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.

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extracted from weblog three hundred and fifty six first published on Friday 22nd December 2006

Two years ago a massive earthquake off the coast of Sumatra triggered the biggest and most devastating tsunami known in recent history. The quake measuring more than 9.0 on the Richter Scale released monstrous waves up to 100 feet high along coastlines across the Indian Ocean from Somalia to Thailand that left 230 000 people killed or lost. The immediate cause of the Asian Tsunami was a sideways rupture of about 50 feet along a seismic fault line under the sea with the sea bed lifting up some ten feet or so.

But the moon may also have played a part in it because recent research has shown that this fault line is sensitive to the monthly lunar cycle. A team of British scientists compared the patterns of quakes and tremors including the Boxing Day 2004 Tsunami with the phases of the moon. Publishing in Geophysical Research Letters the scientists reported that quakes were 86% more likely around full moons and 38% more likely around new moons when tides are at their most extreme. The movement of huge masses of water at these tides could stress fault lines under strain.

As our planet whizzes across the face of the sun at this time of the year on its elliptical orbit...and summer is now on the way...it has always seemed surprising to me that the tilt of the earth?s axis is responsible for the difference between hot summers and cold winters. At the Winter Solstice the Northern Hemisphere is leaning away from the Sun while at the Summer Solstice it is leaning towards it. Why should a few thousand miles make so much difference in ninety three million. Perhaps someone can explain before I try to set up my life to spend half of it in New Zealand.

One person asking such questions was James Croll. In 1864 he published a ground-breaking scientific paper on how fluctuations in the Earth's orbit around the Sun could explain the coming and going of Ice Ages. He had figured out that ice ages came and went as the earth's orbit changed from a circle to an oval-shape...and with changes in the tilt of the Earth. According to his calculations only small changes in the Earth's Orbit were needed because the cooling was amplified by the huge ice sheets reflecting heat from their white surface back into space.

It took some 60 years for these ideas to become widely accepted...and another hundred years to be buried as Bad News by the Global Warming Conspirators. But at least Croll who died in 1890 gained recognition as an inspirational scientist in his own lifetime suggesting there was more good honest horse sense talked about our planet's climate before the Computer Boys hijacked the subject with their Clip Boards and Computer Forecasting Models.

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extracted from weblog three hundred and nineteen first published on Wednesday 15th November 2006

2006 broke the record for the hottest September. UK temperatures averaged sixty degrees Fahrenheit and broke the previous record from 1949 by one and a half degrees. Ireland also broke its September record…as did Oslo. The other side of the world has been unusually warm too. It is spring in New Zealand which has had the third warmest September on record. And Melbourne logged its warmest September since records began in 1907.

Australia has been unusually dry with drought meaning poor grain harvests and rising bread prices next year. Price hikes may be a Dead Cert but not for this reason. Three quarters of the world’s corn exports come from the US but these are vanishing fast.

In South Dakota, Ethanol Distilleries now claim half the corn harvest. And if all the Ethanol Plants proposed for Iowa get built they would use all the corn grown in the state. There is a US Ethanol Subsidy of 51¢ per gallon until 2010 so with oil at $70 per barrel distilling Fuel Alcohol promises huge profits. World grain consumption grew by 20 million tons in 2006…with 14 million tons of it going into the fuel tanks of American cars.

Almost everything we eat can be converted into fuel so the line between Food and Energy Economics is rapidly disappearing. Ten years ago Food Processors and Livestock Producers converted Farm Commodities into products for Supermarket Shelves. Now the Ethanol Distilleries and Biodiesel Refineries are piling into the market for Farm Commodities to supply fuel to service stations.

So the Oil Price is now the support price for Food Commodities. The vast number of distilleries coming on stream is also drawing grain away from beef, pork, poultry, milk, and eggs production. Another problem is that corn and soybean production in the American Midwest is ecologically unsustainable. It produces massive topsoil erosion and pollutes surface and groundwater with pesticides and fertilizer runoff that travels down the Mississippi River to deplete oxygen levels in the Gulf of Mexico.

