On a lighter note, here is a new climate issue being talked about over on Real Climate.
Of course, I agree with you that these are good actions. However, I have to ask you straight up: Are there any actions that you support that would actually be opposed by the most recalcitrant of the fossil fuel companies, namely Exxon and Western Fuels Association? And, if not, how do you expect us to feel about the fact that your position is so extreme that it is out there further than even most of the fossil fuel corporations, power companies, etc. now are?
[Just to start things off, I will note that I do support the continued use of nuclear power…and possibly even the building of new plants (although I don’t want to do it by subsidizing this mature industry, but instead by allowing it to happen if ending the direct and indirect subsidization of fossil fuels makes it economically viable to do so). This is a position that is at odds with many of the environmental groups.]
I haven’t a clue … give me a list of what the “most recalcitrant” of the fossil fuels companies oppose, and I’ll give you an answer. It seems to me to be an exercise in “guilt by association”, however … the question is what the right actions are, not who might agree with those actions.
As a start, however, I suspect that since their business is selling fuel, the companies would oppose reducing fuel use, which I support. I also support the nuclear option, not because I’m particularly enamored of it, but because I see no other immediate economic option for many countries.
Thanks,
w.
jshore, my pleasure as always
My apologies for the shorthand. Here’s the long version. People have proposed a theory that increasing CO2 will warm the surface and the troposphere in the long term (decades), with the troposphere warming more than the surface. The null hypothesis, of course, is that the theory is not true. Since none of the data that I am aware of shows the troposphere warming faster than the surface, we cannot reject the null hypothesis.
The monthly and annual variation of the surface and tropospheric temperatures have been known for years, with the tropospheric temperatures varying more than the surface. The question is not whether there is “new physics” OR bad data, that’s a false dichotomy.
The question is whether increased forcing from gradual CO2 increase is making any measurable difference. If it is, we would see the “amplification” at decadal levels. To date, there is no evidence that this is happening.
All of the atmospheric datasets, including the RSS dataset, show less warming in the troposphere than at the surface. The most likely explanation for this is urban heat islands (UHI) contaminating the surface temperature data. (There are also problems with the sea surface temperature (SST) dataset, but that’s a different question). I’m not clear what “paradox” you are referring to, or why it is no longer a paradox. There is a new NASA study of California temperatures, wherein they find that minimum temperatures in urban areas have risen as much as 5°C !! more than in rural areas, due to UHI.
In addition, the study says that half of the 1°C rise in California temperature is due to landuse changes, with another 10% due to changes in the PDO … doesn’t leave much room for CO2 … in fact, it means the climate sensitivity is well below the IPCC estimate for CO2 doubling … but I digress.
I suspect that China, India, and the other countries signed up because they had no obligations at all under the Kyoto Treaty, and they were unaware of the other costs associated with the Treaty which would fall on them. I can’t call Kyoto a “reasonable compromise”, however, since it costs billions and billions of dollars and will make no difference to the temperature.
w.
intention, it is good to hear from you.
Well, here is Exxon’s recent statement on climate change. To quote part of it:
So, in fact, they do very clearly come out in favor of “putting policies in place that start us on a path to reduce emissions,” “promoting energy efficiency,” and “deploying existing technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions”. And, while they don’t directly express support for regulations to mitigate emissions, they do seem to be starting to accept this reality and discussing the ways in which those regulations can be made better or worse.
Overall, I would say that they seem to be, if anything, somewhat further along the road toward accepting the need to mitigate our emissions than you are. And, no, I don’t mean to be applying guilt be association. However, I do believe that “reality checks” are a good thing. So, for example, when your scientific conclusions / opinions disagree with those of the IPCC, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and analogous bodies in other countries, etc., and your policy views informed by the science are so far to one extreme that one has to look at the most extreme fossil fuel companies to find policy views even roughly akin to yours, don’t you think that might be something to ponder?
I think in order to clarify some of the issues here, it is good to look at the synthesis and assessment report from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program on “Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere”. Let me give you a few quotes from the Executive Summary with the parts I think are most relevant bolded by me:
A few things to note here:
(1) That the models consistently predict the amplification as you go up in the troposphere is true only in the tropics and it is not a consequence specific to forcing due to CO2 but is in fact a prediction based on general principles and “largely independent of the type of forcing”.
(2) There is no fundamental inconsistency between the model tesults and the observations on a global scale. The only place that inconsistency still exists is in the tropics and, as they note, they favor the explanation that errors in the observation datasets are to blame although they admit that the question is still open.
