Category Archives: climate

A Bit of Climate

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What’s up with this?  Is it getting warmer?  Well, yes, maybe, depending on the time scale and the baseline of comparison.  It’s warmer today than during the last Ice Age.  It’s warmer today than during the Little Ice Age of some 3-4 hundred years ago and that ended around 1 hundred years ago.  It’s hard to say, though, how today’s temperature compares with the Medieval Warm Period of some 1,000 years ago, since data sets like NASA’s have been falsified to plus up the claimed warming of today.  We aren’t warmer than we were a decade and a half ago.

The claims of warming and of disastrous continued warming get their force in large part from climate models—more than 70 of them—all of which have been predicting warming rates ranging from worrisome to disastrous.  There’s nothing like actual observation, empirical data, to see what’s up, though.  Anthony Watts, of Watts Up With That, has reprinted a graph from Dr Roy Spencer [“doctor” from his PhD in Meteorology, and currently Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama] that compares the year-by-year predictions of those models with satellite and balloon observational data.  The graph has been adjusted by Spencer to produce an artificial agreement between the models and reality in 1979, and then lets the predictions and the empirical data flow from there.

The squares and circles represent the satellite and balloon, respectively, actual observations; the various lines the predictions of the models; and the heavy black line the simple average of the models.  For the climate-worriers’ concerns of the dangerous effects of a 1.5ºC increase in temperature, the overstatement of the models compared to reality of nearly 1ºC lends incredulity to their claims.

Hmm….

Carbon Tax?

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Ex-Secretary of Labor, State, and Treasury George Schultz and Economics Professor Gary Becker say we should have one.  They even insist that it be revenue neutral.

The problem is, though, that they’re arguing from two false premises, and it’s unfortunate that two such well-educated men should be so caught up in drama rather than fact.

The first false premise is that any tax change (as the imposition of a carbon tax would be) must be revenue neutral.  This may, in fact, be needful for the politics surrounding imposing a new tax (or cutting old ones), but there’s no rational reason for revenue neutrality.  The economic necessity, given our exploding deficit (though President Barack Obama says his budget shrinks it, and, sure, he is an honorable man) and our even more explosive national debt, demands a reduction in spending with its associated reduction in borrowing.  Taxes need not be increased under any nearby circumstances, nor need the imposition of a new tax be “paid for” with an equal increase in spending or reduction in tax somewhere else.  With spending coming down to eliminate our deficit and further, taxes overall can be cut, too.

The second false premise is that carbon, or carbon dioxide, is a pollutant, the blatherings of the political bureaucrats at the EPA notwithstanding.  The climate facts here are that CO2—the primary product of, say, Schultz’ and Becker’s energy companies—is a lagging, a confirmatory, indicator.  The climate record demonstrates that CO2 increases in Earth’s atmosphere lags climate warming on a global scale by some hundreds of years.  Since CO2 “emissions” are primarily from plant and animal respiration—even adding in the output of those energy plants—that lag following planetary warming comes from increased plant and animal life on the warmer planet.  It’s a confirmation of the increasing health of the planet.  That’s not much of a pollutant.

We don’t need a carbon tax, though.  Come to that, we don’t need any tax at the levels at which they’re charged today.

Anthropogenic Climate Change

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…and dishonesty.  More is beginning to leak out, this time from of all places the UN.  That august body’s IPCC has had leaked a draft of its latest “study” on the man-caused disaster in climate, and it isn’t a pretty example of the outcome of climate “scientist” incestuousness.

High points on the leak are from Matt Ridley, in The Wall Street Journal, and they concern a “pollutant” that our present administration is going after, and damn the economy—and damn the

poor people whose lives are being ruined by high food and energy prices caused by the diversion of corn to biofuel and the subsidizing of renewable energy driven by carboncrats[.]

The question at hand:

How much warming will a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide actually produce?

Ridley’s information comes from Nic Lewis.

A semiretired successful financier from Bath, England, with a strong mathematics and physics background, Mr Lewis has made significant contributions to the subject of climate change.

Per Lewis [emphasis added]:

[T]he latest observational estimates of the effect of aerosols (such as sulfurous particles from coal smoke) find that they have much less cooling effect than thought when the last IPCC report was written.  The rate at which the ocean is absorbing greenhouse-gas-induced warming is also now known to be fairly modest.  In other words, the two excuses used to explain away the slow, mild warming we have actually experienced—culminating in a standstill in which global temperatures are no higher than they were 16 years ago—no longer work.

Thus [again, emphasis added],

We can now estimate, based on observations, how sensitive the temperature is to carbon dioxide.  We do not need to rely heavily on unproven models.  Comparing the trend in global temperature over the past 100-150 years with the change in “radiative forcing” (heating or cooling power) from carbon dioxide, aerosols and other sources, minus ocean heat uptake, can now give a good estimate of climate sensitivity.

The conclusion—taking the best observational estimates of the change in decadal-average global temperature between 1871-80 and 2002-11, and of the corresponding changes in forcing and ocean heat uptake—is this: A doubling of CO2 will lead to a warming of 1.6°-1.7°C (2.9°-3.1°F).

