Now, It's Global Cooling!!!!

From: Telegraph

There has been a 60 per cent increase in the amount of ocean covered with ice compared to this time last year, they equivalent of almost a million square miles.

In a rebound from 2012's record low an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores, days before the annual re-freeze is even set to begin.

 The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year, forcing some ships to change their routes. A leaked report to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seen by the Mail on Sunday, has led some scientists to claim that the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century.

 If correct, it would contradict computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming. The news comes several years after the BBC predicted that the arctic would be ice-free by 2013. Related Articles Arctic ice cap on course to shrink to its lowest level 22 Aug 2012.

The plodding music of global warming 30 Aug 2013 Our fizzy seas of soda water 01 Jul 2013 The weather prophets should be chucked in the deep end 23 Jun 2013 Despite the original forecasts, major climate research centres now accept that there has been a “pause” in global warming since 1997.

The original predictions led to billions being invested in green measures to combat the effects of climate change. The changing predictions have led to the UN's climate change's body holding a crisis meeting, and the the IPCC is due to report on the situation in October.

A pre-summit meeting will be held later this month. But the leaked documents are said to show that the governments who fund the IPCC are demanding 1,500 changes to the Fifth Assessment Report - a three-volume study issued every six or seven years – as they claim its current draft does not properly explain the pause.

 The extent to which temperatures will rise with carbon dioxide levels and how much of the warming over the past 150 years, a total of 0.8C, is down to human greenhouse gas emissions are key issues in the debate. The IPCC says it is “95 per cent confident” that global warming has been caused by humans - up from 90 per cent in 2007 – according to the draft report.

However, US climate expert Professor Judith Curry has questioned how this can be true as that rather than increasing in confidence, “uncertainty is getting bigger” within the academic community. Long-term cycles in ocean temperature, she said, suggest the world may be approaching a period similar to that from 1965 to 1975, when there was a clear cooling trend.

At the time some scientists forecast an imminent ice age. Professor Anastasios Tsonis, of the University of Wisconsin, said: "We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped.” The IPCC is said to maintain that their climate change models suggest a pause of 15 years can be expected. Other experts agree that natural cycles cannot explain all of the recorded warming.

Sea Level Rise Surprise by S Fred Singer

From American Thinker

Driving the seemingly endless climate-treaty negotiations, the most widely feared consequence of Global Warming appears to be a catastrophic rise in sea level (SLR).  Environmental advocacy groups are filling the airwaves with lurid images of flooding of Bangladesh and Pacific islands, and raising the specter of hundreds of millions of environmental refugees demanding care and compensation.  

Even sober scientists, while not endorsing such obvious scare stories, predict an acceleration of the ongoing global rise, which a system of tidal gauges places at about 18 cm (7 inches) during the 20^th century.  Economists concerned with trying to estimate a 'social cost' of carbon-dioxide emissions predict huge economic losses from future SLR.  Not surprisingly, insurance companies, looking to raise premiums, are cheering them on.


However, more detailed analyses of actual observations suggest an opposite outcome: A climate warming might even slow down SLR -- rather than accelerate it.  To understand this counter-intuitive result, one must first get rid of false leads -- just as in a detective story.  The misleading argument here is the oft-quoted statement that the climate warmed by 1degF (0.6 C) in the last 100 years and that SL rose by 18 cm.  Both parts of the statement may well be true; but the second part does not necessarily follow from the first.


Curiously, Barack Obama predicted a deceleration of SLR when he accepted his party's nomination in 2008: "This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal."   Some tidal-gauge data do show deceleration, but starting in 1960.  Hey, wasn't that the year during which Obama was conceived?

Climategate (Part II)

From: The Weekly Standard

The conventional wisdom about blockbuster movie sequels is that the second acts are seldom as good as the originals. The exceptions, like The Godfather: Part II or The Empire Strikes Back, succeed because they build a bigger backstory and add dimensions to the original characters. The sudden release last week of another 5,000 emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University​—​ground zero of “Climategate I” in 2009​—​immediately raised the question of whether this would be one of those rare exceptions or Revenge of the Nerds II.

Before anyone had time to get very far into this vast archive, the climate campaigners were ready with their critical review: Nothing worth seeing here. Out of context! Cherry picking! “This is just trivia, it’s a diversion,” climate researcher Joel Smith told Politico. On the other side, Anthony Watts, proprietor of the invaluable WattsUpWithThat.com skeptic website, had the kind of memorable line fit for a movie poster. With a hat tip to the famous Seinfeld episode, Watts wrote: “They’re real, and they’re spectacular!” An extended review of this massive new cache will take months and could easily require a book-length treatment. But reading even a few dozen of the newly leaked emails makes clear that Watts and other longtime critics of the climate cabal are going to be vindicated.

Climategate I, the release of a few thousand emails and documents from the CRU in November 2009, revealed that the united-front clubbiness of the leading climate scientists was just a display for public consumption. The science of climate change was not “settled.” There was no consensus about the extent and causes of global warming; in their private emails, the scientists expressed serious doubts and disagreements on some major issues. In particular, the email exchanges showed that they were far from agreement about a key part of the global warming narrative​—​the famous “hockey stick” graph that purported to demonstrate that the last 30 years were the warmest of the last millennium and which made the “medieval warm period,” an especially problematic phenomenon for the climate campaign, simply go away. (See my “Scientists Behaving Badly,” The Weekly Standard, December 14, 2009.) Leading scientists in the inner circle expressed significant doubts and uncertainty about the hockey stick and several other global warming claims about which we are repeatedly told there exists an ironclad consensus among scientists. (Many of the new emails make this point even more powerfully.) On the merits, the 2009 emails showed that the case for certainty about climate change was grossly overstated.

More damning than the substantive disagreement was the attitude the CRU circle displayed toward dissenters, skeptics, and science journals that did not strictly adhere to the party line. Dissenting articles were blocked from publication or review by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), requests for raw data were rebuffed, and Freedom of Information Act requests were stonewalled. National science panels were stacked, and qualified dissenters such as NASA prize-winner John Christy were tolerated as “token skeptics.” The CRU circle was in high dudgeon over the small handful of skeptics who insisted on looking over their shoulder, revealing the climate science community to be thin-skinned and in-secure about its enterprise​—​a sign that something is likely amiss. Even if there was no unequivocal “smoking gun” of fraud or wrongdoing, the glimpse deep inside the climate science community was devastating. As I wrote at the time (“In Denial,” March 15, 2010), Climategate did for the global warming controversy what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war 40 years ago: It changed the narrative decisively.

The new batch of emails, over 5,300 in all (compared with about 1,000 in the 2009 release), contains a number of fresh embarrassments and huge red flags for the same lovable bunch of insider scientists. It stars the same cast, starting with the Godfather of the CRU, Phil “hide the decline” Jones, and featuring Michael “hockey stick” Mann once again in his supporting role as the Fredo of climate science, blustering along despite the misgivings and doubts of many of his peers. Beyond the purely human element, the new cache offers ample confirmation of the rank politicization of climate science and rampant cronyism that ought to trouble even firm believers in catastrophic climate change.

In fact, the emails display candid glimpses of concern inside the CRU circle. Peter Thorne of NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration), who earned his Ph.D. in climate science at East Anglia in 2001, wrote Phil Jones in a 2005 message, “I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.” An appeal to “context,” which the climate campaigners say is crucial to understanding why excerpts such as this one are unimportant, does quite the opposite, and only points to the problems the climate change campaigners have brought upon themselves by their tribalism.

This exchange between Thorne and Jones, along with numerous similar threads in the new cache, is concerned with what should and shouldn’t be included in a chapter of the IPCC’s 2007 fourth assessment report​—​a chapter for which Jones was the coordinating lead author along with another key Climategate figure, Kevin Trenberth. The complete chapter (if you’re keeping score at home, it’s Chapter 3 of Working Group I, “Observations: Surface and Atmospheric Climate Change”) lists 10 “lead authors” and 66 “contributing authors” in addition to Jones and Trenberth. One of Jones’s emails from 2004 displays how explicitly political the process of assembling the IPCC report is: “We have a very mixed bag of LAs [lead authors] in our chapter. Being the basic atmos obs. one, we’ve picked up number of people from developing countries so IPCC can claim good geographic representation. This has made our task harder as CLAs [contributing lead authors] as we are working with about 50% good people who can write reasonable assessments and 50% who probably can’t.”

