Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Climate & Climate Change

Climate Change Conference, New York – Day 2, In Review

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The 500-strong contingent of skeptics currently in New York for The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change were up early to hear Robert Balling and Ross McKitrick speak at breakfast.

A key message from the address by Professor Balling was that there are a lot of non-greenhouse signals that can impact climate including sulphates, dust, ozone, biomass burning and land use change. Given even the IPCC agrees that we have a poor understanding of the impact of these different variables on climate – how can the debate be over? The Professor concluded with the Thomas Huxley quote, “Skepticism is the highest of duties, blind faith the one unpardonable sin”.

Ross McKitrick gave a very different type of address getting into the detail of the recent temperature record – how it is measured and how there is a large population effect on the US temperature data which accounts for about half the observed warming since 1980. Dr McKitrick went into the detail of the statistic analysis and his arguments with the IPCC and scientists at Realclimate.

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Ross McKitrick speaking to the title ‘Quantifying the Influence of Anthropogenic Surface Processes on Gridded Global Climate Data’, 7am Breakfast Session

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Bob Carter amongst the crowd who woke early to hear Dr McKitrick

Following the breakfast we had a choice of 6 different tracks on either paleoclimatology, climatology, impacts, economics, politics or movies. I spent most of the day in the ‘impacts’ track and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

I even got to meet polar bear expert Mitch Taylor. He followed a presentation by entomologist Paul Reiter which emphasised malaria is not historically a tropical disease with outbreaks in the England, Sweden and Finland before the advent of DDT. Dr Reiter also made the point that Al Gore was completely wrong in his documentary to suggest that Nairobi did not have a history of malaria outbreaks – in fact here were five major epidemics to the 1950s.

Of course the best photographs for the day were from Mitch Taylor who told us about his field work in the Arctic counting polar bears – or more correctly field sampling using mark-recapture techniques. Dr Taylor said that these demographic studies indicated at least two subpopulations of polar bears in the Artic had a constant population size, that two were increasing in number and that two were in decline – one of these from over hunting and the Churchill subpopulation from climate change in particular a reduction in the amount of sea ice. Accepting the climate models Dr Taylor indicated that bear numbers could decline across the Artic from present numbers of about 24,500 to around 17,000 over the next 100 years.

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Jennifer Marohasy and Mitch Taylor, Marriott Hotel, March 3, 2008 International Climate Change Conference

My colleague Alan Moran told me that the best speakers of the day were Tim Ball and Fred Singer at lunch, but still slightly jet lagged and still recovering from a breakfast of scrambled egg, hash-browns, spinach, bacon, fried tomato and a bit more I decided to sleep through lunch. I also missed Dr Moran’s presentation as it clashed with Dr Taylor’s.

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Denis Avery giving a television interview.

I did wake up in time to hear William Briggs who gave a fascinating insight into the worldwide hurricane data concluding there is no discernable increase in either number or intensity. This conclusions was supported by Stan Goldenberg from NOAA who emphasised the importance of understanding how hurricane data has been collected historically in his presentation which included photographs taken inside the eye of hurricanes from flights within NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters – WP-3D Turbo Prop Aircraft.

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Leon Ashby, South Australian landholder and director of the Australian Environment Foundation, films conference proceedings.

I sat in on one of the economics sessions and the talk by Michael Economides, University of Houston, focused on our past, present and likely future dependence on oil and gas explaining that these hydrocarbons account for 87 percent of the world’s energy needs and suggesting that there was no alternative to hydrocarbon energy in the immediate future with wind and solar only likely to ever meet half of 1 percent of our energy needs over the next century. This presentation, in which the professor explained he considered AGW “unadulterated nonsense” contrasted sharply with the presentation from Benny Peiser. Dr Peiser spoke at the last session for the day in the impacts track asking the question “What if Al Gore is right?” He put it to the audience that the current response from the world’s skeptics was not reassuring to the public or politicians and that given our “cultural baggage” people had reason to fear climate change. Dr Peiser, like the other speaker in this session, Dr Stan Goldberg from NOAA, suggested regardless of the cause of climate change we should prepare for it.

