Author: Ron Clutz

When did global warming start?

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Here is the answer provided by Steve Maley on Quora. The response is in italics with my bolds and images.

Fig. 10. The 105 year time series of filtered monthly average temperatures (ºC) for the Des Moines, IA station plotted a) versus time in months (years also added) b) first derivative of temperature (ºC mo-1) versus temperature (ºC) c), and d) as power spectra, with the ordinate displaying the relative magnitude or power of the Fourier and wavelet coefficients, respectively, and the abscissa displaying the period of each cycle in years. In addition, the 95% confidence level against the white noise background continuum is shown by the dashed line.

Global Warming began in Muncie, Indiana on June 17, 1953 at 2:30 in the afternoon. It was a Tuesday.

Up until that time, weather was “average” all the time.

That is, except for the Dust Bowl, the Little Ice Age, Medieval Warm Period, etc.

Up until then, people had ideal, sustainable lifestyles. 90% of men spent all day in the fields looking at the backsides of two mules. Their spare time was spent chopping wood in hopes they could make it through another winter.

Women stayed at home and had babies. They had to have 8–10 because 2 or 3 of them wouldn’t live to see their 10th birthday.

Farm to Table was a thing. Since nobody had any money, it was a choice between raising your own food or starving.

Yes, it was an idyllic lifestyle. Damn fossil fuels screwed it all up.

How? By changing the atmosphere. Gases other than CO2 used to be 99.97% of the air we breathe. Now it’s 99.96%.

The horror.

Fort Lauderdale Repels Climate Pirates

Posted on by Ron Clutz

This just in from Erin Mundahl writing at Energy In Depth Fort Lauderdale Deals Another Blow to Climate Litigation Campaign. The article will appear below in italics with my bolds. But first some background.

Background on Climate Piracy

Those paying attention have noticed for some years now a new type of pirate has emerged: Climate Lawyers. Taking their game plan from the Tobacco Pirates, they are now targeting a different set of deep pockets: Big Oil Companies. Since 30+ Billion US dollars were extracted from tobacco companies (including contingency fees to lawyers), a comparable, if not larger payday is sought by these new corporate raiders. Unlike Somali pirates who attacked the tankers themselves, Climate Lawyers are using the courts to sue Big Oil for damages their products cause consumers. In order to succeed in these lawsuits, they recruit jurisdictions like states or cities to claim they have been victimized by having fossil fuel products imposed upon them.

[Full Disclosure: The photo above symbolically depicts Climate Lawyers in the boat confronting an oil tanker, when in fact they won’t get their suits wet. The original image was a Greenpeace zodiac]

Fort Lauderdale Stands Up Against Pressure from Climate Lawyers

It’s a bright day for Fort Lauderdale. Despite a full-court press by climate activists, city officials have decided not to pursue a climate liability lawsuit. This is a blow for climate activists, who are hoping to expand their litigation campaign into Florida.

Over the past six months, lawyers and environmental groups have devoted considerable time and effort to persuading cities in the Sunshine State to join their quixotic climate litigation campaign. Despite their efforts, Fort Lauderdale was not convinced.

EarthRights International hides behind NGO to lobby city officials.

Released emails show that EarthRights International, the Rockefeller-funded organization representing the City and County of Boulder and San Miguel County in their climate change lawsuit, and the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development (IGSD) coordinated to lobby Fort Lauderdale city officials throughout 2018.

In June, Mayor Dean Trantalis and his chief of staff, Scott Wyman, received emails from a Miami Beach lobbyist, Seth Platt. Platt was hired to represent IGSD, which runs the Center for Climate Integrity, a project that “supports meritorious climate cases aimed at holding fossil fuel companies and other climate polluters liable for the damages they have caused.” The emails show that Platt was eager to introduce Trantalis and Wyman to EarthRights International (ERI) and their agent, Jorge Musuli, who Platt said was working with the City of Miami to file a climate nuisance lawsuit:

“I have invited Jorge Mursuli to the meeting as his group, [ERI], is working with the City of Miami to file a lawsuit. We are trying to collaborate on advocacy in Broward.”

Sher Edling joins EarthRights International in their pursuit

In a surprising twist of fate, ERI added another plaintiffs’ attorney firm involved in climate litigation, Sher Edling, as co-counsel in their pursuit of the city. By July, Seth Platt had arranged for Vic Sher and Matt Edling, who represent more than a dozen cities in climate cases, to join ERI for a meeting with Fort Lauderdale City Attorney Alain Boileau. After the meeting, Boileau followed up with the mayor, telling his boss about the “positive meeting” he had had with Sher, Edling, Marco Simons (general counsel for ERI), and Mursuli, all thanks to Platt.

Records show that Platt conducted all of these meetings on behalf of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development – not ERI. When pressed on this by local reporters, Platt did not respond.

IGSD finds itself at the center of the climate litigation campaign…. again

Platt’s lobbying affiliation highlights the well-coordinated network of climate activism aimed at taking down fossil fuels by any means necessary. IGSD is a key player in a carefully organized media campaign that rehashes a stale, repeatedly debunked story for the sake of silencing dissent . Richard Wiles, who serves as the ringleader for their climate litigation campaign, produced the IGSD-funded podcast Drilled and published Climate Liability News, an activist site designed to promote climate litigation.

ERI fails to impress the City Commission

In October ERI General Counsel Marco Simons gave a presentation to Trantalis and the Fort Lauderdale City Commission. The meeting was a full court press that emphasized how climate change could hurt city finances and how wealthy anti-fossil fuel foundations were willing to foot the bill for the lawsuit. Simons explained their strategy during the pitch:

“At the litigation stage it would be necessary to join together with co-counsel from private firms. They would be interested in pursuing this on a contingency fee-basis… And it would be a combination of our pro-bono representation and a private firm, contingent fee representation, again with no up-front cost to the city and that’s the model that’s been done in all of these cases so far.”