The final chapter was amended along lines Thorne recommended, but several other objections and contrary observations (one in particular from Roger Pielke Jr. about extreme weather events that has been subsequently vindicated) were scornfully dismissed. And appeals to context avoid the question: Is this “science-by-committee” a sensible way to sort out contentious scientific issues that hold immense public policy implications? Perhaps a politicized, semi-chaotic process like the IPCC is unavoidable in a subject as wide-ranging and complex as climate change; future historians of science can debate the issue. But the high stakes involved ought to compel a maximum of open debate and transparency. Instead, the IPCC process places a premium on gatekeepers and arbiters who control what goes in and what doesn’t, and it is exactly in its exercise of the gatekeeping function that the CRU circle has shredded its credibility and trustworthiness.

One thing that emerges from the new emails is that, while a large number of scientists are working on separate, detailed nodes of climate-related issues (the reason for dozens of authors for every IPCC report chapter), the circle of scientists who control the syntheses that go into IPCC reports and the national climate reports that the U.S. and other governments occasionally produce is quite small and partial to particular outcomes of these periodic assessments. The way the process works in practice casts a shadow over one of the favorite claims of the climate campaign​—​namely, that there exists a firm “consensus” about catastrophic future warming among thousands of scientists. This so-called consensus reflects only the views of a much smaller subset of gatekeepers.

Beyond additional bad news for the hockey stick graph, is there anything new in these emails about scientific aspects of the issue? This will take time to sort out, but I suspect anyone with the patience to go through the weeds of all 5,300 messages and cross check them against published results may well discover troubling new aspects of how climate modeling is done, and how weak the models still are on crucial points (such as cloud behavior). Some of the new emails frankly acknowledge such problems. There are arcane discussions about how to interpolate gaps in the data, how to harmonize different data sets, and how to resolve the frequent and often inconvenient (because contradictory) anomalies in modeling results. Definite examples of political influence have emerged already from a first pass over a sample of the massive cache.

In the editing process before the IPCC’s 2001 third assessment report, Timothy Carter of the Finnish Environmental Institute wrote in 2000 to three chapter authors with the observation, “It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group.” In this case, decisions at the highest levels of what specific figures and conclusions were to appear in the short “summary for policy makers”​—​usually the only part of the IPCC’s multivolume reports that the media and politicians read​—​required changing what appeared in individual chapters, a case of the conclusions driving the findings in the detailed chapters instead of the other way around. This has been a frequent complaint of scientists participating in the IPCC process since the beginning, and the new emails show that even scientists within the “consensus” recognize the problem.

Comments such as one from Jonathan Overpeck, writing in 2004 about how to summarize some ocean data in a half-page, reinforce the impression that politics drives the process: “The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s included and what is left out.”

No amount of context can possibly exonerate the CRU gang from some of the damning expressions and contrivances that appear repeatedly in the new emails. More so than the 2009 batch, these emails make clear the close collaboration between the leading IPCC scientists and environmental advocacy groups, government agencies, and partisan journalists. There are repeated instances of scientists tipping their hand that they’ve thrown in their lot with the climate ideologues. If there were only a handful of such dubious messages, they might be explained away through “context,” or as conciliatory habits of expression. But they are so numerous that it doesn’t require an advanced degree in pattern recognition to make out that these emails constitute not just a “smoking gun” of scientific bias, but a belching howitzer. Throughout the emails numerous participants refer to “the cause,” “our cause,” and other nonscientific, value-laden terms to describe the implications of one dispute or another, while demonizing scientists who express even partial dissent about the subject, such as Judith Curry of Georgia Tech.

Since the beginning of the climate change story more than 20 years ago, it has been hard to sort out whether the IPCC represents the “best” science, or merely the findings most compatible with the politically driven climate policy agenda. Both sets of emails have lifted the lid on the insides of the process, and it isn’t pretty.

A good example of how the political-scientific complex works hand-in-glove to tightly control the results comes from May 2009, when the IPCC authors were working on a “weather generator,” which they hoped would produce climate change scenarios tailored to localities, so as to promote favored adaptive measures (sea walls, flood control, drought readiness, etc.). This is a small but hugely controversial aspect of climate modeling, and one where politicians and advocacy groups (the World Wildlife Fund was especially keen to have this kind of work done) may well be asking scientists to do the impossible. But there’s research money in it, so scientists are only too happy to oblige. Kathryn Humphrey, a science adviser in Britain’s DEFRA (Department of Environment, Forestry, and Rural Affairs​—​Britain’s EPA) wrote a worried note to Phil Jones and several other scientists involved in the project about criticisms of the cloistered working group behind the weather generator scheme, noting, “Ministers have also raised questions about this so we will need to go back to them with some further advice.” Jones tries to reassure Humphrey that he’s got the working group under control: “As I’ve said on numerous occasions, if the WG [working group] isn’t there, all the people that need [the weather generator] will go off and do their own thing. This will mean that individual sectors and single studies will do a whole range of different things. This will make the uncertainties even larger!” What Jones is referring to are numerous independent scientific efforts to “downscale” climate models to predict local impacts, and the fact that the results of these separate efforts have been chaotic, rather than demonstrating consensus. Hence the need for someone in authority to marginalize uncertainties and contradictory results. But this is properly called politics, not science.

Humphrey wrote back: “I know this is extremely frustrating for you and completely understand where you are coming from. This is a political reaction, not one based on any scientific analysis of the weather generator. We did the peer review to take care of that. I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story. They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.” (Emphasis added.) Even putting the most charitable possible construction on this exchange​—​namely that Humphrey really thought the criticisms of the weather generator lacked solid scientific foundation​—​other messages in the emails make clear that many scientists understand that their models really aren’t up to it, despite Jones’s attempts at reassurance.

In a 2008 email from Jagadish Shukla of George Mason University and the Institute of Global Environment and Society to a large circle of IPCC scientists, Shukla put his finger squarely on the problem: “I would like to submit that the current climate models have such large errors in simulating the statistics of regional [climate] that we are not ready to provide policymakers a robust scientific basis for ‘action’ at a regional scale. .  .  . It is inconceivable that policy-makers will be willing to make billion- and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.” Despite this and other cautionary messages from scientists, Jones, DEFRA, and the IPCC charged ahead with the weather generator anyway.

Other problems with climate modeling are more -subtle and less easily discerned from the emails. In particular, there is much discussion about the political pressure to tune the climate models to isolate and emphasize the effect of carbon dioxide only, even though there are other important greenhouse gases and related factors highly relevant to a complete understanding of climate change. Carbon dioxide was emphasized because it is the variable that the policymakers made central to their monomaniacal mission to suppress fossil fuels to the exclusion of other policy strategies, such as “geoengineering,” that might be considered in the event of drastic climate change. Here and there Jones and his compatriots complain about this constraint, but go along with it anyway. But it’s another case of policy-driven science, and not science-driven policy, which we are constantly reassured is the mission of the IPCC.

These are only a few of the many problems with the climate models on which all of the predictions of doom decades hence depend. It will take months of careful review to sort the wheat from the chaff, but there is enough evidence already to support the conclusion that the climate science establishment has greatly exaggerated what it knows. One of the stranger aspects of all of these emails is how much they are concerned with statistical refinement of climate models, and how little work there seems to be on basic atmospheric physics. There are curious exchanges over the impact of changes in solar activity on global warming. The effect of fluctuations in the sun have been consistently downplayed in the climate models and IPCC reports, despite a steady stream of science journal articles​—​most of them peer reviewed​—​that argue for a more substantial weighting of solar factors. As with so many parts of climate science, the empirical basis of solar factors is controversial and incomplete.

For example, a 2003 email from Michael Mann of Penn State summarily dismisses one variation of the solar story: “I’m now more convinced than ever that there is not one single scientifically defensible element at all [in this]​—​the statistics, supposed climate reconstruction, and supposed ‘Cosmic Ray Flux’ estimates are all almost certainly w/out any legitimate underpinning.” And yet the basis for the idea he dismisses was largely vindicated a few months ago in a major study from CERN, the European lab that is behind the Large Hadron Collider, which found a significant role for cosmic ray flux in cloud formation. The imperatives of climate orthodoxy came immediately into view when Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director of the CERN lab, told a German news-paper, “I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them. That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.”

As all the new emails are dissected and analyzed, no doubt Jones and the CRU circle will be able to claim to have been misinterpreted or wrongly besmirched in many instances. But between their boorish behavior, attempts to conceal data and block FOIA requests, and dismissal of dissent, the climate science community has abdicated its credibility and done great damage to large-scale scientific inquiry.

Possible New Climate Gate Emails Leaked

FROM: THE DAILY CALLER

A new batch of emails similar to the original Climategate emails, which were released in November 2009, were leaked Tuesday morning. The 5,000 new emails, pirated from University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, appear to have been culled at around the same time as the first round.

They have been released just days before the upcoming United Nations Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa. The first round of emails were released a month before the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

The university has yet to confirm the authenticity of the emails, reported the Guardian, but Michael Mann — the climate scientist at the center of the first Climategate data falsifying scandal — said the emails appear to include his.

