Climate change - the POLITICAL debate. Vol 3
Discussion
hidetheelephants said:
S7Paul said:
The Beeb is carrying the same report, though admitting that air temps were not at record levels. It was them boiling oceans wot dunnit!
Review of the papers on BBC TV morning blatherfest; some guest skycaptain has got excited about the Indy's revelation and has concluded that it's worse than we thought.steveT350C said:
The Green Party's deputy Shahrar Ali was on LBC having a love-in with James O'Brien a couple of days ago. In amongst O'Brien's snipes at UKIP, Ali claimed we are approaching a 'carbon tipping point.'
Is that when trees start getting fat?
I wonder what they'd do if they realised they're also made of carbon (well carbon based!) Perhaps they'd remove themselves from the planet to save us all!Is that when trees start getting fat?
The media stuff on this is all nonsense because none of them really understand anything of it at all.
hole!mybrainhurts said:
I'm sure I heard the BBC today saying the hottest 14 years have been in the last 15 years...
I might not be entirely correct with that reproduction, but what does the BBC do each morning, pull numbers out of a jar...?
Radio 4 were saying that Friday. They also said last year was the hottest ever ever ever.I might not be entirely correct with that reproduction, but what does the BBC do each morning, pull numbers out of a jar...?
I seem to recal them saying a figure .78 or something increase.
motco said:
Mornin' all! 
Your friendly neighbourhood even-handed newspaper 'The Independent' has news for YOU!
Indie says 2014 WAS the hottest on record
On the other hand the Mail says it wasn't - probably Your friendly neighbourhood even-handed newspaper 'The Independent' has news for YOU!Indie says 2014 WAS the hottest on record
motco said:
motco said:
Mornin' all! Your friendly neighbourhood even-handed newspaper 'The Independent' has news for YOU!
Indie says 2014 WAS the hottest on record.
On the other hand the Mail says it wasn't - probably. Your friendly neighbourhood even-handed newspaper 'The Independent' has news for YOU!Indie says 2014 WAS the hottest on record.
In January last year, Hansen et al with help from Gavin Schmidt were predicting 2014 would be the hottest on record, due to (natural) El Nino. They were wrong about El Nino but the forecast for a record year could well have set hares running.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2014/201401...
The authors hedges their bets with a punt for 2015 if 2014 didn't make it, but there was a lot of political expediency in 2014 making it, and it did in terms of unscientific coverage making no mention of data quality or error bars.
Given the corrupt gridded data used for these headline grabbing purposes, who knows what the hottest year was. The less molested and more accurate satellite temperature measurements with far better sampling indicate that 2014 was a year of only slightly above average temperature, the sixth warmest in the satellite record iirc.
America vs Russia, Hansen vs Abdussamatov:
Several times up to and including 2013 Absussamatov said:
Beginning around 2014 the average annual temperature will begin to drop, and by 2050 it will be about 1.5°C cooler than today.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/new-paper-predicts-another-little-ice.htmlBuy Damart and candles.
From Forbes - and like Hansen's fiction, also near the start of 2014 but with no helo from Gavin: a "compare and contrast" exercise on the latest junkcsience SPM from IPCC divorced from the data, and sound science from NIPCC in keeping with the data. Most folks will know already but the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) was founded in 2003 by atmospheric physicist Prof S Fred Singer. http://www.nipccreport.org/
IPCC: “Risk of death, injury, and disrupted livelihoods in low-lying coastal zones and small island developing states, due to sea-level rise, coastal flooding, and storm surges.”
NIPCC: “Flood frequency and severity in many areas of the world were higher historically during the Little Ice Age and other cool eras than during the twentieth century. Climate change ranks well below other contributors, such as dikes and levee construction, to increased flooding.”
IPCC: “Risk of food insecurity linked to warming, drought, and precipitation variability, particularly for poorer populations.”
NIPCC: “There is little or no risk of increasing food insecurity due to global warming or rising atmospheric CO2 levels. Farmers and others who depend on rural livelihoods for income are benefitting from rising agricultural productivity throughout the world, including in parts of Asia and Africa where the need for increased food supplies is most critical. Rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels play a key role in the realization of such benefits.
IPCC: “Risk of severe harm for large urban populations due to inland flooding.”
NIPCC: “No changes in precipitation patterns, snow, monsoons, or river flows that might be considered harmful to human well-being or plants or wildlife have been observed that could be attributed to rising CO2 levels. What changes have been observed tend to be beneficial.”
IPCC: “Risk of loss of rural livelihoods and income due to insufficient access to drinking and irrigation water and reduced agricultural productivity, particularly for farmers and pastoralists with minimal capital in semi-arid regions.”
NIPCC: “Higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations benefit plant growth-promoting microorganisms that help land plants overcome drought conditions, a potentially negative aspect of future climate change. Continued atmospheric CO2 enrichment should prove to be a huge benefit to plants by directly enhancing their growth rates and water use efficiencies.”
IPCC: “Systemic risks due to extreme [weather] events leading to breakdown of infrastructure networks and critical services.”
NIPCC: “There is no support for the model-based projection that precipitation in a warming world becomes more variable and intense. In fact, some observational data suggest just the opposite, and provide support for the proposition that precipitation responds more to cyclical variations in solar activity.”
IPCC: “Risk of loss of marine ecosystems and the services they provide for coastal livelihoods, especially for fishing communities in the tropics and the Arctic.”
NIPCC: “Rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels do not pose a significant threat to aquatic life. Many aquatic species have shown considerable tolerance to temperatures and CO2 values predicted for the next few centuries, and many have demonstrated a likelihood of positive responses in empirical studies. Any projected adverse impacts of rising temperatures or declining seawater and freshwater pH levels (“acidification”) will be largely mitigated through phenotypic adaptation or evolution during the many decades to centuries it is expected to take for pH levels to fall.”
IPCC: “Risk of loss of terrestrial ecosystems and the services they provide for terrestrial livelihoods.”
NIPCC: “Terrestrial ecosystems have thrived throughout the world as a result of warming temperatures and rising levels of atmospheric CO2. Empirical data pertaining to numerous animal species, including amphibians, birds, butterflies, other insects, reptiles, and mammals, indicate global warming and its myriad ecological effects tend to foster the expansion and proliferation of animal habitats, ranges, and populations, or otherwise have no observable impacts one way or the other. Multiple lines of evidence indicate animal species are adapting, and in some cases evolving, to cope with climate change of the modern era.”
IPCC: “Risk of mortality, morbidity, and other harms during periods of extreme heat, particularly for vulnerable urban populations.”
NIPCC: “More lives are saved by global warming via the amelioration of cold-related deaths than those lost under excessive heat. Global warming will have a negligible influence on human morbidity and the spread of infectious diseases, a phenomenon observed in virtually all parts of the world.”
Conclusion ref IPCC: climate science deliberately excluded or misrepresented.
IPCC: “Risk of death, injury, and disrupted livelihoods in low-lying coastal zones and small island developing states, due to sea-level rise, coastal flooding, and storm surges.”
NIPCC: “Flood frequency and severity in many areas of the world were higher historically during the Little Ice Age and other cool eras than during the twentieth century. Climate change ranks well below other contributors, such as dikes and levee construction, to increased flooding.”
IPCC: “Risk of food insecurity linked to warming, drought, and precipitation variability, particularly for poorer populations.”
NIPCC: “There is little or no risk of increasing food insecurity due to global warming or rising atmospheric CO2 levels. Farmers and others who depend on rural livelihoods for income are benefitting from rising agricultural productivity throughout the world, including in parts of Asia and Africa where the need for increased food supplies is most critical. Rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels play a key role in the realization of such benefits.
IPCC: “Risk of severe harm for large urban populations due to inland flooding.”
NIPCC: “No changes in precipitation patterns, snow, monsoons, or river flows that might be considered harmful to human well-being or plants or wildlife have been observed that could be attributed to rising CO2 levels. What changes have been observed tend to be beneficial.”
IPCC: “Risk of loss of rural livelihoods and income due to insufficient access to drinking and irrigation water and reduced agricultural productivity, particularly for farmers and pastoralists with minimal capital in semi-arid regions.”
NIPCC: “Higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations benefit plant growth-promoting microorganisms that help land plants overcome drought conditions, a potentially negative aspect of future climate change. Continued atmospheric CO2 enrichment should prove to be a huge benefit to plants by directly enhancing their growth rates and water use efficiencies.”
IPCC: “Systemic risks due to extreme [weather] events leading to breakdown of infrastructure networks and critical services.”
NIPCC: “There is no support for the model-based projection that precipitation in a warming world becomes more variable and intense. In fact, some observational data suggest just the opposite, and provide support for the proposition that precipitation responds more to cyclical variations in solar activity.”
IPCC: “Risk of loss of marine ecosystems and the services they provide for coastal livelihoods, especially for fishing communities in the tropics and the Arctic.”
