Over the past decade the need to save the planet from global warming has become one of the most pervasive issues of our time. In 2004 Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, even claimed that global warming posed 'a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism', warning that by the end of this century the only habitable continent left will be Antarctica.

But whenever such claims are questioned, the messenger is denounced, the evidence is ridiculed and the message is ignored. Inevitably, many people have been bemused by this somewhat one-sided debate, imagining that if so many experts are agreed, then there must be something in it. But is there? Here is the story of how this fear was promoted. It will leave any honest believer in global warming feeling uncomfortable.

One consistent critic has been the Daily Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker. At the end of last year he and his long-term colleague Richard North published a book entitled Scared to Death: From BSE To Global Warming - How Scares Are Costing Us The Earth where the case was made against Global Warming in general and against the Carbon Dioxide Theory in particular. In the UK the book's publication was met with a deathly silence. Why?

Christopher Booker explains that the story of how the panic over climate change was pushed to the top of the international agenda falls into five main stages. Stage one came in the 1970s when many scientists expressed alarm over what they saw as a disastrous change in the earth's climate. Their fear was not of warming but global cooling, of 'a new Ice Age'.

For three decades, after a sharp rise in the interwar years up to 1940, global temperatures had been falling. The one thing certain about climate is that it is always changing. Since we began to emerge from the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago, temperatures have been through significant swings several times. The hottest period occurred around 8,000 years ago and was followed by a long cooling. Then came what is known as the 'Roman Warming', coinciding with the Roman empire. Three centuries of cooling in the Dark Ages were followed by the 'Medieval Warming', when the evidence agrees the world was hotter than today.

Around 1300 began 'the Little Ice Age', that did not end until 200 years ago, when we entered what is known as the 'Modern Warming'. But even this has been chequered by colder periods, such as the 'Little Cooling' between 1940 and 1975. Then, in the late 1970s, the world began warming again.

A scare is often set off when two things are observed together and scientists suggest one must have been caused by the other. In this case, thanks to readings commissioned by Dr Roger Revelle, a distinguished American oceanographer, it was observed that since the late 1950s levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere had been rising. Perhaps it was this increase that was causing the new warming in the 1980s?

Stage two of the story began in 1988 when, with remarkable speed, the global warming story was elevated into a ruling orthodoxy, partly due to hearings in Washington chaired by a youngish senator, Al Gore, who had studied under Dr Revelle in the 1960s. But more importantly global warming hit centre stage because in 1988 the UN set up its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC). Through a series of reports, the IPCC was to advance its cause in a rather unusual fashion.

First it would commission as many as 1,500 experts to produce a huge scientific report, which might include all sorts of doubts and reservations. But this was to be prefaced by a Summary for Policymakers, drafted in consultation with governments and officials - essentially a political document - in which most of the caveats contained in the experts' report would not appear. This was very similar to the process that produced the notorious Blair/Campbell Dodgy Dossier that duped the House of Commons into sending military forces into Iraq in 2003.

This contradiction was obvious in the first report in 1991, which led to the Rio conference on climate change in 1992. The second report in 1996 gave particular prominence to a study by an obscure US government scientist claiming that the evidence for a connection between global warming and rising CO2 levels was now firmly established. This study
came under heavy fire from various leading climate experts for the way it manipulated the evidence.

But this was not allowed to stand in the way of the claim that there was now complete scientific consensus behind the CO2 thesis, and the Summary for Policy-makers, heavily influenced from behind the scenes by Al Gore, by this time US Vice-President, paved the way in 1997 for the famous Kyoto Protocol.

Kyoto initiated stage three of the story, by formally committing governments to drastic reductions in their CO2 emissions. But the treaty still had to be ratified and this seemed a good way off, not least thanks to its rejection in 1997 by the US Senate, despite the best attempts of Mr Gore.

Not the least of his efforts was his bid to suppress an article co-authored by Dr Revelle just before his death. Gore didn't want it to be known that his guru had urged that the global warming thesis should be viewed with more caution.

One of the greatest problems Gore and his allies faced at this time was the mass of evidence showing that in the past, global temperatures had been higher than in the late 20th century. In 1998 came the answer they were looking for: a new temperature chart, devised by a young American physicist, Michael Mann. This became known as the 'hockey stick' because it showed historic temperatures running in an almost flat line over the past 1,000 years, then suddenly flicking up at the end to record levels.

Mann's hockey stick was just what the IPCC wanted. When its 2001 report came out it was given pride of place at the top of page 1. The Mediaeval Warming, the Little Ice Age, the 20th century Little Cooling, when CO2 had already been rising, all had been wiped away.

But then a growing number of academics began to raise doubts about Mann and his graph. This culminated in 2003 with a devastating study by two Canadians showing how Mann had not only ignored most of the evidence before him but had used an algorithm that would produce a hockey stick graph whatever evidence was fed into the computer. When this was removed, the graph re-emerged just as it had looked before, showing the Middle Ages as hotter than today.

It is hard to recall any scientific thesis ever being so comprehensively discredited as the hockey stick. Yet the global warming juggernaut rolled on regardless. And now it was led by the European Union. In 2004, thanks to a highly dubious deal between the EU and Putin's Russia, stage four of the story began when the Kyoto Treaty was finally ratified.

