What bad news for The University of Queensland. Their entire legal staff were on holiday at the same time and this eminent university was protected only by a Law & Society 101 student who staffed the overnight service of FreeLegalAidOnline. A mockfest is ensuing across the Internet. It is so unfair.
A year ago John Cook published another 97% study (the magic number that all consensuses must find). It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (see Anthony Watts view). Cook’s work is obviously impeccable (except for the part about 97% being really 0.3%), but evidently it uses a special new kind of “open data”. The exact date and time each anonymized reviewer reviewed a sacred scientific abstract is commercial and must be kept secret. These volunteer reviewers allegedly stand to, er … lose a lot of money if that data is revealed (they won’t be employed again for no money?). Such is the importance of this that the University of Queensland left the data on secret-secret forum protected by no passwords and then put urls to it on secret forums that were publicly accessible. Brandon Shollenberger had the genius idea of changing the numbers in the url +1, +1, and +1, and voila! For the crime of finding unhidden non-secret data Brandon received a threatening legal letter, and expects the Feds to arrive any minute. You can’t just type any old numbers into a url.
…
Doing the right thing, Brandon contacted John Cook and UQ to give them a chance to tell him any good reason why he should not draw people’s attention to this unhidden, non-secret data (which may possibly save the world by convincing everyone that 97% of honest scientists are believers in a climate catastrophe). Unfortunately the lawyer writing the letter to Brandon was obviously a skeptic plant, cleverly seeded with big-oil funds. It’s the only way anyone can explain why a letter so abjectly clumsy, improbable and ridiculous could come from a university which prides itself on its reputation. Not only could Brandon not reveal the details of how the abstracts were reviewed because they would sue him, but he could not even reveal the letter threatening to sue him, or they would sue him for that too — he would be double-sued.
Apparently the threatening letter was copyright. On that point, Steve McIntyre,wonders about a strange contradiction: “the premise of copyright is the protection of commercial interests. Obviously, the letter from the University of Queensland has no commercial value. ”
I would counter that letter from The University of Queensland does have commercial value (just not the way you might think). They could sell threatening letters to other universities who are trying to hide data and can’t afford real lawyers. Perhaps it has value in comedic theatre? What this is not though (because I’d never suggest such a defamatory thing) is abject panic about potential losses from the grand cash cow that is the climate grants gravy train. UQ are honest, upstanding researchers, who always supply all the data necessary to replicate and analyze work, especially when the health of Planet Earth depends upon the results. Right?
Steve McIntyre points out that The UQ letter raises a variety of interesting issues:
The original Consensus rating project was carried out by SKS volunteers. How did title migrate from SKS to the University of Queensland?
If the ratings data has been owned by UQ all along and the UQ had confidentiality obligations, why did they leave it lying around the internet (apparently) without password protection?
Are there any documents that actually demonstrate the existence of “contractual obligations to third parties”? This is eerily reminiscent of the U of East Anglia.
On what conceivable basis can the University justify its refusal to provide anonymized rater information and datestamps?
Finally, some coverage of the massive amount of money pumping the Big-Green agenda. What is really so remarkable about this is that skeptics are winning, despite the fact that the greens have almost all the institutional, academic, government, and big-media support, and far, far more money. All we have is truth and wits.
Mainstream media don’t know Big Green has deeper pockets than Big Oil
Ron Arnold
Mainstream reporters appear not to be aware of the component parts that comprise Big Green: environmentalist membership groups, nonprofit law firms, nonprofit real estate trusts (The Nature Conservancy alone holds $6 billion in assets), wealthy foundations giving prescriptive grants, and agenda-making cartels such as the 200-plus member Environmental Grantmakers Association. They each play a major socio-political role.
Seeing Big-Green funding means taking a broader view of the money trail:
Invisible fact: the environmental movement is a mature, highly developed network with top leadership stewarding a vast institutional memory, a fiercely loyal cadre of competent social and political operatives, and millions of high-demographic members ready to be mobilized as needed.
That membership base is a built-in free public relations machine responsive to the push of a social media button sending politically powerful “educational” alerts that don’t show up on election reports.
Big Oil doesn’t have that, but has to pay for lobbyists, public relations firms and support groups that do show up on reports.
US environmental activists have access to $13 billion?
I’d like to see a detailed breakdown of that. But if we include government funding to activist-scientists, as well as government grants for all forms of emissions reduction and education campaigns, it’s believeable. Compare $13 billion to funding for skeptical scientists. The Heartland Institute are the largest single group usually named as supporting skeptical scientists. Their total budget (for all their projects, which involve a lot more than just the climate) is about $6 – $7m.
“… you do need detailed knowledge to parse Big Green into its constituent parts. I spoke with Washington-based environmental policy analyst Paul Driessen, who said, “U.S. environmental activist groups are a $13-billion-a-year industry — and they’re all about PR and mobilizing the troops.
“Their climate change campaign alone has well over a billion dollars annually, and high-profile battles against drilling, fracking, oil sands and Keystone get a big chunk of that, as demonstrated by the Rockefeller assault.”
Mind-boggling. One hundred billion at their disposal?
Bill Nye thinks science is about opinion polls — not about reason and evidence, and John Oliver (who’s he? A British/US comedian) thought they should take that fallacy and run with it.
Oliver couldn’t quite sort out his opinion polls from his facts. He seemed to think that when believers do key-word surveys of abstracts it’s “a fact”, but when 75 million Americans are skeptical of a theory (which only has key-word surveys to back it up) “who gives a s***?”
He goes on to say: “You don’t need people’s opinions on a fact”. Except the “fact” in question is just some other people’s opinions. Obviously what matters to him is not the number of people who believe something, but whether they are card carrying members of the right club. After all only 62 climate scientists actually reviewed the chapter that mattered in the 2007 IPCC report, but some 31,000 scientists, including 9,000 PhD’s, 49 NASA scientists and 4 Apollo astronauts, and 2 Nobel Physics Prize winners disagree. Other surveys show that skeptics are older, better with numbers and smarter. Two thirds of geoscientists and engineers are skeptics. The obvious conclusion (if you think surveys matter in science, which I don’t) is that the recent warming is more natural than man-made, and that the young and gullible are easily fooled. But John Oliver, comedian with a degree in English, obviously knows more than Ivar Giaevar or Robert Laughlin right?
My point is not that skeptics are right because they are wiser, smarter, better scientists — which they are, but that Olivers method for finding scientific truth fails by its own criteria. The truth about the climate comes from the observations, not the surveys. If surveys mattered, Oliver would be a skeptic.
As a comedian John Oliver probably likes to think of himself as being a bit counter culture and someone who tests political bounds. (Oh boy is he in for a surprize.) Instead he went for the safe impress-my-friends soft form of propaganda — the establishment comedian. Parody for the paradigm. He’s an obedient servant of the climate cult.
Truth actually matters quite a lot in comedy. It just isn’t that funny if its a comment on a fantasy. The art of satire as a political tool depends on the satirist understanding the topic.
Memo to John: great comedians skewer the state sanctioned litany — they don’t produce free advertising. Why don’t you do something really risky and interview Buzz Aldrin, or Harrison Schmidt or Ivar Giaevar — these guys are real scientists. Bill Nye the science guy is the go-to guy for climate propaganda for a reason. The real climate scientists who believe a tax-can-change-the-weather can’t afford to debate skeptics — they have a reputation that matters and public humiliation would blow the facade completely. When Bill Nye bombs, who cares? He’s disposable.
Bill-Nye-the-propaganda-guy abuses science every time he whips out “the consensus”.