NIPCC: “Rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels do not pose a significant threat to aquatic life. Many aquatic species have shown considerable tolerance to temperatures and CO2 values predicted for the next few centuries, and many have demonstrated a likelihood of positive responses in empirical studies. Any projected adverse impacts of rising temperatures or declining seawater and freshwater pH levels (“acidification”) will be largely mitigated through phenotypic adaptation or evolution during the many decades to centuries it is expected to take for pH levels to fall.”
IPCC: “Risk of loss of terrestrial ecosystems and the services they provide for terrestrial livelihoods.”
NIPCC: “Terrestrial ecosystems have thrived throughout the world as a result of warming temperatures and rising levels of atmospheric CO2. Empirical data pertaining to numerous animal species, including amphibians, birds, butterflies, other insects, reptiles, and mammals, indicate global warming and its myriad ecological effects tend to foster the expansion and proliferation of animal habitats, ranges, and populations, or otherwise have no observable impacts one way or the other. Multiple lines of evidence indicate animal species are adapting, and in some cases evolving, to cope with climate change of the modern era.”
IPCC: “Risk of mortality, morbidity, and other harms during periods of extreme heat, particularly for vulnerable urban populations.”
NIPCC: “More lives are saved by global warming via the amelioration of cold-related deaths than those lost under excessive heat. Global warming will have a negligible influence on human morbidity and the spread of infectious diseases, a phenomenon observed in virtually all parts of the world.”
Conclusion ref IPCC: climate science deliberately excluded or misrepresented.
TB that website seems to take an interesting approach to analysing papers that could be said to be doing exactly the same thing the IPCC are being accused of. Picking out the points that suit in scientific papers and taking them outside what the authors actually said isn't very helpful...
For example, I looked up the section on flood impacts and the first paper they quote from: (Kundzewicz, Z.W., Kanae, S., Seneviratne, S.I., Handmer, J., Nicholls, N., Peduzzi, P., Mechler, R., Bouwer, L.M., Arnell, N., Mach, K., Muir-Wood, R., Brakenridge, G.R., Kron, W., Benito, G., Honda, Y., Takahashi, K. and Sherstyukov, B. 2013. Flood risk and climate change: global and regional perspectives. Hydrological Sciences Journal: 10.1080/02626667.2013.857411). is analysed as saying:
"In a massive review of the subject conducted by a team of seventeen researchers hailing from eleven different countries, i.e., Kundzewicz et al. (2013), we learn the following: (1) "no gauge-based evidence has been found for a climate-driven, globally widespread change in the magnitude/frequency of floods during the last decades," (2) "there is low confidence in projections of changes in fluvial floods, due to limited evidence and because the causes of regional changes are complex," (3) "considerable uncertainty remains in the projections of changes in flood magnitude and frequency," (4) increases in global flood disaster losses reported over the last few decades "may be attributed to improvements in reporting, population increase and urbanization in flood-prone areas, increase of property value and degraded awareness about natural risks (due to less natural lifestyle)," (5) "the linkages between enhanced greenhouse forcing and flood phenomena are highly complex and, up to the present, it has not been possible to describe the connections well, either by empirical analysis or by the use of models," and (6) "the problem of flood losses is mostly about what we do on or to the landscape," which they say "will be the case for decades to come."
In closing, Kundzewicz et al. write that "the climate change issue is very important to flooding, but we have low confidence about the science," adding that "work towards improvements in GCMs [global climate models] to bring us to a point where all of this is made clear is much needed, and may take much time." And they thoughtfully remind us - in the interim - that "although media reports of both floods and global flood damage are on the increase, there is still no Mauna-Loa-like record (see Vorosmarty, 2002) that shows a global increase in flood frequency or magnitude."
When you look at the full conclusions from the paper itself the overall findings of the paper have a somewhat different perspective:
"Based on the evidence recently assessed in the SREX report (S12), one can assess at present that it is likely that there have been statistically significant increases in the number of heavy precipitation events (e.g. 95th percentile of 24-h precipitation totals of all days with precipitation) in more regions than there have been statistically significant decreases, but there are strong regional and sub-regional variations in the trends, both between and within regions. Based on cumulative evidence, there is additionally medium confidence that anthropogenic influence has contributed to the intensification of heavy precipitation at the global scale, though attribution at the regional scale is not feasible at present. Projected changes from both global and regional studies indicate that it is likely that the frequency of heavy precipitation, or the proportion of total rainfall from heavy falls, will increase in the 21st century over many areas of the globe, especially in the high-latitude and tropical regions and northern mid-latitudes in winter. Heavy precipitation is projected to increase in some (but not all) regions with projected decreases of total precipitation (medium confidence).
Despite the diagnosed extreme-precipitation-based signal, and its possible link to changes in flood patterns, no gauge-based evidence had been found for a climate-driven, globally widespread change in the magnitude/frequency of floods during the last decades. As assessed in the SREX report, projected temperature and precipitation changes imply changes in floods, although overall there is low confidence in projections of changes in fluvial floods, due to limited evidence and because the causes of regional changes are complex. There is medium confidence (based on physical reasoning) that projected increases in heavy rainfall would contribute to increases in rain-generated local flooding in some areas. Earlier spring peak flows in snowmelt- and glacier-fed rivers are very likely, but there is low confidence (due to limited evidence) in their projected magnitude.
There are not many projections of flood magnitude/frequency changes at regional and continental scales. Projections at the river-basin scale are also not abundant, especially for regions outside Europe and North America. In addition, considerable uncertainty remains in the projections of changes in flood magnitude and frequency. Therefore, there is low confidence in future changes in flood magnitude and frequency derived from river discharge simulations.
Kundzewicz et al. (2007, 2008) and Bates et al. (2008) argued that climate change (i.e. observed increase in precipitation intensity and other observed climate changes) might already have had an impact on floods and that physical reasoning suggests that projected increases in heavy rainfall in some catchments or regions would contribute to increases in rain-generated local floods (medium confidence). They argued that more frequent heavy precipitation events projected over most regions would affect the risk of rain-generated floods (e.g. flash flooding and urban flooding). Changes in precipitation totals, frequency and intensity, along with snow cover, snowmelt and soil moisture, are all relevant for causing changes in floods. However, confidence in the magnitude of change of one of these components alone (and—over some regions—even in the sign of change) may not be sufficient to confidently project changes in flood occurrence.
According to UNISDR (2011), the global mortality risk from floods increased from 1980 to 2000, but is now stabilizing and even reducing, because of a compensation of the increase in exposure by a significant decrease in vulnerability. However, the global trend is largely influenced by developments in China (in particular around vertical urbanization). If China is removed from the data set, the mortality risk is increasing (UNISDR 2011). Economic losses from floods have increased considerably (H12), but with large spatial and inter-annual variability (high confidence, based on high agreement, medium evidence). Global flood disaster losses reported over the last few decades reflect mainly monetized direct damages to assets. Trends in the vulnerability of what is exposed are variable by location, and the global picture is strongly influenced by China, where vulnerability to floods has decreased over the past decade. Current studies indicate that increasing exposure of population and assets, and not anthropogenic climate change, is responsible for the past increase in flood losses. While early warning systems can successfully reduce mortality risk through evacuation of the population, crops and infrastructures remain in place, and hence the significant increase in infrastructures has led to a drastic increase in economic risk (Bouwer 2011, UNISDR 2011). Studies that project future flood losses and casualties indicate that, when no adaptation is undertaken, future anthropogenic climate change is likely to lead to increasing flood losses, alongside the increase in exposure linked to ongoing economic development (H12). Where rapid urbanization brings inadequately engineered in-city drainage infrastructure as well, its effect can promote rather than decrease losses to both the economy and human lives. In general, human modifications of watersheds, changing their runoff characteristics (e.g. urbanization, deforestation, building of flood walls and dams, and artificial land drainage), lead to flood risk changes.
The impacts of changes in flood characteristics will be highly dependent on how climate changes in the future, and there is low confidence in specific projections of changes in flood magnitude or frequency. However, even in the absence of increased flood risk owing to increased heavy precipitation or other modifications of the climate system, flood risk will generally increase as exposure continues to rise. Hence, flood adaptation strategies need to jointly consider landscape changes that affect flood response, the location and protection of people and property at risk, as well as changes in flood risk due to changes in climate. All three are of critical importance to the future of flood hazards and economic losses due to flooding.
There are at least two ways of interpreting the notion of “early flood warning” (Kundzewicz 2013). The more common interpretation of the notion refers to a short-term flood preparedness system, where a flood warning contains specific timely information, based on a reliable forecast, that a high water level is expected at a particular location and time. A warning should be issued sufficiently early before the potential inundation to allow adequate preparation and to ensure that emergency actions, such as strengthening dikes or evacuation, can be undertaken, so that flood damage to people and property is reduced. The appropriate timeframe is affected by the catchment size relative to the vulnerable zones. The warning should be expressed in a way that persuades people to take appropriate action. The solutions lie in the area of improved weather and hydrological forecasting, better weather and hydrologic networks and better real-time risk communication.