In the past three years, we have seen the European Union announcing every kind of measure geared to fighting climate change, from building ever more highly-subsidised wind turbines, to a commitment that by 2050 it will have reduced carbon emissions by 60 per cent. This is a pledge that could only be met by such a massive reduction in living standards that it is impossible to see the peoples of Europe accepting it.

All this frenzy has rested on the assumption that global temperatures will continue to rise in tandem with CO2 and that, unless mankind takes drastic action, our planet is faced with the apocalypse so vividly described by Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth.

Yet recently, stage five of the story has seen all sorts of question marks being raised over Gore's alleged consensus. For instance, he claimed that by the end of this century world sea levels will have risen by 20 ft when even the IPCC in its latest report, only predicts a rise of between four and 17 inches.There is also of course the harsh reality that, wholly unaffected by the Kyoto Protocol, the economies of China and India are now expanding at nearly ten per cent a year, with China likely to be emitting more CO2 than the US within two years.

More serious, however, has been all the evidence accumulating to show that, despite the continuing rise in CO2 levels, global temperatures in the years since 1998 have no longer been rising and may soon even be falling.

It was a telling moment when, in August, Gore's closest scientific ally, James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was forced to revise his influential record of US surface temperatures showing that the past decade has seen the hottest years on record. His graph now concedes that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998 but 1934, and that four of the 10 warmest years in the past 100 were in the 1930s.

Furthermore, scientists and academics have recently been queuing up to point out that fluctuations in global temperatures correlate more consistently with patterns of radiation from the sun than with any rise in CO2 levels, and that after a century of high solar activity, the sun's effect is now weakening, presaging a likely drop in temperatures. At least scientists, unlike politicians, understand that correlation and causation are different things.

Let Christopher Booker have the last word. 'If global warming does turn out to have been a scare like all the others, it will certainly represent as great a collective flight from reality as history has ever recorded. The evidence of the next 10 years will be very interesting.'

more from Shepherd on Climate

Sea levels will rise over the coming century about a foot or about as much as they rose over the past 150 years. This is Bjorn Lomborg's best guess...and his guesses are better than most because he knows what he is talking about.

To learn more read Cool It!: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming...the antidote to what Lomborg refers to as 'choreographed screaming'. This detailed study of global warming is published by Marshall Cavendish. (London, 2007, 352 pps, £19.99, ISBN 978-0-462-09912-5) and includes a thousand references and a thousand endnotes.

If sea levels rise this amount it will be a problem...but it won't be a catastrophe. Ask a very old person about the most important issues that took place in the 20th century. She will likely mention the two world wars, the cold war, the internal combustion engine and perhaps the IT revolution. But it is very unlikely she will add: 'Oh, and sea levels rose.'

We dealt with sea levels rising in the past century, and we will do so in this century too. It doesn't mean that it will be unproblematic, but it is unhelpful...and incorrect...to posit it as the end of civilization.

Moreover sea level rise will be a much bigger problem for countries that are poor than for countries that are wealthier. In fact if we work hard at reducing sea level rises, it is likely that we will reduce the rise by 35% but at the same time end up making each person about 35% poorer. The upshot is that places such as Micronesia and Tavalu will get three times more flooded, simply because lower incomes more than outweigh the lower sea level rise.

Thus we cannot talk about CO2 when we talk about dealing with climate change...we need to bring it into the dialogue considerations both about carbon emissions and about economics, for the benefit of both humans and the environment.

more from Shepherd on Climate

Shepherd on Climate Website

THE SHEPHERD CLIMATE BLOGS
01. Energy Makeover
02. Wind Farm Politics
03. Blue Moonwaves
04. Cosmic Warning
05. Earth Temperature
06. Six Million Years
07. Global Baloney
08. State of Fear
09. Think Global Act Local
10. Global Electricity Grid
11. Carbon Emissions
12. Local Energy Power
13. Arctic Photo Opportunity
14. State of Ignorance
15. Politico-Legal-Media Complex
16. Orthodoxy & Heresy
17. Who? Whom?
18. Changing Climate Change
19. Global Warming Orthodoxy
20. Per's Peer Review
21. Majority Against Orthodoxy
22. Carbon Emissions Trading
23. Useful Idiots
24. Story of Global Warming
25. New Ice Age
26. Unnatural Disasters
27. Hubris & Nemesis
28. Limits to Models
29. Greenhouse Effects
30. Cloud Cuckoo Land
31. Sunken Knowledge
32. Right Science
33. Good Science
34. Medieval Warm Period
35. Climate Thermodynamics
36. Consensus Statistics
37. Treetalk
38. Climate Weapons
39. Car Fodder
40. Moon & Ice
41. Data Quality
42. Stern Reports
43. Whirling Dervishes
44. Kyoto Economics
45. Ice Ages & Science Wars
46. Inconvenient Truths
47. Cows & Moose
48. Sea Levels
49. Climate Deceits

England's Climate & Energy Politics by William Shepherd

extracted from weblog two hundred and fifty nine published on Saturday 16th September 2006

Across the Irish Sea, out in the country and down on the farm policymakers have discovered that Irish agriculture accounts for 29% of Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions…and that half of this emerges from the front and back ends of the animals which give us Irish Beef and Kerrygold Butter.