(3) They conclude that in fact the “observed temperature change in space and time show clear evidence of human influences on the climate system (due to changes in greenhouse gases, aerosols, and stratospheric ozone)”.
jshore, thanks for the information from Exxon. Which of their policies do you disagree with?
w.
jshore, thank you for your quote from the UN IPCC. I have posted a number of citations showing that the IPCC is not a scientific organization, it is a political organization. They refuse to accept scientists such as Paul Reiter, who disagree with the “consensus”. They utilize unpublished papers. Scientists are chosen by the politicians of their respective governments, not on merit, and may have no expertise in the area they are reporting on. The IPCC allows politicians (plus a few carefully selected scientists) to write the “Summary for Policymakers”, and then they alter the other scientists’ conclusions to agree with the Summary. They allow authors like Michael Mann to review their own work and push it to the forefront, without checking to see if it contains errors. They utilize papers from authors who flatly refuse to reveal their data so their conclusions can be verified.
I can provide citations for everything in the paragraph above, and indeed, I have already provided citations for many of the points.
Now, if you want to get your science from UN politicians, that’s your choice. Me … I prefer to get mine from scientists, and I prefer scientists who follow the scientific norms, not scientists who hide their data, and definitely not scientists who are driven by their agenda to hype and exaggerate their results …
There are a number of scientists on both sides of the climate issue, so unfortunately, it is necessary to pick which ones to listen to. I pick by reading their studies, seeing if I can reproduce their results, checking their numbers, examining their mathematics, and giving them the “smell test”. Scientists like Jim Hansen, who has an obvious agenda and an infatuation with the media strong enough to give 1,400 interviews on company time while being paid to be a scientist on company time, get their results scrutinized very carefully.
For example, I examined the models’ hindcast surface temperature (SST) results in the Santer paper quite carefully. The majority of them were totally unlike the real world. Some went on wild temperature swings never seen in the century long sea surface temperature record. Others barely changed temperature from month to month, again in a way never seen. I compared the inter-quartile distance, the mean, the standard deviation, the outliers, the first and second derivatives, the Jarque-Bera test, the autocorrelation, the Hurst statistic, the skewness, and the kurtosis of the model hindcast surface temperatures. None of the model hindcasts were at all lifelike, none of them resembled the observational data. Most of them were not just a bit different from the observations, they were wildly different in everything but the trend … but then, they’re tuned to reproduce the trend, so that’s no surprise.
So you can put your trust in models like that, I know lots of people do, you can claim that those models are better than the troposphere temperature data despite being hugely wrong about the sea surface temperature data … but I’ve written too many computer programs to buy a bill of goods like that without kicking the tires and looking under the hood. That’s how I decide which scientists to believe … I get the data and do the math myself, I do the hard yards, I do the work the authors didn’t do, and at the end, I’m able to make an educated scientific decision. I don’t decide based on the scientist’s reputation, or who they work for, or whether other scientists agree with them, or whether they are a media darling or not. I go to the sources, get the data, and determine if they are right.
You seem to think that there are only two or three scientists who disagree with the “consensus” as represented by the IPCC, or that I am just making all this up or deciding based on my general philosophy, or something. In fact, there are many well respected scientists who think the consensus view is 100% incorrect in one or many respects. When I look at their work, when I examine their data and math and theories, I get to the end and oftentimes (but of course not always) I say, “Yes, that makes sense, that checks out, that holds together.”
So, let me introduce you to another unknown scientist whose work I have examined … Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu. You probably never heard of him because, unike Hansen, he’s not parading for the media once a week instead of doing the work he’s paid to do. He is the Director of the International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks. Unlike the politicians (and, unfortunately, far too many scientists) who unthinkingly buy into the politically driven "consensus’, he actually looks at the data, and thinks about it … and he finds that the UN IPCC conclusions are like the conclusions of politicians everywhere, and particularly UN politicians … they contain enough hot air to cause global warming on their own …
Finally, I note that the ultimate conclusion of the IPCC regarding the question of tropospheric warming is that “the issue is still open” … which is my conclusion about the climate question in general.
My best to you, thank you as always for both your contributions and your style,
w.
Hi, intention, and thanks for your post. I could defend the IPCC by, for example, pointing out that it is considered to be the definitive summary of the field by most scientists who publish in the refereed journals and cite it as representing such, and that its conclusions are generally accepted by the National Academy of Sciences, by the APS and AGU councils in their statements on climate change, and even by the governments of most nations, including the U.S.
