Gerald North Andrew Dessler
Guest essay by Robert Bradley Jr.
“I did worry that my comment on my not being willing to sign on to Kyoto right now got into the [Houston] Chronicle and in our local paper. I do not like being too public on policy matters. It ain’t my thing.”
– Gerald North (email communication, October 2, 1998)
“In his article Sunday, Rob Bradley reminds us of the errors made about dire climate predictions proffered by some climate science outliers…. Virtually all of these dire predictions were never made or endorsed by the mainstream climate community of researchers in the field.”
– Gerald North, “Fringe Predictions,” Letter to the Editor, Houston Chronicle, April 1, 2008.
“So what is the argument about? The answer is policy…. [W]e both support balanced action to address the clear and present danger of climate change.”
– Andrew Dessler and Gerald North, “Climate Change is Real and Denial is Not About the Science,” San Antonio Express News, October 6, 2013.
If Texas A&M scientists calculated that an asteroid was heading our way, we would likely head for the hills with a lot of pills. But when Texas A&M climatologists warn of dangerous man-induced global warming and call for government action (think new taxes and regulation), many of us roll our eyes and watch our wallets.
We live in a postmodern world where emotion and desire substitute for reason and scholarship. With climate alarmism in deep trouble on a variety of data fronts, from temperature increase to sea-level rise to hurricane frequency and intensity, elder Texas A&M climate scientist Gerald North joined climate scientist/campaigner Andrew Dessler to write (sign on to?) a disingenuous opinion-page editorial for the San Antonio Express, “Climate change is real and denial is not about the science.”
The Dessler/North wolf cries of recent years have been made in the face of growing contradictory evidence. While alarmism may have once gotten attention, the two are are now like the Enron carnival barkers of 2000/2001, proclaiming surety and shouting ‘you just don’t get it’ at the skeptics. Andy Dessler and Jerry North are, indeed, the smartest guys in the climate room.
Emotional Scientists, Bad Science
The tight-knit climate scientist-activist community was exposed by the Climategate emails to be to be working from a Malthusian, alarmist script. Instead of going from science to real-world implications, the cabal was caught going from an agenda to ‘science.’ Remember “hide the decline”? Remember the chatter about keeping their critics out of the peer-reviewed journals? Even physically attacking a critic at a forthcoming climate conference?
Climategate’s mendacity and trash talk have made many thousands of non-climate scientists skeptical and disappointed in academic and government climatologists who are, indeed, giving physical science a bad name. Critics might say that a few dozen scientist/activists are turning a hard science into a soft one.
Take Gerald North, who I hired as Enron’s climate consultant in 1997. I pressed him on the what and why of climate alarmism. He explained that the climate community was a very close group with personal relationships valued greatly. Some top scientists were husband/wife teams. Others were close friends. The buddy system went far and deep.
North did not need to tell me that most of the same considered modern society as ‘unsustainably’ intruding on ‘optimal’ nature. And that this community was dependent on government grants for research dealing with problems–so climate change needed to be a problem.
But it was Dr. North who privately said a lot of things to me that he did not want repeated in public. And in a number of emails, indeed, he questioned the great climate alarm. I made these emails public when North inexplicably went political several years ago at the urging of his activist colleague Andrew Dessler. I value truth over political power, and the Internet gives truth a powerful voice against professional misconduct.
North Goes Strange
Funny thing: Global temperatures have not increased since North was back at Enron, frankly telling me about the excesses of his profession. He was cautious, even skeptical, about high climate sensitivity estimates—and climate models in general (see the Appendix below for some of his quotes).
Now, he and Dessler write an editorial that assumes (rather than debates) a coming climate crisis–and jumps to political ad hominem to explain why the public does not agree on either the ‘problem’ or the ‘solution’.
So a question to Dr. North: what has changed in the last 15 years to make you more, rather than less, concerned about a catastrophic warming?
And just where do you get your expertise to tell us in this op-ed that there is a cost-effective solution for the United States and the world from governmental caps or taxes on CO2? Why aren’t you sticking to the physical science rather than jumping to other disciplines (economics, political science, public policy) far removed from your area of expertise?
In fact, climate economists such as Robert Mendelsohn of Yale might just tell you that the social cost of carbon dioxide, the green greenhouse gas, is positive, not negative, given the lower climate sensitivity that even the politicized, alarmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) now accepts in its forecast range.
