This is one of the reasons that studying historical temperatures is so important (a need that resulted in ClimateGate and the CRU emails). If history shows that Earth has been dramatically warmer than current temperatures, then we can assume that the runaway tipping point will not be reached (at least not very soon).

A recent study shows that this feedback appears to exist. The good news is that the models have it wrong – they expected a far greater feedback than was found in this current study. This is great news for mankind as our imminent death is at least delayed. It also reaffirms my call for better climate modeling science!

It is unlikely that President Barack Obama is strong enough to persuade Congress to pass sweeping legislation to ruin the American economy with global warming fears. It was close though! If the US Government had gone after cap and trade prior to healthcare, they would have pulled it off. Now it is doubtful.

The following article by Alister Doyle appeared on Reuters.

Climate change caused by mankind will release extra heat-trapping gases stored in nature into the atmosphere in a small spur to global warming, a study showed.

But the knock-on effect of the additional carbon dioxide — stored in soils, plants and the oceans — on top of industrial emissions building up in the atmosphere will be less severe than suggested by some recent studies, they said.

“We are confirming that the feedback exists and is positive. That’s bad news,” lead author David Frank of the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL said of the study in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature.

“But if we compare our results with some recent estimates (showing a bigger feedback effect) then it’s good news,” Frank, an American citizen, told Reuters of the report with other experts in Switzerland and Germany.

The data, based on natural swings in temperatures from 1050-1800, indicated that a rise of one degree Celsius (1.6 degree Fahrenheit) would increase carbon dioxide concentrations by about 7.7 parts per million in the atmosphere.

That is far below recent estimates of 40 ppm that would be a much stronger boost to feared climate changes such as floods, desertification, wildfires, rising sea levels and more powerful storm, they said.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have already risen to about 390 ppm from about 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution. Only some models in the last major U.N. climate report, in 2007, included assessments of carbon cycle feedbacks.

Frank said the new study marks an advance by quantifying feedback over the past 1,000 years and will help refine computer models for predicting future temperatures.

SURPRISES

“In a warmer climate, we should not expect pleasant surprises in the form of more efficient uptake of carbon by oceans and land,” Hugues Goosse of the Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, wrote in a comment in Nature.

The experts made 220,000 comparisons of carbon dioxide levels — trapped in tiny bubbles in annual layers of Antarctic ice — against temperatures inferred from natural sources such as tree rings or lake sediments over the years 1050-1800.

Goosse said the study refined a general view that rising temperatures amplify warming from nature even though some impacts are likely to suck carbon dioxide from the air.

Carbon might be freed to the air by a projected shift to drier conditions in some areas, for instance in the east Amazon rainforest. But that could be partly offset if temperatures rise in the Arctic, allowing more plants to grow.

Warmer soils might accelerate the respiration of tiny organisms, releasing extra carbon dioxide to the air. Wetlands or oceans may also release carbon if temperatures rise.

Frank said it was hard to say how the new findings might have altered estimates in a report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 that world temperatures could rise by between 1.1 and 6.4 Celsius by 2100.

“Of the models that did include the carbon cycle, our results suggests that those with slightly below average feedbacks might be more accurate,” he said. “But we can’t now say exactly what sort of temperature range that would imply.”

Last November, U.N. climate chief Rajendra Pachauri delivered a blistering rebuke to India’s environment minister for casting doubt on the notion that global warming was causing the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers.

“We have a very clear idea of what is happening,” the chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) told the Guardian newspaper. “I don’t know why the minister is supporting this unsubstantiated research. It is an extremely arrogant statement.”

Then again, when it comes to unsubstantiated research it’s hard to beat the IPCC, whose 2007 report insisted that the glaciers—which feed the rivers that in turn feed much of South Asia—were very likely to nearly disappear by the year 2035. “The receding and thinning of Himalayan glaciers,” it wrote in its supposedly definitive report, “can be attributed primarily to the [sic] global warming due to increase in anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases.”

It turns out that this widely publicized prediction was taken from a 2005 report from the World Wildlife Fund, which based it on a comment by Indian glacier expert Syed Hasnain from 1999. Mr. Hasnian now says he was “misquoted.” Even more interesting is that the IPCC was warned in 2006 by leading glaciologist Georg Kaser that the 2035 forecast was baseless. “This number is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude,” Mr. Kaser told the Agence France-Presse. “It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing.”

On Wednesday, the IPCC got around to acknowledging that the claim was “poorly substantiated,” though Mr. Pachauri also suggested it amounted to little more than a scientific typo. Yet the error is of a piece with other glib, and now debunked, global warming alarms.

Among them: that 1998 was the warmest year on record in the United States (it was 1934); that sea levels could soon rise by up to 20 feet and put Florida underwater (an 18-inch rise by the year 2100 is the more authoritative estimate); that polar bears are critically endangered by global warming (most polar bear populations appear to be stable or increasing); that—well, we could go on without even mentioning the climategate emails.

For the record, most Himalayan glaciers do seem to be retreating, and they have been “since the earliest recordings began around the middle of the nineteenth century,” according to a report from India’s ministry of environment and forests. The reasons are complex and still poorly understood, and we’re glad to see responsible scientists acknowledge as much. If more of them could help the IPCC get its facts straight, we might put more stock in its reports.

Lord Lawson was U.K. chancellor of the exchequer in the Thatcher government from 1983 to 1989. He is the author of “An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming” (Overlook Duckworth, paperback 2009), and is chairman of the recently formed Global Warming Policy Foundation (www.thegwpf.org).

The world’s political leaders, not least President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are in a state of severe, almost clinical, denial. While acknowledging that the outcome of the United Nations climate-change conference in Copenhagen fell short of their demand for a legally binding, enforceable and verifiable global agreement on emissions reductions by developed and developing countries alike, they insist that what has been achieved is a breakthrough and a decisive step forward.

