The following editorial appeared on the Huffington Post website today (italicized entries, below)…and I couldn’t help but give the writer some of his own medicine (my responses not italicized, & in parentheses).

WHY TO DENY ON CLIMATE CHANGE

1) Compassion fatigue: No one really denies world hunger, but we sure are good at turning away from it. People have been hearing about climate for two decades now, and they’d really not think any more about it.

(Americans give more to charity than any country in the world, and they are perfectly willing to help out…when there is a REAL crisis. They are not so crazy about supporting those who profit off of imaginary ones.)

2) Stigma: Pick one guy and stick with him as the personification of evil. That would be Al Gore, who plays the same role for climate that Jane Fonda did, and still does nearly 40 years later, for Vietnam. Jane has admitted that she made a huge mistake by posing with the North Vietnamese, and neither her multiple apologies, the fact that she was right about the war, nor the otherwise-accepted concept of Christian Forgiveness will ever let her off the hook for millions of Americans.

(Stigma? You mean like labeling us “deniers”? Or “flat-Earthers”? Or “corporate toadies?” Or “Holocaust deniers”?)

3) Dogma: Those who talk about climate change are the same ones who occupy the tenth circle of Hell for many Americans: Politicians, the Media, Scientists, Educators, Hippies, and Showbiz types. So it’s a moral imperative to be agin what they’re for.

(If the shoe fits….)

4) Fear Factor: Losing your SUV, or ATV, is more of a fright than phenology (the effect of climatic changes on the seasons), or melting permafrost, or polar bears.

(Losing liberty over a theoretical threat is the main concern here (no one has ever been killed by manmade global warming…because there is no way to distinguish manmade warming from natural).

5) Manufactured denial: Marc Morano is a Senate staffer for James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who’s said that climate change is a “hoax.” In that role, Morano’s been the Drum Major of the denial parade. The Marc Moranos of the world function for climate the way that Johnnie Cochran functioned for OJ Simpson: Raise enough shreds of doubt, even if you do it in reckless and theatrical ways, and climate change can win an acquittal, or at least a mistrial no matter how strong the rest of the evidence is. (It was reported last week that Morano’s career as a public servant will soon end, and he’ll take the denial machine to the private sector).

(I think a better analogy is one person, Marc Morano posting information…maybe with some spin…versus hundreds or thousands of journalists who are doing the same thing on the other side. Are those odds still not good enough for you?)

6) Devotion: The corollary to not believing anything Al Gore and his ilk is that you must believe everything that a crackpot like Glenn Beck says. [Blogger’s Note: The word “ilk” is a very special one. A nonscientific Googling of the terms “Al Gore” and “Ilk” yielded 705 results. “Al Gore” and “Antichrist” got 693 hits, but that’s misleading, since the “Antichrist” in question in many of those hits was either Hillary or Obama, and Gore was just mentioned as a henchman.]

(Actually, WE are the ones who tolerate a variety of theories for what causes climate change. We just don’t believe the first place you should look is in the tailpipe of an SUV, or up some bovine orifice.)

7) Lack of backbone in Senior Editorial Management: A long-gone CNN boss of mine once told me that he hesitated about climate change stories. If he had his doubts about a diplomacy story, he said, he could get Henry Kissinger or Madeleine Albright on the phone to explain it to him. But for climate, he said he was “stuck” with only me.

(WHAT? You mean there are MORE ways to be killed by global warming than the 37 that we’ve already heard about??)

8 ) Current events: The Gallup poll just released that shows an increase in the number of Americans who think that climate fears are “exaggerated” also points out that this always happens with many secondary issues when the merde hits the fan –9/11 or Depression tend to make issues like climate seem less important. They also get covered less.

(Yes, there is something about real death and suffering that concerns reasonable people somewhat more than science fiction documentaries.)

9) Credentials: Peer review means nothing to the general public. And it’s unreasonable to expect a casual reader to make a huge distinction between a respected and peer-reviewed climate scientist like Steve Schneider, and the “coal monkeys” (Schneider’s term) who staff the Denial Labs.

(We have peer reviewed science, too, but it is you journalists who don’t have the backbone to report on it. How convenient.)

10) Frank Luntz: Go to www.ewg.org and read the 2003 memo from the peerless Republican consultant. It counsels that manufacturing doubt is the only way to avoid losing the battle. In an interview at last year’s Heartland Institute’s Deny-a-Palooza, Morano claims he’s never read the Luntz memo. Which, if true, means that a superstar political consultant wrote a memo for his party on the environment, and the party’s most prominent environmental spokesman has managed to ignore it for six years?

(Tell me again…who is Frank Luntz, and what does he have to do with me?)

11) Ideology: Environmentalists often make the mistake of tarring all skeptics with the same brush. Not everyone’s on the take from Exxon and Peabody Coal. Not by along shot. But policy fixes to climate change are absolutely toxic to many freemarketers and libertarians.

(“Policy fixes to climate change” is like saying, “let’s outlaw gravity”.)

12) Ossified science: William Gray, the hurricane guy, is the best example of an old-line scientist who has complete contempt for any science that’s not generated in a lab or on a chalkboard. He’ll go to his grave not believing in any global warming, nor anything else that relies on computer models for its science. Chris Mooney’s book “Storm World” tells this story very well.

(Actually, I think Bill Gray has the best answer to ultimately what causes most climate fluctuations, including global warming (and cooling): changes in ocean circulation. In fact, we now have satellite evidence that a major mode of this kind of change – the Pacific Decadal Oscillation – has caused most of the warming we’ve seen in the last century. But don’t look for it in the news when it finally gets published.)

So there’s a dozen reasons for denying climate change, and I didn’t even mention
Creationists.

(So, there’s a dozen reasons why a journalist can be misinformed on climate science, and I didn’t even mention Athiests.)