The world’s crop-based fuel production is concentrated in Brazil, the United States and Europe. Last year the US and Brazil each produced over four billion gallons of ethanol. Brazil uses sugarcane as the feedstock while the US distillers use grain…mostly corn. The 55 million tons of US corn going into ethanol this year represent 16% of the country’s grain harvest…and supplies 3% of its automotive fuel.

Brazil is converting half of its sugar harvest into Fuel Ethanol …doubling the world sugar price by effectively withdrawing 10% of the harvest. In 2005 the European Union produced 1600 million gallons of biofuels…half of it biodiesel produced from vegetable oil in Germany and France and the other half ethanol from grain in France, Spain and Germany.

Last year China converted two million tons of grain into ethanol mostly corn but also some wheat and rice. In India ethanol is produced largely from sugarcane. Thailand is concentrating on ethanol from cassava, while Malaysia and Indonesia are investing heavily in additional palm oil plantations as well as biodiesel refineries. Malaysia has approved 32 biodiesel refineries but has also had the sense to call a pause to assess the future for Palm Oil Supplies.

The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol can feed one person for a year. Ominously the world grain stocks are at their lowest level in 34 years with 76 million more mouths to feed each year. As the reality of this trade-off works its way through global markets the poorest 2 000 million people in the world who already spend well over half of any income they have on food will be priced out. Grain importers like Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria and Mexico will need to find the money to match their grain imports with imports of tanks and guns and riot gear.

Back to our European superstate where its joined-up government has decreed that by 2020 ten percent of all transport fuel in the EU must be biofuels. Forget the science and get the arithmetic. To meet their share of the EU target Brits will need 14 million tons of wheat. At present the country only grows half of this…and puts it on the kitchen table. But ever since a barrel of oil set the bread price, wheat prices have doubled. Goodness knows where they will be by 2020.

What to do? Reclaim set-aside and annihilate the country’s bird and wildlife populations? Global set-aside trading exchange like Jimmy Carter promised Robert Mugabe & Joshua Nkomo back at Lancaster House in 1980? Import palm oil from Indonesia and massacre orang-utans whose tropical forest habitats have made way for palm oil plantations? Looks like those tanks, guns and riot gear will be needed here.

Picture the scene. Lunch-time at the Travellers’ Club in St. James. No briefcases or files allowed in the member’s lounge. Just the sound of hushed voices from the leather upholstery.

‘Time we set the terrorist laws on those tree huggers at CAAT. Had it up to here with their bloody FOIRs.’
‘Only a thousand media chaps at the MOD? Double it. Get the girls in.’
‘Should let BAE have those arms salesmen over at the DESO. Learn from the Yanks. Call ‘em private contractors. Funding from black ops. Get 'em off balance sheet.’
‘Good piece by Roberts. That’s the way to go, old boy. Must stay ahead of the dykes and pinkos, eh what? Them or us!
Your father in the Guards? Well, I’ll be blowed! And at Eton together too!’

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Shepherd turned to Calderón. ‘Come on Constanza. Time out. Let’s go outside for a few minutes. We need some fresh air. Did you think any of that was getting through?’

‘Oh yes,’ Constanza replied. ‘People are always persuaded by you. But most of them are always persuaded by the last person they listened to. The real question is whether any of it sticks.’

‘I think the scepticism…the attitude…sticks and acts as an inoculation. Coleridge divided readers into four categories: sponges who absorb all they read and return it nearly in the same state, only a little dirtied; sand-glasses who retain nothing, and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time; strain-bags who retain merely the dregs of what they read; and mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read and enable others to profit by it also.’

‘I have another question before we veer off at a tangent about Romantic Poets. Whenever I hear you talking about climate change you censure any mention of the role of the military and their climate weapon development programmes. But you always include it whenever you write about the risks of climate change. In fact your first strategic bullet point is always ‘We will outlaw the use and development of climate weapons immediately’. What is actually going on?’

Shepherd stopped and turned to Calderón. She held his gaze. ‘The first question is easy to answer. I don’t talk about it because I am uncertain of my facts. Your second question is harder to answer. I need a Deep Throat or a whistleblower. What is actually going on? The quick answer is ‘I don’t know.’ What have you managed to turn up? We have twenty minutes. Perhaps we should compare notes. Let’s sit over there by the herb garden. You go first. Let us try to agree about the background. Not right back to the Armada and the claims that the Wessex witches created the storm that scattered the Spanish fleet. But more recently.’

‘How about starting with Tesla?’ Calderón suggested.

‘Good idea. Tesla filed a bunch of wild patents for an unmanned electrically propelled aircraft that could fly at eighteen thousand miles per hour and could be used as a weapon. He came up with something called teleforce, which was a death ray that could melt airplane engines at a distance of two hundred and fifty miles. He did a lot of work on wireless transmission of electricity. He was fascinated by the possibility of focusing electrical force and amplifying its effect. He even claimed to have once produced an earthquake from his lab.

The trouble is that this information comes, not from a scientist or a historian, but from a novelist. And novelists are not accepted as credible sources even though Michael Crichton was the first person to testify before a Senate Committee investigating scientific fraud at the ICPP. As thrillers both State of Fear and Clive Cussler's Polar Shift are marvellous reads, the kind of book I get through in a half a dozen sittings...and then have to catch up on a couple of weeks' sleep. But how good is their research. Peer review is a ncessary condition for scientific authenticity and novelists don't do it. Anyway I'm wandering. Perhaps you can take it from here.’

Calderón paused to gather her thoughts. Shepherd continued to pull together his own.

‘Tesla could simply have been ahead of his time as far as ballistics missiles and lasers are concerned. His concepts were sound. But the execution never lived up to the expectations. He’s become something of a cult figure in recent years. The conspiracy-minded suspect that governments have been experimenting with the work of both Tesla and Wilhelm Reich.’

‘You mean Reich’s cloud-busters that landed him in gaol and got his books burned at the end of the 1940s?’

‘Well that’s not the whole story.’ Shepherd said. ‘The official case focused on his orgone accumulator. But Reich’s work is all of a piece. Anyway both Reich and Tesla have attracted attention. But there is a third man, a brilliant electrical engineer from Budapest where Tesla worked in the late eighteen hundreds who picked up on Tesla’s work in the 1930s and concentrated on extra-low-frequency electromagnetic transmission. His name was Lazlo Kovacs. What do you know of him?

‘What does anyone know?’ Calderón replied. ‘He worried about his work. He reckoned that certain transmissions could be used to disrupt the atmosphere and produce severe weather and earthquakes. I read somewhere that he had actually developed a set of frequencies to focus electromagnetic resonance and use the surrounding material to amplify the effects. Apparently his findings were published and can be found in the scientific literature. He refused to make public the complete set of frequencies necessary to build a real device so other scientists were understandably pretty sceptical. But I have never followed any of this up in the literature.’

‘No but some people have. The Nazis were very open to ideas of mysticism, the occult and pseudoscience. Those stories about Nazi archaeologists searching for the Holy Grail are true. They pounced on Kovacs and kidnapped him and his family. After the war ended, it was disclosed that they had put him to work in a secret lab on a project to develop a super-weapon that would win the war.

Papers uncovered after the war suggested that he was on the verge of an electromagnetic warfare breakthrough when the Russians overran his lab in East Prussia. Kovacs had disappeared but the Soviets carried out research based on the Kovacs Theorems, something the US was aware of. The significance of electromagnetic radiation has never been lost on the military. There was a big conference at Los Alamos to talk about applied weapons technology based on his work, which concluded that the manipulation of electromagnetic waves could be more devastating than a nuclear device. The military took Kovacs very seriously.’

‘Are you implying that the Kovacs Theorems were behind the testing of electromagnetic pulse weapons in 1991 in the first Gulf War?

