All posts tagged Climate Change

Bjorn Lomborg on Climate Costs in the Australian

Australian Climate Madness blog points to an article, “Wrong way, go back“, in the Australian Newspaper by Skeptical Environmentalist Bjorn Lomberg on Australia’s climate policies. This is my comment.

This statement in the article is significant

When economists estimate the net damage from global warming as a percentage of gross domestic product, they find it will indeed have an overall negative impact in the long run but the impact of moderate warming (1C-2C) will be beneficial. It is only towards the end of the century, when temperatures have risen much more, that global warming will turn negative.

Now consider the Apocalypse Delayed? posting of March 28th. Referring to an Economist article, it says that a number of empirical studies show that climate sensitivity is much lower than the climate models assume. Therefore, moving into the net cost range seems much less likely.
But why are there net costs? Lomberg’s calculations are based on William Nordhaus’s DICE model that

calculates the total costs (from heat waves, hurricanes, crop failure and so on) as well as the total benefits (from cold waves and CO2 fertilisation).

I would claim that the destablisation of the planet’s climate by rapid warming has very little evidence. Claims in AR4 that hurricanes were getting worse; that some African countries would see up to a 50% reduction in crop yields by 2020; that the Himalayan Glaciers would largely disappear by 2035; that the Amazon rainforest could catastrophically collapse – all have been over-turned.
Thus the policy justification for avoiding climate catastrophe as a result rising greenhouse gases is a combination of three components. First, a large rise in temperatures. Second, the resulting destablisation of the climate system having net adverse consequences. Third, is that the cost of constraining the rise in greenhouse gases is less than the cost of doing nothing.
It is only this third aspect that Bjorn Lomberg deals with. Yet despite that he shows that the Australian Government is not “saving the planet for future generations”, but causing huge net harm. Policy-making should consider all three components.

That is, there are three components to the policy justification to combatting “climate change” by constraining the growth in greenhouse gas emissions

  1. That there will be a significant amount of global warming.
  2. That this is net harmful to the planet and the people on it.
  3. That the net harm of policies is less than the net harm of warming. To use a medical analogy, the pain and risks of treatment are less than the disease.

Lomberg, using the best cost model available, comes up with far less costs of global warming than, say, the Stern Review of 2006. He also uses actual policy costs to assess the net harm of global warming. Lomberg does not, however, challenge the amount of warming from a given quantity of CO2 rise, nor the adverse consequences of that warming. The Economist article
and editorial of March 30th conversely challenges the quantity of warming from arising from a given rise in CO2, but just sees it as “apocalypse delayed” and not “apocalypse debunked“.

Kevin Marshall

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by manicbeancounter on April 13, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Australia, Climate Change, Climate Change Economics, Feedbacks
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Posted by manicbeancounter on April 13, 2013

http://manicbeancounter.com/2013/04/13/bjorn-lomberg-on-climate-costs-in-the-australian/

Tung and Zhou claim of constant decadal anthropogenic warming rates in last 100 years

Bishop Hill reports on

A new paper in PNAS entitled ‘Using data to attribute episodes of warming and cooling in instrumental records’ looks important. Ka-Kit Tung and Jiansong Zhou of the University of Washington report that anthropogenic global warming has been overcooked. A lot.

My comment was:-

My prediction is that this paper will turn out to have exaggerated the anthropogenic influence, rather than have under-estimated it.

The relevant quote:-

The underlying net anthropogenic warming rate in the industrial era is found to have been steady since 1910 at 0.07–0.08 °C/decade

Greenhouse gas emissions have not been increasing at a steady rate. The most important is CO2. A couple of years ago I tried to estimate from country data (filling in important gaps) how global CO2 emissions had increased. The increases per quarter century were

1900-1925 85%

1925-1950 60%

1950-1975 185%

1975-2000 45%

That meant global CO2 emissions increased more than 12 times (1100%) in 100 years. The conversion rate to retained CO2 seems to be roughly constant – 4Gt of carbon equivalent to increase CO2 levels by 1ppm. Furthermore, the C20th warming was nearly all in two phases. 1910-1945 and 1975-1998. Rather than temperature rise being related to CO2 emissions, it seems out of step. That would imply a combination of two things for the anthropogenic warming rate to be constant at 0.07–0.08 °C/decade. First is that CO2 has massively diminishing returns. Second is that CO2 emissions alone have a much smaller impact on the global average temperature changes (as reported in HADCRUT4), than this paper concludes.

