Climate Ideology

Breaking the Climate Spell

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

Rupert Darwall is one of the more knowledgeable people concerning how the world came under the spell of global warming/climate change. This post features his recent article regarding how the worldwide delusion may be losing its power. Breaking the Climate Spell. appeared today in the Weekly Standard.  Excerpts below in italics with my bolds.

Getting out of the Paris Agreement was just the first step on the road to a realist global energy policy. Thirteen years ago, a Republican president who had pulled the United States out of an onerous climate treaty faced isolation at the annual gathering of Western leaders. “Tony Blair is contemplating an unprecedented rift with the U.S. over climate change at the G8 summit next week, which will lead to a final communiqué agreed by seven countries with President George Bush left out on a limb,” the Guardian reported of the meeting at Glen­eagles, Scotland. France and Germany preferred an unprecedented split communiqué to a weak one, the article said.

George W. Bush, who had pulled the country out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2003, blinked and agreed to an official document that affirmed global warming was occurring and that “we know enough to act now.” The 2005 G8 put the United States back on the path that ultimately led through the Copenhagen climate summit—when China and India thwarted U.S.-led attempts at a global climate treaty—to the Paris Agreement 11 years later.

There was a very different American president this June at the Charlevoix G7 (as it has been since Russia’s suspension in 2014). Had it not been for the row with Justin Trudeau, when the Canadian prime minister responded to President Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs with retaliatory tariffs of his own, the big story would have been the climate split. Where 15 years ago the mere possibility of isolation pushed Bush to compromise, Trump embraced the isolation and inserted an America-only paragraph into the summit communiqué outlining a position fundamentally contradicting the rest of the group’s.

Donald Trump with G7 leaders in Charlevoix, Canada, June 9. Credit: Jesco Denzel / Bundesregierung / Getty

“The United States believes sustainable economic growth and development depends on universal access to affordable and reliable energy resources,” it reads, going on to offer a manifesto for global energy realism. That single paragraph is more definitive than the president’s announcement last August that the United States would be withdrawing from the Paris treaty. After all, George W. Bush nixed the Kyoto Protocol that Bill Clinton signed. And Trump, when announcing the Paris withdrawal, left the door open to U.S. participation in a renegotiated climate deal. At Charlevoix, he closed it. Unlike in 2005, it’s very hard now to see any way back.

This is about far more than process. Trump is breaking the spell of inevitability of the transition to renewable energy. The impression of irresistible momentum has been one of the most potent tools in enforcing compliance with the climate catechism. Like socialism, the clean-energy transition will fail because it doesn’t work. But it requires strong leadership to avoid the ruin that will disprove the false promise of cost-free decarbonization.

That reality is already hurting those countries that are farther down the renewable-energy path of ruin than the United States—and, when offered the chance, voters are taking it out on politicians. In March, a fanatically pro-wind and solar energy Labor government in South Australia, one of the eight states and territories that make up the country, decided to make the state elections a referendum on renewable energy. With some of the world’s most expensive electricity and a serious blackout in 2016, South Australia voters kicked out Labor and voted in a government vowing to repeal the state’s renewable-energy target.

Days before Justin Trudeau took the center of the global stage as host of the G7 summit, his Liberal party was trounced in provincial elections in Ontario. The province’s party had won four consecutive terms in office and had pressed virtually every pro-renewable, anti-hydrocarbon policy imaginable. In the June 7 elections, they took just seven seats in the 124-seat legislature. “I made a promise to the people that we would take immediate action to scrap the cap-and-trade carbon tax and bring their gas prices down,” newly elected premier Doug Ford announced.

 

Nowhere has confrontation with the physical and economic realities of renewable energy been more painful than Germany, the birthplace of renewable-energy ideology. As party leaders negotiated a new coalition agreement after the September 2017 elections, they acknowledged for the first time that Germany was going to miss the sacrosanct 2020 target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels. This had been set in 2007, and the first 20 percent had been easy. Thanks to German reunification, the former East Germany had seen its industries collapse, and there were plenty of inefficient power stations to close. It had always been clear, Angela Merkel declared three weeks after the September federal elections, that it was not going to be easy to cut the other 20 percent “at a time of relatively strong economic growth.” Note: Stronger growth equals higher emissions.

Launching the German renewables transition in 2004, energy minister Jürgen Trittin promised that it would put no more than the cost of an ice cream on monthly electricity bills. Nine years later, his successor, Peter Alt­maier, admitted that the costs could amount to $1.34 trillion by the end of the 2030s. At a meeting in June of E.U. energy ministers, Germany ran up the white flag. Altmaier shocked fellow E.U. energy ministers by rejecting higher renewable-energy targets. “We’re not going to manage that,” he told them. “Nowhere in Europe is going to manage that. Even if we did manage to get enough electric cars, we wouldn’t have enough renewable energy to keep them on the road.”

No country has a greater abundance of hydrocarbon energy than the United States. The corollary is that no country was as big a loser from participating in the Paris Agreement and its intention to progressively decarbonize the world’s hydrocarbon superpower. On July 10, the Energy Information Administration forecast that next year, the United States will produce 12 million barrels of oil a day and overtake Saudi Arabia to be the world’s number-one producer. When it comes to the politics of energy, the interests of the United States and European green ideology are irreconcilable.

Donald Trump understands this. “Our country is blessed with extraordinary energy abundance, which we didn’t know of even 5 years ago and certainly 10 years ago,” the president said in 2017. Those remarks were not only a paean to America’s energy resources, they were a full-dress rejection of the policies of his predecessor and of the Democrats’ goal of Europeanizing American energy policy.

“We have nearly 100 years’ worth of natural gas and more than 250 years’ worth of clean, beautiful coal. We are a top producer of petroleum and the number-one producer of natural gas. We have so much more than we ever thought possible. We are really in the driving seat. And you know what? We don’t want to let other countries take away our sovereignty and tell us what to do and how to do it. That’s not going to happen. With these incredible resources, my administration will seek not only American energy independence that we’ve been looking for for so long, but American energy dominance. And we’re going to be an exporter—exporter. We will be dominant. We will export American energy all over the world, all around the globe. These energy exports will create countless jobs for our people, and provide true energy security to our friends, partners, and allies all across the globe.”

For the first time since 1992, when George H.W. Bush went to the Rio Earth Summit, an American president was outlining a global energy strategy diametrically opposed to the tenets underlying the U.N. climate process. Trump was establishing a rival pole based on energy realism and energy abundance.

The Rio Summit was the brainchild of Canadian ­Maurice Strong, and he understood that what most motivates political leaders, bureaucrats, and corporate CEOs is the fear of being left out. “The process is the policy,” Strong said, and the annual climate conferences that have been held since the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted in Rio created a sense of irresistible momentum. It’s that spell Trump is now breaking. Countries around the world are being damaged by the anti-hydrocarbon policies encouraged by the U.N., but leaving the Paris Agreement was a step only the United States was strong enough to take. Now it is up to the Trump administration to help other countries act in their economic interests.

Energy secretary Rick Perry has talked of U.S. willingness to lead a global alliance of countries wanting to make fossil fuels cleaner rather than abandoning them. Of the G7, Japan has traditionally been most leery of decarbonization, and after the 2011 Fukushima accident Japan decided to expand its coal-fired generating capacity by half, building 45 new coal power stations.

Poland is another coal-based economy that has no intention of phasing out coal. Of all energy-realist nations, Poland is the one that sees eye to eye with the Trump administration. During the Brezhnev years, Poland—alone of the Eastern Bloc nations—refused to sign up to sulphur-emission cuts designed to isolate the U.K. and the United States at the height of the acid rain scare. As host of the next round of U.N. climate talks, at Katowice in December, Poland is more than usually important as a U.S. energy ally. Australia, the world’s largest coal exporter, is another obvious U.S. partner.

