Above: At left – Myself, James O’Brien from FSU, and Steve McIntyre at podium. Photo by Evan Jones
This morning’s breakfast program featured congressman Tom McClintock of California. He quipped:
“I was the first to discover global warming during a grade school trip to a natural history museum, where I deduced dinosaurs were destroyed by warming temperatures.” Unfortunately, he said, Miss Conroy, his elementary school teacher, failed to nominate him for a Nobel Prize, “so instead of jetting around the world in a fleet of Gulfstream Fives to tell people they need to feel guilty about driving to work, I have to take the subway. And I don’t get paid $100,000 a speech for my original discovery. But then again, I don’t have Al Gore’s electricity bills either, so I guess it all balances out.”
NASA’s only geologist to walk the moon, Harrison “Jack” Schmidt gave the noon presentation today. I hope to have the text of his speech posted here soon.
Also today I made my presentation on the surfacestations.org project at 4PM, and sat on the panel with Steve McIntyre whose presentation immediately followed me. Both were well received, Steve is now off to Thailand.
I spoke with a number of people today, including Richard Lindzen, who had encouraging words and we exchanged some good ideas. I’ll have more on that later. It’s now midnight, I’m exhausted and have another day tomorrow plus a flight back to California.
Professor Bob Carter is doing a better job than I am in blogging, (he apparently has more time) so I’ll post his report again below.
March 8, 2009
Currently, visitors from outside USA who happen to turn their TVs to one of the 24-hours news channels are astonished – or at least, I was – at the vehement hostility of right-wing commentators to the new Obama administration. This hostility has spread even to some Democrats, who were instrumental in helping to defer Mr Obama’s $410 billion financial rescue package when it was approaching the vote in Congress on Thursday.
The reason is that attached to the bill are more than 6,000, mostly small, spending earmarks (US lingo for tailored, pork-barrel voting inducements), summing to about $7 billion, each one of which is in the interest of particular members or Senators. Earmarking has a long history in the US legislature, but its efflorescent continuation against the financial crisis, and the associated announcement today of 8.1% US unemployment, does not look good given that President Obama gave a campaign pledge to close the practice down.
It is accepted that any new head-of-state deserves a honeymoon period, but Barack Obama may already be close to exhausting his. This is partly because of the unfulfillable expectations that his campaign rhetoric aroused, partly because of the sheer size of the urgent problems that confronted him, and partly because of the polarizing nature of some of the key appointments he has made to his administration. This is particularly true in the environmental area and associated portfolios, where he has appointed John Holdren as Science Adviser, Stephen Chu as Secretary of Energy, Carol Browner (former EPA head) in the new position of Energy Co-ordinator and Lisa Jackson as Administrator of the EPA.
However distinguished the careers of these persons, their public record on the key environmental issues of the day is not one of balance – and especially not regarding global warming. One wonders whether a senior representative of the Obama climate team will pitch up at the Heartland conference, for it is very clear that his administration would benefit from an injection of reality on the issue.
Against this background – and the dependence of President Obama on revenue from a carbon dioxide cap and trade bill to meet his aim of halving the US deficit in the four years 2012-2016 – travellers from around the world are today converging on the Mariott Marquis in Times Square, where the Heartland Institute is hosting its second Manhatten conference on climate change.
Accordingly, press and blog comment is starting to stir. Fascinatingly, two of the first cabs off the rank give diametrically opposed views of the conference.
Writing in the Canadian National Post, Peter Foster summarises the IPCC claim that the climate is at a crisis point, with human carbon dioxide emissions the main culprit, then commenting:
The Heartland conference will present papers suggesting that such views are at best simplistic and at worst downright wrong. It will also feature bold voices who stress the political nature of the climate change bandwagon, and its success in closing down debate as it threatens already foundering global prosperity. These include Vaclav Kraus, president of the Czech Republic and of the European Union.