Dr Peiser acknowledged government across the world had no real solution to rising emission levels but that solutions would come through geoengineering. In contrast to Professor Economides, Dr Peiser suggested the world might one day be run on solar energy and that within a 100 or so years we would know how to make it rain.

With the conference over for the day, my colleague Alan Moran and I decided on a brisk walk through Central Park before a wine and meal at Morrell’s in Rockefellar Plaza.

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A racoon in Central Park. March 3, 2008

Another great day thanks to conference organisers The Heartland Institute.

More tomorrow.

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And you can read about yesterday here: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/002809.html

Economic Implications of Climate Change Measures: Alan Moran

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A matter that has received less attention than it should is what are the energy consumption and cost implications of the measures proposed to abate carbon dioxide and what would be the economic consequences of success in this.

There are many emission abatement goals that have been floated. Perhaps the two most conservative are an emission stabilisation goal and a 20 per cent reduction goal. In Australia and England the respective Garnaut and Stern reports have envisaged much deeper cuts than these.

The first chart show business-as-usual – with emissions in 2030 projected forward at the 1990-2004 rates of 1.3 per cent for the OECD and 5.7 per cent for the developing countries; the former Soviet bloc is held constant. This shows emissions at an aggregate 43 billion tonnes, almost 50 per cent higher than 2004.

Chart 1

Alan Chart 1.jpg

Even though emissions in the developing world probably overtook those of the OECD in 2007, their per capita emissions were very much lower 2.4 tonnes compared with 11.5 tonnes (with the former CPEs at 7.9 tonnes). Notwithstanding the fast growth of the developing country emissions in business-as-usual 2030 they remain little more than a quarter of those of the OECD.

If now we were to call for a 20 per cent reduction on 2004 levels and apportion that equally in per capita terms, the outcome is a standard 2.5 tonnes per capita. For the OECD countries this is a dramatic reduction. The OECD’s aggregate 16 billion tonnes under BaU (12 tonnes per capita) becomes 3.3 billion tonnes. Developing countries, though above their 2004 levels are well below their BAU on a per capita basis, as are the former soviet bloc countries. Chart 2 illustrates this.

Chart 2

Alan Chart 2.jpg

The most recent Australian report on the emission control measures, by Professor Garnaut, acknowledges that the easy gains in emission reductions have been made, especially with the dismantling of the command economies of the Soviet bloc and China. Those countries’ CO2 intensities have now stopped falling, in fact are rising. Indeed, China has already surpassed the magic 4 tonnes per capita which would be the level required for stabilisation of emissions and has only pulled a fifth of its population out of poverty.

Mr Garnaut suggests that Indonesia and PNG could become vast sinks to offset other countries’ emission levels. This is a pipe dream. It may allow for a windfall gain for the two economies but there are not enough trees for this to offer anything but a pinprick.

Ominously, Garnaut hints strongly about the necessity of trade pressures on developing countries to reinforce their sense of public spirit. That in itself would destroy the world trading regime and retard all countries’ living standards. And, the process is already underway with the EU negotiations of bilateral “Free Trade Agreements” with developing countries. As Rasheed Sally points out, “The EU is also increasingly interested in linking trade policy to climate change. New FTAs will likely contain trade-and-sustainable-development chapters, which could house climate-change provisions in the future.”

If targets for reduced carbon dioxide emissions could be met by replacing baseload power stations with nuclear power, the cost increases for most countries would be relatively small. For countries like Australia, where coal is cheap and massively abundant, a premium on existing prices of perhaps 30-40 per cent would be expected. Many European countries would face no cost increases since nuclear is already the cheapest option.

However, several of these countries have already gone a good way to a nuclear power based electricity industry. And this illustrates the difficulties in making the required level of cuts. Even France with over 70 per cent nuclear emits 6 tonnes per capita. France is therefore way above the magical 2.5 tonnes of CO2 per capita and has already used up its scope to make the cuts by substituting out of carboniferous fuels.