Where the United States can make the biggest difference, though, is with the developing nations who depend on overseas finance to build out their electrical grids and need the cheap, reliable energy only coal can supply. Last September, Southeast Asian energy ministers, noting the rising use of coal in the region, called for greater promotion of clean coal. In June, India struck a strategic energy partnership with the United States, described by Perry as an “amazing opportunity for U.S. energy” to sell clean coal, nuclear technology, oil, and gas.

In October 2016, Nigeria’s finance minister, Kemi Adeosun, railed against the West’s energy imperialism and the hypocrisy of using coal to industrialize and then denying it to Africans. “By telling us not to use coal they are pushing us into the destructive cycle of underdevelopment; while you have the competitive advantages, you tie our hands behind us,” she said.

Denying the world’s poor cheap electricity is the official policy of the World Bank. In 2012, Barack Obama agreed to the appointment of Jim Yong Kim as president of the World Bank, and the next year, the bank stopped the financing of coal-fired generation. Although the Trump administration publicly opposes the coal ban and the United States has the largest number of votes at the World Bank, the institution is doubling down on its anti-fossil-fuel agenda. At Emmanuel Macron’s climate summit in December 2017, Kim announced the bank was extending the financing ban to upstream oil and gas. Here is the first order of business for a global energy alliance—to pressure the World Bank to lift its hydrocarbon financing bans and serve the world’s poor rather than sacrifice them to a regressive climate agenda.

As it is, China is the biggest winner from the World Bank’s energy policies. A June 2017 World Bank report notes China’s “global dominance” in the supply of materials needed by renewable energy technologies. In addition to China’s control over the supply of base and rare-earth metals, last year 7 of the top 10 global suppliers of solar panels were headquartered in China. An eighth is in Hong Kong and a ninth in Canada, but with Chinese links. For as long as the World Bank’s hydrocarbon-financing bans remain, American taxpayers will be funding a war on American coal and subsidizing China’s solar industry. If this seems an unappealing prospect, the Trump administration should move fast to assemble the necessary votes ahead of the World Bank meeting in October.

Domestically, the climate caravan keeps rolling. At the beginning of June, 13 Republican senators wrote to the president urging him to submit the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, described by the U.N. as “another global commitment to stop climate change,” for the Senate’s advice and consent. Two weeks later, the New York Times carried a report and associated op-ed by former senators Trent Lott and John Breaux on a new group, Americans for Carbon Dividends, which has hired the bipartisan pair to lobby for a carbon tax. “We must put a meaningful price on carbon,” they wrote, arguing for a $40 per ton tax “high enough to encourage a turn to cleaner energy sources.”

Former Fed chair Janet Yellen, another member of the group, told the Times that taxing carbon emissions is “absolutely standard textbook economics.” The textbook actually teaches that a carbon tax would be efficient if it replaced all the tax credits, subsidies, portfolio standards, and regulations supporting the expansion of uneconomic wind and solar energy. Their inherent defect is that the amount of energy they produce depends on the weather, not on demand. Because of the way the electrical grid works, they dump their intermittency costs on other generators, particularly the reliable coal and nuclear plants. It is not surprising that the backers of Americans for Carbon Dividends and its seven-figure annual budget include First Solar, Inc. and the American Wind Energy Association.

Only a small portion of the putative climate benefits of a carbon tax would ever flow back to the United States in the form of avoided climate impacts. Insofar as cutting greenhouse gas emissions creates environmental benefits, it’s a vast foreign aid program in which costs are incurred domestically and most of the benefits go abroad. Worse still, federal government estimates of the social costs of carbon still rely on climate models using computer-simulated data. These produce higher values than estimates based on actual climate data. According to a 2017 paper by the economists Kevin Dayaratna, Ross McKitrick, and David Kreutzer, a $37 per ton carbon tax using model-based estimates for the climate sensitivity of carbon dioxide would be halved if based on empirical data. Dayaratna, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has also noted that one of the impact assessment models used by the Obama administration even produces a negative estimate for the social cost of carbon under “very reasonable assumptions.” A negative carbon tax—subsidizing carbon emissions—is hardly what First Solar and the American Wind Energy Association are funding some of Washington’s most expensive lobbyists for.

For all the energy revolution so far, the Trump administration’s energy agenda remains incomplete. The Clean Power Plan is being rolled back, but the EPA’s 2009 greenhouse-gas endangerment finding on which it stood remains in place. There has been talk from the administration of creating red and blue opposing teams of climate scientists to give politicians and the public a more balanced view of our understanding of climate. On energy policy, Rick Perry’s grid-security study can be extended to examine how wind and solar subsidies distort the costs of electricity. That way, Americans will begin to see the true price of renewables and the extra they’ll have to pay to keep the lights on thanks to the intermittency problem of generating energy from the winds and the sun.

Exiting Paris was the first step. The president has also ended his predecessor’s war on coal. Globally, the administration’s continued advocacy for energy realism can win friends among the world’s poor and make allies of some of the world’s most dynamic economies. The geostrategic potential of American energy is already being felt. American gas is being shipped to Poland and American coal to Ukraine—reducing the region’s dependence on Russian gas. As the president pointed out at the NATO summit in early July, Germany’s pipeline will see it paying “billions of dollars” a year to Russia, although he subsequently undercut the strategic logic of his argument at the disastrous press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on July 16. The Trump administration should now formalize its ties with other energy-realistic nations and show the world the benefits of America’s energy exceptionalism—jobs at home, booming exports, and an escape from dismal energy policies predicated on bogus resource shortages. Having broken the spell, America and its friends around the world can reap the benefits.

Rupert Darwall is the author of Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex.

Climatist Revolutionaries

Posted on by Ron Clutz


Obama and other Western political leaders have been saying that Climate Change is the biggest threat to modern society. I am coming around to agree, but not in the way they are thinking. I mean there is fresh evidence that we can defeat radical Islam, but radical climatism is already eroding the foundations of our modern societies.  I refer to climate alarm and activism, which has come to dominate the environmental movement and impose an agenda for social re-engineering.  At the end of this post is my understanding of their revolutionary game plan, but first a new report on the strategy and current events in the campaign.

A fresh confirmation of my insights from two years ago regarding the motives and tactics of the radical anti-fossil fuel movement is provided in The Conversation article All the battles being waged against fossil fuel infrastructure are following a single strategy Excerpts in italics with my bolds

Keep it in the ground

The overarching aim is to prevent as much new fossil fuel infrastructure as possible from being built and shutting down as many operations as possible. It’s all part of a “keep it in the ground” strategy with “it” referencing fossil fuels.

This wide-ranging attempt to block oil, gas and coal infrastructure emerged after the American political system tried and failed to deal with climate change.

Many of this movement’s rank-and-file members reached two main conclusions regarding this failure. Real climate action, they decided, would require a broad-based, grassroots social movement. And the oil, gas and coal industries’ influence over the nation’s political system, through financial donations to politicians and other activities, was to blame for the lack of climate action in the U.S.

As one movement strategist at a prominent climate advocacy organization told me, a large number of climate activists at that point became determined to bring about what they called the managed decline of the fossil fuel industries.

They are trying to expedite the demise of the oil, gas and coal businesses through a death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach that includes several strategies. One is getting investors, including university endowments and public sector pension funds, to stop investing in fossil fuel stocks and other assets. When I researched this divestment movement with journalism professor Jill Hopke, we found that activists were trying to chip away at the moral legitimacy of the oil, gas and coal industries. Another is fighting new fossil fuel infrastructure through civil disobedience and litigation.

celts-storm-exxon

Climate Activists storm the bastion of Exxon Mobil, here seen without their shareholder disguises.