Thankfully, Fort Lauderdale decided to resist the pressure. Despite the focus Simons put on how the lawsuit could financially benefit the city, it would tie the city up in litigation for months or years, taking attention away from much needed resiliency projects. So far, none of the plaintiffs – or the cities – pursuing climate litigation across the country have seen a dime. Meanwhile, the major green donors financing the pro bono legal work are using the lawsuits to promote their own climate agenda, both in the courtroom and the court of public opinion.

Local voices also reject lawsuits

Over the past several months, op-ed pieces in papers around Florida have emphasized that suing energy companies distracts attention from the harms of climate change and discourages cooperation between industry and government. In a Naples Daily News op-ed this spring, Sal Nuzzo of the Tallahassee-based James Madison Institute, criticized using lawsuits to develop state policy, instead pushing for cooperation between businesses and government for environmental issues:

“For policies to succeed, public officials must work with business…Florida’s unemployment rate is low and our economy is growing at a faster pace than the U.S. economy overall in part because our tax and regulatory burdens are lower than many other states. A hostile approach toward manufacturers would ill serve our state and hinder efforts to address environmental issues.”

Not only does litigation waste taxpayer money, it also distracts from state-level policies that are making meaningful improvements to Florida’s environment. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) “went green” in the words of political columnist Barney Bishop, who wrote in the Sunshine State News to praise the governor for his plan to invest heavily in resiliency efforts and Everglades restoration and water cleanup, an approach he contrasted with that of “public officials working hand in hand with activists”:

“The reality is that real-life actions like the ones being taken by Gov. Ron DeSantis are the best way to help our environment. Lawsuits such as these offer no real benefit and only serve to threaten American companies and American jobs.”

It’s a good thing Fort Lauderdale saw through the scam.

See also US State Attorneys Push Back on Climate Lawsuits

See also Is Global Warming A Public Nuisance?

Climate Models on Fire!

Posted on by Ron Clutz

They are at it again: Our future will be filled with death and destruction according to climate models. The latest doomsday scenario is that every summer in the future will be hotter than the one before, brought to you by CNN: “All the Fear All the Time.”

Future summers will ‘smash’ temperature records every year says CNN. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

If you think it’s hot now, you haven’t seen anything yet. A new study predicts that parts of the world will “smash” temperature records every year in the coming century due to climate change, “pushing ecosystems and communities beyond their ability to cope.”

The scientists who authored the study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Monday, used 22 climate models to game out exactly how hot these summer temperatures would be. They determined that by the end of the 21st century, future temperature events “will be so extreme that they will not have been experienced previously.”

The temperature increase is directly tied to rising global greenhouse gas emissions, the authors say.

The world is already seeing record setting temperatures and while warming hasn’t been uniform, earlier studies have shown that the planet has been in a warming trend, generally.

Heat waves will be deadly. Heat stroke, breathing issues, heart attacks, asthma attacks, kidney problems are all a big concern for people when the temperatures increase, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Higher temperatures can also make air pollution worse, make water scarce and cause crops to fail, leading to malnutrition and starvation.

In 2014, the World Health Organization predicted 250,000 more people will die annually between 2030 and 2050 due to climate change. More recent studies predict that this is a “conservative estimate.”

If, however, countries meet goals of limiting global temperature rise less than 2 degrees Celsius, as set out in the Paris agreement, that scenario would be much less likely.

Footnote: A second separate heat wave alarm study was published and trumpeted in the Seattle Times. (H/T kakatoa, comment below) Cliff Mass does his usual thorough review pointing out problems both in the estimating of future temperatures and in calculating projected deaths from heat waves.

The article by Mass is The Seattle Times Story on Massive Heat Wave Deaths in Seattle: Does it Make Sense?


Trudeau’s Empty Plastic Gesture

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Bjorn Lomborg writes in the Globe and Mail about Canadian PM Justin Treudeau showing off by proposing to ban single-use plastics. Sorry, banning plastic bags won’t save our planet. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a plan to reduce plastic pollution, which will include a ban on single-use plastics as early as 2021. This is laudable: plastics clog drains and cause floods, litter nature and kill animals and birds.

Of course, plastic also makes our lives better in a myriad of ways. In just four decades, plastic packaging has become ubiquitous because it keeps everything from cereals to juice fresher and reduces transportation losses, while one-use plastics in the medical sector have made syringes, pill bottles and diagnostic equipment more safe.

Going without disposable plastic entirely would leave us worse off, so we need to tackle the problems without losing all of the benefits.

The simplest action for consumers is to ensure that plastic is collected and used, so a grocery bag, for example, has a second life as a trash bag, and is then used for energy.

But we need to be honest about how much consumers can achieve. As with other environmental issues, instead of tackling the big-picture problems to actually reduce the plastic load going into oceans, we focus on relatively minor changes involving consumers, meaning we only ever tinker at the margins.

More than 20 countries have taken the showy action of banning plastic bags, including even an al-Qaeda-backed terrorist group which said plastic bags pose “a serious threat to the well-being of humans and animals alike.”

But even if every country banned plastic bags it would not make much of a difference, since plastic bags make up less than 0.8 per cent of the mass of plastic currently afloat on the world’s oceans.

Rather than trying to save the oceans with such bans in rich countries, we need to focus on tackling the inferior waste management and poor environmental policies in developing regions.

Research from 2015 shows that less than 5 per cent of land-based plastic waste going into the ocean comes from OECD countries, with half coming from just four countries: China, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam. While China already in 2008 banned thin plastic bags and put a tax on thicker ones, it is estimated to contribute more than 27 per cent of all marine plastic pollution originating from land.

Moreover, banning plastic bags can have unexpected, inconvenient results. A new study shows California’s ban eliminates 40 million pounds of plastic annually. However, many banned bags would have been reused for trash, so consumption of trash bags went up by 12 million pounds, reducing the benefit. It also increased consumption of paper bags by twice the saved amount of plastic – 83 million pounds. This will lead to much larger emissions of CO₂.

