdaining, of climategate.

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2009/11/world-on-course-for-catastrophic-6-rise.html“>World on course for catastrophic 6° rise, reveal scientists

World on course for catastrophic 6° rise, reveal scientists – Climate Change, Environment -

The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. …

Note the date, relative to the East Anglia CRU hack. Also of interest, in the article cited in part above, the authors of the alrmist report were a group of scientists called the Global Carbon Project study:

“The Global Carbon Project study, led by Professor Corinne Le Quéré, of the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey, which found that there has been a 29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel between 2000 and 2008, the last year for which figures are available.”

uh-huh. Why are we not surprised? and further….

Fossil Fuel Is the New Slavery: Morally and Economically Corrupt

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-chase/fossil-fuel-is-the-new-sl_b_310007.html
Fossil Fuel Is the New Slavery: Morally and Economically Corrupt

A century and a half ago, fossil fuels replaced slaves as the underpriced energy source driving American economic growth. And like slavery, our deep economic dependence makes change difficult, despite the incontrovertible reality that our fossil-fueled system is profoundly wrong. America could not thrive while captured by the slave economy, nor can she thrive while in thrall to a carbon-based economy.

It required almost a hundred years and a devastating civil war to rid the US of slavery. Business interests fought to retain the morally and economically corrupt status quo. Favorable economics prompted blindness and slow response to the moral imperative for ending slavery. Favorable economics today cloud the minds of many legislators and business interests to cling to our system of underpriced fossil fuels. Despite the best efforts of Congressmen Waxman and Markey, the climate bill out of Congress proposed 2020 goals of only 17 percent reductions in CO2 over 2005 levels and passed by the narrowest of margins. Science tells us our 2020 goals need to 25 to 40% reductions over 1990 levels. Senators Boxer and Kerry have proposed 20%, a step in the right direction.

Ownership of another human being and reaping the benefit of their labor is repugnant. While burning fossil fuels is not as intimately observable or viscerally felt, a direct link from our actions to real individual suffering can be traced. [snip]

And there will be more casualties. The best estimates of the slave trade’s death toll are 15 to 20 million people over its 400-year history. Failure to move to a new low-carbon energy source will result in a similar magnitude of unforgivable suffering and death. The World Health Organization says that climate change was responsible for 300,000 deaths this last year, predicting as many as 9 million excess deaths over the next 20 years alone. Almost all of these initial victims will be among Africa and Asia’s poorest who have no voice and no vote with regard to what happens in the US Congress. [snip]

Delaying real change is intolerable. Unlike slavery, the global warming legacy will be forever irreparable and unrecoverable. New predictions indicate a good chance of a nine degree global temperature increase this century. What we eat, where we live, how we live, and indeed who lives will be changed. Forever. Again, we face an undeniable moral imperative.”

_________________________________

So it is nine degrees in this article up from six in the previous one. 

And if I burn the logs I cut in my woodstove, is this the moral equivalent of  slavery. or merely feudalism?

George Monbiot, England’s chief propagandist for anthropogenic global warming (AGW), has recently found reason to call for the resignation of Phil Jones, head of the Climate Research Unit for criminal suppression of evidence.

In a column produced in November 2 this year, he tried to explain why global warming denial was spreading so fast.

“Almost all my fiercest arguments over climate change, both in print and in person, have been with people in their 60s or 70s. Why might this be?” he asked.

He answered his rhetorical industry thus:

“A recent paper by the biologist Janis L Dickinson, published in the journal Ecology and Society, proposes that constant news and discussion about global warming makes it difficult for people to repress thoughts of death, and that they might respond to the terrifying prospect of climate breakdown in ways that strengthen their character armour but diminish our chances of survival(14). …. Dickinson proposes that growing evidence of climate change might boost this tendency, as well as raising antagonism towards scientists and environmentalists. Our message, after all, presents a lethal threat to the central immortality project of Western society: perpetual economic growth, supported by an ideology of entitlement and exceptionalism.

“If Dickinson is correct, is it fanciful to suppose that those who are closer to the end of their lives might react more strongly against reminders of death? I haven’t been able to find any experiments testing this proposition, but it is surely worth investigating. And could it be that the rapid growth of climate change denial over the past two years is actually a response to the hardening of scientific evidence? If so, how the hell do we confront it?”