The Trump effect
The keep it in the ground movement has gained a new sense of urgency during the Trump administration.

Because of this new political climate, activists have concentrated harder than ever on local actions, such as fighting pipelines and other infrastructure projects, wherever they believe they can make a difference during the Trump years. This stands in contrast to their strategy of only a few years ago that focused at least to some degree on influencing national policies.

The Climatist Game Plan

Mission: Deindustrialize Civilization

Goal: Drive industrial corporations into Bankruptcy

Strategy: Cut off the Supply of Cheap, Reliable Energy

Tactics:

  • Raise the price of fossil fuels
  • Force the power grid to use expensive, unreliable renewables
  • Demonize Nuclear energy
  • Spread fear of extraction technologies such as fracking
  • Increase regulatory costs on energy production
  • Scare investors away from carbon energy companies
  • Stop pipelines because they are too safe and efficient
  • Force all companies to account for carbon usage and risk

Progress:

  • UK steel plants closing their doors.
  • UK coal production scheduled to cease this year.
  • US coal giant Peabody close to shutting down.
  • Smaller US oil companies going bankrupt in record numbers.
  • Etc.

Collateral Damage:

  • 27,000 extra deaths in UK from energy poverty.
  • Resource companies in Canada cut 17,000 jobs in a single month.
  • Ontario green energy policy results in highest NA electricity rates and largest debt among the world’s sub-sovereign borrowers.
  • EU farmers now growing more biofuels instead of food crops.
  • Etc.

Summary:

Radical climatism is playing the endgame while others are sleeping, or discussing the holes in the science. Truly, the debate is over (not ever having happened) now that all nations have signed up to the Paris COP doctrine. Political leaders are willing, even enthusiastic dupes, while climatist tactics erode the foundations of industrial society.  Deaths and unemployment are unavoidable, but then the planet already has too many people anyway.

ISIS is an immediate threat, but there is a deeper and present danger already doing damage to the underpinnings of Life As We Know It. It is the belief in Climate Change and the activists executing their game plan.  Make no mistake: they are well-funded, well-organized and mean business.  And the recent behavior of valve-turners, acting illegally to shut off supplies of fossil fuel energy, shows they are willing to go very far to impose their will upon the rest of us.

See Also:  Upping the Stakes for Ecoterrorists

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Heat Wave AGW Hysteria Not So Much. Why?

Posted on by Ron Clutz

An editorial at Investor’s Business Daily poses the question: Why Hasn’t The California Heat Wave Sparked The Usual Global Warming Hysteria?  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

It wasn’t long ago when the mainstream press took every opportunity, no matter how weak the connection, to blame bad things on global warming. So far, at least, we haven’t found one major story using the heat wave gripping the southwest to sound the alarm about global warming.

This lack of alarmism has not gone unnoticed.

Writing at the New Republic this week, Emily Atkin complained that despite record-breaking heat and a wildfire season that, she says, is already worse than usual, “there’s no climate connection to be found in much news coverage, even in historically climate-conscious outlets like NPR and The New York Times.”

When Atkin contacted NPR for an explanation, the network’s science editor said “You don’t just want to be throwing around, ‘This is due to climate change, that is due to climate change.‘”

Wow.

Also this week, Chris Hayes of the uber-liberal MSNBC responded to a complaint on Twitter that his network wasn’t clanging the global warming alarm bells loudly enough or regularly enough with this tweet:

“every single time we’ve covered it’s been a palpable ratings killer. so the incentives are not great.”

So why this sudden outburst of common sense among the mainstream press?

Perhaps they’ve come to the realization that after decades of end-of-the-world predictions and oversaturation coverage, during which time global temperatures have barely budged, the public has stopped paying attention. You can only predict the end of the world so many times, after all, before people start to get skeptical.

The attempts by scientists and environmental activists to blame everything on global warming has probably increased public skepticism as well. Case in point is a video running on the Weather Channel app about a study that claims to have found a link between suicides and climate change. Even an uninformed public will start to question the validity of all these wild claims.

The public may also have noticed that the most vocal preachers of climate change doom — Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, etc. — don’t act like there’s any crisis whatsoever. They still own huge energy sucking mansions and party on massive gas guzzling yachts.

They aren’t the only global warming hypocrites. A survey earlier this year by researchers at the University of Michigan and Cornell University found that those who said they were “highly concerned” about global warming were the least likely to take individual action. Skeptics were more likely to do the things the alarmist demand: recycle, use public transportation and so forth.

How big a crisis can climate change be if those who scream the loudest about it can’t be bothered to change their own behavior?

Whatever the cause of the climate ennui, it’s clear that years of proselytizing about the “existential threat” posed by a warmer planet has failed to win many converts.

In fact, a recent Gallup survey asked people to name the most important problems facing the country today. Neither “climate change” nor “global warming” even showed up on the list of more than 45 items. Just 2% named “environment/pollution.”

We’d say the public has it right. But don’t be surprised if the media returns to its climate change obsession, if only to take a break from its Trump obsession.

Update July 28:

As if on cue the mainstream media is now awash with headlines claiming AGW is causing heat waves and forest fires.

Summary

The editors are referring to major mainstream media not rising to the bait as usual.  Of course, the activist alarmist websites and blogs have been going crazy with this momentary weather situation.  I noticed, however, on one of the twitter threads comments from a few climate researchers confiding that they don’t speak out lest they be branded as Alarmists.

Now that is progress if scientists are taking to heart the need to be balanced and objective conveying information.  Fame and fortune may still await a breakthrough scary climate finding, but now responses will include skeptical voices. The public is not as naive and gullible as before, having been spoofed too often.

See Also:  On climate polling trickery The Art of Rigging Climate Polls

And why climate and suicides do not mix Stanford Jumps Suicide Climate Shark

Climatist Suicidal Obession

Posted on by Ron Clutz


Fresh evidence this week linking climate alarm and suicidal fascination.  I am referring to all the mass media reports right now that climate change will cause large numbers of suicides.  The claim (yet again from my alma mater Stanford) is ludicrous for many reasons:

1. A suicide is a personal event with many contributing factors, weather and climate being the most peripheral.

2. Serious suicide researchers have identified risk factors that inform caregivers, no mention of climate.  Franklin et al. provide this analysis of experience with suicidal incidents Risk Factors for Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors: A Meta-Analysis of 50 Years of Research.

suicide-risk-factors1

With such complexity of influencing factors, putting emphasis on a bit of warming is both myopic and lopsided. For example, some places report springtime suicides are more frequent, others see more such deaths in Summer or Autumn. The seasonal relationship is quite mixed in studies with various theories being suggested along with great uncertainty.

3. Suicides occur more frequently in colder climates than in warmer ones. For example, European studies find the highest rates in eastern European nations and lowest rates in Mediterranean countries.

4. Preventing suicides is a serious issue, and has nothing to do with reducing CO2.

But the whole climate alarm movement is stained with a suicidal impulse and disdain for humanity

Micheal Walsh published The Suicidal Narrative of the Modern Environmental Left, November 16, 2017.

Walsh presents two recent experiences showing how environmental concerns are embedded everywhere including plane trips and merchandising, then gets into the implications. His text with my bolds and images.