The Second International Conference on Climate Change, held March 8-10 in New York City, was a great success, with considerably greater attendance than the first conference. Keynote speakers included President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic, Prof. Dick Lindzen, Gov. John Sununu, Harrison Schmitt (last man to walk on the moon), Lord Monckton, and several others. A total of approximately 80 speakers packed a series of four parallel sessions throughout the 2 days of talks.

As was the case last year, several lines of evidence were presented in support of the two most important scientific objections to the currently popular view that humans now rule the climate system: (1) climate sensitivity is much lower than the United Nations claims it is; and (2) nature, not humans, dominate climate change.

On the latter point, there were several papers presented on the role of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), including my own recent results from the Terra satellite showing the PDO causes a radiative forcing of the Earth (from a change in low cloud cover) that can potentially explain most of the decadal to centennial global temperature change over the last 100 years. Bill Gray presented his theory that the PDO, as well as other long term climate fluctuations, are mostly due to salinity-driven changes in the overturning portion of the ocean circulation. At this point in our meager understanding of long-term climate change, I would agree that this is the most likely explanation.

Prof. Akasofu of the University of Alaska reported that Arctic cooling has continued, with colder Arctic Ocean temperatures and thicker sea ice being encountered by icebreakers than in previous winters. These changes are widely believed to be the result of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation having recently entered into its negative (cooling) phase.

In one of the keynote addresses, Bob Carter argued for a redirection of political and policy efforts to deal with natural rather than anthropogenic climate change, since paleoclimate evidence suggesting that sudden, large changes in regional climate can occur in just a few years.

There was considerable anger and frustration over the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) political hijacking of climate science, and the taking over of most of our professional organizations (e.g. the American Meteorological Society) by environmental activists with strong political connections. In his keynote address, Prof. Lindzen discussed the sorry state of climate science in this context. Lindzen also warned that the skeptics’ arguments need to be chosen wisely, since a few of them were clearly on weak scientific grounds.

I agree with Lindzen on this. But I would like to add that it takes only one of us to be correct for the anthropogenic global warming house of cards to collapse. We skeptics tolerate alternative scientific views, something the IPCC can not allow without undermining their political goals. The claim some others have made that we skeptics should rally around a single explanation for global warming reveals how dangerously close we have come to turning scientific research into a political process.

While it has been difficult to get research funding to investigate natural sources of global warming, a few peer reviewed papers have been getting published. Unfortunately, the greater these papers’ threat to the IPCC party line, the more they are ignored by both the news media and by IPCC scientists. This has perpetuated the public’s mistaken view of just how strong the ‘scientific consensus’ is on manmade global warming. In his keynote speech, Gov. Sununu mentioned the need to get congressional funding of climate science less dominated by a specific ideology.

Many of the talks dealt with the policy implications of global warming, including cap and trade legislation and EPA regulations. The futility of such efforts to fight a largely natural phenomenon (global warming), combined with the economically damaging effects on humanity of punishing energy use, were the main topics of discussion. Roy Innis and Paul Driessen discussed the devastating effects on the poor of current and proposed energy policies.

There was wide agreement that the tide is turning for those of us who doubt that humans play the dominant role in climate change. Increasing numbers of scientists are speaking out on the issue, and recent polls of the public in January have revealed dwindling public alarm over global warming, sentiment no doubt contributed to by the fact that global warming stopped in 2001.

This is in spite of the mainstream media continuing to try to marginalize the views of those of us who are skeptical of the role of humans in warming. Curiously, even though a new Gallup poll has found that an increased number of Americans think global warming is exaggerated, the Gallup writer who editorialized on those results said:

“Americans generally believe global warming is real. That sets the U.S. public apart from the global-warming skeptics who assembled this week in New York City to try to debunk the science behind climate change.”

This uninformed statement helps to perpetuate the myth that we skeptics do not believe in climate change when, of course, we do. Climate is changing all the time. In fact, research into natural sources of climate change was being published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature long before environmental extremists and politicians came along and hijacked the issue in order to achieve their policy goals. Equating “global warming” to “manmade global warming” shows just how successful the IPCC and activists such as Al Gore have been in their disinformation campaigns.

Of course, with hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising, a sympathetic news media, and an increasing number of corporations giving in to the pressure, it’s a wonder any skepticism remains.

All in all, the conference was hugely successful. Since there are so many international participants in these conferences, it looks like next year’s conference will probably be held abroad.

Many of us are off to NYC this coming week for the 2nd
International Conference on Climate Change, being held on Monday and Tuesday, March 9 and 10 at the Marriott Marquis-Times Square.

I like to call this event the “skeptics conference”, but only because that rolls off the tongue easily. I suspect some don’t appreciate that label since it makes it sound like we don’t believe in global warming…which, of course, is wrong. We just don’t believe that mankind is responsible for global warming…or at least not very much of it.

Personally, I think the first place we should look for causes of climate variability is Mother Nature, not in the tailpipe of an SUV.

Those of us who were lucky enough to be asked to speak at the conference will present a wide variety of views on all things related to global warming…er…I mean climate change: the latest science, politics, economics, etc.

Of course, I’m most interested in the science…and there are a number of different opinions on what controls changes in the climate system. For instance, I now believe that most of the warming in the last 100 years was due to natural cloud variations caused by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. I will be presenting evidence for that on Tuesday morning, along with new evidence that the climate system is much less sensitive than the alarmists claim it is.

In fact, I’ll be showing actual satellite measurements of this global warming mechanism…evidence that the climate alarmists do not have. You see, the mechanism for manmade global warming is so small that it can’t be measured by satellite…it instead must be computed based upon theory.

There will be other ideas presented, too: Fluctuations in the circulation of the oceans, solar activity, etc. As should be the case in science, we skeptics are pretty tolerant of multiple views on the causes of global warming.

In contrast, I hear there isn’t quite as much tolerance within the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Those folks decided over 20 years ago that humans cause global warming…even before the IPCC was established. The IPCC was formed to advance a policy agenda…to build the case that humanity is now in control of climate.

