UPDATE: 11/10 From the Sydney Morning Herald
Michael Duffy
November 8, 2008
Last month I witnessed something shocking. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was giving a talk at the University of NSW. The talk was accompanied by a slide presentation, and the most important graph showed average global temperatures. For the past decade it represented temperatures climbing sharply.
As this was shown on the screen, Pachauri told his large audience: “We’re at a stage where warming is taking place at a much faster rate [than before]”.
Now, this is completely wrong. For most of the past seven years, those temperatures have actually been on a plateau. For the past year, there’s been a sharp cooling. These are facts, not opinion: the major sources of these figures, such as the Hadley Centre in Britain, agree on what has happened, and you can check for yourself by going to their websites. Sure, interpretations of the significance of this halt in global warming vary greatly, but the facts are clear.
Satellite derived lower troposphere temperature since 1979 – Click for a larger image
Reference: UAH lower troposphere data
So it’s disturbing that Rajendra Pachauri’s presentation was so erroneous, and would have misled everyone in the audience unaware of the real situation. This was particularly so because he was giving the talk on the occasion of receiving an honorary science degree from the university.
Below: find out how you can tell Mr. Pachauri directly what you think – he has a blog!
Later that night, on ABC TV’s Lateline program, Pachauri claimed that those who disagree with his own views on global warming are “flat-earthers” who deny “the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence”. But what evidence could be more important than the temperature record, which Pachauri himself had fudged only a few hours earlier?
In his talk, Pachauri said the number of global warming sceptics is shrinking, a curious claim he was unable to substantiate when questioned about it on Lateline. Still, there’s no doubt a majority of climate scientists agree with the view of the IPCC.
Today I want to look at why this might be so: after all, such a state of affairs presents a challenge to sceptics such as me. If we’re right, then an awful lot of scientists are wrong. How could this be?
This question was addressed in September in a paper by Professor Richard Lindzen, of the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen, probably the most qualified prominent global-warming sceptic, suggested that a number of changes in the way science is conducted have contributed to the rise of climate alarmism among American scientists.
Lindzen believes another problem with climate science is that in America and Europe it is heavily colonised by environmental activists.
Here are just two examples that indicate the scale of the problem: the spokesman for the American Meteorological Society is a former staffer for Al Gore, and realclimate.org, probably the world’s most authoritative alarmist web site, was started by a public relations firm serving environmental causes.
None of this is necessarily sinister, but the next time you hear a scientist or scientific organisation warning of climate doom, you might want to follow the money trail. Sceptics are not the only ones who have received funding from sources sympathetic to their viewpoint. (And yes, Lindzen did once receive some money from energy companies.)
Lindzen claims that scientific journals play an important role in promoting global warming alarmism, and gives a number of examples.
Someone else who’s looked closely at scientific journals (although not specifically those dealing with climate science) is epidemiologist John Ioannidis of the Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. He reached the surprising conclusion that most published research findings are proved false within five years of their publication. (Lest he be dismissed as some eccentric, I note that the Economist recently said Ioannidis has made his case “quite convincingly”.)
Why might this be so? Later work by Ioannidis and colleagues suggests that these days journal editors are more likely to publish research that will make a splash than that which will not. They do this to sell more copies of their publications and of reprints of papers in it. Ioannidis believes these publication practices might be distorting science.
It’s possible the forces described by Lindzen and Ioannidis have imbued climate science with a preference for results that involve (or seem to involve) disastrous change rather than stability. Rajenda Pachauri’s recent Sydney lecture suggests that in this relatively new field, inconvenient truths to the contrary are not welcome.
custador:
Maybe more exclamation points make you more right. In the mean time, I dispute your unarguable statement, as others have already done:
We will never run out of fossil fuels. Never. Understand? They will simply become increasingly expensive to extract, as the easy oil that is in liquid form, close to the surface, and under dry land becomes more scarce.
With a higher price, the market will then produce more. Econ 1A.
Malthus was wrong, and so are the wild-eyed handwavers who insist that oil is going to “run out.” They’ve been saying that since oil was first discovered, and they’re just as wrong today.
Have a little faith in human ingenuity. I notice that the world hasn’t ended yet, despite the Club of Rome’s Doomsday Clock being almost at midnight for the past 30+ years. It must be a miserable existence believing that all is lost, and the end is nigh.
In fact, living standards are better than ever — and they would be much better still, if the enviro-alarmists would just step aside and let the competent folks produce clean energy and cheap gas.
custador: My mistake on the numbers. Its 1.7 trillion OIP (oil in place), for the oil sands, but still 10% recoverable.
The industry global average is about 25% recoverable oil, in a given formation.