It’s all just advertising, of course, and thus harmless enough. It also goes to reinforcing the narrative: that selfish man is the cause of species endangerment, that primitive societies are superior to developed ones (but then who would buy the locally sourced cocoa beans and moringa leaves?), and that traditional medicine—which is to say, no medicine at all—is somehow superior to what those pill-pushing quacks foist on you before they climb in their BMWs and head out to the links for a round or two of golf. Were that true, the ancient Greeks and Romans might all have lived into their 80s, instead of dying in their 20s and 30s, as unsustainable folks tended to do back then.

Which brings us, ineluctably, to “climate change” and this piece in the Times: “The More Education Republicans Have, the Less They Tend to Believe in Climate Change.” Yes, you read that right:

“Climate change divides Americans, but in an unlikely way: The more education that Democrats and Republicans have, the more their beliefs in climate change diverge.  About one in four Republicans with only a high school education said they worried about climate change a great deal. But among college-educated Republicans, that figure decreases, sharply, to 8 percent.”

The author’s underlying assumption is that the more you know about “man-made climate change,” the more eager you should be to chow down on Endangered Species Chocolate or shovel some women’s-collective moringa into your smoothie before you leave your ant-farm apartment to hop on the mass-transit system on your way to a day job that somehow involves you, personally, saving the planet—not so much by what you do, but by what you don’t do.

But that’s not a future we on the Right want to embrace. I take this poll as a heartening sign that the more you educate yourself about the transparent fraud of “man-made climate change,” the less you’re likely to believe in their genteel fictions of peaceful, happy villages in Liberia or their apocalyptic notions of the End of the World as We Know It, just about any day now. As we’ve learned time and again, mountebanks and charlatans are always promising that the end of days is just around the corner, if only we will repent; find Jesus; join their cult; give away all our possessions; or at least sign up for a lifetime supply of snake oil, delivered by Amazon drones right to our doorsteps.

We’ve seen this movie before, of course. In April, Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute detailed 18 different instances when “[t]he prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong.”

Never mind that the Earth’s climate is always changing; we wouldn’t be here at all if it hadn’t. Never mind that there’s little humans can do to interfere with planetary processes, most of which are beyond our ken. Never mind that we flatter ourselves if we think so. Never mind that to characterize carbon dioxide—which we exhale so that the Amazon rain forest and those West African moringa plants might inhale—as a dangerous “greenhouse gas” is profoundly anti-human.

It’s what you’d expect from a political philosophy that denies God and sees itself as its own worst enemy: a narrative that must end in suicide, and all in the name of the greater good. All we ask our friends on the Left is not to take us with you.

Climate lemmings on the move.

More on the bogus Stanford research linking suicides to climate:  Stanford Jumps Suicide Climate Shark

 

 

 

 

Preschool Alarmist Brainwashing

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

Review from Newsbusters New Magic School Bus to Kids: Use Clean Energy or Monsters Will Eat You Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The Magic School Bus is back in the new Netflix series The Magic School Bus Rides Again! Overall, it’s still a nice, fun 13-episode series like we remember from when we were kids, but with some left turns. There is a pretty predictable take on climate change propaganda for little kids, but that wasn’t the worst. That dubious honor goes to the episode that teaches kids that a monster will eat them if they don’t use alternative clean energy sources.

Of course, conserving energy is a good thing and we should be kind to the earth, but this climate change hysteria is taking over. Usually, somebody will say that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming, and I was surprised that figure didn’t come up in this episode. Could it be that they know how easily debunked that number is? Given the way Dorothy Ann presented man-made climate change as fact, I doubt it.

This issue tends to play incredibly well in the mainstream media, as they use climate change as the universal bad-guy, so I’m sure there were plenty of parents who actually thought this episode was a good idea. I find it hard to believe any parents were happy about this next one, though.

Espisode 12: Monster Power. Click on link below to play short excerpt video.

https://www.mrctv.org/embed/518271

Episode 12, “Monster Power,” teaches kids that a monster will eat them if they don’t use alternative clean energy sources. Albert, one of the students, has seen a movie in which the evil monster loves pollution and is “coming for us next for what we’ve done to this planet!” With the class camping in the woods, Miss Frizzle and the other students help him come up with clean energy alternatives (wind, water, etc) so they won’t be eaten. Instead, Miss Frizzle could tell him that monsters aren’t real, but I guess that didn’t occur to her.

While it makes sense to teach kids the science of pollution and about all kinds of energy (I wouldn’t have minded some talk about oil in the dinosaur episode, to be honest), why would they tell kids that a monster will eat them for using the wrong energy source? I may not have the teaching credentials of Miss Frizzle, but I’m pretty sure that’s not scientifically accurate. They must really hate fossil fuels as much as their friends on the left. Keeping in mind that the TV-Y rating for this series means it’s for kids 2-6, I’m sure there are going to be some parents pretty irked at bedtime when kids are scared of the blot monster.

Overall, this is a cute series and fun bit of nostalgia for those of us who enjoyed the original books (or TV series) as kids, but I could have done without the climate change propaganda, and telling kids that traditional energy sources attract monsters is way over the top. Can’t kids just learn without an anti-scientific social agenda?

 

Update: Climate Change Theater

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

Today we can see again a post discussing Chantal Bilodeau’s theatrical productions concerning warming in Arctic Canada.  At Pacific Standard is today’s article  Chantal Bilodeau Brings Climate Change to the Theater.   Thus I am reposting my previous efforts to find scientific validation for the concerns expressed in her plays, and indeed by residents on Nunavut.

Nunavut is Melting! Or not.

From Yale Climate Connections we heard last week about Nunavut melting and a theatrical production to spread news and concerns about this dangerous development.

“I come from a place of rugged mountains, imperial glaciers and tender-covered permafrost. But Nunavut, our land, is only as rich as it is cold, and today most of it is melting.”That’s Chantal Bilodeau, reading a passage from “Sila,” a play about the effects of climate change in the Arctic.

The characters in her play include polar bears, an Inuit goddess, scientists, and coast guard officers – all working together to save their land.

No doubt her personal experience and feelings for her Nunavut are sincere and profound. (Originally I thought it was her homeland, but in fact she is a New York playwright and translator, born in Montreal.) And there will be a large audience receptive to her concerns about global warming. (Bilodeau has writen six plays about the Arctic and founded the international network Artists And Climate Change.) But I wonder if scientific measurements support her belief that Nunavut is melting.

After all, we have learned from medical research that individual life experiences (anecdotes) may not be true more generally. That is why drugs are tested on population samples with double-blind studies: neither the patient nor the doctor knows who gets the medicine and who gets the placebo.  And when it comes to climate change, every weather event is proclaimed as man made global warming rearing its ugly head.

So I went looking for weather station records to see what is the warming trend in that region. As curiosity does so often, it led me on a journey of discovery, learning some new things, and relearning old ones with fresh implications.

Where are temperatures measured in Nunavut?

It is by far the Northernmost territory of Canada, just off the coast of Northern Greenland.

According to Environment Canada, weather is reported at 29 places in Nunavut. So I went to look at the record at Iqaluit, the capital of the territory. You get monthly normals for the period 1981 to 2010. Historical data (daily averages) can be accessed only 1 individual month/year at a time, the menu stops at 2004. Even then, some months are filled with “M” for missing. Historical data from which trends can be analyzed is hard to come by.

Disappearing Weather Records

It turns out that Nunavut also suffered from the great purging of weather station records that was noticed by skeptics years ago.