However, I think it would suffice simply to note that the quotes I gave you were not from the IPCC. Rather they were from the first synthesis and assessment report of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, which is a program that was started under the current Bush Administration to provide such reports on various scientific issues related to climate change.
It seems strange that you say this and yet you linked approvingly, for example, to the paper of Essex, McKitrick, and Andresen “Does a global temperature exist?” which most scientists in the field will surely consider to be one of the most agenda-driven, over-hyped, and frankly silly papers to see the light of day in the peer review process.
jshore, thanks for the correction, that it was not from the IPCC but from the CCSP. I was reading too fast late at night.
The fact that it is from the CCSP does not help the credibility of the report, though, it actually makes it worse. The authors of the Santer paper were B. D. Santer, T. M. L. Wigley, C. Mears, F. J. Wentz, S. A. Klein, D. J. Seidel, K. E. Taylor, P. W. Thorne, M. F. Wehner, P. J. Gleckler, J. S. Boyle, W. D. Collins, K. W. Dixon, C. Doutriaux, M. Free, Q. Fu, J. E. Hansen, G. S. Jones, R. Ruedy, T. R. Karl, J. R. Lanzante, G. A. Meehl, V. Ramaswamy, G. Russell, and G. A. Schmidt. Of those authors, no less than ten were on the CCSP Committee, and made up more than half of the scientists involved. Santer was the Convening Lead Author of the section on “How well can the observed vertical temperature changes be reconciled with our understanding of the causes of these temperature changes?”. Eight out of the sixteen authors of that chapter were co-authors of the Santer paper.
In addition, the lead author of Chapter Four, “What is our understanding of the contribution made by observational or methodological uncertainties to the previously reported vertical differences in temperature trends?”, was Santer’s co-author Mears. Carl Mears, for those who don’t recognize the name, is one of the originators of the RSS dataset which was cited approvingly by the Santer paper. RSS is a private company, so Mears clearly is not a neutral observer.
Now they all may be fine folks, but having them reviewing their own work is a blatant conflict of interest that would not be allowed in any court and is expressly forbidden in many branches of government. This, in fact, is a perfect example of why I turn over the rocks and I do my own research. Anyone reading that the CCSP had agreed with the Santer paper would be justified in believing that the science had been investigated dispassionately and that the “consensus” was clear. Instead, Ben Santer and Russel Mears and a bunch of their co-authors review their own paper, and surprise surprise, they declare it to be totally reasonable.
As a result, people who aren’t paying attention to the details approvingly cite the report as though it were an independent review of Santer’s conclusions … you can see why I don’t believe the “consensus” when this kind of thing is going on.
There’s more problems with the CCSP report, which are discussed here.
jshore, I like and respect you, but you’ve gotta develop some healthy skepticism, you’re far too trusting. Mears is running a business selling remote sensing results. Santer is the lead author of the paper in question. Having them review their own work is a trap for fools …
w.
intention: The whole point of these synthesis and assessment reports is to get together the people who have done the major work in the field and come out with a document describing where things stand. Did you notice that while Mears and Wentz of RSS both participated, so did both of the UAH members, John Christy and Roy Spencer?
So, let’s see, we can’t trust the IPCC, the NAS, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (here is more about the CCSP), … And, it goes without saying that we can’t trust the environmental groups! Pretty soon, the only people who will be left who we can trust are the ones you cite, such as the Canadian economist who is a fellow at the Fraser Institute or the Idso clan at the Western-Fuels-Association- and Exxon-funded “Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change”!
Well, to be honest, I would say that I find little to disagree with in this admittedly-vague statement of their views. In fact, my point in quoting it was my note that it would seem on the basis of that statement that you are now farther out of “the mainstream” than Exxon is.
However, as I said, the statement from Exxon is pretty vague…and, we know that in practice, they have been major funders of organizations such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute whose goal seems to be to spread misinformation and such on the subject. Time will tell if they are turning over a new leaf or not.
I agree with you, that Exxon’s statement is vague. I can’t find much to disagree with in it either, because it doesn’t really say anything. They don’t recommend any particular action, and they say that any action must be assessed on “likely effectiveness, scale and cost, as well as their implications for economic growth and quality of life.” Hard to disagree with that. I’ve said before that if there were an effective, cost-effective way to cut CO2 without shrinking economic growth (particularly for the poor), I’d be in favor of it. I just haven’t heard that plan yet.
