Climate crimes. Will the school kids be shown?

The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 23 January 2013

Ulli Kulke, Donner und Doria, 22 January 2013

These days, much is spoken and written about the destruction of our planet as a result of climate change. In his evocative film “Climate Crimes”, the Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Eichelmann who was an active member of WWF for 17 years and worked in conservation for decades, now documents that it is rather the reverse: he shows how many ecosystems, species, habitats and the cultural heritage too are threatened – but, as he sums up, “not by climate change, but by climate protection and the things done in its name.” It is predominantly hydropower and bioenergy projects that threaten to destroy precious areas of our planet’s nature.

That current climate policies harm conservation in many ways is nothing new, even if many do not want to admit it. However, no one so far has compiled the evidence as strongly and on a global scale as Eichelmann. His one-hour film, which is shown in several cinemas in Germany these days and also on Austrian television, is the result of two years of work that led his team to Brazil, Turkey, Iraq and to Indonesia, but also to the model country of climate protection, Germany, where crimes against nature are especially evident.
Eichelmann feels particularly affected by what he has found out in the course of his research; that’s because, as he says, he has been deeply involved in the fight against climate change – until he discovered some time ago “that something went wrong here “.

The individual stages of the film:

Brazil: The huge dams of the South American country, each of which put dozens of square miles of rainforest under water for the generation of electricity, have always been a problem for the Amazon basin. But now, as the momentum of climate policy is added, all laborious progress in terms of environmental sustainability, which has been be built up in recent decades, and even all moratoria, have gone overnight. 60 mega dams of several kilometres in length and several hundreds of medium size are planned in the Amazon basin in coming years. One of them alone, the Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River, will flood a forested area larger than the Lake of Constance; it threatens 200 fish species and will force 20,000 people to relocate. One of the very few large nesting sites of Amazon turtles will fall victim to the dam. The Catholic Bishop Erwin Kräutler, who works there, calls Brazil’s current energy policies of Brazil the “death knell” for the Amazon rainforest.

Turkey: One of the oldest cities in Anatolia, Hasankeyf, renowned for its extensive cave dwellings and other buildings dating from the fourth century, built on the border between the Eastern Roman and the Sassanid Empire, will simply disappear from the map. The reason: the Ilisu dam, which is built there to produce “clean energy”, will ensure that the Tigris will swallow the city. With luck, the upper tips of the ancient minarets could still poke out of the reservoir.
By the way: Do you remember the worldwide outrage over the Taliban, when they destroyed the giant statue of Buddha of Bamiyan? These barbarians, it was said at that time! The loss of Hasankeyf would be vastly greater, yet outrage outside Turkey did not happen – in the name of climate protection people keep quite.

Iraq: There was also great indignation worldwide when the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the mid 1990s dried up the vast Mesopotamian marshes near Basra, out of revenge for what he deemed as the missing fighting spirit of its inhabitants during the first Gulf War. The wetlands, where many species live and people have their agricultural livelihoods, have since been partially restored laboriously. Now, they will finally disappear because dams further upstream will deny them enough water.

Germany: It is hardly possible to describe in words the damage done to German nature, as Eichelmann describes it in his film. The country side is made desolate by monoculture of corn fields stretching to the horizon, and biosphere reserves are not spared. Everything is done just to ensure enough biofuels are produced to meet Germany’s climate targets – all in the name of a supposedly clean energy. Many bird species have already disappeared completely, others will follow. Hares and other soil dwellers will not be seen again. The largest biogas plant in the country needs 1,000 tons of corn per day. 7,000 plants have already been built, about 1,000 on average will be added each year. Due to generous subsidies, the corn farmers can pay any rent, so the rents have more than doubled and farms are going bankrupt. By the way: in 2011 Germany could not cover its cereal needs for the first time.

Indonesia: Even greater is the sprawl of monocultures in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, where palm oil plantations – not least for the production of biodiesel – have destroyed the rainforest almost completely. The last orang-utans are losing their habitat.

Eichelmann presents calculations in his film which show that almost every single project he presents, e.g. each “Climate Crime”, is responsible for emitting more carbon dioxide or methane instead of reducing emissions. Although he has changed from being a climate change campaigner into a fighter against this kind of climate protection, Eichelmann still assumes that greenhouse gases pose a risk to the global climate. He thinks the only chance to counter the risk is to question the idea of global economic growth. Only in this way, he argues, the world could prevent the “Climate Crimes”, which his film documents.

You do not have to share – like this writer – the growth denial strategy in order to be impressed by the movie which is extremely well and comprehensively researched. The development of the global climate, the warming pause in the last decade and a half, and the climate forecasts for the next few years could indicate that it might be useful to transform our energy supply in the long run; but there is no reason today to throw out “the baby with the bathwater”, as economist Niko Paech says in the film – or to accept that “climate protection is used as a cover for environmental crimes.”

My fear is, however, that a growth denial strategy would be nothing else than throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The fact is: only growth-oriented economies can afford to protect the environment. To crack this historic challenge is not impossible theoretically, but it could lead to similar questionable experiments as documented in “Climate Crimes”.

We must take the time to plan sensibly and not to rush into “head-over-heels” measures. Let us beware of exaggerated doomsday prophecies and instead protect nature. Either way, growth or denial, greenhouse hysteria or cool head: “Climate Crimes” is one of the most interesting and daring films on the subject.

Translation Philipp Mueller

see also: New Film Blasts Climate Movement

New Met Office Botch?