Climategate 1.0 included the anonymous release of 1,000 emails and included communications between climate scientists from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that showed climate scientists conspiring to manipulate and obscure data that might potentially contradict theories of rising global climate temperatures. Professor Mann, the scientist who authored a theory of climate change that depicted the rise in temperatures on a graph shaped like a hockey stick, was implicated in the first round.

“Well, they look like mine,” Mann said of the emails, “but I hardly see anything that appears damning at all, despite them having been taken out of context. I guess they had very little left to work with, having culled in the first round the emails that could most easily be taken out of context to try to make me look bad.”

The emergence of the new emails has GOP lawmakers calling for further reining in of the Obama EPA.

Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe — who has said for several years that a crisis of confidence would develop in the IPCC if significant reforms were not made to the organizations’s peer-review process — released a statement on Tuesday stating that, in addition to the IPCC’s faulty science and Climategate 1.0, the emails are “just one more reason to halt the EPA’s job killing global warming agenda.”

Inhofe said that the Obama EPA’s global warming regulations are the result of “endangerment findings” based “on the flawed science of the IPCC.”

“The crisis of confidence in the IPCC translates into a crisis of confidence in the EPA’s endangerment finding,” said Inhofe. “The IPCC science has already disintegrated under the weight of its own flaws, and I believe it will only be a matter of time before the endangerment finding follows suit.  It’s time for the Obama administration to stop trying to resurrect policies that are all pain for no gain, and get to work on reviving our economy.”

Major Garrett Lays into Al Gore and Global Warming Hysterics

Rejecting Junk Science Is Not Religion

From: Conservative Compendium

Jonathan Adler got himself quoted approvingly by Megan McArdle, in her Atlantic blog, for identifying conservatives outraged by NJ Governor Chris Christie’s recent public testimony to his belief in Warmism as being guilty of “anti-scientific know-nothingism.”

Last week, Christie vetoed legislation that would have required New Jersey to remain in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a multi-state agreement to control greenhouse gas emissions through a regional cap-and-trade program. The bill was an effort to overturn Christie’s decision earlier this year to withdraw from the program. Given conservative opposition to greenhouse gas emission controls, the veto should have been something to cheer, right? Nope.

The problem, according to some conservatives, is that Christie accompanied his veto with a statement acknowledging that human activity is contributing to global climate change. Specifically, Christie explained that his original decision to withdraw from RGGI was not based upon any “quarrel” with the science.

While I acknowledge that the levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are increasing, that climate change is real, that human activity plays a role in these changes and that these changes are impacting our state, I simply disagree that RGGI is an effective mechanism for addressing global warming.

As Christie explained, RGGI is based upon faulty economic assumptions and “does nothing more than impose a tax on electricity” for no real environmental benefit. As he noted, “To be effective, greenhouse gas emissions must be addressed on a national and international scale.”

Although Christie adopted the desired policy — withdrawing from RGGI — some conservatives are aghast that he would acknowledge a human contribution to global warming. According to one, this makes Christie “Part RINO. Part man. Only more RINO than man.” [“RINO” as in “Republican in Name Only.”]

Those attacking Christie are suggesting there is only one politically acceptable position on climate science — that one’s ideological bona fides are to be determined by one’s scientific beliefs, and not simply one’s policy preferences. This is a problem on multiple levels. Among other things, it leads conservatives to embrace an anti-scientific know-nothingism whereby scientific claims are to be evaluated not by scientific evidence but their political implications. Thus climate science must be attacked because it provides a too ready justification for government regulation. This is the same reason some conservatives attack evolution — they fear it undermines religious belief — and it is just as wrong. …

[E]ven the vast majority of warming “skeptics” within the scientific community would agree with Governor Christie’s statement that “human activity plays a role” in rising greenhouse gas levels and resulting changes in the climate.

McArdle refers to scientific “denialism,” then establishes a new confirmatory experimental principle: if three libertarians accept it, then it must be true.

I am quite convinced that the planet is warming, and fairly convinced that human beings play a role in this. (When you’ve got Reason’s Ron Bailey, Cato’s Patrick Michaels, and Jonathan Adler, you’ve convinced me). I reserve the right to be skeptical about particular claims about effects (particularly when those claims come via people who implausibly insist that every major effect will be negative) . . . and, of course, of ludicrous worries that global warming will cause aliens to destroy us. But generally, I think global warming is happening, and even that we should probably do something about that, though I’m flexible on “something.”

However. Even if you disagree, it is reprehensible to have a litmus test around empirical matters of fact.

It is always difficult in addressing the enormous pile of rubbish and intellctual confusion that constitutes Warmism to decide exactly where to begin.

Megan McArdle tells us that she is “quite convinced that the planet is warming.” What does she mean exactly? If McArdle means that the climate is generally warmer today than in the 17th century when the Thames froze regularly in the winter, she is obviously correct. If she, on the other hand, thinks that the widely noticed warming trend that began around 1980 has continued uninterrupted to the present day and constitutes a meaningful pattern, she is obviously wrong.

It is generally accepted by everyone that mankind has been living for the last eleven thousand years in a period of Interglacial Warming. So, yes, Megan, the planet is warming. That’s is what happens during periods between glaciations.

The catastrophist statists allege that there is a grave danger of “climate change.” Climate change is a heads I win, tails you lose kind of proposition, as the climate is always changing. There is a major warming (or cooling) trend direction of the earth’s climate, and there are constant short-term variations of irregular interval.
Geologic evidence indicates that periods of glaciation have lasted as long as nearly two hundred million years.

Climate change is an enormously long-term phenomenon and the earth’s climate has moved from extremes far beyond anything known in human history during times in which there was no possibility of human agency playing any role.

Human observational capabilities with respect to phenomena occurring over geologic periods of time is limited by the brevity of our life spans and also by the brevity of the existence of our species and our civilization. Anyone attempting to draw some kind of conclusions on the basis of temperature patterns going back three decades is an idiot.

Warmism rests on unverifiable models and on one grand scientific metaphor, the notion that the earth’s atmosphere is like a greenhouse. But the greenhouse reference is only a metaphor.

A 2007 paper by Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner argues, I think quite successfully, that the greenhouse model is incompatible with Physics.

The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861, and Arrhenius 1896, and which is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism, in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist. Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation.

Mr. Adler’s accusation that aversion to Warmism amounts to “know-nothingism” is based on uncritical acceptance of the greenhouse metaphor and acceptance of the proposition that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide causes warming. Only superstitious savages would deny that carbon dioxide must be decreased.

Well, the role of CO2 in warming and the timing of increased CO2 is a seriously controversial issue.

There are good grounds for doubt that CO2 really is meaningfully increasing.

There is excellent data also showing that historically increases in CO2 occurred after planetary warming, not before.

Patrick J. Michaels may accept the Greenhouse model and claims of increasing CO2, but Mr. Adler and Ms. McArdle ought to delve a little deeper into these issues before climbing on board.

I will only mention in passing that it is possible, further, to dissent from Warmist Catastrophism by taking the view that a slightly warmer climate would not be an entirely bad thing, particularly if you happen to live in Canada, Scandinavia, or Russia.

And, even if one were to surrender completely and abandon critical science and skepticism, even if one were to simply accept that everything Al Gore says is true, human reproduction and increased energy use and industrial development will inevitably continue. The undeveloped world will not relinquish material progress and efforts to close the gap with the developed world, and no collection of treaties and international conferences will prevent everyone in India and China from wanting an automobile and a full assortment of electrical appliances. If human population growth and economic activity really dooms the planet, the planet is well and truly doomed, because government efforts will not succeed in preventing growth and progress.

The real Know-Nothings, the real parties guilty of a lack of seriousness and respect for science, are the people who accept the herd consensus of interested parties and the community of fashion as probative, and who are willing to accept on its say-so unverifiable models as established science.

Adler and McArdle are totally wrong. It would take a very thick book to discuss all the ways that Warmism fails to represent legitimate science, worthy of acceptance and suitable as a basis for public policy. Some of the issues are technical, but a lot of all this is basically pretty obvious.

To believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming, you have be an urban narcissist whose perspective on reality resembles Saul Steinberg’s 1976 “View of the World From 9th Avenue” cover.

Energy Fact of the Week: NAS Tries to Explain Last Decade’s Lack of Global Warming

From: The American

Nothing provokes a tantrum from the climate campaign quicker than pointing out that global temperatures flattened out after 1998, following a two-decade period of more or less steady increase of about 0.4 degrees Celsius. A couple years of temperature variability would be consistent with the General Theory of the Apocalypse, but a whole decade of flat temps starts to cause problems for the Narrative. Hence, the climate campaign has been in “denialist” mode about this anomaly, and keeps saying “hottest year ever” as often as they can, conveniently noting that the current decade represents a plateau in temperatures, while the models say that on a decadal scale temperature should continue to rise steadily.