Here are simpler reasons for opposing AGW, even before the recent news of fraud and bad evidence.

1. We can smell a commie rat.

The notion thatthe advanced industrial powers should send money to the Third World in perpetuity, and lower our standards of living, while obeying the dictates of interfering moral busybodies, strikes us as just another commie plot. We have lived through the twentieth century and we went to university with communists. We recognize them for what they are.

2. We can read a book or two on geology and glaciology

Geology trumps climatology. Rock beats air. For the last 400,00 years, we have been in an ice age, of which this latest interglacial has been one of six interruptions. The likelihood that processes which have continued for hundreds of thousands and even millions  of years to trump human activity strike us as a reasonable bet. In the last billion years, there has been ice at the polar caps for only 20% of that time. Think about global warming in that context.

3. We can recognize fanatics and enthusiasts when we see them

The most disturbing aspect of most of the global warming proponents is their enthusiasm: a word which connotes being taken up with godliness and God – the Greek word theos is the core of the word. They, and not we skeptcs, seem to be impervious to argument, quick to find moral fault in those who are insufficiently persuaded, and invested with vast moral superiority. If I found a skeptical global warmist I could talk to him reasonably. But I search for them and find them not. Maybe some of Monbiot’s psychologizing might better be directed to the understanding of warmist enthusiasm.

With the revelations of scientific fraud in the AGW debate, I await the emergence of our next Senator McCarthy. Who was a party to this conspiracy? Who is covering up for them? How many warmists have been inflitrated into government? What is their relationship to Maurice Strong? Who authored the Copenhagen Treaty and why are they still in government?

Why is the Gaiain religion Leftist?

Let’s start with Leftism. I posit that there is such a thing as Leftism, which is a permanent feature of the human species. It basically says a large No to reality. Reality is wrong and needs to be fixed. Here is a set of its characteristics:

• The world is wrong at some fudamental level.
• The world is rationally knowable.
• Our party has that knowledge.
• That knowledge is perfect.
• Armed with perfect knowledge, we can remake the world.
• Since our knowledge is true and perfect, those who oppose us must in principle be ignorant, or in bad faith.
• The only thng standing in the way of remaking the world into the place it ought to be is the ignorance and bad faith of those who do not know.
• We are entitled to seize power and remake the world in the name of this knowledge.

Compare this to the Gaian religion/ideology:

• man is poisoning the planet with carbn dioxide, and if nothing is done, we will destroy ourselves with the by-products of fossil fuel consumption.
• Our science is unassailable.
• We can re-engineer the world production systems through treaties requiring new production methods to reduce carbon footprints, as well as wealth transfers  engendered by those transfers.
• Those who oppose us are ignorant or deniers.
• The only thi
• We are entitled to seize power and remake the world in the name of this knowledge: viz. the Copenhagen Treaty.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

This is as stylized as kabuki and as predictable as left-wing lunacy.  The Citizen and Canwest don’t want to get caught off-base on this Climategate thing, so they test the waters with David Warren.  If the sky does not fall, then perhaps in a few days John Robson might mention it.  At the Globe, it will almost certainly be their house contrarian Margaret Wente who touches the story first – and maybe last.  Don’t misunderstand. These writers are not being used to legitimize or validate these stories, they are used to signify that the newspaper is aware of them but does not consider them newsworthy. The Citizen and the Globe want to make it clear that they noticed strange people saying strange things. That’s all. That is why they use their in-house ‘writers on strange topics’ – to ensure that the publications are broadcasting their distaste, their distrust and their distance from the topics they are writing about.  As for the CBC? Forget the CBC.

The Wall Street Journal reports that various senators are showing interest in the climate fraud.