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CCNet 16/01/13 New Met Office Botch Climate Scientists Get The Stratosphere Wrong How did the Met Office get their data so wrong? Well there’s the rub. You see, the methodology used to develop the Met Office SSU product was never published in the peer-reviewed literature, and certain aspects of the original processing “remain unknown.” Evidently the boffins at the Met didn’t bother to write down exactly how they were massaging the raw data to get the results they reported. Indeed, those who did the data manipulation seem to have mostly retired. This is an egregious example of sloppy science, slipshod science, bad science. How other climate scientists blindly accepted the Met Office’s manufactured data, even when their models could not be reconciled with nature, leads one to question the scientific integrity of many of those in the field. This is not acceptable behavior in any realm of scientific endeavor. -- Doug Hoffman, The Resilient Earth, 15 January 2013 The steady, relentless collapse of the climate campaign proceeds apace, notwithstanding the sugar high climate campaigners enjoyed after Hurricane Sandy and Obama’s re-election. And if the climate campaign wasn’t already in denial about being abandoned by The One, their media allies, and new carbon riches baron Al Gorezeera, a new report coming out this week from Harvard’s Theta Skocpol should really harsh their mellow. Skocpol, a prominent liberal political scientist, argues that environmentalists deserve most of the blame for the defeat of their agenda. -- Steven Hayward, Power Line, 14 January 2013 In an area where I have expertise on, extremes and their impacts, the report by the US Global Change Research Program is well out of step with the scientific literature, including the very literature it cites and conclusions of the IPCC. Questions should (but probably won’t) be asked about how a major scientific assessment has apparently became captured as a tool of advocacy via misrepresentation of the scientific literature — a phenomena that occurs repeated in the area of extreme events. Given the strength of the science on this subject, the USGCRP must have gone to some effort to mischaracterize it by 180 degrees. How is it that it got things so wrong? --Roger Pielke Jr., 15 January 2013 But what if climate change isn’t the disaster we fear but instead one more obstacle that humans can meet, one that may spur innovation and creativity as well as demand ever more resilience? What if it ultimately improves life as we know it? --Zacharay Karabell, “Climate Change Doesn’t Have To Be All Bad", Reuters, 14 January 2013 The gravest danger to Earth these days isn’t climate skepticism; it’s the broken, Malthusian and statist green policy imagination. Wedded to grandiose and unworkable “solutions”, greens feel they must push the panic button at every opportunity to stampede the world into embracing an unworkable and unsustainable policy agenda. It won’t work. The Al Gore path (alarmism, hypocrisy, dumb policy solutions, green pig lipsticking or corporate subsidies disguised as green breakthroughs) will not bend the curve. --Walter Russell Mead, Via Meadia, 12 January 2013 1) New Met Office Botch: Climate Scientists Get The Stratosphere Wrong - The Resilient Earth, 15 January 2013 2) How Did US Climate Scientists Get Floods 100% Wrong? - Roger Pielke Jr., 15 January 2013 3) The Relentless Collapse of Climate Hysteria - Power Line, 14 January 2013 4) Walter Russell Mead: Green Misread The Climate Tea Leaves - Via Meadia, 12 January 2013 1) New Met Office Botch: Climate Scientists Get The Stratosphere Wrong The Resilient Earth, 15 January 2013 Doug Hoffman Time and again the proponents of catastrophic climate change use the mantra of “settled science” to shout down their critics. This is nothing less than blind faith that science actually knows what is going on in the complex environment that regulates this planet’s climate. Imagine a part of that system that is literally only 10km from anywhere on Earth, a component of our environment that science thought it understood quite well. Now imagine the embarrassment when a major review in a noted journal finds that previous datasets associated with this component are wrong and have been wrong for more than a quarter of a century. Yet that is precisely what has happened. The area in question is Earth’s stratosphere and the impact of this report is devastating for climate scientists and atmospheric modelers everywhere. Scientists have been launching instrument packages into the upper portions of Earth’s atmosphere for a long time. Instruments used for such research were standardized decades ago and programs to collect such data on a world wide basis put into place. If any part of atmospheric science was considered well in hand, if not actually “settled” (a phrase seldom used by real scientists) it would be the long term monitoring of global stratospheric temperatures. However, a report in the 29 November 2012 issue of Nature, “The mystery of recent stratospheric temperature trends,” says that things are not so. The perspective article by David Thompson, et al., reports that what we thought we knew well we hardly knew at all. A new data set of middle- and upper-stratospheric temperatures indicates that our view of stratospheric climate change during the period 1979–2005 is strikingly wrong. Furthermore, “[t]he new data call into question our understanding of observed stratospheric temperature trends and our ability to test simulations of the stratospheric response to emissions of greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting substances.” What is particularly troublesome about this report is the scope of the damage done. The problem involves two different sets of historical data from two respected agencies: the UK Met Office and America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). How significant the error and the puzzlement over what to do about it is shown in the article’s title, where it is referred to as a mystery. The background of the problem is stated by the authors this way: The surface temperature record extends for over a century and is derived from multiple data sources. In contrast, the stratospheric temperature record spans only a few decades and is derived from a handful of data sources. Radiosonde (weather balloon) measurements are available in the lower stratosphere but do not extend to