Prime Minister Rudd, of New Zealand, has decided that climate change skeptics are holding the world to ransom.

Speaking at the Lowy Institute yesterday, Mr Rudd divided the opponents of climate change action into three groups - science sceptics, those who paid lip service to the science but opposed taking action, and the ''wait for others'' group of blockers. He said all were ''quite literally holding the world to ransom'' by provoking fear campaigns in every country they could and blocking or delaying legislation where they could, ''with the objective of slowing and, if possible, destroying the momentum towards a global deal''.



I happily accept any credit he gives on the subject, though I think he's overstating my influence. I recognize that I come from the side of the debate that invokes logic more often. But still, you'd think that he would have figured out which side is demanding money.

As it turns out, math is hard. Physicists, government advisors, environmental journalists, all of them can get trapped in simple math problems, and end up spouting nonsense -- and believing it.

Latest Example:

It came in July, courtesy of the chief climate adviser to the German government. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, chair of an advisory council known by its German acronym, WBGU, is a physicist whose specialty, fittingly, is chaos theory. Speaking to an invitation-only conference at New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute, Schellnhuber divulged the findings of a study so new he had not yet briefed Chancellor Angela Merkel about it. The study has now been published. If its conclusions are correct--and Schellnhuber ranks among the world's half-dozen most eminent climate scientists--it has monumental implications for the pivotal meeting in December in Copenhagen, where world leaders will try to agree on reversing global warming.

Schellnhuber and his WBGU colleagues go a giant step beyond the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body whose scientific reports are constrained because the world's governments must approve their contents. The IPCC says that rich industrial countries must cut emissions 25 to 40 percent by 2020 (from 1990 levels) if the world is to have a fair chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. By contrast, the WBGU study says the United States must cut emissions 100 percent by 2020--i.e., quit carbon entirely within ten years. Germany, Italy and other industrial nations must do the same by 2025 to 2030. China only has until 2035, and the world as a whole must be carbon-free by 2050. The study adds that big polluters can delay their day of reckoning by "buying" emissions rights from developing countries, a step the study estimates would extend some countries' deadlines by a decade or so. [bold mine --.ed]



If you remember percentages, 100% is ALL OF IT. That means, no more cooking, no more breathing, no more driving. Everyone dies. "Carbon free" means everything is dead. You know, I'm not too worried about global warming if the alternative is death. I'll take the heat.

There are problems in basic physics with the "catastrophic climate change" scenario. But if I'm counting on people who can't do percentages to figure it out, I think we're in trouble.

UPDATE: fixed link

Minnesotans for Global Warming, a group that needs your support. They have a nice theme song...

Well, we have an answer. Sadly, it's one that will make you want it to stay bottled up in the Senate, because it's going to cost you in dollars out of your pocket, and raises you'll never see. We start with the economic effects:




And then we get to the dollars out of pocket effects:




With, sad to say, almost no effect:

Climatologists estimate that Waxman-Markey's impact on world temperature will be too small to even measure in the first several decades. The theoretical moderation of world temperature would be 0.05 degree centigrade by 2050. If CO2-emission levels meet the Waxman-Markey target of 17 percent of 2005 emissions by the year 2050, and if they are frozen at that level for the rest of the century, Waxman-Markey would still reduce the world temperature by only 0.2 degree Celsius by 2100.

I'm interested in ecology. I'd like a nice environment. This bill has NOTHING TO DO WITH EITHER.

1. Is global warming occurring?

Nine out of ten US weather stations will report warming over the relevant period. Sadly, this is due primarily to technical faults in the weather stations, not to global warming. Either they are sited in places which have developed heat sources, or they are constructed of materials that intensify the effect of heat over time, or the data was "adjusted" by the NOAA to make a record the way they wanted it. In other words, the data presented by NOAA is unreliable far in excess of the sensitivity needed to report the minor warming that has been alleged: it's garbage. It is possible that the record in other countries is better done: but I'd like to see them do the work, first.

