Like hermit crabs, climate alarmists scramble to find new ways to hide, when put in a box
Guest essay by Dennis M. Mitchell and David R. Legates
As children playing on the beach, we discovered a fascinating behavioral pattern among hermit crabs. Place a dozen in a cardboard box, and within minutes the crabs exit their shells and try to occupy another. This mild stress-induced response probably reflects their life-long drive to continue growing by repeatedly commandeering larger shells, to protect their vulnerable soft bodies.
Similarly, climate alarmists are now scrambling to find new shelter from the stress coming from a public that increasingly realizes their doom-and-gloom predictions of climate chaos are based on shoddy data, faulty computer models and perhaps outright deception. The alarmist scientists have put themselves in a climate cataclysm box, and are desperate to protect their reputations, predictions and funding.
Despite the absence of warming in actual measured temperature records over the last 16 years, and near-record lows in hurricane and tornado activity, they still cry “wolf” repeatedly and try to connect every unusual or “extreme” weather event to human emissions of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide. (Actually, people account for only 4% of all the CO2 that enters Earth’s atmosphere each year.)
Alarmists used their predictions of climate catastrophe to demand that the world transform its energy and economic systems, slash fossil fuel use, and accept lower living standards, in response to the politically manufactured science. Even as growing evidence conflicted with their dogma, the money, fame and power were too good to surrender for mere ethical reasons.
The impact on energy prices, national economies, jobs and people’s lives has been profound and negative. For example, in response to the unfounded alarmism, Germany moved aggressively toward wind and solar energy over the past 15 years – both politically and with taxpayer and investment spending. It also shied away from more nuclear power and saw its economy contract and energy-intensive companies shed jobs and threaten to move overseas. Now Germany is burning more coal and building new coal-fired power plants, in an attempt to reverse the economic disaster its “green” and “climate protection” policies unleashed, but its actions are still sending shock waves at investors around the world.
In Spain, every renewable energy job the government’s climate alarmist policies created was offset by two jobs lost in other sectors of the economy that were punished by soaring electricity prices. The demise of a Spanish economy so committed to wind and solar power finally caused reasonable people to reevaluate why these decisions had been made, and the renewable subsidies were slashed, just as they have been in Germany.
How does Brazil’s future look with biofuels? As reality finally overcomes media bias and political correctness, the naive excitement of a few years ago – when anything “green” was portrayed as lower cost, clean and superior in every technological sense – has given way to more rational thinking. Brazil is now going more for oil and gas, via conventional drilling and hydraulic fracturing, onshore and offshore.
Why are so many countries deciding to abandon or diminish the fools-golden eggs of green-tech? First, green technology power has been grossly oversold on reliability, cost, capacity, job creation and environmental impacts. A stable economy requires all of these power characteristics. Second, speculative alarmism about CO2 has been exposed by the hard data of the past couple decades.
The NIPCC Climate Change Reconsidered-II report presents the facts, so that even non-scientists can appreciate the relevant range of the climate components – and the ways people have been conned into believing we faced a manmade climate Armageddon that hasn’t materialized and was never a threat.
Nevertheless, insisting that “climate chaos” was real, former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson wailed that her agency would need at least 240,000 new EPA employees (each making some $100,000 per year, plus benefits) that she said would be needed just to administer new carbon dioxide regulations – and control nearly everything Americans make, drive, ship and do!
EPA currently employs some 20,000 people at an annual budget of over $8 billion. The new hires alone would cost taxpayers another $24 billion annually – plus hundreds of billions of dollars in economic pain, manufacturing shutdowns and new job losses that EPA’s CO2 regulations would inflict.
Year after year, alarmists have changed their protective shells for more absurd answers regarding where the Earth has mysteriously stashed all the energy that greenhouse gases supposedly trapped. For years, alarmists said ocean waters were storing the missing energy. But when the ARGO project demonstrated that the heat was not in the ocean, at least down two kilometers (1.2 miles) beneath the surface, one prominent alarmist responded, “We are puzzled at the results.” We are not puzzled.
When the data consistently conflict with their hypothesis, reputable scientists revise the hypothesis. Five-alarm climate scientists desperately seek new shells, and new excuses.
The “puzzling” facts triggered the predictable alarmist tactic of attacking the data and claiming the heat was hiding in the really deep ocean. Ignoring the physics of the problem – how the asserted heat was transferred from atmospheric carbon dioxide, through the sea surface, and beyond the first mile of ocean waters, without being detected – they expect us to believe that fluid thermodynamics is akin to magic.
The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) has released its 2013 report Climate Change Reconsidered II. The world finally has a chance to see the actual science – not the kind that’s hidden, massaged and filtered through alarmist shell games.
Unencumbered by political pressure and mega-lobbyists, this 1,018-page review by 50 serious and highly accomplished scientists has exposed the alarmists’ fraud. These real scientists have also exposed as illusory the alarmists’ mystical “tropical hot spot.” This sacred cow turns out to be as fanciful as planetary warming hidden in the deepest ocean, or the infamous hockey stick of Michael Mann’s hidden data and secret computer codes.
Have we forgotten that 1998 was to be the “tipping point,” after which Earth would warm uncontrollably? The 1988 hearing in Washington one hot summer afternoon was dominated by the always sly James Hansen, who wiped his brow furiously, in a room made stifling by Senator Tim Wirth’s cheap trick of turning off the air conditioning. Politics, theatrics and manipulation had replaced honest science.
Because Al Gore switched his CO2 and temperature curves to make it look like rising carbon dioxide levels caused planetary temperature increases – when in fact increasing temperatures always preceded higher CO2 – shouldn’t he have corrected his mistake, returned his ill-gotten millions, and shared his 2007 Nobel Prize and money with Irena Sendler, who should have gotten it for saving 2,500 Jewish children during World War II? Shouldn’t his accomplice, IPCC director and pseudo-Nobel Laureate Rajendra Pachauri, be held accountable for trumpeting made-up stories about melting Himalayan glaciers?
But when you’re an alarmist, being wrong, lying, cheating, misleading the public and killing jobs simply does not count against you – even when the alleged human-caused global warming stopped in 1996.
We literally laughed aloud at a so-called “documentary” that’s about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting public. It’s called “Do the Math: Bill McKibben and the Fight over Climate Change.” For McKibben and his comrades, “doing the math” is really a matter of “counting the cash” the alarmists rake in.
The serious money has always flowed to alarmists, guilt-ridden environmentalists and control-seeking regulators, whom the world’s taxpayers are generously and unwittingly funding. That’s also the real meaning of the “green” movement and “green” energy.
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Dennis Mitchell, CPA/QEP has been professionally involved in environmental and tax compliance, monitoring and education for over 40 years. David Legates, PhD/CCM is a Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware and has been studying climate and its changes for 35 years. A version of this article originally appeared in the 10/18/2013 Investor’s Business Daily.
Richard,
As you know, we have been there before. The “fingerprint” of human CO2 is diluted by the seasonal (and continuous) exchanges of CO2 between the different reservoirs, especially the deep oceans. If these were additional to the human emissions, then the increase in the atmosphere would be 3 times the human emissions. But the increase in the atmosphere is only halve the human emissions, so the contribution of the natural CO2 circulation is only dilution and partly removal, not addition…
One can use the dilution factor caused by the exchanges to calculate how much CO2 is exchanged with the deep oceans, taking into account the isotopic changes at the sea-air and air-sea surface:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/deep_ocean_air_zero.jpg
@ferdinand meeus Engelbeen – so you are saying the “anthropogenic” factor of global warming is “diluted” by natural factors?
Can you quantify that? In other words, what is NATURE doing?
Ferdinand Engelbeen:
Thankyou for your post at October 19, 2013 at 10:42 am which answers my post at October 19, 2013 at 8:52 am.
Yes, we have “been there before”.
As I said in my post which you have replied
And you have replied
QED
If you want to assume the discrepancy of a factor of 3 is caused by “dilution” then the “dilution” smudges the “fingerprint” beyond recognition. So, it shows what I said and nothing more.
Richard
They remind me more of cockroaches. Shine the light of truth on them and they scurry for cover.
The Engineer says:
October 18, 2013 at 4:22 pm
Funny you should mention seashells – as they are responsible for the huge chalk layers in the Earth, the largest CO2 sinks known to man. Imagine all that Carbon was once in the atmosphere.
This is inaccurate. Chalk is mainly an accumulation of the “tests” of foraminifera which are protists. They are microscopic and while a test might arguably be called a “shell” they are not remotely akin to sea shells. “[Shells]” are worn by molluscs and they are only a minor contributor to chalk and limestone formations. “Forams” are the cause of eyestrain and strange rings around the eyes of micropaleontology students. The rings are caused by falling asleep leaning on the microscope eye pieces late at night while cramming for lab tests.
That “sells” ought to be “shells”.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
October 19, 2013 at 1:43 am
…
That is a non-argument. All natural CO2 is removed by natural sinks + a part of human emissions. Thus the natural CO2 is simply circulating through the atmosphere. The 4% human emissions are additional…
The logic here is faulty. CO2 concentrations prior to any influence by industrial output, still varied with changes in ocean temperature, and are at present at or near the lowest levels of the Phanerozoic. There is no means of being certain that increases in CO2 at present are solely attributable to human action. At best, we can argue that the isotope ratios are being altered by human output, since oil and coal are both depauperate in C-13, so our contribution to the process ought to be seen in a change in dC-13 as you state. That in no way can be used as evidence that an increase in the atmospheric concentration is solely the result human action. In fact, since the end of the LIA occurs in the 19th century, it is fully expectable that atmospheric CO2 must increase as the oceans warm naturally. Also, as a simple philosophical point, it is mistaken to differentiate between “natural” and “human,” unless you are convinced that you show that humans are “unnatural” in some definitive qualitative fashion.
Policymakers in government must be frustrated as hell that after spending billions of dollars and euros on study after study, they still have nothing to nail skeptics “to the wall.”
Johannes Herbst says:
October 18, 2013 at 10:45 pm
“Germany isn’t loosing jobs or production through the “Energiewende”. Of course, average people have to pay more, but we are not suffering from it. We just use less.”
Johannes, first of all hello and welcome. Do you realize what you wrote is an oxymoron?
You have to pay more and average people have to use less… unless you are well-to-do, I’d say that is suffering. For some, it means the difference between eating and be able to heat/cool their home.
Also, just because your employment rate is lower than the rest of Europe doesn’t mean this GREEN agenda isn’t affecting the employment rate. The increased cost of energy means less money for people to spend on non-necessities and therefor means less demand for consumer goods and logically also means employment will be LOWER than it would otherwise have been if energy were less expensive.
Latitude says:
October 19, 2013 at 5:52 am
That is what I have been thinking too. Socialism is here. After O’care, the rest of the economy will fall like dominoes. Then the government can create taxes or raise them with no justification. After we have become England, who will be the world’s banker?
Hi again,
thanks for your response. I think I have to clear someting here.
First, I wanted to point out that talking about a desaster because of green energy in Germany is just a false statement. Nobody here sees the desaster, but we see some difficulties, which can be sorted out.
Second:
Alcheson said:
“You have to pay more and average people have to use less… unless you are well-to-do, I’d say that is suffering. For some, it means the difference between eating and be able to heat/cool their home.
Also, just because your employment rate is lower than the rest of Europe doesn’t mean this GREEN agenda isn’t affecting the employment rate. The increased cost of energy means less money for people to spend on non-necessities and therefor means less demand for consumer goods and logically also means employment will be LOWER than it would otherwise have been if energy were less expensive.”
You should face some more facte here in Germany:
-The Energiewende was supported from nearly all German (more than two thirds), not regarding any political colour. If a nation chooses to go in a certain direction, it should have the right to do so. And if there are difficulties, there is also enough knowledge and willingness to solve them.
-About fifty percent of the Renewable Energy production is in the hand of average people, privat house owners, small scale investors, and cooperatives. It’s also a movement against the energy giants. Some villages are even fully independent from any power supply.
-There is a lot of business around producing, Installing and maintainig RE devices, and to improve the enegergetic balance of houses, and it’s also a part of the economic growth here. So there is the choice to invest in something meaningful to save energy or to buy some meanigless luxury goods from China.
In General, if people would choose not to invest in Renewable Energy, they would possibly save the money for bad times, thus slowing down the economy.
Possibly you also have to get a picture about our culture here. We are just having a different point of view. Amarican seem to demand the right to get energy at low prices and to use as much as they can consume.
Here is the tendency to use less energy for the same purpose. One example from our family: We are seven persons in our family. We live in a house with about 1000 sqare feet living space. We have four cars, but only one income from my wife.
We have invested in one solar thermal system and a top-of-the-art woodburnig central heating. We use timber remains for heating, costing about 200 Euro per year. The walls of our farm house is two to three feet thick, so we need no air condtioner in summer. We have changed lighting to LED lamps, which will last a lifetime and use eonly 10% of the energy of normal bulbs.
we have two 3-Liter VW Lupo Diesel cars, a VW up! Eco fuel, (needing only about 10kg of CNG per tank filling, so we can pay the tanking bill with coins), and a VW TDI micro bus, using about 6 litres per 100 km. The electric energy we get from a green company to prices a bit below the normal rates. If we buy a new electric device, we look for lower energy consumption.
You get the idea? For us energy saving is fun! We enjoy it to save money through intelligent energy use. And we invest in High-Tech for that purpose. This is our luxury. Of course, not all Germany are like us, but we are not the only ones.
And one thing you should consider: We do it withouth beliving in AGW. I think the Idea of good stewardship – using our environment with the lowest impact is also a part of our culture – and being proud to save money and energy.
Yes, we are among the big countries in Europe the one with the best economy (and far better than the US for average people and the low income class). Our state Bavaria has even decided not to add any debts and we have started to reduce our debts.
Okay, still a lot to improve also here. But we will do. Starting this praise of our way of living started with the so-called “German desaster”. I like to point out that every sceptic should check carefully every fact he is telling. If the warmists are telling lies and semi-truth, we shouldn’t do that, should we?
Johannes, you are living in a dream world. The laws of economics are immutable. Some day, probably sooner rather than later, you will wake up to a cold, hard reality.
Meanwhile, enjoy your dream world while you can.
Ferdinand, is your 9 gigatons of CO2 emissions a genuine measurement or is it an estimate subject to considerable uncertainty? I have seen a lot of wildly varying figures all claiming to be a measurement of human emissions, so I am not at all convinced that we are measuring emissions accurately. Not even remotely in fact.
I’m therefore also not convinced that presenting that 9 gigaton figure, and also that nature is a net sink, as an indesputable fact can be so easily defended.
I love reading posts like this one, but guys, you’re preaching to the choir. Meanwhile the coal industry in the USA is being destroyed (only partly by tracking); the EPA is hiring tens of thousands to enforce CO2 restrictions; the media portrays a future of ‘Hurricane’ Sandys; and the official organ of the Establishment, NPR, constantly belittles the ‘deniers’ and drums out the looming dangers of ‘carbon’.
Is it going to take an economic collapse here in the US to wake people up enough to throw out the ideologues in government who mindlessly promote these myths and policies?
/Mr Lynn
Bruce Cobb says:
October 20, 2013 at 4:44 pm
Johannes, you are living in a dream world. The laws of economics are immutable. Some day, probably sooner rather than later, you will wake up to a cold, hard reality.
Meanwhile, enjoy your dream world while you can.
Hi again,
It’s all about culture, how you are brought up and how you see the world. I lived in Germany , England and Africa. Every [society] is different. And [everybody] wakes up from dreams. The Southern Europeans are waking up because they have used the Euro to establish a welfare on lent money. And the American dream seem to be over as well. A lot of poor, some very rich, and the middle class is diminishing. And the US indebted to the Chinese. A lot of strange things are going on. Every nation can decide to live in a certain way. And reality will correct things in the long run.
What I wanted to say in the beginning: There is no good or bad, no black [or] white. left or right. (BTW our conservative Parties CDU/CSU have more leftist ideas than Obama). It’s not only laws of economic. There are a lot of other standards a [society] can set, e.g. social security and welfare for everybody or how to deal with resources, or which kind of energy they use. If something is really bad, it will be corrected. But there are a lot of shades in a system one can use.
To come back to our topic: There is no economic [disaster] in Germany. And the economic [disaster] in some Southern European countries started in the U.S. through Lehman and consortes. And in Germany there will be no economic [disaster] in future through Green power. There will be some corrections, for sure. The pendulum will swing back and forth.
To use the word [disaster] is not appropriate in a discussion about climate and energy. Except one is an alarmist.,