When Kenya banned plastic bags, people predictably shifted to thicker bags made of synthetic fabric – which now may be banned. But Kenya had to relent and exempt plastics used to wrap fresh foods such as meat and other products.

We also need to consider the wider environmental impact of our bag choices. A 2018 study by the Danish Ministry of Environment and Food looked not just at plastic waste, but also at climate-change damage, ozone depletion, human toxicity and other indicators. It found you must reuse an organic cotton shopping bag 20,000 times before it will have less climate damage than a plastic bag.

If we use the same shopping bag every single time we go to the store, twice every week, it will still take 191 years before the overall environmental effect of using the cotton bag is less than if we had just used plastic.

Even a simple paper bag requires 43 reuses to be better for the environment – far beyond the point at which the bag will be fit for the purpose.

The study clearly shows that a simple plastic bag, reused as a trash bag, has the smallest environmental impact of any of the choices.

If we want to reduce the impact of plastic bags while still allowing for their efficient use, a tax seems like a much better idea. A 2002 levy in Ireland reduced plastic bag use from 328 bags a person per year to just 21 bags.

And if we really want to make a meaningful impact on ocean plastics coming from land, we should focus on the biggest polluters such as China, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam, and emphasize the most effective ways to cut the plastic load, namely better waste management in the developing world.

We should also recognize that more than 70 per cent of all plastics floating on oceans today – about 190,000 tonnes – come from fisheries, with buoys and lines making up the majority. That tells us clearly that concerted action is needed to clean up the fishing industry.

If our goal is to get a cleaner ocean, we should by all means think about actions we can take as consumers in rich countries to reduce our use of unnecessary plastic bags. But we need to keep a sense of proportion and, if we’re serious, focus on change where it’s really needed.

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.

See Also Plastic Trash Talking

Waste Management Saves the Ocean

Mid June Arctic Ice Lopsided

Posted on by Ron Clutz

In the first half of June 2019, the shift from ice to water is unusually lop-sided in two respects. The image above, supported by the table later on shows that in the last two weeks water has opened up faster on the Pacific side, and much slower on the Atlantic side, with the exception of Baffin Bay.  The other surprise is that MASIE shows much less ice than does SII, a reversal of the typical situation.

The graph below shows the surprising discrepancy between MASIE and SII appearing in May and continuing in June.

Note that the  NH ice extent 12 year average declined from 12.7M km2 to 10.9M km2 during in the last 30 days.  MASIE 2019 shows about the same decline from 11.9M km2 to 10.3M km2.  That track matched 2016 in May, but is now closest to 2010 and below other years.  Interestingly SII showed a much slower rate of ice extent loss, starting nearly the same as MASIE, but ended this period 400k km2 higher. and close to average and 2018.

I have no explanation for the differential between MASIE and SII.  Note that ice extents in both datasets are levelling off mid-June.

Region 2019166 Day 166 Average 2019-Ave. 2010166 2019-2010
 (0) Northern_Hemisphere 10340833 10933549 -592716 10534077 -193244
 (1) Beaufort_Sea 761369 968193 -206823 933194 -171824
 (2) Chukchi_Sea 680432 799211 -118778 839873 -159441
 (3) East_Siberian_Sea 1049046 1054090 -5045 1068901 -19856
 (4) Laptev_Sea 750164 778536 -28372 772185 -22021
 (5) Kara_Sea 671900 722641 -50741 717539 -45640
 (6) Barents_Sea 261587 215180 46408 138264 123324
 (7) Greenland_Sea 549038 568045 -19007 524612 24426
 (8) Baffin_Bay_
Gulf_of_St._Lawrence		 558105 733399 -175294 667457 -109352
 (9) Canadian_Archipelago 787036 798742 -11706 766642 20394
 (10) Hudson_Bay 1014530 1004832 9698 826781 187749
 (11) Central_Arctic 3229461 3221030 8431 3206453 23008
 (12) Bering_Sea 17768 33002 -15234 21317 -3550
 (13) Baltic_Sea 0 7 -7 0 0
 (14) Sea_of_Okhotsk 9381 35292 -25911 83076 -73695

The table shows where the ice is distributed to make the 5.4% defict to average.  Beaufort and Chukchi Seas are more than half of the NH deficit to average, while Baffin has lost 175k km2 to average.

Illustration by Eleanor Lutz shows Earth’s seasonal climate changes. If played in full screen, the four corners present views from top, bottom and sides.

Epic Science Fraud by Inept Journalist

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Alex Berezow reminds why we cannot trust today’s journalists to tell the truth, especially regarding anything scientific. His article at American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) is La Croix And BPA: Journalist Celebrates That She Caused Millions In Losses. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Journalism is thoroughly inept and corrupt. The quality of journalism has gotten so bad that I have whittled down my trusted sources to merely a handful. Even then, when it comes to science, these sources often get it wrong.

The reason is two-fold: First, journalists aren’t experts in anything. Many of them went to journalism school, which taught them absolutely nothing useful. An editor at The Economist once told me that the newspaper did not hire journalism majors, preferring people who majored in “something real.” The craft of journalism can be learned on the job. Besides, as science communicator Mary Mangan once wrote, “Every crank in the crankosphere has either a politics degree or a journalism degree.”

Second, too many journalists believe their primary job is to “change the world” rather than “report the facts.” If it seems like many journalists behave like partisans or activists, it’s because they really are partisans and activists. Truth matters less than fulfilling an ideological mission. This attitude was summed up best by Michael Wolff, who once said, “If it rings true, it is true.” Really, who needs facts when you have feelings?

Putting this all together, we shouldn’t be surprised when a journalist goes on social media to celebrate when her (poor) reporting causes a company to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in market capitalization.

Business Insider Journalist Celebrates a Massive Loss of Wealth

La Croix is a popular beverage that I refuse to drink because I think it tastes like fizzy horse urine. But plenty of other people like it, which is one reason why its parent company, the National Beverage Corporation, has a market cap well over $2 billion.

