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. Robin Guenier (369) — This is a low bandwidth communication medium.

    Getting ‘thousands’ of scientists to come to ‘concnsus’ on anything is like herding cats. The IPCC AR4 WG1 reads most turgidly and is hardly a way to learn climatology. (It keeps putting me to sleep, mostly.)

    I’ll offer the suggestion that when the problems with SSTs post-WWII are resolved, the model to data fit will be better. However, nobody seems to have good data on aerosols before, say, 1980 CE and so some uncertainty of detailed fit will always remain. So the ‘concensus’ will remain that these earlier periods, before the modern instrumentation records, are ‘poorly understood’.

    That doesn’t make the risk any less compelling; if anything it makes the risk greater.

  2. Peter and Robin: worried about my ID? ….Does it matter?
    Here is what I wrote way above to Brute:

    There are two reasons why I went-off [my old ID of] Black Wallaby;
    1) I had an argument with some physicists over at ClimateAudit that the idea that cold air can heat the warmer ground below, which is a standard part of greenhouse theory, poses a paradox since the second law of thermodynamics describes that heat cannot flow from a cold to hotter body. (just like water cannot flow naturally uphill).
    In a refrigerator this problem is overcome by using a compressor. So, I challenged them [among other things] to demonstrate where is the pump in the climate system. To cut a long story short it got rather heated over there, [and unresolved], and I had to change my ID to Bob_FJ in order to be not ignored on other topics.
    2) In Australia, to call someone a “Wally” is an insult.
    But, if you like B.W. I’ll see if the system will allow me to switch back
    http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3168/2570149348_160a34eb16_o.jpg
    This was my self-image on an older blog website.
    Tried sending this as B.W. and it seems to want a different Email address!
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Although it is very understandable why, one thing that irritates me about scientific debate is the easy tendency to value any comment based on who the author is, rather than to look dispassionately at the scientific merit of the comment. Furthermore, I can list many highly qualified professors etc that spout theological/political nonsense rather than credible science. (Romm is a “favourite” hate here, but personally, I writhe if my eyes fall upon Mann‘s photo, which he is wont to smilingly display everywhere)

    I can see no benefit in providing my full ID in the general blogosphere, where it seems it is the norm to provide a nickname

    However, if you are concerned about my credentials, I have been vetted by the ICSC and am a qualified endorser # 137 on their “Manhattan Declaration”
    http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=37&Itemid=1
    Find the declaration and application form at this link if you are interested.

  3. David (376): well at least we agree that it’s absurd to talk of thousands of scientists coming to a “consensus” and that “The IPCC AR4 WG1 reads most turgidly and is hardly a way to learn climatology”. Most unfortunately, however, most of the Western world’s politicians, institutions and media (but seemingly not those of the powerful developing economies) are sure that the IPCC’s 2007 Summary for Policymakers (in places at odds with the detailed report and, in any case, written as much by government advisers, policy wonks and PR people as by scientists) represents the considered view of nearly all climatologists and believe it is necessary to take actions in accordance with it. That leads directly to the dangerous consequences some of which I mentioned in my post 369. The good news is that elements of informed opinion are beginning at last to have doubts about the reality of dangerous AGW; and, in any case, voters are increasing sceptical – many seeing the issue as a scam.

    Max (372): thanks for the supportive comment.

  4. Robin, (378 and more above)
    On this cold and dank late afternoon, in Melbourne, let me say:
    Not only does Max support your powerfully logical analysese, but so too, me, 111%

    You seem to have the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, very lucidly!

    However, let me say that both Max and me have failed to get DBB to answer very simple direct questions, no matter how hard we tried to repeat and re-focus the Q!
    I hope your fresh approach has more success than ours.
    Unfortunately, Pete is not far behind DBB in the same issue of diversion and obfuscation, in my view!

  5. Brute 374 wrote in part:

    Patience is a virtue. Yes, we’ll see. This evidence regarding the Arctic ice is welcome/wonderful news.

    Yes; I agree, it is very GOOD NEWS if it helps dispel anxiety about AGW, together with reduced soiling of knickers, and less child neurosis resultant of the deliberate scaring of young children with Armageddon etc.