For the oil sands, the SEC has pegged the numbers at 10% recoverable, or 170 billion bbls. (companies can’t book reserves, unless the SEC signs off on the evaluation method. )
We, as an industry, are working at technology to increase the recoverability. An indication of the success of the industry in doing this, is that a few years ago, the recognized recoverability of the sands was ZERO %. From 0 bbls, to 170 billion bbls in a decade.
Our target is about 3 million bbls/day of production, by 2015. Or about 150 years of production. The US will have to make up the rest somewhere else, probably from the oil shales. The Bureau of Land Management estimates 800 billion bbls recoverable, from the shales alone. But the sustained price will need to be about $100/bbl.
But worldwide, there is still about 75% of the OIP. And it does boil down to money, not energy, to recover the remainder.
Argue if you like, but this is my business, and I know my business.
custador:
I’m sorry, WHAT? DO you even know what oil is? Oil is a FOSSIL. It is NOT renewable, the Earth does NOT magically produce more, and your “convincing evidence” is very likely a hoax.
Prove it.
Fossil origin of oil is a theory.
“Magically” is a dodge to avoid thinking.
As for the rest, nah. I won’t go to your level, thanks.
custador: Some numbers to back my assertions:
Alaska’s oil fields will produce about 50% of OOIP (original oil in place).
Weyburn’s Oil Field will eventually produce about 33%, after the CO2 flood. Before, it would have been 25%.
http://www.seed.slb.com/en/scictr/watch/climate_change/weyburn.htm
A good chart in here. It shows oil peaking as new tech was applied.
Oil was in a decline, until about 1987, then it peaked, when new vertical well technology was applied. A gradual decline again, until the mid 90s, when horizontal technology was used. Production will peak again in 2011, as the CO2 flood delivers more oil.
As an industry, that’s what we see; new technology freeing up old oil. Current average recoverability is about 25%, but we expect that to reach 30% to 40%, or more, in a decade.
Custador,
I really hesitate to even reply to someone who seems to be so highly knowledgable about such things, but I’ve been reading many articles lately, like this one:
http://www.geotimes.org/nov02/NN_oil.html
from back in 2002 that indicate there’s some pretty strong evidence that oil is not fossil-based, so one might actually answer No to your question, and, btw, neither do YOU know what oil is…at least not for certain.
Don’t go all flat-earth on us now ;*)…we need to be open-minded and willing to learn in order to engage in serious debate.
Jim
Oh…and wiki has some pretty good info along those same lines:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
Jim
Oh…and here:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=59991
Jim
Les Johnson (18:11:25) :
Well said.
Peak oil is the next scam in my sights after AGW. (Just one long list from The Big Bang to…..)
We tend to find oil wherever we look for it. We tend not to look where it doesn’t suit us to. We use up the farthest reserves first while transport costs are lowest. Our closest reserves are kept for a rainy day. The majority of finds are purposefully underestimated and under-reported, which suits the company, the government and the shareholders for similar reasons. We encourage others to “spend” before we have to, even to the point of offering them the chance to tailor slupply and thereby shape demand.
Also, the way the energy companies act I would be astonished if all the tales of suppressed technology and buyout of patents were fabrications, myths or conspiracy theories.
Fossil origin of oil is a theory.
I think you need to learn the difference between how the word “theory” is used in science and how it is used in everyday conversation. This: http://www.notjustatheory.com/ might help you.
Oil is hydrocarbon based. That means that it originated from or as a carbon-based life form. That means that there are either some creatures living under the Earth which we don’t know about, but which sh*t coal and p*ss oil, or that it’s a fossil.
custador (04:56:26) :
Or – deep organic material dissolves in it over time and during extraction.
I remember a (Life) documentary by David Attenborough claiming 19x as much life (by weight) below ground as above. Mostly bacteria, some several kilometers deep, – and now there are findings that viruses are even more abundant than first thought and they can survive the weirdest environments and would produce an organic marker.
Or – the Russians did an in depth study on this very hypothesis over 60 years ago. They are prepared to, and often do, drill deeper than the rest of us and no-one ever found a fossil anything at the depths they are prepared to go to. They drill so deep that they need an airlock to preserve the pressure differential between ground level and several kilometers down.
Chemists Louis Joseph Gay-Lussac, Marcellin Berthelot and Dmitri Mendeleev, and geologist Alexander von Humboldt (amongst others) published work refuting the fossil origin of rock oil hypothesis.