Graph showing the correlation between Global Mean Temperature (Average T) and the number of stations included in the global database. Source: Ross McKitrick, U of Guelph

I was aware of this because of a recent study looking at trends at stations around the Arctic circle. Arctic Warming Unalarming.  That study included graphs that showed the dramatic removal of station records in the North.  Though the depletion was not limited to the far North, many Canadian and Russian records disappeared from the global database.

arctic-europe-paper-2015_fig6annual

Fig. 6 Temperature change for annual Arctic averages relative to the temperature during 1961 to 1990 for stations in Europe having more than 150 years of observations. The red curve is the moving 5-year average while the blue curve shows the number of stations reporting in each year. 118 stations contributed to the study. W. A. van Wijngaarden, Theoretical & Applied Climatology (2015)

Eureka, Nunavut, Canada “Last Station above latitude 65N”

Eureka got considerable attention in 2010 due to its surviving the dying out of weather stations. The phrase in quotes above reflects an observation that GISS uses Eureka data to infill across the whole Arctic Circle. That single station record is hugely magnified in its global impact in that temperature reconstruction product. Somewhat like the influence of a single tree in Yamal upon the infamous hockey stick graph.

The first High Arctic Weather Station in history, Eureka was established in April 1947 at 80-degrees north latitude in the vicinity of two rivers, which provided fresh water to the six-man United States Army Air Force team that parachuted in. They erected Jamesway huts to shelter themselves and their equipment until August, when an icebreaker reached Eureka – as it has every year since – and brought permanent buildings and supplies. For decades after that, small, all-male crews would hunker down for entire winters, going a little stir-crazy from the isolation. WUWT 2010

GHCN Records for Nunavut

It turns out that in addition to Eureka, GCHN has data for Alert and Clyde (River), but the latter two histories end in 2004 and 2010, respectively. The adjusted files have a few differences in details, but little change from the unadjusted files. The chart below shows the temperatures measured at Eureka, Nunavut, Canada 79° 98’ N, 85° 93’ W.  The other two stations tell the same story as Eureka, though temperatures at Clyde are warmer in absolute terms due to its more Southerly location.

Eureka temps4

The chart shows Annual, July and January averages along with the lifetime averages of Eureka station from 1948 through 2015.  There is slight variability, and a few years higher than average, but nothing alarming or even enough for people to sense any change.  Note also that annual averages are well below freezing, because only 3 months are above 0° C.  I suppose that someone could play with anomalies and generate a chart that looked scary, but the numbers in the record do not support fears of global warming and melting in Nunavut.

Conclusion

Once again we see media announcements that confuse subjective beliefs with empirical observations of objective reality.  And unfortunately, those observations are less and less available to counter the herd instincts of fearing the future and blaming someone.

Footnote

The map at the top shows how crucial is Nunavut to the Polar Ocean Challenge.  If the Northabout  successfuly negotiates the Northern Sea Route (the Russian side), they then must pass from Beaufort Sea through the Parry Channel (or alternative passages) to get to Baffin Bay.  Laptev is the first hurdle, and Nunavut is the last one.

NOAA Climate Intrigue

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Defenders of the Federal status quo (AKA swamp denizens) are aroused over an apparent move to refocus the mission statement of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). UCS raised the alarm which was, as usual, taken up by the New York Times. At a recent Department of Commerce summit, the acting head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet, proposed a new mission statement for the agency. The proposed change in wording is as follows.

The mission of NOAA has been:

  • To understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans and coasts;
  • To share that knowledge and information with others; and
  • To conserve and manage coastal and marine ecosystems and resources.

In his presentation, Rear Admiral Gallaudet suggested the mission statement would change to:

  • To observe, understand and predict atmospheric and ocean conditions;
  • To share that knowledge and information with others; and
  • To protect lives and property, empower the economy, and support homeland and national security.

Comment on NOAA Mission Statement

Note the word “observe” is added to give emphasis to NOAA’s responsibility to obtain and maintain data records relating to the ocean and atmosphere. Instead of the words “changes to climate, weather, oceans and coasts,” NOAA is tasked to predict “atmospheric and ocean conditions.” This suggest a move away from climatological considerations to more immediate support for adapting to natural events. It also suggests that coastal land management is outside NOAA’s scope.

Readers will note the proposed wording drops “conserve and manage” from the mission, replaced by the more explicit “To protect lives and property, empower the economy, and support homeland and national security.” The latter phase would be consistent with the larger thrust of the Commerce Department. (See Commerce priorities at end.)

Background:

September 1, 2017, Rear Admiral Gallaudet was nominated by President Trump and was warmly welcomed by scientists.

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) congratulates Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet, a former oceanographer of the Navy, on his nomination to assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere. In that position, Gallaudet will serve as the second-in-command at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Gallaudet, who also served as commander of the Navy’s Meteorology and Oceanography Command, is a 32-year Navy veteran. He holds master’s and doctoral degrees in oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

“Tim’s mixture of operational expertise and scientific knowledge make him an ideal choice for this position,” said UCAR President Antonio Busalacchi. “His understanding of the vital collaborations between NOAA, private forecasting companies, and the academic community can help foster the movement of research to operational forecasting and advance the nation’s weather prediction capabilities. Furthermore, his knowledge of Earth system science and his ability to align that science with budget and programs will be essential to moving NOAA forward in the next few years.”

NOAA runs the National Weather Services, engages in weather and climate research, and operates weather satellites and a climate data center. The agency also works to better understand and protect the nation’s coasts, oceans, and fisheries.

UCAR is a nonprofit consortium of more than 100 colleges and universities focused on research and training in the atmospheric and related sciences.

September 25, 2017

In his answers to the confirmation committee’s questionnaire, Gallaudet listed the top three challenges he sees facing NOAA. He identified the first challenge as implementing the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act that Congress passed earlier this year.

“If confirmed, I would make it my top priority to meet the intent of this law, especially the aspects concerning improvement to severe weather, tornado and hurricane warnings, and satellite data collection program management. … Finally I will need to work with the NOAA Administrator as well as NESDIS and NWS leadership to focus on the NOAA satellite programs which are growing at an unsustainable rate and that have been delayed numerous times.”

October 2017

Gallaudet was confirmed and on October 11, President Trump nominated Barry Myers, chief executive of the private weather forecasting company AccuWeather, to run NOAA. The appointment breaks from the recent precedent of scientists leading the agency tasked with a large, complex, and technically demanding portfolio. Myers has a bachelor’s degree in business administration and economics, a master’s degree in business from Pennsylvania State University, and a law degree from Boston University School of Law. Myers has been an adviser to five directors of NOAA’s National Weather Service and a representative of the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, according to a biography from AccuWeather. He must be confirmed by the Senate before taking the post.

December 17, 2017

In his Senate Confirmation hearing, Myers sought to assure members of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee that he has a deep appreciation for NOAA’s scientific mission. In response to pointed questions from Democratic senators, Myers vowed to uphold NOAA’s scientific integrity policies and champion free and open data. And, for the first time in public since his nomination, he concurred with the mainstream scientific consensus on climate change and promised to support NOAA’s climate research portfolio. The full inquisition is described by the American Institute of Physics NOAA Nominee Barry Myers Embraces Science at Confirmation Hearing

April 11, 2018

Timothy Gallaudet testifies at Budget hearings.NOAA Budget Cuts Get Chilly Reception in Congress

In his opening statement at the April 11 hearing, Gallaudet explained that the $4.5 billion budget request for NOAA focuses on two priorities. The first is “reducing the impacts of extreme weather and water events, by implementing the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act,” which was enacted last April. The second is increasing sustainable economic contributions of U.S. fisheries and other ocean resources.

Gallaudet also touted NOAA’s successes over the last year in responding effectively to the record-setting hurricane season, saying the agency’s efforts “saved thousands of lives despite Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, [and] Maria, being three of the five most costly hurricanes in history.” He also highlighted the “perfect” recent launches of two flagship weather satellites — Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-S (GOES-S) and Joint Polar Satellite System-1 (JPSS-1).