And France, like many other European economies has outsourced many of its energy intensive industries like smelting to areas like Eastern Europe and the Gulf where energy is cheap but greenhouse emissions are no less than if the production was left at home.

Chart 3 Emissions and GDP per Capita

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The impossibility of meeting emission reductions by replacing coal with nuclear, in itself the least fearsome solution, is illustrated by the relative shares of electricity and gas in the emission profile.

All OECD countries are a bit different but the magnitudes are similar. For Australia, electricity is only 35 per cent of emissions and this starts to define the maximum that can be achieved by making the use of coal prohibitively expensive.

Chart 4

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The report to the former Australian government examined the switch to emission levels at 80 per cent of 1990 levels by 2020 . This estimated the CO2 equivalent trajectories were as follows.

Chart 5

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Noting that a 37 per cent reduction was required, it argued, “To illustrate the magnitude involved, this is equivalent to, for example, replacing Australia’s entire existing fossil fuel–fired electricity generation capacity with electricity from nuclear energy while at the same time removing all existing vehicles from our roads.”

Moreover, these measures are not taking place in a vacuum. A great many greenhouse mitigating regulatory programs are in place even in those Kyoto recalcitrants which used to comprise Australia as well as the US. For Australia:
• There is a vast number of subsidies for emission management renewable energy technology and installations,
• We have regulatory impositions on electrical equipment and most importantly on new houses which have to meet a “5 Star” energy efficiency standard; this is a convenient means by which those that presently have their own homes can shift costs onto those looking to buy them and salve their consciences without incurring any expense – indeed profiting since the higher costs of new houses is automatically transmitted to the value of the existing stock,
• There are obligations on electricity retailers to use a specific and growing share of renewables in their mix of energy sources. These renewables, as well as requiring costly additional management expenditures to deal with their intermittency, are about twice the cost of conventional coal fired electricity. By 2020, 20 per cent of electricity is to be from renewables, less than 6 per cent of which will come from commercially viable hydro sources.

These existing measures are the equivalent of a tax on stationary sources of electricity of about $10 per tonne, or 30 per cent of the ex-generator cost.

A carbon tax or auction of permits would come in over and above this. Early work on the level of such a tax that would be required put the level on $10. That is a distant dream. Stern put the number at US$100 but also had a lot of persuasion and education to assist – calling upon what the economist Lionel Robbins famously referred to as “that very scarce commodity, human love”. And by bending the rules of finance and allocating very low discount rates to the net present value estimates of costs, he managed to argue that the costs would be minor and swamped by the benefits.

Energy costs have already risen strongly in OECD countries in the light of self-inflicted measures to reduce CO2 emissions. To do the task that is sought by those promoting the notion that catastrophic human induced global warming will take place in the absence of rigorous control measures will result in massive industrial disruption and loss of income as investment is diverted to energy resources that offer poor productivity and as industries and consumers reduce and restructure their demand.

The emission reductions required are much greater than the previously horrific calls like 20 per cent below 1990. For OECD countries, we are talking about emission levels of a quarter and less of current levels. Moreover, none of this will do very much for emission controls if Developing Countries are not also forced into making emission reductions or holding them at current levels. In the absence of this we would see emissions of developed countries being largely transferred to developing countries and the emission intensive goods being imported.

To combat this requires a comprehensive new form of currency in the form of carbon ratings. All goods would need to be rated and their producers would be required to demonstrate the required credits. In the case of imports that did not meet these stipulations, the importer would be required to meet the deficit. Pretty soon we would see a world trading economy unrecognisable from that we now have.

At the very least this will create tensions as developing countries will maintain that they are being denied the opportunity to reach the levels of economic wellbeing that the OECD countries have achieved.

In addition, developed countries themselves, aside from denying themselves cheaper goods from the third world, will be incurring inefficient expenditures on investments in green energy (an especially favoured approach by the two Democrat candidates for the US Presidency). This reduces the overall productivity of investment thereby reducing income levels over and above the transitional costs incurred in economic reconstruction.

