While the consensus warns of gloom and doom, the WSJ points out that warming has its positive aspects as well. For example, Trees seem to be responding well to increased CO2. See: Forests in the Eastern United States are growing faster than they have in the past 225 years
The 1970’s worry of the “population bomb” may very well have been subdued by CO2 helping crop yields. WUWT readers may be familiar with Indur Goklany, a regular WUWT contributor. He figures significantly in this WSJ article.
From the Wall Street Journal:
It seems the U.N. IPCC only tabulates the benefits of climate change when they are outweighed by the costs.
By ANNE JOLIS
Could global warming actually be good for humanity? Certainly not, at least if we’re to believe the endless warnings of floods, droughts, and pestilences to which we are told climate change will inevitably give rise. But a closer look at the science tells a more complex story than unmitigated disaster. It also tell us something about the extent to which science has been manipulated to fit the preconceptions of warming alarmists.
According to a 2004 paper by British geographer and climatologist Nigel Arnell, global warming would likely reduce the world’s total number of people living in “water-stressed watersheds”—that is, areas with less than 1,000 cubic meters of water resources per capita, per year—even though many regions would see increased water shortages. Using multiple models, Mr. Arnell predicted that if temperatures rise, between 867 million and 4.5 billion people around the world could see increased “water stress” by 2085. But Mr. Arnell also found that “water stress” could decrease for between 1.7 billion and 6 billion people. Taking the average of the two ranges, that means that with global warming, nearly 2.7 billion people could see greater water shortages—but 3.85 billion could see fewer of them.
Mr. Arnell’s paper, funded by the U.K. government, was duly cited in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s supposedly authoritative 2007 assessment report. But the IPCC uses Mr. Arnell’s research to give the opposite impression, by a form of single-entry book-keeping. While it dutifully tallies the numbers of people he predicts will be left with less water access, it largely ignores the greater number likely to see more water courtesy of climate change.
The IPCC’s much-shorter “Summary for Policy Makers” is even more one-sided. It is riddled with warnings of warming-induced drought and—while acknowledging that a hotter Earth would bring “increased water availability” in some areas—warns that rising temperatures would leave “hundreds of millions of people exposed to increased water stress.” Nowhere does it specify that even more people would probably have more water supplies.
The IPCC also neglects to mention Mr. Arnell’s baseline forecasts—that is, the number of people expected to experience greater “water stress” simply due to factors like population growth and resource use, regardless of what happens with temperatures. This leaves readers with the misleading impression that all, or nearly all, of the IPCC’s predicted “water stress” increases are attributable to climate change.
These omissions were no accident. In 2006, prior to the release of the IPCC’s report and the all-important policy makers’ summary, Indur Goklany—at the time with the U.S. Department of the Interior—alerted the summary’s authors that it was “disingenuous” to report on a warmer world’s newly “water-stressed” without mentioning that “as many, if not more, may no longer be water stressed (if Arnell’s analyses are to be trusted).” Mr. Goklany’s advice was dismissed.
Read the rest of the Article at the WSJ here
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@R. Gates
Deniers is a label that was invented to discredit people who ask questions. Science is about asking the right question more than anything else.
Hence, people who use the term “denier” are the ones who are truly anti-question and thus anti-science.
Just some thoughts for ya.
OT – NOAA’s Prediction of ice extent for April 2 2010
http://i856.photobucket.com/albums/ab125/peterplail/antarctic.jpg
also available for the arctic on
http://arcweb.natice.noaa.gov/dailyproduct.web/default.aspx
Well given that the history of somewhat believable actual lower atmospheric global temperature measurements goes all the way back to at least 1980, it seems we have only just completed one unit of climate timescale, namely 30 years.
So it is a little early to be placing limits on the natural variability of climate.
And given that the extreme range of surface temperatures that one might encounter somewhere on earth, on a typical midsummer (northern) day, is about 150 deg C p-p, I don’t think the less than 1 deg F we may have seen of warming since the end of the 19th century, is anything to even comment on, let alone go into a panic over.
