I spoke at this conference in Washington DC yesterday, and presented preliminary findings of my surfacestations.org report which you can see here.
I was also privileged to hear MIT’s Dr. Richard Lindzen give a presentation on the state of climate science today, as well as his views on Climate Sensitivity.
You can look at his powerpoint presentation here.
In addition, a significant new report was released, the NIPCC. It is a comprehensive rebuttal to the IPCC report.
Climate Change Reconsidered, the 2009 report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), is the report on global warming the United Nations’ climate panel should have written – but didn’t.
The 880-page report, released June 2nd, 2009 at an international meeting in Washington DC of scientists and policy experts, rigorously critiques the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which concluded that harmful global warming “very likely” has been due to human activity in the release of greenhouse gases. The science behind that conclusion is soundly refuted in Climate Change Reconsidered, coauthored by Dr. S. Fred Singer and Dr. Craig Idso.
The full text of the report and related materials can be found here.
You can also watch a Youtube video of the press conference June 2, 2009 in Washington DC to announce the publication of Climate Change Reconsidered: the 2009 report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).
Here is Joseph Bast, President of Heartland as he introduces it:
Here is the official written press release:
Scientists, Economists
Challenge Global Warming Alarmism
Third international conference
attracts SRO crowd to Washington, DC
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Global warming skeptics, who for a decade have emphasized hard-science evidence to refute doomsday predictions from alarmists, added new ammunition to their arsenal Tuesday at the third International Conference on Climate Change.
Craig Idso, Ph.D., chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change and coauthor of Climate Change Reconsidered, addresses the Third International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, DC on June 2. |
More than 250 people crowded into Washington Court hotel meeting rooms to hear a dozen elite scientists refute the claim that global warming is either man-made or would have harmful effects on Earth.
But The Heartland Institute, a 25-year-old think tank that produced the three international climate conferences, also recruited seven elite economists to focus on the devastating personal and broad economic impact of legislation, sponsored by Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and headed for approval in the U.S. House, to put a cap on greenhouse gas emissions. Businesses, commercial structures, farms, and other emitters could purchase and trade the permits to emit carbon dioxide and other gases that exceed the cap.
While the scientists reported on a vast array of peer-reviewed literature that cast doubt on the causes and severity of global warming, the economists produced data that showed the cap-and-trade scheme not only wouldn’t halt the release of greenhouse gases, but would add huge costs to business activity that inevitably would be passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices.
Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D. and David Douglass, Ph.D. discuss temperature trends over breakfast at the Third International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, DC on June 2. |
Dr. Jeff Kueter, an economist and president of the George C. Marshall Institute, referred to Waxman-Markey as “a dismal down-payment on injuries more intrusive into our lives and economy” than ever seen before.
Kueter cited independent economic studies that showed the diversion of capital to emission permits from the investment in new plant and equipment in the U.S. economy would:
- reduce employment by 1.1 million jobs a year from 2012 to 2030, and more than double that job-loss in 2035.
- slash gross domestic product by an average of $491 billion a year from 2012 to 2035, and hit $662 billion in 2035 — a total evaporation of productive output of goods and services worth more than $9.4 trillion.
- reduce average global temperatures by an insignificant 0.36º Fahrenheit by 2100 and by 0.09º F by 2050.
Similar costs with negligible benefits in Waxman-Markey were cited by other economists and public officials, including Dr. David Tuerck, president of the Beacon Hill Institute and chairman of the economics department at Suffolk University in Boston, and U.S. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla).
U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), a veteran global warming skeptic, urged attendees to call Waxman-Markey a “cap-and-tax plan” that amounts to “unilateral disarmament in the economic sphere” for American businesses and workers.
Another long-time skeptic, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (D-Calif.), provoked sustained applause when he declared that the partisans of Waxman-Markey are “stampeding the public and elected officials in the biggest power grab in the history of human kind.”
Economist Dr. Gabriel Calzada of King Juan Carlos University in Madrid reviewed the dismal performance of cap-and-trade mandates in Spain, where unemployment has reached a daunting 18 percent, carbon emissions are higher today than before cap-and-trade was installed, and fraud and misrepresentation of emission abatement programs are rampant.
Calzada dismissed claims that such policies have created “green jobs” in the Spanish economy and presented data that showed Spanish businesses have spent billions of dollars on carbon credits and abatement programs, resulting in two jobs being lost in the regular economy or never being created for every one job created in the “green economy.”
Energy industry scholar Ben Lieberman of The Heritage Foundation rounded out the economists’ dire projections by showing that by 2035, the added costs stemming from Waxman-Markey would add 58 percent to the price of gasoline at the pump, 90 percent to the typical family of four’s annual cost of electricity, 55 percent to the price of natural gas, and 56 percent to the price of heating oil.
In all, Lieberman said, the tax impact for a family of four would average $4,618 a year through 2035, creating a total additional outlay of more than $110,000 with no added benefit to the family’s quality of life or personal consumption.
Additionally, a parade of climatologists and scientists during the conference challenged the science, causes, and severity of global warming.