This is a copy of the address by Alan Moran, Institute of Public Affairs,
to the The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change , New York, March 3, 2008

Climate Change Conference, New York – Day 1, In Review

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I arrived in New York this morning for the first ever international meeting of ‘global warming skeptics’.

It’s actually called ‘The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change’ but many of the speakers and delegates are well known AGW skeptics and they have never gathered before in one place and time. At least certainly not the 500 or so said to be here today. [And of course none of them are skeptical of climate change – but rather the extent to which carbon dioxide drives warming.]

Perhaps appropriately for a first meeting of AGW skeptics it has been a chilly day. It has been probably close to zero outside with a blustery wind.

Indeed when I ventured out onto Broadway for brunch this morning in a warm coat I thought my ears were going to freeze off. Then I found a shop full of hats and bought something lined with fake fur – and I was slightly warmer.

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Jennifer in her new hat, Manhattan, March 2, 2008

After a long nap – I hadn’t really slept for 36 hours having missed my connecting flight from Sydney to New York in San Francisco – I registered for the conference at 5pm.

The conference is at the New York Marriott Marquis right on Broadway. I am also staying at the hotel and I think you can get everything here except a pot of tea.

Anyway, it was good to see some Australians here including my colleague Alan Moran, Bob Carter and his wife Ann, Viv Forbes, Ian McClintock, Tom Quirk – and that was just who I met this evening.

I was asked to mind a table for the Australians for dinner at the request of Viv Forbes, anyway, next thing a couple of Italians asked if they could join me and I thought what the heck, then three New Zealanders turned up and sat down, and Viv returned to find his dinner table full of ‘others’ and me – but I think he had a good night anyway.

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My colleague Alan Moran (the good looking one) with a fellow from Sweden and another from Holland at the conference reception. Manhattan, March 2, 2008.

The conference dinner was opened by Joseph Bast, President of The Heartland Institute. He began by saying that Jim Martin, Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment, recently told the Denver Post, “You could have a convention of scientists who dispute climate change in a relatively small phone booth” and went on to say that we finally hope this conference will put this misinformation to rest for good. He mentioned some of the 101 speakers from around the world joining the 400 or so delegates including skeptics from Russian, France, Canada and Australia.

Mr Bast also mentioned that Al Gore had been invited to the conference and to speak and that The Heartland Institute was prepared to pay his US$200,000 speaking fee – but he declined the invitation.

There were few formalities, no head table or pledges of allegiances. We were asked to respect diversity of opinion and the freedom to disagree.

The first speaker was a comedian Tim Slagle who was absolutely hilarious. He began by complaining that he had looked many of the delegates up at Sourcewatch before coming and was disappointed to find he was the only one not getting a million dollars from an oil company. [It was a joke, which the dinner crowd enjoyed, and by-the-way The Heartland Institute organised the conference without any money from oil or gas companies]. Most of Slagle’s jokes were so politically incorrect I shall not repeat them here and he included a plea for the legalization of cannabis and a comment that “global warming would be a God sent for Canadian citrus growers”.

The keynote speaker was Dr Patrick Michaels. He gave a really interesting address focusing on whether global temperature is still on a warming trend and what is happening at the Arctic and Antarctica concluding that the temperature trend is still one of increase – when ENSO, volcanoes, solar variability and carbon dioxide are taken into account – but that the warming is not much of a global threat. [The presentation also included a couple of good Al Gore impersonations.]

Much of the discussion that followed the key note address was around the subject of warming trends right back to the so-called Medieval Warm period and Ross McKitrick was invited to the stage to comment on the extent to which there is now a consensus regarding the last 1,000 or so years of the temperature record. For those who have read ‘Taken by Storm’ you may not be surprised to know that his answered was long and interesting.

All in all it was a great day and dinner and I would like to thank The Heartland Institute, The International Policy Network and The IPA for the opportunity to be here.

More tomorrow.

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The view from my room. Even at midday Broadway was lite up.