‘The testing definitely took place and there are those who claim the Soviets conducted similar ones that caused earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and weather disturbances. Witnesses report bright light flashes in the sky and an aurora borealis. There’s a great deal of controversy over a project called HAARP, short for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, being carried out by the US. The idea is to shoot a focused electromagnetic beam into the ionosphere. It’s been billed as an academic programme to improve worldwide communications but some people speculate that the goals are military, from Star Wars defence to mind control. Whatever the truth, HAARP’s roots are in Tesla’s coil and Kovacs theorems.’

A young woman and an older man came over and sat down beside Shepherd and Calderón. Shepherd turned to Calderón and introduced her as the ocean geologist Kerstin Henriksson. ‘And my colleague,’ said Henriksson, ‘is the Ukrainian physicist Petrov Goldberg’.

‘Good timing Doctor Henriksson. Nice to meet you Petrov.’ Shepherd said. He turned back to Calderón. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong Kerstin but a Tesla coil is a resonant transformer made up of two coils which transfer pulses of energy between one another until they produce a lightning-like discharge.’

‘Close enough. How much do you know of our latest work? We are through with solid ground and the atmosphere and are now sending transmissions to the bottom of the ocean. Our amplified electromagnetic waves can penetrate deep into the earth’s crust. Our guess is that the transmissions can cause anomalies in the earth’s mantle in roughly the same way the HAARP programme disturbs the atmosphere.’

‘What sort of anomalies?’ Calderón asked.

‘Whirlpools and eddies.’

‘And then?’

‘The swirling molten layer under the earth's crust is what creates the magnetic field that surrounds the earth. Any disruption of the field has the potential to cause all sorts of disturbances. Of course on the face of it power from the Tesla-Kovacs spark plug will be puny compared to the mass of the earth. So you don’t deploy it this way. Instead you have perhaps a dozen of these devices spread out and concentrating their power on a small area. We think that might work and produce something a bit more than waves in a bathtub.’

Shepherd was looking grim. ‘So this is where Einstein’s letter to the President comes in.’

‘Einstein!’ exclaimed Calderón. ‘But his letter to Roosevelt was about nuclear weapons.’

‘You are half right,’ Shepherd responded. ‘His other letter was to Harry Truman. This one has never been published. In it he warned of the dangers of electromagnetic war based on Kovacs. Presidents do not ignore Einstein. Truman appointed a committee to look into it. Out of it came a research effort similar to the Manhattan Project.

‘We’ve heard that the Russians were pursuing the same line of research,’ Henriksson said.

‘That’s right. By the mid-sixties the US and the Russians were neck and neck. The Russians concentrated on the land rather than the sky and created some earthquakes. After the big Alaskan quake the US retaliated and caused some floods and droughts in Russia. But this was only the warm-up. Scientists from both countries discovered about the same time that the combined force from their experiments could cause major changes in the earth’s electromagnetic field. A top secret meeting between the two countries was held on a remote island in the Bering Sea. Scientists and government officials attended. Both countries were presented with evidence showing the serious consequences of further experimentation using the Kovacs Theorems.’

‘How do you two know all this if it was so secret? Calderón asked.

‘Kerstin was one of the participants,’ Shepherd replied. ‘And I have friends at Draper Labs in the heart of the MIT campus. We talk regularly and share our concerns.’

‘We agreed to end research and get back to lesser evils such as nuclear warfare.’ Henriksson added with a wry smile. ‘Hard to believe isn’t it. A nuclear holocaust as a lesser evil.’

‘Believe it.’ Shepherd leaned forward and lowered his voice as if the low railings around the herb garden were bugged. ‘Keeping the secret was considered of such consequence that a security apparatus was set up in each country. Anyone who became too inquisitive or knowledgeable about Kovacs and his work was discouraged or eliminated.’

‘A Kovacs Society was established as part of the set-up,’ Henriksson remarked. ‘The reasoning was that it would be a first stop for someone interested in Kovacs’ work. Before the Berlin Wall came down one telephone call would get rid of anyone who got too curious. But nowadays disinformation and half-truths are placed on conspiracy websites instead which is just as effective and a lot less messy.’