Like several other high-profile companies, La Croix has been the target of a junk science lawsuit. The company was accused of using synthetic chemicals instead of natural ones as advertised, a distinction without a difference, as my colleague Dr. Josh Bloom explains.

Now, they are the subject of another lawsuit, this time revolving around bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical that is used as a liner to protect the integrity of cans. There are no known health effects caused by the tiny doses to which humans are exposed, and the FDA declares BPA “safe.” So, what’s the basis of the lawsuit?

According to court filings reported by Business Insider, the president of the National Beverage Corp. planned to lie about the BPA content of its products. Specifically, he allegedly planned to announce that the company no longer used BPA months before the cans would actually be BPA-free. When a high-level executive voiced opposition, he was fired. The lawsuit, then, is for wrongful termination.

There are two facets to this story: (1) The science of BPA; and (2) The conditions surrounding the termination of the employee. As already discussed, (1) is perfectly clear. Yet, despite the fact that the FDA has declared BPA “safe,” Business Insider originally called the chemical “toxic.” The article was eventually updated to remove that completely inaccurate descriptor.

The exact details of (2) are unknown. The only thing we know is that allegations have been made in a lawsuit. But Hayley Peterson, the author of the Business Insider piece, not only seems to have concluded erroneously that BPA is dangerous, but that the company is guilty of wrongful termination. How else can we explain her decision to go on LinkedIn and brag that her reporting cost the company 10% of its market cap?

How a Responsible Journalist Would Cover the La Croix Lawsuit

Instead of just cursing the darkness, I will attempt to light a candle. Here’s how a responsible journalist would cover the La Croix lawsuit.

First, it would be discussed in-depth that the entire basis of the controversy — namely, the presence of BPA — is entirely misguided because it’s a safe product. Whether the company engaged in wrongful termination is far less important than the larger discussion about BPA, which is used in many different products. Second, it would be made clear, if it is eventually found that the president planned to lie and that he acted illegally by terminating an employee, that this has no bearing on the safety of BPA. BPA is safe whether or not the president is a jerk. Third, a responsible journalist wouldn’t go on social media and brag about how they destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth.

Essentially, I’m asking that journalists be competent, well-informed, and well-behaved. I know that’s asking a lot in 2019.

Upside Down CO2 Dogma

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Yoga experts taking the IPCC position attributing rising CO2 to humans.

In the field of climatology, we see repeatedly that alarmists/activists turn things upside down to justify a narrative.  Causes and effects are reversed in order to foster alarm about the burning of fossil fuels.  This distorted way of thinking is described in more detail in essays linked at the end.  This post is concerned with one particular reversal of reality, namely the assertion by IPCC adherents that atmospheric CO2 is rising entirely because of emissions from fossil fuels.  They have it upside down:  Rising temperatures are the main reason CO2 is rising, not the other way around.

The latest heads up treatise on this issue is published this week at Earth Sciences Journal What Humans Contribute to Atmospheric CO2: Comparison of Carbon Cycle Models with Observations by Hermann Harde, Experimental Physics and Materials Science, Helmut-Schmidt-University, Hamburg, Germany.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Harde (2019) Conclusion

The increase of CO2 over recent years can well be explained by a single balance equation, the Conservation Law (23) which considers the total atmospheric CO2 cycle, consisting of temperature and thus time dependent natural emissions, the human activities and a temperature dependent uptake process, which scales proportional with the actual concentration. This uptake is characterized by a single time scale, the residence time of about 3 yr, which over the Industrial Era slightly increases with temperature.

Only this concept is in complete conformity with all observations and natural causalities. It confirms previous investigations (Salby [7, 10]; Harde [6]) and shows the key deficits of some widespread but largely ad hoc carbon cycle models used to describe atmospheric CO2, failures which are responsible for the fatal conclusion that the increase in atmospheric CO2 over the past 270 years is principally anthropogenic.

GHG blocks

 

For a conservative assessment we find from Figure 8 that the anthropogenic contribution to the observed CO2 increase over the Industrial Era is significantly less than the natural influence. At equilibrium this contribution is given by the fraction of human to native impacts. As an average over the period 2007-2016 the anthropogenic emissions (FFE&LUC together) donated not more than 4.3% to the total concentration of 393 ppm, and their fraction to the atmospheric increase since 1750 of 113 ppm is not more than 17 ppm or 15%. With other evaluations of absorption, the contribution from anthropogenic emission is even smaller.
[Note:  FFE is Fossil Fuel Emissions, LUC is Land Use Change]

Thus, not really anthropogenic emissions but mainly natural processes, in particular the temperature, have to be considered as the dominating impacts for the observed CO2 increase over the last 270 yr and also over paleoclimate periods.

[Read the entire paper for discussion of the error-prone CO2 models employed by IPCC]

Background from Previous Post:  Who to Blame for Rising CO2?

Blaming global warming on humans comes down to two assertions:

Rising CO2 in the atmosphere causes earth’s surface temperature to rise.

Humans burning fossil fuels cause rising atmospheric CO2.

For this post I will not address the first premise, instead refer the reader to a previous article regarding efforts to measure temperature effects from CO2. Greenhouse gas theory presumes surface warming arises because heat is forced to escape at a higher, colder altitude. However, at least four separate studies of the available datasets were not able to detect any shift in the atmospheric temperature profile coincidental with rising CO2 in recent decades.  The discussion of the GHG warming theory and its lack of evidence in the real world is summarized in the post No GHG Warming Fingerprints in the Sky

The focus in this piece is the claim that fossil fuel emissions drive observed rising CO2 concentrations. IPCC consensus scientists and supporters note that human emissions are about twice the measured rise and presume that natural sinks absorb half, leaving the other half to accumulate in the atmosphere. Thus they conclude all of the increase in atmospheric CO2 is from fossil fuels.

This simple-minded conclusion takes the only two things we measure in the carbon cycle: CO2 in the atmosphere, and fossil fuel emissions. And then asserts that one causes the other. But several elephants are in the room, namely the several carbon reservoirs that dwarf human activity in their size and activity, and can not be measured because of their complexity.

The consensus notion is based on a familiar environmental paradigm: The Garden of Eden. This is the modern belief that nature, and indeed the climate is in balance, except for humans disrupting it by their activities. In the current carbon cycle context, it is the supposition that all natural sources and sinks are in balance, thus any additional CO2 is because of humans.

Now, a curious person might wonder: How is it that for decades as the rate of fossil fuel emissions increased, the absorption by natural sinks has also increased at exactly the same rate, so that 50% is always removed and 50% remains? It can only be that nature is also dynamic and its flows change over time!

That alternative paradigm is elaborated in several papers that are currently under vigorous attack from climatists. As one antagonist put it: Any paper concluding that humans don’t cause rising CO2 is obviously wrong. One objectionable study was published by Hermann Harde, another by Ole Humlum, and a third by Ed Berry is delayed in pre-publication review.

The methods and analyses are different, but the three skeptical papers argue that the levels and flows of various carbon reservoirs fluctuate over time with temperature itself as a causal variable. Some sinks are stimulated by higher temperatures to release more CO2 while others respond by capturing more CO2. And these reactions occur on a range of timescales. Once these dynamics are factored in, the human contribution to rising atmospheric CO2 is neglible, much to the ire of alarmists.

Ed Berry finds IPCC carbon cycle metrics illogical.

Dr. Ed Berry provides a preprint of his submitted paper at a blog post entitled Why human CO2 does not change climate. He welcomes comments and uses the discussion to revise and improve the text. Excerpts with my bolds.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims human emissions raised the carbon dioxide level from 280 ppm to 410 ppm, or 130 ppm. Physics proves this claim is impossible.

The IPCC agrees today’s annual human carbon dioxide emissions are 4.5 ppm per year and nature’s carbon dioxide emissions are 98 ppm per year. Yet, the IPCC claims human emissions have caused all the increase in carbon dioxide since 1750, which is 30 percent of today’s total.

How can human carbon dioxide, which is only 5 percent of natural carbon dioxide, add 30 percent to the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide? It can’t.

This paper derives a Model that shows how human and natural carbon dioxide emissions independently change the equilibrium level of atmospheric carbon dioxide. This Model should replace the IPCC’s invalid Bern model.

The Model shows the ratio of human to natural carbon dioxide in the atmosphere equals the ratio of their inflows, independent of residence time.

Fig. 5. The sum of nature’s inflow is 20 times larger than the sum of human emissions. Nature balances inflow with or without human emissions.

The model shows, contrary to IPCC claims, that human emissions do not continually add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but rather cause a flow of carbon dioxide through the atmosphere. The flow adds a constant equilibrium level, not a continuing increasing level, of carbon dioxide.

 

Fig. 2. Balance proceeds as follows: (1) Inflow sets the balance level. (2) Level sets the outflow. (3) Level moves toward balance level until outflow equals inflow.

Ole Humlum proves that CO2 follows temperature also for interannual/decadal periods.

Humlum et al. looks the modern record of fluctuating temperatures and atmospheric CO2 and concludes that CO2 changes follow temperature changes over these timescales. The paper is The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature OleHumlum, KjellStordahl, Jan-ErikSolheim.  Excerpts with my bolds.

From the Abstract:
Using data series on atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperatures we investigate the phase relation (leads/lags) between these for the period January 1980 to December 2011. Ice cores show atmospheric CO2 variations to lag behind atmospheric temperature changes on a century to millennium scale, but modern temperature is expected to lag changes in atmospheric CO2, as the atmospheric temperature increase since about 1975 generally is assumed to be caused by the modern increase in CO2.

In our analysis we used eight well-known datasets. . . We find a high degree of co-variation between all data series except 7) and 8), but with changes in CO2 always lagging changes in temperature.

Highlights
► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 11–12 months behind changes in global sea surface temperature. ► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 9.5–10 months behind changes in global air surface temperature. ► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging about 9 months behind changes in global lower troposphere temperature. ► Changes in ocean temperatures explain a substantial part of the observed changes in atmospheric CO2 since January 1980. ► Changes in atmospheric CO2 are not tracking changes in human emissions.

Summary

Summing up, monthly data since January 1980 on atmospheric CO2 and sea and air temperatures unambiguously demonstrate the overall global temperature change sequence of events to be 1) ocean surface, 2) surface air, 3) lower troposphere, and with changes in atmospheric CO2 always lagging behind changes in any of these different temperature records.9

A main control on atmospheric CO2 appears to be the ocean surface temperature, and it remains a possibility that a significant part of the overall increase of atmospheric CO2 since at least 1958 (start of Mauna Loa observations) simply reflects the gradual warming of the oceans, as a result of the prolonged period of high solar activity since 1920 (Solanki et al., 2004).

Based on the GISP2 ice core proxy record from Greenland it has previously been pointed out that the present period of warming since 1850 to a high degree may be explained by a natural c. 1100 yr periodic temperature variation (Humlum et al., 2011).

Hermann Harde sets realistic proportions for the carbon cycle.

Hermann Harde applies a comparable perspective to consider the carbon cycle dynamics. His paper is Scrutinizing the carbon cycle and CO2 residence time in the atmosphere. Excerpts with my bolds.

From the Abstract:

Climate scientists presume that the carbon cycle has come out of balance due to the increasing anthropogenic emissions from fossil fuel combustion and land use change. This is made responsible for the rapidly increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations over recent years, and it is estimated that the removal of the additional emissions from the atmosphere will take a few hundred thousand years. Since this goes along with an increasing greenhouse effect and a further global warming, a better understanding of the carbon cycle is of great importance for all future climate change predictions. We have critically scrutinized this cycle and present an alternative concept, for which the uptake of CO2 by natural sinks scales proportional with the CO2 concentration. In addition, we consider temperature dependent natural emission and absorption rates, by which the paleoclimatic CO2 variations and the actual CO2 growth rate can well be explained. The anthropogenic contribution to the actual CO2 concentration is found to be 4.3%, its fraction to the CO2 increase over the Industrial Era is 15% and the average residence time 4 years.
Fig. 1. Simplified schematic of the global carbon cycle. Black numbers and arrows indicate reservoir mass in PgC and exchange fluxes in PgC/yr before the Industrial Era. Red arrows and numbers show annual  anthropogenic’ flux changes averaged over the 2000–2009 time period. Graphic from AR5-Chap.6-Fig.6.1. 

Conclusions

Climate scientists assume that a disturbed carbon cycle, which has come out of balance by the increasing anthropogenic emissions from fossil fuel combustion and land use change, is responsible for the rapidly increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations over recent years. While over the whole Holocene up to the entrance of the Industrial Era (1750) natural emissions by heterotrophic processes and fire were supposed to be in equilibrium with the uptake by photosynthesis and the net ocean-atmosphere gas exchange, with the onset of the Industrial Era the IPCC estimates that about 15–40% of the additional emissions cannot further be absorbed by the natural sinks and are accumulating in the atmosphere. The IPCC further argues that CO2 emitted until 2100 will remain in the atmosphere longer than 1000 years, and in the same context it is even mentioned that the removal of human-emitted CO2 from the atmosphere by natural processes will take a few hundred thousand years (high confidence) (see AR5-Chap.6ExecutiveSummary). Since the rising CO2 concentrations go along with an increasing greenhouse effect and, thus, a further global warming, a better understanding of the carbon cycle is a necessary prerequisite for all future climate change predictions.

In their accounting schemes and models of the carbon cycle the IPCC uses many new and detailed data which are primarily focussing on fossil fuel emission, cement fabrication or net land use change (see AR5-WG1- Chap.6.3.2), but it largely neglects any changes of the natural emissions, which contribute to more than 95 % to the total emissions and by far cannot be assumed to be constant over longer periods (see, e.g.: variations over the last 800,000 years (Jouzel et al., 2007); the last glacial termination (Monnin et al., 2001); or the younger Holocene (Monnin et al., 2004; Wagner et al., 2004)).

Since our own estimates of the average CO2 residence time in the atmosphere differ by several orders of magnitude from the announced IPCC values, and on the other hand actual investigations of Humlum et al. (2013) or Salby (2013, 2016) show a strong relation between the natural CO2 emission rate and the surface temperature, this was motivation enough to scrutinize the IPCC accounting scheme in more detail and to contrast this to our own calculations.

Different to the IPCC we start with a rate equation for the emission and absorption processes, where the uptake is not assumed to be saturated but scales proportional with the actual CO2 concentration in the atmosphere (see also Essenhigh, 2009; Salby, 2016). This is justified by the observation of an exponential decay of 14C. A fractional saturation, as assumed by the IPCC, can directly be expressed by a larger residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere and makes a distinction between a turnover time and adjustment time needless.

Based on this approach and as solution of the rate equation we derive a concentration at steady state, which is only determined by the product of the total emission rate and the residence time. Under present conditions the natural emissions contribute 373 ppm and anthropogenic emissions 17 ppm to the total concentration of 390 ppm (2012). For the average residence time we only find 4 years.

The stronger increase of the concentration over the Industrial Era up to present times can be explained by introducing a temperature dependent natural emission rate as well as a temperature affected residence time. With this approach not only the exponential increase with the onset of the Industrial Era but also the concentrations at glacial and cooler interglacial times can well be reproduced in full agreement with all observations.

So, different to the IPCC’s interpretation the steep increase of the concentration since 1850 finds its natural explanation in the self accelerating processes on the one hand by stronger degassing of the oceans as well as a faster plant growth and decomposition, on the other hand by an increasing residence time at reduced solubility of CO2 in oceans. Together this results in a dominating temperature controlled natural gain, which contributes about 85% to the 110 ppm CO2 increase over the Industrial Era, whereas the actual anthropogenic emissions of 4.3% only donate 15%. These results indicate that almost all of the observed change of CO2 during the Industrial Era followed, not from anthropogenic emission, but from changes of natural emission. The results are consistent with the observed lag of CO2 changes behind temperature changes (Humlum et al., 2013; Salby, 2013), a signature of cause and effect. Our analysis of the carbon cycle, which exclusively uses data for the CO2 concentrations and fluxes as published in AR5, shows that also a completely different interpretation of these data is possible, this in complete conformity with all observations and natural causalities.

On Myopic, Lop-sided Climatism

Fearless Physics from Dr. Salby

Climate Reductionism

More on CO2

CO2 Fluxes, Sources and Sinks

Obsessed with Human CO2

Not Worried About CO2

Live and Let Live, It’s the American Way

Posted on by Ron Clutz

People are fed up with political correctness and walking on eggs because differences are now socially disturbing (micro-aggressions anyone?). The progressive war on individual diversity in the name of “social Justice” strikes at the heart of modern democratic society and free enterprise. James I. Wallner writes at Law and Liberty Make America Diverse Again. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. The motto, emblazoned on one side of the Great Seal of the United States, succinctly captures the dual nature of the American founding. With just thirteen letters, it invokes both the revolutionary act by which thirteen separate colonies declared their independence from Great Britain and the subsequent decision of the new states to join together to form one nation. Foreshadowing the unprecedented success of the American experiment in self-government, Novus Ordo Seclorum (new order of the ages), is inscribed on the seal’s opposite side. The two inscriptions serve as a reminder that in the United States, for the first time in human history, free citizens call the shots instead of their rulers.

Cracking the Code of Freedom

Of course, Americans are not the first people to establish a government on the idea of political equality. That distinction belongs to Athenians who, in the fifth century BCE, used the terms isonomia (equality of law) and isegoria (equality of speech) to distinguish their unique form of self-government from neighboring Greek tyrannies, as well as from Persian despotism. Among the Athenians, isokratia (equality of power) prevailed when no citizen was considered to be above the law, and all took part in making it.