Lennart Bengtsson joined the GWPF only two weeks ago. He’s a very well respected Swedish leading climate scientist. But he’s been put under — as he describes it — unbearable pressure to quit. Steve McIntyre calls it a fatwa.
What an extraordinarily raw letter:
Dear Professor Henderson,
I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF. I had not expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc.
I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expecting anything similar in such an original peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently it has been transformed in recent years.
Under these situation I will be unable to contribute positively to the work of GWPF and consequently therefore I believe it is the best for me to reverse my decision to join its Board at the earliest possible time.
With my best regards
Lennart Bengtsson
Even those within the climate “community” must recognize that end days are near. What an over-reaction presumably driven by fear, and compromising long-standing professional relationships. (Bengtsson knows who his real friends are now.)
The tribal witch-hunt speaks volumes about the strength of their arguments. For Bengtsson –what a back-handed compliment. If he did not have a scientific reputation, the tribe would not have “cared”.
Late thought: I don’t know that those long standing professional relationships will ever be the same. By resigning so publicly and explicitly Bengtsson has made the reasons for his resignation very clear. How many others resigned in the past from other politically incorrect groups and made some pat excuse instead in the hope of buying forgiveness and getting back in “the club”?
Three years ago I made the case for dumping renewables, and doubling medical research — and both occurred in last night’s budget. (Yes, I hear the cry that this is just more big-government funded bad-science, bear with me, I’ll get to that). First let me bask in the glory (wink).
I’m especially proud of the Op-Ed I wrote in The Weekend Australian in May 2011. Indeed it’s very much my driving mission — to redirect corrupted and wasteful tax funds towards better uses, and to help four year olds with cancer, and all the other variants of human pain.
It’s big biccies… The Abbott Government is setting up a 20 billion dollar medical research future fund, which is expected to distribute $1 billion to research annually by 2022-23. It’s being claimed it is the largest in the world (I am not entirely convinced, but nonetheless, it’s radically big). We currently spend about $800m a year on medical research, so this would really double it. (Spooky).
But I can feel the barbs of skeptical libertarians already — saying the money should have been used to pay off the debt or returned to the people who earned it — and I’m sympathetic. Public medical research funds get corrupted and wasted as efficiently as any other public kind. Hear me out — even if this could have been better, it’s a magnitude better than what went before, and if there ever was a case for public funded science research it surely starts with medicine.
First, funding inefficient solar panels is dead money — there is no upside, not even the possibility of discovery, no chance that second-hand solar panels will be worth something. But in medical science there is a revolution going on — like the silicon chips of the 1970’s, medical science is on the start of the exponential curve — glittering, transformative new tools have appeared in the last 15 years. We’re talking of curing blindness and paraplegia, regrowing replacement organs for people waiting on endless lists. There is so much upside that even inefficient, biased, public funded research can produce things we want — something we can sell for decades to come. Something we know there will be a demand for as long as there are people. Whether this is a good outcome or more wasted spending is partly up to us. What government science needs is real science journalists, commentators and organized public critics. We need to find ways to make Ministers accountable for non-productive, politically correct ARC grants. This is an opportunity, not a guarantee…
We’re thinking of axing Australian medical research yet we’re supporting solar panel manufacturers in China. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Solar energy costs us more than five times what coal-powered energy does. So instead of spending $1bn on solar panels, we could have spent $200 million on cheap electricity and used the other $800m to double our medical research budget.
All the money spent employing green police, subsidizing solar or researching how to pump carbon dioxide underground is money not spent on medical research. Opportunity cost is a killer. The path not taken could be lined with happier, longer lives…
When Julia Gillard spends money on climate-related work instead of medical research, she is making a choice about the net benefits and it’s supposedly based on science. It’s true sooner or later medical research will get the answers right, but for someone who is sick with a deadly disease, sooner makes a life-and-death difference.
“Which four-year-old in 2018 will die because Gillard introduced a carbon tax instead of increasing medical research funding? Which father will die in 2022 who would have lived if we had doubled our funding for medical research?
What would we rather export ten years from now? Ten-year-old second-hand Chinese solar panels or an Australian made cure for prostate cancer?”
“As a result, it may be an Australian who discovers better treatments and even cures for dementia, Alzheimer’s, heart disease or cancer. If we start investing now, this new and historic commitment in medical research may well save your life, or that of your parents, or your child.”
The timing is right and the incentives lean in the right direction (mostly)
Medical research is blossoming at a phenomenal, historic pace
The exponential curve in gene therapy, telomerase research, genomics and glycobiology is barely beginning. Four significant breakthroughs were made in medical research in 1996, 1997, 1998 and 2000. These were the kinds of breakthroughs people had worked for decades to make, and some were not predicted even a few years beforehand. The human genome project was finished five years ahead of schedule and for a fraction of the expected price.
Right now, a year of medical research really does make a difference. These are the areas where we will be left behind and it will hurt. These are the industries where we need to stay at the head of the pack, not just to save lives but to save the economy as well. Access Economics estimated in 2003 that every dollar invested in the Australian health research and development sector returned at least $5 in national economic development.
When government-funded Australian researchers discover treatments, we own vital intellectual property. We not only export products the world wants, we avoid being beholden to foreign patent holders. Some effective cancer drugs cost $2000 a week. Isn’t that the kind of research we want to own?
If we lead the world in medicine, the world is our oyster. If it turns out clean carbon technology is useful, we can buy it with the spare change from the profits of medical research. We know we need a cure for cancer. We don’t know if the rest of the world will want to pump CO2 underground 10 years from now.
When we lead the world in putting inefficient solar panels on roofs, we only help Chinese manufacturers and we win a race no one wants to win. You can’t export second-hand solar panels or resell old pink batts.
I’m all ears for ideas. Let’s talk. Publicly funded science has plenty of pitfalls and failures. Sinclair Davidson and I agree on almost all of them (see his Catalaxy post). I’m sure there is a better way, but private funding has drawbacks too. Big Pharma profits and patents mean that many natural molecules get ignored — they can’t be patented, and there is no profit.
Even when there are profits, that doesn’t mean it will be funded. When David (Evans — the other half) studied at Stanford and worked in Silicon Valley, he came back to Australia around 1990 hoping to use his talent, only to discover that the Australian chip industry had basically died in the 1980s. It was the heady days of computing, of hardware, networking, software and the birth of the Internet, but there was no private research here, and no real government funding either. Left to private industry, the silicon chip sector in Australia is what it is today. So be it — apparently the world only needs a few centers for such development, but none of them are now here.
UPDATE: The bottom line. Meh.People are calling it “brutal”, and saying it’s a slash and burn budget, but really government spending will only shrunk by 0.5% of GDP.
[The Guardian]“The government is cutting overall spending, but relatively slowly – from 25.3% of GDP to 24.8% next year, 24.7% in 2016-17 and rising to 24.8% again in 2017-18. By comparison Peter Costello’s first budget was much more savage, cutting government spending from 25.1% to 23.9% of GDP.”
The Australian 2014/15 Budget has just been released. It’s the first budget of the Abbott government. (Catallaxy has the transcript of the speech). Given election cycles there will probably not be a better opportunity to move towards a smaller, less burdensome government. Are the cuts enough? [UPDATE: No].
How much unnecessary tithing is there to the carbon monster?
There are some good signs: 16,500 public service jobs will be cut. And “70 government agencies will be scrapped or merged” including the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA). Depressingly, while this is useful, it’s not much. There are apparently so many government agencies no one can figure out the exact number. There are estimates it’s close to 1000.