    However, I think it is BAD NEWS for trade and a lot of other real-world stuff. For example, I’d be displeasured from any cold north-winds and precipitation etc, if I lived in the Great Lakes area . I’d rather put my snow-shovel away and remember it like a curiosity piece, somewhat in the way that here in Oz, lawn water sprinklers are perhaps becoming collector’s items. (BTW; I have much experience of bizarre “weather” extremes in Detroit and Windsor)

    BUT, from the more banal GOOD NEWS aspect;
    Just imagine the frenzy of media headlines screaming with delight say next September/October, with stuff like:

    * Arctic frozen solid! ….. Has AGW stopped?
    * Polar bear procreation threatened by vast increase in last summer’s sea-ice range!
    (Bears unable to find each other for humpy, or even to go for a relaxing swim ….sheez!)
    * Eskimos warn that their tits may drop off this coming winter!
    * Canada’s war canoes trapped in harbour!
    * Northern Californian eucalypt trees finally killed by severe frosts even worse than
    those of the mid-late eighties! (That I experienced)

    Oh boy! What fun it would be, to be a journalist!

  6. Bad Behavior may work as an effective spam filter for some people, but it doesn’t seem to have been a success here. I’ve now reverted to Akismet and I would be grateful if anyone who has problems posting comments would let me have feedback. In the meantime I will keep looking for an alternative anti-spam plugin.

  7. For those of you who have been discussing the extent of the Arctic sea ice, Steve McIntyre has started asking some awkward questions about the way in which this is calculated at ClimateAudit.

  8. I’m not sure where Brute has found his good news about recent Arctic ice cover. Even though the August/Sept summer minimum may not turn out to be quite so low as last year it still looks like it will be pretty bad. It will be well below the levels of just a few years ago and probably the second worst year on record.

    Brute might well have noticed that the price of petrol, at his local gas station, had reached an all time record on 4th July holiday but then may have dropped back a couple of cents afterwards. That’s what would happen in Australia after a public holiday.

    Thats OK of course but its hardly cause to crack open the champagne and tell the world about the ‘good news’.

  9. Max,

    I liked your post above (339). Back in January, I posted the following on the New Statesman-David Whitehouse comment thread. It’s a slightly different take on the energy-efficiency/co2 output vs GDP argument your post illustrates. Peter or Nelson or one of the AGW defenders pooh-poohed my thinking at the time, but I think it is a worthy position.

    PS to Tony: Is it possible for you to (easily) recreate the entire Whitehouse/Lynas comment threads here? Hopefully in a searchable way? There are lots of great posts and links there.

    JZ Smith
    14 January 2008 at 21:47

    A bit off-topic, but the discussions above regarding the use of fossil fuels, and the often-used statement that ‘the USA is the largest consumer of energy’ got wondering about global energy usage. My argument against the USA being the “largest user” of energy has always been that we use the most because we produce the most, but have never really looked at the numbers before.

    So some quick internet research comes up with some interesting bits: [But first a caveat: I am neither a scientist nor statistician; I’m only as smart as what I can read!]

    I don’t mean to pick on the EU, but it is a good comparison to the USA. More in-depth research may well produce better and more accurate answers, but here goes:

    EU population: 495m

    USA pop: 303m

    EU GDP: $14.6t

    USA GDP: $13.1t

    EU per capita GDP: $28.213

    USA per cap GDP: $44,198

    EU “primary” energy consumption: 78 quadrillion BTU

    USA consumption: 122 quad BTU

    Doing the math:

    EU per cap GDP/ Quad BTUs = $362

    USA per cap GDP/Quad BTUs= $361

    So by comparison, the USA produces nearly double the per capita GDP as the EU, at roughly the same cost in quadrillion BTU’s of energy usage. In other words, the USA’s productivity is nearly double that of the EU, but use nearly an identical amount of energy to produce it (per quad BTU’s).

    [OK, so I’m not a mathematician, either. If I’ve done my math wrong, please be gentle in correcting me.]

    To conclude, then, to argue that the USA is a wasteful user of energy, compared, at least, to the EU, is not true.