Later in the hearing, Gallaudet described further investments NOAA is making in high-performance computing and modeling to support operational weather prediction. In describing the Global Forecast System FV3 experimental model that is being transitioned to the National Weather Service, Gallaudet said,

This model out-performed the European models for the hurricane track forecasts for the three Category 4 hurricanes that made landfall [last year]. Our goal is to regain world leadership, take number one back for our weather modeling. We’re on track to do it. We expect to do that before 2020.

Gallaudet assured Cartwright that climate is “embedded” within NOAA’s weather and water forecasting priority, explaining that it includes consideration of “scales that are in weeks to seasonal and even sub-seasonal and climate types of scales.”

Although the administration has proposed deep cuts for climate research and grant programs, including termination of the $48 million Competitive Climate Research grant program and the $6 million Arctic Climate Research Program, Gallaudet assured members that climate research would continue, “because there’s much we still don’t know.”

When Cartwright pressed further on his concerns about the White House’s treatment of climate change, Gallaudet reassured him that the White House has “not zeroed out our climate work,” pointing to the Climate Prediction Center’s publication of seasonal and long-range outlooks as well as recent collaboration between NOAA and the U.S. Navy on Arctic sea ice forecasting. In addressing similar concerns brought up by Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) at the April 12 hearing, he added that the White House is “supporting much of our Arctic-related research that is driven primarily by climate change,” and that he has not been directed to eliminate or remove the phrase “climate change” from reports.

May 14, 2018

Senate Should Confirm Barry Myers to Lead NOAA

NOAA – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – needs its leader! President Trump nominated Barry Lee Myers, the CEO of AccuWeather, to the post in mid-October. The Senate Commerce Committee has twice advanced Myers’ nomination to the full Senate. All that’s needed to fill this important job is a majority vote on the Senate floor, which both Democrats and Republicans expect to happen. Unfortunately, partisan politics keeps getting in the way, delaying the vote.

Senate offices have received more than 60 letters from individuals and organizations supporting his confirmation, including strong backing from the past four leaders of the U. S. National Weather Service who served under both Democratic and Republican administrations. In addition, the seafood industry has overwhelmingly advocated his confirmation with letters of support from seafood processors and others in the fisheries industry ranging from ship captains to sport fishermen.

Also, as a recognized leader in the sciences, Myers has demonstrated respect for quality-tested science when making decisions related to all areas of the agencies’ responsibilities, including the nation’s fisheries, weather, oceanographic and climate challenges.

Myers worked closely with lawmakers to help secure enactment of last year’s Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act. The American Meteorological Society conferred its highest award for Excellence in Meteorology on him. He also has demonstrated a deep knowledge about NOAA and is committed to making the agency the best it can be, second to none in the world.

Prompt confirmation of Myers will benefit the public and the U.S. economy in the days, weeks and months ahead by solidifying the NOAA leadership team. With the unprecedented threat of catastrophic storms, the agency’s mission – protecting life and property and expanding American economic competitiveness – is on the line. The Senate should quickly confirm Barry Myers as NOAA administrator.

Conrad C. Lautenbacher Jr. VADM USN (ret.), CEO of GeoOptics, is a former under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and administrator of NOAA.

Robert Vanasse is executive director of the National Coalition for Fishing

Overview of Strategic Plan of US Department of Commerce 2018 to 2022

Knowing that innovation is a key driver of economic advancement, we are placing an increased emphasis on the commercial opportunities of space exploration and aquaculture while our scientists are conducting foundational research in areas ranging from artificial intelligence to quantum computing. Our patent professionals are also working to improve the protection of intellectual property so that creators can profit from their inventions.

U.S. businesses must export more, and our workers deserve a level playing field. Enforcing our trade laws to ensure that trade is free, fair, and reciprocal is a top priority of the Department. We are also joining with all federal agencies in cutting red tape that drives up costs and puts American workers and businesses at a disadvantage.

To maintain America’s leadership in next-generation technologies, we are making important advances in data, cybersecurity, and encryption technology. Our economists and statisticians are improving Commerce data that American businesses and communities use to plan investments and identify growth opportunities. Every level of the Department will be engaged to ensure that we conduct the most accurate, secure, and technologically-advanced decennial census in history.

Finally, teams across the Department are working to keep Americans safe by predicting extreme weather events earlier and more accurately, preventing sensitive technology from getting in the hands of terrorists, rogue regimes, and strategic competitors, and deploying a nationwide public safety broadband network that allows better coordination among first responders.

Thank you to every employee at the Department and to our industry and government partners for your dedication to our mission.

Post by Wilbur Ross Secretary of Commerce

Pope Francis Has Climate Change Backwards

Posted on by Ron Clutz

150928believer

Reblogged from Town Hall Pope Francis has it Exactly Backwards on Climate Change by Gregory Whitestone. Text in italics with my bolds.

This week Pope Francis will host a gathering of executives from major oil companies and investment firms at the Vatican to have a dialogue on climate and more specifically on transitioning away from fossil fuels. Already confirmed to attend were leaders of BP, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell and mega-investment firm Black Rock. That these major companies would attend such a meeting shows just how successful the constant world-wide drum beat of climate alarmism has been. I doubt that these oil executives would agree to bring the rope to their own hanging, but they certainly appear to be ready to negotiate the terms of their own demise.

This pope has a long history of supporting the notion of catastrophic man-made global warming and using his interpretation of biblical teaching to support it. In 2015 he wrote his encyclical Laudato Si, on climate change and man’s responsibilities to the planet as a warning to his flock of the dangers of our “sins of emission” through our use of fossil fuels and in praise of renewable energy and living a more spartan existence. This more than 100-page manifesto reads like it could have been co-authored by Al Gore, Karl Marx and Chicken Little and depicts an Earth that is spiraling quickly into man-made climate hell which can only be saved by radically reducing our carbon footprint and curbing our wasteful habits.

The document contains bitter condemnations on human failures that are supposedly harming the planet including the usual litany of a lack of clean water, soils that are despoiled by pesticides, increasing air pollution, desertification and drought, to name a few. In it he states that we must, “… hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. These situations have caused sister earth, along with all the abandoned of our world, to cry out, pleading that we take another course. Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years.”

The encyclical professes to speak for the poor but in truth, it will be the poor that will bear the brunt of the very policies the Pope endorses. Pope Francis’ endorsement of climate agreements like the Paris Climate Accord will necessarily limit and reduce the availability of inexpensive, reliable energy that can help lift the billions of the poorest out of staggering poverty. Nearly a billion people do not have the benefit of electricity and another 2 billion have very limited access to the energy standards we expect in the western world. In addition, the living standards of all peoples benefit from inexpensive, dependable energy from fossil fuels.

The Pope recommends that we move away from low-cost, reliable energy provided through fossil fuels and embrace expensive, intermittent “green” energy. In developed countries, the poor pay a higher percentage of their income on energy than others, so in effect, the policies proposed are a regressive form of taxation with higher costs to the poor than the wealthy. It is estimated that pollution from dirty, inefficient cooking and heating fuels, often dung, lead to about 4 million premature deaths a year. Policies such as that proposed by Francis condemn these unfortunates to more generations of poverty, disease and despair.

The Pope has it exactly backwards. A prospering of the human condition requires full use of all of God’s Creation. Reliable, inexpensive energy is part of the solution which can lift billions of God’s creatures out of systemic poverty and disease. Instead of promoting fruitless and harmful policies to control global temperature, Christian leadership should embrace responsible environmental stewardship, make energy and all its benefits more affordable, and thereby free the poor to rise out of poverty.

