Murdock on Climate Change

Rupert Murdock has the best short assessment of the situation with regard to climate change. He recently tweeted: "Climate change very slow but real. So far all cures worse than disease." That is the real state of affairs, and Fred Krupp, writing in the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, urges both the alarmists and the hard-core skeptics to heed it. In particular he urges conservatives to seek market-based responses to global warming.

It sounds good, and to my mind is the only reasonable response to the current situation, but given the polarization of opinion on the issue of climate change, it will be difficult to achieve a reasonable set of policies. 

Perhaps a Romney administration can craft such policies. The current one certainly, on the basis of its performance so far, cannot.

One can hope.
 
Read his editorial here.

The Climate Debate [continued]

A group of climate scientists who have challenged the ruling orthodoxy on global warming published a piece in the Wall Street Journal outlining their objections [here]. Not surprisingly this prompted a strong response from the American Physical Society, which has been a bastion of warmist sentiment. Now they publish a response to the APS here. It makes for interesting reading and an implied criticism of how big science is done these days.

And the beat goes on...., the beat goes on....

On Climate Change -- Don't Believe the Scare Stories

Bjorn Lonborg notes that the media routinely misrepresent the results of climate research:

Scary climate stories rely on a simple narrative: More CO₂ means more environmental damage and death—and the only way to address it is to cut carbon emissions. While this makes for a catchy political message, it has the distinct disadvantage of being wrong.

 In the process negative effects of global warming are grossly exaggerated while beneficial effects are ignored. The result is unwarranted public alarm and pressure to undertake foolish and counter-productive public policies. Lonborg is by no means a global warming denier, and he accepts that the IPCC data are generally pretty good, but he insists that they be interpreted in a reasonable manner, and that is where the media let us down. In search of scary headlines, they seriously distort the results of climate science and in doing so they perform a terrible disservice to the peoples of the world.

None of this is news to many of us. What is significant to me is that Lonborg's article appeared in a decidedly left of center publication like Slate, which suggests that the era of Gorish hysteria about climate change is finally, and deservedly, over. 

Read it here.

The Climate Cabal

Jim Lacey, over at National Review Online, discusses the dimensions of the fraud perpetrated by a small group of climate scientists and their allies in the mainstream media and government, the full extent of which is revealed in the latest leak of documents the press has titled "Climategate II". These e-mails show that not only was data selectively reported and sometimes suppressed, but the peer review process was compromised, critics were shut out of journals and skeptics intimidated, and false information was fed to and promulgated by media outlets, government agencies, and NGOs. The result has beem a fiasco that compromises not just climate science, but scientific authority everywhere.

Read the whole thing here.

Lies Of the Left -- Gore's Junk Science

Al Gore keeps saying that we should abandon pseudo-science and political posturing and face the truth. James M. Taylor calls upon him to practice what he preaches.

Many of the assertions Gore makes in his movie, ''An Inconvenient Truth,'' have been refuted by science, both before and after he made them. Gore can show sincerity in his plea for scientific honesty by publicly acknowledging where science has rebutted his claims.

For example, Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate reported, "Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame."

Gore claims the snowcap atop Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro is shrinking and that global warming is to blame. Yet according to the November 23, 2003, issue of Nature magazine, "Although it's tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit. Without the forests' humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine."

Gore claims global warming is causing more tornadoes. Yet the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in February that there has been no scientific link established between global warming and tornadoes.

Gore claims global warming is causing more frequent and severe hurricanes. However, hurricane expert Chris Landsea published a study on May 1 documenting that hurricane activity is no higher now than in decades past. Hurricane expert William Gray reported just a few days earlier, on April 27, that the number of major hurricanes making landfall on the U.S. Atlantic coast has declined in the past 40 years. Hurricane scientists reported in the April 18 Geophysical Research Letters that global warming enhances wind shear, which will prevent a significant increase in future hurricane activity.

Gore claims global warming is causing an expansion of African deserts. However, the Sept. 16, 2002, issue of New Scientist reports, "Africa's deserts are in 'spectacular' retreat . . . making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa."

Gore argues Greenland is in rapid meltdown, and that this threatens to raise sea levels by 20 feet. But according to a 2005 study in the Journal of Glaciology, "the Greenland ice sheet is thinning at the margins and growing inland, with a small overall mass gain." In late 2006, researchers at the Danish Meteorological Institute reported that the past two decades were the coldest for Greenland since the 1910s.

Gore claims the Antarctic ice sheet is melting because of global warming. Yet the Jan. 14, 2002, issue of Nature magazine reported Antarctica as a whole has been dramatically cooling for decades. More recently, scientists reported in the September 2006 issue of the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series A: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences, that satellite measurements of the Antarctic ice sheet showed significant growth between 1992 and 2003. And the U.N. Climate Change panel reported in February 2007 that Antarctica is unlikely to lose any ice mass during the remainder of the century.

Each of these cases provides an opportunity for Gore to lead by example in his call for an end to the distortion of science. Will he rise to the occasion? Only time will tell.

Do tell? Will Gore start to tell the truth? Don't hold your breath.

Read it here.

In a related development, Gore has repeatedly denied that he has any interest in running for President. Well, apparently that declaration is now "inoperative."