The other interpretation of “early flood warning” is a statement that a high water level or discharge is likely to occur more (or less) frequently in a time scale of decades. Technically, this constitutes a “prediction” of a change in flood frequency compared to a reference period. An early warning of this type could, for example, predict that at a site of concern, the current 100-year flood (river flow exceeded once in 100 years on average in the reference period) may become a 50-year flood in a defined future time horizon. Despite the inherent uncertainty, such an early warning would be an important signal for decision-makers that the required level of protection is unlikely to be maintained in the future unless flood preparedness is improved.
The linkages between enhanced greenhouse forcing and flood phenomena are highly complex and, up to the present, it has not been possible to describe the connections well, either by empirical analysis or by the use of models. It is clear that current trends in human activity on the landscape continue to cause an increase in flood damages. Decreasing or reversing this trend will require substantial attention from governments, private citizens, scientists and engineers, and the actions needed to accomplish this are largely the same regardless of the nature of the greenhouse gas–flood linkage. If anything, the state of the science of regarding this linkage should cause decision-makers to take a more cautious approach to flood adaptation because of the added uncertainty that enhanced greenhouse forcing has introduced. There is such a furore of concern about the linkage between greenhouse forcing and floods that it causes society to lose focus on the things we already know for certain about floods and how to mitigate and adapt to them. Blaming climate change for flood losses makes flood losses a global issue that appears to be out of the control of regional or national institutions. The scientific community needs to emphasize that the problem of flood losses is mostly about what we do on or to the landscape and that will be the case for decades to come.
The climate change issue is very important to flooding, but we have low confidence about the science. What should the science community, engineers, citizens or governments do with that? The precautionary principle is a right choice. Doing the right things should not depend on waiting for the answers to the greenhouse forcing–flood issue. The continuation of empirical and model-based science and a “no regrets” strategy for limiting flood losses should be encouraged. However, work towards improvements in GCMs to bring us to a point where all of this is made clear is much needed, and this may take much time (Kundzewicz and Stakhiv 2010).
Although media reports of both floods and global flood damage are on the increase, there is still no Mauna-Loa-like record (see Vörösmarty 2002) that shows a global increase in flood frequency or magnitude."
For example, I looked up the section on flood impacts and the first paper they quote from: (Kundzewicz, Z.W., Kanae, S., Seneviratne, S.I., Handmer, J., Nicholls, N., Peduzzi, P., Mechler, R., Bouwer, L.M., Arnell, N., Mach, K., Muir-Wood, R., Brakenridge, G.R., Kron, W., Benito, G., Honda, Y., Takahashi, K. and Sherstyukov, B. 2013. Flood risk and climate change: global and regional perspectives. Hydrological Sciences Journal: 10.1080/02626667.2013.857411). is analysed as saying:
"In a massive review of the subject conducted by a team of seventeen researchers hailing from eleven different countries, i.e., Kundzewicz et al. (2013), we learn the following: (1) "no gauge-based evidence has been found for a climate-driven, globally widespread change in the magnitude/frequency of floods during the last decades," (2) "there is low confidence in projections of changes in fluvial floods, due to limited evidence and because the causes of regional changes are complex," (3) "considerable uncertainty remains in the projections of changes in flood magnitude and frequency," (4) increases in global flood disaster losses reported over the last few decades "may be attributed to improvements in reporting, population increase and urbanization in flood-prone areas, increase of property value and degraded awareness about natural risks (due to less natural lifestyle)," (5) "the linkages between enhanced greenhouse forcing and flood phenomena are highly complex and, up to the present, it has not been possible to describe the connections well, either by empirical analysis or by the use of models," and (6) "the problem of flood losses is mostly about what we do on or to the landscape," which they say "will be the case for decades to come."
In closing, Kundzewicz et al. write that "the climate change issue is very important to flooding, but we have low confidence about the science," adding that "work towards improvements in GCMs [global climate models] to bring us to a point where all of this is made clear is much needed, and may take much time." And they thoughtfully remind us - in the interim - that "although media reports of both floods and global flood damage are on the increase, there is still no Mauna-Loa-like record (see Vorosmarty, 2002) that shows a global increase in flood frequency or magnitude."
When you look at the full conclusions from the paper itself the overall findings of the paper have a somewhat different perspective:
"Based on the evidence recently assessed in the SREX report (S12), one can assess at present that it is likely that there have been statistically significant increases in the number of heavy precipitation events (e.g. 95th percentile of 24-h precipitation totals of all days with precipitation) in more regions than there have been statistically significant decreases, but there are strong regional and sub-regional variations in the trends, both between and within regions. Based on cumulative evidence, there is additionally medium confidence that anthropogenic influence has contributed to the intensification of heavy precipitation at the global scale, though attribution at the regional scale is not feasible at present. Projected changes from both global and regional studies indicate that it is likely that the frequency of heavy precipitation, or the proportion of total rainfall from heavy falls, will increase in the 21st century over many areas of the globe, especially in the high-latitude and tropical regions and northern mid-latitudes in winter. Heavy precipitation is projected to increase in some (but not all) regions with projected decreases of total precipitation (medium confidence).
Despite the diagnosed extreme-precipitation-based signal, and its possible link to changes in flood patterns, no gauge-based evidence had been found for a climate-driven, globally widespread change in the magnitude/frequency of floods during the last decades. As assessed in the SREX report, projected temperature and precipitation changes imply changes in floods, although overall there is low confidence in projections of changes in fluvial floods, due to limited evidence and because the causes of regional changes are complex. There is medium confidence (based on physical reasoning) that projected increases in heavy rainfall would contribute to increases in rain-generated local flooding in some areas. Earlier spring peak flows in snowmelt- and glacier-fed rivers are very likely, but there is low confidence (due to limited evidence) in their projected magnitude.
There are not many projections of flood magnitude/frequency changes at regional and continental scales. Projections at the river-basin scale are also not abundant, especially for regions outside Europe and North America. In addition, considerable uncertainty remains in the projections of changes in flood magnitude and frequency. Therefore, there is low confidence in future changes in flood magnitude and frequency derived from river discharge simulations.
Kundzewicz et al. (2007, 2008) and Bates et al. (2008) argued that climate change (i.e. observed increase in precipitation intensity and other observed climate changes) might already have had an impact on floods and that physical reasoning suggests that projected increases in heavy rainfall in some catchments or regions would contribute to increases in rain-generated local floods (medium confidence). They argued that more frequent heavy precipitation events projected over most regions would affect the risk of rain-generated floods (e.g. flash flooding and urban flooding). Changes in precipitation totals, frequency and intensity, along with snow cover, snowmelt and soil moisture, are all relevant for causing changes in floods. However, confidence in the magnitude of change of one of these components alone (and—over some regions—even in the sign of change) may not be sufficient to confidently project changes in flood occurrence.
According to UNISDR (2011), the global mortality risk from floods increased from 1980 to 2000, but is now stabilizing and even reducing, because of a compensation of the increase in exposure by a significant decrease in vulnerability. However, the global trend is largely influenced by developments in China (in particular around vertical urbanization). If China is removed from the data set, the mortality risk is increasing (UNISDR 2011). Economic losses from floods have increased considerably (H12), but with large spatial and inter-annual variability (high confidence, based on high agreement, medium evidence). Global flood disaster losses reported over the last few decades reflect mainly monetized direct damages to assets. Trends in the vulnerability of what is exposed are variable by location, and the global picture is strongly influenced by China, where vulnerability to floods has decreased over the past decade. Current studies indicate that increasing exposure of population and assets, and not anthropogenic climate change, is responsible for the past increase in flood losses. While early warning systems can successfully reduce mortality risk through evacuation of the population, crops and infrastructures remain in place, and hence the significant increase in infrastructures has led to a drastic increase in economic risk (Bouwer 2011, UNISDR 2011). Studies that project future flood losses and casualties indicate that, when no adaptation is undertaken, future anthropogenic climate change is likely to lead to increasing flood losses, alongside the increase in exposure linked to ongoing economic development (H12). Where rapid urbanization brings inadequately engineered in-city drainage infrastructure as well, its effect can promote rather than decrease losses to both the economy and human lives. In general, human modifications of watersheds, changing their runoff characteristics (e.g. urbanization, deforestation, building of flood walls and dams, and artificial land drainage), lead to flood risk changes.
The impacts of changes in flood characteristics will be highly dependent on how climate changes in the future, and there is low confidence in specific projections of changes in flood magnitude or frequency. However, even in the absence of increased flood risk owing to increased heavy precipitation or other modifications of the climate system, flood risk will generally increase as exposure continues to rise. Hence, flood adaptation strategies need to jointly consider landscape changes that affect flood response, the location and protection of people and property at risk, as well as changes in flood risk due to changes in climate. All three are of critical importance to the future of flood hazards and economic losses due to flooding.