The Kyoto Protocol reckons that methane is twenty times as lethal as Carbon Dioxide. New Zealand has known this for quite a while...ever since local scientists calculated that the country's thirty million sheep and ten million cows were giving off thirty seven million tons of methane a year…more than any other part of the economy. How was it to meet it’s Kyoto Commitments?

A Flatulence Tax on the country’s sheep, cows and deer was the answer New Zealand’s Labour Government came up with. You couldn’t make it up. The idea was not to persuade the dumb beasts to hold back their wind but to delude the dumber politicians that the £14 million a year raised by the tax would be used to subsidise research into ways of getting the animals to give off rather less of the noxious gas sometime in the future.

The nationwide guffaw of incredulity was soon followed by a roar of protest from New Zealand’s 130 000 farmers who launched a Fight Against Ridiculous Tax…FART…campaign.

Polls showed that only 12% of the population were green enough to think the Fart Tax was anything other than a bad joke. On behalf of the 84% opposed to the tax, farmers blocked the streets of Wellington the capital with 200 tractors. One Member of Parliament even drove a tractor up the steps of the parliament building in protest…and earned himself a bossy reprimand on health and safety grounds from the country’s Prime Minister Helen Clark for his pains. A local newspaper gave out free baked beans to the demonstrators so they could make up for all the cows and sheep which could not be represented.

Up until now New Zealand’s farmers were best known for the fact that alone in the developed world they receive no government subsidies. Since these were abolished agriculture has become the fastest growing sector of the economy. New Zealand’s farmers are now so efficient they can transport their lamb and butter half way round the world to Britain and still compete on price with their lavishly-subsidised European Union counterparts.

But terrified that their country might get the reputation of being a bastion of the free market New Zealand’s politically correct Labour Party ministers seem determined to make their country the laughing stock of the farming world. At least Ireland hasn’t announced plans to do the same…yet.

But the really terrifying thought is that when the Department for Environment Farming and Rural Affairs works out that Britain has even more sheep and cattle than either of these countries the English might be commanded to save the planet by following New Zealand’s example.

Not that the Irish and the Kiwis are the only ones in trouble. Pity the poor Norwegians. Their national symbol is the moose and they are worried about the noble beast's propensity to burp and fart his way through the forest. Moose too produce a steamy heap of methane. According to calculations at Trondheim Technical University one moose lets fly with the equivalent of a couple of long-haul flights a year. And it's getting worse. Here's the science.

The planet warms up, the snows recedes, the moose eat more blueberries and make more baby moose, up goes the Norwegian methane count and down goes their Kyoto compliance. The ultimate perpetual motion machine.

So the next time David Cameron drives a husky sledge across Norway's Svalbard Peninsula he might think about shooting a passing moose. The perfect carbon offset for his photo-shoot. A shoot for a shoot. And think of the side-effects. Who wouldn't want a rugged hunting 'n shooting man as their next Prime Minister?

Read England's Climate & Energy Policy for background or visit my climate website for more on the politics of climate change.

more from Shepherd on Climate

Inconvenient Truth One

There was acute embarrassment at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) following the exposure of a serious flaw in its record of US surface temperatures since 1880. The error was so glaring that on 7th August 2007 GISS had to post revised figures which show instead of temperatures reaching their highest level in the past decade that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998 but 1934. Of the ten warmest years since 1880 it turns out that four were in the 1930s and only three in the past decade.

According to Christopher Booker writing in the Sunday Telegraph on Sunday 19th August 2007, the significance of this is that the head of GISS is James Hansen the inventor of global warming and for the past 20 years, Al 'Inconvenient Truth' Gore's closest scientific ally in his promotion of the global warming scare. The revised figures relate only to temperatures in North America but the fact that the pre-eminent scientific champion of the orthodoxy has been promoting erroneous data has considerable implications.

The expert responsible for spotting GISS's error was Stephen McIntyre, a Canadian computer analyst who four years ago scored the greatest coup in the history of this debate by demolishing the notorious hockey stick - the graph which purported to show temperatures flat-lining for centuries until they suddenly began an exponential rise in the late 20th century was produced by concealing data for the Medieval Warm Period recognised by all historians of the period. The hockey stick was adopted as the supreme icon of the global warming lobby led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which reproduced it no fewer than five times in its 2001 sexed-up report.

Since McIntyre exposed the mass of basic computer errors on which it was based, the IPCC in its most recent dodgy dossier quietly dropped it. The new GISS graph, conceding that the last decade may not have seen the hottest years of the past century, follows the latest satellite figures from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) showing that in recent years global temperatures have not continued to rise (as orthodox CO2 warming theory would suggest) but have flattened out at a level significantly lower than in 1998.