Comes now the National Academy of Sciences, which yesterday published a new paper that sets out to explain “why global surface temperatures did not rise between 1998 and 2008.” Apparently the NAS didn’t get the memo from the Center for American Progress that we’re not supposed to acknowledge that global warming has not happened over the last decade.

But not to worry. The NAS has it covered. As the rest of the abstract explains:

We find that this hiatus in warming coincides with a period of little increase in the sum of anthropogenic and natural forcings. Declining solar insolation as part of a normal eleven-year cycle, and a cyclical change from an El Nino to a La Nina dominate our measure of anthropogenic effects because rapid growth in short-lived sulfur emissions partially offsets rising greenhouse gas concentrations. As such, we find that recent global temperature records are consistent with the existing understanding of the relationship among global surface temperature, internal variability, and radiative forcing, which includes anthropogenic factors with well known warming and cooling effects.

Translation: China is saving us with their soaring emissions from coal use (sulfur dioxide particles reflect solar radiation). The effect of sulfur dioxide particles, and other atmospheric phenomena (including clouds) is a matter of huge uncertainty in the official climate models the UN employs, but I’ve seen at least one prominent alarmist scientist make a case that sulfur dioxide emissions amplify warming, so this is another good example of the climate campaign being unable to keep its story straight. But a couple other items from the article provoke wry smiles as well, especially the fragment about “declining solar isolation.”

NASA Climate Change Alarmist James Hansen Caught Profiting Off of Climate Change Advocacy

From: Left Coast REbel

Climate change advocacy is proving very lucrative. Al Gore has made nearly a billion dollars. Now it appears James Hansen of NASA, has been caught profiting off of climate change as well:

The NASA scientist who once claimed the Bush administration tried to "silence" his global warming claims is now accused of receiving more than $1.2 million from the very environmental organizations whose agenda he advocated.

NASA Gets Caught Faking Climate Change

Another great post from Yid With Lid

From: YID With LID

One of the big threats from the global warming moonbat types is that a rise in temperature will melt the polar ice caps causing the oceans to rise, with the cataclysmic result of skyscrapers being under water. Let's face it, if you think that the commute into Manhattan is bad now....just wait.

There is only one problem with this scenario, Mother Nature isn't being cooperative. You see it is true that sea level has risen during the 20th century and probably well before that. Scientists estimate that sea level has increased by 7 inches during the 2oth century.

The climate change hoaxers use computer models to predict that sea levels would rise anywhere from 15 inches to 2o feet because of global warming in the 21st century (the consensus number is closer to 3 feet).

In Search Of...With Leonard Nimoy (1978) On Global Cooling

I linked a post to the Blog Prof earlier today regarding a post about "Global Cooling", In it were three YOU TUBE links to "In Search Of", with Leonard Nimoy from 1975, I remember and loved watching the show as a kid. It's hokey to look at today, and many episodes were dubious. This episode was obviously dubious because it was wrong, but it demonstrates how we have come full circle from forecasts of a "NEW ICE AGE", to "MELTING POLAR CAPS".

NEWSWEEK 1975: Global Cooling Caused Tornado. NEWSWEEK 2011: Global Warming Caused Tornados

A great entry from The Blog Prof. I'll post the YOu tube separately.

From: The Blog Prof

As it is, the some of the same people that in the 1970s were predicting our doom because of global cooling caused by our activity, are now saying the exact opposite. And I do mean the exact opposite. Via Jazz Shaw: Tornadoes Absolutely Caused by Global Warming. Or Cooling. Or Something

Inevitably the devastating tornadoes that killed more than 300 people in the US prompted Newsweek to ask: “Is global warming responsible for wild weather?” The answer, it found, is “yes”.

Another Newsweek article cited “the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded”, killing “more than 300 people”, as among “the ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically”. But that article was published on April 28, 1975, when Newsweek listed the US tornado disaster of 1974 as one of the harbingers of disastrous global cooling, heralding the approach of a new ice age.

And a flashback from TIME magazine:

In a story about the coming ice age on June 24, 1974 the magazine reported:

Scientists have found other indications of global cooling. For one thing there has been a noticeable expansion of the great belt of dry, high-altitude polar winds — the so-called circumpolar vortex—that sweep from west to east around the top and bottom of the world.

Related: Flashback Video (1970s): In Search Of... THE COMING ICE AGE!

Global Warming Wearing Thing

From: American Thinker

The so-called global warming crisis is falling apart at ever-increasing rates as skeptical bloggers chisel away at faults in the IPCC and whitewashes of ClimateGate, while digging up long-forgotten dire forecasts of weather driven by global cooling. It all must be working. Polls indicate downward trends in public concern over the issue, so organizations like Google come up with plans to fix public ignorance.

Global warming believers think this putative ignorance can be cured by shouting their old 3-part mantra louder:

1. "the science is settled";

2. skeptic scientists are paid by fossil fuel industries to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact";

3. the media gives too much attention to those skeptics, who do not deserve equal time.

This strategy works when nobody questions anything about those three points -- thus the shouting.

I started questioning where the hokey phrase in point #2 came from in late 2009. Rather than finding simple answers, I instead found a sea of red flags associated with that corruption accusation and its promoters, the now-defunct Ozone Action group, and anti-skeptic book author Ross Gelbspan, prompting me to write articles here and elsewhere about it. Having gathered 17 months of research on this, it looks to me like all three points were consolidated at the hands of that group, so I do double-takes whenever I see a familiar looking mantra narrative.

Such as when I saw mantra point #3 in this "Longtime Minnesota TV reporter digs into global climate change" article just days ago in the Duluth Budgeteer, (reproduced here). At first glance, we read what appears to be a simple explanation:

After spending 32 years in front of the camera as an anchorman and investigative reporter for WCCO-TV in Minneapolis, Don Shelby wanted to apologize to people about climate change. ...

The TV newsman's mea culpa about having misreported climate change came after of years of treating the story the same as he would any other, requiring the views of two opposing parties ...

Shelby said he used the skills of any good investigative reporter and followed the money. "Once I began to trace back the source and the politics of that approach to science ... Things began to smell. I then started pointing out those facts". ...

Flashback 2005: UN Predicts 50 Million Global Warming Refugees By 2010

From: Newsbusters

To give you an idea of the kind of hysterical predictions the global warming crowd have made in recent years, the United Nations in 2005 actually forecast that by the end of the previous decade, there would be 50 million environmental refugees around the world as a result of climate change.

Britain's Guardian reported October 12, 2005:

Rising sea levels, desertification and shrinking freshwater supplies will create up to 50 million environmental refugees by the end of the decade, experts warn today. Janos Bogardi, director of the Institute for Environment and Human Security at the United Nations University in Bonn, said creeping environmental deterioration already displaced up to 10 million people a year, and the situation would get worse.

"There are well-founded fears that the number of people fleeing untenable environmental conditions may grow exponentially as the world experiences the effects of climate change," Dr Bogardi said. "This new category of refugee needs to find a place in international agreements. We need to better anticipate support requirements, similar to those of people fleeing other unviable situations." [...]

Hans van Ginkel, UN under-secretary-general and rector of the university, said: "This is a highly complex issue, with global organisations already overwhelmed by the demands of conventionally recognised refugees. However, we should prepare now to define, accept and accommodate this new breed of refugee."

Arctic Sea Ice Increases for Third Consecutive Year: Global Warming to Blame?

From: Conservative Hideout

I know, they’re calling it Global Climate Disruption© these days, but we know they’ll change the terminology to cover the failure of the narrative, right?
Steve, from Motor City Times, found this before me, so he deserves the credit.

5000 cubic km more sea ice?
Now that we’ve just past the March-peak in Arctic sea ice area, I thought it’s a good time to take another look at the Arctic sea ice thickness again. What follows is a comparison of March 23, 2008 (the old death spiral days) and March 25, 2011.

Tim Flannery: Climate Change Skeptic

From: Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt Blog

On our MTR 1377 show today:

- Our fine Resources Minister Martin Ferguson pays out Greens Leader Bob Brown as “Soapbox Bob”.
- An anecdote that helps to confirm that Ferguson is a climate sceptic.

- Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery joins us - but refuses to say by how much the world’s temperature will fall thanks to Julia Gillard’s global warming policies. Later he concedes that even if the whole world slashes its emissions we won’t know what difference it will make for maybe a thousand years. Doesn’t sound like much of a deal to me.
- Flannery agrees that Julia Gillard was wrong to say that every reputable climate scientist backs her view of man-made warming.