Media Raises False Alarms of Ocean Cooling

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The RAPID moorings being deployed. Credit: National Oceanography Centre.

The usual suspects, such as BBC, the Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post etc., are reporting that the Atlantic gulf stream is slowing down due to climate change, threatening an ice age.  That’s right, warmists are now claiming fossil fuels do cooling when they are not warming.  As usual the headlines are not supported by the details.

The AMOC is back in the news following a recent Ocean Sciences meeting.  This update adds to the theme Oceans Make Climate. Background links are at the end, including one where chief alarmist M. Mann claims fossil fuel use will stop the ocean conveyor belt and bring a new ice age.  Actual scientists are working away methodically on this part of the climate system, and are more level-headed.  H/T GWPF for noticing the recent article in Science Ocean array alters view of Atlantic ‘conveyor belt’  By Katherine Kornei Feb. 17, 2018 . Excerpts with my bolds.

The powerful currents in the Atlantic, formally known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), are a major engine in Earth’s climate. The AMOC’s shallower limbs—which include the Gulf Stream—transport warm water from the tropics northward, warming Western Europe. In the north, the waters cool and sink, forming deeper limbs that transport the cold water back south—and sequester anthropogenic carbon in the process. This overturning is why the AMOC is sometimes called the Atlantic conveyor belt.

Fig. 1. Schematic of the major warm (red to yellow) and cold (blue to purple) water pathways in the NASPG (North Atlantic subpolar gyre ) credit: H. Furey, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution): Denmark Strait (DS), Faroe Bank Channel (FBC), East and West Greenland Currents (EGC and WGC, respectively), NAC, DSO, and ISO.

In February at the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU’s) Ocean Sciences meeting, scientists presented the first data from an array of instruments moored in the subpolar North Atlantic. The observations reveal unexpected eddies and strong variability in the AMOC currents. They also show that the currents east of Greenland contribute the most to the total AMOC flow. Climate models, on the other hand, have emphasized the currents west of Greenland in the Labrador Sea. “We’re showing the shortcomings of climate models,” says Susan Lozier, a physical oceanographer at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who leads the $35-million, seven-nation project known as the Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program (OSNAP).

Fig. 2. Schematic of the OSNAP array. The vertical black lines denote the OSNAP moorings with the red dots denoting instrumentation at depth. The thin gray lines indicate the glider survey. The red arrows show pathways for the warm and salty waters of subtropical origin; the light blue arrows show the pathways for the fresh and cold surface waters of polar origin; and the dark blue arrows show the pathways at depth for waters that originate in the high-latitude North Atlantic and Arctic.

The research and analysis is presented by Dr. Lozier et al. in this publication Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program: A New International Ocean Observing System Images above and text excerpted below with my bolds.

For decades oceanographers have assumed the AMOC to be highly susceptible to changes in the production of deep waters at high latitudes in the North Atlantic. A new ocean observing system is now in place that will test that assumption. Early results from the OSNAP observational program reveal the complexity of the velocity field across the section and the dramatic increase in convective activity during the 2014/15 winter. Early results from the gliders that survey the eastern portion of the OSNAP line have illustrated the importance of these measurements for estimating meridional heat fluxes and for studying the evolution of Subpolar Mode Waters. Finally, numerical modeling data have been used to demonstrate the efficacy of a proxy AMOC measure based on a broader set of observational data, and an adjoint modeling approach has shown that measurements in the OSNAP region will aid our mechanistic understanding of the low-frequency variability of the AMOC in the subtropical North Atlantic.

Fig. 7. (a) Winter [Dec–Mar (DJFM)] mean NAO index. Time series of temperature from the (b) K1 and (c) K9 moorings.

Finally, we note that while a primary motivation for studying AMOC variability comes from its potential impact on the climate system, as mentioned above, additional motivation for the measure of the heat, mass, and freshwater fluxes in the subpolar North Atlantic arises from their potential impact on marine biogeochemistry and the cryosphere. Thus, we hope that this observing system can serve the interests of the broader climate community.

Fig. 10. Linear sensitivity of the AMOC at (d),(e) 25°N and (b),(c) 50°N in Jan to surface heat flux anomalies per unit area. Positive sensitivity indicates that ocean cooling leads to an increased AMOC—e.g., in the upper panels, a unit increase in heat flux out of the ocean at a given location will change the AMOC at (d) 25°N or (e) 50°N 3 yr later by the amount shown in the color bar. The contour intervals are logarithmic. (a) The time series show linear sensitivity of the AMOC at 25°N (blue) and 50°N (green) to heat fluxes integrated over the subpolar gyre (black box with surface area of ∼6.7 × 10 m2) as a function of forcing lead time. The reader is referred to Pillar et al. (2016) for model details and to Heimbach et al. (2011) and Pillar et al. (2016) for a full description of the methodology and discussion relating to the dynamical interpretation of the sensitivity distributions.

In summary, while modeling studies have suggested a linkage between deep-water mass formation and AMOC variability, observations to date have been spatially or temporally compromised and therefore insufficient either to support or to rule out this connection.

Current observational efforts to assess AMOC variability in the North Atlantic.

The U.K.–U.S. Rapid Climate Change–Meridional Overturning Circulation and Heatflux Array (RAPID–MOCHA) program at 26°N successfully measures the AMOC in the subtropical North Atlantic via a transbasin observing system (Cunningham et al. 2007; Kanzow et al. 2007; McCarthy et al. 2015). While this array has fundamentally altered the community’s view of the AMOC, modeling studies over the past few years have suggested that AMOC fluctuations on interannual time scales are coherent only over limited meridional distances. In particular, a break point in coherence may occur at the subpolar–subtropical gyre boundary in the North Atlantic (Bingham et al. 2007; Baehr et al. 2009). Furthermore, a recent modeling study has suggested that the low-frequency variability of the RAPID–MOCHA appears to be an integrated response to buoyancy forcing over the subpolar gyre (Pillar et al. 2016). Thus, a measure of the overturning in the subpolar basin contemporaneous with a measure of the buoyancy forcing in that basin likely offers the best possibility of understanding the mechanisms that underpin AMOC variability. Finally, though it might be expected that the plethora of measurements from the North Atlantic would be sufficient to constrain a measure of the AMOC within the context of an ocean general circulation model, recent studies (Cunningham and Marsh 2010; Karspeck et al. 2015) reveal that there is currently no consensus on the strength or variability of the AMOC in assimilation/reanalysis products.

Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Red colours indicate warm, shallow currents and blue colours indicate cold, deep return flows. Modified from Church, 2007, A change in circulation? Science, 317(5840), 908–909. doi:10.1126/science.1147796

In addition we have a recent report from the United Kingdom Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership (MCCIP) lead author G.D. McCarthy Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) 2017.

Figure 1: Ten-day (colours) and three month (black) low-pass filtered timeseries of Florida Straits transport (blue), Ekman transport (green), upper mid-ocean transport (magenta), and overturning transport (red) for the period 2nd April 2004 to end- February 2017. Florida Straits transport is based on electromagnetic cable measurements; Ekman transport is based on ERA winds. The upper mid-ocean transport, based on the RAPID mooring data, is the vertical integral of the transport per unit depth down to the deepest northward velocity (~1100 m) on each day. Overturning transport is then the sum of the Florida Straits, Ekman, and upper mid-ocean transports and represents the maximum northward transport of upper-layer waters on each day. Positive transports correspond to northward flow.