A more moderate interpetation of the behaviour of the Climate Club scientists appears today at the Air Vent. This is a letter from a climate skeptic to the New York Times reporter,  Andy Revkin, who it appears from the hacked data, has been working hand in glove with the Climate Club scientists. Identified as Ryan O, he writes:

“These (a selection of emails) serve to illustrate not that the scientists involved are engaged in fraudulent behavior for personal gain, but rather that they feel that it is their right or duty to be the gatekeepers of what information is allowed to be seen. I think it is clear that the scientists believe that they are correct. I think it is clear that they use this belief to justify actively engage in censoring their own results (and pressure others to censor theirs) to prevent full disclosure of the uncertainties involved in the methods they employ. I think it is clear that they use this belief to justify attempts to discredit legitimate criticisms, in some cases with the knowledge that those criticisms are accurate. I think it is clear that they use this belief to advocate suppressing free expression on the internet. I think it is clear that they use this belief to attempt to manipulate the peer review process to present their results in a way that lends more credibility to their conclusions than otherwise would be the case. This is advocacy, not science. It in no way invalidates AGW theory, but it does call into question the certainty with which these scientists claim to understand the magnitude of the AGW effect – and, by extension, the magnitude and timing of the anticipated consequences.”

“This naturally leads into another important lesson: the insular nature of this relatively small, yet incredibly influential, group of scientists leads them to believe that it is their right to decide who should be privy to data and code. As a party to several of the FOIA requests of the University of East Anglia and CRU, I find myself appalled at the cavalier manner in which several key individuals handled FOIA requests.”

An excellent review of the nature of the offences against science is given at Pajamas Media: “Three things you absolutely must know about climategate“, by Iain Murray. He states that the data released show unequivocally that:

1. They have manipulated data to produce predetermined results (NB All computer modelling does this to some extent).

2. They have discussed methods of subverting the scientific peer review process to ensure that skeptical papers had no access to publication. (ANd then said that opponents, such as Stephen McIntyre,  should not be listened to because they have not been published in peer-reviewed journals.

3. They have worked to circumvent the Freedom of Information process of the United Kingdom.

All this is unequivocal. What is alluded to but not mentioned in Murray’s article is that the data does not produce the published results when it is run through the algorithms they say they have used. Too many “parameterizations”, what we know as fudge factors, have been employed, I reckon. We will be hearing more about this aspect soon.

And more will follow.
 
From the Australian Herald Sun, news that a major propagandist for man caused global warming recants.

None of this would matter in the least if trillions of dollars in cap and trade, and other major policy initiatives, were not at stake.

As one physicist said, if information is lost in black holes, that is a genuine scientific dispute. The second law of thermodynamics would be violated, and Stephen Hawking would have some explaining to do.

Whether the planet is cooling or warming is not really a genuine scientific dispute, unless the measurement is intended to drive a vast transfer of wealth from productive societies to unproductive ones.  Who gives a damn if the planet cools or warms by two degrees centigrade? You care only if the warming is the harbinger of an irreversible crisis. If it is the normal variation (it is) in a planet wobbling between ice ages, then global warming should be relished while it lasts.

Meanwhile, the ships of state plow forward.The government of Quebec yesterday announced a major policy on greenhouse gas reductions, with the Premier of Quebec blasting Ottawa for failing to do more of the same. Premier Jean Charest said that climate warming was “real”. Probably he is judging climate change by how late the golf courses are open this year, the same way everyone else does.

Based on an article by Andrew Orlowski in the Register.

He writes:

“At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC’s assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the British climate research centre CRU at the University East Anglia. In every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors.

“At issue is the use of tree rings as a temperature proxy, or dendrochronology. Using statistical techniques, researchers take the ring data to create a “reconstruction” of historical temperature anomalies. But trees are a highly controversial indicator of temperature, since the rings principally record Co2, and also record humidity, rainfall, nutrient intake and other local factors.

“Picking a temperature signal out of all this noise is problematic, and a dendrochronology can differ significantly from instrumented data. In dendro jargon, this disparity is called “divergence”. The process of creating a raw data set also involves a selective use of samples – a choice open to a scientist’s biases.

“Yet none of this has stopped paleoclimataologists from making bold claims using tree ring data.”

For the exposure of this fraud we have the Canadian mathematician Steve McIntyre to thank. He has laboured for over a decade to get the underlying data that the IPCC has used for its “hockey stick” graph, the one that has erased the medieval warm period and the little ice age from the historical record.