the middle and upper stratosphere. Lidar (light detection and ranging) measurements extend to the middle and upper stratosphere but have very limited spatial and temporal sampling. By far the most abundant observations of long-term stratospheric temperatures are derived from satellite measurements of long-wave radiation emitted by Earth’s atmosphere. The longest-running records of remotely sensed stratospheric temperatures are provided by the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU), the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU), and the Stratospheric Sounding Unit (SSU). The SSU and MSU instruments were flown onboard a consecutive series of seven NOAA polar-orbiting satellites that partially overlap in time from late 1978 to 2006; the AMSU instruments have been flown onboard NOAA satellites from mid-1998 to the present day. The widely accepted, continuous record of temperatures in the middle and upper stratosphere going back to 1979 was based exclusively on SSU data. The SSU data were originally processed for climate analysis by scientists at the UK Met Office in the 1980s and further revised as newer satellite data became available in 2008. Here is were things begin to get a bit dodgy. There are rules that scientists must follow in order for their work to be judged valid. The work must be done openly, transparently—there can be no secret steps or hidden incantations. This is because the work must be reproducible, not just by those who originated it but by outsiders as well. Things began going off the rails when NOAA recently reprocessed the SSU temperatures and published the full processing methodology and the resulting data in the peer-reviewed literature. This is as it should be, NOAA followed the rules. But it soon became obvious that there were grave discrepancies between the new NOAA data and the older Met Office data. Time series of monthly mean, global-mean stratospheric temperature anomalies. The global-mean cooling in the middle stratosphere, around 25–45 km in altitude, is nearly twice as large in the NOAA data set as it is in the Met Office data set (see the figure) The differences between the NOAA and Met Office global-mean time series do not occur in a single discrete period of time, but begin around 1985 to increase until the end of the record. According to the Nature article: “The differences between the NOAA and Met Office global-mean time series shown in Fig. 1 are so large they call into question our fundamental understanding of observed temperature trends in the middle and upper stratosphere.” How did the Met Office get their data so wrong? Well there’s the rub. You see, the methodology used to develop the Met Office SSU product was never published in the peer-reviewed literature, and certain aspects of the original processing “remain unknown.” Evidently the boffins at the Met didn’t bother to write down exactly how they were massaging the raw data to get the results they reported. Indeed, those who did the data manipulation seem to have mostly retired. “The methodology used to generate the original Met Office SSU data remains undocumented and so the climate community are unable to explain the large discrepancies between the original Met Office and NOAA SSU products highlighted here,” Thompson et al. summarize. And the damage doesn’t stop there. The data from the erroneous dataset has been used widely to help drive and define computer climate models, the same models used to prop-up alarmist claims of impending catastrophic climate change. According to the report: “Two classes of climate models commonly used in simulations of past climate are coupled chemistry–climate models (CCMs) and coupled atmosphere–ocean global climate models (AOGCMs). By definition, the CCMs explicitly simulate stratospheric chemical processes, whereas the AOGCMs explicitly simulate coupled atmosphere–ocean interactions… A key distinction between the model classes that is pertinent to this discussion is that in general the CCMs resolve the stratosphere more fully than do the AOGCMs.” One of the predictions made by climate models is that as surface temperatures rise temperatures in the stratosphere should drop. Precisely why this should be so is complex and not important to the point being made here. Suffice it to say, the Met Office version of the SSU data suggests that the models overestimate the observed stratospheric cooling, whereas the NOAA SSU data suggest that the models underestimate it. As the authors put it: If the new NOAA SSU data are correct, they suggest that the stratospheric mass circulation is accelerating at a rate considerably higher than that predicted by the CCMs, at least in the middle and upper stratosphere (that is, at the altitudes sampled by the SSU instrument). Again, it is possible that the models are correct and that the SSU data are in error. But the fact that the discrepancies between the magnitudes of the simulated and observed cooling in the tropical stratosphere extend to MSU channel 4, which samples the lower stratosphere and exhibits trends that are fairly reproducible from one data set to the next suggest that model uncertainties should not be discounted. The bottom line here is that models based on this almost universally accepted data are wrong. “If the NOAA SSU data are correct, then both the CCMVal2 and CMIP5 models are presumably missing key changes in stratospheric composition,” the report plainly states. The article goes on to suggest corrective actions to prevent such a travesty being repeated in the future. Alas, the damage has already been done. What is documented here is simply astounding. That which was thought to be understood is found to be misunderstood. Readings thought to be accurate are shown to be inaccurate. How the data were derived is found to be a secret now lost. The impact of the bogus data ripples through past results and, in particular, climate models, rendering old assumptions invalid. What was that line again about “settled science?” This is an egregious example of sloppy science, slipshod science, bad science. How other climate scientists blindly accepted the Met Office’s manufactured data, even when their models could not be reconciled with nature, leads one to question the scientific integrity of many of those in the field. This is not acceptable behavior in any realm of scientific endeavor, and when the results of research are used to inflame the public and drive questionable socioeconomic programs the malfeasance could be considered criminal. This is what happens when the race for fame, government funding and political advantage collide with science—the validity of the science is destroyed. Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. 2) How Did US Climate Scientists Get Floods 100% Wrong? Roger Pielke Jr., 15 January 2013 The US Global Change Research Program has released a draft national assessment on climate change (here in PDF) and its impacts in the United States, as required by The US Global Change Research Act of 1990 (which incidentally was the subject of my 1994 PhD dissertation). There has been much excitement and froth in the media. Here I explain that in an area where I have expertise on, extremes and their impacts, the report is well out of step with the scientific literature, including the very literature it cites and conclusions of the IPCC. Questions should (but probably won’t) be asked about how a major scientific assessment has apparently became captured as a tool of advocacy via misrepresentation of the scientific literature — a phenomena that occurs repeated in the area of extreme events. Yes, it is a draft and could be corrected, but a four-year effort by the nation’s top scientists should be expected to produce a public draft report of much higher quality than this. Since these are strong allegations, let me illustrate my concerns with a specific example from the draft report, and here I will focus on the example of floods, but the problems in the report are more systemic than just this one case. What the USGCRP report says: Infrastructure across the U.S. is being adversely affected by phenomena associated with climate change, including sea level rise, storm surge, heavy downpours, and extreme heat… Floods along the nation’s rivers, inside cities, and on lakes following heavy downpours, prolonged rains, and rapid melting of snowpack are damaging infrastructure in towns and cities, farmlands, and a variety of other places across the nation. The report clearly associates damage from floods with climate change driven by human activities. This is how the draft was read and amplified by The New York Times: [T]he document minces no words. “Climate change is already affecting the American people,” declares the opening paragraph of the report, issued under the auspices of the Global Change Research Program, which coordinates federally sponsored climate research. “Certain types of weather events have become more frequent and/or intense, including heat waves, heavy downpours, and, in some regions, floods and droughts.” To underscore its conclusion, the draft report includes the figure at the top of this post (from Hirsch and Ryberg 2011), which shows flood trends in different regions of the US. In a remarkable contrast to the draft USGCRP report, here is what Hirsch and Ryberg (2011) actually says: The coterminous US is divided into four large regions and stationary bootstrapping is used to evaluate if the patterns of these statistical associations are significantly different from what would be expected under the null hypothesis that flood magnitudes are independent of GM [global mean] CO2. In none of the four regions defined in this study is there strong statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing with increasing GMCO2. Got that? In no US region is there strong statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing with increasing CO2. This is precisely the opposite of the conclusion expressed in the draft report, which relies on Hirsch and Ryberg (2011) to express the opposite conclusion. Want more? Here is what IPCC SREX, the recent assessment of extreme events, says (here in PDF): There is limited to medium evidence available to assess climate-driven observed changes in the magnitude and frequency of floods at regional scales because the available instrumental records of floods at gauge stations are limited in space and time, and because of confounding effects of changes in land use and engineering. Furthermore, there is low agreement in this evidence, and thus overall low confidence at the global scale regarding even the sign of these changes. The SREX is consistent with the scientific literature — neither detection (of trends) nor attribution (of trends to human forcing of the climate system) has been achieved at the global — much less regional or subregional — levels. Yet, USGCRP concludes otherwise. The leaked IPCC AR5 SOD reaffirms the SREX report and says (here in PDF), in addition to documenting a signal of earlier snowmelt in streamflows, no such signal of increasing floods has been found: There continues to be a lack of evidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale The IPCC has accurately characterized the underlying literature: Observations to date provide no conclusive and general proof as to how climate change affects flood behaviour Given the strength of the science on this subject, the USGCRP must have gone to some effort to mischaracterize it by 180 degrees. In areas where I have expertise, the flood example presented here is not unique in the report (e.g., Hurricane Sandy is mentioned 31 times). Do note that just because the report is erroroneous in areas where I have expertise does not mean that it is incorrect in other conclusions. However, given the problematic and well-documented treatment of extremes in earlier IPCC and US government reports, I'd think that the science community would have its act together by now and stop playing such games. So while many advocates in science and the media shout "Alarm" and celebrate its depiction of extremes, another question we should be asking is, how is it that it got things so wrong? Either the IPCC and the scientific literature is in error, or the draft USGCRP assessment is -- But don't take my word for it, check it out for yourself. 