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Far from achieving a major step forward, Copenhagen—predictably—achieved precisely nothing. The nearest thing to a commitment was the promise by the developed world to pay the developing world $30 billion of “climate aid” over the next three years, rising to $100 billion a year from 2020. Not only is that (perhaps fortunately) not legally binding, but there is no agreement whatsoever about which countries it will go to, in which amounts, and on what conditions.

The reasons for the complete and utter failure of Copenhagen are both fundamental and irresolvable. The first is that the economic cost of decarbonizing the world’s economies is massive, and of at least the same order of magnitude as any benefits it may conceivably bring in terms of a cooler world in the next century.

The reason we use carbon-based energy is not the political power of the oil lobby or the coal industry. It is because it is far and away the cheapest source of energy at the present time and is likely to remain so, not forever, but for the foreseeable future.

Switching to much more expensive energy may be acceptable to us in the developed world (although I see no present evidence of this). But in the developing world, including the rapidly developing nations such as China and India, there are still tens if not hundreds of millions of people suffering from acute poverty, and from the consequences of such poverty, in the shape of malnutrition, preventable disease and premature death.

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Moreover, the argument that they should make this economic and human sacrifice to benefit future generations 100 years and more hence is all the less compelling, given that these future generations will, despite any problems caused by warming, be many times better off than the people of the developing world are today.

Or, at least, that is the assumption on which the climate scientists’ warming projections are based. It is projected economic growth that determines projected carbon emissions, and projected carbon emissions that (according to the somewhat conjectural computer models on which they rely) determine projected warming (according to the same models).

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Moreover, any assessment of the impact of any future warming that may occur is inevitably highly conjectural, depending as it does not only on the uncertainties of climate science but also on the uncertainties of future technological development. So what we are talking about is risk.
OpinionJournal Related Stories:

Not that the risk is all one way. The risk of a 1930s-style outbreak of protectionism—if the developed world were to abjure cheap energy and faced enhanced competition from China and other rapidly industrializing countries that declined to do so—is probably greater than any risk from warming.

But even without that, there is not even a theoretical (let alone a practical) basis for a global agreement on burden-sharing, since, so far as the risk of global warming is concerned (and probably in other areas too) risk aversion is not uniform throughout the world. Not only do different cultures embody very different degrees of risk aversion, but in general the richer countries will tend to be more risk-averse than the poorer countries, if only because we have more to lose.

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And the outlines of a credible plan B are clear. First and foremost, we must do what mankind has always done, and adapt to whatever changes in temperature may in the future arise.

This enables us to pocket the benefits of any warming (and there are many) while reducing the costs. None of the projected costs are new phenomena, but the possible exacerbation of problems our climate already throws at us. Addressing these problems directly is many times more cost-effective than anything discussed at Copenhagen. And adaptation does not require a global agreement, although we may well need to help the very poorest countries (not China) to adapt.

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Despite the overwhelming evidence of the Copenhagen debacle, it is not going to be easy to get our leaders to move to plan B. There is no doubt that calling a halt to the high-profile climate-change traveling circus risks causing a severe conference-deprivation trauma among the participants. If there has to be a small public investment in counseling, it would be money well spent.

I especially like the realism in his comments about the exporting of carbon usage to China (or other less developed countries) and then blaming those countries for their dramatic increase. This is an issue that is often overlooked in the discussion of curtailing carbon output in any individual country.

Lord Turnbull: My Lords, on first reading the Committee on Climate Change’s latest progress report, I found it an impressive document. It was broad in

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scope and very detailed. But the more I dug into it the more troubled I became. Below the surface there are serious questions about the foundations on which it has been constructed. There are questions in four areas-the framework created by the Climate Change Act 2008, the policy responses at EU and UK level, the estimate of costs and finally the scientific basis on which the whole scheme of things rests. I will consider each in turn.

Unlike many of those involved in the climate change field, I have no pecuniary interest to declare, but I am a founder trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which seeks to bring rationality, objectivity and, above all, tolerance to the debate.

I have long been in the camp of what might be called the semi-sceptics. I have taken the science on trust, while becoming increasingly critical of the policy responses being made to achieve a given CO2 or global warming constraint. First, let us look at the Climate Change Act, which has been highly praised, even today, as the most comprehensive and ambitious framework anywhere in the world-a real pioneering first for the UK. However, it has serious flaws. It starts by imposing a completely unworkable duty on the Secretary of State to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, even though many of the actions required lie outside his control. It would have been better, as the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, and I argued, for the duty to be connected to what the Secretary of State can control, such as his own actions and policies, and not the outcome, which he cannot.

In the Act’s passage through Parliament, the target was raised from 60 per cent to 80 per cent, with little discussion of its costs or feasibility. It is a simple arithmetic calculation to show that if the UK economy continues to grow at its historic trend rate, we will need, only 40 years from now, to produce each £1,000 of GDP with only 8 per cent of the carbon we use today. That is a cut of 90 per cent. Many observers think that this is implausible. A recent report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers reported that the rate of improvement in carbon intensity/productivity would need to quadruple from the 1.3 per cent achieved in the five years up to the recession to around 5.5 per cent. It would need to be even higher at the end of the period to make up for what the noble Lord, Lord May, calls falling behind the run rate.

Professor Dieter Helm has pointed out that the measurement system used in the Kyoto framework and in the UK’s carbon accounts is a misleading guide to what is really being achieved. The carbon accounts use the territorial method-that is, the emissions from UK territory. In this way, the UK is able to claim that CO2 emissions have been reduced, but that is a misleading way of measuring a nation’s carbon footprint and its impact on the world. It should include the carbon in its imports. If this was done it would show that we are going backwards, since we would be forced to take responsibility for the manufacturing that we have outsourced to such countries as China but are still consuming. The current method is, of course, politically very convenient as it allows us to label China as the world’s largest emitter. The embedded carbon calculation is, I accept, far more complicated, but it is far more honest.

