I cannot think - by Richard... Wednesday, February 10, 2010

I cannot think - by Richard... Wednesday, February 10, 2010

... of anything less likely to induce me to buy organic food than this. 

"It's a nice elegant design and I look forward to buying products carrying this logo," says EU agriculture commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel. You can put it where the sun doesn't shine, responds the chorus of Eurosceptics.

Strangely, that is roughly what the first comment on the piece says.

COMMENT THREAD

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The politics of climate - by Richard... Tuesday, February 09, 2010

In politics, what you see is rarely what you get. In common with magicians (and confidence tricksters) skilled politicians are masters of the sleight of hand, their words and actions designed to deceive rather then illuminate.

It thus takes Barun S Mitra - director of the Liberty Institute, an independent think tank in New Delhi - writing in the Wall Street Jorunal to sneak a look beyond the smoke and mirrors of Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh's expression of support last Friday for the embattled IPCC chief, Rajendra Pachauri.

The move has surprised many observers, writes Mitra, but it may prove to be politically astute. Assailed by "gates" of all manner and description, the credibility of the IPCC is in tatters which, on top of the much-publicised spat between Ramesh and Pachauri, might have led one to expect the Indian government to ditch their climate champion.

Certainly, that was our expectation but, it seems, Delhi is playing the long game. It is in the Indian government's interest to perpetuate a weak IPCC, and backing a toothless Pachauri at its helm keeps it that way. 

Mitra suggests that part of the reason for placing an Indian at the head of IPCC was that he might be able to influence Indian policy. His thesis is that, having bought the idea of man-made global warming, rich countries had to try and ensure that developing countries fell in line.

Whether that was in Bush's mind is debatable but it is certainly the case that Pachauri has assumed that role. But, in his weakened state, he is hardly in a position to lobby India for carbon concessions. Furthermore, no one from the IPCC can again cavalierly dismiss their critics as promoting "voodoo" science or "vested interests," as was Mr. Pachauri's wont. 

If one accepts this, it means that Pachauri was becoming a nuisance, if not an embarrassment to the Indian government, pressuring Indian leaders into ignoring the developmental aspirations of their people.

But in democratic India, writes Mitra, even if some Indian elites want to sell the future of the country by agreeing to some form of restrictions on energy usage - and thus on economic growth - in the fiercely competitive world of Indian politics they stand no chance. He continues:

The IPCC was created as a way to make the world, particularly the poor, fall in line and support expensive climate-change initiatives by overwhelming them with the apparent authority of the world's leading technical body on the subject, backed by a supposed scientific consensus. This attempt was doomed to fail, because scientific inquiry does not respect consensus, and orthodoxy is anathema to scientific progress.

Thus, Mitra observes, "there is some poetic justice in this whole drama. Countries like India that were always apprehensive of institutions like the IPCC now prefer to keep it twisting in the wind. The rich countries that gave birth to the idea of the IPCC cannot afford to disown it without exposing their own underlying design." 

"They could try to replace its head, in the hope that the new face might be able to rebuild the credibility of the institution. But having tasted blood, there is no reason why India (and China – which is in the same boat) should let the current advantage pass so easily."

Mitra concludes that the IPCC has been checkmated, as have so many other UN institutions before it. This, he asserts, is the inevitable consequence of the desire for global government under the misguided belief that ordinary people do not know what is in their own interest. 

"With the deepening of democratic ideals, people power can no longer be overturned so easily. The failure of the IPCC shows that sovereignty still lies with the people, not with the aspirants for global government."

That is a point of view. It seems to have some merit, although one could argue about the details, but has to be the case that developing countries such as India and China, with expanding industrial bases, have more to lose from a powerful IPCC – the Western nations having already sold the pass.

And if that is the case, there is an interesting schism building between the developed and developing nations, the former wanting to get rid of Pachauri, the latter wanting to keep him. Either way, this is a "win" for the sceptics. With the IPCC in disarray, torn by institutional strife, it will be less able to push its destructive agenda.

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

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POSTPONED DUE TO WEATHER - by Richard...

The following Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works hearings have been postponed due to inclement weather this week:

Subcommittee on Water and Wildlife, hearing entitled, "Collaborative Solutions to Wildlife and Habitat Management."

The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works hearing entitled, "Global Warming Impacts, Including Public Health, in the United States."

Once the hearings are rescheduled, information will be posted at www.epw.senate.gov

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

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Another day, another "gate"? - by Richard...

Both American Thinker and Watts up with that pick up on yet another issue in the IPCC's AR4, this one dubbed by Marc Sheppard of Thinker as "Droughtgate", dealing with experiences of drought in Australia.

On the face of it, this addresses another poster child of the warmists, their doom-laden prediction that higher temperatures will increase the frequency and/or intensity of droughts. In fact, according to Sheppard, the reverse seems to be true – that droughts give rise to local increases in temperature, the initial drought event being entirely unrelated to temperature, per se.

These specific dynamics could be important, in two respects. Potentially, it cold be identifying another type of error within the body of the IPCC, beyond miss-citation or unsupported assertions, into the realm of bad science, where the climate body is relying on assertions which are simply wrong.

