Climategate

“Climate change of pace,” (the confessions of Phil Jones), my Forbes Online piece

by Michael Fumento on February 18, 2010

in Odds & Ends

There have been a lot of well-kept secrets among the global warmists – which is primarily why the so-called “Climategate” stolen e-mails proved such a scandal. They showed that, in addition to squelching dissenters, the warmists were admitting things to each other that they were denying to the public. They felt, as a Jack Nicholson character put it, “You can’t handle the truth!”

But now the truth is coming out. One fact is that there has been no statistically significant warming for quite awhile. The other is that temperatures in the Middle Ages, at the very least in the northern hemisphere, were considerably warmer than they are now. (See inset.)

Conceding both these points in a BBC interview was Professor Phil Jones. He was director of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, where the hacked Internet server released thousands of e-mails and other documents. Read about his shockingly honest admissions – and the ramification of them – in my new Forbes Online piece.

Scientist at center of email scandal admits no recent warming

by Michael Fumento on February 14, 2010 · 1 comment

in Global Warming, Odds & Ends

There has been no global warming for a long time, as I wrote recently in Forbes Online (“Show Me the Warming,” Nov. 30, 2009).

I noted that Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the warmist bible, the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report—told Congress two years ago that evidence for manmade warming is “unequivocal.” He claimed “the planet is running a ’fever’ and the prognosis is that it is apt to get much worse.” Yet in one of the released emails he admitted that data showed there was no warming “at the moment.” I then explained:

But Trenberth’s “lack of warming at the moment” has been going on at least a decade. “There has been no [surface-measured] warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995,” observes MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen. “According to satellite data, global warming stopped about 10 years ago and there’s no way to know whether it’s happening now,” says Roy Spencer, former NASA senior scientist for climate studies.

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
The atmospheric concentration of CO2 keeps going up, yet temperatures for the last decade have been flat

The importance of this is that during the past decade, we’ve belched so-called “greenhouse gases” (GHGs) into the atmosphere at ever greater rates, from 6,510 million metric tons in 1996 to 8,230 in 2006—a 26% increase. Atmospheric concentrations have also reached the highest levels ever observed.

Now Professor Phil Jones, director the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Center and the central figure in the ‘Climategate’ affair, has conceded there’s been no ‘statistically significant’ warming. Naturally he said it was a “blip” and not a trend, and he may well prove right. But that doesn’t eliminate the problem that this “blip” has been occurring with historic GHG emissions, therefore the grossly simplistic formula of GHG emissions = warming is false.

He also made what may be the strongest admission by a major warmist that the earth could have been warmer during medieval times (about 800 – 1300) when mankind was emitting essentially no GHGs. (Viking ships did use sails, you may recall.) And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

Heretofore, warmists tried to dismiss this altogether or say it only applied to northern climes.

Nevertheless, “There is much debate over whether the MWP was global in extent or not,” Jones admitted, adding “The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.”

He said that, “For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere” and “There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.” Still, “If the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented.”

In that case, he should be informed of a Nature magazine study last year indicating water temperatures in the area of Indonesia were the same in the MWP as they are today.

You can read some of the specific questions and answers here with annotations by Indur Goklany.

Let’s salute Phil Jones’s honesty – even if he only came by it relatively late in life.

My Two Cents on AmazonGate

by Marlo Lewis on January 27, 2010 · 2 comments

in Global Warming

Climategate, Himalayagate, Pachaurigate, and now NOAAgate — it’s hard to keep up with all the relevations and allegations buzzing around some of the biggest names in climate science.  

Earlier this week in the Telegraph, the intrepid James Delingpole debuted “Amazongate.” Like Himalayagate, this is a case in which the IPCC relied on a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report, rather than a peer-reviewed scientific study, to make a scary claim about global warming.

The IPCC (Working Group II, Ch. 13, p. 596) says that, “Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation” due to global warming. The IPCC’s reference for this claim is Rowell and Moore (2000), which turns out to be an IUCN/WWF report, Global Review of Forest Fires.  

The IUCN/WWF report does cite a peer-reviewed study to support the 40% estimate: Nepsted et al. 1999. Large – scale Impoverishment of Amazonian Forests by Logging and Fire, Nature, Vol. 398, p. 505. The study is available here. 

But the Neptsed study doesn’t quite say what WWF suggests it does. The study says: “Because of the severe drought of 1997 and 1998, we calculate that approximately 270,000 km2 of Amazonian forest had completely depleted plant-available water stored in the upper five metres of soil by the end of the 1998 dry season. In addition, 360,000 km2 of forest had less than 250mm of plant-available soil water left by this time . . .”

The IUCN/WWF report reproduces that statement almost verbatim:
“Up to 40% of the Brazilian forest is extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall. In the 1998 dry season, some 270,000 sq. km of forest became vulnerable to fire, due to completely depleted plant-available water stored in the upper five metres of soil. A further 360,000 sq. km of forest had only 250 mm of plant-available soil water left.”

