Mar 172008

THIS PAGE HAS BEEN ACTIVATED AS THE NEW STATESMAN BLOG IS NOW CLOSED FOR COMMENTS

At 10am this morning, the New Statesman finally closed the Mark Lynas thread on their website after 1715 comments had been added over a period of five months. I don’t know whether this constitutes any kind of a record, but gratitude is certainly due to the editor of of the New Statesman for hosting the discussion so patiently and also for publishing articles from Dr David Whitehouse and Mark Lynas that have created so much interest.

This page is now live, and anyone who would like to continue the discussion here is welcome to do so. I have copied the most recent contributions at the New Statesman as the first comment for the sake of convenience. If you want to refer back to either of the original threads, then you can find them here:

Dr David Whitehouse’s article can be found here with all 1289 comments.

Mark Lynas’ attempted refutation can be found here with 1715 comments.

Welcome to Harmless Sky, and happy blogging.

(Click the ‘comments’ link below if the input box does not appear)

 

10,000 Responses to “Continuation of the New Statesman Whitehouse/Lynas blogs.”

  1. Tony,

    It

  2. Not certain what happened there……..

    Tony,

    It’s difficult to say. While I do think that “concern for the environment” has had some impact on people’s habits lately, I’m not certain that the global warming scare has affected oil prices. I do see more Prius cars on the highway and have seen an advertising blitz about gasoline/energy use. Some automobile manufacturers are closing plants and discontinuing models that are/were deemed as “inefficient”……. I suppose the mood of the public is that gasoline/energy prices are high and they should use less to protect their personal bottom line. I think that the global warming issue has very little to do with the price of gasoline. Most people don’t have the time to worry about it and polls have shown that the majority of Americans don’t believe that mankind is affecting the environment as the Alarmist describe. The eco-zealots make a lot of noise, but do not represent the majority of Americans. Most citizens are far more practical and reasonable.

    Recent legislation aimed at taxing energy further to protect the environment have/are failing. Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of expanding oil production and there is an exploding movement to lift the ban on offshore drilling and drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge……

    Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less has become a popular refrain.

    In my field of expertise, we are focusing on energy efficiency, not so much to “save the polar bear”, but to simply keep our energy budgets in line. Energy prices are rising and we are researching and implementing control schemes and techniques to lower our client’s energy profile. In one particular case, I managed to cut Kilowatt consumption 14% which managed to lower the yearly cost to our client 6%. (The difference being that the cost per kilowatt has risen).

    Deregulation of energy producers has also caused electric prices to rise in the short term. Outside of Washington D.C. the price per Kilowatt has risen 72% for residential customers. I believe the price will level out as more companies are providing alternative sources to purchase power from on the open market. For instance; a customer living in New York can now choose to purchase power from a provider in Texas if he is so inclined…….many people don’t realize that and/or don’t want to be bothered. We buy power from a provider in Ohio and live on the East Coast.

    I’m old and wise enough to realize that this thing is cyclical and will fade quickly. The United States receives 2/3rds of its oil from North American sources, (Canada). The United States must follow Canada’s lead and extract oil from shale and oil sands in addition to expanding drilling/extracting crude from domestic sources. The price per gallon of gasoline has now made it profitable for these sources to expand production.

    Supply and Demand is the bottom line. China and India’s consumption of oil is exploding and these economies are willing to pay higher costs which impacts the global price. Canada could very well export its oil to China as opposed to the United States if these emerging economies are willing to pay more. What the public fails to understand is that oil companies are BUSINESSES and exist to provide a product and MAKE MONEY for their shareholders who have invested in the company in hopes of a financial gain.

    In the end, I don’t feel that people personally feel that their habits impact the “environment”. They are more concerned with their personal finances and the oil providers are simply selling their product to the highest bidder.

  3. FT article cited by Robin Guenier

    Hi Robin,

    You linked to a Financial Times article by Philip Stevens, asking for comments.

    “For all the accumulated evidence to the contrary, there are still a determined few who see global warming as the invention of woolly-hatted do-gooders and of scientists who want to be soothsayers. The small band of sceptics seizes on the inevitable imprecision of the effort to predict the future relationship between greenhouse gases and changes in temperature as an excuse to ignore the overwhelming weight of scientific knowledge.”

    As the author points out later the so-called “determined few” turns out to be a significant majority in major countries such as the USA and China. And there are significantly fewer people who consider AGW a problem today than there were a year ago. Is this any wonder, since temperature has not risen for the past decade despite predictions to the contrary? You can only fool people so long before they begin to wake up to the facts.