    By extension then, could not significant gains in energy efficiency be made, thus lowering carbon emissions to the atmosphere, but focusing attention on the EU and probably even more importantly on 2nd and 3rd world economies? Worded differently, more gains can be had by cleaning up the developing economies than working to clean up an already efficient developed economies.

    Sources:

    link 1

    link 2

    link 3

  10. JZ Smith,

    Having spent some time wandering around Europe I can think of no reason to doubt your conclusions. There is a huge difference between the economies in the west and those in the old eastern block countries and this may well explain why you were able to reach your rather surprising, and very interesting, conclusions.

    So far as recreating the NS threads in a searchable form is concerned, I think that this may be possible, although there could be copyright issues and shear file size may also be a problem. I’ve tried squirting them into Word as, if I put them into a plain text file, the dynamic links would not work. This produces file sizes of 4.8Mb + 2.0Mb = ~7MB. I could post this as a single file somewhere on the site for those who might have the patience to download it. Incidentally, the combined file would run to over half a million words.

    For the reasons mentioned above, I do not want to include this as part of the blog as it might lead to (quite justified) objections from the NS and also because it would significantly increase the time that it takes to do backups and the storage required. Let me know what you think.

  11. Tony,

    I was also surprised by the magnitude of the disparity between the EU and the USA in this regard. Another thing to consider is that compared to the USA, the EU is less than half the total area (~10 million KM^2 vs ~4.3 million KM^2), so transportation costs alone in the USA are clearly higher, so it follows that carbon emissions must also be higher per capita.

    I am also not surprised by the NS situation and your thinking. Just to find my post above was a painstaking process, but I guess I will have to live with it.

    Thanks!

  12. JZ Smith does raise an interesting point by showing that the normalised production of the USA and EU (in $ dollar terms) requires approximately the same amount of energy input. The technology of production is pretty much the same in both places so I wouldn’t dispute his conclusions.

    There are however a few other points to be made.

    1) It’s not energy use, itself, that is of concern; it is CO2, and other GHG, emissions. If the BTUs, or kiloJoules, of energy are generated by clean low emission methods, they are no real problem.

    2)I think the ratio that JZ describes is referred to as economic efficiency and that has improved everywhere over time. As production in the world increases, the ratio in terms of unit production relative to emissions, has to improve further just to keep emissions constant.

    3) Even if you have constant emissions, the total atmospheric CO2 level can still keep increasing, if the level of those emissions exceeds the earths natural capacity for sequestration.

    4)While it is Ok to normalise production relative to energy inputs (or emissions) for our own economic analysis, the earth’s atmosphere doesn’t make similar allowances!

  13. Finding a posting on the now closed NS websites shouldn’t be too hard, providing, of course that they are kept on line, and that you can remember one or two key words or phrases in the posting.

    Just use CTRL+F for “find on this page”

  14. Thanks Peter. I’ll give it a try.

  15. That worked pretty nicely, Peter. Thanks for the tip!

  16. Robin Guenier (378) — However, AGW is a consequence of known physics, a climatological ‘theorem’ if you will. And there are serious consequences for the future. For example, in 1950 CE about 20% of land was desert; now about 30% is; as AGW proceeds about 50% will be. It appears that the rest will suffer increased flooding as exemplified by recent events.

    So where will we grow food?

    I will certainly do what I can to see appropriate actions are taken, less for my sake than for my children and even more so, theirs.

    On a more technical note, the first third or so of

    http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309095069

    was quite good in helping to understand what constitues radiative forcing and a bit later helps to confirm that solar forcings do not explain the global warming of the past 35+ years.

  17. manacker — While you may care to also read the report linked above, the (short) workshop report

    http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10787&page=1

    was most useful to me in understanding ‘climate sensitivity’ in some depth.

  18. Hi JZSmith,

    Your analysis makes good sense.

    The only difference from my calculation is that you have compared per capita GDP per total energy consumption and mine is tied to the total GDP generated by each economy divided by the tons of CO2 emitted by that economy.
    http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3070/2647364221_b1cf427ab1_b.jpg
    http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3122/2647377283_76aa70033b_b.jpg

    In my analysis the Japanese and EU economies have a higher “carbon efficiency” than the USA, while other major emitters, such as Russia and the other ex-Soviet Union nations, China, India, the developing Asian nations and the major oil-producing nations all have lower “carbon efficiencies”. The World on average also has a lower “carbon efficiency” than the USA.