Meanwhile, over at Grist, Coby Beck adopts the long-favoured technique of ad hominem attack in an attempt to discredit the Heartland-2 event. In a vicious example of the polemic art, Mr Beck manages to denigrate Roy Spencer, Dick Lindzen, Bill Gray, Willie Soon, Arthur Robinson, Stephen McIntyre, Jack Schmidt, Christopher Monckton and Lawrence Solomon – fine intellects, one and all – summarily dismissing them, and others, with the sneering comment:
Hardly ‘the world’s elite scientists specializing in climate issues.’ In fact, none of these experts is a trained climate scientist. In the community of actual experts, the consensus is:
- The earth is rapidly warming (over 0.6 deg. C in the last century)
- Human activities are the primary cause
- Warming will continue and accelerate if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated.
Can this be the same group of people who Peter Harris characterizes as:
I’ll be thinking about that [climate change as the new state religion] every time I look out of my window over the next couple of days, grateful that there are intellectual lights still shining inside the building, and at least some voices speaking up for intellectual freedom and scientific objectivity.
Though it received little press coverage at the time, last year’s Heartland-1 conference resulted in the striking Manhatten Declaration on Climate Change, which commented, inter alia:
That current plans to restrict anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a dangerous misallocation of intellectual capital and resources that should be dedicated to solving humanity’s real and serious problems.
That there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.
That attempts by governments to inflict taxes and costly regulations on industry and individual citizens with the aim of reducing emissions of CO2 will pointlessly curtail the prosperity of the West and progress of developing nations without affecting climate.
The Heartland-2 event obviously has a hard act to follow.
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Meanwhile in a parallel universe another conference takes place where everything is the same but opposite and nothing is quite what it seems.
“Sea level rises could bust official estimates – that’s the first big message to come from the climate change congress that kicked off in Copenhagen, Denmark, today.”
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16732-sea-levels-rising-faster-than-predicted.html
Pierre;
Second Dispatch from the ICCC Climate Sanity Front
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/03/second_dispatch_from_the_iccc.html
sorry
How many people have noticed that the cap’n trade proposal is supposed to fund government services while discouraging carbon emissions? Where will the funding come from if cap’n trade does reduce emissions?
BTW: I’m sure it will reduce emissions in this country, but not worldwide. Hello, Cap’n Trade, goodbye jobs!
all scientific aspect of the story apart, taking control of energy use you gain control of the world. using CO2 as lever, and forbidding nuclear on the other side, you have basically gained control over the world very easily and very cheaply. then of course CO2 is a good excuse to tax people to death, at the same time taking control of them and letally damaging capitalism.
Anthony
The problem of lack of media interest has been highlighted yet again. I hope a punchy press statement will be released at the end of the conference – make life easy for the media.
1. According to AGW theory increased CO2 results in increased temperatures.
2. CO2 levels continue to rise but global temperaures have not risen over the last x years.
3. The predictions of the IPCC models, which are driving the key political decisions, have not been validated.
4. Therefore there must something wrong with the hypothesis.
Paul Zrimsek (05:13:22) :
If a rise of 0.6C over the past century counts as “rapidly warming”, how did people who predict a similar rise over the coming century ever get to be called “denialists”?
Because they refuse to believe (they deny) that such an increase would be a problem that we could stop if we weren’t so selfish.
Paul Zrimsek (05:13:22) :
If a rise of 0.6C over the past century counts as “rapidly warming”, how did people who predict a similar rise over the coming century ever get to be called “denialists”?
Because they refuse to believe (they deny) that such an increase would be a problem and that we could stop if we weren’t so selfish.
Richard Heg (07:39:12) :
Meanwhile in a parallel universe another conference takes place where everything is the same but opposite and nothing is quite what it seems.
“Sea level rises could bust official estimates – that’s the first big message to come from the climate change congress that kicked off in Copenhagen, Denmark, today.”
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16732-sea-levels-rising-faster-than-predicted.html
Am i reading this right? Is this just another prediction by a “very sophisticated”
climate model? I thought they had some observations. I wonder if they did a look back on the last decade.
Paul Zrimsek (05:13:22) :
If a rise of 0.6C over the past century counts as “rapidly warming”, how did people who predict a similar rise over the coming century ever get to be called “denialists”?