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From today’s New York Times:

Skeptics on Human Climate Impact Seize on Cold Spell
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: March 2, 2008

“The Heartland Institute, a public policy research group in Chicago opposed to regulatory approaches to environmental problems, is holding a conference in Times Square on Monday and Tuesday aimed at exploring questions about the cause and dangers of climate change.

“The event will convene an array of scientists, economists, statisticians and libertarian commentators holding a dizzying range of views on the changing climate — from those who see a human influence but think it is not dangerous, to others who say global warming is a hoax, the sun’s fault or beneficial. Many attendees say it is the dawn of a new paradigm. But many climate scientists and environmental campaigners say it is the skeptics’ last stand.

Read more in the New York Times here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/science/02cold.html?_r=2&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

But of course don’t believe everything you read.

Joseph Bast’s Opening Speech at the New York 2008 International Conference on Climate Change

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Below is a transcript of Joseph Bast’s opening speech at the New York 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, March 2 – 4, 2008.

2008 International Conference on Climate Change
Opening Remarks by Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute

Good evening, and welcome to the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change. I am Joseph Bast, the president of The Heartland Institute, and along with James Taylor, I will be your co-host tonight and for the next two days.

This dinner kicks off a truly historic event, the first international conference devoted to answering questions overlooked by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We’re asking questions such as:

* how reliable are the data used to document the recent warming trend?

* how much of the modern warming is natural, and how much is likely the result of human activities?

* how reliable are the computer models used to forecast future climate conditions? And

* is reducing emissions the best or only response to possible climate change?

Obviously, these are important questions. Yet the IPCC pays little attention to them or hides the large amount of doubt and uncertainty surrounding them.

Are the scientists and economists who ask these questions just a fringe group, outside the scientific mainstream? Not at all. A 2003 survey of 530 climate scientists in 27 countries, conducted by Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch at the GKSS Institute of Coastal Research in Germany, found

* 82 percent said global warming is happening, but only

* 56% said it’s mostly the result of human causes, and only

* 35% said models can accurately predict future climate conditions.

Only 27% believed “the current state of scientific knowledge is able to provide reasonable predictions of climate variability on time scales of 100 years.”

That’s a long ways from “consensus.”

It’s actually pretty close to what the American public told pollsters for the Pew Trust in 2006:

* 70% thought global warming is happening,

* only 41% thought it was due to human causes,

* and only 19% thought it was a high-priority issue.

The alarmists think it’s a “paradox” that the more people learn about climate change, the less likely they are to consider it a serious problem. But as John Tierney with the New York Times points out in a blog posted just a day ago, maybe, just maybe, it’s because people are smart rather than stupid.

And incidentally, 70% of the public oppose raising gasoline prices by $1 to fight global warming, and 80% oppose a $2/gallon tax increase, according to a 2007 poll by the New York Times and CBS News.

I’ve got news for them: reducing emissions by 60 to 80 percent, which is what the alarmists claim is necessary to “stop global warming,” would cost a lot more than $1 a gallon.

Al Gore, the United Nations, environmental groups, and too often the reporters who cover the climate change debate are the ones who are out of step with the real “consensus.” They claim to be certain that global warming is occurring, convinced that it is due to human causes, and 100% confident that we can predict future climates.

Who’s on the fringe of scientific consensus? The alarmists, or the skeptics?

These questions go to the heart of the issue: Is global warming a crisis, as we are so often told by media, politicians, and environmental activists? Or is it moderate, mostly natural, and unstoppable, as we are told by many distinguished scientists?

Former Vice President Al Gore has said repeatedly that there is a “consensus” in favor of his alarmist views on global warming. And of course, he’s not alone.

Two weeks ago, Jim Martin, the executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, when told of our conference, said “You could have a convention of all the scientists who dispute climate change in a relatively small phone booth.” (Denver Post, February 12, 2008).

RealClimate.org predicted that no real scientists would show up at this conference.

Well …

With we have us, tonight and tomorrow, more than 200 scientists and other experts on climate change, from Australia, Canada, England, France, Hungary, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Sweden and of course the United States.

They come from the University of Alabama, Arizona State, Carleton, Central Queensland, Delaware, Durham, and Florida State University.

From George Mason, Harvard, The Institute Pasteur in Paris, James Cook, John Moores, Johns Hopkins, and the London School of Economics.

From The University of Mississippi, Monash, Nottingham, Ohio State, Oregon State, Oslo, Ottawa, Rochester, Rockefeller, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

And from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Suffolk University, the University of Virginia, Westminster School of Business (in London), and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

And I apologize if I left anyone out.

These scientists and economists have been published thousands of times in the world’s leading scientific journals and have written hundreds of books. If you call this the fringe, where’s the center?

Hey Jim Martin, does this look like a phone booth to you?

Hey RealClimate, can you hear us now?

These scientists and economists deserve to be heard. They have stood up to political correctness and defended the scientific method at a time when doing so threatens their research grants, tenure, and ability to get published. Some of them have even faced death threats for daring to speak out against what can only be called the mass delusion of our time.

And they must be heard, because the stakes are enormous.

George Will, in an October Newsweek column commenting on Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize, wrote that if nations impose the reductions in energy use that Al Gore and the folks at RealClimate call for, they will cause “more preventable death and suffering than was caused in the last century by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot combined.”

It takes more than four Norwegian socialists to win a Pulitzer Prize, so I’ll put George Will’s Pulitzer Prize and his recent Bradley Prize up against Gore’s Nobel any day.
You’ve probably read some of the attacks that have appeared in the blogosphere and in print directed against this conference, and against The Heartland Institute. Let me repeat for the record here tonight what appears prominently on our Web site:

* No corporate dollars were used to help finance this conference.

* The Heartland Institute has 2,700 donors, and gets about 16% of its income from corporations.

* Heartland gets less than 5% of its income from all energy producing companies combined. We are 95% carbon free.

And let me further add to the record:

* the honoraria paid to all of the speakers appearing at this conference add up to less than the honorarium Al Gore gets paid for making a single speech, and less than what his company makes selling fake carbon “off-sets” in a week.

* it is no crime for a think tank or advocacy group to accept corporate funding. In fact, corporations that fail to step forward and assure that sensible voices are heard in this debate are doing their shareholders, and their countries, a grave disservice.

We’re not doing this for the money, obviously. The Heartland Institute is in the “skeptics” camp because we know alarmism is a tool that has been used by opponents of individual freedom and free enterprise since as early as 1798, when Thomas Malthus predicted that food supply would fail to keep up with population growth.

We opposed global warming alarmism before we received any contributions from energy corporations and we’ll continue to address it after many of them have found ways to make a fast buck off the public hysteria.

We know which organizations are raking in millions of dollars a year in government and foundation grants to spread fear and false information about climate change. It’s not The Heartland Institute, and it’s not any of the 50 cosponsoring organizations that helped make this conference possible.

The alarmists in the global warming debate have had their say – over and over again, in every newspaper in the country practically every day and in countless news reports and documentary films. They have dominated the media’s coverage of this issue. They have swayed the views of many people. Some of them have even grown very rich in the process, and others still hope to.

But they have lost the debate.
Winners don’t exaggerate. Winners don’t lie. Winners don’t appeal to fear or resort to ad hominem attacks.

As George Will also wrote, “people only insist that a debate stop when they are afraid of what might be learned if it continues.”

We invited Al Gore to speak to us tonight, and even agreed to pay his $200,000 honoraria. He refused. We invited some of the well-known scientists associated with the alarmist camp, and they refused.

All we got are a few professional hecklers registered from Lyndon LaRouche, DeSmogBlog, and some other left wing conspiracy groups. If you run into them in the course of the next two days, please be kind to them … and call security if they aren’t kind to you.

Skeptics are the winners of EVERY scientific debate, always, everywhere. Because skepticism, as T.H. Huxley said, is the highest calling of a true scientist.

No scientific theory is true because a majority of scientists say it to be true. Scientific theories are only provisionally true until they are falsified by data that can be better explained by a different theory. And it is by falsifying current theories that scientific knowledge advances, not by consensus.

The claim that global warming is a “crisis” is itself a theory. It can be falsified by scientific fact, just as the claim that there is a “consensus” that global warming is man-made and will be a catastrophe has been dis-proven by the fact that this conference is taking place.

Which reminds me … the true believers at RealClimate are now praising an article posted on salon.com by Joseph Romm – a guy who sells solar panels for a living, by the way – saying “‘consensus’? We never claimed there was a ‘consensus’!”

And notorious alarmist John Holdren a couple weeks ago said “‘global warming’? We never meant ‘global warming.’ We meant “‘global climate disruption’!”

I’d say this was a sign of victory, but that would suggest their words and opinions matter. It’s too late to move the goal posts, guys. You’ve already lost.

It is my hope, and the reason The Heartland Institute organized this conference, that public policies that impose enormous costs on millions of people, in the U.S. and also around the world, will not be passed into law before the fake “consensus” on global warming collapses.

Once passed, taxes and regulations are often hard to repeal. Once lost, freedoms are often very difficult to retrieve.

ENDS

See also Jen’s previous post ‘The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change: I’m off to New York’

Survey of IPCC WG1 Climate Scientists Rejected for Publication

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Some time ago I noticed a submitted paper on Roger Pielke Sr’s research group publications webpage and I referred to it in a comment on this blog. The paper is a survey entitled ‘Is there agreement amongst climate scientists on the IPCC AR4 WG1?’ by Brown, F., J. Annan, and R.A. Pielke Sr.

Months passed until on 22nd February 2008 Pielke Sr published the paper on his weblog, explaining the history of the paper’s rejection by EOS and Nature Precedings:

One of the readers of Climate Science (Fergus Brown), in response to the questions that have been raised by the weblog (and elsewhere) wanted to poll the climate community to ascertain their views on the IPCC WG1 report. The article that we completed on this subject, under his leadership, is given in its entirety later in this weblog. However, a brief history as to why we are publishing as a weblog and not in another venue is discussed below.

After the survey was completed last summer and the article written, it was submitted to the AGU publication EOS as a “Forum piece. The EOS description of a Forum is that it

”contains thought-provoking contributions expected to stimulate further discussion, within the newspaper or as part of Eos Online Discussions. Appropriate Forum topics include current or proposed science policy, discussion related to current research in our fields especially scientific controversies, the relationship of our science to society, or practices that affect our fields, science in general, or AGU as an organization. Commentary solely on the science reported in research journals is not appropriate.”

Our article certainly fits this description. However, after 4 months without a decision, our contribution was summarily rejected by Fred Spilhous without review. He said our article did not fit EOS policy. We disagreed, of course, based on the explicit EOS policy given above, but our follow request for an appeal was ignored.

We then submitted to Nature Precedings where their policy states

“Nature Precedings is a place for researchers to share pre-publication research, unpublished manuscripts, presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and other scientific documents. Submissions are screened by our professional curation team for relevance and quality, but are not subjected to peer review. We welcome high-quality contributions from biology, medicine (except clinical trials), chemistry and the earth sciences.”

According to Pielke Sr:

Our article was quickly rejected without explanation.

From this experience, it is clear that the AGU EOS and Nature Precedings Editors are using their positions to suppress evidence that there is more diversity of views on climate, and the human role in altering climate, than is represented in the narrowly focused 2007 IPCC report.

Our article follows below. We invite colleagues who are expert in polling techniques to build on the polling questions that we pose in our contribution, and to provide the community and policymakers with the actual range of perspectives on climate science.

Excerpt:

In our poll, there were 140 responses out of the 1807 who were contacted by the first author. The authors participated along with poll specialist David Jepson (Bsc Hons) in writing the polling questions (see Table 1 for the questions), but had no knowledge of who participated in the polling. It is interesting to note, however, that among the respondents were a substantial number of senior scientists and leading figures in climate science, whose support and interest in the poll were much appreciated. It is important to recognize that we are not presenting the results as representing anything other than the views of those who responded as we have no way to assess the relationship of the responders with the total relevant population.