Inconvenient Truth Two

Officials in the UK Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform briefed ministers on how to explain to the EU's energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs that the UK will not be able to comply with a European Council decision in March 2007 that the EU must derive 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

The officials calculated that this could cost UK electricity users alone an additional 22 billion pounds a year equivalent to two thousand pounds per household. This is two percent of GDP and double Sir Nicholas Stern's estimate for the entire cost of halting global warming.

Whitehall officials advised the Government that the target was not remotely achievable anyway and, taking a leaf out of the Yes Minister Handbook, recommended ministers to start being economical with the actualite. So expect nuclear power to become sustainable (as well as carbon-lite) again. Germany meanwhile would like to move the target up seven percentage points to 27 percent.

Inconvenient Truth Three

Cuts in greenhouse gas emissions on the scale proposed by Al Gore might possibly save $12 trillion but their cost would be $34 trillion.
Professor William Nordhaus of Yale - the world's leading expert on the financial costs of tackling global warming.

Then there are the inconvenient supplementaries as to who pick up the costs and the benefits. Who? Whom?

more from Shepherd on Climate

From 1962 to 1966, Nigel Calder edited the scientific journal New Scientist. Subsequently he became well-respected as a science journalist with many books and articles to his name. Forty years on he joined forces with Henrik Svensmark and wrote The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change (Icon Books, ISBN 1-84046-815-7).

The book launch earlier this year was coordinated with publication of Dr. Svensmark’s peer-reviewed article entitled ‘Cosmoclimatology: a new theory emerges' which appeared in the February 2007 issue of Astronomy & Geophysics, (Vol. 48, Issue 1, pages. 1.18-1.24). The article represented the culmination of ten years of work at the Danish National Space Center correlating satellite records of low-altitude clouds with variations in cosmic rays.

Experiments in the basement of the Danish National Space Center showed that electrons are set free when cosmic rays pass through air. These free electrons then act as catalysts in the assembly of nuclei onto which water vapour condenses to make clouds.

But dust particles from air-borne pollution and ash from erupting volcanoes play a similar role. It was a key mechanism in Carl Sagan’s Nuclear Winter Scenario that has been quietly forgotten. Cloud science is at an early stage and the best cloud scientists sit with their backs to the window. They plan to turn their chairs around if their computer models ever look like simulating what goes on outside their windows.

Cosmic ray intensities change because of a number of factors…the Sun’s own activity such as solar flares, the variations in the Sun’s magnetic field which is crucial in shielding planets in our solar system from cosmic rays coming from elsewhere in the galaxy, and changes in the properties of the local interstellar medium (LISM).

According to Professor D.E. Shemansky of the Department of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering at the University of Southern California, ‘the dominant role of neutral hydrogen in the formation of the termination shock in the collision of the solar wind with the LISM has only recently been recognized by the particles and fields research community. ‘Indeed he claims that ‘…the NASA Space Physics Division has shown a persistent pernicious bias against work on the effects of the neutral gas in the LISM in the United States, from the time of the formation of the division.’ Strong words but suggestive that Henrik Svensmark might just be onto something.

Cosmic rays intensity varies on both short and long timescales and with it the concentration of radioactive carbon-14 and other unusual atoms created by these cosmic rays…thereby providing a record of shifting cosmic-ray intensities. And this record shows repeated alternations between cold and warm periods during the past 12 000 years.

Nir Shaviv of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Ján Veizer of the Ruhr University and the University of Ottawa linked these changes to the journey of the Sun and the Earth through the Milky Way galaxy. They blame the icehouse episodes on encounters with bright spiral arms, where cosmic rays are most intense. More frequent chilling events, every 34 million years or so, occur whenever the solar system passes through the mid-plane of the Galaxy. In Snowball Earth episodes around 700 and 2300 million years ago, even the equator was icy. At those times the birth-rate of stars in the galaxy was unusually high, which would have also meant a large number of exploding stars and intense cosmic rays.

According to Svensmark, whenever the Sun was feeble, cosmic-ray intensities were high and cold conditions ensued. The most recent occurrence was in the Little Ice Age that climaxed 300 years ago. During the past 500 million years the Earth has passed through four ‘hothouse’ episodes, free of ice and with high sea levels, and four ‘icehouse’ episodes like the one we live in now, with ice-sheets, glaciers and relatively low sea levels. The theory of cosmic rays and clouds would also seem to explain why the Earth did not freeze solid when it was very young. The Sun was much fainter but also more vigorous in repelling cosmic rays, so the Earth would not have had much cloud cover.

But the Cosmoclimatology Hypothesis may also have a contribution to make to discussions of the fossil record. While calculating the changing influx since life began about 3.8 billion years ago, Dr Svensmark discovered a surprising connection between cosmic-ray intensities and a variability of the productivity of life. The biggest fluctuations in productivity coincided with high star formation rates and cool periods in the Earth’s climate. Conversely, during a billion years when star formation was slow, cosmic rays were less intense and the Earth’s climate was warmer, the biosphere was almost unchanging in its productivity.

In any properly conducted scientific endeavour these ideas of Shemansky, Svensmark and Calder would be treated seriously. They would be formed into an hypothesis, predictions would be made, experiments designed to test them and attempts made to replicate results with a view to disproving or modifying the hypothesis. This is the scientific method one of the most powerful tools ever invented by mankind.