Because they refuse to believe (they deny) that such an increase would be a problem and that we could stop it if we weren’t so selfish.
Richard Heg
I now have a stock list of around 10 artickles I post as there is no doubt that there are a number of arguments that keep coming round time and again.
The article you linked to was interesting. It was at variance to the findings of a large conference held at Exeter last autumn sponsored by the UK Met office/Hadley centre which revised their predictions down.
A metre rise is 10mm a year which is more than 3 times some official figures state, and infinity greaer than observations in many places which show little change and what there is appears to be cyclical. Here is an item I posted earlier which related specifically to a query that came up about San Francisco in respect of some scheme being proposed.
The link below leads to information on projected future sea level rises in San Francisco bay of 20-80 cm. This estimate goes directly back to what I said in an earlier post that govt agencies are being instructed to use IPCC projections whether or not they are rooted in reality –this estimate goes from the bottom to top end at from 8 inches per century-(reasonable) to getting on for three feet-(fantasy figures).
http://www.climatechange.ca.gov/events/2006_conference/presentations/2006-09-14/2006-09-14_KNOWLES.PDF
The next link gives information on the bay-you appear to have the longest tide gauge measurements in the western world. Over the last century the mean sea level rise has been eight inches. Intriguingly the first report above seems to have taken a projection that doesn’t match the actual figures-sea levels appear to have dropped over the last 2 years but the projection is taken from the high point.
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/topics/navops/ports/san_francisco_tide_gauge.pdf
There is a famous sea level mark in Australia made about the same time as your tidal gauge was established, held up by the Australian authorities as ‘proof’ of considerable rise-nicely debunked by John Daly in this link
http://www.john-daly.com/ges/appendix.htm
Sea levels go in cycles as does the climate-I would hazard a guess that the warm periods prior to 1850 would have had a higher mean sea level than when the tide gauge was established in the 1850’s, and todays levels are merely approaching it again
This is my own graph of Hadley CET figures (I am British) which shows temperature spikes back to the 1660’s. If your part of the world resembles this dataset the thermal expansion mentioned below would only kick in during the warm years
http://cadenzapress.co.uk/download/menken_hobgoblin.jpg
San Francisco bay sea levels are complicated by regular cyclical thermal expansion (the PDO?) Building, and seismic activity-it is difficult to believe your famous earthquakes haven’t had some effect on sea levels locally.
All things being equal however, I would say nothing extraordinary is happening and there is no evidence whatsoever to support a 80cm rise and the next few years might see a continuation of the current apparent fall (eyeballed only)
TonyB
The spelling mistakes in my last post only go to show you shouldn’t compose a message whilst listening to the cricket….
Tonyb
“EPA for the first time looks to mandate reporting of the gases linked to global warming”
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/090310/epa_greenhouse_gases.html
@Jack Simmons (02:46:18) :
“The real fun for the current administration has not even begun.
Just wait until Joe Sixpack finds out CO2 taxes are going to add to his gasoline bill.
Or Miss Granny down the street is going to pay more on her electrical bill.”
Joe Sixpack will be fuming over more than just CO2 taxes, if that is the direction we follow. Simply increasing bio-fuels in gasoline and diesel, and increasing renewable energy as power generation will greatly increase costs to everyone. The poor and those on fixed incomes will be hurt the most. (see link below)
Elected officials should be acutely aware that the baby boomers are about to retire in droves, and they are plenty unhappy that their 401(k)s are now 201(k)s after the stellar stock market performance with Obama at the helm. [sarc off] And, baby boomers vote.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/ab-32-hits-poor-hardest.html
TonyB
The calendar issues are something else.
I would assume that Manley converted all Julian dates to Gregorian.
It would be awful if the January 1700 record consisted of December 1699 readings. As an aside The Battle of Culloden, date 16th April 1746; which 16th of April?
The CET record from 1707 to1723 has been “bridged” – Manley’s phrase – as he could not find any data. His original Fahrenheit table shows these values in brackets with the phrase “Regarded with Reserve”.