The CSIRO, which invented WiFi, Aeroguard and extended wear contact lenses, will be slashed the most, losing $111.4 million over the next four years. A staggering amount of money.
This hardly a “slashing” cut given that the CSIRO budget is $1.2b billion a year, and these cuts are spread over 4 years. If CSIRO trims some admin fat, the scientists might not even notice…
The ARENA chop is worth “$1.3 billion from 2017-18”. (Shame we have to pay out until then).
UPDATE: ABC and SBS budgets will face tiny cuts– “NATIONAL broadcasters ABC and SBS will lose $43.5 million in funding over four years. ” Before the election the Coalition should never have said they would not cut ABC funding (What exactly were the words?). It works out to be less than $10m a year in cuts shared between a $1b budget for the ABC and whatever the SBS budget is. It’s practically nothing. Not worth the pain and cries of people pointing back at their election statements. Disappointing. If they did promise not to cut, they shouldn’t have done it.
Mother Nature has issued a disguised voluntary recall notice for Arctic Treemometers. Sold as a way of measuring temperatures over the last two millennium, they turned out to fail frequently, even going against trends in most other thermometers in the last half century. The flaw has been quietly recognized for years, but is rarely mentioned in polite circles.
Critics wonder why it took Mother Nature so long to issue the recall and why it is so qualified and partial. They point out that these safety warnings only seem to appear when product salesmen are also offering a repair kit for sale too.
In this case Stine and Huybers tell us they can fix the “divergence” problem with treemometers by considering incoming light. Treemometers are failing, they say, because of global dimming and inconvenient volcanoes. As long as sunlight reaches trees the treemometers work. (Critics dryly reply that it’s hardly news that sunlight affects tree growth, and that they never bought the tree-ring data in any case.)
Meanwhile Mann-made Treemometers Inc issued a statement in 4-point Roman Half-Uncial script at 3am saying that their Treemometers are as accurate as ever in all locations where cloud cover, dust and rainfall doesn’t deviate more than 5% from the seasonal mean. They unconditionally guarantee their reliability “in all situations and centuries where cloud cover data is available, and emails about data are not”.
One stock analyst predicted that “One day, most of the Western World will want a refund”.
Arctic study sheds light on tree-ring divergence problem: Changes in light intensity may impact density of tree rings
[Science Daily]
New research has found that changes in tree-ring density in the Arctic may be evidence of changes in light intensity during the trees’ growth. The finding has direct implications for the tree-ring ‘divergence problem,’ in which the density of tree rings in recent decades has not kept pace with increases in temperature, as expected.
The finding has direct implications for the tree-ring “divergence problem,” a phenomenon that has received considerable media attention but has been widely misinterpreted, said Stine, an assistant professor of Earth & climate sciences.
Tree rings consist of a low density ring, which forms early in the growing season, and a high density ring that forms late in the growing season. In colder parts of the world, the dense latewood rings tend to be denser during warm years. Temperature records inferred from Arctic tree rings do a good job of tracking temperature up until the 1960s, but subsequent Arctic tree-ring densities did not keep pace with increases in temperature, a discrepancy that is called the divergence problem.
A miracle has occurred, climate models which have been plagued with failure and have finally been gifted with The Scientific Truth. Apparently the God of Weather has visited upon Matthew England and others. (We wonder why God didn’t visit earlier, but are grateful for this insight.)
The climate models didn’t predict Antarctic sea ice extent trends. Polar amplification was supposed to mean it would warm twice as fast at the poles, yet inconveniently after years of massive output of CO2 — above the levels assumed in the models — Antarctic sea ice has hit another record high. Finally in the eighth round of making excuses for their excuses, the Scientific Truth has emerged to sweep away the scientific untruths that went before. (After all, climate models couldn’t possibly have been expected to understand heat flow around the planet could they?)
The yellow line shows how much rain Antarctica is stealing and dumping as sea ice. If you turn on your tumble drier the penguins in Antarctica have to walk further.
New research has explained why Antarctica is not warming as much as other continents, and why southern Australia is recording more droughts. Researchers have found rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are strengthening the stormy Southern Ocean winds which deliver rain to southern Australia, but pushing them further south towards Antarctica.
CO2 is trapping heat all over the planet, but because some of that warming air is also trapped over Antarctica it’s, er, … staying cold. (And if you understand how that works please explain it to me, it sounds like Antarctica has become a reverse cycle air conditioner. Does anyone know what happens to those extra infrared photons in the thieving Antarctic circle?).
“With greenhouse warming, Antarctica is actually stealing more of Australia’s rainfall. It’s not good news — as greenhouse gases continue to rise we’ll get fewer storms chased up into Australia,” Dr Abram said.
“As the westerly winds are getting tighter they’re actually trapping more of the cold air over Antarctica,” Abram said. “This is why Antarctica has bucked the trend. Every other continent is warming, and the Arctic is warming fastest of anywhere on earth.”
This part contains empirical evidence (bravo):
By analysing ice cores from Antarctica, along with data from tree rings and lakes in South America, Dr Abram and her colleagues were able to extend the history of the westerly winds back over the last millennium.
“The Southern Ocean winds are now stronger than at any other time in the past 1,000 years,” Abram said.
This part is where God helped:
“The strengthening of these winds has been particularly prominent over the past 70 years, and by combining our observations with climate models we can clearly link this to rising greenhouse gas levels.”
Study co-authors Dr Robert Mulvaney and Professor Matthew England said the study answered key questions about climate change in Antarctica.
The miracle of Cause and Effect
Southern Ocean winds are now stronger than at any other time in the past 1,000 years. But any form of warming might also cause this to happen. How do we know that high winds in the modern era are due to CO2 and not, say, to natural causes like, ocean current changes, trends in cloud cover, or even the recent grand solar maximum? (Coincidentally, the late 20th Century solar maximum was highest in the last 1,200 years too, see Usiokin, and possibly highest in last 11,500 years, see Vieira 2013.)
We know that natural factors could not have created the faster winds, because The God of Weather hath spoken to Prof Matthew England, Nerilie Abram, Robert Mulvaney and gifted them with the correct assumptions and estimates to finally create Climate Simulations which produce real empirical evidence instead of just calculations.
While no computer simulation has worked before. We are blessed that finally they have got it RightTM.
Soon, for the first time, Climate Model predictions will match the instruments. I can’t wait.
How incredibly fortunate for us that though Climate Modelers have been using the wrong assumptions and estimates for the last 30 years they have been adding up mistakes around the globe and somehow accidentally getting the final conclusions correct all along! Surely God is bountiful and generous, otherwise we might have wasted billions trying to reduce CO2 when it was unnecessary.
[Welcome to The Magical World of Science in 2014. I just can’t take any of them seriously any more – Jo.]
REFERENCES
Nerilie J. Abram, Robert Mulvaney, Françoise Vimeux, Steven J. Phipps, John Turner, Matthew H. England. (2014) Evolution of the Southern Annular Mode during the past millennium. Nature Climate Change; DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2235
The fiscal churn is large. How many people are paid to spend all their productive hours just managing a circle of money?
On average, Australian families will pay $12,935 in income tax this year, but receive $9,515 in benefits — leaving a net yearly contribution to the public purse of just $3424.
There are also 16 million government workers (not counted in the 86 million tally) — some of whom are most definitely serving the public. On the other hand, some of the private sector workers are doing contracts for the government, and are effectively government paid workers. I wouldn’t want to quibble about the exact numbers. What matters is that we are at the point where half the voters are surely (and quite rationally) focused on voting for benefits. How does a democracy thrive?