 Richard Lindzen, Ph.D. of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology delivers a keynote addresses at the Third International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, DC on June 2. |
Dr. Richard Lindzen, MIT professor of meteorology, reiterated premises underlying global-warming alarmism, such as dangerous increases in carbon dioxide emissions since the Industrial Revolution, rising global mean temperatures, and the slackening of the sex drive in butterflies. Such questions, he said, “are meaningless except in the propaganda war” being waged by a compliant mainstream media and a scientific community that finds it easier “to accept authority than disputing questions that are at issue.”
Dr. Patrick Michaels, a Cato Institute scholar and research professor of environmental studies at the University of Virginia, blamed some of the success of doomsday alarmism on the absence of fact-checking in mainstream media when alarmists go on a sortie.
Citing recent television and print coverage, Michaels noted faulty assertions such as Al Gore’s statement that 49 percent of the United States is in drought conditions; U.S. Sen. Harry Reid’s statement that California wildfires are a manifestation of global warming; several alarmist predictions of a three-foot rise in sea levels; and a decline in agriculture yields.
Lord Christopher Monckton, former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who has closed each of the two previous international climate conferences, once again brought the crowd to its feet in a cheering standing ovation when he concluded his typically witty speech, “… the highly placed conspirators who seek to ride the climate scare to world domination have reckoned without one thing. You. You are here, and you will not let the truth go.
“Thanks to you, it is becoming evident that the rent-seeking promoters of this great boondoggle, through the very scientific ignorance that they had sought to exploit in others, have merely deluded themselves.
“In the end, it will be here, in the United States, that the truth will first emerge. … Not in Europe, for we are no longer free. … It is here, in this great nation founded upon liberty, that the battle for the world’s freedom will be won.”
For more information about the Third International Conference on Climate Change, visit the event’s Web site at http://www.heartland.org/events/WashingtonDC09/index.html or contact Dan Miller, publisher, or Tammy Nash, media relations manager, at 312/377-4000, email dmiller@heartland.org or tnash@heartland.org.
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“”” RW (15:40:28) :
“the observed decreases in the average global temperatures in the early 21st century”
George, do you know what ’statistical significance’ is, and how to calculate it in relation to trends in global temperature? “””
“”” John F. Hultquist (17:33:57) :
RW (15:40:28) :
“the observed decreases in the average global temperatures in the early 21st century”
George, do you know what ’statistical significance’ is, and how to calculate it in relation to trends in global temperature?
RW,
I’m a little rusty on my statistics so I wonder if you will explain your meaning? I assume someone has used some temperature measurements to show or plot a trend. How many measurements are we talking about and how are they distributed? Do we need to do this 30 times or so and take an average? Is it the average of these 30 or so attempts at determining a trend that is being tested? Or are we examining the data for measurement error? I seem to remember some comments by instructors about population mean versus sample mean and so on, and also sample size, and tests of significance when appropriate. I just wonder how all this shakes out with respect to what you and George seem to be arguing about? “””
I’m not quite sure who is arguing, or with whom; nor do I get whatever point RW is trying to make with regard to his question on “statisticsl significance”
If RW, you are questioning my commnet on: “the observed decreases in the average global temperatures in the early 21st century” ; let me say, those are NOT my observations; but are the work of others.
I looked quickly throguh my 20 foot stack of papers to try and find either a GISStemp anomaly or lookalike graph going back to ‘the early 20th century’ and sad to say the first paper that came to hand happened to be a Wikipedia dissertation on global warming; specifically :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming; and their very first graph on the first page, is global mean surface temperature anomaly relative to 1961-1990, which I take a wild guess at is likely some rendition of Hansen’s GISStemp anomaly, although Wiki gives no credit, and I can’t discern, if it is GISStemp, what version or edited release, or update of, it is.
But it clearly shows “anomaly” falling from 1880, then an up blip around 1900, followed by a continuation of the decline to around 1910, that being reasonably the early part of the 20th century, and the graphed data being in some way “observed” rather than a prediction or even a projection of some supercomputer climate GCM.
From 1910 we then get a steady climb to a peak around 1940, substantially above the 1880 to 1910 region thereby suggesting that the early part of the 20th century was indeed lower.
The 1935-1980 era was then relatively flat to slightly donwhill; which as I recall was the period during which the AGW folks were crying about the coming ice age; not unlike the current period post 1995 (exempt 1998) to today.
Now wiki was not my source that led to that comment; one of the recognized reporting groups was; and no don’t ask which one because I don’t remeber those kind of details; I have enough to just remeber the data; and the source is always recoverable by you Googlers.
But anyhow RW, that is what that one liner was all about; and now that I have explained that; I have no idea how that relates to your question.
But as to your question on the statistical significance and how to calculate the same.
To me it is of no statistical significance; because I already know that the data is not believable, simply because of the blatant violations of the Nyquist Sampling Theorem. The sampling process doesn’t even satisfy Nyquist for the temporal variation; to give an aliassing noise free time average for even a single measuring station; and for the spatial sampling, the violation is by orders of magnitude; so has no global significance.
So the time to consider “Statistical significance” and Central Limit Theorems, comes after you first gather actual real data, that is not irretrievably corrupted by aliassing noise; about which your statistics can do nothing.
