A Second Hand Conjecture

The Economist
Interesting article about the roots of the problem. What I found fascinating was this root cause.

the historical accident of a very low loss rate during the early history of subprime mortgage foreclosures in 2001-2002.

This is the reminder that “accidents” continue to happen and that our best models are always suspect. Lesson learned – events will continue to occur that challenge conventional thinking and assumptions. Some short term data (an accident) led investors to believe there was less risk and uncertainty.

This idea can be extrapolated to all models that try to describe large complex systems – like AWG.

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I know that many of you think that global warming, at least anthropogenic global warming, is a fraud. I am not so sure. Either way though, I think Peter Huber has the broad contours of any attempt to address it correct.

So does the climate computer have a real audience, or is it really just another bag lady muttering away to herself in a lonely corner of the intellectual park? That the computer is heard in Hollywood, Stockholm, Brussels and even some parts of Washington is quite beside the point–they have far less global power and influence than they vainly imagine. Vinod Dar is right: “Contingency planning should entail strategic responses to a warming globe, a cooling globe and a globe whose climate reverberates with laughter at human hubris.”

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Yep, there sure is consensus about global warming…

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The march of the watermelons towards control of US policy continues apace:

Polar bears will now be listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.

But in announcing the listing, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne said the decision should not be “misused” to regulate global climate change.

“Listing the polar bear as threatened can reduce avoidable losses of polar bears. But it should not open the door to use of the Endangered Species Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles, power plants, and other sources,” said Kempthorne.

“That would be a wholly inappropriate use of the ESA law. The ESA is not the right tool to set U.S. climate policy.”

It is certainly an inappropriate tool for shaping such policy. And it just as certainly the tool that will be used quite effectively to do so. Like I wrote over a year ago, this is nothing more than a backdoor way of implementing Kyoto in the US.

If the polar bear were listed as a threatened species, all federal agencies would have to ensure that anything they authorize that might affect polar bears will not jeopardize their survival or the sea ice where they live. That could include oil and gas exploration, commercial shipping or even releases of toxic contaminants or climate-affecting pollution.

Environmentalists hope that invoking the Endangered Species Act protections might eventually lead the government to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and other heat-trapping “greenhouse” gases blamed for warming the atmosphere.

“The Interior Department has pretty much explicitly said that they don’t think they have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emission, but we know that the Endangered Species Act goes well beyond these walls, that it’s taken into account by other agencies,” said Kert Davies, research director for Greenpeace.

Since the above was written, the Supreme Court has ruled that the EPA does have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, but more importantly, under the ESA the government is required to evaluate any project that may have an impact on endangered species. Normally this would be limited to such species within the geographical span of the proposed project, but you can bet your bottom dollar that Greenpeace, et al., will attempt to draw a direct connection between whichever new project they are challenging and polar bears using the threat of increased greenhouse gas emissions.

The coup de grace, of course, will be when all private industry and behavior is brought with in the realm of the EPA’s regulation authority (my emphasis):

As Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne noted, the 1973 Endangered Species Act is “perhaps the least flexible law Congress has ever enacted.” In 2005, green litigants took advantage of this rigidity, suing the government to force it to label the polar bear at risk for extinction. Since the 1980s, the sea ice that the bears use to hunt and breed has been receding. Although the population has increased from a low of 12,000 in the 1960s to roughly 25,000 today – perhaps a record high – computer projections anticipate that Arctic pack ice will continue to melt over the next half-century. This could, maybe, someday, lead to population declines.

The lawsuits were hardly motivated by concern for polar bear welfare. Instead, environmentalists asserted that the ice is thinning because of human-induced global warming. A formal endangered listing is one more arrow in their legal quiver as they try to run U.S. climate policy through the judiciary.

They’ll argue that emissions from power plants, refineries, automobiles – anything that produces carbon – would contribute to warming, thus contributing to habitat destruction, and thus should be restricted by the Endangered Species Act. This logic could be used to rewrite existing environmental policy to accommodate greenhouse gasses, purposes for which they were never intended but with economy-wide repercussions.

Is there any doubt that granting full regulatory control over all productive activities is the ultimate goal of these lawsuits? I’m sure that some in the movement are motivated entirely by their heart-felt concern for the welfare of animals and the environment. But the vast majority of these environmental activists are driven by the desire to bring capitalist forces to heel, towards which end their totalitarian instincts guide them. Passage of the ESA in 1973 was the first step in that cause. The combined forces of the AGW movement with this latest court victory may be all that’s needed to achieve their goal.

See also: McQ, who has more on the listing of polar bears as a threatened species.