2. The CO2 model has problems when you do the math.

The runaway warming forecast by alarmists contradicts basic physics. I admit the paper takes a while to read ("a while" meaning about a week's study until I could do the work it describes, but then I've always been a bit slower on complex mathematics). If you'd like a popular summary instead, check this out. It's cuter and saves time. The research was backstopped recently by this paper, though I haven't read it enough to duplicate it yet. There is no runaway global warming, no forcing.

3. Really doing the science causes problems for the IPCC model.

The predictions for this decade do not match the reality. And models which fail to predict the past results aren't usually worth relying on for future results.

4. On the other hand, semi-famous judges with a penchant for economics have decided that they are climate experts, and it is all proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and those who disagree are kooks.

I guess I'm a kook. I like logic too much to give it up when important people say to.

As it turns out, the models they use are very unreliable, even on their own terms.

Geographically distributed predictions of future climate, obtained through climate models, are widely used in hydrology and many other disciplines, typically without assessing their reliability. Here we compare the output of various models to temperature and precipitation observations from eight stations with long (over 100 years) records from around the globe. The results show that models perform poorly, even at a climatic (30-year) scale. Thus local model projections cannot be credible, whereas a common argument that models can perform better at larger spatial scales is unsupported.

In other words, while large computer models might be interesting as exercises in extended logic, they are not useful in the "real world" where we don't understand what we are modelling all that well. It's similar to a finding in another discipline taking advantage of math as a way to extend logic: papers that use "lemmas" rarely establish anything worth citing. Models of argument that rely primarily on logic have been consistently rejected by audiences: everyone is aware that logic is a cute way to organize a presentation, but no guarantee that the conclusion is worth listening to.

Hysteria. That's the word for this. A quick flavor:

We need to get prepared for four degrees of global warming, Bob Watson told the Guardian last week. At first sight this looks like wise counsel from the climate science adviser to Defra. But the idea that we could adapt to a 4C rise is absurd and dangerous. Global warming on this scale would be a catastrophe that would mean, in the immortal words that Chief Seattle probably never spoke, "the end of living and the beginning of survival" for humankind. Or perhaps the beginning of our extinction.

The collapse of the polar ice caps would become inevitable, bringing long-term sea level rises of 70-80 metres. All the world's coastal plains would be lost, complete with ports, cities, transport and industrial infrastructure, and much of the world's most productive farmland. The world's geography would be transformed much as it was at the end of the last ice age, when sea levels rose by about 120 metres to create the Channel, the North Sea and Cardigan Bay out of dry land. Weather would become extreme and unpredictable, with more frequent and severe droughts, floods and hurricanes. The Earth's carrying capacity would be hugely reduced. Billions would undoubtedly die.

And the author, who has written a book on this subject, which probably has the same flavor, would like us to panic wildly into doing whatever it is he advocates.

Meanwhile, I'd remind you of the first bit of advice you need whenever you face something threatening: "Don't Panic." Panicky people die. And columnists running around with their hands in the air saying "oh, oh, oh, we're all going to die" are doing the very thing that helps kill people. All with, as I'm sure he'd reassure us, the best of intentions. For those of us who look at actions and judge their probable results, however, his intentions matter less than his irresponsible silliness.

OK, global warming. Don't think CO2 has much to do with it (see past decade of plateau and drop while CO2 increases), but then, I've had experience of research contradicting reality before.

Favorite example:

Hurricanes getting stronger!

Hurricanes Getting weaker!

and, of course, Stunning new breakthrough on hurricanes says it's Global Warming!

Finally, of course, Bill Gray takes it in hand.

He showed that during 1945-1969 (25 years), during a period the globe was cooling slightly, there were three times as many intense hurricanes in the Atlantic compared to the 25 year period 1970-1994--a period the globe warmed significantly. His tongue-in-cheek conclusion: "CO2 gets into these storms and squashes them!" Extending this result to landfalling U.S. hurricanes, one could claim that we should expect zero landfalling U.S. hurricanes by 2050. Dr. Gray cautioned that this ridiculous result showed that one can manipulate statistics to show virtually any result you want.

Who wins?

Well, as it turns out, the hicks.

