USS Pennsylvania leads convoy to reduce Japanese carbon emissions
Tom Quirk sends me thought provoking news.
File this in the Semi-Satirical Times
Since 1920, ice cores from Law Dome show only one significant pause in an otherwise relentless rise in CO2. Ominously, that sole plateau occurs from 1940 to 1950. If human activity drives changes in global CO2, there is no mistaking that the pause was during the only decade that war went global.
The question has to be asked: Is war an alternative to wind-farms?
Who would have thought all the tanks, bullets and bombs, and all the men in green uniforms, could be so good for the planet? World War II must have been a low electricity use time.
Or was it the mass burials – a form of carbon sequestration? (Though, cremation, after all, undoes the benefits. Does anyone have stats on the ratio of burning versus burial? Can we get a grant?)
In World War 2, direct action against the evil large fossil fuel polluters took on a new meaning. Don’t just tax those factories, bomb them!
Ahem… (all jokes aside — let’s look at that data…).
To get this extraordinary information Tom Quirk looked at the modern records from Law Dome Antarctica. We can’t use Mauna Loa data because that station didn’t start until the late 1950s. Firstly, it’s worth knowing that the ice bubbles at Law Dome are really storing a kind of 5 year smoothed averaged, not a year by year record. We know that because of the Nuclear Tests which pumped C14 into the sky show up as a spike in direct annual records from New Zealand. The spike is smeared over 4 years as captured by the bubbles in the Law Dome records. (see Figure 1)
Then knowing that the Antarctic record will smooth out spikes into flat plateaus, Quirk shows that there is a plateau in the Law Dome records of CO2 levels that starts at the same time as WWII. He estimates that CO2 levels must have spiked up and then down to produce the flat line. Curiously the spike down rather fits with sea surface temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere (it must be a coincidence 😉 ). Pace Murry Salby.
Just imagine we were taxing, trading and burying CO2 in holes in the ground (not to mention building masses of windmills and solar panels) but at the same time we didn’t know the major sinks and sources of CO2 emissions? Welcome to the post modern economy — where money is wasted on billion dollar scales every day.
— Jo
Guest Post Tom Quirk
Returning the compliment
Near constant values for atmospheric CO2 in the 1940s have been found in ice core measurements made by the CSIRO at the Law Dome in Antarctica. Ice core measurements come from bubbles trapped in the ice which, while forming, sample the atmosphere over a period of years.
Fortunately there is a way of measuring the time window over which the ice core bubbles sample the atmosphere and this has been done by the CSIRO. A peak occurred in atmospheric CO2 labeled with radioactive carbon-14 in 1963, before the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty came into force. There was a near doubling of carbon-14 CO2 and this peak was captured in the ice cores at the Law Dome. Comparison with direct air measurements in New Zealand enables the calculation of the extent of atmospheric sampling in the ice cores. The sampling is approximately characterized by a normal (Gaussian) distribution with a 4.2 year standard deviation (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Direct atmospheric measurements in New Zealand and ice core measurement of C-14 labelled atmospheric CO2. The continuous green diamonds area modelled ice core simulation from redistributing the direct measurements using a normal distribution with a standard deviation of 4.2 years.
The reverse process of unfolding the ice core CO2 measurements is now possible. The result shows that the apparent plateau in the 1940s for CO2 is the result of a fall in atmospheric CO2 concentrations at the South Pole in the middle of the 1940s. It is not possible to simulate the measurements using a plateau in atmospheric CO2 concentrations (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Law Dome ice core and direct South Pole measurements of atmospheric CO2. Solid line – modelled direct atmospheric CO2 concentrations increasing at 0.389 ppm per year before 1946 and 0.556 ppm per year after 1948. The continuous red line is the simulated ice core measurements assuming a 4.2 year standard deviation for atmospheric mixing in the ice core air bubbles.
Most conservative governments have bowed to the name-calling bullies for far too long. They are either fooled by the names (do they think “denier” is a scientific term?), or they are so afraid of being called “deniers” themselves that they adopt the bullies meme, too scared to ask the most basic and substantial questions of it. They have stayed out of science, while big-government players have milked the good brand-name shamelessly. Science needs to be set straight.
Above all else, those who care about the environment and the people should grab the moral high ground and the sensible-middle-road at the same time, and get serious about getting the science correct— which means the most rigorous investigation, the best practice, and a real ongoing public debate (no, there hasn’t been one yet). The environment and citizens deserve nothing less. And paying for better studies costs a fraction of global trading schemes, along with tens of thousands of bird-killing turbines and solar industrial plants.
Before we spend anything on mitigating a problem based on models, we need to know what empirical evidence supports the assumptions in the models. (Make no mistake, while CO2 causes warming it is the models that predict how much warming). I’ve been asking for since Jan 2010 and no one can name that mystery paper with strong observations. We need to understand how accurate those predictions are. It is only then that we can figure out which are the most important environmental concerns. As it happens the models are doing a really poor job of prediction (see also here).
Those who are our elected representatives should be representing their electorate. Who has audited the recommendations of the foreign committee known as the IPCC? Who is protecting Australians (or Americans, Europeans or New Zealanders) from being exploited? Can anyone name a government investigation that seriously discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the last IPCC report? Apparently checks are left to volunteers online. It’s a crazy way to run a country.
We need a free market in science
The monopolistic version of research is not serving us well. Unless both sides of a controversial theory get funding to put their best case forward, all-too-human factors can easily dominate the scientific process. John Howard, former PM of Australia, and other conservative leaders around the world could have set up independent research groups 15 years ago, but missed the chance to ensure there was real competition in science.
What sensible politicians could do (and should have done): Establish the Bureau of Climate Prediction or The Climate Research Institute
The western world needs some independent science organizations of experts outside official climate science — drawn from fields such as maths, statistics, engineering and geology. They should audit and check the IPCC pronouncements on behalf of Australians, Canadians, etc. They could also advise the government science funding bodies on which areas of research would be most useful for scientists to pursue. Obviously a research institute could do original research.