There are at least two ways of interpreting the notion of “early flood warning” (Kundzewicz 2013). The more common interpretation of the notion refers to a short-term flood preparedness system, where a flood warning contains specific timely information, based on a reliable forecast, that a high water level is expected at a particular location and time. A warning should be issued sufficiently early before the potential inundation to allow adequate preparation and to ensure that emergency actions, such as strengthening dikes or evacuation, can be undertaken, so that flood damage to people and property is reduced. The appropriate timeframe is affected by the catchment size relative to the vulnerable zones. The warning should be expressed in a way that persuades people to take appropriate action. The solutions lie in the area of improved weather and hydrological forecasting, better weather and hydrologic networks and better real-time risk communication.
The other interpretation of “early flood warning” is a statement that a high water level or discharge is likely to occur more (or less) frequently in a time scale of decades. Technically, this constitutes a “prediction” of a change in flood frequency compared to a reference period. An early warning of this type could, for example, predict that at a site of concern, the current 100-year flood (river flow exceeded once in 100 years on average in the reference period) may become a 50-year flood in a defined future time horizon. Despite the inherent uncertainty, such an early warning would be an important signal for decision-makers that the required level of protection is unlikely to be maintained in the future unless flood preparedness is improved.
The linkages between enhanced greenhouse forcing and flood phenomena are highly complex and, up to the present, it has not been possible to describe the connections well, either by empirical analysis or by the use of models. It is clear that current trends in human activity on the landscape continue to cause an increase in flood damages. Decreasing or reversing this trend will require substantial attention from governments, private citizens, scientists and engineers, and the actions needed to accomplish this are largely the same regardless of the nature of the greenhouse gas–flood linkage. If anything, the state of the science of regarding this linkage should cause decision-makers to take a more cautious approach to flood adaptation because of the added uncertainty that enhanced greenhouse forcing has introduced. There is such a furore of concern about the linkage between greenhouse forcing and floods that it causes society to lose focus on the things we already know for certain about floods and how to mitigate and adapt to them. Blaming climate change for flood losses makes flood losses a global issue that appears to be out of the control of regional or national institutions. The scientific community needs to emphasize that the problem of flood losses is mostly about what we do on or to the landscape and that will be the case for decades to come.
The climate change issue is very important to flooding, but we have low confidence about the science. What should the science community, engineers, citizens or governments do with that? The precautionary principle is a right choice. Doing the right things should not depend on waiting for the answers to the greenhouse forcing–flood issue. The continuation of empirical and model-based science and a “no regrets” strategy for limiting flood losses should be encouraged. However, work towards improvements in GCMs to bring us to a point where all of this is made clear is much needed, and this may take much time (Kundzewicz and Stakhiv 2010).
Although media reports of both floods and global flood damage are on the increase, there is still no Mauna-Loa-like record (see Vörösmarty 2002) that shows a global increase in flood frequency or magnitude."
Edited by Lotus 50 on Sunday 18th January 14:21
turbobloke said:
America vs Russia, Hansen vs Abdussamatov:
Buy Damart and candles.
Soooo... 1.5°C cooler than today.Several times up to and including 2013 Absussamatov said:
Beginning around 2014 the average annual temperature will begin to drop, and by 2050 it will be about 1.5°C cooler than today.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/new-paper-predicts-another-little-ice.htmlBuy Damart and candles.
What does that mean in terms of typical winters and summers? More and prolonged snowfall? Or just greyer for longer?
mondeoman said:
turbobloke said:
America vs Russia, Hansen vs Abdussamatov:
Buy Damart and candles.
Soooo... 1.5°C cooler than today.Several times up to and including 2013 Absussamatov said:
Beginning around 2014 the average annual temperature will begin to drop, and by 2050 it will be about 1.5°C cooler than today.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/new-paper-predicts-another-little-ice.htmlBuy Damart and candles.
What does that mean in terms of typical winters and summers? More and prolonged snowfall? Or just greyer for longer?
http://iceagenow.info/2012/05/year-summer-occurred...
If solar decline continues to Maunder Mibnimum levels, then conditions from the Little Ice Age would be closer to it.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/28/bbc-real-ris...
A comment from the last link applies in both cases, only to a significantly different extent in terms of both temperature and timescale from Dalton to Maunder: It’s worth stressing that not every winter would be severe; nor would every summer be poor. But harsh winters and unsettled summers would become more frequent."
Unethical Unintended Consequences Of Climate Policies
Mitigation Policies Have Brought Pain & Chaos In Their Wake
A new paper by Andrew Montford and published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation examines the unintended consequences of climate change policy around the world.
We are constantly told about the risks of what climate change might bring in the distant future. In response, governments have adopted a series of policy measures that have been largely ineffective but have brought with them a bewildering array of unintended consequences. From the destruction of the landscape wrought by windfarms, to the graft and corruption that has been introduced by the carbon markets, to the disastrous promotion of biofuels, carbon mitigation policies have brought chaos in their wake.
The new paper surveys some of the key policy measures, reviewing the unintended consequences for both the UK and the rest of the world. Mr Montford is a prominent writer on climate change and energy policy and has appeared many times in the media.
“The most shameful aspect of the developed world’s rush to implement climate change mitigation policies is that they have often been justified by reference to ethics. Yet the results have been the very opposite of ethical.” said Mr Montford.
“Andrew Montford has reviewed the sad truth about various schemes to ‘save the planet’ from the demonized but life-giving gas CO2: from bird-killing windmills, native peoples expelled from their ancestral lands, to fraud in the trading of carbon credits. Every thinking citizen of the planet should read this,” said William Happer, Professor of Physics at Princeton University.
Unintended Consequences of Climate Change Policy
Summary
At the heart of much policy to deal with climate change lies an ethical approach to the question of intergenerational equity, namely that current generations should avoid passing costs onto future ones, who can play no part in the decisions. In fact it has been said that this is the only ethical way to deal with global warming, although this is not true – professional economists have identified several alternatives.
Working within this ethical framework, governments have taken expensive policy steps to prevent the costs of climate change falling on future generations, for example by fixing energy markets in favour of renewables or by instituting schemes to cap and trade carbon emissions. There has been an unfortunate and bewildering array of unintended consequences that refute the ‘ethical’ label for the framework:
• clearing of rainforests
• human rights abuses
• hunger and starvation
• destruction of valued landscapes
• slaughter of wildlife
• waste
• transfers of wealth from poor to rich
• fuel poverty and death
• pollution
• destruction of jobs
• higher-than-necessary carbon emissions.
In view of the damage done by this ‘ethical’ approach this report calls for a public debate on alternative approaches to intergenerational equity and for an end to the measures that are currently being used to address it.
Link (pdf) http://thegwpf.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c...
GWPF, London, 19 January 2015
Mitigation Policies Have Brought Pain & Chaos In Their Wake
A new paper by Andrew Montford and published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation examines the unintended consequences of climate change policy around the world.
We are constantly told about the risks of what climate change might bring in the distant future. In response, governments have adopted a series of policy measures that have been largely ineffective but have brought with them a bewildering array of unintended consequences. From the destruction of the landscape wrought by windfarms, to the graft and corruption that has been introduced by the carbon markets, to the disastrous promotion of biofuels, carbon mitigation policies have brought chaos in their wake.
The new paper surveys some of the key policy measures, reviewing the unintended consequences for both the UK and the rest of the world. Mr Montford is a prominent writer on climate change and energy policy and has appeared many times in the media.
“The most shameful aspect of the developed world’s rush to implement climate change mitigation policies is that they have often been justified by reference to ethics. Yet the results have been the very opposite of ethical.” said Mr Montford.
“Andrew Montford has reviewed the sad truth about various schemes to ‘save the planet’ from the demonized but life-giving gas CO2: from bird-killing windmills, native peoples expelled from their ancestral lands, to fraud in the trading of carbon credits. Every thinking citizen of the planet should read this,” said William Happer, Professor of Physics at Princeton University.
Unintended Consequences of Climate Change Policy
Summary
At the heart of much policy to deal with climate change lies an ethical approach to the question of intergenerational equity, namely that current generations should avoid passing costs onto future ones, who can play no part in the decisions. In fact it has been said that this is the only ethical way to deal with global warming, although this is not true – professional economists have identified several alternatives.
Working within this ethical framework, governments have taken expensive policy steps to prevent the costs of climate change falling on future generations, for example by fixing energy markets in favour of renewables or by instituting schemes to cap and trade carbon emissions. There has been an unfortunate and bewildering array of unintended consequences that refute the ‘ethical’ label for the framework:
• clearing of rainforests
• human rights abuses
• hunger and starvation
• destruction of valued landscapes
• slaughter of wildlife
• waste
• transfers of wealth from poor to rich
• fuel poverty and death
• pollution
• destruction of jobs
• higher-than-necessary carbon emissions.