You can apply your lovely statistical mathematics to a number set as meaningless as your local telephone directory set of numbers; and assign some statistical significance to that; but that does not avoid the fact that those numbers have no real world significance, other than if you dial one of them, a single telephone will ring somewhere.
And I am not sure I grasp John’s point fully; but it does lead me to comment that such plots, as GISStemp anomaly, and whatever it is that Wiki posted on that site purport to be observed measurment data.
As such, each plotted point is a separate entity, unrelated in any way to any other plotted point; and the values are all different, because they are supposed to be all different; just like telephone numbers are supposed to be all different.
And from what little I know about the origins of those numbers or the original raw measurements; they come from a completely chaotic physical system; so one would not ever expect to find any relationship between one number and another.
In particular at no point in such a graph is it ever possible to predict what the next plotted point will be; or even whether it will be higher or lower than the last plotted point.
So my view is that the application of statistical mathematics to such a data set, is a futile attempt to create information where ther is none to be found.
George
PS and finally, these plots and all like them, are plots of AlGorythmically masticated temperature anomaly “data”. They don’t have anything whatsoever to do with global temperatures; for which we have no practical means of making credible measurments.
Leif Svalgaard (23:17:53) :
The 880-page report, released June 2nd, 2009
Has a chapter 5 that greatly misrepresents the current status of long-term solar variations……
Whether one agrees with the rest of Leif’s comments, we should take it as a reminder not to assume that everything in this report is the ‘right ‘ view of the science in question, just because it expresses opinions closer to one’s own than warmists do. We need to have a sceptical approach to all the science, if we are to approach a true understanding.
Flanagan (10:55:06) :
replied
“Smokey: the IPCC does not start by giving the solution before they know the problem. It’s simply not a scientific way of doing things. And what would be the political agenda of the UN? Being re-elected?”
Flanagan, the clue to the IPCC’s rationale lies in the the third and fourth letter of their acronym.
Tonyb
I am sure it was written simply to provoke a response, but this little gem gets my vote for Quote Of The Week.
“The IPCC does not start by giving the solution before they know the problem. It’s simply not a scientific way of doing things. And what would be the political agenda of the UN? Being re-elected?”- Flanagan (10:55:06)
John Galt (12:02:57) :
@ur momisugly Nasif Nahle (11:17:18) :
I hear you. I remember quite well the scientific method.
Uh! I’m sorry… I took the whole post as if it were yours. Actually, those were words from Flanagan. Sorry again! 🙂
John Galt: even when looking very carefully at the IPCC ARs, I never see anywhere “knowing that global warming is man-made, blablabla” The role of these reports is to assess the role of man in the recently observed warming. To ASSESS, not to prove.
Flanagan (22:44:28) :
John Galt: even when looking very carefully at the IPCC ARs, I never see anywhere “knowing that global warming is man-made, blablabla” The role of these reports is to assess the role of man in the recently observed warming. To ASSESS, not to prove.
You’re exactly right. The IPCC was not created to see if AGW is actually happening. They already concluded it’s true without any compelling evidence to back it up.
Thank you for making my point.
Flanagan (10:55:06) :
Flanagan me boy, how about if I give you a clue: the IPCC is composed of 100% political appointees. They have their marching orders, and they produce the response expected by their respective governments — that global warming is gonna getcha.
In reality, the IPCC’s agenda is to get the UN’s hands deep into the pockets of Western taxpayers. Every action they take and every statement they make supports that agenda. Only those blinded by true belief think the UN is interested in science.
You’re sort of correct. The IPCC was not chartered to determine how or why the climate changes…Or even if it is currently changing in any sort of anomalous manner. It wasn’t even chartered for scientific purposes.
It starts from a point of assumed settled science: The climate change of the late 20th century is anomalous and probably caused by the United States…I mean anthropogenic activities…
What the heck is, “socio-economic literature produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change?”
Sounds like something that Jeffery Sachs might write in his little column in Scientific American.
I think the spam filter may have just grabbed my last post due to an IPCC link.
“And what would be the political agenda of the UN? Being re-elected?”- Flanagan (10:55:06)”
Ted Turner gave the UN a $1 billion donation and asked them to set up a center to document the destructive effects of AGW. They did so. Their agenda is to repay their alarmist benefactor, and possibly to induce further donations.
Flanagan, this is all that really interests the UN: click
Money Money Money. Our money, and how the craven UN can get its hands deeper into the pockets of U.S. taxpayers.
The UN’s proposed “World Tax” [now re-named “Millenium Development Goals”] was proposed to be a .7% tax on GDP. For the U.S. that would mean over $100 billion every year, taken from working taxpayers and paid into the opaque and unaccountable United Nations.
That world tax has not been implemented. So, what is the UN’s response? The UN has now raised its demand, to a full one percent tax on U.S. GDP annually.
U.S. GDP is currently about $14 trillion. The UN looks at that money and gets absolutely ravenous with greed. They intensely hate the U.S. and the West — but they crave the West’s money like an unemployed brother in law living in your extra bedroom craves the money you work for. The sooner they are cut off, the better for all of us.