Its purpose…articulated by Sir Francis Bacon…is to advance knowledge by the deployment of a collective enterprise that pushes back the boundaries of ignorance, prejudice and superstition. This has never been easy…in part because it is too easy to cherry-pick the data. New Scientist indicates the scope of the problem in this diagram from an article published on 16th May 2007 in Issue 2604 (page 34-42) entitled ‘The Seven Biggest Myths about Climate Change’.

In the Age of the Gentleman Scientist real attempts were made to uphold The Baconian Oath. Minds were open, royal societies were free and open. Scientific careers advanced on merit more than patronage. But this is no longer the case. Nowadays rhetoric is deployed to discredit ideas and assassinate character at the behest of the political agendas of shadowy forces that are only ever seen as through a glass darkly. New Scientist it seems is among their public spokesmen. Here is New Scientist in its published critique of the Cosmoclimatology Hypothesis that the ionisation of air by cosmic rays imparts an electric charge to aerosols that encourages them to clump together; the clumps become large enough to trigger the condensation of water, and hence clouds form.

‘As yet there is no convincing evidence that such clumping occurs. Experiments under way at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva should settle the issue, but will not reveal if it matters in the real world: the atmosphere already has plenty of cloud condensation nuclei, so it is not clear why cosmic rays should have any great effect on cloud formation.’

This is unlikely to be the whole truth and would doubtless be challenged by Dr Svensmark. But the journal continues in the best Alistair Campbell manner with a piece of classic spin.

‘A series of attempts by Svensmark to show an effect have come unstuck. Most recently, he has claimed there is a correlation between low-altitude cloud cover and cosmic rays. Yet a correlation does not prove cause and effect. What's more, the correlation holds up after 1995 only if data is "corrected", and others in the field say this correction is not justified. "It's dubious manipulation of data in order to suit his hypothesis," says Joanna Haigh, an atmospheric physicist at Imperial College London. A few independent studies by other groups hint at a very tiny effect on clouds, but most have found no effect.’ This is disingenuous.

Every scientist’s data is ‘manipulated’. Peer review is one technique that is deployed to address the potential problem. It is not always so easy to separate out scientific fact from scientific fraud. The deliberate suppression of data providing evidence of a medieval warming period went too far…and a Senate Committee rightly rapped IPCC on the knuckles for being party to the planting of false evidence in the public domain. Every temperature-time series needs massaging. There is very little data in very few fields of scientific endeavour that do not need adjusting for operant conditions or to ensure a better fit to other data. The whole point of statistical techniques is to do precisely that. Any set of data can be forced to fit any mathematical equation. And so to New Scientist’s final point.

‘Even if changes in cosmic ray intensity do turn out to influence cloud cover and temperature, they cannot explain the rapid warming of the past few decades. Direct measurements going back 50 years show a periodic variation in intensity, but no downward trend coinciding with the recent warming. Indirect measurements of cosmic rays, based on the abundance of certain isotopes, suggest that their intensity fell between 1900 and 1950. While there can be a lag between a big change in a climate ‘forcing’ and its full effect on temperature, most warming should occur within a few years and taper off within decades. This is not the pattern we see.’

This again is disingenuous. At the heart of the scientific debate about global warming is the Lambda Factor that converts Heat-Energy Forcings into Temperature Changes. There is no scientific consensus about its value. Accountants always make sure they include a line in their spreadsheets called ‘adjustment’. Lambda is the climate modeller’s adjustment. Here is what I posted to my climate blog on 11th November 2006 about the ‘Battle of the Lambdas’ in a piece entitled Climate Thermodynamics.

‘The Stefan-Boltzman Law is to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein’s equation E=mc2 is to astrophysics. Boltzman relates energy to the square of the speed of light but by reference to temperature rather than mass. It was derived experimentally 100-years ago by a Slovenian professor and proved by his Austrian student. Buried in the small print of IPCC’s third assessment report is the bizarre statement that its climate models had found lambda to be 0.5C per watt of Forcing. Lambda from the Boltzman Equation is half this…based on Experiments with Nature not Manipulations with Computers.

Lambda Inflation is in fashion because the bigger the value of lambda the bigger the temperature increase you can predict from any particular set of Forcings Data. James Hansen who invented Global Warming in his evidence to Senate Hearings in the middle of a Washington Heatwave offers lambdas of 0.67, 0.75 or 1.0. John Houghton who chaired the IPCC working group trumps this with 0.8 while IPCC’s computer models now use 1.0. But The Stern Report deserves an Oscar for its implied lambda of 1.9…between six and eight times the Boltzman lambda.

Multiply by Boltzman’s lambda and temperature rise this century is in line with observation at 0.44 to 0.6C. Stern’s lambda gives nonsense. The Hadley Centre had the same problem so they now have one lambda to predict with and another…lambda divided by three…to match actual 20th Century temperatures.’

In his article Svensmark writes that the ‘multidisciplinary nature of Cosmoclimatology is both a challenge and an opportunity for many lines of inquiry. Even the search for alien life is affected because it should now take into account of the need for the right magnetic environment if life is to originate and survive on the planets of other stars.’ We can take this thought further. Our sun is at the heart of every religion…including Christianity…and it is becoming increasingly clear that something is going on. We need to find out and understand what this is.

