Archives for August 2007

Newsweek Magazine’s cover story of August 6, 2007 entitled, “The Truth About Denial” contains very little that could actually be considered balanced, objective or fair by journalistic standards.

The one-sided editorial, masquerading as a “news article,” was written by Sharon Begley with Eve Conant, Sam Stein and Eleanor Clift and Matthew Philips and purports to examine the “well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change.”

The only problem is — Newsweek knew better. Reporter Eve Conant, who interviewed Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Ranking Member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, was given all the latest data proving conclusively that it is the proponents of man-made global warming fears that enjoy a monumental funding advantage over the skeptics. (A whopping $50 BILLION to a paltry $19 MILLION for skeptics – Yes, that is BILLION to MILLION)

This week’s “news article” in Newsweek follows the Magazine’s October 23, 2006 article which admitted the error of their ways in the 1970’s when they predicted dire global cooling.

First, let’s take a look at Newsweek’s use of the word “denier” when describing a scientist who views with skepticism the unproven computer models predicting future climate doom. The use of this blatant Holocaust terminology has drawn the ire of Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. “The phrase ‘climate change denier’ is meant to be evocative of the phrase ‘holocaust denier,’” Pielke, Jr. wrote on October 9, 2006.

“Let’s be blunt. This allusion is an affront to those who suffered and died in the Holocaust. This allusion has no place in the discourse on climate change. I say this as someone fully convinced of a significant human role in the behavior of the climate system,” Pielke, Jr. explained.

Newsweek reporter Eve Conant was given the documentation showing that proponents of man-made global warming have been funded to the tune of $50 BILLION in the last decade or so, while skeptics have received a paltry $19 MILLION by comparison.

Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter, who has testified before the Senate EPW committee, explains how much money has been spent researching and promoting climate fears.

“In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure of more than $US50 billion on research into global warming since 1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a dangerous one.”
For a breakdown of how much money flows to promoters of climate fear, see a Janaury 17, 2007 EPW blog post:
“The [climate] alarmists also enjoy a huge financial advantage over the skeptics with numerous foundations funding climate research, University research money and the United Nations endless promotion of the cause. Just how much money do the climate alarmists have at their disposal? There was a $3 billion donation to the global warming cause from Virgin Air’s Richard Branson alone.

The well-heeled environmental lobbying groups have massive operating budgets compared to groups that express global warming skepticism. The Sierra Club Foundation 2004 budget was $91 million and the Natural Resources Defense Council had a $57 million budget for the same year. Compare that to the often media derided Competitive Enterprise Institute’s small $3.6 million annual budget. In addition, if a climate skeptic receives any money from industry, the media immediately labels them and attempts to discredit their work. The same media completely ignore the money flow from the environmental lobby to climate alarmists like James Hansen and Michael Oppenheimer. (ie. Hansen received $250,000 from the Heinz Foundation and Oppenheimer is a paid partisan of Environmental Defense Fund)

The alarmists have all of these advantages, yet they still feel the need to resort to desperation tactics to silence the skeptics. Could it be that the alarmists realize that the American public is increasingly rejecting their proposition that the family SUV is destroying the earth and rejecting their shrill calls for “action” to combat their computer model predictions of a ‘climate emergency?'”

As Senator Inhofe further explained in a September 25, 2006 Senate floor speech: “The fact remains that political campaign funding by environmental groups to promote climate and environmental alarmism dwarfs spending by the fossil fuel industry by a three-to-one ratio. Environmental special interests, through their 527s, spent over $19 million compared to the $7 million that Oil and Gas spent through PACs in the 2004 election cycle.”

Now contrast all of the above with how much money the “well funded” skeptics allegedly receive.

The most repeated accusation is that organizations skeptical of man-made climate fears have received $19 Million from an oil corporation over the past two decades. This was the subject of a letter by two U.S. Senators in 2006 (See Senators letter of October 30, 2006 noting the $19 Million from Exxon-Mobile to groups skeptical of man-made global warming).

To put this $19 Million over two decades into perspective, consider: One 2007 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) grant of $20 million to study how “farm odors” contribute to global warming exceeded all of the money that skeptics reportedly received in the past two decades. To repeat: One USDA grant to study the role of “farm odors” in global warming exceeded almost ALL the money skeptics have been accused of receiving over the past two decades. (Excerpt from article: “The United States Department of Agriculture has released reports stating that when you smell cow manure, you’re also smelling greenhouse gas emissions.”

As erroneous and embarrassingly one-sided as Newsweek’s article is, the magazine sunk deeper into journalistic irrelevance when it noted that skeptical Climatologist Patrick Michaels had reportedly received industry funding without revealing to readers the full funding picture. The magazine article mentions NASA’s James Hansen as some sort of example of a scientist untainted by funding issues. But what Newsweek was derelict in reporting is that Hansen had received a $250,000 award from the Heinz Foundation run by Senator John Kerry’s wife Teresa in 2001 and then subsequently endorsed Kerry for President in 2004.