But when you look at Hadley CET there is no indication that these values are suspect. The Hadley table displays authoritative measurements correct to one decimal place and average correct to two decimal places. Now what really annoys me is that these values are taken as fact and appear to be beyond reproach.
The web site
http://www.usefulinfo.co.uk/climate_change_global_warming.php
which is quoted above says:
“This valuable and highly respected temperature record is shown in Figure 3 and several features are evident:”
Valuable and highly respected, yes, but with a health warning!
As you rightly said “It is probably worse these days as so much weight is given to their findings.” May I also add that it is probably worse these days as numbers a chucked into a computer and different numbers are produced and these new numbers are shown to an ever increasing number of decimal places.
I keep asking, what would Edward Lorenz make of it?
There is a need to point out that President Bush put out a comprehensive energy plan in 2001. This was comprehensive and included conservation, electricity generation and transmission, alternative fuels, ethanol, biofuels, hydrogen, solar, Nuclear, as well as conventional fossil fuels, including drilling in Alaska. Also it stressed development of technologies that would improve efficiency and more advanced drilling technologies. It predicted energy needs and how different sources might provide the required energy The Obama White house has killed any white house link to this program so I cannot find it anymore. I think they want to re write history to their advantage.
Had we instituted even portions of this policy, we would be considerably better off in terms of having indetendence from foreign oil. This was declared DOA on arrival by Congress.
As you may remember this program was severly criticized primarily because it’s preparation included consulting with knowledgeable experts in the energy business including electricity generation, oil and natural gas producers. The proposal was never seriously considered except to demagouge those who provided input. Congress even went to court to find out who said what in the meetings, but they lost. There was never any serious discussion about the content of the energy plan.
While Obama has shut down the link, the following ling gives some insight:
http://www.infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/issue38/bush.html
Don Shaw,
You should be able to find old Whitehouse info archived here:
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov
For instance:
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/energy/2001/Forward.pdf
McClintock is a natural as a strap hanger. Maybe he’ll thrive on the East Coast, who knows where it will lead. McClintock ’16?
Jack Schmidt doesn’t understand the difference between dilutive mixing (5 years) and equilibrium spike diffusion (50 years).
The molecules are not anthropogenic, but the amount is.
Example if I bring a given amount of paper money to the bank, my bills won’t be there after a while, but my money is, wellhopefully that is in these days of crisis 😉
The coins and bills flow is altogether different from the money amount flow, likewise tracing a molecule of CO2 doesn’t tell you anything about the decay time of an excess amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
“”” The earth is rapidly warming (over 0.6 deg. C in the last century)
Human activities are the primary cause
Warming will continue and accelerate if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated. “””
From “”Coby Beck” above; is it permissable to state here, that I have never heard of Coby Beck.
Well I would challenge Coby Beck to PROVE #1, given that in 2001 it was demonstrated that prior to about 1980, when some buoys were laid out in some oceans, to simultaneously measure near surface (-1 metre) water temperatures and lower troposphere (+3 metres); and it was shown that (a) the water temperatures OVERESTIMATED the lower tropospheric warming for that 20 year period; and (b), the water and air temperatures are not correlated; which means it is impossible to recover the historic lower troposphereic temperatures for what amounts to about 73% of the total planet’s surface. So bunkum on that 100 year’s temperature increase.
It seems that observational climate monitoring doesn’t really begin in any kind of scientific way till around 1980, which oddly is also when the the first polar satellites were launched; enabling arctic ice data to be gathered, and also roughly the time that solar irradiance satellite measurements first began (maybe a little earlier).
But personally, I wouldn’t trust ANY climate “data” from prior to IGY in 1957/58, and very little of that before 1979/80.
Also I don’t trust GISS or any other kind of “anomalies” to in any way reflect the true surface or lower troposphere mean global temperature; because fo gross violations of the Nyquist sampling Theorem and Criterion. Might as well be averaging the phone numbers in your local telephone directory.