3) The Relentless Collapse of Climate Hysteria Power Line, 14 January 2013 Steven Hayward The steady, relentless collapse of the climate campaign proceeds apace, notwithstanding the sugar high climate campaigners enjoyed after Hurricane Sandy and Obama’s re-election. Obama promises that a price on carbon is a main objective of his second term, but given that it is an Obama promise, climate campaigners should understand they’ve just been given the kiss of death. The media is slowly starting to give up on the whole game. The New York Times has decided to break up its entire environmental unit and reassign reporters to other beats. A lot of climateers are striking their best Kevin Bacon “All-is-well” poses (from Animal House), but this looks to me just like what happened around the time of 9/11, when urban affairs reporters who couldn’t stop churning our five-part features on how suburban sprawl was ruining St. Louis (or plug in your own local metropolis) were reassigned to other beats. I went from getting two or three calls a month from reporters working on sprawl to none almost overnight. Andy Revkin, one of the better Times reporters, is trying to be upbeat but is concerned. James Delingpole can’t resist a beatdown, in “Now Even Pravda Admits the Global Warming Jig Is Up”: Rumours that the entire environment team, headed by Andy Revkin, have volunteered to be recycled into compost and spread on the lawn of the new billion dollar home Al Gore bought with the proceeds of his sale of Current TV to Middle Eastern oil interests are as yet unconfirmed. What we do know is that it’s very, very sad and that all over the Arctic baby polar bears are weeping bitter tears of regret. A spokesman for the New York Times, quoted in the Guardian, has reaffirmed the paper’s commitment to environmental issues. “We devote a lot of resources to it, now more than ever. We have not lost any desire for environmental coverage. This is purely a structural matter.” Absolutely. It’s what newspapers always do when they’re committed to a particular field: close down the entire department responsible for covering it. Not to be left behind, Reuters has decided that it may as well switch sides completely, with a feature today that “Climate Change Doesn’t Have To Be All Bad.” Reuters’ Zacharay Karabell writes: But what if climate change isn’t the disaster we fear but instead one more obstacle that humans can meet, one that may spur innovation and creativity as well as demand ever more resilience? What if it ultimately improves life as we know it? Keep writing like that and Reuters will be attacked for joining the “S” (skeptic) team. Expect more of these kind of “contrarian” news articles to appear as the media covers up the fact that it is saying, “Never mind.” And if the climate campaign wasn’t already in denial about being abandoned by The One, their media allies, and new carbon riches baron Al Gorezeera, a new report coming out this week from Harvard’s Theta Skocpol should really harsh their mellow. Skocpol, a prominent liberal political scientist, argues that environmentalists deserve most of the blame for the defeat of their agenda. (Hmmm, they could have saved themselves a lot of time and trouble by just reading Power Line.) Here’s some of Skocpol’s assessment: Meanwhile, political consultants and public relations wordsmiths urged environmentalists to redouble euphemistic locutions already deployed during the cap and trade battle – to talk about “green jobs,” “threats to public health,” and the need to “reduce dependence on foreign oil to bolster national defense,” anything but the threat of global warming and catastrophic climate upheavals. Such advice tailed off during the record heat-waves of the summer of 2012; and after Hurricane Sandy devastated the East Coast shortly before the November elections, the New York media openly connected global warming to the unusual late autumn mega- storm. Some environmentalists declared that politicians are now bound to take up the issue.This almost certainly overstates the likelihood of sustained official attention. It’s that last sentence that really hurts. Just how many Green Weenie Awards can these guys win? I’m sure this won’t be the last. 4) Walter Russell Mead: Green Misread The Climate Tea Leaves Via Meadia, 12 January 2013 The gravest danger to Earth these days isn’t climate skepticism; it’s the broken, Malthusian and statist green policy imagination. In recent days we’ve been hearing a lot of hysterical chatter, from the NYT, the National Geographic, and other mediaoutlets—about how 2012 was the hottest year ever for the continental United States. Obviously, this is evidence that global warming will soon destroy us all: Scientists said that natural variability almost certainly played a role in last year’s extreme heat and drought. But many of them expressed doubt that such a striking new record would have been set without the backdrop of global warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases. And they warned that 2012 was probably a foretaste of things to come, as continuing warming makes heat extremes more likely. Meanwhile, in China, the FT reports the country is having its coldest winter in thirty years, leading to a sharp rise in food prices. India too has had a terribly cold winter. And in the Middle East, a snowstorm has been sweeping across the region and even hit Saudi Arabia, in an usually cold and wet winter for the area. As we’ve said before, whenever it’s especially warm out, alarmists take that as decisive evidence of our impending doom. When it’s cold or normal, they dismiss it as mere “weather,” if they mention it at all. For much of the green movement, weather only counts as climate when it proves their arguments. A heat wave in Australia is proof that immense disasters are about to strike; cold waves in Eastern Europe and India that kill hundreds of people mean nothing at all. Via Meadia accepts the growing consensus that human actions are playing a role in climate change, but the habit of reading every warm spike and every storm as fresh confirmation of the coming apocalypse needs to stop. It’s bad science and it’s bad politics. Green hysteria is more likely to paralyze us then help us take the kind of steps we need to take towards sustainability. The gravest danger to Earth these days isn’t climate skepticism; it’s the broken, Malthusian and statist green policy imagination. Wedded to grandiose and unworkable “solutions”, greens feel they must push the panic button at every opportunity to stampede the world into embracing an unworkable and unsustainable policy agenda. It won’t work. The Al Gore path (alarmism, hypocrisy, dumb policy solutions, green pig lipsticking or corporate subsidies disguised as green breakthroughs) will not bend the curve. Until the green movement internalizes this lesson and moves on, it will waste its energy on foolishness like the failed Kyoto Protocol and ethanol subsidies and greens will have little constructive impact on a planet they claim to love.