I posted these quotes in mid-2011 in The Slow Death of Democracy, time to quote them again:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”
“Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.”
When do we start the mature conversation about this weakness of democracy?
Here’s some fun questions to take into the weekend. When do we teach this in school? There is no longer any shame at all in living off the productivity of other people. It’s time to bring that back. But how do we reestablish pride in standing on our two feet, without demonizing people who do genuinely need support? We don’t even have the right word to capture those people and businesses who are independent, self sufficient producers in our language, yet the concept is so important. We need a word (or several) that rewards the net-tax-paying individual… suggestions welcome (we may have to invent a word). Does any language have a word for this?
Disaster Disaster! Driving a car in 2014 could one day cause 2 billion people to suffer from zinc and iron deficiencies leaving them anaemic and prone to infection, and causing a loss of 63 million life-years annually. This is brought to you from the Annals of Hyped-Science (formerly known as Nature). A sad day indeed.
It’s true that carbon dioxide is plant fertilizer and increases plant yields, so future crops, grown in a CO2 rich world, may not have exactly the same nutrient profile. Presumably future plants will have slightly more useless starchy carbohydrate. It is a kind of dilution effect at work, where plants keep absorbing the same amount of minerals, but spread them out among more carbohydrate.
Before we hit the panic button, lets look the numbers. The new Myers et al study[1] reports that zinc and iron content of rice may fall by, wait for it, five percent. In wheat the iron content could fall by as much as 10%. But no one who has a choice, eats grains like rice or wheat for their iron and zinc content, since both these are poor sources of both. We’re talking about low grade bulk filler food.
Assuming the reduction in nutrients is real (and it might not be — see Craig Idso’s links below) to overcome this “threat” some people are wondering if we could compensate with mineral fertilizer or genetic engineering. But we don’t need to — we just eat slightly less bulk filler and slightly more food with a higher nutrient profile. In the case of rice and wheat, this means swapping a fraction of these grains for almost any edible plant or animal. Actually, it’s hard to think of ingredients with a lower nutrient profile than rice, except for pure white sugar and beach sand. Indeed, nearly anything will do: go right ahead and swap some rice for bacteria, algae or fungus.
According to the USDA nutrient profiles Gelatinous White Rice, Cooked (doesn’t that sound delicious) has all of 0.14mg of iron per 100 grams and 0.41mg of zinc.Chick peas on the other hand have 2.89mg of iron per 100g and 1.53mg of zinc. So chickpeas have 20 times the iron content, and 3.7 times the zinc content. In other words, to solve a shortage of a 10% reduction in iron and zinc in rice, the average person eating 100g of rice would need to eat an extra 2.6 grams of chickpeas (or is that chickpea, singular?). As a bonus they would be getting five times more iron than what they are missing out on in the rice.
Wheat is richer than rice, and contains significant protein for people without access to meat. But a mere 5- 10% deficiency is still easily solveable with a shift in dietry composition. Indeed, even if all food types became slightly diluted (like if poorer grain-feed leads to poorer beef steak) the principle still works.
For sure, the poorest of the poor find even small changes difficult — but that’s exactly why we need to help them develop and raise their standards of living. Making energy expensive will kill far more people in the third world. For those who face famine and starvation, the increased crop yields of extra CO2 surely are a net benefit. Being low in iron is bad, but being dead is worse, right?
For the 2 billion people who allegedly depend on rice for their daily iron and zinc the real problem is that they need better quality food in 2014, not a panic attack over a hypothetical 5% nutrient reduction by 2050.
How about we stop funding scaremonger-science and start something productive instead, say, with something as simple as applications of the right Mycorrhiza — which symbiotically help plant roots extract minerals, as well as improving yields and shortening time to fruit by as much as 40%.
Craig Idso has already assembled many studies on plant yield and nutrition — with mixed results, and some which showed increases in nutrients when CO2 was enriched.
A new study by Steinke shows that the sun could have been a driver (somehow) of some of the monsoonal rain changes over the last 6,000 years over Indonesia and Northern Australia. h/t to The Hockey Schtick
In the spirit of the Perfect ClimateTM that existed prior to Henry Ford, we also find that Indonesia had a dry spell that lasted for a while, like say, 3,000 years. It ended about 800BC whereupon things got wetter, and mostly stayed wetter. The authors (Steinke et al) think this might have something to do with solar minima which was very low 2800 years ago. (Though I note the Greek Dark Ages also finished then, and “city states” arose, right, so it could have been that too. Ahem?)
To get straight to the action in Figure 6 the top squiggly line is AISM Rainfall (that’s the Australian-Indonesian summer monsoon). It shows how things were wetter in the last 2800 years ago and drier before that (annoyingly, the present time is on the left). The second part of the graph in red shows sunspot numbers. That gets flipped upside down and superimposed on the rainfall graph in the third part, and we can see a correlation that’s a lot like the CO2-and-temperature graph we see all the time, but is 5850 years longer.
Fig. 6. Changes in AISM rainfall and solar activity. (a) Ti/Ca ratios in core GeoB10065-7; (b) 10-year averaged reconstructed sunspot number (Solanki et al., 2004); (c) 10-year averaged ln-ratios of Ti/Ca (black) and sunspot numbers (red). 95% confidence intervals (in brackets) for the Pearson correlation coefficient (r) were calculated using a nonparametric bootstrap method, where autocorrelation has been taken into account (Mudelsee, 2003). 21-point running means shown in bold (aeb) to illustrate the long-term trends in ln-ratios of Ti/Ca and sunspot numbers. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.) (Click to Enlarge)
The big shift 2800 years ago is referred to as “drastic” and has been noticed in other places around the world:
Why the 2800 years BP event stands out so drastically in our monsoon record as well as in other records (see below), can currently not be answered conclusively.We suggest that in contrast to other solar minima, the 2800 yr BP minimum lasted longer than most other solar minima. This might have resulted in a stronger effect on the climate system, and also facilitates the detection in proxy records. Either way, there is clear evidence that the 2800 yr BP solar minimum affected climate conditions over much of the planet, including shifts of the Southern Westerlies (van Geel et al., 2000), the establishment of modern wind regimes in northern Africa (Kröpelin et al., 2008), and shifts in atmospheric circulation over Europe (Martin-Puertas et al., 2012). Moreover, the Dongge
Cave EASM record displays a decrease in rainfall around 2800 years BP but no change during other big events in solar output between 4000 years BP and 6000 years BP (Wang et al., 2005).
But nothing is simple. In far north west Australia stalagmites (Denniston et al., 2013, Fig. 5e) shows the “opposite behaviour of monsoonal rainfall with a decreasing AISM rainfall over the Mid-to-Late Holocene.”
They do try to explain the patterns, give them points for trying. It’s complicated. It looks like several big theories are going to be tossed out before this one is figured out:
In order to explain the generally higher rainfall levels after the 2800yr BP event we suggest that the combined effect of orbital and solar forcing is responsible for the long-term temporal behaviour of AISM rainfall over southern Indonesia as well as northern Australia. Despite an increase in austral summer insolation around 10 W/m2 between 6000 yr BP and 3000 yr BP, only a minor increase in AISM rainfall occurred between ~6000 yr BP and 2800 yr BP.We suggest that a long-term upward trend in solar output between 6000 yr BP and ~4000 yr BP (Fig. 6b) counteracts increasing orbital forcing such that the long-term trend in the Ti/Ca record is minor (Fig. 6a). After the 2800 yr BP event, enhanced orbital forcing keeps rainfall at a generally higher level than during the drier Mid Holocene. After ~1200 yr BP decreasing solar activity causes rainfall to increase
further for about 1000 years (Fig. 5a). The steady increase in rainfall after ~1200 yr BP is consistent with rainfall reconstructions based on dD of terrestrial plant waxes from Lake Lading (East Java; Konecky et al., 2013, Fig. 5b).