In view of the damage done by this ‘ethical’ approach this report calls for a public debate on alternative approaches to intergenerational equity and for an end to the measures that are currently being used to address it.
Link (pdf) http://thegwpf.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c...
GWPF, London, 19 January 2015
More bedtime reading, the first from Matt as a lukewarmist/doubting believer (under attack) and the second from Christopher Booker as a climate realist (also under attack). Try to ignore the single quote hiccup.
All the fury must mean that my arguments are hitting home
or efforts would be made to demolish them rather me
I am a climate lukewarmer. That means I think recent global warming is real,
mostly man-made and will continue but I no longer think it is likely to be
dangerous and I think its slow and erratic progress so far is what we should
expect in the future. That last year was the warmest yet, in some data sets,
but only by a smidgen more than 2005, is precisely in line with such
lukewarm thinking.
This view annoys some sceptics who think all climate change is natural or
imaginary, but it is even more infuriating to most publicly funded
scientists and politicians, who insist climate change is a big risk. My
middle-of-the-road position is considered not just wrong, but disgraceful,
shameful, verging on scandalous. I am subjected to torrents of online abuse
for holding it, very little of it from sceptics.
I was even kept off the shortlist for a part-time, unpaid public-sector
appointment in a field unrelated to climate because of having this view, or
so the headhunter thought. In the climate debate, paying obeisance to
climate scaremongering is about as mandatory for a public appointment, or
public funding, as being a Protestant was in 18th-century England.
Kind friends send me news almost weekly of whole blog posts devoted to
nothing but analysing my intellectual and personal inadequacies, always in
relation to my views on climate. Writing about climate change is a small
part of my life but, to judge by some of the stuff that gets written about
me, writing about me is a large part of the life of some of the more
obsessive climate commentators. It¹s all a bit strange. Why is this debate
so fractious?
Rather than attack my arguments, my critics like to attack my motives. I
stand accused of ³wanting² climate change to be mild because I support free
markets or because I receive income indirectly from the mining of coal in
Northumberland. Two surface coal mines (which I do not own), operating
without subsidies, do indeed dig coal partly from land that I own. They pay
me a fee, as I have repeatedly declared in speeches, books and articles.
I do think that coal, oil and gas have been a good thing so far, by giving
us an alternative to cutting down forests and killing whales, by supplying
fertiliser to feed the world, by giving the global poor affordable energy,
and so on. But instead of defending the modern coal industry I write and
speak extensively in favour of gas, the biggest competitive threat to coal¹s
share of the electricity market. If we can phase out coal without causing
too much suffering, then I would not object.
Besides, I could probably earn even more from renewable energy. As a
landowner, I am astonished by the generosity of the offers I keep receiving
for green-energy subsidies. Wind farm developers in smart suits dangle the
prospect of tens of thousands of pounds per turbine on my land and tens of
turbines. A solar developer wrote to me recently saying he could offer more
than a million pounds of income over 25 years if I were to cover some
particular fields with solar panels. Many big country houses have installed
subsidised wood-fired heating to the point where you can hear their
Canalettos cracking. I argue against such subsidies, so I don¹t take them.
I was not always a lukewarmer. When I first started writing about the threat
of global warming more than 26 years ago, as science editor ofThe Economist,
I thought it was a genuinely dangerous threat. Like, for instance, Margaret
Thatcher, I accepted the predictions being made at the time that we would
see warming of a third or a half a degree (Centigrade) a decade, perhaps
more, and that this would have devastating consequences.
Gradually, however, I changed my mind. The failure of the atmosphere to warm
anywhere near as rapidly as predicted was a big reason: there has been less
than half a degree of global warming in four decades and it has slowed
down, not speeded up. Increases in malaria, refugees, heatwaves, storms,
droughts and floods have not materialised to anything like the predicted
extent, if at all. Sea level has risen but at a very slow rate about a
foot per century.
Also, I soon realised that all the mathematical models predicting rapid
warming assume big amplifying feedbacks in the atmosphere, mainly from water
vapour; carbon dioxide is merely the primer, responsible for about a third
of the predicted warming. When this penny dropped, so did my confidence in
predictions of future alarm: the amplifiers are highly uncertain.
Another thing that gave me pause was that I went back and looked at the
history of past predictions of ecological apocalypse from my youth
population explosion, oil exhaustion, elephant extinction, rainforest loss,
acid rain, the ozone layer, desertification, nuclear winter, the running out
of resources, pandemics, falling sperm counts, cancerous pesticide pollution
and so forth. There was a consistent pattern of exaggeration, followed by
damp squibs: in not a single case was the problem as bad as had been widely
predicted by leading scientists. That does not make every new prediction of
apocalypse necessarily wrong, of course, but it should encourage scepticism.
What sealed my apostasy from climate alarm was the extraordinary history of
the famous ³hockey stick² graph, which purported to show that today¹s
temperatures were higher and changing faster than at any time in the past
thousand years. That graph genuinely shocked me when I first saw it and,
briefly in the early 2000s, it persuaded me to abandon my growing doubts
about dangerous climate change and return to the ³alarmed² camp.
Then I began to read the work of two Canadian researchers, Steve McIntyre
and Ross McKitrick. They and others have shown, as confirmed by the National
Academy of Sciences in the United States, that the hockey stick graph, and
others like it, are heavily reliant on dubious sets of tree rings and use
inappropriate statistical filters that exaggerate any 20th-century upturns.
What shocked me more was the scientific establishment¹s reaction to this: it
tried to pretend that nothing was wrong. And then a flood of emails was
leaked in 2009 showing some climate scientists apparently scheming to
withhold data, prevent papers being published, get journal editors sacked
and evade freedom-of-information requests, much as sceptics had been
alleging. That was when I began to re-examine everything I had been told
about climate change and, the more I looked, the flakier the prediction of
rapid warming seemed.
I am especially unimpressed by the claim that a prediction of rapid and
dangerous warming is ³settled science², as firm as evolution or gravity. How
could it be? It is a prediction! No prediction, let alone in a multi-causal,
chaotic and poorly understood system like the global climate, should ever be
treated as gospel. With the exception of eclipses, there is virtually
nothing scientists can say with certainty about the future. It is absurd to
argue that one cannot disagree with a forecast. Is the Bank of England¹s
inflation forecast infallible?
Incidentally, my current view is still consistent with the ³consensus² among
scientists, as represented by the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change. The consensus is that climate change is happening, not that
it is going to be dangerous. The latest IPCC report gives a range of
estimates of future warming, from harmless to terrifying. My best guess
would be about one degree of warming during this century, which is well
within the IPCC¹s range of possible outcomes.
Yet most politicians go straight to the top of the IPCC¹s range and call
climate change things like ³perhaps the world¹s most fearsome weapon of mass
destruction² (John Kerry), requiring the expenditure of trillions of
dollars. I think that is verging on grotesque in a world full of war,
hunger, disease and poverty. It also means that environmental efforts get
diverted from more urgent priorities, like habitat loss and invasive
species.
The policies being proposed to combat climate change, far from being a
modest insurance policy, are proving ineffective, expensive, harmful to poor
people and actually bad for the environment: we are tearing down rainforests
to grow biofuels and ripping up peat bogs to install windmills that still
need fossil-fuel back-up. These policies are failing to buy any comfort for
our wealthy grandchildren and are doing so on the backs of today¹s poor.
Some insurance policy.
To begin with, after I came out as a lukewarmer, I would get genuine
critiques from scientists who disagreed with me and wanted to exchange
views. I had long and time-consuming email exchanges or conversations with
several such scientists.
Yet I grew steadily more sceptical as, one by one, they failed to answer my
doubts. They often resorted to meta-arguments, especially the argument from
authority: if the Royal Society says it is alarmed, then you should be
alarmed. If I want argument from authority, I replied, I will join the
Catholic Church. ³These are just standard denialist talking points² scoffed
another prominent scientist, unpersuasively, when I raised objections as
if that answered them.
My experience with sceptical scientists, many of them distinguished
climatologists at leading universities, was different. The more I probed,
the better their data seemed. They did not resort to the argument from
authority. Sometimes I disagreed with them or thought they went too far. I
have yet to be convinced, for example, that changes in the output of the sun
caused the warming of the 1980s and 1990s an idea that some espouse. So
for the most part, I found myself persuaded by the middle-of-the-road,
³lukewarm² argument that CO2-induced warming is likely but it won¹t be
large, fast or damaging.
Then a funny thing happened a few years ago. Those who disagreed with me
stopped pointing out politely where or why they disagreed and started
calling me names. One by one, many of the most prominent people in the
climate debate began to throw vitriolic playground abuse at me. I was
³paranoid², ³specious², ³risible², ³self-defaming², ³daft², ³lying²,
³irrational², an ³idiot². Their letters to the editor or their blog
responses asserted that I was ³error-riddled² or had seriously
misrepresented something, but then they not only failed to substantiate the
charge but often roughly confirmed what I had written.