Yet the idea of political equality proved challenging to sustain in practice. The Athenians soon realized that they could not secure sufficient space for politics on a permanent basis amidst the frustrations and uncertainty inherent in collective decision-making under conditions of equality. For that reason, their experiment in self-government ended in failure, as would all those that came after until the American founding.

What makes America exceptional is that its people alone broke free of the destructive cycle in which a people seeking freedom would overthrow their tyrant and establish self-government, only to find themselves inevitably succumbing to a new tyranny. Americans were able to do so because they grasped the relationship between freedom and equality on the one hand and space and diversity on the other. The genius of the Constitution should thus be understood as creating a space in which a diverse multitude could rule as one; where free citizens (or their representatives) could gather to resolve their differences based on equality. In contrast to the Athenians’ direct democracy, the Constitution secured that space against encroachments by would-be tyrants by harnessing the conflict in a diverse republic and infusing it into institutional structures like bicameralism, separation of powers, and federalism.

The Triumph of Ideology

Regrettably, this understanding of American exceptionalism is overlooked in today’s political discourse. On both the left and the right, there is a worrisome tendency to gloss over the vital role played by diversity and the conflict it generates.

Both have a tendency to subsume individual difference to demographic categories, in the case of liberals, or abstract ideas, in the case of conservatives.

Yet individual difference, regardless of its source, is the very basis of equality and freedom. Whereas the founders understood politics as an activity in which citizens participate alongside their peers to make collective decisions, today’s liberals and conservatives think of it primarily as the process by which one group can impose its particular standard of truth on those with whom its members disagree. When that happens, citizens are neither equal nor free. That is, they are not allowed to participate in the debate over what particular standard of truth is imposed on the public sphere. Political discourse is transformed into a process whereby combatants delegitimize their opponents on the grounds that they disagree with their standard of the truth.

For example, consider the debate over multiculturalism, or identity politics. The president of the Claremont Institute, Ryan Williams, recently proclaimed multiculturalism to be an “existential threat to the American political order.” According to Williams, the concept is incompatible with political equality and that, if left unchecked, will lead ultimately to the balkanization of America, thus reversing the motto—E uno plura. Out of one, many.

However, to the extent that multiculturalism threatens the American political order, it is only because it destroys the space needed for American self-government to work. It declares entire groups of citizens unfit for politics based on the color of their skin or the nature of their beliefs. Williams rightly points out that so-called multiculturalists are more concerned with denying people with different views or backgrounds that ability to participate in politics than they are with genuine diversity. With its universalizing tendencies, multiculturalism thus ironically eradicates the diversity that makes political equality possible in the first place. In other words, the threat to equality arises out of the “ism” part of multiculturalism, not the “multicultural” part. In that way, multiculturalism is un-American because it is a rigid ideology that does not tolerate dissent from its worldview.

It is the universal and abstract nature of multiculturalism that makes it inconsistent with the very idea of political equality. Free citizens (the many) need a shared space in which they can make decisions affecting the community (the one) because they are all equal. They are equal because they are all different. No two citizens can be considered to be identical in any respect other than the fact that they are both unique individuals who possess distinct abilities, characteristics, interests, and passions, and, in the United States, they both possess the same right to participate in politics. This is what makes self-government possible: the equal participation of different individuals in politics inevitably generates conflict between them in the space where politics occurs. That conflict, in turn, prevents any one person or group of people from amassing the power needed to destroy that space and rule others.

Given this, the case against multiculturalism rests entirely on the ideological threat it poses to American diversity. If the critics of multiculturalism fail to make this point explicit, they leave open the possibility that their opposition to the ideology is due not to the fact that it lacks a standard against which the American regime can be evaluated but because it proposes the wrong standard. In doing so, they wind up declaring entire groups of citizens unfit for politics based on their particular conception of what it means to be an American.

Replacing one ideology with another does nothing to mitigate the threat of ideology. It makes no difference whether the ideology is based on an appeal to overcome a racist past, in the case of some multiculturalists, or to abstract natural rights, in the case of some conservatives. What matters is that the standard of truth that these multiculturalists and conservatives claim to be self-evident is derived by them from a space outside of the actual experience of politics. Its applications to activity inside the public sphere transforms free citizens into cogs in a production process geared towards the realization of a master design. In the process, both freedom and equality are destroyed.

Understanding Politics in Terms of Conflict

This does not mean that there is no truth. The point is that, in America, the standards against which political action is measured can only be defined by a process that is itself characterized by political equality. When politics is no longer understood in these terms, it is no longer an activity in which free citizens call the shots instead of their rulers. The unambiguous lesson of the past is that freedom and equality cannot last long in the absence of diversity and conflict.

Unity grounded in anything other than difference is tyranny.

To sustain the idea of political equality, we must understand American exceptionalism not in universal and abstract terms but rather as something that arises out of a particular kind of practice. In other words, it is the essential activity of being an American that defines who Americans are as a people. It is that which allows them to deliberate on and fight over the truths that they hold to be self-evident.

That is the only way we can ensure that E pluribus unum will last long enough to constitute a novus ordo seclorum.

Is Climate Catastrophe the Lie Whose Time Has Come?

Posted on by Ron Clutz

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” — Joseph Goebbels

The US election cycle is heating up, while the Brexit melodrama is morphing into “Zero Carbon, Please.”  Kids are in the streets on Fridays or suing the government in courts.  Oil Companies are under pressure to commit Hari-Kari by those proposing that wind and solar power be ramped up from 2% of global energy supply to 89% in 12 years.  Can the herd grow any madder than this?

A recent CNN poll of Democrats had 96% saying any presidential nominee has to promise aggressive action to slow climate change, numbers right up there with Mom and apple pie.  And they demand candidates have a whole debate dedicated to climate change so the dozen or so pols can be checked for sincerity.

Progressives certainly think the issue is a winner for them because most Americans agree with them.  But do they really?  How reliable are these polls?  One that is frequently mentioned in support of climate belief by the masses is dissected below so you can draw your own conclusions.