Experiment has shown the abiotic hypothesis to hold water 😉 A google search of-
“Laboratory-pure solid marble (CaCO3), iron oxide (FeO), wet with triple-distilled water, are subjected to pressures up to 50 kbar and temperatures to 2000 C. With no contribution of either hydrocarbons or biological detritus, the CaCO3-FeO-H2O system spontaneously generates, at the high pressures predicted theoretically, the suite of hydrocarbons characteristic of natural petroleum.”
-will produce salient returns.
Of course this would be hidden from us along with all else worth knowing 😉
Mushrooms are best kept in the dark and fed on bullshit.
I see it is still important to be careful what you “KNOW”… because some things you “KNOW” may not be as certain as you think.
As I said earlier, I used to think the whole “renewable oil” thing was a wacko theory, now I’m not so sure. It does seem odd that there exists the sheer quantity of petroleum that we know of, that would appear to require that almost every animal that dies magically has its body fats soak into the planet and pool up. Doesn’t it seem odd that dinosaurs were trapped in tarpits?
Then again, I also used to “KNOW” that manmade global warming was a fact, because the idea was so self evident. And I used to “KNOW” that Santa Claus brought my presents every year.
That conclusion doesn’t follow, you know.
The most recent discovery is about sustainable oil:
http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2008/11/sustainable-crude-oil.html
Interesting article, Ron. Here’s another one linked from it.
There’s a great deal of longstanding evidence for abiogenic petroleum, one of the most telling is the consistent presence of helium in oil reserves.
According to a letter presented to the EPA by retired Analytical Chemist Hans Schreuder we do not have to mention the word CO2 in regard to AGW ever again.
Read the letter and know why he is as confident about his opinion as he is.
Dear Marlo Lewis,
16 Nov 08 – Fred Singer, via his TWTW of 15 Nov 2008, suggested that we submit comments to the EPA over proposed carbon dioxide regulation.
As a retired analytical chemist and webmaster of http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com I would like to submit the following comments, which I hope will be taken into account and receive serious consideration.
By the means of observational and falsifiable evidence, carbon dioxide has never been proven to influence the climate. Never. Only in laboratory flasks, never in the open atmosphere. That is no surprise as it can not, can never and has never influenced the climate in any way whatsoever. T
he one and only influence that carbon dioxide could possibly have in the atmosphere is to increase the dispersal of reflected IR energy from the earth’s surface, but most certainly not warming it in any way whatsoever.
Reflected IR energy coming off the earth after solar energy has heated it would be absorbed and instantly, at the speed of light, dispersed by susceptible molecules like carbon dioxide and water vapor in a random three-dimensional manner, thus halving the energy re-radiated back towards the earth. In a cascading manner, that is why air temperatures drop the instant a cloud passes in between the earth and the observer and why night-time temperatures are lower than day-time temperatures (except in the unusual climatic conditions whereby wind might carry warmer air during the night-time over a cooler area).
If re-radiated warming took place, the carbon dioxide and water molecules in the atmosphere would be capable of maintaining the temperature for the few seconds that a cloud might pass overhead – instead, an instant cooling is experienced – instant.
Reflected energy can in any case not make the emitter of the original energy warmer; if it could, we’d be able to make energy from thin air. Also, air (as in oxygen and nitrogen) does not react substantially to radiation (as you can test in your own microwave oven, where the food gets hot but not the air. Any heating of the air is due to convective heating off the food) and thus carbon dioxide can not possibly warm the air via re-radiating IR energy.
As a further rebuttal of the influence of carbon dioxide over the climate, the alleged greenhouse effect is a non-existent effect.
No greenhouse, whether made from glass, plastic, cardboard or steel will reach a higher inside temperature due to the magic of re-radiated IR energy. If it did, engineers would have long ago been able to design power stations made from air, mirrors and glass, extracting more energy out of it than was put into it – if only!
All natural heating that takes place in a greenhouse (be it made with glass, plastic, cardboard or steel) is due to the restricted access of the heated air to the open atmosphere, where it would normally disperse its excess heat to the next available cooler molecule of any of the IR susceptible gases in our atmosphere in the cascading manner described above.
To classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant is thus nothing short of scientific chicanery, for reasons that have nothing to do with science, but based purely on the pseudo-science so eagerly practised by academia across the world in order to keep their funding sources open to the governmental decrees, which are in turn based on totally false IPCC dogma (yes, dogma – not science).
It is therefore that I rest my case, as expanded upon on my website (see links below).
Sincerely yours,
Hans Schreuder
Ipswich, UK
http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/theory.html
http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/carbondioxide.html
http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/latest.html
http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/latestarticles.html
[…] the PDO effect. What most definitively is the case is the fact that the the chairman of IPCC, Mr.Pachauri (co-Nobel Peace Prize laureate) is a staunch supporter of Al […]