NOAA

NOAA to Skeptics: We’re Right, You Can’t Deny It

by Richard Morrison on July 29, 2010 · 7 comments

in Environment, Global Warming

A recent report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has received wide media attention, has come to the conclusion that evidence for anthropogenic global warming is “undeniable.” This has, of course, been seized on by alarmists as confirming that all of their proposed solutions to future warming must therefore be undeniably correct as well. The conclusions of the report are also being used in attempts to try to bury the Climategate scandal of recent months.

Fiona Harvey of the Financial Times reported on this story (reg. req’d.) for the front page of today’s print edition and has the good sense to quote our very own Myron Ebell for a rebuttal:

Sceptics remain unconvinced. Myron Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said: “I think climategate is nowhere near done and people will become more sceptical as they find out more and more about how these conclusions were not based on science but were in fact based on political calculation.”

The repeated use of the term “undeniable”  by bloggers and activists commenting on the report is merely the latest attempt by the warmists to claim that there’s nothing more to be said about climate policy – that the debate is over. It’s like a boxer suddenly grabbing the announcer’s microphone after round three, announcing he has won, and telling everyone watching the match to go home. The only trouble with that strategy is that we’re still in the ring – and we’re not going anywhere.

Carbon dioxide by any other name would fertilize as well: Myron Ebell quoted in Climatewire

by Marlo Lewis on September 23, 2009 · 1 comment

in Global Warming

Today’s ClimateWire (subscription required) carries an analysis by reporter Lauren Morello that begins:

Say goodbye to “greenhouse gases.” Say hello to “carbon pollution” and ”heat-trapping gases.”  

Morello observes a shift in the vocabulary U.S. government officials are using to talk about global warming — a change much in evidence in President Obama’s climate speech yesterday at the U.N.

Obama officials increasingly avoid the non-pejorative (although somewhat metaphorical) term “greenhouse gas” to describe carbon dioxide and instead refer to “carbon pollution” and “heat-trapping gases.”

Morello quotes NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco’s explanation that these terms are emphasized to “make what’s happening more understandable and more accessible to non-technical audiences.”

Fortunately, she also quotes CEI’s Myron Ebell, who cuts to the chase: “The cleverest thing that the global warming alarmists have done is to categorize carbon dioxide emissions as pollution, because it’s not true.”

The Obama administration’s shift to this terminology is actually way behind the green bamboozle curve. Al Gore repeatedly called carbon dioxide “global warming pollution” in his 2006 film and book, An Inconvenient Truth. Major environmental groups have been denouncing “greenhouse pollution” and “global warming pollution” for years.

The Supreme Court takes the cake, however, deciding in Massachusetts v. EPA (April 2007) that carbon dioxide is an “air pollutant” merely by virtue of the fact that it is “emitted into” the air. By that logic, even zero-pollution, completely clean air is an “air pollutant,” provided it is “emitted.”

This sort of terminological confusion is not harmless. By defining CO2 as an “air pollutant” merely because it is “emitted,” the Court set the stage for a gigantic regulatory chain reaction under the Clean Air Act that could easily dwarf Waxman-Markey and the Kyoto Protocol in cost and scope, as I explain here.

If Lubchenco really wants to demystify the climate debate, she might start by describing CO2 more accurately. Here’s my pick: ”a plant-fertilizing, biosphere-greening, colorless, odorless, non-polluting, trace gas.”

Hurricane Activity Increase Due to Better Monitoring

by Ivan Osorio on August 17, 2009

in Environment, Global Warming

The potential threat from more frequent and stronger hurricanes is a favorite scare scenario of climate alarmists. They point to disasters like Hurricane Katrina as examples. However, such anecdotal evidence, while dramatic, says little about overall cyclonic activity. A greater document of documented storms does not necessarily mean that more storms have occurred, only that more have been recorded. As Gabriel Vecchi and Thomas Knutson of NOAA state:

Two recent papers (Vecchi and Knutson; and Landsea et al) suggest that, based on careful examination of the Atlantic tropical storm database (HURDAT) and on estimates of how many storms were likely missed in the past, it is likely that the increase in Atlantic tropical storm frequency in HURDAT since the late-1800s is primarily due to improved monitoring.

Vecchi and Knutson find this increase among moderate-duration storms (storms lasting longer than two days). Their adjustment for “missing” storms is shown in the chart above . They go on:

Existing records of past Atlantic tropical storm numbers (1878 to present) in fact do show a pronounced upward trend, correlated with rising SSTs (see Figs. 1 and 9 of Vecchi and Knutson 2008). However, the density of reporting ship traffic over the Atlantic was relatively sparse during the early decades of this record, such that if storms from the modern era (post 1965) had hypothetically occurred during those earlier decades, a substantial number would likely not have been directly observed by the ship-based “observing network of opportunity.” We find that, after adjusting for such an estimated number of missing storms, there is a small nominally positive upward trend in tropical storm occurrence from 1878-2006. But statistical tests reveal that this trend is so small, relative to the variability in the series, that it is not significantly distinguishable from zero (Figure 2). Thus the historical tropical storm count record does not provide compelling evidence for a greenhouse warming induced long-term increase.

As for greater economic losses from storms, there are simply more people living on the coasts than ever before, which means more buildings along the coasts than ever before.

For more on hurricanes, see the segment and comments on the topic from Marlo Lewis’s film, Policy Peril. (Thanks to Margaret Griffis for the tip.)