Today's Thought

"Why the IPCC has chosen to take a stand on this issue -- to defend the indefensible -- is beyond me. If you truly believe that science is self-correcting and truth wins in the end, then the IPCC has staked out a position that it cannot win on in the long term, no matter how much spin is applied in the short term. Apparently, however the short term has a ways yet to run..."

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Roger Pielke Jr
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"Notable Quotes"

"So to summarize: Contrary to its procedures the IPCC chose to emphasize a paper that was not peer reviewed to support claims that were contrary to all of the peer reviewed literature on this topic. The IPCC created (or had others create) a graph that appeared nowhere in the literature and was highly misleading. When the paper was eventually published several years later as a book chapter, it was revised in such a substantial fashion so as to eliminate unambiguously any basis for the claims that had been made by the IPCC justified by the earlier version of the paper.

The claims made by the IPCC about the relationship of disasters and climate change, expressed most clearly in the figure above, were not simply made in violation of IPCC procedures. The claims were not just wrong. The claims were based on knowledge that just doesn't exist. Again, not good. "

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Roger Pielke Jr
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Stormy Times For Global Warmists

Hurricanes, it turns out, are not caused by climate change.

FROM- Forbes

Michael Fumento

The cover of Al Gore's new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, features a satellite image of the globe showing four major hurricanes--results, we're meant to believe, of man-made global warming. All four were photoshopped. Which is nice symbolism, because in a sense the whole hurricane aspect of warming has been photoshopped.

True, both greenhouse gas emissions and levels in the atmosphere are at their highest, but this year had the fewest hurricanes since 1997, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For the first time since 2006 no hurricanes even made landfall in the U.S.; indeed hurricane activity is at a 30-year low.

None of which is really all that remarkable. What's remarkable is that the hurricane hysteria essentially reflects a "trend line" comprising a grand total of two data points in one year, 2005. Those data points were named Katrina and Rita.

In a 2005 column, I gave what now proves an interesting retrospective.

"The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name was global warming." So wrote environmental activist Ross Gelbspan in a New York Times op-ed that one commentator aptly described as "almost giddy." The green group Friends of the Earth linked Katrina to global warming, as did Germany's Green Party Environment Minister.

The most celebrated of these commentaries was Chris Mooney's 2007 book Storm World:Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming. Mooney, for the record, is also author of the best-selling book The Republican War on Science.

Yet there were top scientists in 2005 such as Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, publishing data showing the Rita-Katrina blowhards had no business building a case around two anomalies.

Pielke published a report in the prestigious Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (written before Katrina but published shortly afterward) that analyzed U.S. hurricane damage since 1900. Taking into account tremendous population growth along coastlines, he found no increase. His paper was dutifully ignored by the powers that be.

But the so-called Climategate scandal, which illuminated efforts by climate change scientists to squelch opposition viewpoints, has now caught up to one scientist, Kevin Trenberth, who vociferously and influentially demanded that Pielke's paper be shunned.

Trenberth works in the same town as Pielke and is one of the top researchers on the strongly warmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In a leaked e-mail from two months ago, he admitted to colleagues what he had hidden from the outside world: that there's been no measurable warming over the past decade.

Yet two years earlier he told Congress that evidence for man-made warming was "unequivocal" and things were "apt to get much worse." And in 2005 he told the local newspaper that Pielke's Bulletin article was "shameful" and should be "withdrawn."

"Our paper shouldn't have been controversial," notes Pielke today, "and since then our conclusions have been reinforced by the IPPC." The panel's latest report, from 2007, concluded that whether warming is causing increased hurricane activity is "pretty much a toss of a coin."

Yet Pielke's paper was excluded from that report. Why? Says Pielke, "a scientist at a high level of the IPCC saw fit to disparage a paper in his domain, said it should be ignored by the panel, and subsequently it was." He added, "After seeing [leaked] e-mail discussions in which the scientists talked about keeping literature out of the report ... well, you can connect the dots."

But it wasn't just Trenberth. In one of the hacked e-mails, Phil Jones, director of the British climate center from which the e-mails were stolen (and who has since resigned) wrote to colleagues about Pielke's complaints of not being published, "Maybe you'll be able to ignore them?"

For many millions of American homeowners, the 2005 tempest tirade was hardly just academic. Half a year later, a company called Risk Management Solutions (RMS) issued a five-year forecast of hurricane activity predicting U.S. insured hurricane losses would be 40% higher than the historical average. RMS is the world leader in "catastrophe modeling," and insurance companies use those models to set premium rates charged to homeowners as well as by reinsurance companies and others.

With four years of data in, losses are actually running far below historical levels and at less than half the rate that RMS predicted. A lot of individuals and a lot of companies have grossly overpaid.

This hardly supports rushes to judgment on global warming consequences. "If you overestimate or underestimate risks there will be costs," says Pielke. "It's honesty and accuracy that count."

Michael Fumento is director of the nonprofit Independent Journalism Project, where he specializes in science and health issues


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"this is a big one"

FROM-Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog:

We Lost the Original Data

Steve McIntyre, of ClimateAudit, is a determined individual. While this may be no fun for those who fall under his focus and happen to have something to hide, more sunlight on climate science cannot be a bad thing.

Lately Steve has been spearheading an effort to get the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia to release the data that underlie its analysis of global temperature trends. Such a request should not at all be controversial. Indeed the atmospheric sciences community went to great lengths in the 1990s to ensure that such data would be openly available for research purposes, culminating in World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Resolution 40 on the international exchange of meteorological and related data and products. The Resolution states:

Members should provide to the research and education communities, for their non-commercial activities, free and unrestricted access to all data and productsexchanged under the auspices of WMO . . .