Remember the extreme temperature range (global average) for the last 600 million years appears to be from a low of 12 deg C to a high of 22 deg C; and the indications are that life on earth has thrived all throughout that 600 million years.
And the IPCC seems to think we could get up to that 22 deg C level by 2100.
Good luck on that Pachy !
“Jeremy (14:10:51) :
[…]
Hence, people who use the term “denier” are the ones who are truly anti-question and thus anti-science”
Actually, the term is “post-modern science”. THat’s science sans scientific principles. Makes it go a whole lot faster.
@R. Gates
I am puzzled about how you get a historical perspective on lower atmosphere temperatures or do you have some sort of atmospheric temperature proxy like frozen air cores or cloud rings?
“Why did he even bother to write this paper? All he’s saying is he doesn’t know squat.”
At least he’s honest about it.
I wrote to USEPA some time ago on this subject. I asked why it was that only the deleterious effects of warming were listed in their findings. Their answer was that methods of analysis had improved so that they were doing a better job of forecasting. That made no sense and avoided the question. You have to wonder if that type of balanced analysis permeates the agency.
I also found that they rely on the IPCC to come up with their information and opinions, which surprised me, but explained everything. USEPA has decided not to do any thinking on their own. Maybe that’s why Obama wants to give them a 30% raise.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/04/climate-change-email-hacking-leaks
Detectives question climate change scientist over email leaks
“A third blogger with whom Dennis has posted is Anthony Watts, a weatherman for a California radio station who is involved in a sometimes vituperative sceptic blog called Watts Up with That. He has had a book published by the Heartland Institute, a denialist organisation which until 2006, received funding from ExxonMobil.”
I think that the UK Guardian newspaper is a UK gov mouthpiece.
Notice the emotive language that they use to describe “sceptics”!
Does the WSJ realise that it’s identified itself as a heretic opposed to the new religion?
Machu Picchu
R. Gates (13:00:47)
“The medieval warmth was primarily a N. Hemisphere phenomenon.”
You might consider the history of Machu Picchu.
The MWP was around 800-1300, Machu Picchu was built around 1400, but then abandoned around 100 years later when it got too cold for them to feed themselves.
The crops that they grew at Machu Picchu have never grown there again, it’s been too cold.
But when they built Machu Picchu, there was a reason for those crop terraces.
@jon
‘I think that the UK Guardian newspaper is a UK gov mouthpiece.’
Most of us Brits are fully aware that the Guardian is our very own soviet-style Pravda. It’s a shame though that so many Brits aren’t aware that the CRU received funding from BP and Shell. And the Guardian certainly won’t be mentioning it.
R. Gates said
Amazing warmth right now in the lower atmosphere up to about 46,000 ft. Especially take a look at 14,000 ft. global temps and compare to the historical data…the warmest February temps are 2010! (just as was the case with January)
Here is just one of many papers that disagree with your assumption. On historic temperatures. Sincerely, John
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Holocene,Historicandrecentglobaltemperatures.pdf
@ur momisugly Peter (14:22:13) :
“Why did he even bother to write this paper? All he’s saying is he doesn’t know squat.”
At least he’s honest about it.
Ok, I’ll give him that. 🙂 Which, btw, hilites who the real cherry pickers are – those with a political agenda, who seize on every remote probability to entrench themselves in positions of power.
What passes for “climate Science” seems to suffer from a severe case of what I would call “The Ohm’s Law Effect.”
Two specific tenets of classical “climatology” demonstrate the effect.
#1/ The mean global surface temperature of the earth is proportional to the logarithm of the global atmospheric CO2 abundance; hence Schneider’s concept of “Climate Sensitivity”, wherein a doubling of CO2 leads to a temperature increase of 3 deg C; well somewhere between 1 and 10 anyway.
Now don’t talk about feedbacks, or anomalies, or GCMs or any other paraphernalia; either T is proportional to log(CO2) or it isn’t. It is left as an exercise for the reader to list ALL (or some) of the other physical variables that are known to have an influence on the global mean surface temperature, but are NOT changes in atmospheric CO2. Ergo, global mean surface temperature cannot be proportional to the log of global atmospheric CO2 abundance.