When I launched the TalkClimateChange forums last year, I was initially worried as to where I would find people who didn’t believe in global warming. I had planned to create a furious debate, but in my experience global warming was such a universally accepted issue that I expected to have to dredge the slums of the internet in order to find a couple of deniers who could keep the argument thriving.

The first few days were slow going, but following a brief write-up of my site by Junk Science I was swamped by climate skeptics who did a good job of frightening off the few brave Greens who slogged out the debate with. Whilst there was a lot of rubbish written, the truth was that they didn’t so much frighten the Greens away - they comprehensively demolished them with a more in depth understanding of the science, cleverly thought out arguments, and some very smart answers. If you want to learn about the physics of convection currents, gas chromatography, or any number of climate science topics then read some of the early debates on TalkClimateChange. I didn’t believe a word of it, but I had to admit that these guys were good.

In the following months the situation hardly changed. As the forum continued to grow, as the blog began to catch traffic, and as I continued to try and recruit green members I continued to be disappointed with the debate. In short, and I am sorry to say it, anti-greens (Reds, as we call them) appear to be more willing to comment, more structured, more able to quote peer reviewed research, more apparently rational and apparently wider read and better informed.

Don't tell Al Gore. Tip of the hat to Tim Blair

I know, you'll tell me the globe is warming. The climate is changing.

But I bet you're wrong on the direction of the change so far this year...

o 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.

A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

I am waiting for an explanation from those of you that link carbon dioxide production to global temperatures. Not only have we produced more since 1998, the hottest year on record... we've dropped in temperature. I think your models do not mean what you think they mean.

This is one of those boring sensitivity studies on the effect of carbon dioxide and man's role in global warming. Sadly, the conclusion is that the expected warming is only 1.1 degree Celsius (or Kelvin), plus or minus a half a degree. Not quite the amount Al Gore or Leonardo DiCaprio are depicting. But then, once again, it appears to be something we can easily handle with current mechanisms for managing heat.

The latest, in a long list, of reasons to be skeptical of the man-made global warming case against CO2: a look at historical statistics proves that the sensitivity of temperature to CO2 concentration is much less than claimed, and that the resultant warming would be fairly easily dealt with under current parameters.

Finally, in response to my friend Kent: the reason that Russia is not enthusiastic in supporting the Kyoto Protocol, or any climate protocol, is that SHOULD GLOBAL WARMING OCCUR, they would be overwhelming beneficiaries. They WANT global warming.

Funny what happens when you consult experts instead of political hacks.

[W]hen I became president of INQUA Commission on Sea-Level Change and Coastal Evolution, we made a research project, and we had this up for discussion at five international meetings. And all the true sea level specialists agreed on this figure, that in 100 years we might have a rise of 10 cm, with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm -- that's not very much. And in recent years I even improved it, by considering also that we're going into a cold phase in 40 years. That gives a 5 cm rise, plus or minus a few centimeters. That's our best estimate.

But why is some research being produced coming out with these statements that support global warming? Because if you don't support global warming, you get no grants!

If you want a grant for a research project in climatology, it is written into the document that there must be a focus on global warming.

And if scientists don't get grants, their universities aren't that interested in them: they're not a source of prestige for the institution.

Laugh a minute, these politicos.

Begin with the fact that what you have are forcasts, not facts.

The facts have inconveniences, like the fact that this unstoppable global warming appears to have gone on hiatus for the last little bit: average global temperature statistic 1998, 58.1, 2000 57.6, 2001 57.8, 2002 57.9 2003 57.9 2004 57.9 2005 58.0 (a little more and we'll tie 1998!!!), and the fact that global warming means cooling for some regions and some periods, even though CO2 increase shows no similar pattern.

Ah, you say, but these are forecasts made by well informed scientists who conferred with each other and built models!

Sadly, both of those facts indicate a poor forecast. And, as it turns out, applying well known, scientifically tested principles to the forecasts on global warming indicate that there are no scientific forecasts that we should believe, and that the IPCC reports and process routinely violate some key provisions of good forecasting.

And still, I have people claiming to be prudent who think we should accept this hogwash. Like Al Gore, whose movie is riddled with scientific errors, their faith exceeds their knowledge.