With new data from all over the universe pouring into the antennae of the Hubble Telescope and with NASA’s planetary missions collecting an incredibly rich archive of data and images from within our own solar system we should be on the brink of a golden age of science. Analysing and understanding the true implications of this treasure trove is much too important to be left to the small-minded.

The warring of bureaucrats and the political shenanigans of public relations firms with scant regard for truth and cavalier attitude to scientific integrity and the scientific method will lead us to disaster. Their way is to deploy rhetoric, disinformation, character assassination and dodgy dossiers in pursuit of strange hidden political agendas. Science is increasingly threatened with enclosure by shadowy forces with little interest in the fate of their fellow man and great ignorance of the consequences of their arrogant disregard for the web of life created on this planet.

This creeping enclosure this stealthy clearance of the commons must be stopped. Our way, the right way, the only sane humane ecological way must be the way of truth and not authority. The fruits of science are our common wealth; part of the heritage our generation passes on to our children. It is not just another commons to be bought and sold at the whim of the rich, the powerful and the ignorant.

more from Shepherd on Climate

In 1998 Bjørn Lomborg, an associate professor at the Department of Political Science at University of Aarhus in Denmark published Verdens Sande Tilstand. Three years later Cambridge University Press published the book in English under the title of The Sceptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (ISBN 0 521 01068 3).

Later in 2001 Professor Lomborg circulated a 2500-word essay on the economics of the Kyoto Protocol. Here is the full text of the article. He worried that global warming was getting a blank cheque with cost-benefit analysis being thrown out of the window. His essay included numerous references to the 2001 IPCC Report on Global Warming on which he made his position quite clear.

‘Global warming is important, environmentally, politically and economically. There is no doubt that mankind has influenced and is still increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and that this will increase temperature. I will not discuss all the scientific uncertainty, but basically accept the models and predictions from the 2001 report of the UN Climate Panel (IPCC). Yet, we will need to separate hyperbole from realities in order to choose our future optimally.’

For good measure he added a diagram showing the impact of Kyoto…on which there is a scientific consensus.

Figure 1: The expected increase in temperature with business-as-usual and with the Kyoto restrictions extended forever.

So far so good. Here is the crux of Lomborg’s argument in his own words:

‘If Kyoto is implemented with anything but global emissions trading - a scheme which seems utterly unattainable, and was not at all addressed in Bonn - it will not only be almost inconsequential for the climate, but it will also constitute a poor use of resources. The cost of such a Kyoto pact if implemented, just for the US, will be higher than the cost of solving the single most pressing problem for the world - providing the entire world with clean drinking water and sanitation. It is estimated that the latter would avoid 2 million deaths every year and prevent half a billion people becoming seriously ill each year. If no trading mechanism is implemented for Kyoto, the costs could approach $1 trillion, or almost five times the cost of world-wide water and sanitation coverage. For comparison, the total global aid today is about $50 billion annually. If we were to go even further - as suggested by many - and curb global emissions to the 1990 level, the net cost to the world would seriously escalate to about $4 trillion extra - comparable almost to the cost of global warming itself. Likewise, a temperature increase limit would cost anywhere from $3 to $33 trillion extra. This emphasizes that we need to be very careful in our willingness to act on global warming.’

Common sense to you or me. But at this point all hell broke loose around the good professor. Why? Lomborg again.

‘Economic analyses clearly show that it will be far more expensive to cut CO2 emissions radically than to pay the costs of adaptation to the increased temperatures. The Bonn meeting was convened to agree the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to cut carbon emissions to 5.2 percent below 1990-levels in 2010, or a reduction of almost 30 percent, compared to no-intervention. The effect of Kyoto on the climate will be minuscule (and even more so after Bonn). All models agree that the Kyoto Protocol will have surprisingly little impact. One model by a lead author of the 1996 IPCC report shows us how an expected temperature increase of 2.1°C in 2100 will be diminished by the protocol to an increase of 1.9°C. Or to put it more clearly, the temperature that we would have experienced in 2094 we have now postponed to 2100. In essence, the Kyoto Protocol does not negate global warming but merely buys the world six years.

Basically, global warming will be expensive ($5 trillion) and there is very little good we can do about it. Even if we were to handle global warming optimally which would mean cutting emissions a little fairly far into the future, we can only cut the cost very little (about $0.3 trillion). However, if we choose to enact Kyoto or even more ambitious programmes, the world will lose. And this conclusion does not just come from the output from a single model. Almost all the major computer models agree that even when chaotic consequences have been taken into consideration ‘it is striking that the optimal policy involves little emissions reduction below uncontrolled rates until the middle of the [twenty-first] century at the earliest.’

Lomborg is making a perfectly sensible point…and the average grant-funded academic would have stopped there. But there is a different scientific tradition in Scandinavia. This can be traced back to Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century and perhaps even further to the mythologies of their Nordic cultures. Scientists are not easily intimidated, truth still matters, facts are respected and ordinary people have real access to public information. Lomborg once more in his own words.