Finally, Newsweek’s editorial rant attempts to make it appear as though the science is getting stronger in somehow proving mankind is driving a climate catastrophe. There are, however, major problem with that assertion.
Scientists are speaking up around the globe to denounce Gore, the UN and the media driven “consensus” on global warming. Just recently, an EPW report detailed a sampling of scientists who were once believers in man-made global warming and who now are skeptical. [See May 15, 2007 report: Climate Momentum Shifting: Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming – Now Skeptics: Growing Number of Scientists Convert to Skeptics After Reviewing New Research.]

Mathematician & engineer Dr. David Evans, who did carbon accounting for the Australian government, detailed how he left the global warming funding “gravy train” and became a skeptic. “By the late 1990’s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too. I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn’t believe carbon emissions caused global warming,” Evans explained. “But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence outlined above fell away or reversed,” Evans wrote. “The pre-2000 ice core data was the central evidence for believing that atmospheric carbon caused temperature increases. The new ice core data shows that past warmings were *not* initially caused by rises in atmospheric carbon, and says nothing about the strength of any amplification. This piece of evidence casts reasonable doubt that atmospheric carbon had any role in past warmings, while still allowing the possibility that it had a supporting role,” he added.

In addition, just last week, three new scientific studies further strengthened the skeptics’ views on climate change. Further, a recent analysis of peer-reviewed literature thoroughly debunks any fears of Greenland melting and a frightening sea level rise. [See July 0, 2007 – Latest Scientific Studies Refute Fears of Greenland Melt.]

The question remains: Is Newsweek even a news outlet worth taking the time to respond to in posts like this? Does Newsweek, a quirky alternative news outlet, even have an impact on public policy anymore?

Journalism students across the world can read this week’s cover story to learn how reporting should not be done. Hopefully, that will be Newsweek’s legacy — serving as a shining example of the failure of modern journalism to adhere to balance, objectivity and fairness. Anyone who fails to see this inconvenient truth is truly (to borrow Newsweek’s vernacular) a “denier.”

Even the alarmist UN has cut sea level rise estimates in dramatically since 2001 and has reduced man’s estimated impact on the climate by 25%. Meanwhile a separate UN report found that cow emissions are more damaging to the planet than all of the CO2 emissions from cars and trucks.

The New York Times is now debunking aspects of climate alarmism. An April 23, 2006 article in the New York Times by Andrew Revkin stated: “few scientists agree with the idea that the recent spate of potent hurricanes, European heat waves, African drought and other weather extremes are, in essence, our fault (a result of manmade emissions.) There is more than enough natural variability in nature to mask a direct connection, [scientists] say.”

The New York Times is essentially conceding that no recent weather events are outside of natural climate variability. So all the climate doomsayers have to back up their claims of climate fears are unproven computer models of the future. Of course, you can’t prove a prediction of the climate in 2100 wrong today. It’s simply not possible.

Recently, a top UN scientist publicly conceded that climate computer model predictions are not so reliable after all. Dr. Jim Renwick, a lead author of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report, admitted to the New Zealand Herald in June 2007, “Half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don’t expect to do terrifically well.”

A leading scientific skeptic of global warming fears, Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, former CEO of the Netherlands’ Royal National Meteorological Institute, took the critique of climate models that predict future doom a step further. Tennekes wrote on February 28, 2007, “I am of the opinion that most scientists engaged in the design, development, and tuning of climate modes are in fact software engineers. They are unlicensed, hence unqualified to sell their products to society.”

Ivy League geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack of the University of Pennsylvania noted “for most of Earth’s history, the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. It has rarely been cooler,” Giegengack said according to a February 2007 article in Philadelphia Magazine. (LINK) The article continued, “[Giegengack] says carbon dioxide doesn’t control global temperature, and certainly not in a direct linear way.”

Climatologist Dr. Timothy Ball explained that one of the reasons climate models fail is because they overestimate the warming effect of CO2 in the atmosphere. Ball described how CO2 stabilizes in the atmosphere and its warming impact diminishes. “Even if CO2 concentration doubles or triples, the effect on temperature would be minimal. The relationship between temperature and CO2 is like painting a window black to block sunlight. The first coat blocks most of the light. Second and third coats reduce very little more. Current CO2 levels are like the first coat of black paint,” Ball explained in a June 6, 2007 article in Canada Free Press.

New data is revealing what may perhaps be the ultimate inconvenient truth for climate doomsayers: Global warming stopped in 1998.