I have seen bad-tempered polarisation of scientific debates before, for
example during the nature-nurture debates of the 1970s and 1980s between
those who thought genes affected behaviour and those who thought upbringing
was overwhelmingly important. That debate grew vicious. What caused the
polarisation, I realised then, was not just that people on one side read the
articles they agreed with, reinforcing their prejudices, but something more.
They relied on extreme distortions of their enemies¹ arguments, written by
self-appointed guardians of the flame on their own side, so they were
constantly attacking straw men.
It¹s the same here. Most of the people who attack me seem to think I am a
³denier² of climate change because that¹s what a few hyperventilating
bloggers keep saying about me. It¹s not, of course, true. It's these flame
guardians who polarise such debates.
The most prolific of them is a man named Bob Ward. Although employed at the
London School of Economics, he is not a researcher or lecturer, but policy
and communications director, somebody whose day job is to defend the climate
orthodoxy in the media. Some might call him a spin doctor. It appears to me
that he feels compelled to write something rude about me every time I
publish on this topic and although his letters to editors are often
published, he throws an online tantrum if they are not. He is hilariously
obsessed with my peerage, lovingly reciting my title every time he attacks
me, like a Bertie Woosterish snob.
As an example of playing the man and not the ball, Ward and Lord Deben,
chairman of the government¹s official committee on climate change, are both
wont to mock the fact that my Oxford DPhil thesis in 1983 was on the
behaviour of birds. Good luck to them but I notice they don't mock the fact
that the DPhil thesis of Lord Krebs was also on birds, earned in the very
same research group as me: the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology.
Lord Krebs is the chairman of the adaptation subcommittee of the committee
on climate change.
John Krebs, a fine scientist and superb lecturer, was the internal examiner
of my thesis, which he praised at the time, after telling me to correct a
couple of silly mistakes he had spotted in the calculation of a probability
result. I did so. Imagine my surprise when he recently told several separate
people (who reported it to me) that I should not be listened to on climate
change because my DPhil thesis, all those years ago, contained mathematical
errors. Lord May even used this argument against me in a debate in the House
of Lords: that because I got a number wrong in a calculation 31 years ago, I
cannot ever be right again. This is the kind of hilarious thing that happens
to you if you come out as a lukewarmer.
Talking of the committee on climate change, last year Lord Deben
commissioned an entire report to criticise something I had said. Among other
howlers, it included a quotation from the IPCC but the quote had a large
chunk cut from the middle. When this cut was restored the line supported me,
not Lord Deben. When I pointed this out politely to Lord Deben, he refused
to restore the excision and left the document unchanged on the committee¹s
website. Presenting quotations so they appear to mean something different
from what they do is quite a sin in journalism. Apparently not in Whitehall
committees.
I suppose all this fury means my arguments are hitting home. If they were
easily demolished they would demolish them rather than try to demolish me.
Many of the things that I was abused for saying have since proved to be
right. I was one of the first to write an article in the mainstream media
(in The Wall Street Journal in 2012) arguing that the latest data supported
much lower estimates of climate sensitivity (the amount of warming induced
by a doubling of carbon dioxide levels) than those being assumed by the
models used by the IPCC.
This produced the usual vituperation online from about a dozen high-profile
science commentators with nothing better to do. Since then four papers have
appeared in the scientific literature, authored by very prominent climate
scientists, giving low estimates of climate sensitivity, some even lower
than I had said. I am waiting for my critics to acknowledge that my story
was sound.
I have never met a climate sceptic, let alone a lukewarmer, who wants his
opponents silenced. I wish I could say the same of those who think climate
change is an alarming prospect.
Matt Ridley, The Times, 19 January 2015
Forget this mega refugee crisis, let's talk about global warming
Under the heading "We are the last generation that can fight climate
change. We have a duty to act", the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon,
set out in The Guardian (where else?) his global agenda for 2015.
Ebola got a mention, as did Ukraine, terrorism and the recent events
in Paris. But his only specific proposal for action was his wish to
see "an ambitious and universal agreement in Paris in December to keep
the rise in global temperatures below the dangerous threshold of 2
degrees C" (the treaty that isn't going to happen).
Apart from one cursory mention, there was nothing about what another
member of his organisation, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, is
calling "the biggest humanitarian crisis of our era". It is, of
course, the appalling plight of those millions of Syrian refugees -
now made even worse as three million of them freeze in makeshift
Turkish and Lebanese camps that, despite Mr Ban's obsession with
global warming, are under several inches of snow.
The desperation of these refugees has become the largest single
contributor to that other horror story I described last week, the
total shambles the EU and its member states are making of the Syrians'
desire to find "asylum" in Europe, which in every direction is making
nonsense of the law. One law dictates that asylum seekers must be
welcomed. But another makes it illegal to enter the EU without a visa,
while it is made as dangerous as possible to do so. A third then
places responsibility for those who do manage to do so on the first EU
country they enter, usually Italy, where their application to remain
must be "processed". But the only wish of these countries is to evade
the law by moving them on to the countries most actually wish to
reach, such as Germany, Sweden or Britain.
We thus see the farcical situation where France, while otherwise doing
as little as it can to help the asylum seekers, then uses EU cash to
build a £6 million camp for them outside Calais, complete with hot
showers, a Michelin restaurant chef, charging points for their mobiles
and three football pilches - all to assist thousands of them to move
illegally on to Britain, knowing that human-rights law makes it
virtually impossible for them to be returned. Last week, even the
European Parliament held a debate on a crisis now facing the EU with
half a million new asylum seekers a year. But our own MPs were far too
busy discussing how many parties should be allowed to appear on
election broadcasts, like so many angels jostling to get on a pin. As
with Mr Ban, it seems displacement activity from the real world has
become the order of the day.
Christopher Booker, Sunday Telegraph, 18 January 2015
All the fury must mean that my arguments are hitting home
or efforts would be made to demolish them rather me
I am a climate lukewarmer. That means I think recent global warming is real,
mostly man-made and will continue but I no longer think it is likely to be
dangerous and I think its slow and erratic progress so far is what we should
expect in the future. That last year was the warmest yet, in some data sets,
but only by a smidgen more than 2005, is precisely in line with such
lukewarm thinking.
This view annoys some sceptics who think all climate change is natural or
imaginary, but it is even more infuriating to most publicly funded
scientists and politicians, who insist climate change is a big risk. My
middle-of-the-road position is considered not just wrong, but disgraceful,
shameful, verging on scandalous. I am subjected to torrents of online abuse
for holding it, very little of it from sceptics.
I was even kept off the shortlist for a part-time, unpaid public-sector
appointment in a field unrelated to climate because of having this view, or
so the headhunter thought. In the climate debate, paying obeisance to
climate scaremongering is about as mandatory for a public appointment, or
public funding, as being a Protestant was in 18th-century England.
Kind friends send me news almost weekly of whole blog posts devoted to
nothing but analysing my intellectual and personal inadequacies, always in
relation to my views on climate. Writing about climate change is a small
part of my life but, to judge by some of the stuff that gets written about
me, writing about me is a large part of the life of some of the more
obsessive climate commentators. It¹s all a bit strange. Why is this debate
so fractious?
Rather than attack my arguments, my critics like to attack my motives. I
stand accused of ³wanting² climate change to be mild because I support free
markets or because I receive income indirectly from the mining of coal in
Northumberland. Two surface coal mines (which I do not own), operating
without subsidies, do indeed dig coal partly from land that I own. They pay
me a fee, as I have repeatedly declared in speeches, books and articles.
I do think that coal, oil and gas have been a good thing so far, by giving
us an alternative to cutting down forests and killing whales, by supplying
fertiliser to feed the world, by giving the global poor affordable energy,
and so on. But instead of defending the modern coal industry I write and
speak extensively in favour of gas, the biggest competitive threat to coal¹s
share of the electricity market. If we can phase out coal without causing
too much suffering, then I would not object.
Besides, I could probably earn even more from renewable energy. As a
landowner, I am astonished by the generosity of the offers I keep receiving
for green-energy subsidies. Wind farm developers in smart suits dangle the
prospect of tens of thousands of pounds per turbine on my land and tens of
turbines. A solar developer wrote to me recently saying he could offer more
than a million pounds of income over 25 years if I were to cover some
particular fields with solar panels. Many big country houses have installed
subsidised wood-fired heating to the point where you can hear their
Canalettos cracking. I argue against such subsidies, so I don¹t take them.
I was not always a lukewarmer. When I first started writing about the threat
of global warming more than 26 years ago, as science editor ofThe Economist,
I thought it was a genuinely dangerous threat. Like, for instance, Margaret
Thatcher, I accepted the predictions being made at the time that we would
see warming of a third or a half a degree (Centigrade) a decade, perhaps
more, and that this would have devastating consequences.