McIntyre blogs at http://www.climateaudit.org/

Since it was McIntyre who exposed this mess and it was a certain Professor Briffa who has used this widely quoted data without showing how the sampel was derived, I shall let McIntyre have the last, more moderate word:

“On a closing note, as I said from the outset, I did not say or imply that Briffa had “purposely selected” individual cores into the chronology and clearly said otherwise. Unfortunately for himself, Briffa’s tactic of withholding data and obstructing requests for data has backfired on him, as some people (not myself) have interpreted this as evidence of malfeasance, as opposed to my own interpretation that this only shows stubbornness on Briffa’s part and ineffective compliance administration by funding agencies and journals.”

In short, funding agencies are buying swamp gas for science. For all that Wikipedia editors complain that commercial interests negate the value the opinions of global warming skeptics, has anyone asked why public sector money and peer-reviewed journals should be trusted more?

For the evisceration of global warming piffle, read Ian Plimer’s “Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science”. By the way, if you ever needed evidence for the unreliability of Wikipedia, try to read its condescending snippy article on Plimer. You will never read Wikipedia with confidence again. This is a good conclusion to arrive at.

Summer is an exceptional condition in Canada. Most of the world, most of the time, is sweating in what we would call sweltering heat. Here a milder version of that heat lasts six weeks, if we are lucky. I stepped outdoors this morning in shorts, shirt, and barefoot. I stepped on green grass. The grass was moist, the air humid. The trees were langorously breathing, sending cooler air upwards as they evaporated groundwater through their leaves. The air was a pleasant 78Fahrenheit. A gentle breeze was coming in from the south. It was not even hot by Virginian standards. It felt warm to me. The climate was not trying to kill me, for a change.

How exceptional it is to live in a place where it is above freezing for only six months of the year! I assure you, fellow Canadians, there are parts of the world that have never known glaciation. Where I stand on my lawn, 10,000 years ago it had the same temperature as the Greenland ice sheet, and two thousand years from now it will be that cold again. I look at those swaying green trees with the long appraising gaze of a geologist, where ten thousand years is the shortest meaningful stretch of time. I will be gone in another 40 years, but the landscape I look at will be northern taiga in another thousand, Baffin Island in another two thousand, and high Arctic in another five thousand.

Enjoy the heat while you can, Canadians and fellow northmen. We are nearing the end of the curent warm phase of the Milankovitch cycle.

I encourage you to read up on it. Then you will know we are living in a warm interlude in an ice age.

Alex Pang presents an incisive critique of futurist bluffers, and you will find his “tips” manifested throughout our chattering classes, whether it’s crypto-nationalizing the economy or serving up climate change you must believe in:

No expertise, no problem! It’ll actually make your work more accurate if you claim to be an expert– if you’re certain that you’re an expert– but you actually aren’t.

Sounds counterintuitive, right? (This is how you know I’m a successful futurist. I said what you didn’t expect. Now I’ll quote some Science to make my point.) In fact, advanced degrees and deep knowledge don’t make you a better forecaster. Statistically, experts are hardly better at predicting the future than chimps throwing darts at a board.

In the past one billion years of the earth’s history, only about 200 million have seen ice at the poles. Why is there ice at the earth’s polar caps and why is this unusual?

I came across a straight explanation in After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North Americaby Professor E.C.Pielou

Professor Pielou, a specialist in mathematical ecology, taught at Dalhousie University and published this book in 1991, before the global warming hysteria had reduced the question of climate change to partisan shouting.

This book succinctly tells us about why ice ages come and go. It supplies essential background information for those who wish to know about our climate, and conforms to what I have read in other books by geologists and science writers.

Read the rest…

Contemplating the 13C temperature through a rainy weekend in July, I turned to
the google entry “global cooling” and came across this National Geographic
entry of May 2009.

The article notes that solar output has declined somewhat, but then here comes
the kicker:

“But researchers are on guard against their concerns about a new cold snap being
misinterpreted.

“[Global warming] skeptics tend to leap forward,” said Mike Lockwood, a solar
terrestrial physicist at the University of Southampton in the U.K. (Get the
facts about global warming.)

“He and other researchers are therefore engaged in what they call “preemptive
denial” of a solar minimum leading to global cooling.
Read the rest…