Dr. Nigel Calder, co-author with physicist Henrik Svensmark of the 2007 book “The Chilling Stars: A New Theory on Climate Change,” explained in July 2007: “In reality, global temperatures have stopped rising. Data for both the surface and the lower air show no warming since 1999. That makes no sense by the hypothesis of global warming driven mainly by CO2, because the amount of CO2 in the air has gone on increasing. But the fact that the Sun is beginning to neglect its climatic duty – of battling away the cosmic rays that come from ‘the chilling stars’ – fits beautifully with this apparent end of global warming.”

Perhaps the conversion of many former scientists from believers in man-made global warming to skeptics and the new peer-reviewed research is why so many proponents of a climatic doom have resorted to threats and intimidation in attempting to silence skeptics. (See: EPA to Probe E-mail Threatening to ‘Destroy’ Career of Climate Skeptic.)

Links to some of the articles mentioned in this blog post can be found in the original blog post by Marc Morano:
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=38d98c0a-802a-23ad-48ac-d9f7facb61a7. It is reproduced here with permission from the author.

Readers may already have seen the ABC News story ‘Big brown Asian cloud blamed for glacial melting.’ This story is based on a new paper published in the weekly journal Nature, also featured in the News and Views section.

The paper, which looks at the effect of the so-called Asian brown clouds (the aerosols formed by the burning of wood and fossil fuels), is published by a group of scientists from the University of California San Diego and the Nasa Langley Research Center. Up to now, it has been recognised that aerosols can cool the Earth’s surface by scattering the Sun’s rays (global dimming), which is the explanation often used in order to try and explain the global cooling during the 1940’s to the 1970’s, despite rising levels of atmospheric CO2. Researchers now say that they also have a significant warming effect on the atmosphere, dependent on the altitude.

According to the BBC:

“We found that atmospheric brown clouds enhanced lower atmospheric solar heating by about 50%. “[The pollution] contributes as much as the recent increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gases to regional lower atmospheric warming trends,’ they suggested. ‘We propose that the combined warming trend of 0.25 Kelvin per decade may be sufficient to account for the observed retreat of the Himalayan glaciers.”

Also:

“The scientists said there remained a degree of uncertainty because, until now, estimates had largely been derived from computer models.”

Another problem for computer models on which the IPCC base there certainty about climate change.

This new paper adds to the concerns about the reported UK plan of burning more home grown wood in order to help reduce CO2 emissions.

There is also a concern that the Asian Brown Clouds are having a significant effect on the patterns of Australian rainfall via a climate ‘teleconnection.’

Professor Ramanathan concludes, “a huge proportion of the cloud comes from people burning wood and dung to cook their food, so if enough people converted to cleaner fuels, the cloud would quickly dissipate.”

Paul Biggs

‘Recent oppositely directed trends in solar climate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature’

There’s nothing really new in this paper, which is a review partly written in response to the controversial Wag TV documentary ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle.’ Not good news from the point of view of being objective, and I doubt that it’s a coincidence that the paper has found it’s way into the same journal that published Svensmark’s cosmic ray-cloud experiment. The Royal Society are very excited too: ‘Global warming: A Proceedings A paper shows that the Sun is not a factor in recent climate change!’

The Abstract states:

“There is considerable evidence for solar influence on the Earth’s pre-industrial climate and the Sun may well have been a factor in post-industrial climate change in the first half of the last century. Here we show that over the past 20 years, all the trends in the Sun that could have had an influence on the Earth’s climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures.”

An extract from the paper says:

“…it is possible that the decline seen since 1985 marks the beginning of the end of the recent grand maximum in solar activity and the cosmogenic isotope record suggests that even if the present decline is interrupted in the near future, mean values will decline over the next century. This would reduce the solar forcing of climate, but to what extent this might counteract the effect of anthropogenic warming, if at all, is certainly not yet known.”

The paper concludes:

“There are many interesting palaeoclimate studies that suggest that solar variability had an influence on pre-industrial climate. There are also some detection–attribution studies using global climate models that suggest there was a detectable influence of solar variability in the first half of the twentieth century and that the solar radiative forcing variations were amplified by some mechanism that is, as yet, unknown. However, these findings are not relevant to any debates about modern climate change. Our results show that the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability, whichever of the mechanisms is invoked and no matter how much the solar variation is amplified.”

L&F are therefore supportive of a past and relatively recent solar influence on climate, with an ‘unknown’ amplification mechanism. Furthermore, they acknowledge that the ‘grand maximum’ of solar activity seems to be coming to an end, which raises the possibility of global cooling, long predicted by the likes of Fairbridge and Shirley (1987).