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Over at Green Tech we get some figures that should be rather sobering for those who wish for alternative energy to be a significant source of energy in the near future:

Put another way, we’d need to equip 250,000 roofs a day with solar panels for the next 50 years to have enough photovoltaic infrastructure to provide the world with a CMO’s worth of solar-generated electricity for a year. We’re nowhere close to that pace.

But don’t blame the solar industry. You’d also have to erect a 900-megawatt nuclear power plant every week for 50 years to get enough plants (2,500) to produce the same energy in a year to equal a CMO. Wind power? You need 3 million for a CMO, or 1,200 a week planted in the ground over the next 50 years. Demand for power also continues to escalate with economic development in the emerging world.

“In 30 years we will need six CMOs, so where are we going to get that?” Malhotra said. “I’m trying to communicate the scale of the problem.”

What is a CMO? A cubic mile of oil: (more…)

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Pirates Take French Cruise Ship and Gobal Temperatures to ‘Decrease’

It seems we have more correlation between pirates and global warming now. It may be time to update this graph with a downward and backward turn.

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Brrrr… it sure is cold out there. And now the data is in to prove it.

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change every recorded, either up or down.

So, what should good scientists do when the hypothesis doesn’t match real world results? Look for flaws in the hypothesis and add the knowledge gained through observation.

My biggest beef with much of the AGW crowd is their over-reliance on computer models for “forecasting” the future. They’ve continued to be incomplete, missing whole sets of factors that effect the weather and climate. The closer these models get to including these factors, the more I will trust them. In fact, the more they accurately predict changes in the climate, the more I’ll trust them.

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=d7c7fcce-d248-4e97-ab72-1adbdbb1d0d0&k=4336

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona — two prominent climate modellers — the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

“We missed what was right in front of our eyes,” says Prof. Russell. It’s not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind’s effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.

It is interesting that the more I hear about climate and the weather, the more I hear about cycles. Cycles of solar activity, winds, cloud cover, hurricanes, etc.

Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

It’s way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it’s way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.

Now, if in 5-10 years, the consensus swings around to saying that we’re really in danger of another ice age, I’ve got to wonder what the AGW zealots are going to do.

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Please, if you have any humanity in you – do your part to add just a bit to global warming today.

It’s important.

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photo: Chris Dunn

Spiegel has a typically aggressive (and aggressively European) interview with John McCain today. In many ways it’s an interesting yet disappointing exercise, due to its focus on the perceived past sins of the Bush administration. While much ground is covered, a little too often Spiegel essentially asks “Bush did XYZ, which is bad. How will you differ?” That comes at the expense of examining many questions about the future Atlantic partnership.

However, the responses are interesting…particularly in tone. McCain gives Europe answers that in many ways will not conform to their desires in practical terms. But in a way, may be answers which seem more palatable to them. After all, the European adoration of international negotiation, consultative diplomacy and multilateral consent for its own sake, is on a certain popular level a superficial partiality for words and handshakes. One that by nature is always highly susceptible to the rephrasing of any given position to achieve acquiescence.

A few key responses from McCain:

(more…)

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Some highlights:

We have covered Antarctica many times in past essays, and despite literally thousands of websites claiming that some calamity is occurring in Antarctica related to global warming, we side with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in this matter. Magazine covers have wonderful pictures of melting of the Antarctic, but IPCC in their 2007 report clearly states “Antarctic sea ice extent continues to show inter-annual variability and localized changes but no statistically significant average trends, consistent with the lack of warming reflected in atmospheric temperatures averaged across the region” (in fact, Antarctic sea ice extent has recently set record highs for both total areal extent as well as total extent anomaly (see here and here)). Furthermore, IPCC tells the world (and we wonder if anyone is listening) “Current global model studies project that the Antarctic ice sheet will remain too cold for widespread surface melting and is expected to gain in mass due to increased snowfall.”

Is that your impression of what the IPCC says? Not from the media or the Goracle.

So while we’ve heard recent reports about Antarctica losing ice, here we again find evidence to the contrary, and then some, at least in these locations. Not only is there no evidence of melting at the Gomez site, snow is accumulating there at an amazingly high rate. Clearly, this paper adds to the evidence that suggests that we simply, as of yet, do not have a firm grasp on the climate changes and their drivers that are effecting Antarctica, past, present, or, much less, future.

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One has to wonder if these newly discovered facts will be made part of the equations and modeling used to study global warming…

“Giant glaciers formed about 90 million years ago during a warm period when alligators thrived in the Arctic, researchers said Thursday, calling into question the belief that all ice melts in a “super greenhouse” climate.

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