Overall, it’s interesting, but don’t draw too many conclusions. I thank the authors for their honesty. It’s fairly obvious that in the world of rainfall-propheses, scientists are struggling. This paper is filled (as it should be) with caveats and warnings as well as puzzling inconsistencies between proxy graphs of Australia, Indonesia, the Galapagos, and Ecuador. Things are just not neat.
Note the correlation is not too good, and the authors remind us this means a very vague amount — “some” of the variability is due to the sun.
In addition, we find a link between changes in AISM rainfall and solar activity with certain solar minima corresponding to stronger southern Indonesian rainfall, in particular at around 2800 years BP (see Fig. 6aeb). The correlation between the unsmoothed Ti/Ca and solar activity records is relatively low (r ¼ 0.319) but statistically significant for the past 6000 years (p < 0.05) when taking serial correlation into account (Mudelsee, 2003). The statistical significance of the correlation indicates that some of the variability in the AISM rainfall can be attributed to changes in solar activity (Fig. 6c).
I think what really limits conclusions here are the uncertainties in timing of things that happened so long ago, the Egyptians were building pyramids. It’s just too long ago. I mean, I presume if those dates are out by 20 years, the correlation gets shot to pieces. Imagine in the year 5050, trying to match up 1994 rainfall to solar activity in 2014?
Indian researchers have realized that the carbon modelers there had vastly underestimated the CO2 and CH4 given off by the parts of India covered in water, and when they put them in, they discovered they were churning out methane and carbon dioxide and the output was equal to 42% of what the Indian forests, farms and gardens were absorbing. (Lucky that only one sixth of humanity lives in India, eh?)
Humans are putting out less than 4% of total natural emissions of CO2 (as far as we can tell) – but obviously, we don’t even know what those natural emissions are — it’s like plus or minus forty percent. (Say hello to the Pacific Ocean and make that plus or minus 100%). Carbon accounting is a fog of best guesses.
And people trade global markets on this?
Below the authors explain why their estimates are so much better than past ones, but why they still don’t know the real answer. They also explain why the numbers change from place to place, river to river, and even from morning tea to dinner time.
The bottom line is that even suggesting a carbon market globally is an invitation to global rorting. In come the sharks, the smoochers, the white collar crims, and the bun fight ensues over who can wheel and deal their way to rules about an invisible ubiquitous gas which changes from spot to spot and minute to minute and is produced by everything, all of the time, but at ever changing rates. It’s a global game where the players pretend they care about the planet while channeling the river of money their way.
In the national GHG inventory of India, wetlands (inland and coastal waters) were considered in the Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) sector (INCCA, 2010). Because the data on inland and coastal water emissions were scarce, they were not included in the budgets, and the LULUCF sector was estimated to be acting as a sink of 177.0 Tg CO2 yr-1 in 2007 (INCCA, 2010). However, the here presented data show that India’s water bodies are emitting large amounts of CH4 and CO2 to the atmosphere. If our CH4 flux is expressed as CO2 equivalents and combined with the CO2 flux, and assuming a representative extrapolation, about 75 Tg CO2 equivalents yr -1 is being emitted from India’s inland waters (Table 4). This is equal toabout 42% of the estimated land sink of India.
It’s not and was never about the real number of carbon molecules. It’s about what gets counted and what doesn’t, and may the best player win. It’s about networking, machinations, negotiations and estimates; a billion here, a billion there, and soon we’re talking real money.
Let me just say, look at the range on the mean partial pressure mentioned in the abstract. What if we run a global market based on agreements where $3000 was paid which meant you received a range of $400 – $11,467? Happy?
Abstract
Inland waters were recently recognized to be important sources of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere, and including inland water emissions in large scale greenhouse gas (GHG) budgets may potentially offset the estimated carbon sink in many areas. However, the lack of GHG flux measurements and well-defined inland water areas for extrapolation, make the magnitude of the potential offset unclear. This study presents coordinated flux measurements of CH4 and CO2 in multiple lakes, ponds, rivers, open wells, reservoirs, springs, and canals in India. All these inland water types, representative of common aquatic ecosystems in India, emitted substantial amounts of CH4 and a major fraction also emitted CO2. The total CH4 flux (including ebullition and diffusion) from all the 45 systems ranged from 0.01 to 52.1 mmol m -2 d-1, with a mean of 7.8 12.7 (mean 1 SD) mmolm -2 d-1. The mean surface water CH4 concentration was 3.8 ± 14.5 lM (range 0.03–92.1 lM). The CO2 fluxes ranged from 28.2 to 262.4 mmol m -2 d-1 and the mean flux was 51.9 ± 71.1 mmol m -2 d-1. The mean partial pressure of CO2 was 2927 ± 3269 µatm (range: 400–11,467 µatm). Conservative extrapolation to whole India, considering the specific area of the different water types studied, yielded average emissions of 2.1 Tg CH4 yr-1 and 22.0 Tg CO2 yr 1 from India’s inland waters. When expressed as CO2 equivalents, this amounts to 75 Tg CO2 equivalents yr -1 (53–98 Tg CO2 equivalents yr -1; ± 1 SD), with CH4 contributing 71%. Hence, average inland water GHG emissions, which were not previously considered, correspond to 42% (30–55%) of the estimated land carbon sink of India. Thereby this study illustrates the importance of considering inland water GHG exchange in large scale assessments.
Look at the big numbers here. The authors are telling us there are lots of reasons why their estimate is a better stab in the dark than past studies, and may still underestimate the effect of all the bodies of water in India. India is 2.8% of the world’s land area (not that that means anything much in the grand fog of unknowns).
Possible inaccuracies in inland water area.
The first Indian inventory of ecologically and socio-economically important inland and coastal waters for conservation purposes was made by Scott (1989). This estimated the total area to be 582 000 km2, including area under rice cultivation, but excluding rivers. The first national inventory of all the inland and coastal waters using satellite images taken during the years 1992– 1993 at 1 : 250 000 scale was prepared by Garg et al. (1998). The total area was estimated to be 82 600 km2 excluding rice fields, rivers, irrigation channels, and canals. The recent update to this inventory (total area of about 152 600 km2; excluding rice fields) was provided using satellite images from the years 2006–2007 at 1 : 50 000 scale by SAC (2011). Here, the minimum size of water body mapped was 0.022 km2, whereas in the 1998 estimate it was 0.56 km2. The latest inventory estimates the area of rivers/streams to be around 52 600 km2, which partly explains the big difference in the area by both inventories. The rest could be attributed to the higher resolution images used by the 2011 inventory. Yet, the most recent river/stream area does not include streams with areas smaller than the threshold. Thereby, our study underestimates the river/stream fluxes.
Obviously lakes, rivers and wetlands are kinda important, but I happen to know that the world’s best carbon accounting model (FullCAM*) in Australia doesn’t include rivers, streams, lakes, wetlands, and so on and so forth. The only thing I can say is lucky Australia is so dry. A similar study here would probably not make as much difference. Just a few billion dollars worth here or there.
