Lucidity refers to insight: an understanding that arrives in a flash, like lightning or a light bulb overcoming the darkness. It involves seeing things as they are, (not how they should or might be) and how those things fit together into a coherent whole. Socrates and other great teachers down through history saw that lucidity is the coming together of knowledge that is already within but not yet realized.

Turning to our understanding of the climate, we have to ask this question:

Is that light the end of the tunnel or an oncoming train?

In the run up to Paris climate conference, skeptics and the general public are looking into an oncoming train of pressure and propaganda. But lately there are voices pointing to light shining through the fog of consensus climate science. They are not very loud yet compared to the amplified mass media fear-mongering, but it is more pronounced than in the past.  Consider some of the recent media events.

Honest Talk Regarding the Models’ Uncertainties

David Roberts writing here:

Basically, it’s difficult to predict anything, especially regarding sprawling systems like the global economy and atmosphere, because everything depends on everything else. There’s no fixed point of reference.

Grappling with this kind of uncertainty turns out to be absolutely core to climate policymaking. Climate nerds have attempted to create models that include, at least in rudimentary form, all of these interacting economic and atmospheric systems. They call these integrated assessment models, or IAMs, and they are the primary tool used by governments and international bodies to gauge the threat of climate change. IAMs are how policies are compared and costs are estimated.

There is a school of thought that says the whole exercise of IAMs, at least as an attempt to model how things will develop in the far future, is futile. There are so many assumptions, and the outcomes are so sensitive to those assumptions, that what they produce is little better than wild-ass guesses. And the faux-precision of the exercise, all those clean, clear lines on graphs, only serves to mislead policymakers into thinking we have a grasp on it. It makes them think we know exactly how much slack we have, how much we can push before bad things happen, when in fact we have almost no idea.

In the view of these researchers, the quest to predict what climate change (or climate change mitigation) will cost through 2100 ought to be abandoned. It is impossible, computationally intractable, and the IAMs that pretend to do it only serve to distract and confuse.

More CO2 is Good for the Planet

London 12 October: In an important new report published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, former IPCC delegate Dr Indur Goklany calls for a reassessment of carbon dioxide, which he says has many benefits for the natural world and for humankind.

Dr Goklany said: “Carbon dioxide fertilises plants, and emissions from fossil fuels have already had a hugely beneficial effect on crops, increasing yields by at least 10-15%. This has not only been good for humankind but for the natural world too, because an acre of land that is not used for crops is an acre of land that is left for nature”.

In the Forward (here), world-renowned physicist Freeman Dyson says this:

“To any unprejudiced person reading this account, the facts should be obvious: that the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide as a sustainer of wildlife and crop plants are enormously beneficial, that the possibly harmful climatic effects of carbon dioxide have been greatly exaggerated, and that the benefits clearly outweigh the possible damage.”

Dyson also makes this lucid comment:

The people who are supposed to be experts and who claim to understand the science are precisely the people who are blind to the evidence. Those of my scientific colleagues who believe the prevailing dogma about carbon dioxide will not find Goklany’s evidence convincing. . .That is to me the central mystery of climate science. It is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?

Prominent French Weatherman and Mathematicians Speak Out

Recently France’s best-known TV weatherman, Philippe Verdier, was sacked for publishing a book debunking consensus climate science. And now people wonder what punishment will be visited upon the prestigious Société de Calcul Mathématique (Society for Mathematical Calculation), which recently issued a detailed 195-page White Paper that presents a blistering point-by-point critique of the key dogmas of the global warming. Synopsis is blunt and extremely well documented.

Here are extracts from the opening statements of the first three chapters of the SCM White Paper:

Chapter 1: The crusade is absurd
There is not a single fact, figure or observation that leads us to conclude that the world‘s climate is in any way ‘disturbed.’ It is variable, as it has always been, but rather less so now than during certain periods or geological eras. Modern methods are far from being able to accurately measure the planet‘s global temperature even today, so measurements made 50 or 100 years ago are even less reliable. Concentrations of CO2 vary, as they always have done; the figures that are being released are biased and dishonest. Rising sea levels are a normal phenomenon linked to upthrust buoyancy; they are nothing to do with so-called global warming. As for extreme weather events — they are no more frequent now than they have been in the past. We ourselves have processed the raw data on hurricanes….

Chapter 2: The crusade is costly
Direct aid for industries that are completely unviable (such as photovoltaics and wind turbines) but presented as ‘virtuous’ runs into billions of euros, according to recent reports published by the Cour des Comptes (French Audit Office) in 2013. But the highest cost lies in the principle of ‘energy saving,’ which is presented as especially virtuous. Since no civilization can develop when it is saving energy, ours has stopped developing: France now has more than three million people unemployed — it is the price we have to pay for our virtue….

Chapter 3: The crusade is pointless
Human beings cannot, in any event, change the climate. If we in France were to stop all industrial activity (let’s not talk about our intellectual activity, which ceased long ago), if we were to eradicate all trace of animal life, the composition of the atmosphere would not alter in any measurable, perceptible way. To explain this, let us make a comparison with the rotation of the planet: it is slowing down. To address that, we might be tempted to ask the entire population of China to run in an easterly direction. But, no matter how big China and its population are, this would have no measurable impact on the Earth‘s rotation.

Additional discussion and links are here.

Push Back on the Climate Policy Proposals

Eric Worrall expresses a burst of clarity here:

It’s difficult to know what impact Putin’s overt skepticism will have on the Paris climate meeting. The meeting is reportedly already in a lot of trouble, because even our economically illiterate leaders seem to be balking at the prospect of borrowing money from China, so they can gift the principle they just borrowed back to China as climate development assistance, then repay the loan back to China a second time, with interest.

A Lucid Summary of IPCC Climate Policy:
Borrowing money we don’t have
to pay countries having other pressing needs
for a solution that won’t work
to solve a problem that doesn’t exist
while asserting imaginary legal authority.

Conclusion

Switching metaphors, maybe we are starting to see some damage to the Good Ship Climate Alarm:

Final Word to Charles Mackay

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.

― Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

The media blitz ahead of the Paris climate conference is well underway and you can expect sources like the New York Times to publish many stories along these lines. This one evokes the WWII headline, Paris is Burning, and it happens now to be all over Facebook.

Greenland Is Melting Away (link)

What you get is not science, but a compelling human interest story with great photos about a team of researchers working to study rivers on the ice sheet, and then an appeal to share in their fears. A scientific report would at least provide some snippets of findings, and then provide contextual facts for people to interpret the significance of observations.

Instead of that, the story makes an incredible claim:

The scientific data he and a team of six other researchers collect here could yield groundbreaking information on the rate at which the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, one of the biggest and fastest-melting chunks of ice on Earth, will drive up sea levels in the coming decades. The full melting of Greenland’s ice sheet could increase sea levels by about 20 feet.

Not only is there no evidence presented, the article is silent about the contextual facts that contradict that claim.

Here is what you need to know, and what they should be telling you:

1.The Greenland ice sheet is massive and has persisted for millennia.

Doing the numbers: Greenland area 2.1 10^6 km2 80% ice cover, 1500 m thick in average- That is 2.5 Million Gton. Simplified to 1 km3 = 1 Gton

200 Gton is 0.008 % of that mass.
Annual snowfall: From the Lost Squadron, we know at that particular spot, the ice increase since 1942 – 1990 was 1.5 m/year ( Planes were found 75 m below surface)
Assume that yearly precipitation is 100 mm / year over the entire surface.
That is 168000 Gton. Yes, Greenland is Big!
Inflow = 168,000Gton. Outflow is 168,200 Gton.

So if that 200 Gton rate continued, an assumption not warranted by observations below, that ice loss would result in a 1% loss of Greenland ice in 800 years. (H/t Bengt Abelsson)

2. The melting and refreezing depend on multiple factors, principally the runoff rate (which these scientists are studying) and the snow accumulation which is poorly understood and not yet predictable.

That’s not surprising since the ice sheet rebuilds during wintertime, the harshest time of year. Because of the difficulty of doing polar research, the emphasis is understandably on the summer observations. But we should also not make the mistake of the drunk looking for his lost car keys under the street lamp because the light is better.

For an ice sheet that neither grows or shrinks, there is at all points averaged over the year a balance between

the amount of snow that falls and is compressed to ice
the amount of snow and ice that melts or evaporates (sublimates) and
the amount of ice that flows away due to the ice motion
The two first contributions make up the surface mass balance. For the ice sheet as a whole, there is a balance between the surface mass balance and the amount of ice that calves into the ocean as icebergs.

3.Greenland ice is the most stable land ice in the world despite its location in the lower latitudes. Greenland ice sits in a bowl with a ring of mountainous edges constraining the runoff and is unlikely to ever completely melt. That is why it is preferred as a site for ice core sampling to study paleoclimates.

Topographic map of Greenland bedrock

4.The changing of Greenland ice mass waxes and wanes over years, decades and centuries. The fastest rates of melting recently were in the 1930s and 40s. Discoveries were made of Medieval Viking settlements showing when it was much warmer than now.

The resumption of melting recently is reported by GRACE, a new technology that is promising, but researchers caution against trusting it until calibrations are completed and the longer record is built.

DMI has been studying Greenland for a long time and they report this:

Greenland’s ice sheet has seen variable growth and losses over the years.  And mass gains and losses fluctuate also during each year.  So far this year is close to the mean growth for 1981 to 2010.

5. Sea levels do rise from melting ice in warm periods such as the Roman era, but this comes mostly from land glaciers not the polar ice caps. For example, Ephesus was a port on the Aegean Sea in biblical times, but is now several kms inland. Many other such examples exist in times when it was much warmer than now and when Greenland ice was still massive.

6.The Danes know and care the most about the Greenland ice sheet, and they are not alarmed.

The Danes originally colonized the place and still subsidize the national government there.  Their scientists have studied the issue and have this to say:

Scientists have long believed that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting with increasing speed and that this will result in considerable rises in water levels in the world’s oceans over the next 100 years.

But the foundation for this view now appears to be completely wrong.

Greenland’s ice mass shrinks periodically. The ice mass around and on Greenland shrinks because of two effects:  Ice melting and the amount of precipitation – these two factors give a negative net result which means Greenland’s ice mass shrinks.
Ice that flows out to sea and calving – ice that breaks off from glaciers. This form of loss of ice mass is called ‘dynamic ice-mass loss’ and it can be many times higher than the loss of ice due to melting.

Until now, researchers have believed that the dynamic ice-mass loss accelerated constantly. Most climate models are based on this belief.

We can see that the dynamic ice-mass loss is not accelerating constantly, as we had believed,” says Shfaqat Abbas Khan, a senior researcher at DTU Space – the National Space Institute.

“It is only periodically that the ice disappears as rapidly as is happening today. We expect that the reduction in Greenland’s ice mass due to the dynamic ice-mass loss will ease over the next couple of years and will reach zero again.”

http://sciencenordic.com/aerial-photos-greenland-topple-climate-models

Conclusion:

Is Greenland ice melting? Maybe. . . Probably a little.

It has melted a lot faster in the past, and only restarted recently, while the ice sheet has persisted over many millennia. No one knows how long it will melt and when it will reverse. Some Greenland ice loss is a good thing, since it means we are still in a warm period and not yet sliding into the next Ice Age.

So it is something interesting to watch, but not a reason to lose sleep. And it is nothing that we can fix.

Additional informative discussion is here:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/30/greenland-ice-melt-due-to-global-warming-found-not-so-bad-after-all/

A lot of alarmist voices are charging Exxon with all kinds of misdoings with respect to climate science. The usual suspects are implicated, including Bill McKibben, Naomi Oreskes and Bob Ward.

InsideClimateNews broke the story, with the others piling on. Exxon is fighting back and tell their story here:  http://www.exxonmobilperspectives.com/2015/10/21/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-read-the-documents/

The documents referred to are here.

Exxon’s Position:

“Reading the documents shows that these allegations are based on deliberately cherry-picked statements attributed to various ExxonMobil employees to wrongly suggest definitive conclusions were reached decades ago by company researchers. These statements were taken completely out of context and ignored other readily available statements demonstrating that our researchers recognized the developing nature of climate science at the time which, in fact, mirrored global understanding.

What these documents actually demonstrate is a robust culture of scientific discourse on the causes and risks of climate change that took place at ExxonMobil in the 1970s and ’80s and continues today. They point to corporate efforts to fill the substantial gaps in knowledge that existed during the earliest years of climate change research.

They also help explain why ExxonMobil would work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and leading universities like MIT and Stanford on ways to expand climate science knowledge.”

The Royal Society

The list of documents includes an interchange with the Royal Society, and their spokesman, Bob Ward. He criticizes Exxon’s publications for not saying the same things as IPCC documents. He accuses Exxon of funding “organizations that have been misinforming the public about the science of climate change.” That sounds so much like the RICO20 letter.

Kenneth Cohen of ExxonMobil responded in a letter to Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society at that time:

“The Royal Society should welcome the diversity of opinions on all scientific issues. Taking the position that any person or organization that disagrees with the Royal Society on an important scientific issue should be publicly vilified is surely counterproductive for the development of scientific theory, ignores freedom of expression and is hardly consistent with the Society’s stated objective of promoting excellence in science.”

Cohen’s full letter is here:
http://insideclimatenews.org/sites/default/files/documents/Exxon%20Letter%20to%20Royal%20Society%20%282006%29.pdf

Exxon says that they are part of the solution and not the problem, and are asking people to read the documents and decide for themselves.  Sounds reasonable.

Background on RICO and IPCC:

https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/09/18/anti-racketeering-initiative/

Congratulations on winning a majority in the election and now to form the government. I voted for Ramez Ayoub, your newly elected MP in my riding north of Montreal.

The point of this letter is to alert you to the issue of climate change. It was little discussed during the campaign, but it will be immediately forced onto your attention due to the conference next month in Paris.

The knee-jerk reaction would be to declare the Conservatives wrong on this issue and that Liberals will demonstrate change by reversing Canada’s position. That would be unfortunate and premature, considering all of the pitfalls and ramifications tied to this.

For an example of how to mismanage this issue, you need only look south to the US self-imposed predicament. President Obama picked a radical environmentalist, John Holdren, as his science adviser. Uncritically following that advice, Obama has now painted himself into an ideological corner, and will find it difficult to deny claims for payment of reparations from dozens of developing countries.

You could make the same mistake by appointing David Suzuki as your science adviser. He is a renowned environmentalist and biologist, but has no expertise in climate science, energy or economics. The so-called climate consensus surveys of scientists carefully excluded anyone not working for government or academia. That sort of unbalanced approach is wrong-headed.

Despite the pressure to make early commitments on this issue, I urge you to keep a cool head, have a scientific curiosity, and pick a team of advisers providing a balance of environmental and industrial perspectives. You might want to make an announcement that your government will respect the scientific and economic realities concerning the climate, including attention to cost-benefit analyses of policy proposals.

Sincerely,

Ronald R. Clutz
Therese-De-Blainville Riding

https://rclutz.wordpress.com/category/science-and-society/

 

There was a time when our leaders appealed to reason and common sense:

But today, CO2 Fever is upon us, and there is no CO2 rumor too outrageous to be broadcast, repeated and exaggerated.

Just in the last few hours, we have these headlines (from Google News) threatening global warming:

Climate change clips wings of migratory birds
Miami and New Orleans will sink
Global warming could lead to worldwide wars
Coral reefs are dying
25 million Americans could lose their homes to global warming and rising seas
Ocean food chains will collapse
Climate change major threat to global economic stability
Etc., etc. Etc.

Meanwhile, the good news about CO2 is not mentioned in the press, unless you look very hard for it.

London 12 October: In an important new report published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, former IPCC delegate Dr Indur Goklany calls for a reassessment of carbon dioxide, which he says has many benefits for the natural world and for humankind.

Dr Goklany said: “Carbon dioxide fertilises plants, and emissions from fossil fuels have already had a hugely beneficial effect on crops, increasing yields by at least 10-15%. This has not only been good for humankind but for the natural world too, because an acre of land that is not used for crops is an acre of land that is left for nature”.

http://www.thegwpf.org/climate-doomsayers-ignore-benefits-of-carbon-dioxide-emissions/

In the Forward, world-renowned physicist Freeman Dyson says this:

“To any unprejudiced person reading this account, the facts should be obvious: that the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide as a sustainer of wildlife and crop plants are enormously beneficial, that the possibly harmful climatic effects of carbon dioxide have been greatly exaggerated, and that the benefits clearly outweigh the possible damage.”
The full document can be accessed here:

Click to access benefits1.pdf

CO2 hysteria is addictive. Here’s what it does to your brain:

Just say No!