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Met Office says no warming.

Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. HOME WHO WE ARE LATEST POSTINGS GWPF REPORTS PRESS RELEASES VIDEOS CONTACT CCNet 07/01/13 Met Office Forecasts No Global Temperature Rise Global Warming Standstill May Last For 20 Years The UK Met Office has revised its global temperature predictions as a result of a new version of its climate model and climate simulations using it. It now believes that global temperatures up to 2017 will most likely be 0.43 deg C above the 1971 -2000 average, with an error of +/- 0.15 deg C. In reality this is a forecast of no increase in global temperatures above current levels. If the latest Met Office prediction is correct, and it accords far more closely with the observed data than previous predictions, then it will prove to be a lesson in humility. It will show that the previous predictions that were given so confidently as advice to the UK government and so unquestioningly accepted by the media, were wrong, and that the so-called sceptics who were derided for questioning them were actually on the right track. --David Whitehouse, The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 7 January 2013 I argue that the greenhouse effect does not seem to be as significant as suggested. I personally feel that the likelihood over the next century of greenhouse warming reaching magnitudes comparable to natural variability seems small. And I certainly feel that there is time and need for research before making major policy decisions. It seems to me that if science doesn’t have integrity, it isn’t of much use to people. --Richard Lindzen, MIT Talk, 27 September 1989 The stupidest international agreement since the Treaty of Versailles expired at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Fifteen years after its launch, the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change died a miserable failure. Few are likely to mourn. In Britain, however, the Government remains wedded to a post-Kyoto strategy, and along with the rest of the EU has agreed to ‘extend’ the treaty’s provisions. British policy, enshrined in the current Energy Bill, is being driven not by evidence but by irrational dogma, and to question it is to be accused of endangering the planet. In reality, a disaster of a different kind looms: years of chronic impoverishment while competitors roar ahead and world CO2 emissions rise unchecked. Welcome to the British industrial counter-revolution. --David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 6 January 2013 Not that anyone has noticed, but the Kyoto Protocol expired on 31 December, with carbon emissions up by 58% over 1990 levels – instead the 5% cut the signatories envisaged. All that fuss for worse-than-nothing. Kyoto has not been replaced, because a new era of climate change rationalism is slowly taking root. As Nigel Lawson predicted, the hysteria of the last few years is cooling. There’s no point legislating for change that’s not going to happen. --Fraser Nelson, The Spectator, 6 January 2013 Did you know that the Earth is getting greener, quite literally? Satellites are now confirming that the amount of green vegetation on the planet has been increasing for three decades. This will be news to those accustomed to alarming tales about deforestation, overdevelopment and ecosystem destruction. --Matt Ridley, The Wall Street Journal, 5 January 2013 1) David Whitehouse: Met Office Forecasts No Global Temperature Rise - The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 7 January 2013 2) Richard Lindzen’s 23-Year Old Forecast - Fabius Maximus, 7 January 2013 3) David Rose: Welcome To The British Industrial Counter-Revolution - Mail on Sunday, 6 January 2013 4) How Oliver Letwin Lost His Kyoto Bet With Nigel Lawson - The Spectator, 6 January 2013 5) Matt Ridley: How Fossil Fuels Have Greened The Planet - The Wall Street Journal, 5 January 2013 6) And Finally: The Handy All Weather Is Extreme Climate Barometer - Josh 192 - Bishop Hill, 6 January 2013 1) David Whitehouse: Met Office Forecasts No Global Temperature Rise The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 7 January 2013 The UK Met Office has revised its global temperature predictions as a result of a new version of its climate model and climate simulations using it. It now believes that global temperatures up to 2017 will most likely be 0.43 deg C above the 1971 -2000 average, with an error of +/- 0.15 deg C. In reality this is a forecast of no increase in global temperatures above current levels. The new forecast produced by the UK Met Office for the next five years is a considerable change from forecasts given in the past few years. An excellent comparison between the new and older forecasts can be found here. It is worth comparing the current forecast with that made just five years ago. In 2007 The Met Office Hadley Centre reported to the UK Government that it had pioneered a new system to predict the climate a decade ahead. It said that the system simulated both the human-driven climate change and the evolution of slow natural variations already locked into the system. “We are now using the system to predict changes out to 2014. By the end of this period, the global average temperature is expected to have risen by around 0.3 °C compared to 2004, and half of the years after 2009 are predicted to be hotter than the current record hot year, 1998.” Given that we have data for three of the five years of that period and all show no departure from a constant temperature when analysed statistically, this is a prediction that will probably be totally wrong. In any case it is completely at odds with the new forecast. We were also told that the recent temperature standstill was unimportant and that the underlying rate of global temperature increase continued at a constant 0.2 deg C per decade. This, as we pointed out, is only true if one considered decadal averages. If one considers 5-year averages then one arrives at a very different conclusion. The new prediction challenges that assertion that the underlying rate of change of global warming is unchanged. According to the IPCC and the Met Office the unchanging 0.2 deg C underlying rate of global warming should have resulted in a 0.4 deg C rise in global temperature between 1997 -2017. That this has not happened is because of a global cooling offset that has precisely kept pace with the greenhouse gas forcing that wants to raise the Earth’s temperature every year. We have pointed out that this equivalence of the warming and cooling factors, and their associated feedbacks, is not just an average but also a year on year balancing act. This behaviour is scientifically suspicious. That the global temperature standstill (observed from 1997 to the present) could continue to at least 2017 would mean a 20-year period of no statistically significant change in global temperatures. Such a period of no increase coming at a time when greenhouse gas forcing is rising will pose fundamental problems for climate models. If the latest Met Office prediction is correct, and it accords far more closely with the observed data than previous predictions, then it will prove to be a lesson in humility. It will show that the previous predictions that were given so confidently as advice to the UK government and so unquestioningly accepted by the media, were wrong, and that the so-called sceptics who were derided for questioning them were actually on the right track. Feedback: mailto:david.whitehouse@thegwpf.org 2) Richard Lindzen’s 23-Year Old Forecast Fabius Maximus, 7 January 2013 We’ve looked at plenty of false (or at least temporarily not proven) forecasts by American experts about wars and climate. The rule seems to be that political correctness is rewarded, irrespective of accuracy. Today we look at a speech made 23 years ago by a MIT professor. It looks good today, still accurate despite the advances in climate science. Furthermore his forecast of no warming larger than natural variability during the next century has proven accurate so far — after 23 years have elapsed. (1) Contempt for science One of the