However, IUCN/WWF’s paraphase adds something — the “up to 40%” estimate. That figure does not appear in Nepsted et al.

Since the Amazon rain forest is estimated at 8.2 million km2 (http://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/), it would seem that about 8% (630,000 km2) of the region was threatened by the drought in 1998, not 40%.

Note also that the terms “climate change” and “global warming” do not appear in the text of the Nepsted study (although footnote 14 references a paper titled “Amazonian deforestation and regional climate change”).

Apparently, the IPCC recycled two claims in the IUCN/WWF report that the report’s supposed source – Nepsted et al. (1999) — did not make: namely, 40% of the rain forest is risk, and this is due to global climate change.

There may be other reasons to conclude that climate change endangers 40% of the rain forest, but they are not to be found in Nepsted et al. (1999) — the source for the IPCC’s source.

Where did all the global warming hurricanes go? (My Forbes article)

by Michael Fumento on December 30, 2009

in Global Warming

The cover of Al Gore’s new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, features a satellite image of the globe showing four major hurricanes – results, we’re meant to believe, of man-made global warming. All four were photoshopped. Which is nice symbolism, because in a sense the whole hurricane aspect of warming has been photoshopped.

As I note in my article in Forbes, it was all really based on just two data points – with the names “Katrina” and “Rita.”

Now with both greenhouse gas emissions and levels in the atmosphere are at their highest, but this year had the fewest hurricanes since 1997, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For the first time since 2006 no hurricanes even made landfall in the U.S.; indeed hurricane activity is at a 30-year low.

Whoops! So much for Gore’s cover and all the hullabaloo.

In a 2005 column, I gave what now proves an interesting retrospective.

“The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name was global warming.” So wrote environmental activist Ross Gelbspan in a New York Times op-ed that one commentator aptly described as “almost giddy.” The green group Friends of the Earth linked Katrina to global warming, as did Germany’s Green Party Environment Minister.

The most celebrated of these commentaries was Chris Mooney’s 2007 book Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming. Mooney, for the record, is also author of the best-selling book The Republican War on Science.

Yet there were top scientists in 2005 such as Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, publishing data showing the Rita-Katrina blowhards had no business building a case around two anomalies. But his paper was squelched by Kevin Trenbarth of “Climategate” fame.

It’s fascinating stuff. Read it!

Climategate Op-Ed in Detroit News

by Daniel Compton on December 23, 2009 · 1 comment

in Energy, Environment, Global Warming, International, Regulation, Zeitgeist

Here is my op-ed published in the Detroit News on December 23.

Climategate: What e-mail really means

Daniel Compton

By now, most people are aware of the scandal surrounding the leak of thousands of e-mails and other documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). Among these is an e-mail exchange involving several of the world’s leading climate scientists, dated October of 2009, in which the admission is made that even their best models cannot account for the last decade of temperature data. “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” said Kevin Trenberth, one of the world’s preeminent climate scientists and lead author of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC reports.

Significantly for public policy, the admission implies that efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions — including the EPA’s endangerment finding, all forms of cap-and-trade-style legislation, and any possible resolution to emerge from the recently convened Copenhagen conference –have no basis in science .

Trenberth’s statement is compelling on its own, but the subsequent discussion is even more illuminating. Later in the same e-mail thread, fellow climate scientist Tom Wigley replies that he does not agree with Trenberth’s assertion. Trenberth then responds to Wigley, clarifying and expounding upon his earlier claims:

“How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!”

This comment requires some scientific translation for its significance to be fully understood. The “energy budget” is the total energy gains and losses incurred by the Earth. The overwhelming majority of the energy entering the Earth comes from the Sun. Some of that energy is reflected back out into space by the atmosphere, clouds, and the Earth’s surface, while the remaining energy is absorbed, and is later reradiated as heat. The amount of energy the Earth gains is approximately equal to the amount it loses, which is why global temperatures remain relatively stable from day to day.

We have fairly good estimates of how much energy is entering the Earth, and we know from the laws of thermodynamics that energy cannot cease to exist, so “balancing the energy budget” simply entails accounting for where all that energy is going. “Global warming” refers to the condition in which the Earth as a system is taking on slightly more energy than it is losing for a sustained period, causing it to heat up over time. Therefore, it is highly significant when one of the world’s leading climate scientists asserts that we are “no where close to knowing where energy is going” and “not close to balancing the energy budget”.

In this context, “geoengineering” refers to any deliberate effort to affect net energy gains or losses to achieve a desired result, such as a cooler planet. The energy income of the planet is approximately static, and also well beyond our control, so affecting net energy flow necessarily involves changing systemic energy losses.

Greater atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide (CO2), can reduce energy loss, so reducing CO2 emissions is one method of geoengineering. Indeed, Trenberth, in a letter published in the February 2009 issue of Physics Today defined “geoengineering” to include all efforts to “reduce emissions … or reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.” Therefore, using his own definition of “geoengineering,” Trenberth’s remark could be interpreted thus:

The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration to reduce emissions … or reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not!