I suggested as much to a couple of high ranking elected Australian Liberals* a few years ago, and the response was essentially: “But who could we ask?” They wanted names, the obvious inference being that anyone they picked would be accused of being a skeptic, or attacked for some other reason. Which is true.
But the point (which I probably didn’t make well at the time) is that believers of the Global Warming religion would attack anyone and everyone who doesn’t believe. There’s no need to play that game, instead we point out the double standards. Labor employed Tim Flannery, after all. It is preposterous, beyond all reason, to think that virtually any highly educated math, engineering, meteorology or geology expert would not have as much credibility as a man who predicted we needed desalination plants urgently, and tried to convince us in 2007 that dams that would never again fill. (And a few other special Flannery quotes).
Critics would cry that only “climate scientists” can understand climate science. Sensible people could reply that all areas of science work on the same principles, laws and standards of evidence — and if climate science is different then it is not science.
The most important aim of an independent group would be to make predictions about the climate that did not prove to be false. Their reputation and future funding ought to depend on that. If that means the group produced conservative predictions with accurate uncertainty ranges, how could that be a bad thing? It would mean Australians would understand the risks — if it’s not possible to predict the climate yet, shouldn’t Australian’s be aware of that and base funding any emission reduction efforts accordingly?
If we aren’t 95% certain we can predict clouds and humidity a hundred years from now, why pretend we are 95% certain a disaster is on the way? In case you didn’t know, most of that catastrophe predicted by the models depends on clouds and humidity.
No one who has real concerns about the environment could object to having independent institutes set up, to compete to see which one can produce the most accurate predictions. Anyone who complains that an independent body was a front for a government policy could be asked if they also complained about the unscientific pronouncements of the current climate commissioners.
David Archibald points out that even setting up an inquiry into the matter would be enough. Certainly it would be cheaper and faster and involve less bureaucracy. But I’m being ambitious. I think we can do more than just point out the flaws in mainstream climate science, I think we could aim to do real science and see whether a true skeptical approach can outdo the current hobbled, misguided and bureaucrat-driven approach that starts with an assumption rather than a question. Competition is the key.
Can we engender science-as-a-quest for truth, rather than a policy driven profession?
There are not many serious comparisons of the ALP vs Coalition policies on “climate change”. Don Young, a statistician and IT consultant in Canberra, with experience at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and in Washington, is now (happily) retired and has had time to take a close look at both. Strangely, The ABC Drum declined to publish this analysis. (Perhaps the details of reducing CO2 is not a high priority?)
The centerpiece of the Labor strategy is the carbon tax/ETS, which will end up raising $7.7b in financial year 2012/13. That’s $900 per household, and judging by the record of the last few years works out at an average cost of at least $640 per tonne of Co2 not emitted.
The Coalition propose to spend $800 million per year, or $100 per household, with a cap on the cost per tonne that is likely to be much lower, so a lot more effective per dollar. If it can be done.
The Labor Party want us to buy carbon credits overseas, which is “essentially foreign aid”. The Coalition are considering measures like increasing soil carbon, which might not be either verifiable or permanent. I would argue that most of the carbon abatement strategies accepted under the Kyoto Protocol suffer the same uncertainty. Soil carbon can be released into the air, and forests burn down.
Our national debate talks of reducing carbon emissions by at least 5% by 2020. Young points out that to achieve an ambitious 1.5 per cent reduction in co2 emissions per year (so 10% by 2020, 55% by 2050), another 4 per cent of co2 emissions needs to be abated each year (allowing for average GDP and energy growth of 2.5% per year). This amounts to an extra 25 million tonnes of abatements to be found each year. And if that will be hard to do next year, it will be even harder the year after that (and so on).
The stark fiscal inefficiency of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation was news to me. Young notes that the CEFC was set up to invest $10 billion over five years. But after one year it has invested just $138 million, and at a cost to the taxpayer of $18 million per year in management fees to keep the CEFC running. The only good thing is that they are not successful at spending more money.
He writes from the perspective of a person concerned about CO2 levels, looking for the most economically efficient methods to reduce emissions. It’s safe to say he hasn’t read a lot of what’s on this site, but in the spirit of promoting logical analysis (starting from the basis that CO2 should be reduced) I found his thoughts, especially on costs, interesting.
— Jo
Carbon organisms doing free carbon sequestration somewhere near Eucla WA (give or take 500km)
Australia – CO2 Emission Reduction Strategies
Guest Post By Don Young
The Labor Strategy
Treasury estimates that the government will raise $7.7 billion from the carbon tax for 2012-13.*
What happens to this revenue? Compensation for households is about $4 billion. Compensation for business (trade exposed industries, high co2 intensity power stations, coal industry, steel industry, etc.) comes in many forms and is difficult to find and quantify, but seems to be around $3.5 billion (jobs and competiveness $2.4b, coal program $1.0b, steel program $.15b). And a significant amount is needed simply to run the various government bodies set up to administer the carbon tax.
Labor’s strategy is to reduce co2 emissions by making energy more expensive. But energy demand is relatively inelastic, so even a large price rise will only modestly reduce energy usage. So its further strategy is to use the carbon tax to make high co2 emission intensive energy relatively more expensive, encouraging a shift to low co2 emission intensive energy. But because high emission energy is much cheaper to produce than low emission energy for technological reasons, the carbon price needs to be quite large before low co2 emission intensity energy can compete on cost.
Labor claims that its strategy has worked, citing economic growth and decreasing emissions in the last year. No doubt the $23 per ton carbon tax had some impact, but how efficiently and at what cost? Electricity prices have increased about 75 per cent in the last five years (Figure 19). This is mainly due to factors other than the carbon tax, which only accounts for 9% of current electricity prices. Other factors include network costs (including much networking to remote wind turbines), generation costs, RET targets, and feed-in tariffs. The carbon tax has therefore contributed only 21% of the increase in costs over the past five years — and so can only be responsible for 21% of any decrease in co2 emissions due higher electricity prices. Other energy sectors, such as transport, are not yet covered by the carbon tax, so it is not responsible for any decreased emissions in these sectors. And the shift to renewables has been also driven by RET schemes, structural changes to manufacturing, and the loss of aluminium smelters.