great oddities of the debate about climate science is the contempt for scientists displayed by the lay cheerleaders on both sides. Scientists are authorities, unless they disagree with the true dogma — then they’re fools and charlatans. Previous posts looked at forecasts that have proved false, or not correct so far. Today we look at a speech made 23 years ago by a MIT professor. It looks good today, still accurate despite the advances in climate science. Furthermore his forecast of no warming larger than natural variability during the next century has proven accurate so far — after 23 years have elapsed. Speech by Richard Lindzen In M.I.T. Tech Talk of 27 September 1989 Eugene F. Mallove describes a presentation by Richard Lindzen (Prof of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, MIT) to an audience of 250 scientists at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Colloquium. (a) Key Points “I argue that the greenhouse effect does not seem to be as significant as suggested.” “I personally feel that the likelihood over the next century of greenhouse warming reaching magnitudes comparable to natural variability seems small.” “And I certainly feel that there is time and need for research before making major policy decisions.” The science of global warming is “a region in which the uncertainty is vast.” “The trouble with many of these {temperature} records is that the corrections are of the order of the effects, and most of us know that when we’re in that boat we need a long series and great care to derive a meaningful signal.” (b) About the natural variability of climate “Climate inherently has a natural variability that is often attributed to possible variations in solar output, volcanic dust, etc. The point we have to keep in mind is that without any of this at all our climate would wander — at least within limits. The reason is that we don’t have a closed system. “Even if the Sun’s output were fixed, even if the radiative input were absolutely constant, even if there were no change in the absorbing gases, the ocean itself can take up and store heat and release it. It has a stable layer that normally does not communicate with lower levels, but every so often there is upwelling that suddenly presents the atmosphere and the surface world with an erratic energy source.” (c) About Water “Water is terrifically absorptive. We see the bumps [in the absorption spectrum] from CO2 and ozone and methane only because they occur in a window of the water vapor absorption spectrum. Water vapor is far and away the most important greenhouse gas, except for one form which isn’t a greenhouse gas: clouds. Clouds themselves as liquid water are as important to the infrared budget as water vapor. Both swamp by orders of magnitude all the others. With CO2 one is talking about three watts per square meter at most, compared to a hundred or more watts per square meter for water. “… Upper level humidity — especially above 5 kilometers–is rather important and the models are lousy at handling this. In the models, most warming comes from the increase in water that accompanies the warming. Whether such an increase in water vapor above 5 kilometers actually accompanies warming is doubtful. “We don’t know how to calculate cloudiness. Some studies have found that the dominant radiative effect of clouds is cooling. Only a few percent change in cloud cover will more than swamp the estimated CO2 effect, he suggested. In the current models, for reasons that puzzle almost everyone, the cloud feedbacks are positive rather than negative. That is, they increase the temperature. “There are other tricky things that no one has explored. One example: the feedback through albedo — the reflectivity of the Earth such as can be affected by snow cover. In the models this feedback is positive, but it could as well be negative in certain ranges of temperature. On the planet the most wonderful constituent is water with its remarkable thermodynamic properties. It’s the obvious candidate for the thermostat of our system, and yet in most of these models, all water-related feedbacks are positive. I don’t think we would have existed if that were true.” (d) About political use of science Comparing the greenhouse warming debate to an earlier controversy, in his 1988 book Infinite in All Directions Freeman Dyson (Wikipedia bio) wrote: As a scientist I want to rip the theory of nuclear winter apart, but as a human being I want to believe it. This is one of the rare instances of a genuine conflict between the demands of science and the demands of humanity. As a scientist, I judge the nuclear winter theory to be a sloppy piece of work, full of gaps and unjustified assumptions. As a human being, I hope fervently that it is right. Here is a real and uncomfortable dilemma. What does a scientist do when science and humanity pull in opposite directions? Lindzen said about this: “It seems to me that if science doesn’t have integrity, it isn’t of much use to people.” Full story 3) David Rose: Welcome To The British Industrial Counter-Revolution Mail on Sunday, 6 January 2013 The stupidest international agreement since the Treaty of Versailles expired at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Fifteen years after its launch, the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change died a miserable failure. Few are likely to mourn. According to Kyoto’s authors, it should by now have triggered a five per cent fall in the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. In fact, they have risen by 58 per cent because the world’s faster-growing economies never ratified Kyoto at all, nor the drastic cuts in the use of fossil fuel it prescribed. China, America, Brazil and India simply ignored it, while Canada, New Zealand and Russia, although initially committed, later cast it aside. In Britain, however, the Government remains wedded to a post-Kyoto strategy, and along with the rest of the EU has agreed to ‘extend’ the treaty’s provisions. One consequence of this is the new Energy Bill, which by 2020 will triple the subsidies paid by taxpayers and consumers to ‘renewable’ energy suppliers to £7.6 billion a year. The bungs paid to operate offshore wind turbines – the most expensive form of energy ever devised – will rise 16-fold to an annual £4.2 billion. The hated onshore turbines will also get huge new subsidies, at least doubling their number to about 6,500. Even this underestimates the Bill’s full burden, which is closer to £110 billion. Among its enormous further costs are those which will be incurred by the inconvenient fact that wind turbines make electricity for only a third of the time. Replacing coal or ageing nuclear stations with wind requires new back-up capacity powered by gas at the same time – though this itself will be uneconomic because when the wind is blowing it will have to be switched off. Meanwhile, as Oxford University’s Professor Dieter Helm points out in his recent book, The Carbon Crunch, Britain’s claim to stand as a shining example of emissions rectitude is bogus. Yes, the UK’s own production of CO2 fell by 15 per cent between 1990 and 2005, but this was achieved only by exporting British industries to countries such as China, where on average two new power stations fuelled by coal – by far the dirtiest type – come on stream each week. Taking this into account, writes Prof Helm, means the emissions caused by UK economic activity rose by 19 per cent. It doesn’t matter whether one is a global warming sceptic, or an alarmist: considered either as an effective means of cutting world CO2 emissions, or as a way to restart growth, Britain’s energy strategy is self-defeating. And however much subsidy existing renewable technology gets, it will never be enough. [....] British policy, enshrined in the current Bill, is being driven not by evidence but by irrational dogma, and to question it is to be accused of endangering the planet. Only this explains the ferocity of opposition to fracking. In reality, a disaster of a different kind looms: years of chronic impoverishment while competitors roar ahead and world CO2 emissions rise unchecked. Welcome to the British