All policy actions that would be required under the EPA endangerment finding, cap-and-trade legislation, and any global climate treaty amount to attempts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Thus, by his own admission, Kevin Trenberth appears convinced that all these efforts are quite hopeless indeed.

Daniel Compton is a research associate at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and contributor to OpenMarket.org

Climategate and consensus nonsense

by Fran Smith on December 18, 2009

in Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

Cato’s Pat Michaels, one of the scientists attacked in the Climategate emails, has an excellent editorial in the Wall Street Journal today with examples of how the scientists promoting catastrophic global warming shut out dissident voices in supposedly peer-reviewed journals.

Michaels notes that the EPA finding of endangerment from CO2 emissions, based on the tainted research of the Climategate emailers, should be called into question.  He writes:

The result of all this is that our refereed literature has been inestimably damaged, and reputations have been trashed. Mr. Wigley repeatedly tells news reporters not to listen to “skeptics” (or even nonskeptics like me), because they didn’t publish enough in the peer-reviewed literature—even as he and his friends sought to make it difficult or impossible to do so.

Ironically, with the release of the Climategate emails, the Climatic Research Unit, Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley have dramatically weakened the case for emissions reductions. The EPA claimed to rely solely upon compendia of the refereed literature such as the IPCC reports, in order to make its finding of endangerment from carbon dioxide. Now that we know that literature was biased by the heavy-handed tactics of the East Anglia mob, the EPA has lost the basis for its finding.

What Nanny Doesn’t Want You to Know

by Angela Logomasini on December 16, 2009 · 1 comment

in Nanny State, Personal Liberty

Nanny state regulators got it all wrong back in 1977 when the feds placed a warning label on the sugar substitute saccharine. They said it could cause cancer, but their underlying science was flimsy. It took them more than 20 years to admit to that mistake and remove saccharine from the list of carcinogens.

And federal health officials have long warned us all to cut back on salt because they say it might contribute to heart disease. Most people trust this advice, but it’s most likely not true for everyone. Salt appears to be a problem largely for individuals with hypertension, but not so much for the rest of us. Those of us who like salting our veggies and other things to make them more palatable, probably would like to know the whole story.

Yet Nanny statists at National Institutes of Health (NIH) don’t want to give us the whole story. They apparently refuse to release research that might contradict their warnings. Since 2003, that data has been subject to a Data Quality Act petition–a process that is supposed to ensure that the federal government doesn’t base policy on faulty science. Accordingly, regulators are supposed to release data when petitioned, but they usually don’t comply with the law, which lacks a good enforcement mechanism. The feds have managed to keep this research a secret for a long time. That way they can set whatever policies and recommendations they please–without any accountability.

In this case, they start by urging everyone to cut back on salt. Then local and state governments may start regulating salt based on such specious recommendations. As those laws grow, the feds might even step in. Such is the progression of many nanny state regulations.

The recent Climategate scandal underscores this point. The absence of scientific transparency gives regulators free reign. Then regulators and their collaborators can finesse the science in a way that best suits their regulatory aims while concealing inconvenient findings. Personal liberties and economic freedoms are eventually wiped out along with the facts. Bureaucrats end up more powerful, and life for everyone else is less palatable.

Photo attribution: Duchamp’s photostream on flickr.

Lots of vituperative comments to Palin’s WaPo op-ed

by Fran Smith on December 10, 2009 · 1 comment

in Culture, Environment, Global Warming, Personal Liberty, Sanctimony

Sarah Palin’s op-ed in the Washington Post yesterday on ClimateGate and the Copenhagen conference has spawned a blizzard of comments from Post readers.  Almost 4,000 comments as of this morning.  Many of them – no friends of free speech — attack the newspaper for publishing Palin’s article at all. Huffington Post sycophants are similarly energized in their hatred for Palin and for free speech.  Their comments on a cross-posting of Palin’s article number 5,750. Here’s an example:

“someone like palin who does not even understand the difference between climate and weather should not be allowed to do the forecast on a local tv news station, let alone write an op-ed piece for a once respected newspaper like the washington post. . . .”

Interesting that instead of commenting on the substance of the article, detractors are more interested in ad hominems.  May sound familiar to skeptics of catastrophic global warming or the “deniers” as they’re often referred to.

All the Former Vice President’s Men: ClimateGate

by Richard Morrison on December 7, 2009

in Video, Zeitgeist

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCmDmMbtSb0 285 234]

LibertyWeek 72: Champagne Wishes and Climate Change Dreams

by Richard Morrison on December 7, 2009

in CEI Projects, Podcast

Your host Richard Morrison teams up with collaborators Jeremy Lott and William Yeatman to bring you Episode 72 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We begin with UN climate hypocrisy in Copenhagen, presidential arm-twisting on health care and a cloudy look at government transparency. We conclude with the end of the tobacco road in Virginia and scandal of banking and nepotism in Venezuela.

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