Climate Change Is a State of Mind

A recent survey by Yale and George Mason activists is another reminder that “climate change” is actually a branch of environmental psychology. Consider that “climate” is an human construct, defined as the pattern of weather we remember in our living space over seasons and years. And “climate change” is therefore an added belief that our expectations about future weather are uncertain and unreliable. And so, attitude surveys are a suitable way to explore an issue that is wholly a matter of public opinion, IOW a state of mind rather than a state of nature.

The survey is appropriately entitled: Climate Change in the American Mind. Title is link to the website for the 2018 edition, with earlier results back to 2008.

The resources there are informative, including articles expressing both satisfactions and disappointments with the levels of belief and concern expressed by survey participants. The compliant mass media cherry pick various findings, giving headlines like these.

“We’ve entered a new era” of climate concern, survey finds CBS

Americans Believe in Climate Change, But Not Climate Action NYmag

Yale Poll: Climate Change ‘Personally Important’ to Record Number of Americans EcoWatch

Most Americans Don’t Know Vast Majority Of Scientists Agree On Climate Change CleanTechnica

Most Americans now worry about climate change—and want to fix it National Geographic

Poll Shows Most People Believe ‘Global Warming is Happening’ necn

Survey reveals 70% of Americans favour the environment over economic growth ClimateAction

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What is the American Mindset according to the Survey?

So beyond details of particular responses, what can we learn from this series of polls about the American state of mind regarding global warming/climate change?

The specific questions and response patterns are at Appendix I: Data Tables & Sample Demographics

There are a lot of questions asked and answered, including exploring a complete range of feelings people have on the issue. I will summarize the central questions and the pattern of responses over the last decade.

Click on image to enlarge.

The core set of global warming beliefs are listed on the left.  The marked lines show the % of responses each one achieved over the years.  For example, over 50% agreed to four of them in 2018: GW is happening, GW is man made, Future generations will be greatly harmed and Most scientists agree.  Other patterns are also of interest.  Personal experience of GW effects is reported by almost 50%, while only 30% are very worried.  Indeed, people are less concerned about harm to themselves or even the US, then they are fearful for Developing Countries (DCs) and for Future Generations.

Notice there is a general curve to most of the answer time series.  Beliefs are only slightly higher in 2018 than they were in 2008.  In general, the %s were flat or declining in this decade until starting to rise again around 2014.  This points to the linkage between the opinions held by the public and the emphasis promoted in the mass media.  Compare the curvature in the above graph with this chart of climate change coverage in leading US newpapers.

The chart and research come from International Collective on Environment, Culture & Politics, AKA ICECaP.  Note the peaks in 2007-8 at the time of IPCC AR4 and Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth flick, and in 2009-10 around the time of the Copenhagen COP.  The Climategate emails were also in the news in 2010, but for some reason newspapers were less interested in that aspect, the topic dropped in coverage.

The spike in 2013 coincides with Obama’s SOTU speech featuring climate change as the “defining issue of our time.”  The rise in climate change coverage in recent years is a more complex matter.

Climate journalists (like most all journalists) have been obsessed with trashing Donald Trump, and climate change is mentioned often as a subset of Trump complaints.  Consider this chart from Media Matters.

See that huge spike in the middle? That’s from June 1, 2017, when President Donald Trump announced that he intended to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement. No other day in the last three years saw anywhere near that much coverage. When Trump stages an event related to climate change, the media snap to attention. The rest of the time it’s like, “Climate what?”

That aligns with what Media Matters found when we looked at climate coverage on broadcast TV news programs in 2017: Trump dominated the news segments about climate change. Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, in the International Collective on Environment, Culture & Politics, reached a similar conclusion when they analyzed TV news coverage from November of this year: “In US television coverage of climate change or global warming in November 2018, ‘Trump’ was explicitly invoked over fourteen times more frequently than the words ‘science’ or ‘scientists’ together and nearly four times more frequently than the word ‘climate’ itself.”

A research group at the University of Colorado-Boulder, the International Collective on Environment, Culture and Politics (ICE CaPs), produced the findings that illustrate how much climate coverage has been driven by President Donald Trump. It examined coverage last year in five major American newspapers: The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times. In the 4,117 stories in those papers that mentioned “climate change” or “global warming,” the word “Trump” appeared 19,184 times — an average of nearly 4.7 times per article.

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My Mind is Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts. H/T Bjorn Lomborg, WUWT

 

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Summary

To summarize, Survey Says:

What He Said:   “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” (Obama tweet).  The survey could be reduced to one question:  Do you agree with this tweet?

There is not much upward movement in public belief in global warming/climate change.  There is increased attention from the left-leaning media as part of their general dislike of the Trump administration. One more time, who made global warming into a political rather than a scientific issue?

 

Earth and Universe As Never Seen Before

Posted on by Ron Clutz

This is an introduction to amazing graphics done by Eleanor Lutz (no relation) at her website Tabletop Whale, an original science illustration blog. Above is a data-based view of Earth’s seasons. If you watch in full screen, the four corners show views of the cycle from top, bottom, and sides. Below is her map of the solar system, showing how much scientific information is represented in the illustration (H/T Real Clear Science)

An Orbit Map of the Solar System
JUNE 10 2019 · Link to the Open-Source Code

This week’s map shows the orbits of more than 18000 asteroids in the solar system. This includes everything we know of that’s over 10km in diameter – about 10000 asteroids – as well as 8000 randomized objects of unknown size. This map shows each asteroid at its exact position on New Years’ Eve 1999.

All of the data for this map is shared by NASA and open to the public. However, the data is stored in several different databases so I had to do a decent amount of data cleaning. I’ve explained all of the steps in detail in my open-source code and tutorial, so I’ll just include a sketch of the process here in this blog post:

To see details, open image in new tab, then click on it to enlarge.

To see details, open the image in a new tab, then click on it to enlarge. Then browse the solar system to your heart’s content.