industrial counter-revolution. Full story 4) How Oliver Letwin Lost His Kyoto Bet With Nigel Lawson The Spectator, 6 January 2013 Fraser Nelson “Shall I send a cheque to the House of Lords?” Letwin asked Lawson Not that anyone has noticed, but the Kyoto Protocol expired on 31 December, with carbon emissions up by 58% over 1990 levels – instead the 5% cut the signatories envisaged. All that fuss for worse-than-nothing. Kyoto has not been replaced, because a new era of climate change rationalism is slowly taking root. As Nigel Lawson predicted, the hysteria of the last few years is cooling. There’s no point legislating for change that’s not going to happen. No point taxing the poor out of the sky (or off the roads) if it won’t make the blindest bit of difference to the trajectory of global warming. To be sure, countries responsible for 15pc of emissions have signed an extension of Kyoto. But the main players have drawn a veil over this rather hysterical chapter in the great energy debate. Even David Cameron has gone cold on warming. In 2006, the Prime Minister captured the mood with his husky dog trip to Svalbard and advised people to “vote blue and go green”. Nigel Lawson, ex-editor of The Spectator, told Cameron’s policy chief Oliver Letwin that this mania would pass – and, crucially, that Kyoto would expire without any successor. In his column in this week’s magazine, Martin Vander Weyer reveals a conversation he had with Lord Lawson over Christmas where the ex-Chancellor revealed that he:- …bet Oliver Letwin — now David Cameron’s policy co-ordinator — that the Kyoto Protocol on carbon reduction would reach its expiry date on 31 December 2012 without a substantial successor treaty being signed to enforce binding cutbacks in emissions. ‘There has been no new agreement, let alone a “substantial” one,’ declares Lawson, brandishing an email from Letwin that concludes: ‘Shall I send a cheque to the House of Lords?’ The irony is that the rich countries are anyway modifying their behaviour, as greener shale gas becomes more widely available. As we said in the leading article of the Christmas double issue: While the rich world’s economies grew by 6 per cent over the last seven years, fossil fuel consumption in those countries fell by 4 per cent. This remarkable (and, again, unreported) achievement has nothing to do with green taxes or wind farms. It is down to consumer demand for more efficient cars and factories. So there is no more talk from the government about “leading a new green revolution in Britain.” Instead we have the much more sensible Osborne doctrine, revealed in the 2011 Tory conference. The central tenet is very clear:- “Let’s at the very least resolve that we’re going to cut our carbon emissions no slower but also no faster than our fellow countries in Europe.” Under the Climate Change Act, as it is currently structured, the government is legally bound to cut Britain’s carbon emissions by 34 per cent by the end of this decade. The rest of the EU, on the other hand, has only committed to 20 per cent. So the Climate Change Act needs revision. Kyoto shows that all this pious summitry succeeds in nothing more than raising new taxes (which usually hit the poorest hardest). America shows that new technology and greater efficiency is the best way of dealing with the energy problem. It may pain the environmentalists to admit it, but fracking may yet do more to stem carbon emissions than Kyoto ever did. 5) Matt Ridley: How Fossil Fuels Have Greened The Planet The Wall Street Journal, 5 January 2013 Did you know that the Earth is getting greener, quite literally? Satellites are now confirming that the amount of green vegetation on the planet has been increasing for three decades. This will be news to those accustomed to alarming tales about deforestation, overdevelopment and ecosystem destruction. This possibility was first suspected in 1985 by Charles Keeling, the scientist whose meticulous record of the content of the air atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii first alerted the world to the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Mr. Keeling’s famous curve showed not only a year-by-year increase in carbon dioxide levels but a season-by-season oscillation in the concentration. John S. Dykes Satellites show that the amount of green vegetation has been increasing or three decades straight. During summers in the Northern Hemisphere, the Earth breathes in carbon dioxide as green plants (most of which are north of the equator) absorb the gas and turn it into carbohydrate. In the northern winter, the Earth breathes the gas out again, as the summer’s leaves rot. Mr. Keeling and colleagues noticed that the depth of the breathing had increased in Hawaii by 20% since the 1960s: The Earth was taking in more carbon dioxide each northern summer and giving out more each winter. Since the inhalation is done by green leaves, they reasoned, the amount of greenery on the planet must be growing larger. In the 1980s forest biologists started to report striking increases in the growth rates of trees and the density of forests: in Douglas firs in British Columbia, Scots pines in Finland, bristlecone pines in Colorado and even tropical rain forests. Around the same time, a NASA scientist named Compton Tucker found that he could map global vegetation changes by calculating a “Normalized Difference Vegetation Index” (NDVI) from the data produced by a satellite sensor. The data confirmed Mr. Keeling’s suspicion: Greenery was on the increase. At first, this was thought to be a northern phenomenon, caused by faster growth in the great spruce and birch forests of Siberia and Canada, but the satellites showed it was happening all over the world and especially strongly in the Amazon and African rain forests. Using the NDVI, one team this year reported that “over the last few decades of the 20th century, terrestrial ecosystems acted as net carbon sinks,” i.e., they absorbed more carbon than they were emitting, and “net greening was reported in all biomes,” though the effect had slowed down in recent years. The latest and most detailed satellite data, which is yet to be published but was summarized in an online lecture last July by Ranga Myneni of Boston University, confirms that the greening of the Earth has now been going on for 30 years. Between 1982 and 2011, 20.5% of the world’s vegetated area got greener, while just 3% grew browner; the rest showed no change. What explains this trend? Man-made nitrogen fertilizer causes crops to grow faster, but it is having little effect on forests. There are essentially two possibilities: climate and carbon dioxide itself. Warmer, wetter weather should cause more vegetation to grow. But even without warming, an increase in carbon dioxide should itself accelerate growth rates of plants. CO2 is a scarce resource that plants have trouble scavenging from the air, and plants grow faster with higher levels of CO2 to inhale. Dr. Myneni reckons that it is now possible to distinguish between these two effects in the satellite data, and he concludes that 50% is due to “relaxation of climate constraints,” i.e., warming or rainfall, and roughly 50% is due to carbon dioxide fertilization itself. In practice, the two interact. A series of experiments has found that plants tolerate heat better when CO2 levels are higher. The inescapable if unfashionable conclusion is that the human use of fossil fuels has been causing the greening of the planet in three separate ways: first, by displacing firewood as a fuel; second, by warming the climate; and third, by raising carbon dioxide levels, which raise plant growth rates. 6) And Finally: The Handy All Weather Is Extreme Climate Barometer - Josh 192 Bishop Hill, 6 January 2013 Follow on Twitter Forward to Friend Copyright © 2013 Global Warming Policy Foundation, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted into it with your subscription to the GWPF or through CCNet. Our mailing address is: Global Warming Policy Foundation 1 Carlton House Terrace Westminster, London SW1Y 5DB United Kingdom Add us to your address book unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences