Drought, Wildfires Haven’t Changed Perry’s Climate-Change Views : It’s All Politics : NPR
Last week, I drove to College Station to talk with Andy Dessler about the renewed firestorm over global warming. This was the week before actual firestorms roared across Central Texas, killing four people, burning 1,000 homes, and forcing thousands to evacuate. The punishing drought played a major role in the wildfire outbreak, the worst in Texas history, and Dessler says there’s an unmistakable connection between the drought and climate change.
“We can’t say climate change is causing the extreme weather Texas is having right now. On the other hand, we can say humans have increased the temperature of the base climate state pretty much everywhere. And what that means is it makes the heat more extreme and increases evaporation from the soil. We can be confident we’ve made this hellish summer worse than it would have been.”
…
Dessler is not surprised anymore by the vehemence of the emails he receives from people who believe he is perpetrating a fraud.
“People who discount the science of climate change don’t do it because they’ve read the science,” he says. “The science of climate change is a proxy for views on the role of government. From what I understand, Perry’s position is that he doesn’t want government to interfere in private lives or industry. That means climate change — which calls for a government solution; there’s no way for the free market to address climate change by itself — that doesn’t fit anywhere with his political values. So he shoots the messenger.”
The messenger is Andy Dessler and the great majority of other climate scientists who believe human activity is warming the planet.
h/t to Tom Nelson
…may I respectfully suggest, you need to start openly making a cleverly-framed settled case for public distribution.
If you don’t or can’t, can there be any complaint when the warmists triumph in the end?
Ok, here goes, at least as to what I think is the sufficient, settled substance of my case:
1] “CO2 = CAGW” Climate Science is not real science.
Proof: none of its critical, unique predictions has ever occurred in the real world, whose empirical nature now includes even many opposites of its predictions, which have instead subsequently occurred in the real world, thereby solidly unhinging the practice of “CO2 = CAGW” Climate Science from the real world, and from the practice of real science – which otherwise necessarily includes the principle of the possible falsifiability of its therefore meaningful hypotheses.
2] Instead, “CO2 = CAGW” Climate Science is merely a gigantic Propaganda Operation which intentionally ignores the practice of real science.
Proof: Again contrary to the practice of real science, “CO2 = CAGW’s” Climate Scientists simply don’t care that none of their critical, unique predictions has ever occurred in the real world, whose empirical nature now includes even many opposites of their predictions, which have instead subsequently occurred in the real world. As proven by the way they behave, these kind of “Climate Scientists” persist unperturbed by empirical reality and therefore by the principles necessary to the practice of real science, which they willfully ignore.
3] Therefore, contrary to their implied claims as to practicing real science for the benefit of Humanity, and thus by way of an obvious pseudo-scientific subterfuge, “CO2 = CAGW” Climate Science and its Climate Scientists, enc., are trying to achieve something other than a truly scientifically based end or goal which is dedicated towards the benefit of the rest of us humans.
4] To find the main answer as to what this goal is, simply follow the attending money and power redistributions as Climate “Science” practices its manifestly unscientific, therefore exclusively propagandistic “method”.
5] Basically as practiced, “CO2 = CAGW” Climate Science’s main ends are manifestly the same as its well-demonstrated means or “methods” = propagandistic thought control, from which much and even all other control of people can then follow.
I was in College Station during the peak of what is still “the worst drought in the history of Texas.” What we have now would only be a preamble, like in 1950 or so. There I learned enough meteorology and oceanography to make me think I understand this stuff, especially since our professors understood the difference between science and advocacy.
Predicted warming then suggested northward spread of tropicals, but it got wetter and cooler enough to help cover much of Texas with trees, some of which are now burning. A botanist studying a fire in Big Bend National Park once told us that it takes rain and production to have fire. Deserts don’t normally burn.
We had an impressive west Texas dust storm blow in, circa 1955, but the Brazos River Valley flooded in 1957. Drought was an interesting, if severe, event, but fortunately, since only the athletic dorms had air conditioning, I spent summers on the coast where ponds were dry, some salt encrusted, and many tropicals did invade the bays.
Just for a hypothetical moment lets assume that the planet is warming and it is human caused. The next question would “how much warming?” and the answer (for Texas) would be less than 0.5°C.
Exactly how much affect on wildfires would a 0.5°C temperature change have?
I kinda suspect “not much”.
On the other hand, we can say humans have increased the temperature of the base climate state pretty much everywhere. And what that means is it makes the heat more extreme and increases evaporation from the soil. We can be confident we’ve made this hellish summer worse than it would have been.”
Seriously? By raising the base state by half a degree? Can humans even distinguish half a degree difference in temperature? I really doubt it.
These are not serious claims.
“That means climate change — which calls for a government solution; there’s no way for the free market to address climate change by itself ”
And therein lies a sorry tale of scientific political activism and some of the lunar policy outcomes we’ve had to endure as a result, whatever the veracity of the underlying science. All we ever heard from Team Climate was how as a result of their Govt funded consensus science there was a necessary logical consensus on Govt controls, albeit such Govts often lauded a ‘market based’ mechanism with thin air trading among putting the world’s food in our tanks and the like. Did you ever hear them advocate a simple hands off approach to their CO2 bogeyman? ie you want to raise the private cost of fossil fuels to better reflect their perceived view of its truer social cost and how most could they do that? By simply advocating a global move to complete reliance on CO2E taxing as a means of raising the desired quantum of tax revenue and abandoning all other forms of revenue raising as a result. Did they advocate that at Copenhagen, or did they simply want more taxes for more Govt control? After all the developed West raises more tax revenue and presumably it would have a higher CO2e tax base and price as a result, so what’s to complain about?
Well if there was no consensus even advocated on that at Copenhagen and we are left to wonder why not, there was certainly a consensus achieved on all the lunar direct intervention policies arising out of Team Green Climate science. Basically they were soundly rejected by consensus and if you believe in consensus science, etc, you logically have to defer to the lofty decision of the consensus umpire. We skeptics that the science on AGW is settled are happy for some peer review of consensus umpiring if that’s what’s being advocated now.
Thank you for the link to what Hansen said DirkH.
Who peer reviewed these two paragraphs:
“Venus has a temperature of 450°C (842°F), hot enough to melt lead. It once held water but the runaway greenhouse effect heated the planet so much that the water molecules were destroyed.
The sun’s energy hitting Earth is slightly more than half that of Venus. Burning the tar sands and tar shale could, over time, put Earth’s temperature to around 225°C (437°F).”
First of all, any gas laws need to work with absolute temperatures. So while 225 C is half of 450 C, when converted to K, the 450 C on Venus becomes 723 K. Half of 723 is 361.5 K, or 88.5 degrees C.
But of far greater concern is that we will never have close to the concentration of CO2 that Venus has. In my analysis below, I will just do an order of magnitude calculation and for simplicity assume that for each molecule of CO2 that forms, one molecule of O2 is used up. I will also assume that half of all CO2 that man produces ends up in the atmosphere and half in the ocean. (So for the moment, I will ignore the extra amount that will get used in photosynthesis.) I will also assume that when oxygen gets below 15%, then combustion is no longer possible. Since oxygen is about 21% now, it would then drop to 15% if the CO2 increases from essentially 0% to 3% using round numbers.
Considering Venus’ high pressure and CO2 concentration, and IF we assume that Earth’s CO2 concentration did reach 3%, then there would still be about 3000 times as much CO2 in Venus’ atmosphere than on Earth. So I do not see how Earth’s temperature could be anywhere close to 225 C at any time.
Furthermore, if we did burn so much fossil fuel to raise the CO2 concentration to 3%, and thereby lowering oxygen’s concentration to 15%, then cars would stop running and the Texas fires would never get going!
Hate to tell Dessler this but a government solution cannot stop climate change. A government solution will kill more people by making them poorer and less able to deal with climate change.
Look at what is said here. This is *all* politics and powerplay. AGW/climate change, whatever you want to call it. It is all about politics and power. Not one of these people give a damn about saving the planet or anything else. They only care about their on power and influence.
@Wade;
Good post, but this line is a calumny: “Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons claimed to have created cold fusion.” They did not invent the term, and didn’t like it. They had generated unexplained heat (sufficient, when the innocuous rig was first left running overnight, to explode and demolish and burn most of their lab) that they thought, by process of elimination, must involve some nuclear process.
“Things aren’t always what they seem.
Skim milk masquerades as cream.”
G&S
To Christopher Simpson :: We’re on the same side of this AGW nonsense but please forgive me for not being able to resist this slow hanging softball …
Unless all your doctors and associated medical personnel and all your teachers (not to mention the equipment, medication, buildings, electricity, etc) [a] are slaves, or [b] work for free like pro bono lawyers, then they *did* get paid, just not by you. So who paid your bills? I assure you, someone did.
So it was not a government solution, it was the government simply sending your bills to someone else. Governments do not have money, if they give money to someone and this ‘money’ has actual value (not to be confused with printing money which simply devalues existing wealth), then this real money came from someone.
Nothing is free because someone else pays. Certainly it is possible to envision a system where things appear free, but unfortunately it would involve doctors that are slaves (they do not receive payment) or perhaps are independently wealthy and care for patients out of benevolence 🙂
More likely this is a system where people kick in some money into a fund or insurance from taxes and such. However, at the end of the day the patient either [a] is red ink on the ledger (didn’t kick in enough money and winds up passing the bills to others), or [b] is black ink on the ledger (kicked in a lot of money, more than enough to cover all the bills he rang up and thus didn’t really ‘need’ the system in the first place). When there is more black ink than red ink you have a solvent insurance system. Reverse that and you have a quasi-Ponzi scheme like Social Security that will eventually collapse leaving lots of people unable to collect. A kind of musical chairs. Or more accurately, Russian Roulette, since lives are at stake.
So the question really becomes, are you red ink or black ink?
Oh brother. In the past week I’ve given kudos to Dessler both here and at Climate Audit for advancing cooperation between the camps.
However, after reading his remarks in the NPR piece, I take it all back.
Werner, there is the little hitch of proving that Co2 actually causes warming. Sorry.
I’d been tempted to tell you you were being suckered, but I see you’ve reached the same conclusion yourself. “Compromise” to a CAGW-thinker means “Agree with me.”
Christopher Simpson, your dihydrogen monoxide petition made me smile. Christopher you are right, I brought my three children up from a very young age to question authority, including mine. Every so often I would make some deliberately absurd statement which I would prompt them to question, if they initially accepted it as true. Authority is not always correct and I wanted them to question those in charge of them at school and later at the workplace, so if they were ever told to do something that might endanger them, they would question it.
They are all AGW sceptics, but I cannot persuade them to log in to WUWT.
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Gary Hladik says:
September 10, 2011 at 11:19 am
. . . Dessler just doesn’t do his homework. Either that or he copied it from Hugh Pepper.
<<
This was the funniest comment in the whole thread. Thanks for the laugh.
Jim
Texas is currently in the grip of a very severe drought… US Drought Monitor. It does appear that Texas will set a record low for summer precipitation this year; although there is no statistically meaningful trend.
The lack of a trend in the precipitation data made me wonder… Just how often should we be setting precipitation records if the annual variation is random?
The record only goes back to 1895. Does anyone know how often record highs and record lows should be broken in such a short time series?
Since the formula calculates “the probability, pn(1), that the nth observation of a series xm= x1, x2, … xn has a higher value than the previous observations,” I’ll have to convert all of the records to highs by using the absolute value of the anomaly.
In order to analyze the frequency of record excursions, I plotted the absolute value of the annual summer precipitation anomaly along with an “expected records” curve.
At a record length of 117 years, there was a 1% chance of setting a new record high in the 117th year. However, the record excursion occurred four years ago in 2007 – Our record high summer precipitation.
There have been 5 record excursions from the average annual summer precipitation – Exactly what there should have been in a random series of numbers. And the records have occurred with the expected frequency of a random series of numbers. The fifth record excursion should have occurred between 1945 and 2030 – It occurred in 2007.
It’s funny how so many new weather records break old records that had stood for 60-80 years… And that a random time series should be breaking 60-80 year old records in its 120th year.
Is Dr. Dessler unaware of these facts? Or Is he politicizing the weather? Or scare-mongering up another $150k research grant from the NSF?
Once an ardent supporter of the idea of AGW. Then I started reading the literature. The more I read, the more I realized that the “science” of AGW was weak at best.
The misuse of stats, the misuse of uncertainty as certain, the ability of AGW supporters to ignore, or if not ignore, attack contrasting positions without understanding the basic uncertainties has proved that they read selectively.
The AGW believers are being used as a tool by the fossil fuel and banking industries. By the promotion of AGW, they encourage subsidies, carbon taxes etc. These are not productive solutions, only solutions to provide wealth transfer.
It is intersting to observe how truely gulible, uninformed in economics, supply and demand these folks are. I shake my head in amazement at how they can ignore this.
I think this is rather funny. I started following GW in 1988 after the famous speech before congress. I did a paper on it the following year in HS. It wasn’t until 2000 or so, after college, that I actually started reading the science, and that’s what changed my mind to believe that AGW is just nature.
What’s funny to me, though, is that the AGW folks don’t hype on something quite obvious to me. I unfortunately have a touch of asthma. Carbon fuels do put more stuff in the air that makes it tougher to breathe. Oil mostly comes from places that don’t use the majority of it. (The USA produces quite a bit, but imports quite a bit more.) For those like the USA, that’s a big economic cost. Regardless of whether or not CO2 is warming the atmosphere, which again I think is not true, using less carbon fuels would be a good thing economically and environmentally. That statement has a huge caviot, though. That presupposes that we have cheaper means for obtaining and storing energy.
So, what’s my point. Why bother arguing about it? Cheaper energy is something that everyone can get behind, and cleaner energy(soot, mining tailings etc) is something that everyone can support. Why put money into researching climate change, when those same research dollars could be put to new energy storage and new energy collection/production methods that are better than our current ones? It seems to me that we’d be a lot closer to the goals of the AGW folks if we didn’t spend the money on them trying to prove their case, and instead spent it on the solution they they claim to want in the first place. It makes it hard not to think that their goal is not cheaper and cleaner energy. If it’s not that, then what is their goal?
Joe Haberman says:
September 10, 2011 at 9:29 am
Perhaps Dessler should look at the temp. records for Texes befor he credits climate change for this years weather.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/time-series/index.php?parameter=tmp&month=7&year=2010&filter=12&state=41&div=0
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I don’t understand your point. I went to the chart and corrected what you did so it made sense.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/time-series/index.php?parameter=tmp&month=7&year=2011&filter=1&state=41&div=0
That shows 2011 was the hottest July on record for Texas. Isn’t that proving Dessler correct?
Richard Lindzen has a nice long term plot showing that temperature and drought have NOT shown any correlation in the US.
I’ve read so many articles I can’t remember which one to find it in off hand. It is probably in the comments above, but I haven’t read all of them. Too busy reading about the science of climate.
Bill Illis said:
“When the first person that does finally understand it comes forward and says “I’ve figured it out” and the rest of us say “well, that works” and then it continues working, then we will have a field called climate science.”
I think I have figured it out. Some say ‘well,that works’ and I am just waiting to see whether it continues working.
See here:
http://www.irishweatheronline.com/news/environment/climate-news/wilde-weather/feature-how-the-sun-could-control-earths-temperature/290.html
and:
http://www.irishweatheronline.com/news/environment/climate-news/wilde-weather/setting-and-maintaining-of-earth%e2%80%99s-equilibrium-temperature/18931.html
“David Ball says:
September 10, 2011 at 10:07 pm
Werner, there is the little hitch of proving that Co2 actually causes warming. Sorry.”
No argument there! I was being generous to Hansen and assuming for argument sake that it was. However I am well aware of the fact that according to the Hadcrut3 data set at
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt
that 1998 was the hottest year in the modern record. And not only is the 1998 mark not beaten yet, but you have to go back to the 1940s before you find an earlier time when the high temperature mark was not beaten in 10 years or less. Every year that passes when the 1998 mark is not beaten is another nail in the coffin of CAGW.
Dessler ““People who discount the science of climate change don’t do it because they’ve read the science”
Hansen and friends have stated that increasing atmospheric CO2 from 280 ppm to 560 ppm will initiate a tipping point. That is ludicrous. There is no scientific basis for that statement. Facts are facts. Propaganda is propaganda.
Hansen and friends are advocating spending trillions of dollars on boondoggle carbon trading schemes, on carbon sequestration schemes, on wind “farms” in regions where there is no wind. These boondoggle schemes will not significantly reduce CO2 emissions but will waste trillions of dollars of taxpayer dollars.
An increase in CO2 from 280 ppm to 560 ppm will result in beneficial warming (most of the warming will be at higher latitudes where the growing season is limited by frost free days, there is increased precipitation with a warmer planet, and the intensity of storms are less as there is less temperature differential from high and low latitudes).
Atmospheric CO2 on the earth is at its lowest level in 500 million years. 0.039% or 390 parts per million. CO2 on the Venus is 230,000 times greater than on the earth.
We are carbon based life forms. Plants eat CO2. Life would not exist on this planet without CO2. Greenhouses inject CO2 into the “greenhouse” to increase yield and reduce growing times. As CO2 levels increase plants reduce the number of stomata on their leaves to reduce water loss due to evaporation. As CO2 levels rise there is a significant reduction in desertification. This phenomena has already started to occur and is significant. The average atmospheric CO2 level for most of the period life has been on this planet has been around 1000 ppm to 1500 ppm.
CO2 will under business as usual increase from 390 part per million today to around 560 ppm by the end of this century. If there is no feedback to amplify the CO2 warming the planet will warm around 0.7C due to the doubling of CO2.
The warmest period of this current interglacial period was roughly 2C warmer than today. The Greenland ice sheet did not melt, the antarctic ice sheet did not melt. The planet needs to be roughly 5C warmer to melt the greenland ice sheet and 8C warmer to melt the Antarctic Ice sheet.
Mike (NYC Resident) says:September 11, 2011 at 7:11 am
What’s funny to me, though, is that the AGW folks don’t hype on something quite obvious to me. I unfortunately havee a bit, but imports quite a bit more.) For those like the USA, that’s a big economic cost. Regardless of whether or not CO2 is warming the atmosphere, which again I think is not true, using less carbon fuels would be a good thing economically and environmentally. That statement has a huge caviot, though. That presupposes that we have cheaper means for obtaining and storing energy.
So, what’s my point. Why bother arguing about it? Cheaper energy is something that everyone can get behind
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Rational, thoughtful people who understand basically how things work will strongly agree with this. There’s hidden cost of energy buried in the cost of everything, and wealth requires energy. But the following statement was made by US presidential candidate B. Obama in 2008:
“…under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket”
No wonder the pseudo science of climatology is politicised.
reference from:: http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/kerry-picket/2008/11/02/obama-energy-prices-will-skyrocket#ixzz1Xf9FQb4Z
As the official documented ‘Global Warming’ since 1850 based on (HadCRUT3) data published by the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit is at most, beginning from the 1910 low-point, about one deg C (or about 0.8 °C from 1850) it seems to me that it is rather hard to attribute extreme weather to anthropogenic climate disruption. These things happen. I believe the ‘Cliff Dwellers’ of Colorado are supposed to have been forced out by the ‘great’ drought from 1276 to 1299.
Global Temperature Record – Phil Jones
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/
Colorado Early History – First Early Inhabitants of Colorado
http://www.e-referencedesk.com/resources/state-early-history/colorado.html