‘So is it not curious that the typical reporting on global warming tells us all the bad things that could happen from CO2 emissions, but few or none of the bad things that could come from overly zealous regulation of such emissions? Indeed, why is it that global warming is not discussed with an open attitude, carefully attuned to avoid making big and costly mistakes to be paid for by our descendants, but rather with a fervour more fitting for preachers of opposing religions?

This is an indication that the discussion of global warming is not just a question of choosing the optimal economic path for humanity, but has much deeper, political roots as to what kind of future society we would like. This understanding is clearly laid out in the new 2001 IPCC report.

Last month in Bonn most of the world’s nations (minus the US) reached an agreement to cut carbon emissions. Generally the deal was widely reported as almost saving the world. Yet not only is this untrue in the scientific sense - the deal will do almost no good - but it is also unclear whether carbon emission cuts are really the best way for the world to ensure progress on its most important areas.

When the IPCC tells us that the world might warm some 5.8°C over the coming century, this is based on an enormous variety of scenarios and models, where the IPCC has explicitly rejected making predictions about the future, and instead gives us ‘computer-aided storytelling,’ basing the development of crucial variables on initial choice and depicting normative scenarios ‘as one would hope they would emerge.’

Yet the high-end scenarios seem plainly unlikely. Reasonable analysis suggest that renewables - and especially solar power - will be competitive or even out-compete fossil fuels by mid-century, and this means that carbon emissions are much more likely to follow the low emission scenarios, causing a warming of about 2-2.5°C.

Professor Lomborg then remarks that global warming would neither decrease food production nor increase hurricanes and cyclones. As for disease…and malaria in particular….he points out that the IPCC Report concluded that additional exposure would come from middle or high income countries where a well functioning health sector and developed infrastructure makes actual malaria unlikely. Thus the global study of actual malaria transmission shows remarkably few changes, even under the most extreme scenarios. For Lomborg an increase in flood victims was also unlikely because a much richer world would protect itself better just as the Dutch have been doing for centuries. ‘The cost of protection is estimated at 0.1 percent of GDP for most nations, though it might be as high as several percent for small island states.’

By this time civil servants, bureaucrats and politicians are starting to claim that Professor Lomborg has exceeded his scientific brief…a charge he has anticipated. His response is to turn it against his accusers. Lomborg again.

‘Of course, while using global warming as a springboard for other wider policy goals is entirely legitimate, such goals should in all honesty be made explicit. Moreover, it is problematic to have an organization which often quite successfully gathers the most relevant scientific information about global warming, also so clearly promoting a political agenda, which seldom reaches the news headlines.’

Aye! There’s the rub! Particularly when global warming will hit hardest on developing countries with rich countries actually likely to benefit from a warming lower than 2-3°C. Being poor means you have less adaptive capacity so you are hit harder. Our intuition might tell us to do something drastic immediately. But Professor Lomborg’s scientific credentials give him the perfect right to question whether the cure might not be worse than the original affliction. Not least because few other scientists seem to be doing so.

more from Shepherd on Climate

The tropical seas of the Atlantic have been quiet this summer. There have been no hurricanes and only three tropical storms. The official hurricane season begins in June and peaks from August to October. Last year disappointed the global warming fraternity - now re-branded as the extreme climate brotherhood. After getting 2005 billed as the worst hurricane season in history including Hurricane Katrina which came close to wiping out New Orleans they could claim just five hurricanes in 2006, none of which hit the US.

El Niño continues to confound the brotherhood every four years. Nobody has much idea how to model it and last year was no exception. A surge of warm water in the Pacific shifted high-altitude winds across the North Atlantic and ripped apart many fledgling storms before they could develop. Huge clouds of dust sweeping off the Sahara into the Atlantic choked off several other storms.

But that is only one small part of our planet’s 2006 hurricane story. The Earth has Seven Oceans and it was a different story elsewhere. The Eastern Pacific had ten hurricanes with Hurricane Ioka in the Central Pacific breaking all records. Over in the Western Pacific there were twenty-three typhoons and together they killed more than two thousand people with the Philippines being struck five times. The Australians also had a bad year that included Hurricane Monica, the biggest one on record for the southern hemisphere.

The better forecasters reckon that hurricanes probably wax and wane in natural cycles lasting decades. They tell us that, if it turns out with hindsight that we are in a period of growing storminess, then this could last for many years. The best forecasters admit they are just guessing.

Their present view is that neither past trends nor the millions of dollars of computer modelling have been much help. Indeed the suspicion is that global climate modelling is turning out to be counterproductive because it has produced a well-funded priesthood imposing its flawed visions, partial theories and bad science on fellow climate scientists at the behest of those who delight in spreading fear and despondency among the global elite’s chattering classes.

more from Shepherd on Climate

extracted from weblog three hundred and sixty three on Friday 29th December 2006

A Government Report hailed by Tony Blair as ‘the most important document ever published in the history of the world’ predicts a terrifying scenario for mankind in the very near future. As temperatures soar to levels which will make all life unsustainable and sea levels rise by an estimated 120 feet flooding more than 90 percent of the earth’s land mass, experts have predicted that house prices in the south-east of England may collapse by as much as 20 percent. This catastrophic end of the world scenario could mean that a typical 4-bedroom detached family house in Godalming could see as much as £75 000 wiped off its asking price overnight.