For 20 years, many governments have supported that agenda with lavish funding. And if you pay scientists hundreds of millions of dollars to find something, they’ll do their best to find it.

The rest of us, meanwhile, are operating on a shoestring. The NYC conference is supported only by conference fees and by donations from private individuals and foundations. No corporate money was solicited or used.

Later in the week I’ll provide an update on any significant developments.

(edited 4:30 p.m. CST Feb. 22 for the discussion of Dessler et al.-diagnosed water vapor feedback value of 2.0 W m^-2 K^-1)

I’ve been receiving a lot of questions lately about Andrew Dessler’s water vapor feedback paper which supports the positive water vapor feedback exhibited by the IPCC climate models. Dessler and co-authors used AIRS temperature and humidity sounding retrievals from the Aqua satellite during 2003-2008 to compute how the specific humidity changed with warming.

By way of comment, I suppose I could say the same thing I hear whenever I find negative feedback in satellite data: “So what? Feedbacks on such short time scales might have nothing to do with feedbacks associated with long-term warming.”

But I’m not going to do that (insert smiley). Instead, let’s review what Andy has found…and what he hasn’t found.

There are two main categories of radiative feedback involved in climate variability and climate change, and Dessler et al. have addressed a portion of one of them.

These major categories of feedback are the same as the two components of Earth’s radiative energy balance: (1) absorbed/reflected solar (shortwave, SW) radiation, and (2) emitted infrared (longwave, LW) radiation. The LW feedbacks are mainly due to water vapor and high clouds, while the SW feedbacks are mainly due to low clouds.

Longwave Feedback

In response to a warming or cooling influence, the LW feedback is mostly controlled by changes in water vapor and high clouds…Dessler et al. addressed the water vapor part, and got indications of positive water vapor feedback (specific humidity increasing with warming).

And guess what? Using the CERES radiation budget data from Aqua during 2002 through 2007 I get about the same result as they did. In fact, I got an infrared feedback parameter right in the middle of the range of all of the IPCC models. (Note that CERES includes the effect of both cirrus clouds and water vapor, so at face value this would suggest the Infrared Iris effect was not operating during this time…but see “Cause or Effect?” below for another interpretation.)

The Rest of the Story: Shortwave Feedback

The other half of the feedback story which Dessler et al did not address is the reflected solar component. This feedback is mostly controlled by changes in low cloud cover with warming. The IPCC admits that feedbacks associated with low clouds are the most uncertain of all feedbacks, with positive or negative feedback possible…although most, if not all, IPCC models currently have positive SW feedbacks.

But I found from the CERES data a strongly negative SW feedback during 2002-2007. When added to the LW feedback, this resulted in a total (SW+LW) feedback that is strongly negative.

Is my work published? No…at least not yet…although I have tried. Apparently it disagrees too much with the IPCC party line to be readily acceptable. My finding of negative SW feedback of around 5 W m^-2 K^-1 from real radiation budget data (the CERES instrument on Aqua) is apparently inadmissible as evidence.

In contrast, Dessler et al.’s finding of positive LW feedback of 2 W m^-2 K^-1 inferred from the AIRS instrument is admissible.

But whether my SW feedback work is published or not misses the main point. Unless you know both LW and SW feedbacks, you don’t know the sensitivity of the climate system, and so you don’t know how much global warming there will be in the future.

The modelers would probably even claim that everyone already knows water vapor feedback is positive, and so it didn’t need any further observational verification.

Spencer’s Mea Culpa?

While I have believed for years that water vapor feedback might be negative, I will admit the latest evidence is looking more and more like the real story could on the reflected solar side instead. The radiation budget guys have been trying to tell me all along that it was the SW feedback that was the most uncertain…maybe they are right. Of course, it could be that long-term feedbacks are opposite of the short term ones, like others have tried to tell me when I find negative feedback (insert second smiley)….

Cause or Effect?

But, as we HAVE published in Journal of Climate, there is an issue regarding feedbacks that could throw all of our satellite diagnoses of feedback into a cocked hat anyway. That is the issue of causation.

The issue is related to something that Forster & Taylor (2006 J. Climate) and Forster & Gregory (also 2006 J. Climate) have previously demonstrated: In order to estimate radiative feedbacks, you must first remove any sources of time-varying radiative forcing from the data. No one has ever bothered to do this for the time-varying radiative forcing due to natural cloud variations in the satellite data. It appears to be the largest source of decorrelation in both the satellite data and the IPCC model output.

Such variations can even be proved to exist…they produce spiral patterns when you plot running averages of temperature versus radiative flux. We have even found those patterns in all 18 IPCC models we have analyzed. It is the only possible explanation for those patterns…I challenge anyone to find an alternative explanation.

And here’s what happens if you don’t remove the effects of time-varying radiative forcing from the data before feedback diagnosis: It decorrelates the relationship between total (LW+SW) radiative imbalance versus temperature. This is because the temperature change lags the forcing…90 degrees out of phase for harmonic forcing…which is what causes the spiral patterns. This will cause the diagnosed total feedback parameter to be biased toward zero (which would be a borderline unstable climate system) — even if the true feedback is negative!

In fact, we showed that if the forcing is 100% radiative (e.g. from natural cloud fluctuations) the error in the diagnosis of the total feedback will be 100%! In other words, you can not measure feedback in response to an unknown amount of time-varying radiative forcing. At least not until someone invents a new way.

The Simple Version

If this sounds too technical, it can also be explained in terms of causation: When researchers see what looks like positive cloud feedback with warming…how do they know that the warming wasn’t the result of the clouds (forcing), rather than the other way around (feedback)? Time-varying radiative forcing due to cloud fluctuations completely obscures the evidence of feedback, giving the illusion of a sensitive climate system

Takin’ it To The Street

Unfortunately, our J. of Climate article has been greeted with deafening silence. Apparently, everyone is too busy burning up computer cycles to see how much virtual global warming they can create in their models. I’m sorry for sounding so cynical, but given the importance of this issue policy-wise, you would think that someone besides me would be working on it.