    In your “per cap GDP/ Quad BTUs” calculation the EU and USA come out the same.

    Either measure is more meaningful than either of the two measures mentioned by Peter Martin, i.e. the total CO2 emitted per country (where China is now number 1 and growing, ahead of the USA) or per capita CO2 emitted per country (where the USA is sixth from the top behind Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and a couple of small countries).

    In the frenzy to shut down CO2 emissions it is important that governments do not lose sight of the need to keep their economies (and GDP) growing on a per capita basis. China has certainly not fallen into this trap as they see clearly what their real priorities are.

    It is also important that the world’s richer nations do not forget that the poorest countries will all consume more fossil fuels (and generate more CO2) as they manage to increase their per capita GDP and pull out of poverty. Increased prosperity will come through increased energy consumption (as is happening in China and India today). And the richer nations should not try to discourage these poor nations from doing so.

    Peter Martin was right when he wrote (305): “the way forward will be defined mainly on economic terms”.

    And so it should be.

    Regards,

    Max

  19. Hi David,

    You wrote that the cited report: “was quite good in helping to understand what constitues radiative forcing and a bit later helps to confirm that solar forcings do not explain the global warming of the past 35+ years.”

    Probably would have been a bit more precise if you had written: “helps to confirm that solar forcings ALONE do not explain the global warming of the past 35+ years.”

    Regards,

    Max

  20. Max,

    How are you defining economics? I suspect that you are taking much too short term a view and not being sufficiently thorough in your analysis.

    The true cost of consuming a barrel of oil is not just the $140 that it costs to buy. There are environmental costs too which have to be included. Many economists recently have been trying to work, although admittedly it’s not the easiest of tasks, how to assign a value or price to many of these. Its not just CO2 emissions, but all the others such as particulates that can be generated.

    If CO2 emissions are going to cause problems then it is quite reasonable for these problems to be assigned an economic cost to the user.

  21. manacker (394) — Yes. Maybe solar is 25% of it.

  22. Hi Peter,

    You advised me: “If CO2 emissions are going to cause problems then it is quite reasonable for these problems to be assigned an economic cost to the user.”

    This is a big “if”.

    If CO2 emissions are not going to cause any real problems, then these “predicted” problems should not “be assigned an economic cost to the user”. Latest temperature trends point in this direction.

    Right now the best solution is to let the free market decide. Oil is running out. All the oil reserves in the world cannot cause much real warming from CO2 before they run out. Oil will soon become too scarce to use as a fuel, and it will become a petrochemical feedstock (as will natural gas).

    Coal has a bit more time to go, but is also limited. It also has potential as a chemical feedstock (SASOL in South Africa).

    Biofuels can be made to be essentially “carbon neutral” (sugar cane, bio-mass, etc.), so these may be long-term solutions to the impending oil shortage without causing more CO2.

    “Assigning an economic cost to the user” smacks of taxing the “air we breathe” by imposing a carbon tax or cap and trade scheme. This will do absolutely nothing to solve the energy crisis, Peter, it will only distract us from the real problems out there. It will do nothing to significantly reduce CO2 emissions. And it will do even less to “stop global warming”.

    Regards,

    Max

  23. Hi David,

    You wrote: “manacker (394) — Yes. Maybe solar is 25% of it” [i.e post-1976 warming].

    There are other estimates out there that are a bit higher, and some that say that 35% to 75% of the whole 20th century warming can be attributed to solar forcing. Who knows who is right on this?

    Not I. Not you. Not the many studies either way that you or I can cite.

    There is still a whole lot we do not yet know, David.

    Regards,

    Max

  24. David (391): if “AGW is a consequence of known physics”, why don’t the thousands of climate scientists who contributed to the 2007 IPCC report know about it?

  25. Climate change has now begun to impact all our lives, but not in the way that the IPCC has predicted or politicians who are riding on the alarmist bandwagon intended:

    A shop-soiled messiah goes east: Tony Blair, the G8, oil prices, and an inconvenient opinion poll

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