And more. Listen here.
UPDATE
A partial transcript of my interview today with Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery:

Bolt: How much will it cost to cut our emissions by the Government’s target of 5 per cent by 2020 and how much will world temperatures fall by as a consequence?
Flannery: Sure. We do have economists on the commission who will be giving a very in depth look at that this evening and I don’t want to pre-empt their assessment of the various cost options, but in terms of how much it will cut temperatures that really very much depends upon how Australia’s position is seen overseas …
Bolt: No, no, we’ll get onto that, Tim. I’m not going to dodge that. The argument is indeed that we have to set a lead and the world has to follow and on our own we can’t do blah blah, but just looking at the basic facts so people can figure it out for themselves (that) the world needs to come on board. On our own, cutting our emissions by 5 per cent by 2020, what will that lower the world’s temperatures by?
Flannery: See, that’s a bogus question because nothing is in isolation…
Bolt: Everyone understands that that is the argument But we’re just trying to get basic facts, without worrying about the consequences - about what those facts may lead people to think. On our own, by cutting our emissions, because it’s a heavy price to pay, by 5 per cent by 2020, what will the world’s temperatures fall by as a consequence?
Flannery: Look, it will be a very, very small increment.
Bolt: Have you got a number? I mean, there must be some numbers.
Flannery: I just need to clarfy in terms of the climate context for you. If we cut emissions today, global temperatures are not likely to drop for about a thousand years.
Bolt: Right, but I just want to get to this very basic fact, because I’m finding it really curious that no one has got (this) fact. If I buy a car … I want to know how much it costs and whether it is going to do the job.
Flannery: Sure.
Bolt: In this case I want to know the cost of cutting our emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 and will it do the job: how much will the world’s temperatures fall by if Australia cuts its emissions by this much.
Flannery: Look, as I said it will be a very, very small increment.
Bolt: Can you give us a rough figure? A rough figure.
Flannery: Sorry, I can’t because it’s a very complex system and we’re dealing with probabilities here.
Bolt: …I’m just trying to get the facts in front of the public so we know what we’re doing. Just unbiased. Is it about, I don’t know, are you talking about a thousandth of a degree? A hundredth of a degree? What sort of rough figure?
Flannery: Just let me finish and say this. If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as a thousand years because the system is overburdened with CO2 that has to be absorbed and that only happens slowly.
Bolt: That doesn’t seem a good deal…
Flannery: What’s that sorry?
Bolt: That doesn’t seem a good deal. If we spend trillions of dollars to cut world’s emissions that we won’t notice the difference, well our great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren won’t even notice the difference.
Flannery: It will just keep getting worse if we don’t. That’s the problem.
Bolt: I just want to get back to the facts. Someone surely must have done the sums—and I’m looking at some sums here. Someone surely must have done the sums that for all these billions of dollars we’re spending in programs that it’s got to have a consequence in terms of cutting the world’s temperature. So you don’t know about Australia, you wouldn’t dispute that it’s within about a thousandth of a degree, around that magnitude, right?

Flannery: It’s going to be slight.

A transcript of my previous interview with Flannery here.
UPDATE
Yesterday we tried to get precisely the same answer (listen here) from Professor John Daley, CEO of the Grattan Institute, which is releasing a report which finds that our state and federal governments tipped $12 billion into emissions-cutting schemes that were close to useless, and which argues we should go for emissions trading instead:

Bolt: To get to Julia Gillard’s target of cutting emissions by 5 per cent by 2020, how many more of these billions would we need to have spent…?
Daley: Well, if you’re going to do the whole lot through rebate schemes, you’d have to spend in the order of about $300 billion …(Gillard’s emissions trading scheme) is a much more efficient way to go…
Bolt: You say go to carbon trading, or emissions trading. Iin your report you of course have look at whether this is worth doing – you’ve looked at what you would get for your money. By how much will the world’s temperatures fall if we go to this emissions trading scheme that Julia Gillard recommends? You’ve no doubt looked at that.
Daley: Well, it of course depends on what other countries in the world…
Bolt: No, no, just ours, John. I’m just looking at us. Us alone.
Daley: This is a classic collective action problem. If every country in the world looks at how much will their reductions make a difference, the answer for any individual country, even for the United States, even for China, is not that much.
Bolt: No, no, I’ve got you. I’m very familiar with that argument, that if we don’t move, no one else will, and nothing’s done and it all goes to hell in a handbasket. What I’m trying to do is just get to the bottom-line facts: if we spend these umpteen billions on cutting emissions further, to the five per cent by 2020, how much will Australia’s action alone cut the world’s temperature by? That must be measured somewhere. That must be part of your report.
Daley: Well, I think it’s not been measured anywhere because it’s not seen as being the right way to think about this.
Bolt: Well it would be. People want to know the gain for the pain. Have a guess then.
Daley: The reality is that no country in the world is cutting their emissions alone…So to what extent are we doing our fair share?…
Bolt: Look, we’ve got that argument…. I’ll ask just one last time… If you don’t know just say so, but if you do know, I know it’s got all those caveats, but just tell us how much the world’s temperature will fall if we do what you recommend and what Julia Gillard plans.
Daley: As I said, we haven’t run the numbers on how much it will make a difference if Australia acts completely alone.
Bolt: You should have.
Daley: The reason we haven’t done that is because Australia is not acting alone. Therefore it’s not a very helpful thing to analyse.

“Not helpful” means you’d realise the pain is not worth the gain. Whever we do - whatevery anyone does - hardly seems worth it, really.
And by “not helpful”, the people pushing the schemes say they’d rather not tell you the truth. You might ask too many awkward questions.
That is why no one yet pushing an ETS or a carbon tax will answer our question. And why we drew exactly the same blank a fortnight ago with Jill Duggan, from the European Commission’s emissions trading scheme.

NASA Hack James Hansen in 1986: 2°-4° warmer in 2010. The Reality: No Change!

From: The Blog Prof

Don Surber made this great catch today:

Don writes:

From the Miami News on June 11, 1986: Dr. James “Hansen said the global temperatures would rise by 2 to 4 degrees in the following decade,” meaning 2001-2010.

...Steven Goddard mocked James Hansen.

This is what has happened with global temperatures over the last decade:

...How can a man who has been consistently wrong for 35 years be considered a scientist, let alone an expert?

A good question. Another one: what does Hansen have to do to be discredited in his own field of study? Since the 90s, every single IPCC 'model' (they aren't really models - they're scenarios) have been proven to be no better than what comes out of your butt after spicy food that you're not used to. See here:

In science, every theory is supposed to be judged by it's predictive capability versus actual reality. Not in the case of global warming where instead of proving the model is right or wrong, the experimental reality is being fudged. For the alarmist, anything that seems out of the norm (whatever that means) is due to global warming. If it doesn't snow enough, it's obviously global warming. If it snows too much? Well, that's global warming too. Never mind that no IPCC model predicts any such thing.

The Climate of Climate Change

From: The New Atlantis

Climate change is inescapable. Whatever is actually happening in the atmosphere, the hubbub of politics and media ensures that the topic is always in the air — and the past few years have seen the winds of climate-change talk swirl into a tempest and then blow away. In June 2008, Barack Obama, upon effectively securing his party’s nomination for the presidency, predicted that Americans would look back and see that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Both he and John McCain, his Republican opponent, favored some form of carbon-reducing legislation, and momentum seemed to be building toward an international treaty.

Since then, things have changed, to put it mildly. Fishy e-mails were leaked from one of the world’s leading centers of climate research at an English university. The much-anticipated 2009 Copenhagen climate summit failed to produce any substantial achievement. President Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress were unable to pass large-scale climate legislation. And green movement hero Al Gore has done his cause no favors with his recent marital and legal woes.

A Rasmussen tracking poll found that in May 2008, 48 percent of American voters believed that recent global warming was primarily caused by human activity while 34 percent cited planetary trends unrelated to mankind. By April 2010, those numbers had flipped, with 48 percent pointing to natural trends and only 33 percent of the respondents believing that we are the primary culprit. Still, politics and polls aside, the first decade of the 2000s was, according to researchers, the warmest since the advent of modern thermometer-based record keeping.

Four recent books explore the dynamics of the climate debate. British scientist Mike Hulme explores the history and the current state of the debate from a scholarly perspective in Why We Disagree About Climate Change. Stanford’s Stephen Schneider offers an intensely personal reflection on his four decades researching climate in Science as a Contact Sport. TV-weatherman-turned-talk-radio-host Brian Sussman rails against an eco-Marxist conspiracy in Climategate. And Texas Tech geosciences professor Katharine Hayhoe joins her pastor husband Andrew Farley in calling upon fellow believers to focus on the science and then act in A Climate for Change.