The glossy government publication How Australia’s carbon price is working – One Year On summarizes the progress and performance of the government’s carbon tax strategy. Unfortunately this report might kindly be described as “boastful and superficial”, because it fails to provide the basic essential information. There is no detailed summary of money raised, money spent, or co2 emission reductions. There is no detailed analysis of the cost-effectiveness of programs, of other causes of changes to co2 emissions, of how much the carbon tax actually contributed, and no annual projections to 2020. One case study, about the Brisbane City Council, quantifies the savings in electricity costs, but does not quantify how much money was invested or how many tons of co2 emissions were saved, and thus omits the all-important efficiency of the savings ($/tonne of co2). Why was this information withheld?
Sportsbet odds reached $11.50 for an ALP win, and as low as $1.03 for a Coalition win. They’ve just called the Australian Election, nine days early.
That’s it! Sorry Sky News, apologies to the ABC, don’t bother news.com.au. We’re calling it first. – Sportsbet
They’re saying the Coalition will win 90 seats, ALP 56, Katter 1, and Wilkie 1, but don’t know about the seats of Lyons and Lingiari.
Shame the Coalition appears to be missing his rare opportunity to give us the small government we so desperately need. They could savagely cut red-tape and spending, and unleash the power of Australian innovation, brains, and creativity. This is not even being discussed. Sigh. They offer $31b in cuts, but as Judith Sloan points out: “Essentially, both parties expect to spend nearly $1700bn in the next four years. ”
Government shouldn’t be trying to “create jobs” any more than they should be “picking winners” in the market. A governments job is to create the conditions that allow the cleverest, hardest working, and luckiest to mobilize the workforce in the most efficient and fairest way.
UPDATE: ! Oops. They are still taking bets, Title and Tweet corrected. Apologies to Sportsbet, I didn’t see how they could still take money…
Steve Goreham describes how one of the leading Green economies works: Germany has 23,000 wind turbines, half as many as the United States but packed into one 27th of the area. Average turbines are producing 17% of their stated capacity. All up, they make 7 percent of the nation’s electricity but consume 2 percent of the nation’s energy. Crikey! There would be a PhD thesis in making sense of those numbers, because most of that consumption is in the construction phase and depends on assumptions about how long those towers will work. I’d like to see a lifetime calculation of a Joules in and Joules out. Here’s a part I can’t quite wrap my head around: total renewables share of energy consumption (so that includes oil, gas, coal, wood and the like) apparently rose from 4 percent in 2000 to 12 percent in 2012. I can see a most unfortunate meeting of two lines on a graph here…
The Big-Green-Government in Germany decreed that everyone had to pay a lot more for the holy electrons from wind and solar (those electrons have good intentions, after all). Thus and verily (and partly thanks to the angel of inflation), the poor sods in German houses now pay twice as much for electrons as they did in the year 2000. (In USD, it was about 18.5c per kWh then and 35c now.) Meanwhile the intermittent supply from renewables plays havoc with the wholesale electricity price, gas finds it hard to compete, and Germany is building more coal plants.
The best case scenario, if the IPCC is right, is that this pain-in-the-pocket will reduce global temperatures by 0.002C about 90 years from now.
And the Germans are good with numbers and machinery. What hope is there for the rest of us? – Jo
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Wind turbines clutter the north German countryside
Earlier this month, my wife and I toured the scenic German countryside of Schleswig-Holstein. We drove northwest from Hamburg, the largest city in the North German Plain, to St. Peter-Ording, a small resort town on the North Sea. We traversed fields of sheep and cattle, vegetables, corn, and grain, and passed historic towns of quaint homes with thatched roofs. But towering over all was a vast number of giant wind turbines.
Thousands of wind turbines have been erected in northwest Germany to capture winds blowing in from the North Sea. Almost 23,000 wind turbines operated in Germany at the end of 2012, with more than 10,000 located in Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony, the two states bordering the North Sea. Germany now has half the wind turbines of the United States, in an area much smaller.
These wind turbines dominate the countryside. Most reach more than 400 feet into the sky, taller than the Statue of Liberty. Newer, larger turbines stand more than 550 feet high to the top of the blade, higher than the Washington Monument. High voltage towers add to the disfigurement, constructed to transport electricity to populated areas of central and south Germany.
Richard Tol has been relentlessly polite in pursuing the data through email after email to John Cook, Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Professor Max Lu and Professor Daniel Kammen, the journal editor. Tol simply wants the data so he can replicate and check John Cook’s results. Cook et al 2013 tried to demonstrate the irrelevant and unscientific point that there is a consensus among government funded climate scientists (if not among real scientists). We already know this study is fundamentally flawed (see Cook’s fallacy “97% consensus” study).
Now the University of Queensland’s scientific standards are being openly questioned too. Will UQ insist on the bare minimum standard that applies to all scientists — will they make sure Cook provides the data for a published paper? Did they realize what they were getting into when they gave Cook their platform?
Given the large media run when this paper was issued, and the importance of saving the world from a climate catastrophe, you would have thought that Cook et al would know other scientists would want the data. Since Cook must have double checked and been rigorous preparing it, surely Cook would have all that data zipped up, ready to go when the paper was submitted in January? Naturally, Environment Research Letters would want to review that data too, wouldn’t they…
But Richard Tol finds many points to question. The data is not what was reported, it fails validity tests, does not represent the literature it surveys, saying: “the main finding of the paper is incorrect, invalid and unrepresentative”. Cook’s paper essentially relies on only 12 reviewers, who were not tested for rater bias or rater fatigue (despite answering up to 4,000 questions). There is no survey protocol. There were changes to the test that are not documented. Fifty seven percent of the data remains unreleased.