The story was the same throughout Great Britain as hard-pressed decent hardworking homeowners read through the 565-page Stern Report with a sense of mounting despair. Sidney Greenslade a 71-year old retired accountant who lives with his 69-year old wife Pearl in Chertsey Surrey said ‘We bought our executive bungalow in 1989 as our pension scheme. Now we find that the sun is about to fry the earth to a crisp and where does that leave me and Mrs Greenslade? I blame the government.’

First-time buyers wept openly in the streets as the government condemned them to death by drowning as the ice caps melt before they had even got a first foot on the property ladder.

To accompany publication of The Very Stern Report commissioned by Her Majesty’s Treasury the Daily Mail produced this Ten Point Summary headlined We’re All Going To Die Unless We Pay More Tax.

1. Global Warming is the greatest threat which has ever faced the human race;
2. Unless very drastic steps are taken immediately human life as we know it will end in forty-five minutes;
3. It is now an unchallenged fact that as CO2 levels soar to unsustainable levels, scalding hot giant tsunamis will sweep across the world at millions of miles an hour leaving a path of unprecedented devastation in their wake;
4. No form of life will be left unscathed from the mighty elephant to the humblest bacteria;
5. That includes the human race who face imminent and painful extinction unless extremely drastic steps are taken by responsible governments acting in the best interests of humanity as a whole and those of future generations;
6. It is too late for mere talk. It is now the time for action...and unprecedentedly drastic action at that;
7. There can be no half measures;
8. There is only one possible way in which the planet can be saved from a fate too horrible to imagine;
9. Taxes will have to be raised immediately. And by quite a lot;
10. And, to be honest, Gordon’s run out of money, so this end-of-the-world thing couldn’t have come at a better time.

Not to be upstaged the Daily Express published an article headlined Did Global Warming Kill Diana? Here it is.

'Scientists yesterday revealed that the Arctic winter that descended on Paris ten years ago causing Princess Diana’s Mercedes to skid on ice whilst trying to avoid a polar bear driving a white Fiat Uno was actually caused by global warming on the direct orders of the Duke of Edinburgh. Said one meteorological expert yesterday, ‘A thick fug reduced visibility around fuggin’ Paris because the fuggin’ Duke ordered MI6 to increase fuggin’ carbon emissions all over the fuggin’...continued every Monday [Ed.].

more from Shepherd on Climate

extracted from weblog three hundred and sixty two published on Thursday 28th December 2006

The Chinook is a mountain wind named after a Native American tribe from the Pacific North-West. They named it snow-eater because of the heat of the wind racing down the eastern slopes of the Rockies. Moist winds sweeping off the Pacific are lifted up over the mountain range, cool and condense into thick clouds and pour with rain. Then the winds become dried out and as they race down the other side of the mountain they warm up and dry even more.

The temperature change is so dramatic that on 14th January 1972 at Loma Montana a 57 Celsius rise was registered from -48C to +9C…a world record for a 24-hour temperature increase. Boulder in Colorado often gets particularly hard hit by Chinooks as the winds are funneled down through nearby canyons. A gust of 143 miles per hour was registered during January 1971 and in January 1982 a Chinook caused more than $10 million of damage.

In my Cloud Cuckoo Land blog I mentioned the scientific problem with Temperature Gauge Data in Temperature-Time Series. I wrote that you can either measure the temperature in the same place for as long as possible…hopefully for centuries...or you measure under similar operant conditions. Here is some of what I wrote.

‘The first course of action seems to make sense because the shape of the landscape affects the local climate. A number this side of the hill will not be the same as one from the other side. But there is a problem. A hundred years ago your measuring point was in the middle of a field five miles out of town. Today it’s in the middle of a shopping centre’.

The operant conditions of your data point matter because built-up environments are typically several degrees warmer. I ended by remarking that ‘even something as simple as collecting data is far from simple’. This data quality effect might be enough to explain the fact that global temperature data from the Northern Hemisphere appears to suggest that it has warmed more than the Southern Hemisphere…something that is puzzling scientists as it is inherently unlikely.

In a scientifically-literate world this 200-word caveat about Data Quality would be unnecessary. But Public Science is now a branch of Public Relations...and truth an early casualty.

The reported average 30-year temperature in Britain from 1961 to 1990 was 9.47 Celsius. Since 1990 every second year has been at least one degree higher than this. The top yearly averages since have been 1995-10.52C; 1997-10.53C; 1999-10.63C; 2002-10.60C; 2003-10.50C; 2004-10.48C and 2006-10.84C.

This year has been particularly warm. July was billed as Britain’s warmest month ever at 19.66 Celsius and we also had the warmest September since 1729 at 16.55C. Globally 2006 will be our sixth warmest year since 1850.

There are Carbonistas who point the finger of suspicion at The Carbon Economy to explain all this but little of their science stands up to rigorous scrutiny.

more from Shepherd on Climate