Your point in asking the question was? …
w.
jshore, regarding the CCSP: Evidently you think that it was just chance that Mears and Santer were Chief Coordinating Authors, and that it means nothing that a majority of the participants were co-authors of the paper we are discussing.
I don’t get it. If you said “intention, how do I know your work is correct” and I said “My friends and I investigated it, and we concluded it was right”, you’d bust me bigtime for reviewing my own work, and rightly so. It’s a conflict of interest.
But when Santer and his co-authors, not just friends but co-authors, review their own work and hey, guess what, find that it is totally correct and believable, you nod your head and say “Yep, that proves it’s correct” … do you really not understand the idea of “conflict of interest”?
If Spencer and Christy and eight of their co-authors wrote a glowing review of their own work, would you believe it, even if Mears and Santer got a vote on the “consensus”? Do you think that there might be a slight chance that Mears and Santer would get outvoted on that question? That’s why “minority reports” are so valuable, because they avoid the illusion that everyone agrees with the majority. Science is not a democracy where we vote on what is true. But Santer and Mears and eight of their co-authors outvoted Christy and Spencer, and you think that means something …
The courts let the judges write a dissent if they disagree with the majority. Me, I don’t trust “consensus reports” that don’t allow dissenting opinions to be published as a minority report. That’s not science, that’s forced “consensus”, and it has no scientific value.
Finally, I note with some disgust that once again you have descended into ad hominem attacks, this time on the Idsos. Why is it that if someone gets funded by Exxon, they are suddenly shills for the fuel industry and can’t be trusted, while someone who is funded by Greenpeace is a noble scientist, and scientists like Mears and Wentz (who have a strong business interest in the outcome) are not questioned regarding their objectivity?
Did you read the scientific studies that the Idsos reference? What they are doing is providing a list of scientific studies.
jshore, I give up. I can’t do this any more. In response to my pointing you to a long list of scientific papers that disagree with you regarding the Medieval Warm Period, you don’t say a word about the studies, you evidently can’t be bothered with a trivial thing like the science, you don’t say a further word about the Medieval Warm Period.
Instead, you attack the people who made the list of the studies … ignore the science, and attack the list makers, is this your idea of a joke? If so, I don’t get it. I though that shooting the messenger who brings the bad news had gone out of fashion, but I see I was wrong.
That’s not science, that’s not fighting ignorance, that’s not even a discussion. I give you a list of scientific studies that shows your ideas are mistaken, and you attack, not the science, but the folks that made the list …
I give up. If you want to start another thread and actually discuss the science, fine, but since you seem to want to attack the list makers and ignore the scientific papers on the list, this thread is of no further interest to me. I care about facts, and observations, and theories, and mathmatics. I have no time for ad hominem arguments, they are the pathetic last resort of losers; I don’t waste time complaining about who puts together a list of scientific studies, I read the studies instead; I am totally uninterested in who funds which researcher, I care about the work that the researcher produces; I am not impressed by “consensus”; and your repeated focus on these subjects, instead of answering my requests for scientific information or discussing the scientific issues, has finally reached my breaking point.
So, when you want to actually discuss the science instead of attacking the scientists and repeating “the consensus must be right”, let me know. Until then, I wish you the best.
w.
You seem to have strong opinions on how the process actually worked (e.g., that there was voting and that there was no opportunity to write a minority report…or a minority section to the report). How do you know these things?
intention: To be honest, I find it strange that you are so sensitive on this subject of noting possible biases of sources, calling it an “ad hominem attack”. How are all of your statements above concerning the CCSP report and the IPCC reports any different? The only real difference that I can see is that you are attempting to claim bias (and impugning the integrity) of sources that have been set up in ways to try to insure that bias is minimized and that the resulting product represents the views of the scientific community active in the field…And, indeed, these products seem to have been accepted as authoritative sources by most of the scientists and by most of the policymakers.
I, by contrast, am claiming that a source is biased because…well, it is very clearly biased. The Idso clan’s organization was not set up with any attempt to be objective and unbiased…It was set up to further an agenda and one that it is apparently getting considerable funding from interested parties to further. And, it has zero credibility within the scientific community as far as I can tell. It makes sense that if they make up a list of sources that they discuss on a particular subject, like the Medieval Warm Period, both their source list and their discussion are not going to be an unbiased representation of the literature.