And finally, even if measuring the mean global surface or lower troposphere temperature were possible (with any existing technology). it doesn’t have anything to do with whether the earth is gaining or losing energy through net electromagnetic radiation fluxes. And for good measure, the surface total thermal radiation tends to go as the 4th power of temperature, and the thermal spectral radiance peak tends to go as the 5th power of temperature, which relates to the influence of the CO2 15 micron absorption band; so what on earth is the purpose of calculating an average of the temperature; rather than say an average of the 4th or 5th power of the temperature, which might have more relevence to the warming or cooling question.
And of course local thermal fluxes by all known physical mechanisms (eg conduction, convection, radiation, evaporation etc) collectively don’t have any simple relationship to the local temperature, so why measure the temperature; or the anomaly for that matter.
The second is academic; humans influence climate just by trying to measure it; see Heisenberg; so what ?
And his third point is simply proven false by the available data, where CO2 continues to rise and accelerate (maybe) while warming has stopped and has reversed; so claim three is just a bald faced lie; in addition to being scientifically unsupportable.
George
And no I still haven’t heard of the guy; what’s his name !
“”” Hans Erren (13:44:28) :
The coins and bills flow is altogether different from the money amount flow, likewise tracing a molecule of CO2 doesn’t tell you anything about the decay time of an excess amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. “””
And the decay time of CO2 or water vapor or anything else in the atmosphere, doesn’t have any relationship whatsoever to the possible atmospheric or surface warming caused by that GHG species; which depends on the amount present in the atmosphere; not how long it stays there.
George
Just saw Carter’s interview on Glenn Beck. Made a general defense of geologists’ competence in climate studies.
I was at the entire conference. Anthony and Steve both did well with their presentations. While sitting in the back of the room during Anthony’s presentation, I heard frequent gasps as images of choice ‘high quality, reliable’ USHCN surface station sites appeared on the screen. There was a fun excitement about this conference that surprised me. I have been to many professional society conferences (I am an IEEE member) and the quality of the technical presentations was excellent.
The conference ended with a flourish this afternoon with Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount of Brenchley, addressing those who stayed for lunch. It was well worth the wait. I recommend that the entirety of his presentation be posted here at WUWT when a print version becomes available. Shortly after starting, Monckton revealed that he had an older version of his powerpoint presentation after two or three slides . He then seamlessly transitioned into a soliloquy on climate change science and politics that rivaled any Shakespearean play. He brought down the house with brilliant alliteration, mocking lists of coming calamities that echoed scenes from Monty Python, and a heartfelt ending prayer wishing all of the attendees health and success that touched everyone in the crowd.
@george Smith, of course, but first you need to use correct diffusion physics, that’s what I was criticizing. Even with a spike decay time of fifty years the atmospheric co2 increase will be far less than the IPCC wants us to believe.
I know that climate sensitivity is 1.1 degrees increase for co2 doubling, and I also know that there have been claims for both strong negative and strong positive feedbacks, I’m still sitting on the fence on that item.
B Kerr
Nice post.
For those unfamilar with the great and much missed Lorenz (now known for his butterfly theory but actually a statistician and meteorologist) here is a snippet
“In 1820 Pierre Laplace had suggested a deterministic universe in which prediction would be possible if one knew exact details of all the laws of Nature and had both the ability to plot the position of all physical elements, and an intellect which could submit this data to analysis. “Laplace’s demon”, as this theory became known, came to be used to explain why “noise” (or unknown background factors) made it difficult to establish “true” scientific values in complex systems.
Lorenz discovered quite how dramatic this effect could be when, in 1961, he re-entered data from a weather simulation he had previously run into his computer (a Royal McBee LGP-30). But having retyped the numbers from the printout of the first experiment, he found that it produced wildly different results.”
He realised that the reason was that the original computer had entered numbers to six decimal points, but the printout provided only the first three. Entering 0.506, rather than 0.506127 – though a margin of error of less than 0.1 per cent over the experiment, regarded then as utterly trivial – resulted in huge changes and made prediction all but impossible.”
As for what Lorenz would have made of all this, I guess he will be smiling to himself and muttering that we dont know nearly as much as we think we do.
I think he would also have been interested in Steve MCintyres work.
TonyB
Sorry, as regards Lorenz I meant mathematician and meteorologist-not statistician
Tonyb