With admirably honesty the authors tell us that their study doesn’t tell us much about other places, because in West Africa CO2 declines at peak river flow, while in the Amazon it does the opposite. In other words, every water body is different; it’s different in summer and winter, at peak flow, or slow flow, and in the morning, versus the afternoon. (Look at the range on the morning readings compared to other times (range = - 52% to 880%). Who are we kidding?
Look out, Australia might trim a tiny slice from the Tithe to the Gods of Weather (protest coming)
The Australian budget is in dire straits after the Rudd-Gillard years of promised surpluses but exploding arithmetic. The Commission of Audit is here to test public reaction to all the possible ways of paying off the Labor debt. Somehow, it missed the biggest cherry waiting to be plucked. We could save billions if the the Abbott Government become more rigorously scientific. Abbott should cut funding to any scientists who are using models that don’t work, and only fund ones that do.
“Abbott should cut funding to any scientists who are using models that don’t work, and only fund ones that do.”
I expect the Greens will join me in declaring that if the Abbott government cared about the environment it would immediately launch a royal commission, a real audit, or an independent investigation into the effect of carbon dioxide. Only the best science for the planet, right? All funding to environmental programs dependent on unverified research should be frozen until the audit is finished. Easy eh? Let me be PM for a day. :- )
But apparently the sacred carbon cow must not be touched. With billions of carbon-cherries on offer, a tiny reduction in the National Carbon Tithe was suggested:
The Australian Climate Change Science Program’s four-year funding of $31.6 million, mostly to the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, duplicates work by those and other agencies and “should be returned to the budget or allocated to priority areas”, the commission said in its report.
Only $31 million? Is that it?
The total CSIRO budget is $1.2b billion and BOMs is $300m. The Emissions Reduction Fund was budgeted to cost $2.55 billion over four years. There is lots of room here to lighten the burden on struggling tax payers.
We know this $31 million that might be cut is not needed for predicting the climate, because it’s used for models that can’t do that:
But scientists, including Michael Raupach, formerly of the CSIRO and now at the Australian National University, said the program supported a “great deal of critical scientific work” that helps refine climate models which are also used for weather forecasting.
Obviously their income does not depend on keeping the fear alive. Oh wait…
Despite the increasing heatwaves, rising sea levels and ocean acidification – which scientists link to rising greenhouse gas levels – the Abbott government has downplayed the risks from climate change, said Opposition climate change spokesman Mark Butler.
Oh No! 35 not-very-good scientists might lose their jobs?
One scientist said the $4 million or so provided to the CSIRO by the ACCSP per year was the reason the institution “was still in the game”. Another said 30 to 35 climate scientists would lose their jobs directly if the program ceased and probably a similar number indirectly.
Somewhere, 35 real scientists are missing out on funding
They could be curing aggressive neuroblastomas in 3 year olds. Instead witch-doctors who break the tenets of science, call independent scientists names, and ignore the empirical evidence get funds to come up with more excuses, and even excuses-on-their-excuses to cover their failure. (See here, here, and here too.)
Note the scientific precision in this statement below:
“Climate change has not gone away,” said Dr Raupach. “The best scientific assessments indicate that Australia could be subject to warming over the 21st century that could range from less than two to more than five degrees.”
So we spend millions in order for a scientist to tell us that Australia will warm by a number between zero and infinity?
How strong is the influence of the Carbon Tabernacles? Even a government that says it believes the IPCC, and is spending billions in tithing to the scare campaign is not doing enough. This is how the meme lives on, the acolytes simply talk nonsense with a straight face:
“This is a government that has shown a disdain for scientific research,” Mr Butler said. “From the Prime Minister down, it has regularly denigrated the work of scientists here in Australia and internationally around the area of climate change.”
Regularly denigrated the work of scientists? How can a nation have a sensible conversation if the opposition spokesman puts out irrational and self-evidently untrue statements?
Is there any journo asking Butler to provide quotes for regular denigration of scientists here in Australia and internationally? Anyone?
I’m sure the ABC fact check unit will get right onto it.
Climate Depot reports on a New Zealand geoscientist who has worked at the highest levels and has just released a detailed statement about why the threat of rising sea-levels has been blown out of all proportions, and “An ‘innocent gas, CO2, has been demonized and criminalized’”.
“The widespread obsession with Global-Warming-Climate-Change, in opposition to all factual evidence, is quite incredible.”
Kear laments the ‘Astronomical Cost of Major Measures to Combat a Non-Existent Threat’.
His scientific caliber: “Dr David Kear has a background in geology and engineering, becoming the Director General of the DSIR (Department of Scientific and Industrial Research) in 1980. He is a Fellow and Past Vice-President of the Royal Society of New Zealand, and Past President of the New Zealand Geological Society [which promises to catalogue his work here]. Dr Kear has over 100 publications on New Zealand and Pacific geology, vulcanology and mineral resources.” Apparently a foraminifera shell was named after him in 1962.
Six Grave Scientific Errors and the history of an absurd idea
Kear talks about the grave scientific errors he has witnessed, and gives a history of how an absurd idea took hold. I found it very interesting. What I find myself wondering as I read this, is whether he had made any public skeptical statements before, and if not, why not.
My interest in our changing climate and sea level
During fieldwork for a PhD thesisc I found a coastal exposure of soft sandstone at
Ohuka Creek, south of Port Waikato. There were Pliocene fossils of marine shellfish
below an extensive horizontal bedding plane. Above that plane were more fossils, but
of cool-lovinga plants. A finger could show the exact location of the abrupt change to
the cooler climate at the onset of the first of the world-wide Pleistocene glaciations
[Ice Ages]. Ice formed widely at the ultimate expense of sea water, so sea level fell.
At Ohuka, sea bed had become land. Such changes are rarely seen in a continuous
sequence, so I recorded it in a 1957 scientific paperb. That resulted in my joining an
informal world-wide Group researching changing sea levels.
Most interest then was about the rate of sea level rise as the Earth warmed following
the “Little Ice Age”. That cool period, from about 1500 to 1700 AD, halted winemaking
in England and taro cropping in New Zealand. Our Group determined the
rate of sea level rise in many different World regions, from widely-available readings
of tide gauges (less variable than those of thermometers). The average for us all was
125 mm/century (“125” here). Hence it would take 8 centuries for sea level to rise
1m – no serious threat to us.
Global Warming Dawns Subsequently, I attended many international science
conferences representing DSIR, NZ or Pacific Nations. I noted the words “Global
Warming” appearing increasingly in paper titles, and sensed a growing number of
adherents. Those latter arranged a first-ever “Conference on Global Warming” in
Vienna in 1985. Unlike most such meetings, where a communiqué summarising
achievements was released on the final day, the full results of this one were delayed
for over 2 years.
When they did appear (front page, NZ Herald, two days before Christmas 1987) a
World Declaration included “Overseas scientists have estimated that the seas around
New Zealand will rise by up to 1.4 m in the next 40 years”. That article concentrated
on the massive consequent problems, caused by our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions,
but gave no adequate supporting science. That rate of rise was equivalent to 3,500
mm/century, 28 times faster than our 125. Hence we stupidly ignored it, thinking noone
could possibly believe it. But the World did believe, and the Global Warming
mirage was born. Had 3,500 been true, sea level should have risen by almost 1 m by
today – it hasn’t, not even closely.
Here’s a tale of how to generate headlines from circular reasoning built on brave assumptions. All it requires are some unskeptical science journal editors and gullible journalists. Et Voila!
Congratulations to Chip Knappenberger, Pat Michaels, and Anthony Watts, whose response to Åström et al was published Wednesday.