Supplementary Information

This source of the emissions data is

Boden, T.A., G. Marland, and R.J. Andres. 2010. Global, Regional, and National Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tenn., U.S.A. doi 10.3334/CDIAC/00001_V2010

The CO2 levels are for Mauna Loa back to 1959, and estimated backwards from there to 1780.


The above chart shows by estimated CO2 emissions (expressed in units of 10Gt of carbon equivalents) shown as against the HADCRUT3 data set. This shows a slow rate of increase in CO2 emissions in the first half of the twentieth century, with falls in emissions during the Great Depression (1929-1933) and at the end of the Second World War (1945). From 1950 to 1973 there was a huge upsurge in emissions with the post-war economic boom, then stalls in 1973 (The OPEC oil embargo) and 1980-83 (global recession). After 2000 there was another surge in emissions, mostly due to rapid growth in China.

The temperature increases followed a different pattern. There were two periods of increasing temperatures in the twentieth century – From 1910-1945 and 1975-1998. The decadal changes graph below shows clearly the change in emissions. The temperature changes by decade exaggerate the falls in temperature in the Edwardian decade and the 1940s.


What is clearly illustrated is why I believe the anthropogenic influence on temperature was not similar in every decade from 1910, as Ka-Kit Tung and Jiansong Zhou claim.

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by manicbeancounter on February 9, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Climate Change, Environment
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Posted by manicbeancounter on February 9, 2013

http://manicbeancounter.com/2013/02/09/tung-and-zhou-claim-of-constant-decadal-anthropogenic-warming-rates-in-last-100-years/

Are Climate Change and Obesity Linked?

Judith Curry has a (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) look at the links between climate change and obesity.

One of the two references is to the care2 website.

Consider the three alleged “links” between climate change and obesity that Dr Curry summarised:-

  • Rising inactivity rates because of hot temperatures
  • Drought-induced high prices on healthy foods
  • Food insecurity promotes unhealthy food choices

Rising inactivity is commonly thought to be due to less manual work, the rise of the car and evermore staring at the TV or computer. If a rise of 0.8C in temperature were a major factor then in Britain you would see (for instance) the Scots being more active than those in the South of England, or people being more active in winter than summer. In both cases the opposite is true.

Drought-induced high prices would have to show that droughts were the main cause of high prices of health foods compared to junk foods. Maybe convenience and taste have something more to do with the preference for unhealthy diets. Also you would need to show that rising food prices are connected to decreasing crop yields. Biofuels may have more with the rising food prices.

Food insecurity diminishes as per capita income rises, whilst obesity increases. That is the poorest of the world have hunger as a problem, whilst the rich countries have obesity as a growing problem. Obesity may be a problem of the poor in the developed nations, but food as a whole is not a problem.

The above article is a very extreme example of

The underdetermination thesis – the idea that any body of evidence can be explained by any number of mutually incompatible theories

Kuhn Vs.Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science – Steve Fuller 2003 Page 46.

Kevin Marshall

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by manicbeancounter on January 5, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Climate Change Analysis, Climate Change Economics
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Posted by manicbeancounter on January 5, 2013

http://manicbeancounter.com/2013/01/05/are-climate-change-and-obesity-linked/

Stern’s flawed opinion of Energy Stock Valuations

There is an interesting response by Profs Richard Tol and Roger Pielke Jnr on the latter’s blog to an article in the FT by Lord Stern on energy companies being overvalued

Have Markets Misvalued Energy Companies?

Roger Pielke Jr. and Richard Tol

Writing in the Financial Times (Dec. 9) Lord Stern of Brentford suggests that the financial markets have grossly misjudged the valuation of companies that produce fossil fuels, writing, “the market has either not thought hard enough about the issue or thinks that governments will not do very much.” Stern argues that the misjudgment poses a “risk to the balance sheets of large companies – or to the planet, or both.”

Have markets misvalued energy companies? While markets are of course not perfect, for two reasons we believe that in this instance there is no evidence to suggest that the valuation of fossil fuel producers has been grossly misjudged.

First, let us assume that governments around the world decide to take swift and effective action to reduce emissions. Would this mean that fossil fuel companies would go out of business in the near term? No.

Consider the case of Apple. Apple’s revenues depend upon selling products that will be obsolete within years and historical relics in a generation. That does not stop the company from being among the most highly valued in the world. If the world transitions to carbon free energy supply, the big energy producers of today are likely to play a big role.

Under all scenarios for future energy consumption the world is going to need vastly more energy and – whether governments act to decarbonize or not – vastly different types of energy too. Energy majors are so highly valued not simply because of the fossil fuel reserves they own, but because they have the expertise to supply energy at a massive scale along with a track record of successful and rapid innovation, with the ongoing shale gas and ultradeep oil revolutions as the latest examples.

Second, what if governments fail to deeply cut emissions? Might the impacts of unmitigated climate change lead to a dramatic reduction in the valuation of fossil fuel companies?

According to the work of Nick Stern himself this seems highly unlikely. In his famous review of climate change Stern argued that unmitigated climate change might reduce global GDP by as much as 20% by 2100. Using Stern’s own numbers for the most extreme impacts would mean that instead of growing by 2.5% per year to 2100, GDP would grow by 2.24%, with the largest effects occurring at the end of the century. This hardly seems cause for a dramatic revaluation of fossil fuel companies today. 

The impacts estimated by Stern on behalf of the British government are very pessimistic compared to the estimates found in the academic literature. Furthermore, changes in the growth rate of the economy have a muted impact on the growth in energy demand.

Indeed, future demand for energy is largely insensitive to whether governments decide to act on climate change. The more than 1.5 billion people without reliable access to electricity will demand access regardless. A world with unmitigated climate change could in fact be more energy intensive, for instance if more people demand air conditioning. In either case the future for energy companies would be bright.

Humans affect the climate system and it is important for policy makers to respond. But it is unlikely that efforts to second guess the market valuation of energy companies will contribute to such responses. Of course, if Nick Stern really believes that energy companies have been grossly over-valued he could put his money where his convictions lie. Who knows, he may one day be the subject of the sequel to the Big Short.

Roger Pielke Jr. is a professor at the University of Colorado. Richard Tol is a professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin and at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.

My own comment is

The Stern review was not only criticized for being too concerned with the more extreme scenarios, but for applying a near zero discount rate. Whatever the economist’s policy-related arguments over discount rates (and Prof. Tol uses 3% plus), the market valuations of share prices are based upon much, much higher discount rates. This is for good reason. Suppose at the end of 1911 someone could have known that there would be an oil embargo in 1973, resulting from a cartel of oil-producing nations usurping the considerable power of the oil companies. What should have been the discount factor on the 1911 price of oil stocks considering in the interim there were two world wars, between which there was a massive global depression? Even if this was the case the local market factors (such as the emergence of the car industry, global growth, the development of the internal combustion engine and the relative fall in the oil price against coal) were far more important than the historical events. I would contend that in 1911, even if were highly likely that an oil company would be rendered bankrupt 60 years later, the discount factor on the share price would be approximately zero.

Furthermore, since the Stern review the scientific evidence has consistently failed to support the more alarmist scenarios resulting from any further warming (e.g. rapid melting of the Himalayan Glaciers or increased severity of hurricanes), nor for extreme temperature rises resulting from positive feedbacks to the CO2 induced warming. To the outsider looking at the emerging evidence, the cost impact of do-nothing scenarios (weighted by risk) is many times lower than when the Stern Review or AR4 were being published.

I fully realise that your comments were moderated to increase the chance of publication. However, if a more balanced version of Stern were done on today’s evidence, I firmly believe that (like Prof. Tol has concluded) current proposed mitigation policies do not have any form of benefit-cost justification.

Lord Stern might be a distinguished climate change activist, but he falls into the same trap of the amateur armchair activist. By seeing the world from their own narrow perspective, they misread the wider opinions and the facts of the real world. It is when such people acquire positions of power, with immoderate views not softened by political experience, that they can become deniers of reality and haters of sections of the community.

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by manicbeancounter on December 27, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Climate Change, Climate Change Economics
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Posted by manicbeancounter on December 27, 2011

http://manicbeancounter.com/2011/12/27/sterns-flawed-opinion-of-energy-stock-valuations/

Evangelical Christians and Climate Change Skepticism

Wm Briggs reports on a “forthcoming Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society paper “Making the climate a part of the human world”, in which University of British Columbia geographer Simon Donner argues that religion is the cause of global warming denial. ” (Pre-publication copy here)

Simon Donner’s Views

Donner’s Summary is

“Ongoing public uncertainty about climate change is rooted in a perceived conflict between the scientific evidence for a human role in the climate and a common belief that the weather and climate are controlled by higher powers.”

This is backed up by a number of studies of religions, both ancient and primitive religions from various parts of the world. This includes from Fiji and Papua New Guinea. I can find no reference to the major religions of Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism. There is only one biblical reference, from the Old Testament book of Job, but none from the New Testament – the stories about Jesus and his disciples. Neither is there a distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism, nor a split between evangelical and liberal protestants.

The Religious Sceptics in USA

The majority of the religious sceptics in the USA are the Protestant Evangelicals. Their type of Christianity is centred on biblical study, both individually and corporately, to perceive the revealed word of God and the interpretation for current circumstances. There are the specialists – the ordained pastors – who provide interpretations through sermons. However, this is just the lead for personal study and reflection.

Collectively, these evangelicals are not unified body theologically. For instance, a quick comparison of the Southern Baptist Convention and the Assemblies of God websites will quickly demonstrate the point. Nor are there strong ecumenical links between the major churches, as found in Britain.

This bible-based view of Christianity comes directly from the Reformation. In medieval Europe the Bible was handwritten and only available in Latin. With most people illiterate, reading of the Bible was limited to a few dedicated scholars, with interpretation highly centralised and strictly controlled. Any deviation was treated as heresy, often punishable by death. A combination of the advent of printing and translation into the vernacular suddenly made the word of God accessible to a much wider population. It soon became evident that the established religious orthodoxy was, in many places, unsupported from the sacred text and in some cases fundamentally at odds with that text. It was this need to study that changed public worship so dramatically, with teaching replacing the Mass as the centrepiece.

Politically, access to the Bible democratised understanding and the questioning of authority and centralised power. This gave a scholarly impetus to the development of modern science, and also the Liberal political philosophy of John Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment that in turn heavily influenced the Founding Fathers.

An Alternative Thesis

Evangelicals have as their primary resource the Bible and the interpretation of God’s purpose from within their local congregation. Your average church member will have quite a detailed knowledge of the Bible, being able to quote much of the primary doctrine and some major passages. Generally they also “cherish and defend religious liberty, and deny the right of any secular or religious authority to impose a confession of faith upon a church or body of churches.“
(Southern Baptist Convention). The scepticism towards climate change comes from its presentation. It comes across as a core doctrine that is agreed upon by a consensus of leading scientists. But the truth cannot be perceived by the lay person, but only revealed by impenetrable computer models to scientific experts. Any deviation or questioning of core doctrine is treated with contempt and as a heresy. Yet the high scientific standards that these experts are supposed to follow has been found wanting. There are two areas where this is demonstrated most.

First, the poster hockey stick of a decade ago – showing global temperatures were dramatically higher than at an time in the last millennium – was investigated by the Steve McIntyre. He showed the results were as a result of a number of elements including cherry picking data; giving undue weighting to favourable results; excluding some unfavourable data points; failing to apply proper statistical tests. A book charting this episode is found here, and my comparison of an exchange following a savage book review is here.

Second is the Climategate email release, which showed that the core scientists were a fairly small group, that they viewed the science as far from settled, and they adhered to lower standards of scholarship than was the public perception.

The Inferences from the Donner Paper

Donner has either little understanding of mainstream Christianity in the USA, or he deliberately misrepresents what it stands for. In so doing, he not only completely misses the point of why religious Americans are sceptical but does so in such a way that will make them more antagonistic. The fact that peer review should allow through a paper that clearly does not have proper argument to support the thesis shows a failure to of that process. That a person with no qualifications or prior publishing record in the field of sociology or theology should be allowed to publish on the subject in a journal specialising in the weather shows how far climate science is straying beyond its area of competency. For Christians who unsure of the global warming arguments, clear evidence that a climate scientist not knowing what they are talking about will make them more sceptical. They will be more likely to accept the sceptical comments that the science is flawed, whether the theory, the computer models or the statistics.

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by manicbeancounter on August 27, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Christianity, Climate Change, Science & Non-science
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Posted by manicbeancounter on August 27, 2011

http://manicbeancounter.com/2011/08/27/evangelical-christians-and-climate-change-skepticism/

Tamino on Australian Sea-Levels

Tamino attempts a hatchet-job on a peer-reviewed paper on Australian Sea Levels. Whilst making some valid comments, it gives the misleading impression that he has overturned the main conclusion.

The sceptic blogs (GWPF, Wattsupwiththat, Jo Nova) are highlighting a front page article in the Australian about a peer-reviewed paper by P.J. Watson about Australian sea levels trends over the past century.

The major conclusion is that:-

“The analysis reveals a consistent trend of weak deceleration at each of these gauge sites throughout Australasia over the period from 1940 to 2000. Short period trends of acceleration in mean sea level after 1990 are evident at each site, although these are not abnormal or higher than other short-term rates measured throughout the historical record.”

The significance is that Watson shows a twentieth century rise of 17cm +/-5cm in Australia, whilst Government policy is based a sea level rise of up to 90cm by the end of the century. If there is deceleration from an already low base, then government action is no longer required, potentially saving billions of dollars.

Looking for other viewpoints I found a direction from Real Climate to Tamino’s Open Mind blog. Given my last encounter when he tried to defend the deeply flawed Hockey Stick (see my comments here and here) I curious to know if this was another misdirection. I was not disappointed. Tamino manages to produce a graph showing the opposite to Watson. That is rapid acceleration, not gentle deceleration.

How does he end up with this contrary result? In Summary

  1. Chooses just one of the four data sets used. That is the Freemantle data set.
  2. Making valid, but largely irrelevant criticisms, to undermine the scientific and statistical competency of the author.
  3. Takes time to make the point about treating 20 year moving averages as data for analysis purposes. The problem is that it underweights the data points at the beginning and the end. In particular, any recent acceleration will be understated.
  4. Criticizes the modelling method, with good reasons.
  5. Slips in an alternative model that may answer that criticism.
  6. Shows the results of that model output.

Tamino’s choice of the Freemantle data set should be justified, especially as Watson gives the comment in the conclusion.

“There is evidence of significant mine subsidence embedded in the historical tide gauge record for Newcastle and a likelihood of inferred subsidence within the later (after the mid 1990s) portion of the Fremantle record. In this respect, it is timely and necessary to augment these relative tide gauge measurements with CGPS to gain accurate data on the vertical movement (if any) at each gauge site to measure eustatic sea level rise. At present only the Auckland gauge is fitted with such precision levelling technology.”

That is, the Freemantle data shows the largest acceleration towards the end and this extra acceleration might be because land levels are falling, not sea levels rising.

The underweighting of recent data is important and could be dealt with by looking at shorter period moving averages and observing the acceleration rates. That is looking at moving averages for 19, 18, 17 years etc. If the acceleration rates cross the 20cm a century rate with the shortening of the time periods then this will undermine Watson’s conclusion. Tamino does not do this, despite being well within his capabilities. Until such an analysis is carried out, the claim abstract in the abstract that “(s)hort period trends of acceleration in mean sea level after 1990 … are not abnormal or higher than other short-term rates measured throughout the historical record ” is not undermined.

Instead of pursuing the point, Tamino then goes on to substitute Watson’s modelling method for an arbitrary one plucked from the air, with the comment

“Finally, we come to the other very big problem with this analysis: the model itself. Watson models his data as a quadratic function of time:

.

He then uses  (the 2nd time derivative of the model) as the estimated acceleration. But this model assumes that the acceleration is constant throughout the observed time span. That’s clearly not so. “

Instead he flippantly inserts a quartic equation, which gives the time-varying acceleration (the second derivation) as a quadratic function against time.

There are some problems with a quadratic functions as a model against time. Primarily it only has one turning point. Extend the graph far enough and it reaches infinity. So at some point in the future sea levels will reach the sun, and later the rate of rise will be faster than the speed of light. More seriously, if this quadratic is the closest fit to all the data series, it will either have, or soon will have, overstated the actual acceleration. If used to project 90 years or more ahead, it will provide a grossly exaggerated projection based on known data.

On this basis I have edited to give all the inferences that can be drawn from rising sea levels in Australasia.

That is, a pure maths exercise in plotting a quadratic equation on a graph, unrelated to any reality.

An alternative to this is to claim simply that there is not sufficient valid data, or the analysis is too poor draw any long-term inferences.

An alternative approach is to relate the sea level rises to the global temperature rises. Try comparing Watson’s graph of rate of change in sea levels to the two major temperature anomalies.



First it should be pointed out that Watson uses a twenty year moving average, so his data should lag the temperature data. The strong warming in the HADCRUT data in the 1920s to 1940s is replicated in Fort Denison and Auckland sea level data. The Lack of warming in the 1945 to 1975 period is replicated be marked deceleration in all four data sets from 1950 to the 1970s. The warming phase thereafter is similarly replicated in all four data sets. The current static phase, according to the more reliable HADCRUT data, should similarly be marked by a deceleration in sea level rise from an already low level. Further analysis of Watson’s data is needed to confirm this.

There is no reason in the existing data to believe that Watson’s conclusions are invalid. It is necessary to play fast and loose with the data and get lost in computer games models to draw alternative inferences. Yet if a member of the Australian Parliament says legislation to cope with sea level rise should be withdrawn due to a new study, the alarmist consensus, (who have just skimmed through Tamino’s debunking), will say that the study has been overturned. As a result, ordinary, coastal-dwelling people in Australia will continue to endure real hardship due to legislation based on alarmist exaggerations. (here & here).

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by manicbeancounter on August 1, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Australia, Climate Change, Climate Change Analysis
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Posted by manicbeancounter on August 1, 2011

http://manicbeancounter.com/2011/08/01/tamino-on-australian-sea-levels/

Outflanking Al Gore & other alarmists

At Wattupwiththat there is a proposal to build a database by

Find(ing) every false, misleading, scary, idiotic, non-scientific statement they have made in the past twenty years. Create an index by name with pages listing those statement with links to the source. Keep it factual. Let their own words come back to haunt them.

My comment was

A database of all the exaggerations, errors and false prophesies on its own will do no good. No matter how extensive and thorough and rigorous, it will be dismissed as having been compiled by serial deniers funded by big oil. Getting a fair hearing in the MSM will be impossible. It the coming battle the alarmists have decided the field of battle and have impenetrable armour.

To be brief, there needs to be two analogies brought to the fore.

First is the legal analogy. If there is a case for CAGW, it must be demonstrated by primary, empirical evidence. That evidence must be tested by opponents. It is not the bits, that may be true – like lots more CO2 will cause some warming. But that there is sufficient CO2 to cause some warming, which will be magnified by positive feedbacks to cause even greater warming, and this substantive warming will destabilize the planet weather systems in a highly negative way. The counter-argument is two-fold – that many of dire, immediate, forecasts have been highly exaggerated and more importantly, the compound uncertainties that have been vastly underestimated. That the case is weak is shown by the prominence given to what is hearsay evidence, such as the consensus, or the proclamations of groups of scientists, or to the image of the hockey stick. In some cases, it has been tantamount to jury-tampering.

Second is the medical analogy. A medical doctor, in proscribing a painful and potentially harmful course of treatment, should at last have a strong professionally-based expectation that post treatment the patient will be better off than if nothing was done. The very qualities that make politicians electable – of being able to make build coalitions by fudging, projecting an image, and undermining the opponents by polarizing views – make them patently unfit for driving through and micro-managing effective policy to reduce CO2. They will of necessity overstate the benefits and massively understate the costs, whether financial or in human suffering. They will not admit that the problem is beyond their capabilities, nor that errors had been made. The problem is even worse in powerful dictatorships than democracies.

I have tried to suggest a method (for those who are familiar with microeconomics) the IPCC/Stern case for containing CO2 here.


http://manicbeancounter.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/climate-change-policy-in-perspective-%E2%80%93-part-1-of-4/

Also, why there is no effective, global political solution possible.


http://manicbeancounter.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/climate-change-in-perspective-%E2%80%93-part-2-of-4-the-mitigation-curve/

What is missing is why the costs of global warming have been grossly exaggerated.

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by manicbeancounter on July 17, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Climate Change, Climate Change Analysis, Science & Non-science
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Posted by manicbeancounter on July 17, 2011

http://manicbeancounter.com/2011/07/17/outflanking-al-gore-other-alarmists/

Keynes, Hayek and Global Warming

Jo Nova points to the excellent Keynes versus Hayek rap videos and compares with global warming views. My own observations are more to do with the nature of theory.

To compare Keynes & Hayek, I believe that we need to separate Keynes from the mainstream Keynesians. Keynes saw theory as a means to get the policy he wanted. It was the Keynesians (starting with John Hicks’ IS-LM analysis) that started the modelling approach. Both Keynes and Hayek eschewed the mathematical modelling of modern economics. In this Keynes would be closer to the perspective of GLS Shackle than Keynesians

  1. Keynes saw the economic system as being essentially unstable. There was no tendency for the economic system to tend towards an optimal equilibrium. Rather it could get stuck for long periods with high unemployment. This seems to parallel to the notion of tipping points. The Keynesian multiplier The parallel in CAGW theory can be seen in the positive feedbacks and tipping points. When Bob Carter says that climate is homeostatic (or Warren Meyer at climate-skeptic uses his ball in a bowl illustration), they criticize the climate models for being Keynesian. I would think that the Carter/Meyer view of climate is similar to that of Hayek on economic phenomena. Climate is essentially chaotic, having only general empirical regularities. However, it has tendencies towards equilibrium. Please note that Hayek occupies a position close to Keynes this issue. Walrasian General Equilibrium with perfect knowledge and instantaneous leaps from one equilibrium to another is an extreme caricature of more mainstream economics. Here Keynes v. Hayek is more apt for the views on climate.
  2. Keynesians view all the essential features of the economic system as being essentially knowable, capable of being reasonably represented in mathematical models. Hayek calls this a “pretence of knowledge” (the title of his Nobel Prize lecture), as although we may know essential features of the system, the relationships are highly complex and changing. The problem is not just lack of measurement, it is having data that is capable of being modelled in order make manipulation of these variables possible. In economics, the manipulation is control of macro economy. In climate, it is to control the global average temperature.
  3. Keynesians believe that a few major measures are sufficient to describe an economy. CAGW theorists believe that the global surface temperature and atmospheric CO2 are key measures. Hayek questioned whether such variables were meaningful. CAGW theorists are on much shakier ground than the Keynesians here. Bob Carter points out in his book that the stored heat in the atmosphere is a tiny fraction of that stored in the oceans. When it comes to stored CO2 the problems are even greater.

But when it comes to the rhetoric of global warming, the analogy should not be with Keynes, but with Karl Marx. Climate models give true scientists perfect insight into the real nature of climate. Those who are on the outside are delusional and/or are either knowingly, or subconsciously, acting as lackeys of the oppressive class. In Marx the oppressive class are the bourgeois, in climate alarmism they are Big Oil.

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by manicbeancounter on June 27, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Australia, Climate Change, Climate Change Analysis, Global Warming, Hayek
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Posted by manicbeancounter on June 27, 2011

http://manicbeancounter.com/2011/06/27/keynes-hayek-and-global-warming/

British-Irish Council taken over by Climate Alarmists?

The Irish Times has carried a report that

THE BRITISH government could massively subsidise the Irish wind energy industry under proposals to be considered in London today.

Would that be the same British Government who are struggling to control a record budget deficit? A Government that presides over a territory which is in many parts extremely windy. Where would these windmills be located? The proposal would be offshore. So the UK is a short of coastline then?

Who put forward this proposal? The famous British-Irish Council. Their website is here.

And here is a screen-shot of that homepage.

It strikes as a little odd that the website should be hosted in Jersey. Or if you do a Google search you will find lots of references to renewable energy and the Isle of Man. Promoting the minor islands and wind power would be a major part of its’ purpose then?

To quote the website

Priority areas of work

At its first summit in London in December 1999, the council decided on a number of priority areas of work which would benefit from such co-operation. While the list is not exhaustive, it includes:

  • agricultural issues
  • health
  • regional issues
  • consideration of inter-parliamentary links
  • energy
  • cultural issues
  • tourism
  • sporting activity
  • education
  • approaches to EU issues
  • minority and lesser used languages
  • prison and probation issues

    So that would be a no then.

    It would seem that the original purpose of the British-Irish Council has been lost and that the organisation has been taken over by some Climate Alarmists from the Isle of Man, Jersey or Scotland. Perhaps the Council is no longer fit for purpose.

    Update

    The actual meeting in London was full of the wind issue. See the Irish Times and BBC Wales.

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by manicbeancounter on June 21, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Climate Change
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Posted by manicbeancounter on June 21, 2011

http://manicbeancounter.com/2011/06/21/british-irish-council-taken-over-by-climate-alarmists/

Prof Nir Shaviv Presentation

A couple of blogs (Bishophill and Jo Nova) direct you to a short 30 minute presentation by Prof Vincent Courtillot. The proceeding presentation by Prof. Nir Shaviv on cosmic ray theory, though more technically advanced, is worth a look, especially if you compare the strength of his argument with the IPCC greenhouse theory.

For the non-scientist, the Shaviv thesis of solar changes explaining the 20th century warming episode is better than the IPCC greenhouse theory as

  • Has some corroborating evidence to suggest that cosmic rays are affecting the climate, with the extent.
  • Has a simple computer model that explains most of the twentieth century warming. In particular the two similar periods of warming from 1915 to 1940 and 1975 to 1998, and the pauses are all modelled quite well. Using Occams Razor  (the most succinct hypothesis, or that which needs the fewest assumptions), it beats the anthropogenic greenhouse gas theories. Alternatively, it is a better fit of the data, as AGW only fits the later warming. The early 20th century warming can only be explained by predominantly natural factors.
  • Is happy flicking between the decadal time-scale that he is trying to explain to geological time scale of hundreds of millions of years and then to the influence of solar flares that last a few days. Neither does he have problems with natural variations.

The IPCC greenhouse gas models do have a number of models that concur. But this can be explained that they have similar assumptions and assumptions behind them. Indeed, given the strong coherence it is a weakness that they have such a wide variation in the data. The IPCC

  • Lacks corroborating evidence, particularly of the tropical tropospheric hotspot.
  • Relies on computer models are highly complex, rely on a two-stage process (see note below), and have many ad hoc adjustments.
  • Yet these computer models that do not tie in very well with the data. To explain the lack of warming in the 1945 to 1978 period and post 1998 you have to resort to an ad hoc inclusion of aerosols. The early-twentieth century warming, so similar empirically, has to have a different explanations.
  • Greenhouse gas theory is uncomfortable with looking beyond the twentieth. It cannot explain the medieval warm period, hence the amount of backing for the infamous hockey stick which suggests the twentieth century warming was unusual. Neither can it explain the other natural fluctuations in the current inter-glacial.

An opposite view that Shaviv’s work is insignificant can be referenced at Sourcewatch, a highly pro-AGW site. They state

“While he does believe the earth is warming, he contends that the sun’s rays, rather than human produced CO2, are the cause. But a 2009 analysis of data “on the sun’s output in the last 25 years of the 20th century has firmly put the notion to rest. The data shows that even though the sun’s activity has been decreasing since 1985, global temperatures have continued to rise at an accelerating rate.”

There are counters to this is that Sourcewatch is speaking about the wrong thing. Shaviv contends it is cosmic rays emanating from elsewhere in the galaxy that affect cloud cover and by this means temperature. Solar winds (determined by solar activity) heavily influence the levels of cosmic rays reaching the earth. A much smaller influence is the solar variability. Shaviv shows the following slide (at 17 mins) to show the difference in his measured magnitudes.

Note on IPCC Climate models

The IPCC climate models do not just rely on greenhouse gases directly impacting on the temperature to generate global climate catastrophe. This was nicely summarized by Prof Richard Lindzen in his Congressional testimony of November 17th 2010. (Full pdf here, Warren Meyer comments here)

  1. A doubling of CO2, by itself, contributes only about 1C to greenhouse warming. All models project more warming, because, within models, there are positive feedbacks from water vapour and clouds, and these feedbacks are considered by the IPCC to be uncertain.
  2. If one assumes all warming over the past century is due to anthropogenic greenhouse forcing, then the derived sensitivity of the climate to a doubling of CO2 is less than 1C. The higher sensitivity of existing models is made consistent with observed warming by invoking unknown additional negative forcings from aerosols and solar variability as arbitrary adjustments.
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by manicbeancounter on April 3, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Climate Change, Climate Change Analysis, Nir Shaviv, SourceWatch, Vincent Courtillot
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by manicbeancounter on April 3, 2011

http://manicbeancounter.com/2011/04/03/prof-nir-shaviv-presentation/

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