Cook claims “confidentiality”. Tol repeatedly offers to sign a confidentiality clause.
I will make sure the Australian Research Council is made aware of the situation.
– Jo (my bolding below).
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Professor Dr Richard S.J. Tol MEA
University of Sussex
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Tinbergen Institute
Professor Peter Høj
President and vice-chancellor
University of Queensland
Falmer, 27 August 2013
Re: Open letter on access to data for replication
Dear Professor Høj,
I was struck by a recent paper published in Environmental Research Letters with John Cook, a University of Queensland employee, as the lead author. The paper purports to estimate the degree of agreement in the literature on climate change. Consensus is not an argument, of course, but my attention was drawn to the fact that the headline conclusion had no confidence interval, that the main validity test was informal, and that the sample contained a very large number of irrelevant papers while simultaneously omitting many relevant papers.
My interest piqued, I wrote to Mr Cook asking for the underlying data and received 13% of the data by return email. I immediately requested the remainder, but to no avail.
I found that the consensus rate in the data differs from that reported in the paper. Further research showed that, contrary to what is said in the paper, the main validity test in fact invalidates the data. And the sample of papers does not represent the literature. That is, the main finding of the paper is incorrect, invalid and unrepresentative.
Furthermore, the data showed patterns that cannot be explained by either the data gathering process as described in the paper or by chance. This is documented. I asked Mr Cook again for the data so as to find a coherent explanation of what is wrong with the paper. As that was unsuccessful, also after a plea to Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, the director of Mr Cook’s work place, I contacted Professor Max Lu, deputy vice-chancellor for research, and Professor Daniel Kammen, journal editor. Professors Lu and Kammen succeeded in convincing Mr Cook to release first another 2% and later another 28% of the data.
I also asked for the survey protocol but, violating all codes of practice, none seems to exist. The paper and data do hint at what was really done. There is no trace of a pre-test. Rating training was done during the first part of the survey, rather than prior to the survey. The survey instrument was altered during the survey, and abstracts were added. Scales were modified after the survey was completed. All this introduced inhomogeneities into the data that cannot be controlled for as they are undocumented.
The later data release reveals that what the paper describes as measurement error (in either direction) is in fact measurement bias (in one particular direction). Furthermore, there is drift in measurement over time. This makes a greater nonsense of the paper.
I went back to Professor Lu once again, asking for the remaining 57% of the data. Particularly, I asked for rater IDs and time stamps. Both may help to understand what went wrong.
Only 24 people took the survey. Of those, 12 quickly dropped out, so that the survey essentially relied on just 12 people. The results would be substantially different if only one of the 12 were biased in one way or the other. The paper does not report any test for rater bias, an astonishing oversight by authors and referees. If rater IDs are released, these tests can be done.
Because so few took the survey, these few answered on average more than 4,000 questions. The paper is silent on the average time taken to answer these questions and, more importantly, on the minimum time. Experience has that interviewees find it difficult to stay focused if a questionnaire is overly long. The questionnaire used in this paper may have set a record for length, yet neither the authors nor the referees thought it worthwhile to test for rater fatigue. If time stamps are released, these tests can be done.
Mr Cook, backed by Professor Hoegh-Guldberg and Lu, has blankly refused to release these data, arguing that a data release would violate confidentiality. This reasoning is bogus.
The ABC keeps giving us more reasons to say “Privatize the national broadcaster”. Such is the quality of the insights on offer.
Clive Hamilton, ethics professor and former Greens candidate, uses most of the alarmist toolbox on the ABC Drum –-the name-calling, hypocrisy, and argumentum ad auctoritatem. He still can’t tell the difference between science and religion, he thinks science works like a church, with decrees issued from the Mount. He talks of the mythical God known as “the science”. Clive has read the leak of the latest commandment from on high, and it says “95%”! There is gnashing of teeth:
Further confirmation of the science will certainly not persuade any climate science deniers. They are beyond persuasion, because the argument is only superficially about the science. It’s really about culture and ideology.
Strangely, he’s unwitting hit upon a truth. But it’s a projection of his headspace, run rife. Who denies the evidence showing climate models are broken.Whose argument is superficial? Who doesn’t even know what science is? Yes, really this is about culture and ideology. His. And it’s a dark ideology; read on.
What Clive wants more than anything is to monsterize anyone who questions his faith. His scorn for those who don’t wholeheartedly bow to the God of Alarm is complete, and his fantasy wish is to make that hatred a stronger part of our culture.
This is what it’s all about — the nub:
I have been in rooms where even sophisticated people who would cringe at being associated with climate deniers look for comfortable ways out. They pull back from what the science requires because the policy task looks too hard, oblivious to the fact that it now looks harder because others before them have reacted with the same timidity.
He hopes people will cringe rather than listen to deniers. (God forbid that citizens might have a polite discussion, or there be an actual debate like in a courtroom or a parliament.) Hamilton is delivering his sermon to the poor sods who read the ABC Drum. He’s reminding them that skeptics are the lepers of our community, and if any of the faithful should make the mistake of asking whether a foreign government committee might be less than 100% correct (in being 95% scared), they shall be shunned from the Citadel of Ultimo.
Sadly for him, the vicious bullying campaign is past the useby date, people are awake to it, and the more he does it, the sillier it looks. The ABC and to some extent, Hamilton, live off the largess of Australian taxpayers, and yet something like 70% of them don’t want the government spending any more of their money on “environmental issues.”
The Science has spoken:
The point is that politicians instinctively know all of this. They know that most Australians accept the science and are at times worried about climate change. They want their governments to ‘do something’ and make the problem go away.