    All of the above confirms Abraham Lincoln’s statement that “you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”.

    If the numbers cited by the author are correct, the doomsayers have apparently done a better job of selling their story in “Japan, France, Tanzania ,Turkey and Brazil”. Tanzania? Turkey? Hmmm…

    “A year or so ago, the political conversation in most developed economies was how to reduce the amount of carbon released into the skies. Carbon-free was cool. Now the priority is to persuade Saudi Arabia to get more hydrocarbons out of the ground. How, the politicians plead, can we tell voters to make sacrifices when the prices of energy and food are so high? Greenery goes out of fashion when times are tough.”

    This is a reiteration of the “facts of life”. AGW has always been a “rich man’s problem”, fueled by politicians that see opportunity for shuffling around obscenely large sums of money as carbon taxes or cap and trade schemes kick in. As politicians have been known to do in the past, they have resorted to generating fear” in the general public to gain support for their unpleasant agenda. A bit of “guilt” also works well as a motivational factor among the affluent. Rock stars and other “media darlings” jump on the bandwagon, along with the sensationalist press.

    As the early 20th century American writer and journalist, H.L. Mencken, once observed, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

    But when times get “tough”, real problems begin to take higher priority and the virtual computer-generated pseudoproblem of rampant global warming (some time in the future, maybe) wanes in importance.

    For the poorest on this planet AGW never was a real problem. The 4 million people whe die annually from lack of clean drinking water or lack of electricity or clean fuel for inside cooking clearly have other, more pressing priorities. It is precisely the billions of people at the bottom of the economic pyramid that would suffer the most from the proposed steps to reduce “carbon footprint”.

    And finally, people are not blind. When Hadley predicts loudly with much press ballyhoo “next year will be a record hot year” two times in a row (2006, 2007) only to have to admit quietly later on that it did not turn out that way, people start wondering “if these guys can’t even get next year right, how can we believe their predictions for the next 50 or 100 years?” When they realize that there has been essentially no warming over the past decade, despite IPCC forecasts of record temperature increase, they begin to see that the AGW “poster period” of rapid warming (1976 to 1998) has apparently come to an end for now, despite all-time high CO2 emissions, and that something is very wrong with the disaster predictions.

    That’s when an increasing number of people realize that they have been fooled, confirming the authors statement: “In both the US and China, people are less concerned about climate change than they were a year ago. The proportion in China has almost halved from the previous 42 per cent.” It is also when Abraham Lincoln’s observation becomes evident.

    Regards,

    Max

  4. Re: #50, Brute

    All that you say points to continuing high demand for fossil fuels, but with a minor tendency for individuals to try and use these more efficiently in response to a price spike.

    What I am wondering is whether this spike would have happened, or at least reached such heights, if here had been no fear of AGW. The rapid development of the Chinese and Indian economies was not unforeseen. Why did the oil producers not take advantage of forecasts of increased demand from these developing countries by boosting production? Have they been mislead by Kyoto and other carbon saving initiatives into expecting overall demand to fall as the developed world cut their consumption for environmental reasons? As this has not happened, are we now suffering because of a failure to increase supply rather than because of a supposedly unexpected increase in demand from the developing countries?

    To put it another way, if the oil producer’s strategic planning over the last 5-10 years has been based on Kyoto being a success, then its not surprising that we now have a problem with oil prices.

  5. Tony,

    I don’t think that oil producers could increase production in any meaningful way to effect prices in the short term. Yes, environmentalists have made it more difficult for oil producers to increase production/supply for the past +/- 35 years. In all fairness, what do the oil producers care? Supply declines or stays stable, demand increases dramatically and the price rises which increases revenue for them, (also tax revenue to the government increases so they are happy also). They are in bussiness to make money. It seems that $4.00 per gallon is/was enough for people to take notice and demand an increase in supply. Congress will put the leash back on the environmental attack dogs and allow the oil companies to expand production.

    I don’t see Congress investigating other industries who are making “obsene” profits. Coca Cola’s profit margin is higher as is Google and Microsoft to name a few.

  6. manacker keeps posting his ‘the world is flat’ stuff. So does brute.

    But here are the decadal averages since 1850 CE from the HadCRUTv3 global temperature product:

    http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/10yave.jpg

    which clearly show that the average temperature during the interval 2000–2007 CE was warmer than any prior decade.

  7. Hey, David!

    The group is starting to reform. Great…..now we can write without having posts censored.