Ian Murray points to this interesting item:

From the Taipei Times:

Al Gore visit postponed. Former US vice president Al Gore will not be able to make it to Taiwan this September to address the issue of global warming, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tien Chiu-chin said yesterday. Tien, who invited Gore to visit Taiwan to promote awareness on global warming, told reporters yesterday that she received an e-mail from the Harry Walker Agency, which has the exclusive right to arrange Gore's speeches, saying that Gore had canceled all his scheduled events in the next six months. The visit to Taiwan had been postponed to next year, she added. Tien said the reason for the cancelation was that Gore was considering a presidential bid.

And so it begins?

Read it here.

More On the Crumbling Climate Consensus

Even as Al Gore took his apocalyptic dog and pony show to Capitol Hill, we learned from NASA that long-term climate changes are correlated with solar output.

Long-term climate records are a key to understanding how Earth's climate changed in the past and how it may change in the future. Direct measurements of light energy emitted by the sun, taken by satellites and other modern scientific techniques, suggest variations in the sun's activity influence Earth's long-term climate. However, there were no measured climate records of this type until the relatively recent scientific past.

Scientists have traditionally relied upon indirect data gathering methods to study climate in the Earth's past, such as drilling ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica. Such samples of accumulated snow and ice drilled from deep within ice sheets or glaciers contain trapped air bubbles whose composition can provide a picture of past climate conditions. Now, however, a group of NASA and university scientists has found a convincing link between long-term solar and climate variability in a unique and unexpected source: directly measured ancient water level records of the Nile, Earth's longest river.

Alexander Ruzmaikin and Joan Feynman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., together with Dr. Yuk Yung of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., have analyzed Egyptian records of annual Nile water levels collected between 622 and 1470 A.D. at Rawdah Island in Cairo. These records were then compared to another well-documented human record from the same time period: observations of the number of auroras reported per decade in the Northern Hemisphere....

Emphasis mine.

Well, whaddaya know? They found correlations!

The researchers found some clear links between the sun's activity and climate variations. The Nile water levels and aurora records had two somewhat regularly occurring variations in common - one with a period of about 88 years and the second with a period of about 200 years.

They even propose a mechanism.

So what causes these cyclical links between solar variability and the Nile? The authors suggest that variations in the sun's ultraviolet energy cause adjustments in a climate pattern called the Northern Annular Mode, which affects climate in the atmosphere of the Northern Hemisphere during the winter. At sea level, this mode becomes the North Atlantic Oscillation, a large-scale seesaw in atmospheric mass that affects how air circulates over the Atlantic Ocean. During periods of high solar activity, the North Atlantic Oscillation's influence extends to the Indian Ocean. These adjustments may affect the distribution of air temperatures, which subsequently influence air circulation and rainfall at the Nile River's sources in eastern equatorial Africa. When solar activity is high, conditions are drier, and when it is low, conditions are wetter.

This last is important, because a great deal of the anthropogenic scare scenario depends not just on predictive models but on a plausible mechanism for explaining how climate changes. Now you have not only contrary evidence indicating a solar rather than human agency, you also have a plausible mechanism for the alternative scenario being proposed.

The case for the anthropogenic apocalypse just keeps getting weaker and weaker.

Read the whole thing here.

The Continuing Collapse of Scientific Authority -- Global Average Temperature

I've been saying this for a long time -- there is no such thing as a global average temperature. What you get is an average for the points and times measured and depending on what you choose to measure and when and at what altitude you can get radically different results. Finally, credentialed "scientists" make this obvious point as well as several others I had not considered.

From Science Daily:

Discussions on global warming often refer to 'global temperature.' Yet the concept is thermodynamically as well as mathematically an impossibility, says Bjarne Andresen, a professor at The Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, who has analyzed this topic in collaboration with professors Christopher Essex from University of Western Ontario and Ross McKitrick from University of Guelph, Canada.

.....

"It is impossible to talk about a single temperature for something as complicated as the climate of Earth", Bjarne Andresen says, an an expert of thermodynamics. "A temperature can be defined only for a homogeneous system. Furthermore, the climate is not governed by a single temperature. Rather, differences of temperatures drive the processes and create the storms, sea currents, thunder, etc. which make up the climate".

He explains that while it is possible to treat temperature statistically locally, it is meaningless to talk about a a global temperature for Earth. The Globe consists of a huge number of components which one cannot just add up and average. That would correspond to calculating the average phone number in the phone book. That is meaningless. Or talking about economics, it does make sense to compare the currency exchange rate of two countries, whereas there is no point in talking about an average 'global exchange rate'.

If temperature decreases at one point and it increases at another, the average will remain the same as before, but it will give rise to an entirely different thermodynamics and thus a different climate. If, for example, it is 10 degrees at one point and 40 degrees at another, the average is 25 degrees. But if instead there is 25 degrees both places, the average is still 25 degrees. These two cases would give rise to two entirely different types of climate, because in the former case one would have pressure differences and strong winds, while in the latter there would be no wind.

....

A further problem with the extensive use of 'the global temperature' is that there are many ways of calculating average temperatures.

Example 1: Take two equally large glasses of water. The water in one glass is 0 degrees, in the other it is 100 degrees. Adding these two numbers and dividing by two yields an average temperature of 50 degrees. That is called the arithmetic average.

Example 2: Take the same two glasses of water at 0 degrees and 100 degrees, respectively. Now multiply those two numbers and take the square root, and you will arrive at an average temperature of 46 degrees. This is called the geometric average. (The calculation is done in degrees Kelvin which are then converted back to degrees Celsius.)

The difference of 4 degrees is the energy which drives all the thermodynamic processes which create storms, thunder, sea currents, etc.

Read the whole thing here.