So…my book describing these issues is almost finished…it’s due at the publisher by March 2. Since even the public understands “cause versus effect”, I decided to put it all down in as simple terms as possible.

Maybe there will be some physicists or engineers out there who understand what I’m talking about.

REFERENCES

Forster, P. M., and J. M. Gregory (2006), The climate sensitivity and its components diagnosed from Earth Radiation Budget data, J. Climate, 19, 39-52.

Forster, P.M., and K.E. Taylor (2006), Climate forcings and climate sensitivities diagnosed from coupled climate model integrations, J. Climate, 19, 6181-6194.

Spencer, R.W., and W.D. Braswell (2008), Potential biases in cloud feedback diagnosis: A simple model demonstration, J. Climate, November 1.

Something about retirement apparently frees people up to say what they really believe. I retired early from NASA over seven years ago to have more freedom to speak my mind on global warming.

You might recall that after Dr. Joanne Simpson retired from NASA she (trmm.gsfc.nasa.gov/3rd_trmm_conf/simpson.doc) admitted to a long-held skepticism regarding the role of mankind in global warming.

And who can forget NASA’s Administrator, Michael Griffin, admitting that he was skeptical of the urgency of the global warming problem? After the outrage that ensued, I suspect he wishes he had never brought it up.

And now my old boss when I was at NASA (as well as James Hansen’s old boss), John Theon, has stated very clearly that he doesn’t believe global warming is manmade…and adding “climate models are useless” for good measure. Even I wouldn’t go quite that far, since I use simple ones in my published research.

I remember the old days at NASA, when even John Theon was singing the same tune as most people at NASA were. Manmade global warming was a potentially serious threat, and NASA wanted Congress to fund new satellites to study the problem. It was a team effort to get that accomplished.

Global warming research was a relatively new field back then. Was Theon always skeptical, and just being a team player at the time? I don’t know. It could be that Dr. Theon, after watching 15 years of climate research go by, decided that he was no longer convinced that mankind was at fault for warming.

After all, there is some precedence for scientists changing their minds. One of today’s leading global warming alarmists is Stephen Schneider, who did a major about-face from the 1970s when global cooling was all the rage. At least Theon didn’t write a book back then about how serious the global warming issue was, as Schneider did on global cooling.

And how many defections have we seen in the other direction — from the skeptics’ camp to the alarmists’ camp? Seems like it’s been a one-way street so far.

Theon now also supports what I have repeatedly said over the years. That NASA’s James Hansen routinely ignored NASA policy, and said whatever he wanted to the press and to Congress without getting approval first. The reason why everyone at NASA looked the other way was that we were trying to get congressional funding for satellite missions to study climate. I personally don’t think we needed Hansen’s extremist views to get that accomplished, but it probably helped to some extent.

I asked NASA managers at the time, how can Hansen get away with saying whatever he wanted to? The answer was, “well…he’s not supposed to”.

You might think it’s OK for the lone scientist to warn everyone of impending planetary doom. But I consider it much closer to someone who makes a habit of yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. Forcing expensive energy on people will lead to death and suffering. These are very real threats, not theoretical like manmade global warming, and they exist today. I personally don’t care where our energy comes from — but I do care that a maximum number of people can afford it.

In truth, it wasn’t Hansen who was muzzled, but it was me in the Clinton-Gore years, who was asked to keep my mouth shut about my skeptical views. That was fine…if a little annoying. At least the flap Hansen caused has managed to force NASA to say that their scientists no longer have to march in lock-step on scientific issues. That’s a good thing.

I have to wonder…how many more scientists will be outing themselves as skeptics? While we may never constitute a majority, and many of us have differing views on the real causes of climate change, it only takes one of us to be right for the global warming house of cards to collapse.

The methods used by global warming alarmists to convince you that more carbon dioxide is going to ruin the Earth are increasingly laced with insults and attacks directed toward anyone who might disagree with them. For instance, one of the many intellectually lazy (& false) claims is that I am paid by Big Oil.

Mr. Gore’s tactics have been a little more subtle, and reminiscent of propaganda methods which have proved to be effective throughout history at influencing public opinion. One should keep in mind that his main scientific adviser, NASA’s James Hansen, has the most extreme views of any climate researcher when it comes to predicting a global warming induced Armageddon.

Listed below are ten propaganda techniques I have excerpted from Wikipedia. Beneath each are one or more examples of Mr. Gore’s rhetoric as he has attempted to goad the rest of us into reducing our CO₂ emissions. Except where indicated, most quotes are from his testimony before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, March 21, 2007. (Mr. Gore is scheduled to testify again tomorrow, January 28, 2009, before the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee…if the cold and snowy weather doesn’t cause them to reschedule.)

Appeal to fear: Appeals to fear seek to build support by instilling anxieties and panic in the general population.

“I want to testify today about what I believe is a planetary emergency—a crisis that threatens the survival of our civilization and the habitability of the Earth.”

Appeal to authority: Appeals to authority cite prominent figures to support a position, idea, argument, or course of action. Also, Testimonial: Testimonials are quotations, in or out of context, especially cited to support or reject a given policy, action, program, or personality. The reputation or the role (expert, respected public figure, etc.) of the individual giving the statement is exploited.

“Just six weeks ago, the scientific community, in its strongest statement to date, confirmed that the evidence of warming is unequivocal. Global warming is real and human activity is the main cause.”

“The scientists are virtually screaming from the rooftops now. The debate is over! There’s no longer any debate in the scientific community about this.” (from An Inconvenient Truth)

Bandwagon: Bandwagon and “inevitable-victory” appeals attempt to persuade the target audience to join in and take the course of action that “everyone else is taking”. Also, Join the crowd: This technique reinforces people’s natural desire to be on the winning side. This technique is used to convince the audience that a program is an expression of an irresistible mass movement and that it is in their best interest to join.