Spencer Weighs In
Fellow climate scientist Roy Spencer called the two out on their false analogies and postmodern view of: Assume a problem, imagine a governmental solution … Assume market failure, but not government failure in solving it….
Spencer complains:
… Dessler and North [hide] the fact that global temperatures stopped rising 15 years ago, in contradiction to most, if not all, IPCC climate model forecasts.
They could have said, “The lack of warming is good news for humanity! Maybe global warming isn’t a serious problem after all!” Or even, “We have more time to solve the problem!” But, no.
Instead, they do exactly what they accuse Republicans of doing…letting their views of the proper role of government (and their desire for more climate research funding) determine what they believe (or profess to believe) about the science.
Spencer concludes:
So, stick to the ivory tower, guys. Better to let the people who work to support you wonder about your cluelessness, rather than open your mouths and remove all doubt.
This is a hard rebuke, but Dessler/North picked the fight … again. (And Dr. North, how many times do I need to resurrect the level-headed, less emotional North of old to counter the new, politicized you? Don’t we both have better things to do?)
Let’s hope that good science can continue to drive out bad despite the effort of some climate-turned-political scientists to keep the great false climate alarm going for more research grants and more and bigger Government.
Appendix: North on Climate Models
“We do not know much about modeling climate. It is as though we are modeling a human being. Models are in position at last to tell us the creature has two arms and two legs, but we are being asked to cure cancer.”
– Gerald North (November 12, 1999)
“[Model results] could also be sociological: getting the socially acceptable answer.”
– Gerald North (June 20, 1998)
“There is a good reason for a lack of consensus on the science. It is simply too early. The problem is difficult, and there are pitifully few ways to test climate models.”
– Gerald North (July 13, 1998)
“One has to fill in what goes on between 5 km and the surface. The standard way is through atmospheric models. I cannot make a better excuse.”
– Gerald North October 2, 1998)
“The ocean lag effect can always be used to explain the ‘underwarming’…. The different models couple to the oceans differently. There is quite a bit of slack here (undetermined fudge factors). If a model is too sensitive, one can just couple in a little more ocean to make it agree with the record. This is why models with different sensitivities all seem to mock the record about equally well. (Modelers would be insulted by my explanation, but I think it is correct.)”
– Gerald North (August 17, 1998)
and on Climate Politics
“I did worry that my comment on my not being willing to sign on to Kyoto right now got into the [Houston] Chronicle and in our local paper. I do not like being too public on policy matters. It ain’t my thing.”
– Gerald North (October 2, 1998)
– See more at: http://www.masterresource.org/2013/10/political-science-north-dressler/#sthash.XSOtpSJW.dpuf
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I don’t blame you for being skeptical, Bart! Many millions of dollars have been thrown into the “algae pool” over the past decade, with little to show for it. Shell pulled out of its algae venture, Exxon-Mobil is backing away from Craig Venter etc.
However, my group at the University of Illinois is proving how it can perhaps be done, we project that we could capture fossil fuel carbon dioxide and produce biodiesel for less that $2.00 per US gallon. Stay tuned, when the news breaks, it will break on WUWT first.
I thought that the San Antonio Express was and is a stage coach!Now I am being informed that it is a newspaper.There goes one of my pictures of the wild west.Ah well, I now have to go to work so I will catch the next Kangaroo passing my front door and should be in town in about four hours (It is all about perception).
They’re right. Folks that are skeptical about climate change are likely to be skeptical about other nonsense such as gun control and government run healthcare. They are also known as people who actually think!
They didn’t have the guts to actually say these people are also more likely to be homophobes and racist. But that’s clearly the message hiding directly below the surface.
These guys clearly believe passionately in Federally run gun control, healthcare control, and climate control. They’re all working out so well, right?
Heck the Feds can’t even manage a government shut down. It’s hardly surprising they can’t manage a functioning government.
Jack Simmons, had to stop on yours, you make zero sense at first comment and I must assume that either you do not know little physics/engineering or you know of some secondary energy source that supplies such system to convert the co2 to methanol (concentrated solar, thermal molten salt reactors, geothermal (ah…)?).
Iceland seems an isolated case for even though not efficient, being on an island with long energy transport distances involved, it then becomes feasible and that of the lower cost.
To just capture the co2 takes energy itself that would create yet more fossil fuels to be used. All systems have rather large losses so ‘that loss’ will also cause yet another expenditure of fossil fuels to create the methanol. At the end you have just created a terribly inefficient system. Seems you are going in circles and in the process accelerating our use of energy in the long run. If not, describe the system in detail tracking the energies involved at each and every step.
Now if you include auxiliary or even primary concentrated solar, thermal molten salt reactor or geothermal if hot enough into such a system, yes, it very well may fall over into the ‘more efficient’ category, great. That is, where is the energy really coming from per co2 molecule and at what efficiency.
As far as I’m concerned TAMU has left the room of science – someone please close the door. Consider this – sounds like they at least know one thing: who supplies the jam for their toast:
“Texas A&M has a large atmospheric sciences department. On their website there are 22 tenured and tenure track faculty. What is really unusual about the department is that all the regular faculty are seemingly required to sign a global warming loyalty oath called the climate change statement. Every faculty member except one new arrival has signed. None of the lowly adjunct faculty’s names appear.
The Texas A&M atmospheric sciences department is part of the College of Geosciences. That college also houses the department of Geology and Geophysics that operates practically as a satellite of the Texas energy industry. Texas A&M has a large endowment, heavily invested in energy industries, and of course, the revenue of the state of Texas is heavily dependent on carbon burning energy industries. There are strange bedfellows in the Texas A&M College of Geosciences.”
Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/is_roy_spencer_the_worlds_most_important_scientist.html?utm_source=feedly#ixzz2UE63AkZQ
Jack Simmons says “Right now, a coal burning plant releases its CO2 directly into the atmosphere. With the Olah process, that same CO2 is captured and converted into methanol. The methanol is then consumed by vehicles and released into CO2. In effect, you have cut the total amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere by our coal plant in half, because the CO2 is recycled.”.
The energy released by burning the methanol into CO2 must, by the fundamental laws of physics, be no more than the energy used to turn the CO2 into the methanol in the first place.
Let’s do the sums: I burn x amount of coal to get y amount of energy, releasing z amount of CO2 in the process. I then use the y energy to turn z CO2 into methanol which I then burn, getting max y energy and releasing z CO2. So the net effect is that I burn x coal, release z CO2, and get y energy. That’s exactly the same result as just burning coal. It’s really a much worse result, of course, because of all the inefficiencies in the process.
RE Pippen Kool @ur momisugly 11:19 Oct 11 — I believe you must have mistyped. Your last sentence should refer to ‘comment’, not ‘post’.
Actually, I suspect strongly all your comments may be filed under that.
“disingenuous”…or incredibly ignorant
…your choice
Jack Simmons says:
October 11, 2013 at 10:37 am
“In effect, you have cut the total amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere by our coal plant in half, because the CO2 is recycled.
Isn’t that wonderful?”
Only a person who believes that CO2 is harmful could get the idea that that is wonderful. I wuold call it pointless, and probably expensive due to extra energy expenditure – i.e. wasteful; harming the environment insofar as more mining becomes necessary for a given amount of useable output energy.
Pippen Kool says:
October 11, 2013 at 11:19 am
“How do we know that? Do we have some information that they are being “dishonest”.”
Dessler is known to be a dishonest tool for his frequent use of the phrase “heat-trapping gas” when referring to CO2 (He cannot really be stupid enough to not know about Kirchhoff’s Law; so it must be his dishonesty making him write like that).
Exhibit A:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/6900556.html
negrum says:
October 11, 2013 at 11:20 am
“The doctrine of atheism does not equate humans to animals.”
So why don’t you tell us the “doctrine of atheism”.
Jack,
If man’s CO2 release to the atmosphere is indeed a problem, then conversion of CO2 into methanol may make sense, but so far the data says it is NOT a problem and may actually be net beneficial at this point. This overall CO2 to methanol process from start to finish is nothing more than the conversion of geothermal energy (the energy source you identified) into a transportable form (methanol) with a net reduction of total release of CO2 to the environment due to CO2 recycling.
alcheson says:
October 11, 2013 at 12:41 pm
alcheson,
Please read my comments carefully.
1) I do not advocate any sort of regulations at all. I was offering a suggestion in an environment where fuel mandates and CO2 emissions for coal plants are a given. In this regulatory environment, the EPA is mandating CO2 emissions for coal plants that are, with today’s sequestration technologies, unobtainable. In fact, no one has successfully captured the CO2 from a coal plant and sequestered it, at any cost. If someone knows better, please let me know. Coal plant operators are faced with only two options, shutting down, or spend untold millions on a sequestration technology that may or may not work.
If the economics of the Olah process can at least break even, there might be some hope of keeping the coal plants running. If the EPA were to allow the use of methanol as a fuel, the sale of the methanol would help bring in additional revenues for the coal plant operators.
2) I was not advocating geothermal energy as the source of energy for the Olah process. My thought was the energy produced by the power plant could be used to power the Olah process. Perhaps this is not possible; I don’t know what the energy budgets are for the Olah process. I was focusing on the CO2 budgets of coal burning plants and the Olah process.
3) I agree with you; CO2 emissions are not a problem, or if they are, they are minor. Certainly not worth the cost of fuel mandates, carbon trading schemes, carbon taxes, etc.
4) We should let all these energy options trade in an unregulated marketplace. No subsidies. No additional taxes on carbon. No mandates for fuel content. Let the price at the pump or electric meter dictate the winner.
Let the marketplace tell us what works and what doesn’t.
If there are people out there who believe carbon is a problem, they can chose the ‘green’ alternatives and pay the higher price. Airlines could chose the ‘green’ fuel, advertise the fact, and charge their customers the higher ticket prices. Same for trucking companies. Same for delivery companies.
This wouldn’t work because environmentalists are largely hypocritical in they avoid paying the prices for their policies, the classic example being Al Gore.
My predication would be the green alternatives would all die a slow death in the marketplace.
My use of the term wonderful in describing the Olaf process is aimed at the environmentalists. This should be something they would just love.
If as you say using the Olaf process results in $5 per gallon for fuel, it will die a natural death in the marketplace.
Maybe its something in the water at Texas Universities. Some of the worst science claiming biological doom due CO2 came from Camille Parmesan at Texas.
http://landscapesandcycles.net/climate-doom–parmesan-s-butterfly-effect.html
http://landscapesandcycles.net/hijacking-conservation-success-in-the-uk.html
http://landscapesandcycles.net/fabricating-climate-doom—part-3–extreme-weather.html
I always shake my head when I hear Americans talk about petrol prices.
US$ 5.00 a gallon, unbelievable.
Here in New Zealand we are paying an average of US$ 6.70 a gallon.
By the way, 40% of the US$ 6.70 comprises of taxes.
And the petrol price is is low because the NZ dollar has strengthened compared to the US dollar in the last few years. Since Obama took office, the US dollar has fallen from NZ$ 2.00 to NZ$ 1.20.
DirkH says: “Dessler is known to be a dishonest tool for his frequent use of the phrase “heat-trapping gas” when referring to CO2 (He cannot really be stupid enough to not know about Kirchhoff’s Law; so it must be his dishonesty making him write like that).”
Either you are joking or being so obtuse that I don’t understand. Saying CO2 is a heat trapping gas is like saying HOH is a liquid. Get over it.
That comment aside, I think the general tone for “whats up” of the evil scientists being in a conspiracy is so over done and so stupid, that it degrades your entire “skeptic” argument. To believe scientists are conspiring in a grand scheme going back decades is only for those who cant think straight or are drunk. opps, I repeat myself.
.
However, it is pretty cute that you think scientists are so organized…
DirkH: “So why don’t you tell us the “doctrine of atheism”.”
Formally, it’s a rejection of the proposition that there are one or more deities.
Informally, ‘deity’ should be understood as including or excluding any of Great Men, Worshipped Ancestors, Allah, or quasi-possible half materialist agents such as Ghosts, Shinto spirits, Buddha and so on. But nearly always includes, on a per person basis, the preferred object as a moral touchstone or font in the person’s culture.
Practically, it’s a denial of epistemic certainty of deontological claims and idols of others that have not been personally expereienced. But not a wholesale reticence, skepticism, or lack of gullibility about things for which there is epistemic uncertainty. Or the a rejection of deontological claims. eg. An Atheist is perfectly capable of believing in Fireball Earth theories and making moral claims as to culpability. Up to and including the punishment by law. But if made law, and once accepted as moral, they would reject it.
I signed up and tried commenting over there. They deleted it. As Anthony said, we do in fact live in a postmodern world.
Other_Andy (October 11, 2013 at 4:03 pm) “I always shake my head when I hear Americans talk about petrol prices. US$ 5.00 a gallon, unbelievable.”
I just filled up for $3.10 If it stays above $4, my commuter van will raise their prices and people will start to drop out which will further increase the prices. I suppose we could all move to the city and ride bicycles like they do in Europe. But from big city taxes I can calculate energy usage (and waste). The models say that large bureaucracies are bad for the planet, unbelievable!
Sun Spot says:
October 11, 2013 at 12:41 pm
“@ur momisugly Gary Pearse says: October 11, 2013 at 10:32 am and dbstealey says:October 11, 2013 at 11:06 am . . .
I call BulllSh**t on your assessment of socialism ruining education, that’s pure bunk !! America has morphed into a “Capitalist Democracy”, your capitalist extremism has brought you your problems. It’s pretty rich for Americans to blame wacky climate science in their country on Socialism.”
So Sunspot,yeah lets crush mean old capitalist democracy, destroy cheap energy, cripple America, which has been (I use the tense advisedly) the only real engine of global economic prosperity along with those who have strived to copy it. So let’s put the UN in charge, or have a people’s committee organizing kumbaya evenings and playing mandolins in the forest. This is precisely what my remarks were about. You are just proof that the process I describe is indeed clever and subtle. I didn’t say that people were broadly aware of what is happening to them.
Methanol would be a very poor fuel additive. Unlike ethanol, it is not freely miscible with aliphatic hydrocarbons – it tends to phase-separate. Also, it will bind more water and would be even harder on the engines than ethanol.
Dessler is just a little Michael Mann wannabe. He can’t even lie as well as Mann. What a waste of tax money of the good people of Texas.
CRS, DrPH says:
October 11, 2013 at 1:58 pm
“Stay tuned, when the news breaks, it will break on WUWT first.”
Well, I wish you good luck. Not because of any effect on CO2, which is a non-issue AFAIAC. But, because more choices for energy brings the cost down, and makes us all better off.
However, I still do not see it scaling very well. It has been estimated that we would need something on the order of 10,000 square miles of Arizona desert carpeted with solar cells to satisfy our energy needs (and, I think that estimate was from ten or more years ago, and overly optimistic then). An area that large taken over by banks of solar arrays would have unfathomable environmental impacts, would create a mega-UHI-like effect, would be a maintenance nightmare, and would require decades, if not centuries, of our current production rates of key materials to construct.
Unless algae is significantly more efficient, and I am aware of no reason it should be, we would have to have an ungodly area covered by vats of nasty muck. And, even if you can get something in an agreeable price range at the outset, an avalanche of demand would create bottlenecks, and the price would quickly rise per unit of production. To be brutally honest, I just don’t see these low energy density projects relying on wind or solar as ever amounting to much.
Other_Andy says:
October 11, 2013 at 4:03 pm
Not to put too fine a point on it, but we have farther to drive.
Guest Blogger,
Who the heck are you? I don’t often ask this type of question being a person of several pseudonyms myself, but you wrote, “Take Gerald North, who I hired as Enron’s climate consultant in 1997.” That is such a specific, potent, and, otherwise unverifiable claim that I think many would expect you in decency to ‘out’ yourself. Being a manager at Enron with enough seniority to be hiring climatologists really begs for disclosure, you are in my mind in this context a ‘somebody’ especially given Enron’s particular status in American business history.
Regards,
W^3
Pippen Kool says:
“Saying CO2 is a heat trapping gas is like saying HOH is a liquid.”
The problem is that at current CO2 concentrations, almost no heat is being ‘trapped’. The effect took place almost entirely in the first 20 ppm. But at a current concentration of ≈400 ppm, the “heat trapping” effect of CO2 is too small to measure.
Your ‘carbon’ scare is fizzling out, because the effect of CO2 is so minuscule. But nice try, and thanx for playing.
dbstealey says: “But at a current concentration of ≈400 ppm, the “heat trapping” effect of CO2 is too small to measure.”
Too small to measure?
Okay, dude. I am sure you know.
Does’t your ignorance embarrass you? Or, for king and country, are you beyond that?