WMO recognized the need to protect commercial activities, but placed no restrictions on the exchange of climate information described as follows:

All reports from the network of stations recommended by the regional associations as necessary to provide a good representation of climate . . .

Obviously, the ability to do good research depends upon good data with known provenance. At the time WMO Resolution 40 was widely hailed in the atmospheric sciences community as a major step forward in data sharing and availability in support of both operations and research.

Thus it is with some surprise to observe CRU going through bizarre contortions to avoid releasing its climate data to Steve McIntyre. They first told him that he couldn't have it because he was not an academic. I found this to be a petty reason for keeping data out of the hands of someone who clearly wants to examine it for scholarly purposes. So, wanting to test this theory I asked CRU for the data myself, being a "real" academic. I received a letter back from CRU stating that I couldn't have the data because "we do not hold the requested information."

I found that odd. How can they not hold the data when they are showing graphs of global temperatures on their webpage? However, it turns out that CRU has in response to requests for its data put up a new webpage with the following remarkable admission (emphasis added):

We are not in a position to supply data for a particular country not covered by the example agreements referred to earlier, as we have never had sufficient resources to keep track of the exact source of each individual monthly value. Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data.

Say what?! CRU has lost track of the original data that it uses to create its global temperature record!? Can this be serious? So not only is it now impossible to replicate or reevaluate homogeneity adjustments made in the past -- which might be important to do as new information is learned about the spatial representativeness of siting, land use effects, and so on -- but it is now also impossible to create a new temperature index from scratch. CRU is basically saying, "trust us." So much for settling questions and resolving debates with empirical information (i.e., science).

To be absolutely clear, none of what I write here should be taken as implying that actions to decarbonize the global economy or improve adaptation do not make sense -- they do. However, just because climate change is important and because there are opponents to action that will seize upon whatever they can to make their arguments, does not justify overlooking or defending this degree of scientific sloppiness and ineptitude. Implementing successful climate policy will have to overcome the missteps of the climate science community, and this is a big one.

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Take off the blinders

Roger Pielke Jr. has a post on the European version of the Cap and Trade called Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) which I have posted below. As he points out and has before many times the way the ETS and our cap and trade are constituted makes them worse than worthless or as he so precisely puts it :

"If the ETS is not driving investment in low carbon technology, then what is the point?"

It should be obvious by now that the people who advance these schemes such as Waxman-Markey are more than willing to compromise the stated goal in order to enact the schemes regardless of their effectiveness. The question isn't "what is the point" of programs like the ETS and Cap and Trade, rather what is the motive of the people who continue to promote them despite the obvious fact that they are not capable of achieving their stated goal?

If we are to be an "Honest Broker" of the facts before us there are only two possibilities. Either the politicians who will continue to promote such flawed plans are too stupid to understand that their schemes will not work, or their motives are not to control emissions but rather to control people, industries and the economy.

Given the fact that these schemes, even if they worked, are still worthless if developing countries will not limit their emissions, then again why bother? Even a stupid politician knows that India and especially China are not going to limit their emissions just because we do. So the obvious answer is that these schemes have nothing to do with curbing emissions but the political control they give the governments which promote them.

I have no great respect for politicians in general but I seriously doubt they are all that stupid. I can only surmise that the promoters of these schemes are not the least bit interested in controlling emissions but rather in controlling me...and you and Roger Pielke Jr. Whether or not he or anyone else wants to admit it, the entire emission control scheme is an exercise in political power having little to do with energy, carbon dioxide, global warming, climate change or any of the countless other Trojan horses being used to mask the truth. The truth is that it is a political power grab on a global scale which ultimately will control not only economies and industries but seriously limit personal liberties.

The sooner people take off the blinders and see the motivations of these people the sooner we can end this nonsense-or not.


FROM- Roger Pielke Jr

ETS Lost at Sea

A British NGO called Sandbag has released a quantitative analysis of the effects of the current recession on the ETS -- Europe's version of cap-and-trade, and has found the program to be seriously flawed. Sandbag claims that (here in PDF),

Targets for the Emissions Trading Scheme were already weak and have now been further undermined. . . At the moment the ETS embodies a reversal of the polluter pays principle, where instead polluters are being paid to do nothing to reduce their emissions.

Their critique rests on the fact that there are too many permits available in the European system to lead to a meaningful cap. Too many permits results from an overallocation and also surplus permits resulting from the current economic recession. Sandbag recommends that the caps be tightened and made more real. Good luck with that.

Tim Yeo, member of the UK Parliament, comments on the report's significance:

These findings confirm what many have begun to suspect. Although emissions trading remains conceptually valid, in practice the EU ETS has not succeeded in driving investment in low-carbon technology.
If the ETS is not driving investment in low carbon technology, then what is the point?

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Ah the good old days of "39"

FROM-Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog

Target 1939: A Case for absolute baseline

There has been some occasional chatter about the use of relative baselines in setting targets for greenhouse gas emissions, with some folks arguing for using a 1990 baseline and others suggesting 2005. How silly. How about just using absolute baselines? The following examples use carbon dioxide emissions.

If the world wants to achieve an 80% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions below 1990 levels this really means returning to 1939 levels of emissions.

For the US, a 17% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions below 2005 levels (such as in the Waxman-Markey Bill) represents a return to about 1990 levels. An 80% reduction represents a return to 1905 levels.

For the United Kingdom, a reduction of 34% from 1990-(its 2022 interim target) represents a return to carbon dioxide emissions of 1896 and an 80% reduction (its 2050 target) represents a return to emissions of 1849. (Wow!)

You can calculate other absolute baselines with the dataset here



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