The RAPID/MOCHA/WBTS array (hereinafter referred to as the RAPID array) has revolutionized basin scale oceanography by supplying continuous estimates of the meridional overturning transport (McCarthy et al., 2015), and the associated basin-wide transports of heat (Johns et al., 2011) and freshwater (McDonagh et al., 2015) at 10-day temporal resolution. These estimates have been used in a wide variety of studies characterizing temporal variability of the North Atlantic Ocean, for instance establishing a decline in the AMOC between 2004 and 2013.

Summary from RAPID data analysis

MCCIP reported in 2006 that:

  • a 30% decline in the AMOC has been observed since the early 1990s based on a limited number of observations. There is a lack of certainty and consensus concerning the trend;
  • most climate models anticipate some reduction in strength of the AMOC over the 21st century due to increased freshwater influence in high latitudes. The IPCC project a slowdown in the overturning circulation rather than a dramatic collapse.And in 2017 that:
  • a substantial increase in the observations available to estimate the strength of the AMOC indicate, with greater certainty, a decline since the mid 2000s;
  • the AMOC is still expected to decline throughout the 21st century in response to a changing climate. If and when a collapse in the AMOC is possible is still open to debate, but it is not thought likely to happen this century.

And also that:

  • a high level of variability in the AMOC strength has been observed, and short term fluctuations have had unexpected impacts, including severe winters and abrupt sea-level rise;
  • recent changes in the AMOC may be driving the cooling of Atlantic ocean surface waters which could lead to drier summers in the UK.

Conclusions

  • The AMOC is key to maintaining the mild climate of the UK and Europe.
  • The AMOC is predicted to decline in the 21st century in response to a changing climate.
  • Past abrupt changes in the AMOC have had dramatic climate consequences.
  • There is growing evidence that the AMOC has been declining for at least a decade, pushing the Atlantic Multidecadal Variability into a cool phase.
  • Short term fluctuations in the AMOC have proved to have unexpected impacts, including being linked
    with severe winters and abrupt sea-level rise.

Background:

Oceans Make Climate: SST, SSS and Precipitation Linked

Climate Pacemaker: The AMOC

Evidence is Mounting: Oceans Make Climate

Mann-made Global Cooling

 

 

Pipeline Tragedy/Comedy: Ideology and Energy Don’t Mix

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The inter provincial Canadian war over a bitumen pipeline is taking on Shakespearean drama as reported in the Globe and Mail  The symbolism of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline  The article is by Arno Kopecky, an environmental journalist and author based in Vancouver.  Excerpts below with my bolds and images introducing the principle players.

Spare a thought for Rachel Notley. While you’re at it, spare another for John Horgan and Justin Trudeau. Three star-crossed allies, progressives all, steering ships through a Kinder Morgan tempest no pundit can describe without saying “collision course.” Shakespearean, ain’t it?

There’s tragedy, comedy and irony galore. Ms. Notley’s take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream with her midwinter ban on British Columbia wines – which was lifted on Thursday – lent itself so well to “Reign of Terroir” jokes that it can only end up raising the provincial wine industry’s profile. As for Alberta’s oil industry, this is more like Much Ado About Nothing. Whether the oil sands grow or shrink has much less to do with any one pipeline (even one that leads to almighty tidewater) than the global price of oil. What about all those Kinder Morgan jobs? Comedy. Anyone serious about creating oil-sector jobs for Canadians would be pushing to refine bitumen at home instead of exporting it raw. That’s why Unifor, the biggest union in the oil sands, intervened against the project in the NEB hearings.

But the notion that Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion would add carbon to the atmosphere is comedy, too. If Kinder Morgan isn’t built, trains will keep moving the bitumen they’re already moving, at least until a higher force than pipeline capacity reduces Fort McMurray’s output. Everyone just makes less money that way.

When a country already has more than 840,000 kilometres of pipeline running through it, the fight over roughly 1,000 new kilometres is symbolic for both sides. But symbols matter. Now Trans Mountain has come to symbolize everything from the oil sands to climate change and reconciliation, and everyone’s job is at stake.

Premier Rachel Notley of oil rich, but landlocked and economically struggling Alberta.

None more than Ms. Notley’s, our likeliest candidate for tragedy. Alberta’s most progressive premier in more than 30 years, the woman who imposed a provincial carbon tax and raised royalties on oil sands operators and lifted Alberta’s minimum wage from the lowest to the highest in the country, Rachel Notley will not be replaced by someone nicer. Alberta’s profoundly oil-positive United Conservative Party, freshly merged and braying at her heels, threaten every last NDP policy with a Trumpian corrective. They’ll probably win the next election, too. Ms. Notley’s only hope is in proving to Albertans she can fight as dirty as any conservative would to protect the Symbol.

British Columbia Premier John Horgan, who recently formed a government propped up by a few Green party MPs.

Enter John Horgan, stage left. Poor guy. He’s running a province whose biggest, greenest city overwhelmingly voted against a once-in-a-generation opportunity to massively expand public transit, but has already proved itself willing to get arrested en masse in anti-Kinder Morgan protests. Mr. Horgan’s first major decision as Premier, the tortured approval of the Site C dam, earned him the condemnation of every environmentalist and First Nation leader in the province, if not the country. Now that he’s following through on his campaign promise to “use every tool in our tool box” against Kinder Morgan, fans and critics are trading placards. Never mind that Site C will keep far more carbon in the ground than any thwarted pipeline.

The thing is, pipeline battles on the coast aren’t about pipelines or even climate change. They’re about oil tankers. Want symbols? Wild salmon and orca populations are rapidly approaching extinction in southern B.C. Yes, oil tankers do already ply these waters. No, we don’t love hearing that the only way to pay for sorely lacking coastal protection is to heighten the risk of an oil spill by tripling the number of tankers.  But that’s the deal.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau currently touring India.

Enter Justin Trudeau, our doomed and dashing Hamlet, haunted by the ghost of his father, asking not to be or not to be, but can the ends justify the means? The greater the ends, it seems, the crueler the means. For all his capacity to renege on inconvenient promises, Mr. Trudeau clearly does regard the fight against climate change as a Very Great End. He knows we’re losing the glaciers whose meltwater irrigates half of Canada’s agriculture; he’s aware of our metastasizing cycle of flood and forest fire; he’s already dealt with one wave of climate refugees, from Syria (yes – that war was largely triggered by a calamitous drought that beggared a million farmers); he knows this is just the beginning. (Note: The reporter and Trudeau believe things cited in this paragraph contrary to evidence, but ignorance and hubris are essential to any tragedy.)

Against all that, he weighs the spill risk of one new pipeline, twinned to a pre-existing condition, with a corresponding increase in tanker traffic through relatively safe waters in which oil tankers can so far boast a 100-per-cent safety rate. Without Kinder Morgan, Mr. Trudeau mutters, pacing the stage from left to right, you lose Alberta; without Alberta, you lose your national climate-change strategy, your coastal protections, your whole progressive agenda. You lose everything.

Enter, in our closing act, B.C.’s coastal First Nations. Of course, they’ve been here all along – Mr. Trudeau made them some promises, too. But so far, his definition of consultation looks a lot like the old one: a process to determine not if a project should proceed on Indigenous territory, but when. The courts may yet cancel Trans Mountain because of it, as they did Northern Gateway. That’s probably Mr. Trudeau’s best hope for a happy ending. He’s created his own Birnam Wood, an army of First Nations and their allies ready to lead the march to Dunsinane Hill, aka Burnaby Mountain and the terminus of the pipeline, for the biggest act of civil disobedience our generation’s seen.

It isn’t a question of if, but when.

This is another example of damage done by virtue signaling, further explained in Virtue Signaling as a Vicious Circle

Footnote:  Regarding the attempt to blame the Syrian conflict on drought, see Climates Don’t Start Wars, People Do