Gradually, however, I changed my mind. The failure of the atmosphere to warm
anywhere near as rapidly as predicted was a big reason: there has been less
than half a degree of global warming in four decades and it has slowed
down, not speeded up. Increases in malaria, refugees, heatwaves, storms,
droughts and floods have not materialised to anything like the predicted
extent, if at all. Sea level has risen but at a very slow rate about a
foot per century.
Also, I soon realised that all the mathematical models predicting rapid
warming assume big amplifying feedbacks in the atmosphere, mainly from water
vapour; carbon dioxide is merely the primer, responsible for about a third
of the predicted warming. When this penny dropped, so did my confidence in
predictions of future alarm: the amplifiers are highly uncertain.
Another thing that gave me pause was that I went back and looked at the
history of past predictions of ecological apocalypse from my youth
population explosion, oil exhaustion, elephant extinction, rainforest loss,
acid rain, the ozone layer, desertification, nuclear winter, the running out
of resources, pandemics, falling sperm counts, cancerous pesticide pollution
and so forth. There was a consistent pattern of exaggeration, followed by
damp squibs: in not a single case was the problem as bad as had been widely
predicted by leading scientists. That does not make every new prediction of
apocalypse necessarily wrong, of course, but it should encourage scepticism.
What sealed my apostasy from climate alarm was the extraordinary history of
the famous ³hockey stick² graph, which purported to show that today¹s
temperatures were higher and changing faster than at any time in the past
thousand years. That graph genuinely shocked me when I first saw it and,
briefly in the early 2000s, it persuaded me to abandon my growing doubts
about dangerous climate change and return to the ³alarmed² camp.
Then I began to read the work of two Canadian researchers, Steve McIntyre
and Ross McKitrick. They and others have shown, as confirmed by the National
Academy of Sciences in the United States, that the hockey stick graph, and
others like it, are heavily reliant on dubious sets of tree rings and use
inappropriate statistical filters that exaggerate any 20th-century upturns.
What shocked me more was the scientific establishment¹s reaction to this: it
tried to pretend that nothing was wrong. And then a flood of emails was
leaked in 2009 showing some climate scientists apparently scheming to
withhold data, prevent papers being published, get journal editors sacked
and evade freedom-of-information requests, much as sceptics had been
alleging. That was when I began to re-examine everything I had been told
about climate change and, the more I looked, the flakier the prediction of
rapid warming seemed.
I am especially unimpressed by the claim that a prediction of rapid and
dangerous warming is ³settled science², as firm as evolution or gravity. How
could it be? It is a prediction! No prediction, let alone in a multi-causal,
chaotic and poorly understood system like the global climate, should ever be
treated as gospel. With the exception of eclipses, there is virtually
nothing scientists can say with certainty about the future. It is absurd to
argue that one cannot disagree with a forecast. Is the Bank of England¹s
inflation forecast infallible?
Incidentally, my current view is still consistent with the ³consensus² among
scientists, as represented by the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change. The consensus is that climate change is happening, not that
it is going to be dangerous. The latest IPCC report gives a range of
estimates of future warming, from harmless to terrifying. My best guess
would be about one degree of warming during this century, which is well
within the IPCC¹s range of possible outcomes.
Yet most politicians go straight to the top of the IPCC¹s range and call
climate change things like ³perhaps the world¹s most fearsome weapon of mass
destruction² (John Kerry), requiring the expenditure of trillions of
dollars. I think that is verging on grotesque in a world full of war,
hunger, disease and poverty. It also means that environmental efforts get
diverted from more urgent priorities, like habitat loss and invasive
species.
The policies being proposed to combat climate change, far from being a
modest insurance policy, are proving ineffective, expensive, harmful to poor
people and actually bad for the environment: we are tearing down rainforests
to grow biofuels and ripping up peat bogs to install windmills that still
need fossil-fuel back-up. These policies are failing to buy any comfort for
our wealthy grandchildren and are doing so on the backs of today¹s poor.
Some insurance policy.
To begin with, after I came out as a lukewarmer, I would get genuine
critiques from scientists who disagreed with me and wanted to exchange
views. I had long and time-consuming email exchanges or conversations with
several such scientists.
Yet I grew steadily more sceptical as, one by one, they failed to answer my
doubts. They often resorted to meta-arguments, especially the argument from
authority: if the Royal Society says it is alarmed, then you should be
alarmed. If I want argument from authority, I replied, I will join the
Catholic Church. ³These are just standard denialist talking points² scoffed
another prominent scientist, unpersuasively, when I raised objections as
if that answered them.
My experience with sceptical scientists, many of them distinguished
climatologists at leading universities, was different. The more I probed,
the better their data seemed. They did not resort to the argument from
authority. Sometimes I disagreed with them or thought they went too far. I
have yet to be convinced, for example, that changes in the output of the sun
caused the warming of the 1980s and 1990s an idea that some espouse. So
for the most part, I found myself persuaded by the middle-of-the-road,
³lukewarm² argument that CO2-induced warming is likely but it won¹t be
large, fast or damaging.
Then a funny thing happened a few years ago. Those who disagreed with me
stopped pointing out politely where or why they disagreed and started
calling me names. One by one, many of the most prominent people in the
climate debate began to throw vitriolic playground abuse at me. I was
³paranoid², ³specious², ³risible², ³self-defaming², ³daft², ³lying²,
³irrational², an ³idiot². Their letters to the editor or their blog
responses asserted that I was ³error-riddled² or had seriously
misrepresented something, but then they not only failed to substantiate the
charge but often roughly confirmed what I had written.
I have seen bad-tempered polarisation of scientific debates before, for
example during the nature-nurture debates of the 1970s and 1980s between
those who thought genes affected behaviour and those who thought upbringing
was overwhelmingly important. That debate grew vicious. What caused the
polarisation, I realised then, was not just that people on one side read the
articles they agreed with, reinforcing their prejudices, but something more.
They relied on extreme distortions of their enemies¹ arguments, written by
self-appointed guardians of the flame on their own side, so they were
constantly attacking straw men.
It¹s the same here. Most of the people who attack me seem to think I am a
³denier² of climate change because that¹s what a few hyperventilating
bloggers keep saying about me. It¹s not, of course, true. It's these flame
guardians who polarise such debates.
The most prolific of them is a man named Bob Ward. Although employed at the
London School of Economics, he is not a researcher or lecturer, but policy
and communications director, somebody whose day job is to defend the climate
orthodoxy in the media. Some might call him a spin doctor. It appears to me
that he feels compelled to write something rude about me every time I
publish on this topic and although his letters to editors are often
published, he throws an online tantrum if they are not. He is hilariously
obsessed with my peerage, lovingly reciting my title every time he attacks
me, like a Bertie Woosterish snob.
As an example of playing the man and not the ball, Ward and Lord Deben,
chairman of the government¹s official committee on climate change, are both
wont to mock the fact that my Oxford DPhil thesis in 1983 was on the
behaviour of birds. Good luck to them but I notice they don't mock the fact
that the DPhil thesis of Lord Krebs was also on birds, earned in the very
same research group as me: the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology.
Lord Krebs is the chairman of the adaptation subcommittee of the committee
on climate change.
John Krebs, a fine scientist and superb lecturer, was the internal examiner
of my thesis, which he praised at the time, after telling me to correct a
couple of silly mistakes he had spotted in the calculation of a probability
result. I did so. Imagine my surprise when he recently told several separate
people (who reported it to me) that I should not be listened to on climate
change because my DPhil thesis, all those years ago, contained mathematical
errors. Lord May even used this argument against me in a debate in the House
of Lords: that because I got a number wrong in a calculation 31 years ago, I
cannot ever be right again. This is the kind of hilarious thing that happens
to you if you come out as a lukewarmer.
Talking of the committee on climate change, last year Lord Deben
commissioned an entire report to criticise something I had said. Among other
howlers, it included a quotation from the IPCC but the quote had a large
chunk cut from the middle. When this cut was restored the line supported me,
not Lord Deben. When I pointed this out politely to Lord Deben, he refused
to restore the excision and left the document unchanged on the committee¹s
website. Presenting quotations so they appear to mean something different
from what they do is quite a sin in journalism. Apparently not in Whitehall
committees.
I suppose all this fury means my arguments are hitting home. If they were
easily demolished they would demolish them rather than try to demolish me.
Many of the things that I was abused for saying have since proved to be
right. I was one of the first to write an article in the mainstream media
(in The Wall Street Journal in 2012) arguing that the latest data supported
much lower estimates of climate sensitivity (the amount of warming induced
by a doubling of carbon dioxide levels) than those being assumed by the
models used by the IPCC.
This produced the usual vituperation online from about a dozen high-profile
science commentators with nothing better to do. Since then four papers have
appeared in the scientific literature, authored by very prominent climate
scientists, giving low estimates of climate sensitivity, some even lower
than I had said. I am waiting for my critics to acknowledge that my story
was sound.
I have never met a climate sceptic, let alone a lukewarmer, who wants his
opponents silenced. I wish I could say the same of those who think climate
change is an alarming prospect.