Let’s take a look at some of the contentious points relating to L&F and TGGWS :

1. Solar cycle length v temperature

The use of the 1991 Friis-Christensen and Lassen graph of solar cycle length plotted against mean surface temperature attracted much criticism because the correlation diverged after the paper was published. The graph was lifted directly from F-C & L in order to demonstrate a solar link to climate.

The sunspot cycle length data finishes after 1980 – at least 1985 – the graph just looks like it finished in 1980 because the dots are plotted in the centre of the cycle.

Additionally, cosmic ray data goes back to the 1950’s, so Lockwood is the one ignoring data that doesn’t suit him by starting the graphs at 1975 which we know was a turning point in temperature.

2. Smoothing and sunspot cycle length

When Lockwood smoothes his graph to expose the long-term trends, he basically averages the readings over the length of one sunspot cycle. Like F-C & L, he plots the result in the MIDDLE of the data range. So each point on his graph is a combination of the previous 5 years’ data with the 5 years in the FUTURE. This is the same as the FC& L graph, but Lockwood uses it to make it look like the solar activity started to fall away long before it actually did.

3. The data itself

There are several different sets of data used:

a. Total solar irradiance TSI – amount of energy arriving from sun – correlated with sunspot cycle.

(There has been some debate about the preference for Frohlich’s own PMOD data set over the ACRIM data, and the adjustment to the Lean TSI reconstruction data 2 months before the publication of the L & F paper, but I don’t intend to dwell on that here!)

b. Number of sunspots observed – averaged over a month

c Length of sunspot cycle (varies 9-11.5 years)

d Direct measurements of cosmic rays – cosmic rays are lower when sunspots higher because the solar magnetic field blocks them.

(N.B. The Berrylium10 proxy for cosmic ray flux is formed by 1 GeV cosmic rays, whereas it is 10 GeV cosmic rays that are of interest and responsible for atmospheric ionisation. Ion chambers are sensitive to very high cosmic ray energies of 10’s of GeV.)

Comparing Lockwood’s paper with Lassen’s, the main difference is that Lassen’s stops in the late 1980s whereas Lockwood’s includes one more sunspot cycle peaking in 2001.

The sunspot cycle peaks grow higher through the 1970, 1980 and 1990 peaks, which are all very large in the context of the last 150 years, and 2001 is considerably lower.

Equally, the minima in cosmic ray flux (measured at the edge of space by Lockwood) get deeper up to 1990, but the 2001 one is shallower again – about the same as 1980.

So any divergence between the solar record and the temperature record only begins in the last ten years or so, even failing to allow for the “middle of cycle plot” – not in the last 20 like Lockwood says.

L & F says that “Earth’s surface air temperature does not respond to the (11 year) solar cycle…..(due to)…long thermal time constants associated with……the oceans”

In other words, 10 years is far too short a time to show any effect from long-term solar changes. Interestingly, the temperature graph seems to level off around 2003 – as you would expect if there were a lag.

However, a new GRL paper by Camp and Tung, published 18th July 2007, claims that: “By projecting surface temperature data (1959–2004) onto the spatial structure obtained objectively from the composite mean difference between solar max and solar min years, we obtain a global warming signal of almost 0.2°K attributable to the 11-year solar cycle. The statistical significance of such a globally coherent solar response at the surface is established for the first time.”

Summary:

The ‘science’ is far from ‘settled.’

Solar activity is higher than it has been for at least 1000 years.

IPCC AR4 rates the ‘level of scientific understanding’ of ‘solar irradiance’ as ‘low,’ other solar factors have a LOSU of ‘very low.’ The emphasis is always on irradiance rather than eruptivity, which I believe is much more important.

Small solar changes seem to have a much larger influence on climate than expected, suggesting an unknown amplification mechanism.

Global mean surface temperatures have levelled off since the 1998 El Nino, and there has been little or no ocean warming for the past 5 years according to the ARGO network.

Solar cycle length, sunspots, irradiance, are general indicators of solar activity. Nir Shaviv sees no reason why the length of the solar cycle should be related to solar activity – it could be a coincidence, and it is largely a phenomenon of the Northern Hemisphere. That said, the correlation between solar cycle length and a long mean surface temperature series has also been observed at Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland.

There is also an interesting paper from 2005, by Hengyi Weng entitled ‘The influence of the 11 yr solar cycle on the interannual-centennial climate variability.’ There is also a summary here entitled ‘Influence of the 11-year solar cycle more significant than previously thought.’

The full paper is here:

http://tinyurl.com/94dtf

Any hypothesis involving correlations between 2 variables out of many is likely to diverge at some point. The attempted 20th century correlation of CO2 and temperature diverged from the 1940’s to 1970’s, yet the hypothesis wasn’t abandoned. Instead cooling due to sulphate aerosols was touted as an explanation. A cue for another blog post perhaps!

Paul Biggs