In October 2013 Åström et al claimed that global warming had killed lots of people in Stockholm, hundreds. But the first thing you need to know is that they don’t appear to start with actual mortality data in the early 1900’s. Surprised? Me too. Anthony Watts found it hard to believe . The other thing worth knowing is that extreme heat was defined as the top 2% of hot days, and in Stockholm that mean everything above a terrifying 2-day-moving-average mean temperature of 19.6C (67 F).
From the methods:
We collected daily mortality during the period 1980-2009 and daily temperature data for the period 1900-2009 for Stockholm County, Sweden.
Åström 2013: Figure 2 j Temperature distribution of 2-day moving average of mean temperatures during summer months. Grey distribution, 1900–1929; black distribution, 1980–2009.
It appears the authors compared calculated death rates (using a model) from 1900-1929 with rates from 1980-2009 and concluded that mortality from heat was twice as high as it would have been which appears to be a product of their assumptions. They also find there was “no evidence” that humans adapted to extreme temperatures. It’s a notion that seems self-evidently silly. We don’t need statistical tests to figure out if humans adapt to heat and cold, we see hot people turn on air-conditioners — and any statistical test is confounded by improvements that are difficult to quantify, like medical knowledge, diet, exercise and changes in population diversity. Our species thrived through 4 million years of rolling ice-ages, and spread out to inhabit nearly every weather-zone from the Arctic to the Sahara. Why would homo sapiens find 0.7 of a degree warming to be difficult to adapt too? How many Swedes die of heatstroke when they holiday on the Mediterranean? Assume the paper is correct and Scandinavians couldn’t adapt to heat — wouldn’t there be shorter lifespans among those who emigrated to Australia, California and Florida?
Perhaps I’m missing something. If we assume that exposure to a certain temperature causes a certain death rate (is that what they are saying?), I would have thought it follows automatically that adaption is not possible. If people adapted to hotter days the exposure–response rate would not stay the same?
The statistics on cardiovascular disease make it clear that cold weather is deadly. In Russia, ischemic stroke is 32% more likely on colder days; in Norway, cardiovascular deaths are 15% higher in winter months; in Israel, cardiovascular deaths were 50% higher in winter, even though Israeli winters are not exactly cold. Likewise in California heart disease mortality in 220,000 deaths was 33% higher in winter. A study in Brazil found that deaths were 2.6% more likely for every degree the temperature fell below 20°C. Need I go on?
Plus there is the other assumption in Åström et al, that the cause of the warming was human emissions of CO2, which for lots of reasons we know is a spurious exaggeration. There are plenty of factors that could make Stockholm warmer that have nothing to do with coal fired power plants. For starters, it is one of Europe’s fastest growing cities. The North Atlantic Oscillation had different effects in the latter 30 years than the earlier period.
Congratulations to Chip Knappenberger, Pat Michaels, and Anthony Watts, who show that warmer temperatures led to a reduction in the rate of heat-related mortality in Stockholm which is pretty much what we would expect, and consistent with most other literature.
Anthony Watts notes that Nature Climate Changetook months to publish their comment, used a long review process, and only published with a reply from Åström running along-side. All of which is fine, if only they applied the same rules to both sides of the equation, they might not publish so many weak studies in the first place.
This study was all so circular.
We quantified the number of deaths that could be attributed to climate change
through a change in the frequency of extreme heat and cold events. If the numbers
of extreme events were roughly the same during the reference period as during
1980-2009, it would not have been possible to attribute any change in the extremes
or their associated mortality to climate change.
This is the third time in a week I’ve hit a paper with the marvel factor — I marvel that anyone thought it should be done in the first place, let alone submitted. And what were the editors thinking?
(I guess this is not a serious science journal, only Nature, right?)
Did a single person die in 1917 because the daily 2-day running average temperature hit 20C in Stockholm? Or were deaths on those days occurring because their health was so precarious they would likely have died anyway in the next few weeks or months?
Dare I suggest that people have to die sometime, sooner or later. Even if they lived under continuous ideal temperature conditions we would still see deaths on days of ideal weather. It’s true there are curves, and more people die at the hotter and colder extremes, but there is no perfect temperature, and deaths at the warm end are often people who were likely to die. Mortality rates rise during heatwaves but its a well known phenomenon that they often fall below the expected afterwards. After mild heatwaves, the deficit mortality as it is known, “was close to 1.0” meaning most of those particular deaths were likely to have occurred soon anyway. (See Saha et al.) This does not seem to be the case for severe heatwaves like the one in France in 2003. (Though here, confoundingly, the mortality deficit was inexplicably higher than expected, but did not fit the spacial distribution pattern. The authors could only speculate as to why thousands less people died over the following year than were expected too). But in Stockholm, remember, we are not talking about extreme heatwaves so much, but 2 day pairs of mean temperatures above 19.6C degrees (about 70 deg F).
These results are completely contrary to others, like Keatinge in BMJ which looked at mortality rates and temperatures across Europe and concluded that “Populations in Europe have adjusted successfully to mean summer temperatures ranging from 13.5°C to 24.1°C, and can be expected to adjust to global warming predicted for the next half century with little sustained increase in heat related mortality.” (H/t to Ferdinand Engelbeen)
Read this one carefully:
All temperature-related mortality is potentially preventable, making mortality during extreme temperature events a public health concern.
What exactly is a “temperature related death? ” There is not a single definitive temperature death curve for homo sapiens. What is a “heat extreme” and “cold extreme” changes with latitude. Feeling a bit wicked, can I suggest that if “all temperature related mortality is potentially preventable” what we really need are days with no temperature, so no one ever dies. (Ban thermometers: cut the celcius, and kill the kelvin.)
But dutiful gullible science journalists soaked in the statistics and generated these headlines:
I say, it’s lucky people who want to save the planet do it for the love of it:
National Post: The Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has helped funnel almost $400-billion into emission-cutting projects in developing countries by allowing investors to earn carbon credits they can sell to companies and governments of richer nations that use them to meet emission targets.
I imagine they love $400 billion too.
This was just one branch of the great green-industrial-machine. (And yet skeptics are winning, she says wickedly, with hardly any money).
But those halcyon days are gone for the CDM — what was $30 per ton, is now 30c.
From 2003, developers flocked to register projects such as destroying heat-trapping waste gasses at Chinese chemical plants or installing hydroelectric power stations in Brazil, and made huge profits by selling the resulting carbon credits for up to $30.40 a tonne in 2008.
But interest has waned while countries wrangled over setting new emission goals under the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), hammering credit prices down to unprofitable levels below $0.30.
There’s a tiny $200 million or so left ticking over in the accounts:
The latest UN financial statements show the CDM has operating cash of $148-million, on top of a separate reserve of $45-million, meaning the system’s administrators could continue at current levels almost until the end of the decade.
At its peak the UN CDM Fund employed 160 people to register and issue credits.
The CDM raises funds by charging fees to developers for registering projects and issuing credits, a relatively unique mechanism that helped it grow from a handful of staff in 2003 to more than 160 in 2013 as the number of projects mounted.
It’s all come undone so quickly.
In true bureaucratic style now that projects have fallen by 90%, staff numbers have slipped from 160 to 150.
Its accounts show almost half of the current annual budget of $32.9-million is to pay staff, which still number around 150 despite a massive drop-off in new projects seeking registration.
Previously it took 1.6 full time employees to approve and register one project per month. Now with productivity improvements each case only needs a full time staff of … 50.
UN data shows just three projects a month were registered on average this year, against 268 a month at the peak of activity in 2012. This means a staff of 10-20 people would be sufficient, said Axel Michaelowa, a University of Zurich climate policy academic and founding partner of consultancy Perspectives.
Hmm Jo thinks, but since CDM’s were by definition, pointless (because they didn’t change the weather), there is no net productivity difference whether they occur or not. Hence the total productivity of the CDM Fund has not changed. But it’s more efficient now that it has ten less staff.
The Universe is surely conspiring against ecologicist scientists*. Their task is to convince the world that things are dire, and yet just as humans pump out more carbon dioxide pollution than ever before, many natural markers start behaving as if CO2 was having barely any effect at all. It’s all potentially so misleading.
A new paper by Cazenave et al 2014 digs deep to uncover the reasons for yet another unfortunate un-catastrophic trend change.
First, global surface temperatures stopped rising in the late 1990’s. Now, it’s become irrefutable that, for the last ten years, the rate of sea-level rise slowed by thirty percent. Seas were rising at 3.5mm a year up til 2003, then the rate fell to 2.2mm per year for the next eight years. This is exactly what ninety-eight percent of expert Global Climate Models did not predict. The slowing sea level rise is extra problematic because it forms the backbone of the excuse for the long pause in surface warming that wasn’t supposed to happen either. The fact that it coincided with the global pause in surface temperatures was no comfort at all. The missing heat, after all, must be hidden in the oceans, and that must be causing the oceans to rise even faster than they were before (an obvious, inescapable fact of physics). So now climate modelers are forced to stack excuses — they need an excuse for the excuse. (It’s excuses-squared in the name of science.)
Fortunately, brave scientists have discovered a way to correct the data. The man-made global warming theory is as settled as ever, it is just that the PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation) has been affecting trends more in the last ten years than in the years before that (see Judith Curry’s discussion). The extra La Ninas after 2003 have drawn water from the oceans, and dumped it onto Brisbane and Somerset and that has been hiding the true man-made sea level rise. After corrections, the adjusted real sea-level rise is 3.3mm annually. The previous 3.5mm rise in the 1990’s has come down to 3.3mm. Thus and verily, the trend has not slowed at all, it’s really been linear for 20 years. (It was supposed to accelerate. I guess there are more adjustments to come?)
The implications are serious. Do we build sea-walls to deal with the actual sea-level rise (2mm a year) or the corrected sea-level rise (3.3mm)? Presumably a Senate Select Committee for Corrective Sea Services will have to be formed to review the implications. How about we build sea-walls to accommodate the actual rise, then measure those walls with climate-science-calipers and “correct” those measurements post hoc. Thus the corrected height of the sea-wall will always exactly match the corrected height of the sea. You know it makes sense…
But what the PDO giveth, the PDO can taketh away. If La Ninas reduce sea-levels by dumping water over the land perhaps El Ninos raise the oceans artificially by drying out land-masses and keeping the water in the ocean? Apparently El Ninos rain more on the ocean, and La Ninas more on the land.
Ultimately the slowing sea level rise means one of two things. Either:
It’s bad luck. The El Ninos caused a slightly faster sea level rise to occur in the 1990’s (so all the models overestimated the rise) then the La Ninas arrived and took away the fun just as skeptics were gaining momentum. Or:
It was no accident, and conservatives and skeptics have control of the Pacific Trade Winds. (The bastards.)
GMSL rate over five-year-long moving windows Figure 2: a, Temporal evolution of the GMSL rate computed over five-year-long moving windows shifted by one year (start date: 1994). b, Temporal evolution of the corrected GMSL rate (nominal case) computed over five-year-long moving windows shifted by one year (start date: 1994).
I must say its a marvel that climate scientists didn’t notice how El Ninos were raising sea-levels in the 1990’s. Incredibly bad luck that they didn’t think to ask skeptical questions of the rate back then. Everyone seemed happy (apart from Nils, anyway) to accept the rapid rise at the time. (It’s funny how the Climate ScienceTM downward corrections only seem to happen to the peaks years after the fact but the acceleration of trends occurs in real time.) I don’t think this study tells us much that is definitive about sea levels, but it shows something about bureaucratized science driven by one-sided grants.
After all is said and done, let’s not forget that the raw satellite measurements of sea levels in the 1990s showed almost no rise at all. So the rise in the 1990’s is already almost entirely thanks to adjustments. These now are adjustments on adjustments.
Worse, Geoff Sherrington also points out that we haven’t measured half the deep oceans, there are mass hydrothermal vents which may be changing in trend and about which we have virtually no data. “You cannot talk about ocean expansion until you have accurate measurement of the contributions from all sources. The bottom 50% is virtually unmapped.”
Jo says attributing sea level changes 2 kilometers down to “missing heat” from a trace gas 10 kilometers up is “not obvious”. Occams razor on Vodka.
Could this be why climate models do rainfall with all the competence of tea-leaf-reading? Tiwari et al report that as much as 47% of the recharge rates of ground water in China are controlled by the sun. Apparently climate models miss the minor factor of the major cycles.
Try this radical idea on: imagine a world where climate models worked. Not only could the BoM warn people that there would be a drought coming, they could name the region, and the years.
Tiwari et al:
Here for the purpose of comparison of long term ground water recharge rates with long term solar activity, we used the 10-year average sunspot time series, for the period 1300 to 1905 AD, published by Solanki et al., [2004]. Also the additional average annual sunspot number time series (1700 to 2000 AD) is used from data source Solar Influences Data Analysis Centre. In addition to decadal data annual sunspot number data from 1700 to 2000 AD downloaded from Solar Influences Data Analysis Centre is used in the present study. The cross-correlation coefficient (+0.63) between the groundwater recharge rate time series and decadal sunspot number [Solanki et al., 2004] shows that there is statistically significant solar forcing on ground water recharge. Fig.3 shows the comparison of long-term averaged ground water recharge rates data with long term sunspot cycles.
Figure 3: Comparison of Sunspot cycles and Dry and Wet season of the area.
Pat Michaels has been a skeptic in the climate change debate since the beginning, speaking his mind for 25 years and writing six books. He has been a research professor for 30 years. He was The State Climatologist of Virginia, and a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists, and has published hundreds of papers.
” because I was told that I could not speak in public on my area of expertise, global warming, as state climatologist… it was impossible to maintain academic freedom with this speech restriction.”
Lubos Motl lamented that “Prof Patrick Michaels was effectively stripped of his title”, in another act of “blatant ideological cleansing.” He was replaced with someone who had published hardly any papers but evidently had the “right” views. Newsbusters notes the hypocrisy over the reporting of the incident. Where NASA asked James Hansen not to speak about policy but to stick to science, a huge fuss was made. When the Governor of Virginia tried to stop a skeptical scientist talking about science, where was the outrage?
These events are booking out fast! – Jo
Dr Patrick Michaels in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane
The IPA is delighted to be welcoming internationally renowned scientist Dr Patrick Michaels for a tour of Australia in April and May. Patrick is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington D.C., and formerly a professor at the University of Virginia. He’s the author of many important books on climate change, including Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media and Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know which he co-authored.
Patrick’s visit to Australia will come at a vital time in the debate about climate change, as the parliament prepares to repeal the carbon tax, reviews the Renewable Energy Target and considers other expensive measures to supposedly tackle global warming, like direct action.
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Perth BOOKING IS CLOSED
Tuesday 29 April 2014, 5.00pm for 5.30pm, Hyatt Regency, 99 Adelaide Terrace, Perth
Melbourne BOOKING IS CLOSED
Thursday 1 May 2014 5.00pm for 5.30pm, CQ Functions, 113-123 Queen Street, Melbourne
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