All of these works affirm that, in one way or another, climate change is a profoundly human phenomenon. By that I do not simply mean that these authors accept (as all but Sussman do) the anthropogenic theory asserting that humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions are largely to blame. No, climate change is best described as a human phenomenon because it cuts across (and sometimes into) deeply held understandings of culture, including our capacities for knowledge, progress, and purpose; our relationship to the natural world and each other; and our relationship to the divine. Disagreements may sometimes masquerade as scientific disputes, but often this is just a proxy war while the real interests driving the fight remain behind the scenes.

Mike Hulme did the bulk of his writing before the recent shift in American sentiment about global warming, but Why We Disagree About Climate Change remains very useful for understanding the current debate. Hulme, who was the tenth-most-cited scientist in the climate-change field for the period of 1999 to 2009, is a professor at the University of East Anglia, the center of the e-mail leak. Although Hulme was not involved in the controversial e-mails, he has proven more prescient than most in the science world when gauging the scandal’s impact. Even though nothing in the “Climategate” e-mails directly supports the claim that the anthropogenic theory is a vast hoax, more people believe that now than did before. As Hulme argues in his book, public perceptions of truth can be more consequential than the truth itself.

In Why We Disagree About Climate Change, Hulme says hardly a word pro or con about the potential merits of alternative explanations, like volcanoes and sun cycles, seemingly central to the minority scientific view. Instead, he pulls up the underlying cultural, psychological, and sociological roots of our climate disagreements — the factors that he believes give rise to much of the passion associated with this topic — and lays them on the table in a calm and workmanlike fashion.

While openly acknowledging his own predispositions — as a Prius-driving professor, an orthodox Anglican Christian, and a member of the Labour Party, to name a few — Hulme works to maintain the stance of a neutral and nonjudgmental observer. In this he largely succeeds. Indeed, at times he may succeed too effectively, as the book occasionally drags for lack of either a clear villain or a prescriptive thesis — although his cool, methodical approach is a plus in a genre too often beset by activist hyperbole on all sides.

Hulme opens with a brisk tour of the history of climate as a concept, highlighting the shift from the integration of climate and daily life in pre-modern societies (think of the lessons communicated through Old Testament droughts) to modernity’s cleaving of culture from nature. Climate has also been tied to theories of cultural superiority and historical determinism, from the ancient Greeks (who gave us the word klimata to distinguish their productive zone on earth from the perils to the frigid north and torrid south) to Immanuel Kant (who saw the benefits of a temperate climate as the key to explaining why certain “peoples have educated the others and controlled them with weapons”) to Jared Diamond (whose recent book Collapse chronicles the fall of civilizations that apparently overstrained their ecosystems).

Hulme’s second chapter follows the “discovery of climate change,” highlighting the work of and scientific culture surrounding such scientists as John Tyndall, who formulated the theory of greenhouse gases in the 1860s, and Svante Arrhenius, who in 1896 first calculated by hand, with impressive accuracy, the climate sensitivity associated with a doubling of carbon dioxide. Though several of these early pioneers saw the modification of the atmosphere as a positive potential insurance against the return of an Ice Age, that view shifted over time. By the 1980s, Wallace S. Broecker of Columbia University was advancing the idea of very negative physical “tipping points” that now dominates much of the academic and popular thinking. Hulme emphasizes that each era’s scientists operated in a culture with its own paradigms, its own “ways of seeing the world; ways of believing.”

The meat of the book is in seven chapters, each dedicated to one of our own era’s belief structures — the fears, cultural factors, and value judgments that drive our responses to theories of climate change and possible remedies: first, we disagree about the role of scientific knowledge and the role of scientists in policy discussions; second, we disagree about the ways we value things (our economics); third, our religious and ethical outlooks differ, or as the author puts it, “our duty to others, to Nature, and to our deities”; fourth, we have disparate personal and corporate approaches to risk; fifth, we respond differently to mixed messages communicated about those risks; sixth, we have differing views of “development” for the global poor; and seventh, we disagree about how issues of global importance should be governed. There is, of course, much overlap between these categories — our views about science will influence our understanding of risk, for example, and our religious and economic convictions can influence our opinions about development for the poor and the proper role of government. Hulme acknowledges these overlaps even as he works to illuminate each category on its own; the effect, however, is a repetition that leaves the reader wondering whether the book could have been considerably shorter.

The central issue Hulme raises is that we fundamentally disagree about what we, knowingly or unknowingly, hold most dear, and that our disagreement can produce a host of secondary conflicts. If we differ on first principles we will usually differ on much that comes after.

Though Hulme ably covers topics as diverse as international treaties, the social cost of carbon, and environmental theology, he is at his best when dealing with the role of science in society. He argues that the scientific norms of skepticism, universalism, communalism, and disinterestedness are difficult to apply to public problems where “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high, and decisions urgent” — what Silvio Funtowicz and Jerry Ravetz have termed “post-normal science.” Hulme notes this not to disparage the traditional norms but to help scientists and the public see the situation more clearly. He calls for humility and transparency, and recognition of the important but limited role for science when facing difficult ethical decisions. All sides of the climate policy debate — both those who argue that the science is currently settled (and assume that the need for vigorous government intervention is unquestionable) and those who argue that the policy status quo must not change unless and until all doubt is removed — would be wise to remember that, as Hulme puts it well, “Certainty is the anomalous condition for humanity, not uncertainty.”

While Hulme’s treatise attempts to illuminate the human element of the debate, the late Stephen Schneider’s memoir illustrates it personally. As a child, Schneider was fascinated with hurricanes, and he grew up with a desire to make a difference in the world. During a long career in atmospheric modeling where he was a central figure in battles over global cooling, nuclear winter, ozone-layer depletion, and global warming, Schneider found himself dueling with a pre-Penthouse Bob Guccione in the New York Times, receiving smuggled documents from the Soviet Union, going off-script on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, fishing for trout with Dan Rather, verbally sparring with congressmen on Capitol Hill, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize along with other climate scientists and Al Gore, and talking global warming with rapper Snoop Dogg and the (aptly named?) band Widespread Panic at a summer music festival.

Undoubtedly, it was an interesting ride — and it makes for a surprisingly good read, a bit like sitting on the porch and listening to a cantankerous but lovable old uncle recount his war stories. There are backs to be patted, scores to be settled, apologies to be made, lessons learned, and perhaps an embellishment or two. It may not be history exactly as it was, but it is certainly one man’s personal sense of history as it was felt.

Schneider rose to fame due to some solid scientific chops, a lot of being in the right place at the right time, and a knack for producing a great quote. In 1973, when mute uncertainty reigned over whether competing anthropogenic effects might produce a net cooling or warming, he quipped, “Mark Twain had it backwards. Nowadays everybody is doing something about the weather, but nobody is talking about it.” Nice line — and the New York Times’s science writer agreed.

But he who lives by the sword sometimes suffers self-inflicted wounds. Schneider’s most famous quote, one that still regularly pops up in books and columns and online today, comes from a 1989 interview with Discover magazine: “[Scientists] have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”

Schneider spends several pages expressing his frustration at having his views misrepresented and only partially quoted. To be fair, let us here provide the full quotation:

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.

Though still rightly disturbing for those of us who would prefer the whole truth all the time, this is quite a bit more nuanced than the we make up what we need caricature of Schneider’s comments that one often sees.

It is also noteworthy that Schneider stood up for scientific truth even when the facts ran counter to his personal policy preferences and friendships. The most notable example in the book is his disagreement with the über-activist-scientist Carl Sagan in the early 1980s over nuclear winter — the theory that a large nuclear war would plunge the planet into a period of extreme cold. With Schneider’s access to more advanced atmospheric modeling systems, he could see that Sagan’s doomsday predictions of a nuclear winter that could wipe out humanity were vastly overblown. Sagan had earlier been a friend (he had helped get Schneider on the Tonight Show), but Schneider felt compelled to advocate against Sagan’s winter scenario with what he (ever quotable) dubbed a “nuclear fall” theory — a far milder and more temporary scenario. He describes his falling out with Sagan as “one of the most unpleasant chapters in my life.” They did not reconcile until years later, when the climate-policy fight eventually brought them together again.

One of Schneider’s aims is to set the record straight on what he and his allies said and did, but it must be noted that he sometimes distorts the record of those with whom he disagrees. He blithely labels President George W. Bush and most Republicans as global-warming deniers. Clearly President Bush, who refused to support the Kyoto Protocol or major domestic climate-change legislation, did not take policy positions that Schneider would have preferred. But in 2001, President Bush affirmed his belief in the reality of global warming and favorably noted the National Academy of Sciences conclusion that the increase was due in large part to human activity. Toward the end of Bush’s presidency, his administration took pains to highlight its achievements on the issue, including the establishment of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, an initiative intended to be much more practicable than Kyoto. Contrasting Schneider’s nonchalant criticism of conservatives with the angst he felt in disagreeing with Sagan reminds us that, in science as in life, we usually want to take it easier on our friends.