    By the way, why does Romm do that? Why doesn’t he just let people write what they want to and then prove them wrong with facts when he disagrees? It seems cowardly to simply “pick up your marbles and go home” when you are in the middle of a match….don’t you think?

    Did I lure you over from Climate Progress?

  8. Hi David,

    Welcome back!

    “Flat Earth?” Decadal averages? Hmmm…

    Why don’t you just use the data as they are recorded and published. You’ll see things more clearly that way.

    Plateau – GISS
    http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3232/2590412265_d7f734577c_b.jpg

    Plateau – Hadley
    http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3134/2591260894_011a1a6c9c_b.jpg

    Plateau – RSS
    http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3125/2591268046_fa0d4057e9_b.jpg

    Plateau – UAH
    http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3108/2590437485_805bc7a960_b.jpg

    It has stopped warming by all published records since 1998 (or, if you prefer, since 2001). Just the facts, David.

    Regards,

    Max

  9. Brute — Joe Romm clearly wants his blog to consider solutions, not fend off the modern version of flat-earthism. His comment policy makes that clear, I think.

    Hook, line and sinker. But I’ll not appear here very often.

  10. Hey David,

    “Joe Romm clearly wants his blog to consider solutions, not fend off the modern version of flat-earthism. His comment policy makes that clear, I think.”

    Naw, David. You got that one wrong (as usual). It appears you are not too strong in the “perception” department.

    JR does not want to “consider solutions”, regardless of what he may say his “comment policy” is. He wants to censor the discussion to limit it to his own personal version of the “truth”. Anything that disagrees with his own narrow version is censored out (the Joseph Goebbels or Joe Stalin way).

    Tell me, David, are you really that inobservant or are you a “flat-earther” yourself?

    Regards,

    Max

  11. David Benson wrote in part:

    “…here are the decadal averages since 1850 CE from the HadCRUTv3 global temperature product:
    http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/10yave.jpg
    which clearly show that the average temperature during the interval 2000–2007 CE was warmer than any prior decade.”

    Sorry, what is your point? Notice that in the following graph, the decade centred on ~1940 AD was also warmer than any prior decade, however it was followed by a significant cooling period just as CO2 was taking-off

    http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2131/2458648692_1701416471_o.jpg

    Of course this history may not be repeated, but the last decade is very similar to the ~1940 AD episode

    Also, I guess Tamino made-up his ten-year average graph from Hadley. Does that make it better than Hadley’s 20-year smoothing?

  12. Max and Bob,

    Sorry that your most receent comments were delayed by moderation. I think that this was because there were multiple links in them which WordPress sees as a characteristic of comment spam. I have now changed this setting.

  13. Tony, I did not notice any delay in my last post…..
    Regards Bob_FJ

  14. Bob: There are areas of WordPress that are still a mystery to me!

  15. Robin referred to an article by Philip Stephens in last week’s Financial Times here. As he obvioulsly felt that there was quite a lot that was worth saying about it, I have asked him to do a guest post. You will find it here:

    Global Warming – don’t despair

    I hope that it will be a ‘must read’ for everyone. Thanks Robin!

  16. Thanks Brute, that one really is interesting and I’d missed it.

  17. Bob_FJ — Yes, decadal averages from the HadCRUTv3 global temperature product. That is not ’20 year smoothed’ and I know of no 20 year smoothed product from the Hadley Centre site (although I haven’t searched hard for it.)

    I find the decadal averages to be much easier to read than the raw product.

    The decadal cooling from the 1940s to the 1950s is due to a combination of aerosols plus solar forcings, I believe. In any case, it has not been repeated (so far), which is certainly to the point.

    I’ve read prediction that the next solar cycle (22 years) will be much stronger than in the last 50+ years. I’ve also read of predictions of a Dalton-type minimum. If the latter, it is just barely possible that the 2010s will be about the same as the current decade. We’ll see.

  18. manacker — I have no trouble posting alternate solutions as comments on Joe Romm’s blog.

    He hasn’t taken any of mine up as his own, but I’m certainly not censored.

  19. “but I’m certainly not censored.’

    That’s because you regurgitate his religious dogma.

  20. The Hadley global average land and sea surface temperature anomaly recorded a linear increase of 0.65C over the 20th century (1901-2000). IPCC TAR reported this as 0.6C and then later revised it to 0.74C in 2007 SPM by replacing five years of cooling at the beginning of the record (1901-1905) with five essentially “flat” years at the end of the record (2001-2005).