“Today, I am here to deliver more than a half million messages to Congress
asking for real action on global warming. More than 420 Mayors have now
adopted Kyoto-style commitments in their cities and have urged strong federal action. The evangelical and faith communities have begun to take the lead, calling for measures to protect God’s creation. The State of California, under a Republican Governor and a Democratic legislature, passed strong, economy wide legislation mandating cuts in carbon dioxide. Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia have passed renewable energy standards for the electricity sector.”

Flag-waving: An attempt to justify an action on the grounds that doing so will make one more patriotic, or in some way benefit a group, country, or idea. Also, Inevitable victory: invites those not already on the bandwagon to join those already on the road to certain victory. Those already or at least partially on the bandwagon are reassured that staying aboard is their best course of action.

“After all, we have taken on problems of this scope before. When England and then America and our allies rose to meet the threat of global Fascism, together we won two wars simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific.”

Ad Hominem attacks: A Latin phrase which has come to mean attacking your opponent, as opposed to attacking their arguments. Also Demonizing the “enemy”: Making individuals from the opposing nation, from a different ethnic group, or those who support the opposing viewpoint appear to be subhuman.

“You know, 15 percent of people believe the moon landing was staged on some movie lot and a somewhat smaller number still believe the Earth is flat. They get together on Saturday night and party with the global-warming deniers.” (October 24, 2006, Seattle University)

Appeal to Prejudice: Using loaded or emotive terms to attach value or moral goodness to believing the proposition.

“And to solve this crisis we can develop a shared sense of moral purpose.” (June 21, 2006, London, England)

Black-and-White fallacy: Presenting only two choices, with the product or idea being propagated as the better choice.

“It is not a question of left vs. right; it is a question of right vs. wrong.” (July 1, 2007, New York Times op-ed)

Euphoria: The use of an event that generates euphoria or happiness, or using an appealing event to boost morale:

Live Earth concerts organized worldwide in 2007 by Al Gore.

Falsifying information: The creation or deletion of information from public records, in the purpose of making a false record of an event or the actions of a person or organization. Pseudo-sciences are often used to falsify information.

“Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous (global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.” (May 9, 2006 Grist interview)

Stereotyping or Name Calling or Labeling: This technique attempts to arouse prejudices in an audience by labeling the object of the propaganda campaign as something the target audience fears, hates, loathes, or finds undesirable. Also, Obtain disapproval: This technique is used to persuade a target audience to disapprove of an action or idea by suggesting that the idea is popular with groups hated, feared, or held in contempt by the target audience

“There are many who still do not believe that global warming is a problem at all. And it’s no wonder: because they are the targets of a massive and well-organized campaign of disinformation lavishly funded by polluters who are determined to prevent any action to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming out of a fear that their profits might be affected if they had to stop dumping so much pollution into the atmosphere.” (January 15, 2004, New York City)

You have probably already heard about a Pew survey released yesterday, which shows that out of a choice of 20 primary concerns the American public has, the economy and jobs rank at the very top, and global warming ranks at the very bottom. Here are the stats:

A couple of blogs I’ve visited this morning show considerable fretting over this situation, with calls for reframing the global warming issue in terms that hit home with people, or reducing the alarmist rhetoric, etc. In other words, the public just isn’t getting it, and the problem lies with the communicators of the global warming message.

Well, maybe the problem doesn’t lie with the communicators…but instead with the long tradition science has of overselling issues that the scientific community knows relatively little about. The public already knows that science has a history of being spectacularly wrong with long-term predictions of doom. Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb bombed, and yet many people still fret over the Earth being overpopulated. (In my view, the only thing we are overpopulated with is stupidity).

And the time it takes for science to realize that the ‘scientific consensus’ is wrong can be very, very long indeed. For instance, as early as 1948 it was learned that administering antibiotics to farm animals eliminated the incidence of stomach ulcers. The medical community was told about this and they considered the idea as preposterous. Finally, in 2005 two Australian scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize for “discovering” the bacterial basis of peptic ulcers. The truth is, one of them was tipped off by a rancher many years earlier to look into using antibiotics.

Gee, I wonder how much more difficult it is to come to a sufficient theoretical understanding of the sensitivity of the climate system, compared to figuring out empirically what works for the treatment of stomach ulcers…when we have had literally millions of patients to test treatments on over the years? And stomach ulcer research doesn’t carry all of the baggage that accompanies global warming research, like economics, politics, the role of government in peoples’ lives, and even our religious beliefs regarding mankind’s relationship to the environment.

And what is particularly fascinating about the Pew study is that addressing global warming (at the bottom of the list of priorities) could supposedly help the economy (at the top of the list). If Obama really believes his own rhetoric about green energy creating green jobs as a way of invigorating the economy, he should be making alternative energy a top priority.

But the dirty little secret is that renewable energy is very expensive and requires large areas of land to be used for its generation…which then has its own environmental impact. I’m attending a PowerSouth electric utility cooperative meeting where the trustees are fretting over where our future energy will come from. While most of the energy producers in America are investor-owned, and will simply pass higher prices on to consumers (with investors continuing to take a piece of the pie), the electric co-ops are more interested in keeping prices low because they are looking out for their customers.

The most interesting presentation I’ve seen at the meeting so far compared the energy content of various energy sources to how much real estate it takes to create that energy. Ethanol was absolutely the worst, with huge amounts of land required to generate relatively little energy. Nuclear power is, of course, at the other end of the spectrum, with a huge amount of energy being generated with very little land.

But the future (it was claimed by the presenter) is with methane and natural gas, large deposits of which are being found under the ocean floor. If one compared how much hydrogen energy is contained in various fuels compared to their carbon content (and thus how much CO2 is produced when the are burned), the order from worst to best runs: wood & biomass, coal, petroleum, natural gas, methane, and pure hydrogen. (Since there are no natural deposits of hydrogen, it’s inclusion is somewhat irrelevant).

And the infrastructure required to retrieve and use these gases to fire electric turbines takes up very little space. His view was that methane IS renewable, continuously being generated by microbes in the Earth’s crust.

Whether these sources will help solve our energy problems, I have no idea. But if for no other reason that the physical limits on how much energy we can get out of one acre of wind, solar, biomass, etc., I predict we will never substantially reduce CO2 emissions until we embrace nuclear once again, or develop some other new energy technology which we, at this point, can only dream about.

(Of course, if you have read my writings, you already know my research suggests that the climate system is relatively insensitive to the CO2 we produce, anyway.)

The energy needs of humanity are so vast (and growing, especially in India and China) that we can only stay economically competitive if we abandon ideas which provide a poor return on investment, and remain open to ideas that might at first seem preposterous…such as using antibiotics to treat ulcers.

After yesterday’s post about manmade vs. natural sources of CO2, I received the following e-mail from Ferdinand Engelbeen. I’ve reproduced that e-mail below, and made a couple of comments (also in italics)….I’m at a conference, so I posted this quickly…sorry for any typos… and thanks to Ferdinand for taking the time to respond. – Roy

Dear Dr. Spencer,

I have reacted a few times via Anthony Watts’ weblog on your different thoughts about the origin of the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. Regardless if that is man made or not, I think we agree that the influence of the increase itself on temperature/climate is limited, if observable at all. But we disagree about the origin of the increase. I am pretty sure that the increase is man-made and have made a comprehensive page to show all the arguments to that at:

http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/co2_measurements.html

Thus here follows my critique on your blog page:

Besides the mass balance (which excludes any net natural addition as long as the increase in the atmosphere per year is less than the emissions), there are two essential points:

The d13C reduction:
Indeed it is not directly possible to make a distinction between 13C depleted fossil fuel burning and 13C depleted vegetation decay. The fingerprint of d13C changes by vegetation over the seasons is much larger than from fossil fuel burning (~60 GtC vs. 8 GtC, with about the same average d13C level). But vegetation changes are two-way, while fossil fuel burning is one-way addition. Thus the absolute height of the seasonal variation is not important, only the difference at the end of the year with the previous year is important for the year-by-year and multiyear trend. (Yes…I was making no claim regarding the seasonal cycle as being contributed to by mankind…although a change from one year to the next could still be due to a small imbalance between the huge natural sources and sinks. – Roy)

To know if the biosphere as a whole (sea algues + vegetation + soil bacteria) is a net absorber or emitter, we have a nice distinction between the two opposing actions of growth and decay: oxygen use. That can be used to determine the difference. The type of fuels used are known with reasonable accuracy, and thus their oxygen use when burned is known with reasonable accuracy too. Now since about 1990, oxygen measurements have sufficient accuracy to see the very small changes that fossil fuel use cause and the deficit/addition that the biosphere growth/decay adds to the fossil fuel use of oxygen. This revealed that since about 1990 the biosphere is a net source of oxygen and thus a net sink for CO2 (and thus of preferentially 12CO2), enriching the atmosphere with 13CO2. The biosphere as a whole thus is a net source of 13CO2 and can’t be the origin of the decreasing d13C levels. The oxygen use and d13C changes are used to estimate the partitioning of CO2 sequestering between land biosphere and oceans:
See: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/287/5462/2467
and: http://www.bowdoin.edu/~mbattle/papers_posters_and_talks/BenderGBC2005.pdf (up to 2002) (But isn’t this just one component of the total budget? You are talking specifically about what happens to the extra manmade CO2, and how it affects O2 and C13…I’m talking about some sort of oceanic, temperature dependent source…say a decrease in phytoplankton growth associated with warming.-Roy)

Other sources of low d13C don’t exist in fast/large quantities: (deep) oceans, calcite deposits/weathering, volcanic degassing,… in general have high(er) d13C levels (around zero per mil) compared to the atmosphere (-8 per mil). Thus the human use of low d13C (and zero d14C) fossil fuels is the sole cause of decreasing d13C levels. (But Behrenfeld, 2006 showed huge Climate Driven Trends in Contemporary Ocean Productivity…wouldn’t these have a substantial depleted C13 signature? – Roy)

d13C levels decrease as well as in the atmosphere as in the upper oceans in line with the use of fossil fuels: relative stable from 600 to 150 years ago and starting to decrease faster and faster in the past 150 years, see e.g. the decrease of d13C in coralline sponges and ice cores/firn/atmosphere at:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/sponges.gif

Although fossil fuel burning is the sole cause of the d13C decrease, the result is less (about 1/3rd) of what can be expected from the burning of fossil fuels, if every molecule remained in the atmosphere. But that is not the case, as near 20% per year of the atmospheric CO2 is exchanged with vegetation (less influence, as most comes back next season), upper oceans (idem) and deep oceans (that is important, as that disappears in a large mass). With an exchange of about 40 GtC from the deep oceans, the calculated reduction of d13C fits most of the (recent) trend of d13C in the atmosphere…

Further: the sentence:
“And since most of the cycling of CO2 between the ocean, land, and atmosphere is due to biological processes, this alone does not make a decreasing C13/C12 ratio a unique marker of an anthropogenic source.”
Is not accurate, as most of the seasonal cycling between the oceans and atmosphere (~90 GtC) is abiogenic and a matter of solubility of CO2 at different temperatures and salt/bi/carbonate concentrations and pH of the ocean surface layer.
Feely e.a. has made several interesting pages on that: http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/pubs/outstand/feel2331/exchange.shtml (I’m surprised at this claim…I thought the seasonal cycle is dominated by Northern Hemispheric vegetation growing and dying each year? Indeed, my first figure from yesterday’s post clearly shows the seasonal cycle has the largest dC13 signature…? – Roy)

Thus the main conclusion is that the d13C trend is not caused by the biosphere and strengthens the case for a human origin.

The temperature-CO2 connection:
I have had several discussions about this subject. The first point is that most of the people look at too short time intervals. We are interested in the (none) role of increased CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere on climate. Thus let us start with the trend of accumulations: temperature vs. accumulated emissions and accumulation in the atmosphere:

Well the temperature trend shows distinct periods with flat to negative trends (1900-1910, 1945-1975 and 1998-current) and upgoing trends (1910-1945, 1975-1998). There is some correlation with CO2 levels. As good as for temperature caused by CO2 levels as the “warmers” assure us, as the opposite way, but not really convincing. On the other hand the accumulation in the atmosphere is a near perfect replica of the accumulated emissions only at a lower level: 55% of the emissions on the whole 100+ years trend or any part of a few years long of that trend. One can see that more clear in the two correlation trends:

A huge short term temperature change of halve the scale has an influence of only a few ppmv/°C, while the “long” term temperature change should have an influence of 80 ppmv/°C? Seems rather impossible, especially when compared to the Vostok (and other ice cores) record, where a relative constant ratio of 8 ppmv/°C is recorded over the full past 420,000 years.

Compare that to the emissions-atmospheric accumulation correlation trend:

A near perfect fit…

Thus what you see if you look at the year-by-year accumulation rate is a mix of a trend (at about 55% of the emission, or about 1.5 ppmv/yr nowadays) and the direct, short-term influence of (mainly) temperature.

Your formula for the direct temperature influence (both detrended) is:
dCO2/dt = 1.71 ppmv/yr/°C
but there is a problem with this. The detrended plot for dCO2/dt should be around zero, but the plot shows an average of 1.24 ppmv/yr, which is attributed to the temperature changes, thus is not really detrended. And even with a negative temperature anomaly, there still is a continuous increase of CO2, which ends at about -0.7°C temperature anomaly.

The next, more important problem is that the formula has no time limit. Even with a constant temperature, the CO2 increase is indefinitely. If that is applied to the past, then the ice ages should show zero CO2 and the interglacials several thousands of ppmvs… Even on the more nearby past: the LIA lasted several decades, but only shows a decrease of about 8 ppmv/°C, near identical to the long term ratio seen in the Vostok ice core. While the current variability around the trend is in the order of 3 ppmv/°C. That is a lot different from an unlimited trend of 1.71 ppmv/yr/°C.

If we look again at the graph of the temperature and the accumulation of the atmosphere, then according to your interpretation, the CO2 levels would be decreasing increasing 1900-1920, increasing increasing 1920-1940, constant increasing 1940-1975, increasing increasing 1975-1998 and constant/declining increasing 1998-current. Although resembling, not really what is seen in the trends. Still the trend from accumulated emissions is far superior…

My formula looks more like:
dCO2/dt = 3 * dT + 0.55 * d(emissions)
where dCO2/dt holds for any time period (past or present), 3*dT is for short term changes and may expand to 8*dT for long term sustained changes and dT is for any time period, but always the difference over the full period.

Pieter Tans has a better fit than me by including precipitation. See:
http://esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/co2conference/pdfs/tans.pdf

Last but not least, the mass balance is a little difficult to explain with your attribution of a large part of the increase to temperature. As long as no matter disappears to space we have according to your attribution over the past 50 years:

attributed to temperature: +52 ppmv
added by humans: +110 ppmv
observed: +60 ppmv
to be removed by unknown (natural) sinks: 102 ppmv

Thus some natural sinks must remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than the increase of CO2 which is attributed to the temperature increase…

Moreover, as the oceans are the main source of extra CO2 by increasing temperatures, according to this scheme, the sole fast sink remaining is the biosphere. Thus the terrestrial biosphere should have removed 102 ppmv in 50 years, which means the equivalent of about 33% of the total terrestrial vegetation (see http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/CarbonCycle/Images/carbon_cycle_diagram.jpg )… That in times of disappearing tropical forests seems rather unlikely…

That is the kernel of my objections…

Sincerely,

Ferdinand Engelbeen
retired engineer process automation

I’ve usually accepted the premise that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are due to the burning of fossil fuels by humans. After all, human emissions average around twice that which is needed to explain the observed rate of increase in the atmosphere. In other words, mankind emits more than enough CO2 to explain the observed increase in the atmosphere.

Furthermore, the ratio of the C13 isotope of carbon to the normal C12 form in atmospheric CO2 has been observed to be decreasing at the same time CO2 has been increasing. Since CO2 produced by fossil fuel burning is depleted in C13 (so the argument goes) this also suggests a manmade source.

But when we start examining the details, an anthropogenic explanation for increasing atmospheric CO2 becomes less obvious.

For example, a decrease in the relative amount of C13 in the atmosphere is also consistent with other biological sources. And since most of the cycling of CO2 between the ocean, land, and atmosphere is due to biological processes, this alone does not make a decreasing C13/C12 ratio a unique marker of an anthropogenic source.

This is shown in the following figure, which I put together based upon my analysis of C13 data from a variety of monitoring stations from the Arctic to the Antarctic. I isolated the seasonal cycle, interannual (year-to-year) variability, and trend signals in the C13 data.

The seasonal cycle clearly shows a terrestrial biomass (vegetation) source, as we expect from the seasonal cycle in Northern Hemispheric vegetation growth. The interannual variability looks more like it is driven by the oceans. The trends, however, are weaker than we would expect from either of these sources or from fossil fuels (which have a C13 signature similar to vegetation).

C13/C12 isotope ratios measured at various latitudes show that CO2 trends are not necessarily from fossil fuel burning.

Secondly, the year-to-year increase in atmospheric CO2 does not look very much like the yearly rate of manmade CO2 emissions. The following figure, a version of which appears in the IPCC’s 2007 report, clearly shows that nature has a huge influence over the amount of CO2 that accumulates in the atmosphere every year.

The yearly increase of CO2 measured at Mauna Loa shows huge natural fluctuations which are caused by temperature changes.