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Another flaw in the framework is that the targets are unconditional. It is a legal duty, irrespective of what other countries achieve. Some, including me, argue that there should be two targets: one of which is a commitment, and a higher one which we will argue for internationally but only undertake as part of an agreement. Ironically, this is precisely the approach that the EU is taking with its 20 per cent reduction target by 2020, which would be raised to 30 per cent as part of an international agreement. The danger is that by going it alone we could face a double whammy, paying for decarbonising our own economy, yet still having to pay for the costs of raising our sea defences if others do not follow suit.

Secondly, let us consider the specific policies that have been adopted. Current EU policy follows two inconsistent paths. On the one hand, the ETS seeks to establish a common price for CO2, against which various competing technologies can be measured. The market share of each is determined by the relative costs. This is attractive to economists, since it allows the cost per tonne of CO2 abated to be equalised at the margin, thereby ensuring that the cost of achieving any CO2 target is minimised. The problem is that, despite its theoretical attractions, the ETS is failing. It provides no clear signal on the price of carbon on which investors can base their decisions. The committee, in this report, estimates that the ETS CO2 price in 2020 will be around €22 per tonne. The committee has rightly identified the central contradiction in its own report: the carbon price will be too low and too uncertain to stimulate the low-carbon investments needed to validate the committee’s projections.

At the same time, the EU is following a different approach under its 20:20:20 plan-to achieve a 20 per cent reduction in CO2 by 2020, with 20 per cent of energy coming from renewables. In this way, it predetermines a market share for a technology-renewables-rather than letting the merit order decide. The danger is that in pressing to achieve this target, which implies that over 30 per cent of electricity generation will come from renewables, some renewables capacity will be created which will be more expensive than other responses.

There is also a lack of clarity about the true cost of wind power, once we factor in the cost of retaining a large amount of underutilised conventional capacity, and the extension of the grid. The noble Lord, Lord Reay, has said more than enough on that so I do not need to follow that line of argument.

There is illogicality in the treatment of nuclear energy in the climate change levy. It is ridiculous that nuclear power, as a low-carbon source, is still in the taxable box. For 50 years, a major experiment has been conducted just 20 miles off our coast. France has generated three-quarters of its electricity from nuclear power. The French believe that it has been a huge success, delivering electricity which is secure, cheap and stable in price. France’s carbon intensity is 0.3 of a tonne per $1,000 of GDP, compared to 0.42 in the UK, 0.51 in Germany-so much for it being a market leader-and 0.63 in the US. However, the French option has barely been considered in this country.

As part of the EU plan, 10 per cent of road fuel is mandated to come from biofuels, but by the time this

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was enacted the credibility of first-generation biofuels had collapsed. Finally, our policy framework lacks balance. It is almost exclusively focused on mitigation through CO2 reduction, The Institution of Mechanical Engineers has argued for what it calls a MAG approach, with effort being committed not just to mitigation but to adaptation and geo-engineering.

Thirdly, there is the issue of cost. All we had to go on at the time when the target was set more ambitiously was the estimate by the noble Lord, Lord Stern, of 1 per cent of GDP. Many people were sceptical at the time and probably even more are now, including, it seems, the noble Lord, Lord Stern, himself. It was reported in the press last week that he now thinks that it might be 2 per cent, but could rise to 5 per cent. I hope he will clarify this when he speaks to us shortly.

In the document that we have before us, the committee says that it previously estimated that costs in 2020 would be about 1 per cent of GDP. That is consistent with its view that it might get to 2 per cent by 2050. In the new report it simply reaffirms the 1 per cent figure in just one paragraph in 250 pages. That is it. I have to say to the noble Lords, Lord Krebs and Lord May, that I do not think that that is adequate. It is difficult to relate these figures to what we are observing on the ground about the difficulties and costs of bringing on stream different technologies such as offshore wind and CCS.

One of the problems bedevilling the debate is the lack of transparency over the huge cross-subsidies that are being created by the renewables obligation and the regime for feed-in tariffs. There is no assurance that their extent is commensurate with the benefits in CO2 abated. My electricity costs me 11p per kilowatt hour. If I erected a wind turbine, I could sell the power I produced to the grid for a whopping 23p. I think I would go out and buy a gizmo which linked my inward meter to my outward meter. That excess cost is averaged over the bills of consumers as a whole, but how much is it in total, or for individual consumers? Here I differ from the noble Lord, Lord May. The whole issue of cost must be given far more attention. The Government cannot ask people to make radical changes to their lifestyle without being more open about the costs that they are being asked to bear.

I accept that “do nothing” is not the right option. Some measures, such as energy efficiency, heat recovery from waste and biomass, and stopping deforestation are probably justified on their own merits. More nuclear power which, in turn, would open the way for electrification of our transport fleet would enhance security of supply. Other measures may be justified as pure insurance, given the uncertainty that we face. But what is badly needed is a consistent metric that allows us to judge whether any given objective is being achieved at minimum cost. The recent book by Professor MacKay, the newly appointed scientific adviser at DECC, provides an excellent starting point. I also very much welcome the intervention by the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, debunking the waste hierarchy and the act of faith that that embodies.

There is the issue of the science, which I had previously taken as given; but many people’s faith is being tested. We are often told that the science is

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settled. I suppose that is what the Inquisition said to Galileo. If so, why are we spending millions of pounds on research? The science is far from settled. There are major controversies not just about the contribution of CO2, on which most of the debate is focused, but about the influence of other factors such as water vapour, or clouds-the most powerful greenhouse gas-ocean currents and the sun, together with feedback effects which can be negative as well as positive.

Worse still, there are even controversies about the basic data on temperature. The series going back one, 10 or 100,000 years are, in the genuine sense of the word, synthetic. They are not direct observations but are melded together from proxies such as ice cores, ocean sediments and tree rings.