He “knows” that the citizens are shallow people, feeling guilty and looking for a cheap way out. No wonder the Greens don’t like mainstream Australians. What else can we infer from this:
Yet our political leaders also know, from street talk, focus groups and hard political experience, that Australians want symbolic actions only, actions that will make them feel better about themselves but not require anything of them. When political leaders get it wrong, and take what voters tell pollsters at face value, they find themselves in hot water.
By this view, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, Australians know it, but are too selfish and stupid to act. So little respect is shown for the unwashed masses views there’s an element of class warfare. Those who drink from Clive’s bowl find reasons to resent most Australians, but gain no understanding. Is this what the ABC is for?
There’s no acknowledgment in Clive’s “Good or Evil” world that the unwashed masses may have a more complex view entirely – perhaps Australians are aware of which answer they are supposed to give on surveys, but they also know the Green policies to change the weather are pointless, so they tick the boxes that say: “Yes I believe” but no, “Don’t waste the money”.
Note the mass emissions in the Amazon and Africa in Sept 2007
The Carbon tracker shows the major CO2 polluters as they splurt out CO2. See the massive plumes of CO2 around the planet.
Look at China… watch clusters of coal fired power stations bursting into life only to shut down a month later. (Or maybe not.)
Is that mass rallies of four wheel drives each August in the Congo? No, it must be air-conditioners in Kinshasa…
😉
Tom Quirk tells me that the intermittent polluters around the equatorial region are likely to be massive fires. (And there are even monster fires as far north as Siberia).
I’m intrigued but I want some data. The NASA Earth Observatory obviously have some data — see the picture here of the same month as the picture at the top (sept 2007). It is not enough though. The dots represent the number of fires, but not the intensity, and not the fuel load…
Note the active fires in the Amazon and Africa in Sept 2007
Watch the global wildfires rage and die out in this animation below:
Skeptics are often accused of being ideologically motivated to find reasons to “deny” the threat posed by man-made Global Disruptification (or whatever it is now called). Which begs the question of what ideology motivated Jo-the-former-Green, along with all the other former believers, to convert. It certainly wasn’t the money (we know from first hand experience). Could it be that damn truth-seeking ideology?
Judith Curry points out that “motivated reasoning” also applies to believers (to which I would add, yes, double-yes, and more-so — follow that money). When grants, careers, junkets, book sales, and offers to sit on golden-commissions are on the line, it doesn’t take much motivated reasoning to find excuses to believe your work is “science” even as you ignore opportunities to follow data that doesn’t quite fit, or delay publications of inconvenient graphs, while you double check, triple check, and invite like-minded colleagues to help find reasons the graphs are not important.
Some scientists are so motivated that they call opposing scientists petty names, and toss allusions they must be “funded” by vested interests, even as they ignore the billions of vested interests funding the name-callers. Meanwhile, all the silent so-called scientists in the tea-rooms that let the one-sided insults go unopposed are complicit in the steady corruption of a once noble profession.
This is about the power of the tea-rooms of research — the places where scientists test out their ideas, not just to see if it holds water scientifically, but to see how the cultural climate will receive it. Who wants to be vilified? Step right up “Denier”.
There are many ways human foibles can slow scientific progress and keep zombie science alive. When research turns up results that will have a negative effect on your colleague’s careers (as well as your own), why would a scientist treat it exactly the same way as the opposite results? Some scientists rise above and overcome the peer pressure, but it takes a special kind of moral fiber to go against the crowd.
Curry discusses the conflict between a scientist’s loyalty to their colleagues and their institution, their loyalty to the public, and the loyalty to the endless quest for understanding. She talks about how scientists ask whether they should release awkward results, and is amazed that most other scientists not only think it’s a reasonable question but say “No” because ” it would only provide fodder for the skeptics”. She describes how she has been ostracized, and how even sympathetic colleagues stay silent, and are deterred from speaking because of her experience.
I have been told examples in Australia of outright intimidation of skeptical scientists by colleagues in senior and very influential roles. I have the names, dates and details. I keep them strictly confidential to protect careers. Please email me if you have a story, or post an invitation in comments, and I’ll be in touch. It is worth sharing your experience. Even anonymized, these details help decision makers understand how corrupt institutional science is. I will not publish anything without express permission.
It can be a lonely place being a scientist. All credit to Judith Curry for rising above — despite the price. May she be rewarded in the long run.
Were [these] just hardworking scientists doing their best to address the impossible expectations of the policy makers? Well, many of them were. However, at the heart of the IPCC is a cadre of scientists whose careers have been made by the IPCC. These scientists have used the IPCC to jump the normal meritocracy process by which scientists achieve influence over the politics of science and policy. Not only has this brought some relatively unknown, inexperienced and possibly dubious people into positions of influence, but these people become vested in protecting the IPCC, which has become central to their own career and legitimizes playing power politics with their expertise.
The red carpet and rewards are rolled out for those with fewer scruples. It includes not just scientists, but organizations and journals:
When I refer to the IPCC dogma, it is the religious importance that the IPCC holds for this cadre of scientists; they will tolerate no dissent, and seek to trample and discredit anyone who challenges the IPCC. Some are mid to late career middle ranking scientists who have done ok in terms of the academic meritocracy. Others were still graduate students when they were appointed as lead authors for the IPCC. These scientists have used to IPCC to gain a seat at the “big tables” where they can play power politics with the collective expertise of the IPCC, to obtain personal publicity, and to advance their careers. This advancement of their careers is done with the complicity of the professional societies and the institutions that fund science. Eager for the publicity, high impact journals such as Nature, Science, and PNAS frequently publish sensational but dubious papers that support the climate alarm narrative.
The meme will turn against the apostate even more than the always-skeptic — it has too, in order to dissuade others that leaving the meme:
Let the historic dissection begin. Man-made global warming is a dying market and a zombie science.
The Carbon Capture Report, based in Illinois, tallies up the media stories from the English speaking media on “climate change” daily. Thanks to the tip from Peter Lang, we can see the terminal trend below. The big peak in late 2009 was the double-whammy of Climategate and Copenhagen (aka Hopenhagen). It’s all been downhill since then.
Mentions of “climate change” in news, blogs and tweets dropped suddenly from July 29, 2011
But something that caught my eye was the drop in mid 2011 (or precisely — July 29, 2011) when media stories fell by half, a step-change fall from which they never recovered.
Media Matters, and Joe Romm make much of of the fact that after Paul Ingrassia (a skeptic) was appointed as Reuters deputy-editor-in-chief news coverage of climate change fell by half.
Media Matters found a 48% decline in climate-change coverage over a six-month period, after Ingrassia joined the agency in 2011.
But Ingrassia started in April 2011not July. Media Matters compares 6 months before the global fall Oct 2010 – April 2011 — to a six month period after the global fall (Oct 2011 – April 2012). Media Matters and Romm missed the big picture.
The Carbon Capture report graph above includes news, articles, blogs, tweets. The step change occurs in news stories and tweets, but doesn’t happen in blogs til October 15, 2011. When it comes, the use of “climate change” in blogs plummets about 70%. What happened? (Suggestions welcome). Is this an artefact, does it include comments? Is this a moment when the 50c army got new instructions (and why?), or, who knows, perhaps paychecks for astroturfing stopped? I have no data…
Blog mentions of “climate change” apparently fell after Oct 13th 2011
Mentions of “wind power” similarly fell off their own cliff the same week as media mentions of “climate change”. The dot just above the fall is July 26th, 2011.
Mentions of “Wind Power” drop from July 26th 2011.
The term “solar power” fell into a ditch that week, but recovered on and off. It was not the same pattern.
Mentions of “Solar Power” in media, blogs and tweets
I wondered what events has caused the fall. I figured there would be clues in the carbon market, and sure enough, the death spiral in prices began in June 2011.
Carbon credit prices
Global mentions of carbon credits reached a wild peak on July 1o.
What was going on?
Everyone was talking about carbon credits on July 10, 2011.
So I started hunting
I skimmed through wayback machine pages of Climate depot and Tom Nelson. (Keep hunting, you may find something I missed).
The Chicago Climate Exchange collapsed in late 2010. That wasn’t the trigger. Though it was an early victim of the same general trend. The Republicans took control of the US Senate House in Nov 2010, and Cap n Trade was declared dead then. By February 2011, renewables were off the agenda in “austerity-struck Europe” and I noted the money was leaving the room.
What looks like the most important clue was a key report issued on June 1 by the World Bank which said the international carbon market was in deep trouble: World Bank warns of ‘failing’ international carbon market [Guardian June 2] . Another version said: “Carbon credits market at point of collapse”. They are talking about the international CDM market, which is not the same as the EU market, though the Guardian had a leaked report suggesting that the big EU market was in trouble too.
“THE international market in carbon credits has suffered an almost total collapse, with only $US1.5 billion of them traded last year – the lowest since the system opened in 2005, says a report from the World Bank.
A fledgling market in greenhouse gas emissions in the United States also declined, and only the European Union’s internal market in carbon remained healthy, worth $US120 billion. However, leaked documents appear to show that even the EU’s system is in danger.
The international market in carbon credits was brought about under the Kyoto Protocol, as a way of injecting investment in low-carbon technology in the developing world.
Under the system, known as the clean development mechanism [CDM], projects such as wind farms or solar panels in developing countries are awarded credits for every tonne of carbon avoided. These credits are bought by rich countries to count towards their emissions reduction targets.”
What about the monster spike in carbon credits stories?
By July 10th, perhaps the world’s media finally realized what traders, bloggers, then bureaucrats had already figured out. The price of everything to do with carbon credits was falling. It could be that in a brief flurry they woke up, announced that, and then lost interest. Meanwhile all the groups who normally issue press releases were downsizing or closing, didn’t feel like telling the world, and the rain of wind-power and climate change news slowed as the investment money, and the press writers, moved to different industries.
It seems hard to believe, but the July 10 spike could have had something to do with Australian PM Julia Gillard. With impeccable timing and style, as carbon markets fell, Julia Gillard signed Australia up to the most expensive carbon tax scheme in the world. She announced those details on Sunday July 10th. She really did pick the last possible moment to leap from the life-raft onto the burning ship. And hasn’t Australia paid dearly for that.
So Copenhagen was the peak, the markets lived on sheer momentum for another year, but underneath the surface the big players were quietly leaving. Meanwhile the Greek and other EU economies were hitting the wall at the same time as the promise of the renewables industry and the carbon market were proving to be hollow. The carbon market for the EU maintained the price in 2010, but had none of the strength, and when the World Bank report appeared the medium-serious-money started walking away too, and has been walking away ever since.
Pure speculation…
It may have taken 18 months, but the Great Global Warming Scare was tested for real for the first time in Copenhagen and it failed. The collision with decades of dismal EU monetary policy, and a couple of cold winters help seal its fate. How much of that was due to FOIA and Climategate, we’ll probably never know.
If the media had really reported what happened in Climategate at the time, they could have led opinions instead of being the mere recorders of history after the fact — telling the world what it mostly already knew. The MSM is in its own little version of a death spiral, largely because we no longer trust it to report the news without omissions. Science journalists could have punctured the global warming scare years ago if they’d been doing their jobs. Thank goodness for Booker, Bolt and Ridley, and for Delingpole. Thank goodness for Blogs.
Proving that nature can outdo anything humans have done, a new paper shows that sea-levels off Western Australia may have risen as high as 9 m above the current level during the last warm period over a hundred thousand years ago. The authors (O’Leary et al) conclude that seas were 3-4 m higher for most of the last warm period (known as the Eemian) but towards the end of the period a large sudden rise occurred. They suggest that an ice shelf collapsed in Antarctica or Greenland or both, causing a 5m rise (17 feet).
The point of the paper was this double spiked shape of the sea level rise during the last warm interglacial known as the Eemian.
The Age interviewed O’Leary who said “he was confident that the 17-foot jump happened in less than a thousand years – how much less, he cannot be sure.”
Figure 3 j Relative sea-level curve for Western Australia. A geomorphically defined palaeoMSL datum of C2:5m 120 kyr ago (Fig. 1c) anchors a predicted relative sea-level curve at Red Bluff, which includes a GIA signal based on the test calculation (see Methods) plus the following ESL history: ESL jumps from 0 to 3.4m between 127.5 kyr and 127 kyr agoand remains at this level until 120 kyr ago; and 120 kyr ago, ESL jumps 6m over 1 kyr. Dashed green line is an inferred sea-level curve based on a minimum coral palaeodepth (solid bar above circle) of 0.4m below palaeoMSL. This palaeodepth calculation is applicable only to highest in situ corals, as corals of the same age found at lower elevations will have a known water depth of at least up to the height of the coral above it. Arrows indicate potential for greater palaeodepth range.
Note the graph runs “backwards” and the oldest dates are on the right. (Which annoys me since we read left to right, so dates ought to run left to right…).
In the last 130,000 years sea levels have ranged from 120m below the current level to 9 m higher. For thousands of years they’ve stayed higher than today’s level — long enough for whole coral reefs to form, die and be left high and dry. Those reefs are now long gone and fragmented. Meanwhile our sea-levels are rising at 2mm or even 3mm a year (but only if you believe the highly adjusted data) and we’re whipped into a panic.
Tipping Points in Ice Sheets?
Before we push the anxiety button on tipping points, we ought to remember that the Vostok Ice Cores tell us Antarctica was over 2 degrees warmer during the early Eemian, and Greenland was as much as 8 degrees warmer. And if seas were 3 -4 m higher before the ice sheet collapsed, that rather suggests we have a way to go before we reach that precarious state…
The late big rise apparently occurred at 118.1 ±1.4 thousand years ago. We don’t really know if that rise occurred in a decade or over 3,000 years. We do know that the cooling that came after that was bad news for the coral reef off Western Australia that was left high and dry after the water receded. Otherwise, corals, fish, and people around the world have somehow survived massive shifts in temperature and sea-level that had nothing to do with humankind.
Perhaps there are tipping points in Antarctic and Greenland shelves, and we would want to avoid triggering them (assuming we could). But things were also warmer 7,000 years ago in the Holocene and the large ice sheets appeared to have managed just fine. That’s another point suggesting we have some safety margin. Plus, there’s no reason to believe that 2 degrees of warming is coming anytime soon, because the amplified exaggerations of the climate models are known to be wrong.
Stick with us overseas readers. The spectacle goes on…
How times have changed
Back in 2007 both major parties wooed the Green vote. Now Green is so on the nose that Abbott not only declared that he was putting them last on preference swaps*, but felt it was worth egging the Labor party to join him. The ALP did not scoff. Abbott is marking the Greens as worse for the nation than the Labor Party. In response the Labor Party put out a definite “maybe-sorta-kindof”. Rudd ruled out “deals” to form government (though it’s not clear what that means exactly), but he naturally wants to use preference swaps and won’t be bragging about it.
Both major parties are competing to look tough on “irregular maritime migrants”. Though both still pay lip service to the climate-scare. It’s a shame the Liberals are still too afraid of the name-calling bullies to stand up and ask for evidence, or to promise to set up an independent science agency to audit the IPCC claims on behalf of Australian taxpayers.
Where did that bounce go?
The honeymoon is over for Rudd.
Sportsbet have the Conservatives at $1.11. Labor at $6.50. The Labor Party suffered ignominious polling news that Peter Beattie (star pick, former-Premier, parachuted in last week) is not-too popular and unlikely to win the seat (Ouch. 40%). The Hollow Men magic is failing.
Meanwhile Rudd announced a plan to reduce company tax in the Northern Territory. As far as most people could tell, he decided it on Thursday, and waited a whole day to announce it. I think Abbott launched a similar idea months ago, and at the time it was mocked. Simon Crean (Labor MP) called it: “Tony Abbott’s grab bag of wacky ideas.” What was yesterday’s dumb idea is today’s grand plan. Too bad about intelligent repartee. Most of the Australian policy debate is analyzed with scorn or derision.
The tally for Labor waste stands at $250 billion according to Henry Ergas and Judith Sloan.
Remember Rob Oakshott and Tony Windsor?
The two infamous independent M.P.s wanted a stable big-spending-soft-government and a carbon tax and thanks to them, we got it. The big lie was that their electorates wanted this too.
Latest New England Poll suggests a 66% vote coming for the conservative candidate. In Lyne, it’s 59%.
Shucks but I’ll miss Rob Oakshott. His words of wisdom from the Hansard record of Parliament May 2010:
“I take this opportunity to raise the issue of the smoking guns that I have seen over the last six months. I smelt a rat in the shift that I saw and what looked to be—to their credit—a very well organised and very well-funded campaign from the likes of JoNova and Viv Forbes.”
I’m bowled over by the compliment. Is he really giving me and Viv the joint credit for the sweeping poll changes? (As if). I’ll just ask my PR department (me) to arrange with my cartoonist (me too) to throw together a parody of parliament, which the web-editor (me) can code into a page. All of us are delighted to be described as well organized. (It’s true, we communicate like we are all in one head.) **
We’re a bit confused about the “well funded” term though, since we write pro bono, and are essentially a charity operator…
Arnold Schwarzenegger uses all his best scientific reasoning to wow the crowd at the annual National Clean Energy Summit on Tuesday in Las Vegas, Nevada:
Speaking of greenhouse gas deniers: “Strap some conservative-thinking people to a tailpipe for an hour and then they will agree it’s a pollutant!
