Dave's Top Ten Reasons Why the Oil Industry Doesn't Spend its Billions on Disproving the Junk Science of AGW

Guest post by David Middleton

In my Internet “debates” with warmists, I occasionally encounter challenges like this…

We don’t yet not know the real global impact man has on the environment. It may be negligible. What we do know is that if the oil companies with their billions could disprove this manmade warming they could in an instance. They have not.

My response to this challenge is in the style of David Letterman…

Dave’s Top Ten Reasons Why the Oil Industry Doesn’t Spend its Billions on Disproving the Junk Science of AGW

10) It’s impossible to prove a negative.

9) The burden of proof is on those who wish to bankrupt these United States of America in order to reverse this…

8) The climate is always changing, always has, always will. There is absolutely no evidence that modern climate changes are exceeding the pre-human range of variability. There are anthropogenic influences which modify the climate’s natural oscillations. Very few scientists in the oil industry doubt that anthropogenic activities affect the climate. We just know for a fact that those effects are not causing the climate to change in ways that exceed the normal variability of the Holocene and that such effects are likely to be so small that they can’t be differentiated. Otherwise, the Warmists would have long ago clearly differentiated the anthropogenic from the natural. Furthermore, none of the proposed solutions are economically feasible, nor would they mitigate climate change in any measurable way.

7) The “oil industry” is composed of corporations engaged in the various aspects of oil & gas exploration, drilling and production. These corporations are owned by people, usually shareholders, who invested their own money for the purpose of making a profit on the exploration, drilling and production for and of oil and natural gas. They didn’t invest their money in science projects, particularly not junk science projects.

6) We already have full time jobs. I do this as a hobby because it combines my professional skills as a geoscientist and 25 years of experience (out of nearly 33) working in a Quaternary-Upper Tertiary sedimentary basin, with my longtime interest in palaeoclimatology.

5) The Warmists have already proven that AGW is wrong. The lack of global warming since the late 1990’s forced them to morph “global warming” into “climate change,” “global weirding,” “global climate disruption,” and other temperature-neutral descriptions.

4) The Warmists have already proven that AGW is wrong – Part Deux. Every conceivable weather, health, agricultural, botanical, zoological and even geophysical incident is “consistent” with the Gorebotic AGW “theory.” Thus rendering their “theory” un-falsifiable and rendering it unscientific. Kevin Trenberth of NCAR even declared the no longer scientific theory to be un-falsifiable when he stated that the “null hypothesis” principle should be reversed for AGW.

3) The Warmists have already proven that AGW is wrong – Part Trois: That pesky climate sensitivity thing.  Gorebot Prime, James Hansen, formerly of NASA-GISS and now a full-time political activist, first proved that AGW was wrong 25 years ago and then delivered an endless stream of idiotic alarmism. Back in 1988, he published a climate model that, when compared to his own temperature data, substantially disproves AGW…

GISTEMP has tracked the Hansen scenario in which a Gorebotic utopia was achieved more than a decade ago. Hansen’s model used an equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) of 4.2°C per doubling of pre-industrial CO2. The IPCC “consensus” is 3.0°C. The maximum physically possible ECS is no more than 2.0°C. The maximum physically possible ECS, consistent with the observations, is about 1.0°C.  Recent papers have concluded that solar forcing has been underestimated by a factor of six and CO2 forcing is much lower than the so-called consensus estimate. “Scenario B” might be the most relevant prediction because CH4 and CFC’s have followed closest to the “C” trajectory, while CO2 has tracked “A”. If you look at the model results, there is little difference between “A” and “B” in 2010…

Hansen describes “A” as “business as usual” and “B” as a more realistic or “Lite” version of “business as usual.” “C” represents a world in which mankind essentially undiscovered fire in the year 2000. The actual satellite-measured temperature change since 1988 tracks below “C,”  with the monster ENSO of 1998 being the only notable exception…

Since CO2 tracked “A”, CH4 and CFC’s tracked “C” and temperature tracked below “C,” the atmosphere is far less sensitive to CO2 than Hansen modeled.  The atmosphere was essentially insensitive to the ~50ppmv rise in CO2 over the last 24 years. Hansen may have inadvertantly provided solid support for this “inconvenient truth.”

2) The Warmists have already proven that AGW is wrong – Part Quatre: A model of failure. Let’s give Gorebot Prime, Jimbo Hansen, a pass. His 1988 model reflected old science and old computers and surely the models have gotten better over the last quarter-century… Or not.

STILL Epic Fail: 73 Climate Models vs. Measurements, Running 5-Year Means June 6th, 2013 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D. […]

In this case, the models and observations have been plotted so that their respective 1979-2012 trend lines all intersect in 1979, which we believe is the most meaningful way to simultaneously plot the models’ results for comparison to the observations. In my opinion, the day of reckoning has arrived. The modellers and the IPCC have willingly ignored the evidence for low climate sensitivity for many years, despite the fact that some of us have shown that simply confusing cause and effect when examining cloud and temperature variations can totally mislead you on cloud feedbacks (e.g. Spencer & Braswell, 2010). The discrepancy between models and observations is not a new issue…just one that is becoming more glaring over time. It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out in the coming years. I frankly don’t see how the IPCC can keep claiming that the models are “not inconsistent with” the observations. Any sane person can see otherwise. If the observations in the above graph were on the UPPER (warm) side of the models, do you really believe the modelers would not be falling all over themselves to see how much additional surface warming they could get their models to produce? Hundreds of millions of dollars that have gone into the expensive climate modelling enterprise has all but destroyed governmental funding of research into natural sources of climate change. […] Dr. Roy Spencer

[Assuming whiny Gorebot voice]… Oh… That tricky Roy Spencer. That’s just the tropics and it goes way back to 1979… That’s unfair! The science is verified! The models are right! Or not… The following CMIP5 model was parameterized (fudged) to accurately retrocast HadCRUT4 from 1950-2004.

Eight years and out! Within eight years, the observed temperature is on the verge of dropping out of the lower error band. This model from Kaufmann et al., 2011 simulated natural and anthropogenic (primarily CO2) forcing mechanisms from 1999-2008. Natural forcing won by a score of 3-1.   Although, the authors seem to have concluded that anthropogenic forcing related to global cooling were masking theanthropogenic forcing” related to global warming. This is to be expected because, obviously, the Earth’s climate was static prior to the incorporation of Standard Oil Company… Models are great heuristic tools; but they cannot and should never be used as substitutes for observation and correlation. I can build a valid computer model that tells me that a geopressured Cibicides opima sandstone at depth of 15,000′ should exhibit a Class 3 AVO response. If I drill a Class 3 AVO anomaly in that neighborhood, I will drill a dry hole. A little bit of observation and correlation would quickly tell me that productive geopressured Cibicides opima sandstones at depth of 15,000′ don’t exhibit Class 3 AVO anomalies. 99% of petroleum geologists and exploration geophysicists would laugh you out of the room if you seriously thought a model was superior to actual observations.

2) The Warmists have already proven that AGW is wrong – Part Cinq: That pesky climate sensitivity thing – Subpart Deux. In our last episode of climate sensitivity, we reviewed Jimbo Hansen’s spectacularly wrong Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity of 4.2 °C. Now we will move on the current alleged consensusECS of 3.3 (±1.1) °C (Nothing like a 33% error bar to instill confidence!)…

The equilibrium climate sensitivity values for the AR4 AOGCMs coupled to non-dynamic slab ocean models are given for comparison (Box 10.2, Figure 1e,f; see also Table 8.2). These estimates come from models that represent the current best efforts from the international global climate modelling community at simulating climate. A normal fit yields a 5 to 95% range of about 2.1°C to 4.4°C with a mean value of equilibrium climate sensitivity of about 3.3°C (2.2°C to 4.6°C for a lognormal distribution, median 3.2°C) (Räisänen, 2005b). 

For good measure, the consensus-teers of the IPCC toss in this bit of gratuitous alarmism…

Studies comparing the observed transient response of surface temperature after large volcanic eruptions with results obtained from models with different climate sensitivities (see Section. 9.6) do not provide PDFs, but find best agreement with sensitivities around 3°C, and reasonable agreement within the 1.5°C to 4.5°C range (Wigley et al., 2005). They are not able to exclude sensitivities above 4.5°C. 

This explains the Gorebotic caterwauling from Climategate University…

“Our research predicts that climate change will greatly reduce the diversity of even very common species found in most parts of the world. This loss of global-scale biodiversity would significantly impoverish the biosphere and the ecosystem services it provides…

[…]

The good news is that our research provides crucial new evidence of how swift action to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gases can prevent the biodiversity loss by reducing the amount of global warming to 2 degrees Celsius rather than 4 degrees.”

The Washington Post’s energy and environment inexpert…

“The current level of action puts us on a pathway towards a 3.5–4°C warmer world by the end of this century.”

And Third World poverty pimps…

The World Bank predicts that we are on track to a rise of 4 degrees Celsius in temperatures by the end of this century. This would mean a rise in sea levels of three to seven feet. 

There is not one single scrap of evidence that the current rate of emissions will lead to more than 2 °C warming (relative to 280 ppmv CO2) by 2100 (we’ll get to sea level in subsequent posts). Every recent observation-based estimate of the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) to a doubling of the assumed pre-industrial CO2 level has been in the range of 1-2 °C and nearly 1 °C of this has already occurred. Asten, 2012 found ECS to be 1.1 ± 0.4 °C based on δ18O and δ11B records from fossil forams and the Eocene-Oligocene transition in marine sediment cores from DSDP site 744. Earlier this year, researchers at CICERO and the Norwegian Computing Center announced that when they incorporated the temperature and CO2 data from 2000-2010 into their instrumental record-based ECS estimate, they obtain a most likely value of 1.9 °C. This work has yet to be published. Lewis, 2013 found a most likely ECS of 1.6 °K (same as C for these purposes) using a Bayesian analysis and incorporating recent data. Masters, 2013 found a most likely ECS of 1.98 °K from ocean heat content and sea surface temperature data… Aldrin et al, 2012 and Forster & Gregory, 2006 also found the ECS to most likely be less than 2 °C. Yet the IPCC, Climategate CRU and other alarmist ideologues continue to prattle on as if the ECS in the range of 4-5 °C or higher…

1) The joke is just too damn funny for us to spoil…

Obama’s global-warming folly

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: July 4

The economy stagnates. Syria burns . Scandals lap at his feet. China and Russia mock him , even as a “29-year-old hacker” revealed his nation’s spy secrets to the world. How does President Obama respond? With a grandiloquent speech on climate change . Climate change? It lies at the very bottom of a list of Americans’ concerns (last of 21 — Pew poll). Which means that Obama’s declaration of unilateral American war on global warming, whatever the cost — and it will be heavy — is either highly visionary or hopelessly solipsistic. You decide: Global temperatures have been flat for 16 years — a curious time to unveil a grand, hugely costly, socially disruptive anti-warming program. Now, this inconvenient finding is not dispositive. It doesn’t mean there is no global warming. But it is something that the very complex global warming models that Obama naively claims represent settled science have trouble explaining. […] For the sake of argument, nonetheless, let’s concede that global warming is precisely what Obama thinks it is. Then answer this: What in God’s name is his massive new regulatory and spending program — which begins with a war on coal and ends with billions in more subsidies for new Solyndras — going to do about it? The United States has already radically cut carbon dioxide emissions — more than any country on earth since 2006, according to the International Energy Agency. Emissions today are back down to 1992 levels. And yet, at the same time, global emissions have gone up. That’s because — surprise! — we don’t control the energy use of the other 96 percent of humankind. […] Net effect: tens of thousands of jobs killed, entire states impoverished. This at a time of chronically and crushingly high unemployment, slow growth, jittery markets and deep economic uncertainty. But that’s not the worst of it. This massive self-sacrifice might be worthwhile if it did actually stop global warming and save the planet. What makes the whole idea nuts is that it won’t. This massive self-inflicted economic wound will have […] For a president to propose this with such aggressive certainty is incomprehensible. It is the starkest of examples of belief that is impervious to evidence. And the word for that is faith, not science.

WaPo