    IPCC states that CO2 increased from around 280 ppmv (pre-industrial level in year 1750) to 379 ppmv in 2005 (p.2), resulting in a radiative forcing of 1.66 W/m² (p.4).
    http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_SPM.pdf

    The second most important greenhouse gas, methane, increased from 715 ppbv to 1774 ppbv over the same time period (p.2), resulting in a radiative forcing of 0.48 W/m² (p.4).

    According to IPCC, warming from other less important GHGs is essentially cancelled out by cooling from land use changes and aerosols.

    If we adjust the radiative forcing to cover the period 1901 to 2000, we have CO2 increasing from around 290 ppmv in 1901 to 370 ppmv in 2000 and CH4 from around 800 ppbv to 1774 ppbv over the same period, resulting in a RF for CO2 of 1.3 W/m² and for CH4 of 0.42 W/m².

    Applying Stefan-Boltzmann, this gives us a theoretical greenhouse warming of 0.24C for CO2 and 0.08C for CH4 over the 100 years.

    IPCC states that the RF from changes in solar irradiance since 1750 is only around 0.12 W/m², but concedes that the “level of scientific understanding” of this factor is “low”.

    There have been many studies, which show that the solar impact is actually much higher.

    Solanki et al (2004) conclude that “the level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional, and the previous period of equally high activity occurred more than 8,000 years ago.” They do state, however, that solar activity alone cannot explain the most recent warming.
    http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf
    http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/solanki2004/solanki2004.html

    Ponyavin et al (2005) state that “It is shown that solar cycle signal is more evident in climatic data during the last 60 years. The result is discussed in conjunction with the problem of unprecedented high level of sunspot activity and climate warmth in the late 20th century.”
    http://sait.oat.ts.astro.it/MSAIt760405/PDF/2005MmSAI..76.1026I.pdf

    Usoskin et al (2006) conclude that “We have revised the earlier sunspot activity reconstruction since 5000 BC, using the new geomagnetic data series, and found that it is roughly consistent with the previous results during most of the period, although the revised sunspot number values are in general higher. Nonetheless, it is confirmed with the new palaeomagnetic series that the Sun spends only 2–3% of the time in a state of high activity, similar to the modern episode. This strengthens the conclusion that the modern high activity level is very unusual during the last 7000 years.”
    http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL025921.shtml

    Geerts and Linacre (1997) constructed a profile of atmospheric climate “forcing” due to combined changes in solar irradiance and emissions of greenhouse gases between 1880 and 1993. They found that the temperature variations predicted by their model accounted for up to 92% of the temperature changes actually observed over the period – an excellent match for that period. Their results also suggest that the sensitivity of climate to the effects of solar irradiance is about 27% higher than its sensitivity to forcing by greenhouse gases.
    http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap02/sunspots.html

    Using up-dated satellite data, Willson (2003) concluded that “the accurate long-term dataset therefore shows a significant positive trend (.05 percent per decade) in TSI between the solar minima of solar cycles 21 to 23 (1978 to present)” and “historical records of solar activity indicate that solar radiation has been increasing since the late 19th century. If a trend comparable the one found in this study persisted during the 20th century it would have provided a significant component of the global warming that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report claims to have occurred over the last 100 years.” Willson indicates that if the current rate of increase of solar irradiance continues until the mid 21st century, then the surface temperatures will increase by about 0.5ºC. This is small, but not a negligible fraction of the expected greenhouse warming.
    http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/news/2003/story03-20-03.html

    Soon et al (1996) pointed out that “a change of, say, 0.4 percent in the total solar irradiance over a time frame of 100 years is about 1 Watt/m2 at the surface of the earth. Since the known increase in greenhouse gas radiative forcing is over 2 Watts/m2 in the last 100 years, it is supposed that the sun has been and will continue to be of lesser importance compared to the forcing from the increase in greenhouse gases. However, such a comparison misses a key point: it is not the arithmetic magnitude of the forcings per se but the responses of the climatic system to these forcings that must be considered. The conjecture that the two radiative inputs give similar responses in the climatic system is an unverified assumption.”

    “Computer simulations of the climate suggest that roughly 0.4 percent changes in solar irradiance over many decades would produce global temperature change of about 0.5ºC (Soon, Posmentier and Baliunas 1996: 891). There is evidence of a solar change of just this magnitude in a recent report of an observed difference of total solar irradiance between two sunspot-cycle minima-1986 and 1996-that would amount to about 0.4 percent change in irradiance over a century (Willson 1997:1963).”

