Climate Tricks 15: AGW Fiction, Avoiding Natural Climate Drivers

After the heavy flooding suffered by millions of people in Metro Manila and many other provinces over early this week, a friend in facebook posted this the other day and dared a debate. I asked his permission to post the exchange in this blog, zero alteration, pure copy-paste, he did not reply, a silent No.

In the spirit of making this debate become more transparent to others who care to read and learn, I am posting portions of the exchanges, but I removed the names. So readers, focus on the message and arguments, not the names. This is the original challenge by S:

Now that things are starting to normalize, I would like to hear anybody who would dispute that climate change is just a political ploy of "watermelon" (their words, not mine) environmentalists to ask more money, and demand more government intervention.

Nonoy Oplas Climate change is natural, warming-cooling-warming-cooling. We're in a period of global cooling, hence, more rains, more flood, and worse to come, http://funwithgovernment.blogspot.com/2012/05/climate-tricks-8-catastrophic-scare-for.html

Government and Taxes: Climate Tricks 8: Catastrophic Scare for Climate Money

funwithgovernment.blogspot.com 

S It's a natural cycle, yes. But it is being hastened by human behavior, especially now with increased industrial activities.

PM: we are not in a period of global cooling. ang mga sobrang rainfall ay dala rin ng global warming, tulad ng paglamig ng ibang lugar dahil natutunaw ang mga yelo. kaya lately ay mas ginagamit na ang "climate change" kaysa "global warming" para hindi na ma-confuse.

Nonoy Oplas It's obvious you did not check the paper I posted. Explain the following:
a. absence of causality, if any, between flat-lining global temp while CO2 concentration is rising.
b. rule out explicitly, the effect of natural factors like the Sun and GCRs on climate.

PM  sorry, mr. oplas, pero i think you should submit your paper (though puro kopya lang sa kung anu-anong source) to the UNFCCC to prove your point. i've been to their sessions and intersessionals at laging durog sa diskusyon ang mga nagsasabi ng mga sinasabi mo.

Nonoy Oplas PM, explain (a) absence of causality, if any, between flat-lining global temp while CO2 concentration is rising.
(b) rule out explicitly, the effect of natural factors like the Sun and GCRs on climate.
Here's more, http://funwithgovernment.blogspot.com/2012/01/climate-tricks-2-solar-activities-tsi.html

Government and Taxes: Climate Tricks 2: Solar Activities (TSI, Ap index, Neutrons) Don't Matter

funwithgovernment.blogspot.com

Energy rationing 4: Anti-coal, anti-nuke hysteria

In one of my discussion googlegroups today, someone posted a campaign, "Please sign: Stop sacrificing the environment and the people's welfare on the altar of profit". Portions of the campaign said,

We, environmental advocates, members of the clergy and churchworkers, citizens, and leaders representing various organizations committed to defending the Philippine environment, unite to declare publicly our growing dismay over the state of ecological destruction and human rights violations under the administration of President Benigno Aquino III....

We challenge President Aquino to stop this sacrifice of the environment and the people's welfare on the altar of profit. We assert our calls for a genuinely pro-people, pro-environment and progressive policy of stewardship over our natural resources by pursuing the following specific demands:

1. Stop the liberalization of the Philippine mining industry.
2. Stop the killings and human rights violations of environmental advocates.
3. Cancel the permits and operations of big commercial logging firms in addition to the logging moratorium.
4. Impose a moratorium on the construction of new coal power plants.
5. Reject the proposal to revive the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant.
6. Scrap the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement.

The writers and endorsers of this campaign possibly forgot that the President came from the Liberal Party, not from the Socialist Party or a Nationalist or Anti-globalization Party.

A liberal, in the classic liberal tradition or even the current European liberalism philosophy, respects the free enterprise system, not more business regulations, more prohibitions.

On their specific demands:

1. Stop the liberalization of mining industry -- and leave the industry only to local politicians and companies? Among the best practitioners of sustainable mining practices are the big multinationals which have global corporate brands and have modern mining and geological technologies to optimize mining with minimal damage to the environment. If we prohibit them from coming in, the mineral potentials of the country at the time that prices of important commodities and mineral products are very high, as well as the creation of many locals jobs, will not be optimized.

2. Stop the killing and human rights violations of environmental advocates -- I support this, we should support this. And not only environmental advocates, all political killings and human rights violations of ordinary citizens should be stopped. Especially by political warlords like the Ampatuans.

3. On commercial logging ban -- and leave the forests to carabao logging, local politicians logging? People need wood, whether we like it or not. The poor especially as they cannot afford the steel and cement housing, or aluminum/steel/glass furnitures. No commercial logging means zero supply of wood from legitimate sources, wood prices shoot up, and the bigger the temptation to do illegal logging by local politicians and carabao logging to take advance of the high prices of wood.

Commercial logging, supervised by licensed foresters and connected with long-term business contracts, practice sustainable logging. A logging concession area is divided into several blocks. For a 20-years cycle for instance, only 1/20th of the entire logging area is cut and cleared for a year, the remaining 19/20th of the area has thick forest, forever. It is to their business interests that there are trees to cut every year, so they keep planting every year.

4. Moratorium on the construction of new coal power plants, reject nuke power plants -- and what else to prohibit, natural gas plants, petrol oil plants? And what will the new houses, new factories, new schools, new offices, new shops and malls use, candles and firewood?

Many environmentalists advocate the renewables like wind, solar, biomass, etc. That's why we have the RE law, and the business cronyism associated with it as it gives lots of incentives and guaranteed profit for the wind farms, solar farms. Our already expensive power prices will soon become even more expensive due to mechanisms like feed-in-tariffs (FIT) and renewable portfolio standards (RPS).

I discussed the cronyism of the RE law here, Energy rationing 2: The Renewable Energy (RE) law. Dr. Willie Soon and Barun Mitra also produced a paper questioning the global energy rationing polices that restrict access of the poor to cheaper energy sources here.

5. Scrapping of Japan-Philippines EPA -- and go back to the old trade protectionism? That EPA is not exactly a free trade agreement (FTA) but it is better than going back to high protectionism.

The petition also mentioned the "Earth Hour". As I posted in Earth Hour lunacy, part 2, I wrote to the top 2 honchos of WWF-EH, Atty. Ibay and Mr. Yan where I sent them my article why the EH is a lunatic idea, they have one standard reply: silence of the lamb. Then I wrote a comment at the EH website comment section, they censored it. I consider the WWF as a bunch of noisy but coward environmental activists.

If the WWF officials and other environmentalist groups will protest my assessment of them, then I am open to any public debate with them on climate science and policy, anytime, anywhere. Leave a note of challenge at the comment section here.

Meanwhile, here is the latest data on global air temperature, composite for northern hemisphere (NH), tropics and southern hemisphere (SH). The lower troposphere temperature anomaly for March 2011 was -0.10 C. That is, the temperature in March 2011 was -0.1 C colder than the average temperature for all March from 1979 to 2010. Zero global warming, only global cooling trend now.

Here are the values, satellite data:

GLOBAL / NH / SH / TROPICS

2010
January 0.542 / 0.675 / 0.410 / 0.635
February 0.510 / 0.553 / 0.466 / 0.759
March 0.554 / 0.665 / 0.443 / 0.721
....
November 0.273 / 0.372 / 0.173 / -0.117
December 0.181 / 0.217 / 0.145 / -0.222

2011
January -0.010 / -0.055 / 0.036 / -0.372
February -0.020 / -0.042 / 0.002 / -0.348
March -0.099 / -0.073 / -0.126 / -0.345

Data and graph source is Dr. Roy Spencer of the Univ. of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).

Dr. Roy Spencer on IPCC defunding

(Note: Related articles in this blog are Dr. Roy Spencer on individual freedom , Climate and government coercion, and Weekend fun 4: IPCC and Pachauri cartoons. Illustrations I just added and not part of Dr. Spencer's article.)

Dr. Roy Spencer is a respected climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and former NASA scientist. He wrote an interesting article in his blog last weekend, On the House Vote to Defund the IPCC. Here are some of his important points:

The climate change deniers have no one but themselves to blame for last night’s vote.

I’m talking about those who deny NATURAL climate change. Like Al Gore, John Holdren, and everyone else who thinks climate change was only invented since they were born.

Politicians formed the IPCC over 20 years ago with an endgame in mind: to regulate CO2 emissions. I know, because I witnessed some of the behind-the-scenes planning. It is not a scientific organization. It was organized to use the government-funded scientific research establishment to achieve policy goals.

Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But when they are portrayed as representing unbiased science, that IS a bad thing. If anthropogenic global warming – and ocean ‘acidification’ (now there’s a biased and totally incorrect term) — ends up being largely a false alarm, those who have run the IPCC are out of a job. More on that later.

I don’t want to be misunderstood on this. IF we are destroying the planet with our fossil fuel burning, then something SHOULD be done about it.

But the climate science community has allowed itself to be used on this issue, and as a result, politicians, activists, and the media have successfully portrayed the biased science as settled.

They apparently do not realize that ‘settled science’ is an oxymoron.

The most vocal climate scientists defending the IPCC have lost their objectivity. Yes, they have what I consider to be a plausible theory. But they actively suppress evidence to the contrary, for instance attempts to study natural explanations for recent warming.

That’s one reason why the public was so outraged about the ClimateGate e-mails. ClimateGate doesn’t prove their science is wrong…but it does reveal their bias. Science progresses by investigating alternative explanations for things. Long ago, the IPCC all but abandoned that search.

Oh, they have noted (correctly I believe) that a change in the total output of the sun is not to blame. But there are SO many other possibilities, and all they do is dismiss those possibilities out of hand. They have a theory — more CO2 is to blame — and they religiously stick to it. It guides all of the research they do.

The climate models are indeed great accomplishments. It’s what they are being used for that is suspect. A total of 23 models cover a wide range of warming estimates for our future, and yet there is no way to test them for what they are being used for! climate change predictions.

Virtually all of the models produce decadal time scale warming that exceeds what we have observed in the last 15 years. That fact has been known for years, but its publication in the peer reviewed literature continues to be blocked.

My theory is that a natural change in cloud cover has caused most of the recent warming. Temperature proxy data from around the world suggests that just about every century in the last 2,000 years has experienced warming or cooling. Why should today’s warmth be manmade, when the Medieval Warm Period was not? Just because we finally have one potential explanation – CO2?

This only shows how LITTLE we understand about climate change…not how MUCH we know.

Why would scientists allow themselves to be used in this way? When I have pressed them on the science over the years, they all retreat to the position that getting away from fossil fuels is the ‘right thing to do anyway’.

In other words, they have let their worldviews, their politics, their economic understanding (or lack thereof) affect their scientific judgment. I am ashamed for our scientific discipline and embarrassed by their behavior.

Is it any wonder that scientists have such a bad reputation among the taxpayers who pay them to play in their ivory tower sandboxes? They can make gloom and doom predictions all day long of events far in the future without ever having to suffer any consequences of being wrong.

The perpetual supply of climate change research money also biases them. Everyone in my business knows that as long as manmade climate change remains a serious threat, the money will continue to flow, and climate programs will continue to grow....

Yes, we should explain and clarify to the public: the IPCC is not and was never a scientific body. It is a political and government body, that is why it is called InterGOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climat Change. IPCC gets its funding from governments, its officials like IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri, are appointed by governments.

Thus, the political leanings of the IPCC and its political agenda of more environmental and more carbon regulations and taxation, jibe well with the politicians. Not one of the known leaders of the AGW scare -- Al Gore, Pachauri, Leonardo di Caprio, Lord Stern -- is a scientist. Pachauri and Lord Stern of UK are both economists. Di Caprio is an actor.

Can the IPCC be defunded? In the short run, I don't think so. Even if the US government will defund it, many governments will be more than happy to continue funding it because it is the IPCC scare tactics and pronouncements that keep fooling th public. When the people are scared of the catastrophic scenarios painted by the IPCC and other climate alarmists, then it is easy to convince them to keep paying more taxes and fees, so that the politicians can continue "saving the planet."