Given the extent to which the outcome is affected by the statistical techniques and the weightings applied by individual researchers, it is essential that the work is done as transparently as possible, with the greatest scope for challenge. That is why the disclosure of documents and e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit is so disturbing. Instead of an open debate, a picture is emerging of selective use of data, efforts to silence critics, and particularly a refusal to share data and methodologies.

Mr. Craig’s article is pretty typical of the problem in this debate for both sides. His article is filled with references to “hoax” in this discussion. Hoax is a word that is often referenced by some that doubt global warming predictions (or more precisely, the efforts to reverse the influence). In this case, Mr. Craig is making fun of it with the natural assumption that he thinks such people are fools for thinking it is a “hoax.”

Is global warming a hoax?  Hardly. According to Dictionary.com a hoax is:

hoax (hks)

n.

1. An act intended to deceive or trick.

2. Something that has been established or accepted by fraudulent means.

tr.v. hoaxed, hoax·ing, hoax·es

To deceive or cheat by using a hoax.

Does anybody really think that carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas? Is anyone really saying that CO2 doesn’t have the chemical and electrical properties that allow it to absorb certain wavelengths of energy? I don’t think so. There is no disputing the properties of CO2. The discussion is about its relative influence on the rest of the atmosphere and the cost to treasure and life.

Mr. Craig makes the following opening statement:

Whenever I hear someone say that Global Warming or Climate Change is a hoax, I wonder if they realize this “hoax” is nearly two centuries old.

Mr. Craig is linking scientific discovery of the physical properties of gases with political discussion of reversing industrial production. Mr. Craig is alluding that because there is good scientific understanding of the nature of a molecule that there is good scientific understanding of the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. Mr. Craig is challenging some that may believe that “fixing” carbon dioxide production with our current industrial knowledge may condemn millions to a life of less wealth and possibly death.

Of course, if people on both sides of the issue continue to use words like “hoax” then we will never have a real discussion of the issues. Mr. Craig appears to be a fairly-well educated individual – it is too bad that he is fanning the flames of confrontation rather than a true discussion on both sides of the issue.

This movie explains some of the reasons of concern for monitoring the increase in temperatures that we have felt since the 1960s.  It is very well done and enjoyable to watch.  Unlike An Inconvenient Truth, it admits that this is not pure imagery but some CGI has been done.

If you can handle the bandwidth, you will see better graphics here rather than watching the embedded YouTube video below.

A case in point is a graph from the USGS fact sheet:

Two conclusions are fairly obvious from the above graph.  First, the size of glacier recession has been occurring almost since the time when we started measuring the size back in the late 50s.  The second is that the reduction seemed to increase rather rapidly in the late 80s and early 90s. If we draw a straight line to average the reduction from 1960 to 1975, we will see a totally different rate as compared to the line that averages 1980 to 2005.

There are several factors that influence the size and positive or negative growth of a glacier and if you read some of the Related Posts below you will learn much more.  It isn’t all the average temperature in the valley. So it is hard to say that there is a direct causation especially since the larger the glacier, the more likely it will affect its micro-climate to create the conditions to allow it to keep growing (it chills the air above it promoting snowfall). Therefore, there is a solid line of reasoning that says that once a glacier retreats a certain percentage, it will continue to rapidly shrink.

However, if we compare the glacier curve above with the famed Mauna Loa CO2 readings, you see that in the late 80s we tripped over the feared 340PPM which many feel is the trigger point for CO2 causing real damage to the climate. So there is a real argument to be made that CO2 is the cause.

The answer to the question: I don’t think we really know.  It is to complicated of a climate model for us to completely understand. As I have argued before (primarily in the comments of various posts such as this one), I don’t believe this stuff one way or the other. I think we need to spend a lot of time and effort to figure this out definitively. The answer to the question is simply too important to guess at.

And here is an image from NSIDC (National Science and Ice Data Center) showing the current ice coverage and the median.

Evidently the original author didn’t like his review and challenged him publicly.  This is fantastic as it allows for the open sharing and discussing of the ideas, thoughts and conclusions.  There needs to be more of this type of exchange on critical issues such as climate change.

Climate Skeptics basic charge is that the increase in disruptions is more a result in differences in data collection over time than it is a change in climate disruptions.  Such a rapid increase in events is almost surely not solely due to weather.

So, in keeping with this dialogue, Climate Skeptic has replied.  The reply is almost better reading and more educational than the original so please click through and read the Climate Skeptic review.

Which leads one to wonder if there is a better source of data for understanding power outages over time?  Is there a reputable source that keeps track of disturbances in the system? Of course there is!  One company that makes a living out of providing real-time information on the health of the utility industry is Genscape.  I don’t know how far back Genscape’s data is gathered but you would think the government would make efforts to use a better source – unless of course the government doesn’t like the conclusions that real data will lead to!

A study by 3 researchers and published in the Journal of Geophysical Research has concluded that the weather variations (both increases and decreases) are the result of natural climate processes. They find that the Southern Oscillation is a key indicator of changing global atmospheric temperatures seven months later.

The paper is titled “Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature” and following is the abstract:

Time series for the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) and global tropospheric temperature anomalies (GTTA) are compared for the 1958−2008 period. GTTA are represented by data from satellite microwave sensing units (MSU) for the period 1980–2008 and from radiosondes (RATPAC) for 1958–2008. After the removal from the data set of short periods of temperature perturbation that relate to near-equator volcanic eruption, we use derivatives to document the presence of a 5- to 7-month delayed close relationship between SOI and GTTA. Change in SOI accounts for 72% of the variance in GTTA for the 29-year-long MSU record and 68% of the variance in GTTA for the longer 50-year RATPAC record. Because El Niño−Southern Oscillation is known to exercise a particularly strong influence in the tropics, we also compared the SOI with tropical temperature anomalies between 20°S and 20°N. The results showed that SOI accounted for 81% of the variance in tropospheric temperature anomalies in the tropics. Overall the results suggest that the Southern Oscillation exercises a consistently dominant influence on mean global temperature, with a maximum effect in the tropics, except for periods when equatorial volcanism causes ad hoc cooling. That mean global tropospheric temperature has for the last 50 years fallen and risen in close accord with the SOI of 5–7 months earlier shows the potential of natural forcing mechanisms to account for most of the temperature variation.

So once again, we are in a situation where one researcher says that humans are to blame and another says that it is all natural.

Following are selected excerpts in Farm Weekly which is the article that AccuWeather referenced:

The findings follow research released earlier this month by US scientists which shows that maximum solar activity and its aftermath have impacts on earth that resemble La Niña and El Niño events in the tropical Pacific Ocean.

In a statement to the media, lead author John McLean said that when climate modellers could not accurately determine historical temperatures “they added a ‘human influence’ to their models”.

“This paper shows that the missing component was the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO),” Mr McLean said.

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“The IPCC acknowledges in its 4th Assessment Report that ENSO conditions cannot be predicted more than about 12 months ahead so until that situation improves projected global temperatures are likely to be quite inaccurate.”

The group says that the surge in global temperatures since 1977 can be attributed to a 1976 climate shift in the Pacific Ocean that made warming El Niño conditions more likely than they were over the previous 30 years and cooling La Niña conditions less likely.

“We have shown that internal global climate-system variability accounts for at least 70 per cent of the observed global climate variation over the past half-century,” Associate Professor de Freitas said.

Climate researchers have long been aware that ENSO events influence global temperature, for example, causing a high temperature spike in 1998 and a subsequent fall as conditions moved to La Niña.

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Professor Bob Carter, one of four scientists who recently assisted Senator Steve Fielding in questioning the justification for the proposed Australian emissions trading scheme, says that this paper has significant consequences for public climate policy.

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“Our paper confirms what many scientists already know: which is that no scientific justification exists for emissions regulation, and that, irrespective of the severity of the cuts proposed, an emissions trading scheme will exert no measurable effect on future climate.”

While few people would call me a global warming alarmists, I do think it is important to have relatively balanced perspective on all of this.  In fact, that is the essence of this blog.

Most reputable scientists without an agenda (which likely excludes anyone associated with Al Gore) had concluded long ago that it wasn’t the CO2 concentrations that would deliver the doom and gloom of the alarmists.  Rather, the concern was a feedback loop that would be accelerated by a fairly rapid expansion of carbon dioxide.  One theory is that this CO2 increase would cause temperatures to increase slightly which causes an increase in H2O in the atmosphere which further increases the temperature in an escalating fashion.

The concern is not the CO2 increase directly but the tipping point that it trips. This is incredibly difficult to model in the computer models that we are using since we have never seen this phenomenon.  This is part of the reason that I do not trust the current state of the art of the computer models – they assume that this tripping point will be hit and we don’t know that it will.

Here are highlights from the USAToday article.

Could the best climate models — the ones used to predict global warming — all be wrong?

Maybe so, says a new study published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience.  The report found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery.

“In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record,” says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, study co-author and professor of Earth Science at Rice University in Houston. “There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models.”

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The conclusion, Dickens said, is that something other than carbon dioxide caused much of this ancient warming. “Some feedback loop or other processes that aren’t accounted for in these models — the same ones used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for current best estimates of 21st century warming — caused a substantial portion of the warming that occurred during the PETM.”

In their most recent assessment report in 2007, the IPCC predicted the Earth would warm by anywhere from 2 to 11 degrees by the end of the century due to increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by human industrial activity.

I guess I am doing a review of the review!  But I have done that before and it seems to be popular and provides a service to my readers.

Here is a rather long video that was released by the US Administration:

I had difficulty downloading the actual report from some of the sites that review it (this may have been a problem with my browser) so I wanted to point the way.  It is located on this page and you can download it here.

GCCI Report #1: Overall Tone
Not a lot in this post. This post is more a setup for the rest of the posts.  I agree with the following comment though:

If you can’t read the whole report, read the list of disasters on page 12. If I had shown this to you blind, and told you it from from a Paul Ehrlich the-world-will-end-in-a-decade book from the 1970s, you would probably have believed me.

This entire report assumes global warming to exist, assumes it is man-made, and assumes its future levels are as large or larger than those projected in the last IPCC report. The first four or five pages merely restate this finding with no new evidence. The majority of the report then takes this assumption, cranks it through various models, and generates scary potential scenarios about the US and it would be like if temperatures really rose 11F over the next century.

GCCI Report #2: Climate Must Be Dead Stable Without Man
Great point here:

So what? Do you really think there is a single 50-year period in the history of North America where you wouldn’t see this kind of effect? Where, sans man, the chart would be all white with no changes? And even trying to pull regional conclusions out of this is almost impossible — for example, the brown in the Southeast is heavily driven by the 2008 endpoint with a big drought. Shift the period by even a few years and the chart has the same mixture of blue and brown, but distributed differently.

GCCI Report #3: Warming and Feedback
Nothing to quote here really.  Good post on feedback if you need a refresher.

GCCI #4: I Am Calling Bullsh*t on this Chart
I completely agree that this chart begs to be challenged and the data doesn’t seem to be realistic.

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Second, let’s just look at some of the numbers.  Is there anyone here who thinks that if we are seeing 10-20 major outages from thunderstorms and tornadoes (the yellow bar) in the last few years, we really saw ZERO by the same definition in 1992?  And 1995?  And 1996?  Seriously?  This implies there has been something like a 20-fold increase in outages from thunderstorms and tornadoes since the early 1990’s.  But tornado activity, for example, has certainly not increased since the early 1990’s and has probably decreased (from the NOAA, a co-author of the report):

GCCI #5: The Dog That Didn’t Bark
The author must have been tired on this post.  Nothing really to talk about.

While there are some problems with relying on wind power for the bulk of our energy needs in the US, wind probably has a place to augment and help us meet our needs, especially if the US doesn’t quickly add more nuclear generation capability!

A short video from Wind Power Works

While I typically do not reproduce pages in whole, I am going to put the entire text of the Wind Day campaign here for your convenience. You should also go to the Global Wind Day site.

In 2009, the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA), which initiated the Wind Day campaign, will join forces with the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) in order to coordinate the first Global Wind Day. The campaign will build on the efforts and success of the European Wind Day 2007 and 2008, in which over 20 countries participated in Europe, with hundreds of public events organised.

At a time of energy and climate crisis, it is vital to explain to the decision makers why the world crucially needs an energy shift. Policy makers are seeking solutions and the wind industry offers the best way to produce CO2-free electricity quickly and efficiently.

Wind can be found everywhere, and energy from wind is helping ease the widespread dependence on fossil fuels. In addition, wind energy creates jobs and contributes to economic growth by offering highly technical know-how and the possibility of exporting wind energy and its technology.

However, wind energy is also close to the everyday life of citizens, and therefore  citizens should be aware of all the benefits deriving from the deployment of this energy source. To fully exploit worldwide wind resources we need the support of local authorities, students, communities and citizens . We need that support to explain that wind power works.

Think global – Act local

The Global Wind Day is an awareness campaign for the promotion of wind energy worldwide. The message is global: wind power works – it tackles climate change, it improves energy dependence on fossil fuels, and it is an intelligent investment. All the events will take place all across 25 countries worldwide. The Global Wind Day will both reach out for and be powered by the people.

On 15 June 2009, thousands of public events will be organised simultaneously. Click here to discover your local events on the wind events map.

2009 will be a crucial year for the fight against climate change. Decision makers from all over the world will meet in Copenhagen in December to discuss the post-Kyoto protocol agreement. By participating in one of the numerous events organised for the Global Wind Day you will have the possibility of learning how wind energy works, and how wind turbines work. Above all, you will join EWEA and GWEC in asking decision makers at national, regional, and local level around the world to endorse new commitments and approve proper legal frameworks that will enable a large-scale development of wind power.

There does not appear to be any new scientific evidence of global warming in this paper.  Instead it references the 2007 IPCC findings and then studies that financial impact of those assertions.

The Telegraph recently wrote a story on the report.

The UK needs to cut greenhouse gases by 45 per cent by 2020 to prevent the world “lurching into climate disaster”, according to a new report from Oxfam.

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This would mean the UK would have to increase its current target to cut greenhouse gases from 34 per cent on 1990 levels to 45.3 per cent by further improving energy efficiency and relying more on renewable energy.

Both Europe and the US would need to cut emissions by 45 per cent by 2020 – almost double the current EU target of 20 per cent and more than three times the most likely target to be set by the US of 14 per cent. Japan would have to deliver a 56 per cent reduction, although the country recently announced it would not commit to more than eight per cent.

At the same time it will be necessary to pump more than £90 billion into helping poorer countries cut carbon emissions and adapt to climate change to prevent “climate catastrophe”.

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Aid agencies and developing countries are putting increasing pressure on rich nations to sign up to tough emissions targets and a “financial mechanism” that can provide money for poorer countries to adapt to climate change. One suggestion is for the money from carbon markets to go towards the adaptation fund or for a tax on international aviation and shipping to provide the money.

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Phil Bloomer, Oxfam’s Campaigns and Policy Director, … “Rich countries have the money and the technology to pull us from the brink of no return. They have a double duty – to deliver massive emissions cuts at home and provide money for poor countries to tackle their emissions too,” he said.

“It is unrealistic and immoral for rich countries to expect developing countries to cut their emissions first when it is developing countries who are most vulnerable to climate change and need to develop out of poverty. Every country must play its part.”

By addressing the magnitude of the climate threat with urgency, a powerful global climate change treaty would help establish a firm foundation for a sustainable economic future. This would set a more predictable framework for companies to plan and invest, provide a stimulus for renewed prosperity and a more secure climate system. Economic recovery and urgent action to tackle climate change are complementary – boosting the economy and jobs through investment in the new infrastructure needed to reduce emissions.

Business is at its best when innovating to achieve a goal and the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions is vital to our common social, economic and environmental future. At the Summit we agreed that this will require ¹:

1. Agreement on a science-based greenhouse gas stabilization path with 2020 and 2050 emissions reduction targets.

We support the scientific evidence of the IPCC’s 4th. We are concerned that some recent scientific evidence suggests the problem may be worse than many of the IPCC estimates.

An effective global climate treaty must establish an ambitious goal and set emission targets that protect us and future generations from the risks of climate destabilization. Limiting the global average temperature increase to a maximum of 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels would entail abatement of around 17Gt versus business-as-usual by 2020.

This will require an immediate and substantial change in the current global greenhouse gases emission trend: it must peak and begin to reduce within the next decade. Longer-term targets must be informed by the evolving science, but the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report indicates that global emissions must fall by at least half of 1990 levels by 2050.

We believe that working to reduce emissions now is less costly than delaying our efforts. There is nothing to be gained through delay. The deepest reductions should initially be made by developed economies though global emissions reduction will require all nations to play a part.

Emissions reduction at this scale will profoundly affect business, and business is already taking action to drive down greenhouse gas emissions. We are ready to make those changes and support ambitious political decisions to address the climate challenge wherever we operate. If policies are well designed and implemented, the benefits of early action will outweigh the short-term adjustment costs. This early action can only be achieved by setting an ambitious 2020 target.

2. Effective measurement, reporting and verification of emissions.

Achieving and tracking greenhouse gas emissions reduction is vital to measuring convergence towards the objectives of an effective climate treaty. As businesses we can set an example by contributing to a unified, coherent and reliable measurement, reporting and verification discipline leading to mandatory reporting. Accounting for the emissions we are responsible for will provide the basis for emissions reduction beyond what may be required by regulation and allow our performance to be properly judged and rewarded by investors and the public.

3. Incentives for a dramatic increase in financing low emissions technologies.

To promote effective, efficient, equitable and ambitious action to address climate change the world will need to mobilize the scale of investment necessary to achieve the emissions reduction required. Properly established, an international carbon market framed around ambitious reduction targets can enable both cost-effective abatement and create the carbon price stability to drive the deployment of technologies that will deliver large-scale emissions reductions.

The first steps to establishing a global market will be to enable linkage between national and regional carbon markets. An international agreement will help secure investor confidence in the carbon market, and national actions will help generate new financial flows for climate investment.

The new climate treaty must “push” the development of new technologies through the use of public funds to leverage private finance in early stage demonstration and deployment. This will require policy measures that create clear, predictable, long-term incentives to stimulate private investment and enable the global diffusion of capital and technology.

4. Deployment of existing low-emissions technologies and the development of new ones.

The private sector is already the source of over two-thirds of the world’s investments in clean technology innovation, and is the most effective source of know-how and technology dissemination and transfer. Many low-technologies already exist and can significantly reduce global emissions. Significant emissions reduction can be achieved through energy efficiency, much of it with positive financial returns. Standards and regulations are the best way to achieve this. A new treaty must support deployment of low-carbon solutions by encouraging incentives for public and private purchasers to choose the lowest emissions infrastructure and technologies and for investors to account for climate risk in their decisions.

Government and business must work together to ensure that all nations have equitable access to new clean energy technologies and other innovations by, among others, working with developing countries to improve the infrastructure required for effective deployment.

An effective global climate treaty must provide the means to fund research, development and the deployment of new clean energy technologies. Pricing can help “pull” these technologies through the innovation chain, generate revenue and enhance the flow of investment to developing countries. Governments should strive to end the current perverse subsidies that favour high-.emissions transport and energy infrastructure and promote deforestation.

A shift to a low-carbon economy, supported by private sector participation and government, has the potential to drive the next generation of technological innovation, address the environmental and economic challenges that climate change presents, and contribute to global development.

5. Funds to make communities more resilient and able to adapt to the effects of climate change.

We recognize that adaptation is as important as mitigation in an effective global climate treaty. Adaptation planning will require a holistic and long-term planning perspective, which will require different levels of activity at the international, national and local levels. Businesses will be responsible for building much of the infrastructure needed to protect us from climate impacts. An effective global climate treaty will mobilize funding that supports public private partnerships to enhance development, adaptive capacity, climate resilience and management of risk.

6. Innovative means to protect forests and balance the carbon cycle.

Because a significant proportion of the CO₂ reduction required by 2020 comes from the sequestration of carbon in forests and agriculture lands, an effective climate treaty must facilitate such sequestration. If emissions reductions targets are to be met, there is an immediate need to protect forests and enhance carbon sequestration. The private sector can play an important role in reducing deforestation, particularly in developing countries, through mechanisms structured to value conservation.

We believe these elements should form the core of the international climate change treaty agreed at Copenhagen. As business leaders we stand ready to innovate and operate within the framework established through that treaty and national policies.

Reducing the emissions that until now have been so linked to our economic growth and betterment will be an enormous, unprecedented global challenge but will also provide significant opportunities for sustainable growth, development and innovation. Acting together, we owe it to future generations to meet this challenge. Now is the time to create the foundations for long term, low carbon prosperity. We are willing to work with government to do so.

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Presented by the Copenhagen Climate Council, informed by discussions with the World Business Council on Sustainable Development; 3C; the World Economic Forum Climate Change Initiative; the U.N. Global Compact and The Climate Group, and deliberations among participants at the World Business Summit on Climate Change, May 24-26 2009.

1. The views expressed here have been informed by discussions at the World Business Summit on Climate Change. They do not necessarily reflect the views of all participants.

This story is from AP.

By DINA CAPPIELLO and H. JOSEF HEBERT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Legislation imposing the first nationwide limits on the pollution blamed for global warming advanced in the House late Thursday, clearing a key committee despite strong Republican opposition.

The Energy and Commerce Committee approved the sweeping climate bill 33-25 after repeatedly turning back GOP attempts to kill or weaken the measure during four days of debate.

The panel’s action increases the likelihood that the full House for the first time will address broad legislation to tackle climate change later this year. The Senate has yet to take up the issue.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the panel’s chairman, said the bill represents “decisive and historic action” to increase America’s energy security and deal with global warming. “When this bill is enacted into law, we will break our dependence on foreign oil, make our nation the world leader in clean energy jobs and technology, and cut global-warming pollution,” said Waxman.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has promised to press for passage of climate legislation this year, but prospects remain uncertain, especially in the Senate. President Barack Obama has told Congress he too wants a bill this year, ahead of international climate talks in December.

The House bill requires factories, refineries and power plants to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and six other greenhouse gases by roughly 80 percent by mid-century and hasten the nation’s energy shift away from fossil fuels by putting a price on carbon dioxide releases.

Only one Republican — Rep. Mary Bono Mack of California — crossed party lines in support of the bill. Four Democrats voted against it. She said that while she had concerns about the bill, including its cost, the country can’t wait “to make needed changes to our energy policy.”

Waxman had vowed to get the 946-page bill out of his committee before Memorial Day. Pressure on lawmakers to leave for the holiday recess pushed the committee to wrap up late Thursday after considering more than 80 amendments, 56 of them from Republicans and many designed to weaken or kill the bill.

“The American people are overwhelming calling for a new direction … to take action in a way that changes forever our relationship with imported oil, with the loss of jobs overseas, with the pollution that is causing greenhouse gas warming on our planet,” said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., a co-sponsor of the bill.

Republicans argued that the pollution cuts would lead to soaring energy prices and threaten economic growth by imposing new costs on energy intensive industries already facing economic hardships.

“We don’t want to put the economy in jeopardy,” said Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the committee’s ranking Republican. He offered an alternative that would have scrapped the cap on greenhouse gases and pollution trading scheme, provide more incentives for nuclear energy and bolster research into capturing carbon from coal-burning power plants. It was defeated 35-19.

Barton said he had “serious concern about the redirection of our energy policy in America.”

“For the sake of our nation I hope to some degree you are right. I’m afraid that you’re not. We will see,” Barton told Waxman minutes before the vote.

To ease the economic impact, supporters of the bill said, the government would issue pollution allowances, or permits, to businesses that could be traded on the open market. The bill calls for giving away 35 percent of the pollution permits to electric utilities that otherwise would likely pass the additional costs onto consumes. The government also would sell 15 percent of the allowances and use the money to provide direct relief to consumers.

“It is very clear that ratepayers are going to be protected,” Waxman insisted.

To get the support of Democrats from coal and industrial states, Waxman agreed to give away significant emissions allowances to industries in their states, including the electric utilities, steel manufactures, automakers and refineries. Waxman also scaled back the required greenhouse gas reductions between now and 2020 from 20 percent to 17 percent. And he eased the requirement for utilities to use renewable energy such as wind and solar for electricity production.

Democrats also added language to create a clean energy bank to disperse grants for new forms of energy and inserted a “cash for clunkers” program that would provide rebates to consumers who turn in gas guzzling vehicles for more fuel-efficient cars.

The bill is H.R. 2454.

I originally found this article by reading Watts Up With That so go over there and check out his handling of this story.

The Interior Department on Friday let stand a Bush administration policy barring the federal government from using the precarious state of the U.S. polar bear population as a reason to crack down on global warming, upsetting environmentalists and cheering oil and gas companies.

The decision means the government cannot use the Endangered Species Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, though Interior Secretary Ken Salazar explicitly has blamed those emissions for the habitat erosion that last year landed the polar bear on the list of threatened species.

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Environmental groups promised to sue.

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Andrew Wetzler, who directs the endangered species project for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the decision was illegal and that the group would “continue to fight it in court.”

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Rep. Doc Hastings of Washington, the top Republican on the House Natural Resources Committee, praised Salazar for what he called “a common-sense decision that will ensure more jobs are not lost due to excessive regulations of greenhouse gases by the government.”

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Congress never intended for the species act to regulate climate change, Salazar said.

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Salazar has overturned several last-minute Bush environmental rules. He rescinded one that would have allowed federal agencies to bypass expert biologists and determine on their own whether their projects threatened endangered plants or animals. He also blocked the issuance of oil and gas drilling leases near national parks in Utah.

Yet Salazar sided with Bush on another high-profile species issue, moving ahead with a plan to remove gray wolves from the endangered list in the Great Lakes region and parts of the Mountain West.

politics, polar bears, Barach Hussein Obama, George Walker Bush,

If you read this site often, you know that I really don’t like carbon trading.  I don’t think it will help solve any problems and it is only a way to tax people and push industries into doom.  Dr. Lovelock appears to agree with me and he is a fairly strong supporter of the theory that global warming is man made. 

Also in this interview, Dr. Lovelock discusses his favorite approach to reducing the overall carbon footprint.  This approach of burying charcoal is not very popular and there are some other environmental concerns in the production of charcoal.

You can read the entire article at NewScientist.  The interview is much longer than what i have reproduced here.  Please click through to the source.

Your work on atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons led eventually to a global CFC ban that saved us from ozone-layer depletion. Do we have time to do a similar thing with carbon emissions to save ourselves from climate change?

Not a hope in hell. Most of the “green” stuff is verging on a gigantic scam. Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It’s not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it’ll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning. I am not against renewable energy, but to spoil all the decent countryside in the UK with wind farms is driving me mad. It’s absolutely unnecessary, and it takes 2500 square kilometres to produce a gigawatt – that’s an awful lot of countryside.

What about work to sequester carbon dioxide?

That is a waste of time. It’s a crazy idea – and dangerous. It would take so long and use so much energy that it will not be done.

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So are we doomed?

There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste – which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering – into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast.

Would it make enough of a difference?

Yes. The biosphere pumps out 550 gigatonnes of carbon yearly; we put in only 30 gigatonnes. Ninety-nine per cent of the carbon that is fixed by plants is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by consumers like bacteria, nematodes and worms. What we can do is cheat those consumers by getting farmers to burn their crop waste at very low oxygen levels to turn it into charcoal, which the farmer then ploughs into the field. A little CO2 is released but the bulk of it gets converted to carbon. You get a few per cent of biofuel as a by-product of the combustion process, which the farmer can sell. This scheme would need no subsidy: the farmer would make a profit. This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference, but I bet they won’t do it.

Do you think we will survive?

I’m an optimistic pessimist. I think it’s wrong to assume we’ll survive 2 °C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4 °C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left. It’s happening again.

I don’t think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what’s coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing’s been done except endless talk and meetings.

global warming, carbon trading, cap and trade, charcoal, James Lovelock, carbon dioxide, CO2

This article misses out by not making a big enough distinction that weather is not climate and climate is not weather. The amount of ice in any given 2 or 3 year stretch has as much to do regarding global warming as the occassional all time high or low that is hit in Peoria, IL. I have talked about weather v. climate before but we always seem to go around to the same things.

Last year, there was a great deal of talk about Arctic Sea ice and the fact that it was vanishing. Very little talk at the time had to do with the currents under the ice (except for here). The end of the world was at hand though if you read some blogs!

The post on WUWT does a good job of showing the various changes in ice thicknesses over the last several decades. It isn’t extremely scientific but it does show photos of open water and thin ice for as long as subs have been poking their head through the ice.