#2 High wispy clouds lead to global surface warming, and the higher and wispier the clouds, the hotter they warm the surface. According to the climate textbooks, this is true, and the atmospheric abundance of water vapor up to those clouds, apparently has no effect, so appears nowhere in the graphs that prove that more high cloud cover gives more positive feedback warming.
Since H2O is well known to be the most significant green house gas in the atmosphere; it simply makes no sense that the high wispy clouds should lead to the same amount of surface warming, regardless of the relative humidity of the intervening atmosphere below those clouds.
Ergo, one cannot claim that the warmer surface temperatures in the presence of high wispy clouds are a result of those clouds, and are unrelated to atmospheric water vapor. Those clouds couldn’t possibly be caused by those surface temperatures, and the atmospheric humidity, clould they ?
So how does this relate to “The Ohm’s Law Effect.”
Well everybody who is involved in electricity or electronics knows all about Ohm’s Law; I know because that has been the first question I have ever asked every single candidate for some electronics job; “What is Ohm’s Law ?”, and it has always yielded the same answer; more or less:-
E = RI, R = E/I, I = E/R and so on, take your pick; I got all of those from PhDs down to junior techs.
Well the problem is that can’t be right. If I have a Voltage V and a Current I, in my circuit element, I must have a power dissipation of VI Watts, and that power dissipation is going to change the temperature of my circuit; yet there is no temperature term in my expression, so it can’t be right.
If I consider simple things like lamps; incandescent, Fluorescent, LED or just about any other light emitting device, none of them follow E = RI .
You see E = RI is NOT Ohm’s law at all. Every one of those candidates gave me a wrong answer.
A more correct formula for Ohm’s Law would be:-
R = C where C is a constant. And as I said, that isn’t true for any of those light sources; or for that matter for most any other electricity conducting device.
You see what it was that GS Ohm discovered, and stated as his law was:- “For a certain class of materials, namely metallic conductors, under constant physical conditions, the current flowing in the circuit is proportional to the applied Voltage.” That’s it. So V/I =R is constant according to Ohm, for metallic conductors provided all other physical conditions are held constant; in particular the temperature T.
In fact it is extremely difficult to actually observe Ohm’s law in action, because of the self heating due to the always present power dissipation.
I can’t swear I have ever observed it; but I suspect it is fairly close to being true, as Ohm stated it.
Well you see those climate axioms have the same problem. The purveyors of those relationships, between clouds, and surface temperatures, or between Log (CO2) and surface temperatures; they never state just what set of physical conditions their “laws” are valid under.
We know that the LWIR available for CO2 to absorb and thus warm the surface, is very dependent on the actual surface temperature; yet that is NOT specified in the “Climate sensitivity” thesis. We also know that the presence or absence of water vapor above the surface, also has a large effect on the heating of the atmosphere, and by inference of the ground.
Over an arid desert, there is little water vapor, so very little atmospheric warming occurs due to CO2, as compared to what is observed over a hot steamy tropical jungle.
So how many more of these simplistic axioms are there in “Climate Science”; that proclaim simple mathematical relationships between a couple of variables, with no restraints on all the other myriad variable that can influence the result.
How many other tenets of climatology suffer from the Ohm’s Law effect ?
Mike D
I do not understand the slur “flat earther”. Do the people who use it not get that the flat earth was the consensus science, and Galileo was the denier?
If you start your meta-analysis from a position skewed by politics and a need to find funding, you’re going to end up coming to unsubstantiated conclusions simply through excluding contrarian evidence and giving undue weight to the information you do include.
Even if you cherry-pick the garbage going in it will still come out the other end as garbage.
I’m with Steve Goddard. I’m tired of winter as I await yet another snow storm here in the midwest.
Some fun charts to view as you all decide if warming is good or not. Arctic Sea Ice for January has shown a definite trend the past 30 years:
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20100203_Figure3.png
Can you spot the trend? Or is this more science conspiracy?
Or how about this chart showing how the summer melt season is getting longer and longer in the Arctic:
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20100203_Figure5.png
And this is one of the most telling, showing the dramatic increase in negative sea ice anamolies in Arctic:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
Or if you go here:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps
and draw the graph, you’ll see that the GLOBAL temps we’ve had at the surface level of the atmosphere over these past few days are normally not seen until the last week of March.
But some of you can keep sipping the cool-aid…
More confirmation that Rupert Murdoch has turned skeptic! We now have The Times [UK], WSJ, The Australian, Times of India, and occasional flashes from Fox News – all putting AGW under the microscope. [And seeing lots of things wriggling!]
R. Gates (16:54:48)…
…conveniently omitted the evidence that CO2 is the cause of the loss of Arctic sea ice. Oops… That’s because there is no evidence that CO2 — or human activity — is the cause. None. It’s all natural variability.
As usual, the alarmist contingent cherry-picks only what suits them. In this case it’s the Northern Hemisphere. Since Gates only shows the Arctic, and pretends that’s where all the planet’s sea ice is, would anyone like to see the other hemisphere? click
Gates shows the Arctic sea ice declining. But the same chart for the Antarctic shows… click
The Antarctic sea ice extent is above the 1979 – 2009 average: click
Another view of the Antarctic sea ice anomaly: click
The Antarctic today: click
The claims that global sea ice is in decline are debunked by this thirty year comparison: click
Here’s another chart of Antarctic ice cover, showing that when ice is lost in the Arctic, it is gained in the Antarctic: click
I see Mr Gates wants another chart, just to be sure: click
Here, maybe a picture of Arctic ice would help: click. Notice any Arctic ice loss? Hmm-m. Those government boys wouldn’t be “adjusting” the numbers, would they? click
For those serious about the subject, there’s no better primer than the late, great John Daly: click
Now, what was that about Kool Aid drinkers?
I guess this makes it “WaterGate” …….
R. Gates (12:02:01) :
RESPONSE:
1. You shouldn’t blame “AGW deniers” for pointing out that the studies that the IPCC itself uses to tell us that millions will face additional water stress also tells that even more millions will see a reduction in stress.
2. There never has been any showing that the changes in precipitation and temperature that we have seen this century are outside of the bounds of natural variability. The null hypothesis, that changes observed over the past century are outside the bounds of natural variability, has never been rejected.
3. So what if temperature, precipitation, sea ice, etc., change? What matters are the attendant impacts, but our knowledge of that is extremely poor, to put it mildly. And when one looks at specific analyses, there is frequently much less to the impacts than generally advertised. Just use the search box on this page , type in “goklany”, and you’ll get a bunch of posts that show that, and provide references.
4. If, nevertheless, you are still concerned about the POTENTIAL impacts of globl warming on human and/or environmental well-being which may or may not occur in the future, you can get far more bang for your buck by addressing real human and environmental problems that exist today. More importantly, you’d be solving real problems that we are 100% certain exist, and solve them sooner than the hypothetical, possibly non-existent problems of tomorrow. See, e.g., Is Climate Change the “Defining Challenge of Our Age”? Energy & Environment 20(3): 279-302 (2009), available at http://goklany.org/library/Goklany%202009%20EE%2020-3_1.pdf.
Correction to the above:
The null hypothesis should be that changes observed over the past century are WITHIN the bounds of natural variability. That’s what needs to be rejected.
So, let me get this straight. The main story is that some plants grow today differently to plants of 225 years ago. Is that right?
Well, that’s proof enough that AGW is real.
Why are we surprised that the IPCC doesn’t want to highlight any benefits of increased CO2 and temp levels?
1.2.1 Article 2 of the Convention
Article 2 of the UNFCCC specifies the ultimate objective of
the Convention and states:
‘The ultimate objective of this Convention and any related
legal instruments that the Conference of the Parties may adopt
is to achieve, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the
Convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations
in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous
anthropogenic interference with the climate system”.
If that is your ultimate objective, you will not be too keen to undermine it with the “positive” effects of of your findings.