Finally climate scientists are starting to ask how the models need to change in order to fit the data. Hans von Storch, Eduardo Zorita and authors in Germany pointedly acknowledge that even at the 2% confidence level the model predictions don’t match reality. The fact is, the model simulations predicted it would get warmer than it has from 1998-2012. Now some climate scientists admit that there is less than a 2% chance that the models are compatible with the 15-year warming pause, according to the assumptions in the models.
In a brief paper they go on to suggest three ways the models could be failing, but draw no conclusions. For the first time I can recall, the possibility that the data might be wrong is not even mentioned. It has been the excuse du jour for years.
Note in the chart that while the 10 year “pause” passed the basic 5% test of statistical significance, by 13 years, the pause was so long that only 2% of CMIP5 or CMIP3 models simulations could be said to agree with reality. By 16 years that will be 1% of simulations. If the pause continues for 20 years, there would be “zero” segments that match.
Figure 2. Consistency between the recent trend of the global mean annual temperature and simulations with climate models: the figure shows the proportion of simulated trends that are smaller or equal to the observed global annual trend in the period 1998-2012 in the HadCRUT4 data set, Rhadcrut15.= 0.0041 oC/year. The ensemble of simulated trends has been calculated from non-overlapping periods of length n in the period 2001-2060. The climate models were driven by the emission scenarios RCP4.5 (CMIP5) and A1B (CMIP3). The inset shows an expanded view of the range 0% to 2% .
Four Apollo Astronauts are outspoken skeptics. This includes Buzz Aldrin and Harrison Schmidt (2 of the 12 men who walked on the moon) and Phil Chapman (Apollo 14) and Walter Cunningham (Apollo 7).
Donn F. Eisele, Walter M. Schirra, Jr. and Walter Cunningham.
Walter Cunningham is a fighter pilot and a physicist and was the Lunar Module pilot on the Apollo 7 mission. In a 263 hour mission in October 1968 the three astronauts covered four and a half million miles.
Over forty years later, he describes how the public trust built by the astronauts and technical specialists who put man on the moon has been abused by opportunists. NASA and science has changed.
UPDATE: Ask yourself how hard it would be for the BBC, ABC or New Scientist to have done this interview (and years ago). Cunningham confirms that none of them have ever approached him to ask why he is openly skeptical, which tells you all you need to know about the impartiality of mainstream “journalists”.
“Those of us fortunate enough to have traveled in space bet our lives on the competence, dedication, and integrity of the science and technology professionals who made our missions possible…In the last twenty years, I have watched the high standards of science being violated by a few influential climate scientists, including some at NASA, while special interest opportunists have abused our public trust.”
“Many of NASA’s retirees have grown increasingly concerned that GISS, a NASA organization located in a midtown Manhattan office building, was allowing its science to be politicized, compromising their credibility. Our concern, beyond damage to the NASA’s exemplary reputation, was damage to their current or former scientists and employees, and even compromising the reputation of science itself.
“We developed a letter to NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden and obtained signatures from seven Apollo astronauts, several former Headquarters managers and Center directors, and 40 former management-level technical specialists. We asked that he restrain NASA from including unproven claims in public releases and on websites. Statements by NASA that man-made carbon dioxide was having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. It is clear that the science is NOT settled.
“James Hansen … was an embarrassment and disgrace to the agency [NASA].
It just shows how dry Australia is and how pathetic we are with water. Australia’s largest river ends in an artificial dam full of feral European Carp. Lobbyists are campaigning hard (and successfully) to take water from upstream farmers to restore the flow. According to Jennifer Marohasy, one of the main outcomes will be to increase a massive artificial freshwater estuary that only exists because several kilometers of man-made barrages were built across the end of the river in the 1930’s. She makes a case that we’d be better off using the $10 billion dollars and the water to restore natural wetlands or to produce food. As she says “Taking one-third of upstream Murray water from farmers to feed a downstream carp fishery makes no economic, environmental or agricultural sense.“
I spoke to Marohasy on the phone today and she makes the point that the Murray River was in strife in the 1980’s, and it did need extra water-flow, but a lot of action had already been taken, and river health improved before this latest $10 billion dollar plan was pledged in April 2007. (For example, in October 2005 the “world’s largest delivery of environmental water“, the equivalent of a Sydney Harbour full of water flooded into the Barmah-Millewah red gum forest that straddles the Murray River upstream of Echuca.) Some of the extra water may help, but how much? The national debate is dominated by vested interests, is very one-sided, and there are hard questions to be answered about the cost-benefits of such a major water buy-back. – Jo
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Guest Post by Jennifer Marohasy
Mulloway, not carp, belong in the Murray River’s estuary
Most Australians have never visited the Murray River, and even fewer know that it ends in a vast and shallow freshwater lake. The freshwater lake is separated from the Southern Ocean by 7.6 kilometres of barrage that were built in the 1930s across the five channels that converge on the Murray River’s sea mouth.
The barrages dammed the estuary and the artificial lake now sits almost 1 metre above sea level and covers an area of about 650 km² (250 mi²). This artificial lake is so vast that you can’t see from one side to the other, and it evaporates the equivalent of about two Sydney Harbour’s full of freshwater each year. It is full of carp, a pest fish introduced from Europe.
Before the barrages were built mulloway, Agyrosomus japonicas, were a mainstay of the local fishery. Milang, a little port on the shores of Lake Alexandrina was home to a hundred mulloway fishermen who routinely sent off several hundred tons of fish to the Adelaide and Melbourne fish markets. Back then the central basin of the wave-dominated barrier estuary was sometimes full of freshwater and sometimes full of salty water, the nature of the mix depended on the tides, the winds and Murray River flows.
According to South Australian historian J.C. Tolley it was the ocean that most affected the size and position of the Murray River’s sea mouth:
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What happens to this revenue?
“Many of NASA’s retirees have grown increasingly concerned that GISS, a NASA organization located in a midtown Manhattan office building, was allowing its science to be politicized, compromising their credibility. Our concern, beyond damage to the NASA’s exemplary reputation, was damage to their current or former scientists and employees, and even compromising the reputation of science itself.
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