Matt Ridley, The Times, 19 January 2015
Forget this mega refugee crisis, let's talk about global warming
Under the heading "We are the last generation that can fight climate
change. We have a duty to act", the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon,
set out in The Guardian (where else?) his global agenda for 2015.
Ebola got a mention, as did Ukraine, terrorism and the recent events
in Paris. But his only specific proposal for action was his wish to
see "an ambitious and universal agreement in Paris in December to keep
the rise in global temperatures below the dangerous threshold of 2
degrees C" (the treaty that isn't going to happen).
Apart from one cursory mention, there was nothing about what another
member of his organisation, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, is
calling "the biggest humanitarian crisis of our era". It is, of
course, the appalling plight of those millions of Syrian refugees -
now made even worse as three million of them freeze in makeshift
Turkish and Lebanese camps that, despite Mr Ban's obsession with
global warming, are under several inches of snow.
The desperation of these refugees has become the largest single
contributor to that other horror story I described last week, the
total shambles the EU and its member states are making of the Syrians'
desire to find "asylum" in Europe, which in every direction is making
nonsense of the law. One law dictates that asylum seekers must be
welcomed. But another makes it illegal to enter the EU without a visa,
while it is made as dangerous as possible to do so. A third then
places responsibility for those who do manage to do so on the first EU
country they enter, usually Italy, where their application to remain
must be "processed". But the only wish of these countries is to evade
the law by moving them on to the countries most actually wish to
reach, such as Germany, Sweden or Britain.
We thus see the farcical situation where France, while otherwise doing
as little as it can to help the asylum seekers, then uses EU cash to
build a £6 million camp for them outside Calais, complete with hot
showers, a Michelin restaurant chef, charging points for their mobiles
and three football pilches - all to assist thousands of them to move
illegally on to Britain, knowing that human-rights law makes it
virtually impossible for them to be returned. Last week, even the
European Parliament held a debate on a crisis now facing the EU with
half a million new asylum seekers a year. But our own MPs were far too
busy discussing how many parties should be allowed to appear on
election broadcasts, like so many angels jostling to get on a pin. As
with Mr Ban, it seems displacement activity from the real world has
become the order of the day.
Christopher Booker, Sunday Telegraph, 18 January 2015
And yet again.....a cold winter night, and all the rotating bird killers can give us is 0.65 gw that's a grand total of 1.4 % of our requirements, I do despair that anybody thinks its a good way of keeping the lights on, will the BBC point this fact out on the News, as they did when the figure was higher than nuclear?.
Many times politicians have parroted the line that recent claimed warming was unprecedented. It's not so as we've seen on PH many times, and some recent results show this clearly. MCA, MWP, potayto potarto.
Roman and Medieval Warm Periods vs. the Current Warm Period
In an eye-opening study published in the Chinese Science Bulletin, Yan et al. (2014) recount how they derived high-resolution sea surface temperature (SST) histories of two 80-year time windows centered at approximately AD 990 and AD 50 within the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) and the Roman Warm Period (RWP), respectively, by analyzing the Sr/Ca ratios and d18O values of Tradacna gigas (giant clam) shells collected from the northern South China Sea.
As indicated in the figure below, this undertaking revealed that the mean annual SSTs of the 80-year periods centered on AD 990 (MCA) and AD 50 (RWP) were 0.8C and 1.4C higher than the mean SST during the AD 1994-2005 portion of the Current Warm Period (CWP). Likewise, they also report that the mean summer SSTs of the MCA and RWP were, respectively, 0.2 and 1.0C higher than that of the CWP, while the mean winter SSTs of the MCA and RWP were, respectively, 1.3 and 1.8C higher than that of the CWP.
In commenting on their findings, the five Chinese researchers say “our well-calibrated high-resolution tropical SST records, which suggested a warmer MCA than recent decades, did not agree with the results of the IPCC fourth report, which suggested that the recent decades were the warmest in at least the past 1,300 years.” And they additionally go on to say that their new temperature reconstruction is “not the only evidence in eastern Asia for a warmer MCA than recent decades.”
By Dr. Craig Idso, CO2 Science, 19 January 2015
Related graphic:
Roman and Medieval Warm Periods vs. the Current Warm Period
In an eye-opening study published in the Chinese Science Bulletin, Yan et al. (2014) recount how they derived high-resolution sea surface temperature (SST) histories of two 80-year time windows centered at approximately AD 990 and AD 50 within the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) and the Roman Warm Period (RWP), respectively, by analyzing the Sr/Ca ratios and d18O values of Tradacna gigas (giant clam) shells collected from the northern South China Sea.
As indicated in the figure below, this undertaking revealed that the mean annual SSTs of the 80-year periods centered on AD 990 (MCA) and AD 50 (RWP) were 0.8C and 1.4C higher than the mean SST during the AD 1994-2005 portion of the Current Warm Period (CWP). Likewise, they also report that the mean summer SSTs of the MCA and RWP were, respectively, 0.2 and 1.0C higher than that of the CWP, while the mean winter SSTs of the MCA and RWP were, respectively, 1.3 and 1.8C higher than that of the CWP.
In commenting on their findings, the five Chinese researchers say “our well-calibrated high-resolution tropical SST records, which suggested a warmer MCA than recent decades, did not agree with the results of the IPCC fourth report, which suggested that the recent decades were the warmest in at least the past 1,300 years.” And they additionally go on to say that their new temperature reconstruction is “not the only evidence in eastern Asia for a warmer MCA than recent decades.”
By Dr. Craig Idso, CO2 Science, 19 January 2015
Related graphic:
turbobloke said:
Many times politicians have parroted the line that recent claimed warming was unprecedented. It's not so as we've seen on PH many times, and some recent results show this clearly. MCA, MWP, potayto potarto.
Roman and Medieval Warm Periods vs. the Current Warm Period
In an eye-opening study published in the Chinese Science Bulletin, Yan et al. (2014) recount how they derived high-resolution sea surface temperature (SST) histories of two 80-year time windows centered at approximately AD 990 and AD 50 within the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) and the Roman Warm Period (RWP), respectively, by analyzing the Sr/Ca ratios and d18O values of Tradacna gigas (giant clam) shells collected from the northern South China Sea.
As indicated in the figure below, this undertaking revealed that the mean annual SSTs of the 80-year periods centered on AD 990 (MCA) and AD 50 (RWP) were 0.8C and 1.4C higher than the mean SST during the AD 1994-2005 portion of the Current Warm Period (CWP). Likewise, they also report that the mean summer SSTs of the MCA and RWP were, respectively, 0.2 and 1.0C higher than that of the CWP, while the mean winter SSTs of the MCA and RWP were, respectively, 1.3 and 1.8C higher than that of the CWP.
In commenting on their findings, the five Chinese researchers say “our well-calibrated high-resolution tropical SST records, which suggested a warmer MCA than recent decades, did not agree with the results of the IPCC fourth report, which suggested that the recent decades were the warmest in at least the past 1,300 years.” And they additionally go on to say that their new temperature reconstruction is “not the only evidence in eastern Asia for a warmer MCA than recent decades.”
By Dr. Craig Idso, CO2 Science, 19 January 2015
Related graphic:
As highlighted above - how does this provide any evidence which is more reliable than 'tree rings'?Roman and Medieval Warm Periods vs. the Current Warm Period
In an eye-opening study published in the Chinese Science Bulletin, Yan et al. (2014) recount how they derived high-resolution sea surface temperature (SST) histories of two 80-year time windows centered at approximately AD 990 and AD 50 within the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) and the Roman Warm Period (RWP), respectively, by analyzing the Sr/Ca ratios and d18O values of Tradacna gigas (giant clam) shells collected from the northern South China Sea.
As indicated in the figure below, this undertaking revealed that the mean annual SSTs of the 80-year periods centered on AD 990 (MCA) and AD 50 (RWP) were 0.8C and 1.4C higher than the mean SST during the AD 1994-2005 portion of the Current Warm Period (CWP). Likewise, they also report that the mean summer SSTs of the MCA and RWP were, respectively, 0.2 and 1.0C higher than that of the CWP, while the mean winter SSTs of the MCA and RWP were, respectively, 1.3 and 1.8C higher than that of the CWP.
In commenting on their findings, the five Chinese researchers say “our well-calibrated high-resolution tropical SST records, which suggested a warmer MCA than recent decades, did not agree with the results of the IPCC fourth report, which suggested that the recent decades were the warmest in at least the past 1,300 years.” And they additionally go on to say that their new temperature reconstruction is “not the only evidence in eastern Asia for a warmer MCA than recent decades.”
By Dr. Craig Idso, CO2 Science, 19 January 2015
Related graphic:
And where did 'tree rings' lead to?
The FACT is...
Nobody has an accurate measure of past global temps.
The same may also be the case for current measures of global temps - I am certainly far from convinced!
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