The results are quite informative. No scientists were willing to admit to the statement that global warming is a fabrication and that human activity is not having any significant effect on climate [0%]. In total, 18% responded that the IPCC AR4 WG1 Report probably overstates the role of CO2, or exaggerates the risks implied by focusing on CO2-dominated Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), to a greater or lesser degree. A further 17% expressed the opinion that the Report probably underestimates or seriously underestimates the consequences of anthropogenic CO2 -induced AGW and that the associated risks are more severe than is implied in the report. The remaining 65% expressed some degree of concurrence with the report’s science basis, of which the largest group [47% of all respondents] selected option 5.

The options were:

1. There is no warming; it is a fabrication based on inaccurate/inappropriate measurement. Human activity is not having any significant effect on Climate. The data on which such assumptions are made is so compromised as to be worthless. The physical science basis of AGW theory is founded on a false hypothesis.

2. Any recent warming is most likely natural. Human input of CO2 has very little to do with it. Solar, naturally varying water vapour and similar variables can explain most or all of the climate changes. Projections based on Global Climate Models are unreliable because these are based on too many assumptions and unreliable datasets.

3. There are changes in the atmosphere, including added CO2 from human activities, but significant climate effects are likely to be all within natural limits. The ’scares’ are exaggerations with a political motive. The undue emphasis on CO2 diverts attention away from other, important research on climate variability and change.

4. There is warming and the human addition of CO2 causes some of it, but the science is too uncertain to be confident about current attributions of the precise role of CO2 with respect to other climate forcings. The IPCC WG1 overestimates the role of CO2 relative to other forcings, including a diverse variety of human climate forcings.

5. The scientific basis for human impacts on climate is well represented by the IPCC WG1 report. The lead scientists know what they are doing. We are warming the planet, with CO2 as the main culprit. At least some of the forecast consequences of this change are based on robust evidence.

6. The IPCC WG1 is compromised by political intervention; I agree with those scientists who say that the IPCC WG1 is underestimating the problem. Action to reduce human emissions of CO2 in order to mitigate against serious consequences is more urgent than the report suggests. This should be done irrespective of other climate and environmental considerations.

7. The IPCC WG1 seriously understates the human influence on climate. I agree with those scientists who say that major mitigation responses are needed immediately to prevent catastrophic serious warming and other impacts projected to result from human emissions of CO2. We are seriously damaging the Earth’s climate, and will continue to face devastating consequences for many years.

Co-author James Annan gives his view on his own blog with a post entitled ‘Too crap to publish or too hot to handle?’

Lead author Fergus Brown gives his views here and here.

Thanks to Luke for suggesting this subject as a blog post.

New Paper from the Virtual World: Stabilizing Climate Requires Near-Zero Emissions

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A new GRL paper by Matthews and Caldeira suggests that, in order to stabilise the computer modelled future climate, CO2 emissions need to be reduced to near-zero.

The abstract of the paper is below:

GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 35, L04705, doi:10.1029/2007GL032388, 2008

Stabilizing climate requires near-zero emissions

H. Damon Matthews

Department of Geography, Planning and Environment, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Ken Caldeira

Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Stanford, California, USA

Abstract
Current international climate mitigation efforts aim to stabilize levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. However, human-induced climate warming will continue for many centuries, even after atmospheric CO2 levels are stabilized. In this paper, we assess the CO2 emissions requirements for global temperature stabilization within the next several centuries, using an Earth system model of intermediate complexity. We show first that a single pulse of carbon released into the atmosphere increases globally averaged surface temperature by an amount that remains approximately constant for several centuries, even in the absence of additional emissions. We then show that to hold climate constant at a given global temperature requires near-zero future carbon emissions. Our results suggest that future anthropogenic emissions would need to be eliminated in order to stabilize global-mean temperatures. As a consequence, any future anthropogenic emissions will commit the climate system to warming that is essentially irreversible on centennial timescales.

So, ’emission impossible’ becomes even more difficult. The only way to achieve near-zero emissions is via air capture of CO2.