Schneider, who unexpectedly passed away in July 2010 on an airplane returning from a scientific conference, operated in the center of what Hulme calls the “co-production” model of public policy formation, wherein scientists and policymakers engage in a complicated dance. His book reveals to us the late-night negotiations and P.R. brinksmanship that occur when science and politics are forced together in the creation of consensus documents, such as those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Schneider was truly a man on a mission, as the subtitle of his book, Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate, makes clear. At times, his arrogance and hubris are jarring. Nevertheless, one also sees a sympathetic figure who clearly loved his wife and faced his own mortality in fighting lymphoma. Those who either deify or demonize activist-scientists like Schneider may benefit from this glimpse of the complex, gifted, but imperfect man he was.

Squarely on the other side of the climate debate from Schneider is Brian Sussman, who now spends his mornings on conservative talk radio in the liberal bastion of San Francisco. His prior claim to fame was being the backup weatherman for the CBS Early Show. His new book Climategate actually has little to say (just some four pages) about the e-mail scandal whence its title comes. During an event at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. in June 2010, Sussman acknowledged that the title was changed at the publisher’s suggestion for marketing purposes. At the same event, he pronounced his book “bulletproof.”

Bullets and revolutions are apparently on Sussman’s mind as he smells a grand Marxist conspiracy at work. Indeed, the book opens with these words: “Global warming’s story begins with a diabolical bastard named Karl Marx.” It seems that almost every page thereafter contains some reference to the bearded one, or Lenin, or Hitler, or “Marxist scientists,” or “eco-Marxists,” or the like. Brazen statements like “the earth’s entire temperature record is rigged” and not-so-subtle suggestions that “Barack Hussein Obama” is a handmaiden of the U.N. “oneworlders” and was never properly sworn in as president (because there was no Bible at the swearing-in do-over after Chief Justice John Roberts publicly flubbed the oath) are commonplace as well.

The primary value of Climategate comes in having all of the major arguments of the “it’s a hoax” crowd together in one volume. Some of the anecdotes are indeed concerning. It certainly does not inspire confidence in our temperature record to see an official weather station five feet from an old trash-burning barrel. Yet it is difficult to know how much to extrapolate from the things that Sussman highlights because, upon even a cursory investigation, this “bulletproof” book is full of holes.

For example, Sussman’s list of the “Twenty Hottest Years” includes data only from the contiguous United States, not the world, which one might expect from a book on global warming. The author does not clue the reader in to this distinction, but it becomes readily apparent if one follows the cryptic footnote to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. This is important particularly because in the lower 48, extremely hot years from the Dust Bowl of the 1930s appear frequently on the list, with the year 1934 coming in at the top. But that regional heat wave was not a worldwide event.

Nevertheless, the author is silent about that crucial distinction, even as he castigates Al Gore for his words about the recent clustering of the world’s ten hottest years. Sussman checks Gore’s quote against his U.S.-only graph and taunts, “I honestly don’t know where Gore obtains his data.” Actually, the Goddard Institute graph labeled “Global Land-Ocean Temperature” seems to match Gore pretty well. Even M.I.T.’s Richard Lindzen (a favorite of the skeptics) agrees with Gore’s assessment of the top ten warmest years, reluctantly observing at another Heritage Foundation event that “there’s no way out of that.”

Sussman’s fun with words and numbers continues as he describes the year 2008 as “the coldest of the new millennium.” Never mind that it was still one of the ten hottest in the modern era of recordkeeping and quite consistent with the long-term warming trend predicted by the majority scientific view.

One could go easily go on and on, but a final example will suffice. Climategate highlights a British court case dealing with teaching materials used in the classroom. In its decision, the court identified several discrepancies between Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and the reports of the IPCC. Sussman attributes the words “political brainwashing” to the court, but the judge never uses those terms or anything similar — a fact easily checked by simply reading the decision. Climategate also neglects to inform readers that the judge noted that he had “no doubt” that “Al Gore’s presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film was broadly accurate.” In the end, An Inconvenient Truth was approved for classroom use.

In a final bit of unintended irony, Climategate closes with a spy-movie-style scene in which a Silicon Valley venture capitalist helps Sussman to follow the money — Gore’s money. Legitimate questions can and should be asked about the former vice president’s green technology ties. Certainly at one level, though, it makes sense that Gore would put his money where his mouth is. Sussman’s mole instead tells us that Gore, despite his years of government work on the issue, does not believe the earth has a fever, he just “believes in money.”

The book concludes with Sussman and his rich friend bemoaning the fate of their country. They vow never to give up the fight to save this nation, and in Climategate’s penultimate sentence the mole says, “That’s why I want this book to be a huge seller.”

Money and patriotism can go hand in hand for Sussman, but apparently not for Gore, who is deplored for being a Marxist on one page and a capitalist on the next. This is emblematic of the sloppy logic in Climategate overall. Upon finishing the book, I could not help but wonder why an otherwise reputable and scholarly think tank like the Heritage Foundation would lend its stamp of approval to a book that is seemingly based on such a limited amount of rational thought.

A nice antidote to the venom of Climategate is A Climate for Change, by Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe and her husband Andrew Farley, a pastor, author, and also a professor at Texas Tech. While they share a Christian faith with Sussman, their approach to global warming could hardly be more different. The couple would likely concur with Mike Hulme that our disagreements about climate change are often grounded less on the actual science (the general knowledge of which rarely rises above sound bites and rumors) than on a host of other factors.

In addition to being a very useful primer addressing the basic science of climate change and the major counterarguments made by climate-change skeptics, A Climate for Change also highlights theological issues related to the care of God’s creation and the demonstration of love to one’s global neighbors. Hayhoe and Farley provide examples of apparent climate-change impacts from the Arctic of Alaska to the tropical island of Tuvalu, and offer concrete steps towards reducing one’s carbon footprint.

Perhaps the book tries to do a little too much, and at times the topics are covered in too cursory a manner as the authors seek to address the full gamut of frequently asked questions they have received over the years. Generally, though, their explanations are both accessible and well documented. The book is enhanced by color charts, graphs, and other figures, many of them created from raw source data by Hayhoe herself. Dealing with a topic that can engender both passionate activism and opposition, A Climate for Change provides a unique perspective at the intersection of religion and science, finding a diagnosis in the material world of science and a call to respond in the realm of faith.

Mike Hulme approaches the same intersection from a similarly spiritual perspective in “Beyond Climate Change,” the final chapter of Why We Disagree. Describing climate change with Horst Rittel’s term “wicked problem” — one in which resolving one aspect may well tear open another — Hulme recasts our current array of reactions within four biblical myths (using the term “myth” non-pejoratively to mean deeply assumed truths).

The myth of Eden laments for the loss of a pristine creation. The myth of Apocalypse channels our fear that we have unwittingly doomed the world. The myth of Babel brings forth the prideful hope that we will solve the problem with a new wave of technology and massive geoengineering. And the myth of Jubilee calls for “climate justice” on a massive scale to redress years of energy and pollution inequality.

Hulme does not argue that one particular myth holds the solution. Instead, he acknowledges that, notwithstanding the hype surrounding each new major report or hurricane or heat wave or election, with each promising to provide the turning point in the fight against global warming, no solution can emerge from today’s dominant systems of thought. He only finds hope in the possibility that the problem of climate change will spur new “modes of knowing” that will press beyond our current “science-saturated and spiritually impoverished wisdom.” Climate change may “do work for us” by waking us from a deep spiritual slumber. For Hulme, the four religious myths offer a starting point from which to explore larger questions about “how and why we live on this planet.”

Hulme’s last chapter feels like it should be the first of a different book — and, in a sense, he hopes it will become just that. By jarring humanity beyond the material worlds of science, economics, and politics, Hulme sees the possibility that climate change may help direct society away from a fate where, as he quotes playwright Tom Stoppard, “When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.” The answer, as Hulme sees it, will be something like ecologist Jesse Ausubel’s pithy summary of medieval history: “Great sins can elicit great cathedrals.” This seems a lot to ask from climate change. But Hulme’s challenging vision suggests that, in ways we can barely begin to imagine, the human phenomenon of climate change and our current disagreements about it may yet turn out to be a blessing in disguise if we can look beyond the atmosphere and see the heavens.

Good bye, Kyoto

From: American Thinker

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, after surviving 15 years, mostly spent on life support. It reached its peak in Bali in 2007 at the annual UN gabfest, had a sudden unexpected collapse in Copenhagen in 2009, and has been in a coma since.