I haven’t given you links to discussions of the science on the Greenpeace website or the NRDC website. If I did, I highly doubt that your response would be anything other than what your response has been when I have cited authoritative sources like the IPCC and the U.S. Climate Change Science Program…In fact, you would likely be even more exercised about these other sources.
You seem to have a double standard here. You want to be able to object to any source as biased, no matter how authoritative it is, and thereby dismiss it. However, you want me to consider and respond intelligently to any source that you present, no matter how clear it is that the source has a strong agenda and zero credibility within the scientific community! Quite honestly, I don’t have the time to do that.
I have enjoyed our conversation and wish you all the best.
By the way, intention, I glanced at your link to articles about the Medieval Warm Period a little more and I’ll give you one more substantive comment: It seems that a lot of the papers that they discuss don’t really support the conclusion that the MWP was warmer than today. For example, they cite and discuss several papers of Esper et al. and a paper of Moberg et al.; however, the fact is, as the plots here show, neither of these folk’s reconstructions supports the idea that the MWP is warmer than current temperatures…in fact both tend to support (perhaps with some caveats about error bars) the idea that it was less warm.
It is interesting because if you read what they write at the CO2science site, they seem to play it more or less straight in that I don’t see them blatantly claiming for example that these papers do directly say that the MWP is warmer…But then when they discuss what they take away from these papers, i.e., their own interpretation, they go a fair bit further and say that this is what they think is true…often with some statement like that they don’t believe the sharp rise in the instrumental temperature record over the past 30 years because of urban heat island effects. (They don’t note that even the UAH satellite record now shows a warming that is basically within error bars of the instrumental record since 1979.)
So, they are basically saying, “If we take these papers and cabal them together with some ideas that we have (which are not, as near as I can find, from the peer-reviewed literature…or at best from the fringes), then we arrive at the conclusion that the MWP was warmer than the present even though these papers themselves don’t conclude that.”
By the way, reflecting on it for a moment, I think that their approach bears a resemblance to your own approach in regards to the NAS report on the temperature reconstructions. I.e., I felt like what you did was to pick a few statements made throughout the body of the report and combine them together with your own ideas or interpretation to arrive at conclusions that the NAS panel never arrived at…and which, in fact, sometimes seem to contradict the conclusions that the panel did arrive at.
That’s certainly true. However, a slowing global economy isn’t by any means the only thing that kills poor people. Environmental catastrophes such as massive droughts, flooding, crop failure, and so on also kill poor people in a myriad of ways. (This is one of the reasons policy-makers have been spending so much time trying to hash out workable compromises between economic growth and emissions reductions, in the hopes of squeaking past both Scylla and Charybdis.)
If rising anthropogenic greenhouse-gas concentrations do turn out to have a severe and increasing impact on global climate, as currently predicted, we won’t have done poor people any favors in the long run by refusing to restrict greenhouse-gas emissions for fear of slowing the global economy. Even investing a little more money in improved disaster relief strategies, as you recommend, won’t be enough to hedge our bet if we end up with tens or hundreds of millions of environmental refugees worldwide.
Moreover, if the problem is real and severe as predicted, then the longer we wait to take action on reducing emissions, the more drastic measures we will have to take when we finally do decide to act. (This is what some environmental advocates call the “braking speed principle”: if you’re driving along and have to stop to avoid hitting an obstacle, it’s a lot better for both your car and your safety if you start braking gradually while you’re still far away from the obstacle, rather than proceeding at full speed and suddenly jamming on the brakes when you’re almost on top of it.)
If it turns out that, say, 600 ppm is a dangerously high concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, it would be much easier to phase in environmental measures for stabilizing CO2 concentrations if we started now at our current CO2 level of about 380 ppm. If we didn’t start until we got to 500 or 520 ppm, we’d have to impose much more draconian restrictions to reduce emissions much more severely, which would have a much more devastating economic impact.
So, paradoxically, a policy of inaction on emissions reductions out of concern for the economic well-being of poor people could actually be setting poor people up for the worst of both worlds. Not only would they have to suffer the bulk of the environmental disasters that high-CO2 climate change would cause, but on top of that they’d be hit with a massive global economic slowdown when we finally realized we had to get serious about drastically cutting emissions in a comparatively short time. And that economic slowdown would decrease the ability of the developed nations simultaneously to fund large-scale disaster relief. So it would be a triple-whammy situation for the poor populations.