    The authors also point out that change in total solar irradiance is not the sole driver of solar-influenced climatic change. “The signature of solar variability appears in meteorological records in ways that suggest that change in total irradiance is not the only impact the sun has on the terrestrial climate”. “The consequence of the existence of these significant non-radiative mechanisms of solar influence on climatic change is important: the assumption of equivalence in the radiative inputs of the sun and increases in greenhouse gases is not valid.”
    http://oldfraser.lexi.net/publications/books/g_warming/solar.html

    Dietze (1999) referred to a study by Lockwood and Stamper (1996) which showed a good correlation between magnetic field and solar brightness for the interval 1901-1995, indicating a rise in the average total solar irradiance of about 1.65 W/m² or 0.12%, and a solar increment to warming over the period of 0.35K, concluding that “solar brightening could explain roughly half of global warming during the last 100 years.”
    http://www.john-daly.com/fraction/fraction.htm
    http://www.wdc.rl.ac.uk/wdcc1/papers/grlcover.html.

    In an earlier study, Gérard and Hauglustaine (1991) stated that “a temperature response range of 1.1 to 2.3°C for a 1% solar irradiance increase is predicted by climate models.” “It is thus concluded that, if the climatic evolution is controlled in part by solar activity, other factors than the photospheric and chromospheric indeces must be used to describe the evolution of the solar output and its secular evolution. For example, a changing magnetic field in the solar convection zone would possibly be able to produce luminosity changes reaching 1%.”
    http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr/1/c001p161.pdf

    Georgieva et al (2005) showed that using the sunspot number alone as an indicator of solar forcing resulted in good correlation with temperature until around 1980. “Solar activity, together with human activity, is considered a possible factor for the global warming observed in the last century. However, in the last decades solar activity has remained more or less constant while surface air temperature has continued to increase, which is interpreted as evidence that in this period human activity is the main factor for global warming. We show that the index commonly used for quantifying long-term changes in solar activity, the sunspot number, accounts for only one part of solar activity and using this index leads to an underestimation of the role of solar activity in the global warming in the recent decades. A more suitable index is geomagnetic activity which reflects all solar activity, and is highly correlated to global temperature variations in the whole period for which we have data.” “The geomagnetic activity reflects the impact of solar activity originating from both the closed and open magnetic field regions, so it is a better indicator of solar activity than the sunspot number which is related to only closed magnetic field regions.”

    The authors propose that there are three “mechanisms for solar influence on climate:
    1. variations in the total solar irradiance leading to variations in the direct energy input into the Earth’s atmosphere (Cubasch and Voss 2000):
    2. variations in solar UV irradiance causing variations in stratospheric chemistry and dynamics (Hood 2003):
    3. variations in solar wind modulating cosmic ray flux which affects the stratospheric ozone and small constituents (Veretenenko and Pudovkin 1999) and/or the cloud coverage (Svensmark and Friis-Christensen 1997), and thus the transparency of the atmosphere.”

    The authors conclude: “So the sunspot number is not a good indicator of solar activity, and using the sunspot number leads to the under-estimation of the role of solar activity in the global warming.”
    http://sait.oat.ts.astro.it/MSAIt760405/PDF/2005MmSAI..76..969G.pdf

    So there is a lot of information out there that confirms a significant warming impact from solar variation (maybe not enough to account for all the observed warming, but much higher than that assumed by IPCC with its admitted “low level of scientific understanding”).

    The estimated solar impact on 20th century warming in the various studies varies from less than 0.1C to a major part of the observed warming. If we take the average estimate from all the studies, we arrive at a rise in the average total solar irradiance of about 1.65 W/m² over the 20th century, which yields a solar increment to 20th century warming of 0.35C. This would seem to be a reasonable estimate.

    So we have in summary for the period 1901-2000:
    0.24C warming from CO2, 0.08C warming from CH4 and 0.35C warming from solar, for a total of 0.67C (compared to an observed warming of 0.65C). Not bad.

    This would indicate that around half of the observed 20th century warming came from GHGs (primarily anthropogenic) and the other half from natural solar variability.

    It would also raise some serious questions regarding the validity of the assumed positive feedbacks, since the total observed warming can be explained without these feedbacks.

    Max

  21. Hi David,

    You wrote: “I’ve also read of predictions of a Dalton-type minimum. If the latter, it is just barely possible that the 2010s will be about the same as the current decade. We’ll see.”

    Yeah, or a helluva lot colder. But you’re right: “we’ll see”.

    Max

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

© 2011 Harmless Sky Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha