We have all heard over and over that the icecaps are melting, glaciers are retreating, and sea level is rising as ice around the world turns to liquid water. We have covered this topic many times in our essay series, but we revisit the ice issue given two recent and important publications in the science literature.
On December 18th, the Washington Post ran an op-ed by Penn State’s Dr. Michael Mann—a central figure in the Climategate emails—arguing that the content of the released email “doesn’t alter evidence for climate change.”
But Dr. Mann is only coming at this from one side of the issue—that of the contents of the peer-reviewed literature. However, the Climategate emails contain ample evidence that the contents of the scientific literature were being influenced by an small group of researchers who sought to suppress ‘bad’ science—that is, science that they personally didn’t like. This is not the way things are supposed to work and has an unknown, but potentially large impact, which makes it virtually impossible to make valid assessments of the “evidence for climate change” based on the contents of the extant scientific literature.
An article posted at the new blog from the Science and Public Policy Institute discusses this situation in a bit more detail and includes a letter-to-the-editor that never made its way into print at the Washington Post that makes the point that contrary to Dr. Mann’s assertions, the Climategate emails reveal that it is not so much what is in the literature that is important, but what is not in the literature.
And this situation represents a true disservice to climate science at large.
If we happen to see an unusually large number of winter storms this year, we suspect some reporter or some scientist will insist we are witnessing the effects of global warming, or at least declare we are witnessing climate change before our very eyes. Oppositely, if this year’s winter storms are infrequent, we will expect to learn from someone that we have seen the effects of climate change. In fact, in a recent paper in the International Journal of Climatology, the authors begin their piece noting “One area of growing concern in climate science is the impact that global warming could have through modulations of the nature and characteristics of naturally occurring extreme events, such as severe mid-latitude storms.” In the very next sentence, the research team from the United Kingdom and Australia state “However, both observational and modelling studies of historical and future storminess patterns and scenarios are divided on the role that global warming has played, or could play, in changing patterns of mid-latitude storms”. Once again, we find any straightforward link between global warming and winter storms is a bit more dicey than originally thought … there is always more to the story.
The wonderful Christmas season is upon us, and no Christmas story would be complete without snow. If you really like snow, Greenland is the place for you! The snow there lasts all year long and is 1,000s of feet deep in the interior – a white Christmas is guaranteed every year in this winter paradise.
Anyone following the global warming debate is aware that Greenland is a favorite topic of the apocalypse crowd – melt Greenland, sea level will rise, the ocean currents will be disrupted, and the climate of the world will be changed for thousands of years — all thanks to our inability to slow-down our greenhouse gas emissions. The rhetoric from Copenhagen recently was full of disasters involving rapid melting of Greenland. Within the past week alone, we found the headlines “Warming Hits Greenland’s Hunters” and “The Maldives and Greenland’s Ilulissat: Two Countries Experiencing Global Warming at an Alarming Rate”.
Be sure not to miss Pat Michaels’ view of one of the most important impacts of ‘Climategate’–the biasing of the contents of the scientific literature upon which the EPA bases its Endangerment Finding.
Pat lays out his case in today’s (Dec. 17, 2009) Wall Street Journal.
In summary:
The result of all this is that our refereed literature has been inestimably damaged, and reputations have been trashed. Mr. Wigley repeatedly tells news reporters not to listen to “skeptics” (or even nonskeptics like me), because they didn’t publish enough in the peer-reviewed literature—even as he and his friends sought to make it difficult or impossible to do so.
Ironically, with the release of the Climategate emails, the Climatic Research Unit, Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley have dramatically weakened the case for emissions reductions. The EPA claimed to rely solely upon compendia of the refereed literature such as the IPCC reports, in order to make its finding of endangerment from carbon dioxide. Now that we know that literature was biased by the heavy-handed tactics of the East Anglia mob, the EPA has lost the basis for its finding.
A new paper that is soon to appear in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds that across the U.S. daily record high temperatures are being set at about twice the frequency of daily record low temperatures and that this ratio—number of record highs to the number of record lows, has been growing larger over the past 50 years.
The popular press seems to be particularly taken with this finding, although headline proclamations fail to disclose important details of the actual findings reported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s (NCAR) Gerald Meehl and colleagues.
Although you can hardly blame the press, because the NCAR press release did much to lead them down this muddy path.
A couple of months back, there was a discussion taking place over at Joe Romm’s ClimateProgress blog concerning a report that the earth’s ability to take-up atmospheric carbon dioxide was declining. A declining CO2 sink, of course, meant that things climatological were going to be even worse than expected, because a growing proportion of anthropogenic CO2 emissions were going to remain in the atmosphere, thus pushing the rise of CO2 concentrations and the degree of climate change higher.
At the time, an alert reader pointed out to Joe Romm that there was in fact, no indication from data and observations that a larger percentage of human CO2 emissions were ending up in the atmosphere. In fact, the data showed that the fraction of CO2 emitted into the atmospheric by human activities has remained constant for the past 40 years.
This fact runs directly counter to the idea that the earth’s natural CO2 sinks are weakening—instead it indicates that natural sinks have been expanding as anthropogenic CO2 emissions have increased. After all, in order to keep the airborne fraction of CO2 emissions constant over time, increasing anthropogenic CO2 emissions must be countered by an increasing CO2 sink.
Joe Romm was a bit dismissive (to say the least) of this line of argument.
Early last January, when the final 2008 numbers were in for the U.S. annual average temperature, we ran an article titled “U.S. Temperatures 2008: Back to the Future?” in which we noted that “The temperature in 2008 dropped back down to the range that characterized most of the 20th century.”
2009 seems to be following in 2008’s footsteps.
The one thing that is the most certain about climate change, is that no matter what happens, we’ll have to adapt. In fact, even if the climate doesn’t change a lick, adaptations will take place, aimed at improving our overall health and welfare by either better protecting us from, or taking better advantage of, the prevailing climate conditions. Such has always been the case, and such always will be.
This is something that global warming alarmists either fail to understand, or fail to acknowledge.
Here is how the Cato Journal describes itself:
Cato Journal is America’s leading free-market public policy journal. Every issue is a valuable resource for scholars concerned with questions of public policy, yet it is written and edited to be accessible to the interested lay reader. Clive Crook of The Economist has called it “the most consistently interesting and provocative journal of its kind.”
Always happy to contribute at least a little something to the public policy debate as it concerns climate change, your humble staff at World Climate Report are pleased announce the inclusion of our article “Scientific Shortcomings in the EPA’s Endangerment Finding from Greenhouse Gases” in the latest issue (Fall 2009) of the Cato Journal.
Hopefully it will prove to be valuable resource for scholars and laypersons alike during the continued debate concerning our national energy policy and how it may (or may not) relate to the issue of global climate change.
Here is a summary of what is contained in our article:
On April 24, 2009, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a finding of “proposed endangerment” from climate change caused by six greenhouse gases, with the largest contributions to warming resulting from emissions of carbon dioxide and methane (EPA 2009a).
The EPA also referred to this document as a “proposed finding” in response to a 2007 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, Massachusetts v. EPA, which empowered the EPA to make such a finding for greenhouse gases under existing law. This was the Court’s interpretation of Section 202 (a) of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990.
In Proposed Endangerment, the EPA requested comments “on the data on which the proposed findings are based, the methodology used in obtaining and analyzing the data, and major legal interpretations and policy considerations underlying the proposed findings” (EPA 2009a: 18890).
We answered the EPA’s request in a filing on June 23, 2009 (Michaels, Knappenberger, and Davis 2009). This article details some of the most relevant findings in our response. In general, we found that Proposed Endangerment suffered from systematic errors that were inevitable, given that the way in which the EPA chose to determine the required background science had to result in both biased and outmoded climate science. In addition, the EPA made grand and sweeping assumptions about human adaptation to climate that are of such illogic as to invalidate the entire study. We believe that these systematic errors call into question any attempt on the EPA’s part to subsequently issue regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. Other entities that may use the EPA’s document as a basis for emissions reductions will be using similarly incomplete science and be subject to severe and public criticism. This conclusion has obvious implications for upcoming negotiations in Copenhagen in December 2009, on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol.
Happy reading!
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