Kyoto had its real beginning at the 1992 Global Climate Summit in Rio de Janeiro. I missed that great party but George Bush the elder went and signed up for the United States. The language of the Global Climate Treaty, the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), was vague enough to not be completely objectionable -- although we should have known better than to let the camel's nose enter the tent. It has prejudiced the subsequent discussion by focusing only on anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

The 1997 Protocol, negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, tried to put teeth into the FCCC. And its bite was strong enough so that the United States never ratified it -- even during the Clinton-Gore years in the White House. The US Senate, bless their hearts, had voted unanimously, 95 to 0, for the 1997 Byrd-Hagel Resolution against imposing any kind of restrictions on energy use mandated by the United Nations. And during the Obama administration, with the most pro-AGW people in the White House, the Democrat-controlled Senate refused to consider the Cap-and-Trade bill (to restrict emissions of CO2) that the House had passed in 2009.

The origin of Kyoto and its demise is a thrilling tale, full of heroes and villains, which has never been fully told. It produced some household words like "Hockeystick," "Climategate," "Mike's trick" and "hide the decline." I was fortunate, if that is the right word, to have been involved continuously in all aspects of Kyoto. Much of it is published in a Hoover Institution booklet "From Rio to Kyoto" -- and I am now working on the sequel "From Kyoto to Copenhagen."

The Rise of Kyoto

I trace the main actor behind Kyoto as the UN-sponsored IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Its first full assessment report in 1990 provided the basis for the Rio Summit and its doctored second assessment report of 1996 provided the scientific underpinning for the Kyoto Protocol.

What exactly did the IPCC have to say in 1996, when its printed report became available? Those of us present in Madrid in 1995, when a final draft was approved by the scientists, became aware that the crucial language was changed after its approval and before it was printed. While this has been hotly denied by the perpetrators, the evidence is quite clear; one only has to compare the two documents. Dr. Frederick Seitz, one of America's most distinguished scientists and President Emeritus of the Rockefeller University, had this to say in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal on June 12, 1996:

"In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report."

And he had good reason to be upset because here are the phrases that were deleted from the final draft:

• "None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases."
• "While some of the pattern-base studies discussed here have claimed detection of a significant climate change, no study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed] to [man-made] causes. Nor has any study quantified the magnitude of a greenhouse gas effect or aerosol effect in the observed data - an issue of primary relevance to policy makers."
• "Any claims of positive detection and attribution of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced."
• "While none of these studies has specifically considered the attribution issue, they often draw some attribution conclusions, for which there is little justification."
• "When will an anthropogenic effect on climate be identified? It is not surprising that the best answer to this question is, `We do not know. "

But the following sentence was added in the "revision":

The body of statistical evidence in chapter 8, when examined in the context of our physical understanding of the climate system, now points to a discernible human influence on the global climate. [IPCC chapter 8, p.439]

The memorable phrase "the balance of evidence" used in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers is essentially meaningless, and certainly not backed by any scientific evidence. It turns out that the two main pieces of evidence, two crucial graphs in the IPCC report , were based on bad information or had actually been doctored [see my Hoover report].

Kyoto: A Money Machine -- for Some

The Kyoto Protocol was a fraud right from Day One. Even if it had been punctiliously followed by all of the nations who ratified it, it would have achieved essentially nothing -- a measly reduction in the calculated temperature half a century hence of 0.02 degrees C -- an amount too small to even measure.

Kyoto was all about politics and money. The terms of the Kyoto Protocol demanded a 5.2% overall reduction from the emission levels of 1990 for industrialized nations. The choice of 1990, however, favored Europe, Britain, Germany, and Russia at the expense of the United States.

Around 1990, Britain switched from primarily coal to natural gas, thus reducing CO2 emissions. And at about the same time, the Soviet Union collapsed and Germany took over its Eastern part, closing down much of its inefficient coal-fired electricity production.

The most pernicious provisions of the Kyoto Protocol were permits for emissions trading within the European Union and the so-called Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). CDM permitted industries and others to keep emitting CO2 while buying unused credits from other Kyoto nations or by sponsoring projects in developing nations that would reduce emissions.

What a racket this turned out to be. It has made Al Gore a "climate billionaire" who emits CO2 copiously from his four residences, jet planes and yachts, but then buys "carbon offsets," emission credits from his own company, set up to trade CO2 permits.

The other big money item has been the drive for so-called "clean energy" -- with its huge subsidies for wind power and solar energy, widely abused in Europe -- but especially in the United States where the subsidies are among the highest.

The poster child for clean energy is probably ethanol -- a huge sink for government subsidies, essentially a wasteful scheme to transfer money from consumers to corn growers and refiners. Even environmentalists admit that ethanol does not lead to CO2 reductions overall -- and has many other undesirable environmental consequences.

Among the worst of the consequences of this "bio-fuel craze" has been the rise in the world price of corn -- doubling to $7 a bushel in the past six months -- wheat, and other agricultural commodities. It has led to food riots in many developing nations and served to perpetuate poverty throughout the world.

The general restrictions on CO2 emissions have also slowed down economic growth by making energy more expensive. All in all, the Kyoto Protocol has caused nothing but disasters.

The Fall of Kyoto

Just as Rio marked the beginning of the Kyoto misadventure, the end became really evident in 2009 in Copenhagen. Even desperate efforts by scientist-alarmists (that went well beyond the IPCC) failed to make an impact. Who still remembers the "Copenhagen Diagnosis" or UNEP's rehash of the IPCC, churned out at the last minute? Ultimately, China and major developing nations rejected all efforts to impose limits on the use of fossil fuels; economic growth proved to be more important than hypothetical climate disasters.

The Climategate revelations may have played a decisive role in shaking the public's faith in the climate science of the IPCC. Not only did a clique of key IPCC scientists hide their raw temperature data and the methodology of their selection and adjustments, but they conspired to delete incriminating e-mails and fought hard against all attempts by independent outside scientists to replicate their results. They also undermined the peer-review system and tried to make it impossible for skeptical scientists to publish their work in scientific journals. In the process, they damaged the whole science enterprise, based on full publication of data and methods, replication of results, and open debate.

No Sequel to Kyoto -- We Hope

And what about the future? There is not likely to be an extension of the Protocol or any similar international demand for emission restrictions. The 2010 gab fest, held in Cancun, Mexico, was not even a holding action and the 2011 conference in Durban, South Africa, will surely be an even greater waste of time and money.

But the financial subsidies have established politically important stakeholders who will continue to fight for programs of "clean energy", "renewable energy", and other such programs -- all in the name of "saving the earth's climate for our children and grand-children."

One only has to look at the current situation in the United States to realize how bad things have become. Western states, under the leadership of California, have established the Western Climate Initiative. Eastern states have established a similar regime. One of the worst ideas is the so-called Renewable Electricity Standard (RES), which would force electric utilities to generate a certain percentage of their power from "renewable energy". Many of these groups demand a 20% "feed-in" quota by 2020, although politicians are playing all kinds of games with numbers. President Obama is calling for a 80% reduction by 2050. As he promised during the 2008 campaign, under his plan "electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket."

Probably the worst of all of the proposals may be the scheme to capture and sequester the emissions of CO2 from power plants. Fortunately, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) may never come to pass because of technological reasons. In the US, a little more than 50% of electric power is produced from coal burning plants, with the cheapest and most secure fuel we have.

The George W. Bush administration was not much better in this respect than the Obama White House. Remember the "hydrogen economy"? Bush is responsible also for feeding the various interest groups with subsidies -- even while he refused to consider CO2 as a pollutant.

Unfortunately also, his EPA and his Justice Department did not mount an adequate scientific defense before the Supreme Court in 2007. By a 5-4 decision, the Court called CO2 a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, but left it up to the EPA to demonstrate that it would constitute a hazard to "human health and welfare." The EPA has now issued an Endangerment Finding based only on the flimsy evidence of the IPCC. But without waiting for the legal challenge to the EF to be settled in court, the EPA is trying to proceed energetically to impose CO2 restrictions under the Clean Air Act. It would be interesting to see how the EPA will set the national ambient air quality standard for CO2, which is globally determined now by the emissions of China and other developing nations - and no longer under the control of the United States.

The battle against the unreasonable efforts of the EPA has to be fought on several fronts. The Congress, with a Republican majority in the House, is trying to cut off funding for EPA programs that involve dubious efforts to control climate change. In the House, the "Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011" is sure to pass. The US Senate may finally pass the "Murkowski Resolution", which would nullify the Endangerment Finding of the EPA.

On the scientific front, it behooves us to demonstrate to all concerned that the conclusion of the IPCC about anthropogenic global warming is not based on any credible evidence. Future generations will thank us for this service: "skeptics" now labeled "deniers," "traitors," "criminals," and worse, will become the "realists" who correctly recognized Global Warming as a non-problem and saved our economy from going down the drain.