‘But of course this does nothing for the threat itself which cannot be eliminated quite so easily,’ Shepherd added. ‘What scared everyone was the possibility that the electromagnetic manipulation would cause a shift of the earth’s poles. Constanza, you’re up on this. Explain how it could happen.’

‘The earth’s electromagnetic field is created by the spinning of the outer crust around the solid part of the inner core. Scientists at Leipzig University developed a model that showed the earth as a gigantic dynamo. The heavy metals and liquid magma of the inner core electromagnet are the clutch. The lighter metals at the crust are the windings. The planet’s poles are determined by the electromagnetic charge. The magnetic poles tend to wander. Navigators take this phenomenon into account all the time. If one pole declines in strength, you might see an actual reversal of the magnetic north and south poles.’

‘Right,’ broke in Henriksson. ‘The effect would be disruptive but not catastrophic. Power grids would be knocked out, satellites rendered useless, compasses confused and atmospheric holes punched in the ozone allowing bursts of solar radiation to get through. You’d see the aurora borealis farther south and migrating birds would be disoriented. But this would be nothing compared to the effects of a geological polar shift. Deep-ocean geologist know the effect of the earth’s crust moving over the inner core - the solid part moving over the liquid part - because it has happened before when a comet passed close to the earth.’

Shepherd took up the story. ‘A comet is one thing but man-made machinations causing physical changes is something else. Electromagnetism runs the universe. The earth is charged up like a huge electromagnet. Changes in the field can cause a shift in polarity. But it can also do something much worse than this. And this is what Kovacs homed in on in his research. Kerstin?’

‘We know two things about matter.’ Henriksson explained. ‘We know there could be twenty times more matter in the universe than we know about. And we know that matter oscillates between the matter and the energy state. Hollywood directors have figured out the consequences. By changing the electromagnetic field of the planet, the location of matter on the earth’s surface could change. The forces of inertia would react to this shift of matter.’

Calderón could keep still no longer. She jumped up and paced back and forth gesticulating energetically.

‘My God! The waters in the world’s oceans and lakes would be jerked around like water in a cooking basin, pounding the coastlines. All electrical devices would fail. We’d have hurricanes and tornadoes of unheard-of force. The earth’s crust would break open causing huge earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and massive lava flows. Climate changes, radiation sickness, millions - billions - would die. Stalin and Hitler, Hiroshima and PolPot would pale by comparison. This is monstrous. Evil in its purest form. How dare…’

Shepherd interrupted her. ‘Time we went back in Constanza. Have I answered your question? What happened to your Catholic faith? Forgive them for they know not what they do might be more appropriate?’

Shepherd turned to Goldberg and Henriksson. ‘Petrov, what part do you play in all this?’

Petrov pondered the question for a moment. ‘Did you ever hear of the Russian Woodpecker Project? It was an effort to control weather for military purposes using electromagnetic radiation. The US were following a similar line of research. And the Chinese are probably not far behind. And where China go Japan and Taiwan are sure to follow.’

‘How successful were these projects?’ Calderón asked.

‘Over a period of time, there was a series of unusual weather events in both countries. They ranged from high winds and torrential rains to drought. Even earthquakes. I have been told on good authority that the research ended with the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union. But it seems unlikely. Some disruption to budgets under Yeltsin. Sure. But Russian President Putin will have restored the programmes. The Russian military is skilled at defending its budgets and protecting its weapon programmes.’

‘We really must get back,’ Shepherd said. ‘I am sorry to rush you Petrov. I assume you are, or were, KGB. We have quite a lot to talk about. But if I understand where you are heading, you suspect that today’s climate effects, if they turn out to be real, could be a hangover from Woodpecker?’

‘Yes but there is something else. Many years ago Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s Security Adviser, predicted that an elite class would arise, using modern technology to influence public behaviour and keep society under close surveillance and control. They would use social crises and the mass media to achieve their ends through secret warfare including weather modification. At the KGB we concluded that such plotters would not advertise the fact but would instead lead people to believe that they opposed such an elite. My concern is that you might be looking the wrong way.’

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