In fact, it turns out that these large year-to-year fluctuations in the rate of atmospheric accumulation are tied to temperature changes, which are in turn due mostly to El Nino, La Nina, and volcanic eruptions. And as shown in the next figure, the CO2 changes tend to follow the temperature changes, by an average of 9 months. This is opposite to the direction of causation presumed to be occurring with manmade global warming, where increasing CO2 is followed by warming.

Year to year CO2 fluctuations at Mauna Loa show that the temperature changes tend to precede the CO2 changes.

If temperature is indeed forcing CO2 changes, either directly or indirectly, then there should be a maximum correlation at zero months lag for the change of CO2 with time versus temperature (dCO2/dt = a + b*T would be the basic rate equation). And as can be seen in the above graph, the peak correlation between these two variables does indeed occur close to zero months.

And this raises an intriguing question:

If natural temperature changes can drive natural CO2 changes (directly or indirectly) on a year-to-year basis, is it possible that some portion of the long term upward trend (that is always attributed to fossil fuel burning) is ALSO due to a natural source?

After all, we already know that the rate of human emissions is very small in magnitude compared to the average rate of CO2 exchange between the atmosphere and the surface (land + ocean): somewhere in the 5% to 10% range. But it has always been assumed that these huge natural yearly exchanges between the surface and atmosphere have been in a long term balance. In that view, the natural balance has only been disrupted in the last 100 years or so as humans started consuming fossil fuel, thus causing the observed long-term increase.

But since the natural fluxes in and out of the atmosphere are so huge, this means that a small natural imbalance between them can rival in magnitude the human CO2 input. And this clearly happens, as is obvious from the second plot shown above!

So, the question is, does long-term warming also cause a CO2 increase, like that we see on in the short term?

Let’s look more closely at just how large these natural, year-to-year changes in CO2 are. Specifically, how much CO2 is emitted for a certain amount of warming? This can be estimated by detrending both the temperature and CO2 accumulation rate data, and comparing the resulting year-to-year fluctuations (see figure below).

Although there is considerable scatter in the above figure, we see an average relationship of 1.71 ppm/yr for every 1 deg C. change in temperature. So, how does this compare to the same relationship for the long-term trends? This is shown in the next figure, where we see a 1.98 ppm/yr for every 1 deg. C of temperature change.

This means that most (1.71/1.98 = 86%) of the upward trend in carbon dioxide since CO2 monitoring began at Mauna Loa 50 years ago could indeed be explained as a result of the warming, rather than the other way around.

So, there is at least empirical evidence that increasing temperatures are causing some portion of the recent rise in atmospheric CO2, in which case CO2 is not the only cause of the warming.

Now, the experts will claim that this is all bogus, because they have computer models of the carbon budget that can explain all of long term rise in CO2 as a result of fossil fuel burning alone.

But, is that the ONLY possible model explanation? Or just the one they wanted their models to support? Did they investigate other model configurations that allowed nature to play a role in long term CO2 increase? Or did those model simulations show that nature couldn’t have played a role?

This is the trouble with model simulations. The ones that get published are usually the ones that support the modeler’s preconceived notions, while alternative model solutions are ignored.

If an expert in this subject sees a major mistake I’ve made in the above analysis, e-mail me and I’ll post an update, so that we might all better understand this issue.

Scientific disagreements over just how much mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions will warm the planet can be described with the analogy of the thermostat in your home. You set the thermostat to a certain temperature, and if it senses (for example) that the temperature is rising too much above that preset level, a cooling mechanism (air conditioning) kicks in and works to push the temperature back down.

I, and a number of other scientists, believe that nature has a thermostatic control mechanism that “pushes back” against a warming influence, such as the relatively weak warming from more atmospheric carbon dioxide. (The direct warming effect of more CO₂ would amount to little more than 1 deg. F by late in this century, and is generally not the subject of debate.)

In climate research (and engineering, and physics) a thermostatic control mechanism is called ‘negative feedback’, and as discussed elsewhere on my web site there are a number of studies that suggest it really does exist in the climate system. At this point my own research suggests that the natural cooling mechanism is most likely due to the response of clouds to warming. While it is a bit technical, the issue is introduced in this peer-reviewed publication.

To be sure, positive feedbacks also exist in nature, such as the enhanced solar heating of the ocean that accompanies the melting of sea ice. But these are regional and relatively weak compared to the dominating, global influence of cloud feedbacks.

The reason why we keep hearing about how serious global warming will be is that all twenty-something of the computer climate models tracked by the IPCC now have net positive feedbacks. They enhance the small direct warming effect of extra CO₂…by near-catastrophic amounts for a couple of the models.

Of course, the models are only behaving the way they are programmed to behave, and here I discuss why I think the modelers have seriously misinterpreted the role of clouds in climate change when building those models. While the modelers do not realize it, their tests of the models’ behavior with satellite observations have not been specific enough to validate the models’ feedback behavior. In effect, their tests are yielding ‘false positives’.

Obviously, the thermostat (feedback) issue is the most critical one that determines whether manmade global warming will be catastrophic or benign. In this context, it is critical for the public and politicians to understand that the vast majority of climate researchers do not work on feedbacks.

In popular political parlance, most climate researchers do not appreciate the nuanced details of how one estimates feedbacks in nature, and therefore they are not qualified to pass judgment on this issue. Therefore, any claims about how many thousands of scientists agree with the IPCC’s official position on global warming are meaningless.

I would challenge any IPCC scientist who considers himself or herself an expert on feedbacks to debate this issue against me. We can invite a variety of physicists and engineers who understand the concept of ‘feedback’, and who do not already have strong philosophical or political biases on the issue, and ask them to judge whether the IPCC models are behaving in realistic ways when it comes to cloud feedbacks.

The debate could be in either oral or written form, with our best arguments presented for evaluation by others. Then, those judges can summarize in lay terms for politicians whether “the science is settled” on this issue.

And I’m particularly interested to see whether anyone can respond to this challenge without using phrases like “this issue is settled”, “the cloud claim is bogus”, or without ad hominem attacks.