This is much lower than the IPCC’s current best estimate, 3°C (5.4°F).

In the end,

A cumulative change of less than 2°C by the end of this century will do no net harm.  It will actually do net good—that much the IPCC scientists have already agreed upon in the last IPCC report.  Rainfall will increase slightly, growing seasons will lengthen, Greenland’s ice cap will melt only very slowly, and so on.

There’s more to this climate pseudo-science failure, and it flows from the CO2 interactions via alleged feedback loops [emphasis added]:

A little warming (from whatever cause [including atmospheric CO2]) heats up the sea, which makes the air more humid—and water vapor itself is a greenhouse gas.  The resulting model-simulated changes in clouds generally increase warming further, so the warming is doubled, trebled or more.

[The problem is,] water vapor may not be increasing.   A recent paper from Colorado State University concluded that “we can neither prove nor disprove a robust trend in the global water vapor data.”  [On top of that], as one Nobel Prize-winning physicist with a senior role in combating climate change admitted to me the other day: “We don’t even know the sign” of water vapor’s effect—in other words, whether it speeds up or slows down a warming of the atmosphere.

One reason for the uncertainty of the sign is that atmospheric water vapor means more clouds, and clouds reflect inbound sunlight while trapping outbound heat.  Which has the greater effect—reducing the inbound inputs or holding onto the outbound outputs?  Only a climate pseudo-scientist claims to know at this point in the data collection and analysis.  Especially given the…quality…of their data and of their models.

There’s a whole lot more at the Watts Up With That? site, both on the present topic and on anthropogenic climate change, generally.

Federal Waste, Climate Change, and Federal Outsourcing

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Fox News ran an article late last week concerning the State Department’s own Office of the Inspector General’s report concerning State’s handling of taxpayer funding of activities in support of the climate change meme—in other countries, yet.  The OIG audit itself can be read here, and the auditors’ list of State programs sampled can be seen here.

What the OIG found in State’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs and its Office of Global Change (OES/EGC), “the nerve center of the Obama administration’s international climate change policy,” was…interesting.  The findings, which included aggregate overspending of some $214 million over the period 2006-2010 that was the subject of the OIG audit, included these:

  • 7 of 19 program totaling $34 million in grants had no particular plans for results monitoring.  Thus, as OIG wrote, “…[State] may not always have reasonable assurance that federal funds were spent in accordance with the grant award; that the grant recipient performed program activities as dictated in the grant award; and that the program’s indicators, goals and objectives were achieved.”
  • [G]rant oversight officers failed to provide written reviews of compliance with State Department reporting standards….
  • [V]isits to climate change sites were rare, and then little effort went into actual examination.  [R]eports “typically summarized meetings held with grantee officials where only the statuses of the programs were discussed.”
  • Requirements that grant recipients submit quarterly financial statements seemed routinely to be ignored.  [A] recipient in Hyderabad, India, who got two separate grants totaling $1.1 million continued to receive funding, even though reporting requirements were not followed.
  • Indeed, reporting requirements for detailed results were not included in any of the seven grants examined by OIG.

Regardless of what anyone might think of the idiocy of spending taxpayer money on the chimera of man-caused global warming, here is a potful of that money being shipped overseas for…well, just because, apparently, given the interest in oversight shown here.  At least, had that money been spent at home, there might have been one or two domestic jobs created or saved, instead of those jobs being outsourced.

Some Thoughts on Climate

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There seems to be a problem with the location of the surface stations that are used to assess  (global) temperatures across a wide geographic area and over long periods (as “climatologists” see it) of time.  In particular, the US Historical Climatology Network, which has major contributions to the data sets used by “climatologists,” seems to have been giving invalid readings for quite a number of years, and at least one US agency involved in driving Federal climate policy seems to have badly “adjusted” the data these stations have been doing a bad job of providing. 

Specifically, as Anthony Watts, the lead author of the paper that investigates the implications of this error (“An area and distance weighted analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends”), put it in an earlier paper,

[A]pproximately 90% of USHCN stations were compromised by encroachment of urbanity in the form of heat sinks and sources, such as concrete, asphalt, air conditioning system heat exchangers, roadways, airport tarmac, and other issues.

This is the result of the well-known urban heat island effect.  The cities grew out to surround the originally placed sensors, and nothing was done about those sitings.

In Watts’ present paper (that inspirationally titled “area and distance weighted analysis” paper), Watts used a better method of assessing the quality of the station locations, one developed by Michel Leroy of METEO-France and accepted for use by the World Meteorological Organization.

Watts’ findings:

…a spurious doubling of U.S. mean temperature trends in the 30 year data period covered by the study from 1979 – 2008.

Moreover,

Poorly sited station trends are adjusted sharply upward, and well sited stations are adjusted upward to match the already-adjusted poor stations.

Well sited rural stations show a warming nearly three times greater after NOAA adjustment is applied.

Urban sites warm more rapidly than semi-urban sites, which in turn warm more rapidly than rural sites.

And finally:

The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward.

Hmm….