Secondly, there is a potential link with another assertion, that relating to "Africagate", where the IPCC similarly projects a doom-laden scenario, in this instance that higher temperatures will lead to a fall off in precipitation, cutting agricultural yields by up to half – whereas, in some instances, higher temperatures are actually leading to increased rainfall. 

As regards the AR4, the Working Group I report is certainly given to unequivocal headline statements, with Table 9.4 in Chapter 9 stating baldly: "Increased risk of drought due to anthropogenic forcing during latter half 20th century."

This is given a greater than 50 percent probability, putting it in the "more likely than not", which raises an interesting point as to the phraseology. We are told of an "increased risk", which is by definition a projection applying to some future time, yet the time period is stated as the "latter half 20th century." With the report published in 2007, surely the authors mean the 21st century?

Whatever period this is taken to cover, it is clear that the authors have no great confidence in the relationship between droughts and global warming, and the assertion in the table is heavily qualified by a caveat:

One detection study has identified an anthropogenic fingerprint in a global Palmer Drought Severity Index data set with high significance, but the simulated response to anthropogenic and natural forcing combined is weaker than observed, and the model appears to have less inter-decadal variability than observed.

Studies of some regions indicate that droughts in those regions are linked either to SST (sea surface temperature) changes that, in some instances, may be linked to anthropogenic aerosol forcing (e.g., Sahel) or to a circulation response to anthropogenic forcing (e.g., southwest Australia). Models, observations and forcing all contribute uncertainty (Section 9.5.3.2).

Nevertheless, Marc Sheppard homes in on one statement attributed to Australian, Neville Nicholls, which states:

[P]recipitation and temperature are ordinarily inversely correlated in some regions, with increases in temperature corresponding to drying conditions. Thus, a warming trend in such a region that is not associated with rainfall change may indicate an external influence on the climate of that region.

This is referenced to Nicholls et al., 2005; Section 9.4.2.3, which in turn is referenced to a peer-reviewed paper (Nicholls, N., P. Della-Marta, and D. Collins, 2005: 20th century changes in temperature and rainfall in New South Wales. Aust. Meteorol. Mag., 53, 263–268.)

However, Sheppard picks up the trail of Nichols, referring to a 2004 paper, The Changing Nature of Australian Droughts, which is not actually cited by the IPCC. This, though, we are told, states:

The relatively warm temperatures in 2002 were partly the result of a continued warming evident in Australia since the middle of the 20th century. The possibility that the enhanced greenhouse effect is increasing the severity of Australian droughts, by raising temperatures and hence increasing evaporation, even if the rainfall does not decrease, needs to be considered.

Later in the paper, Nicholls concludes that "the warming has meant that the severity and impacts of the most recent drought have been exacerbated by enhanced evaporation and evapo-transpiration."

This is then cross-referenced to "Aussie alarmist", David Karoly, responsible for a WWF report, which discusses the 2002 drought in Australia's Murray-Darling Basin and finds that:

This drought has had a more severe impact than any other drought since at least 1950, because the temperatures in 2002 have also been significantly higher than in other drought years. The higher temperatures caused a marked increase in evaporation rates, which sped up the loss of soil moisture and the drying of vegetation and watercourses. This is the first drought in Australia where the impact of human-induced global warming can be clearly observed.

From that, Sheppard asserts that, the basis for the claim that anthropogenic warming causes droughts put forth in the IPCC's AR4 was a WWF report and its follow-up written the next year. Turning to AR4, however, none of the specific assertions made in this report, or Nicholls's non-cited paper, highlighted by Sheppard, actually make their way into the IPCC report.

Nonetheless, it is those assertions which are challenged in a recent paper in Geophysical Research Letters. 

That study demonstrates that the lack of moisture in soil during a drought reduces the amount available for evaporation, thereby reducing actual evaporation, the heat energy thus available being dissipated in raising the air temperature rather than absorbed by the evaporation process. In other words, the lack of moisture in a drought is a causal factor in the increase in temperature, not the other way around.

While this ultimately makes sense, however, it does not seriously challenge the IPCC. In fact, a long passage in Frequently Asked Question 3.2 is so equivocal and hedged withcaveats that, with careful textual analysis, a reader could draw from it any message they wished. Not least, is this delicious section:

Pronounced long-term trends from 1900 to 2005 have been observed in precipitation amount in some places: significantly wetter in eastern North and South America, northern Europe and northern and central Asia, but drier in the Sahel, southern Africa, the Mediterranean and southern Asia. 

More precipitation now falls as rain rather than snow in northern regions. Widespread increases in heavy precipitation events have been observed, even in places where total amounts have decreased. These changes are associated with increased water vapour in the atmosphere arising from the warming of the world's oceans, especially at lower latitudes. There are also increases in some regions in the occurrences of both droughts and floods.

One notes with appreciation the assertion that: "More precipitation now falls as rain rather than snow in northern regions," with Watts up with that reporting:

January, 2008 saw the second greatest snow extent ever recorded. December was the third snowiest on record in the Northern Hemisphere and seventeen out of last twenty-one Decembers were above normal snowfall. November was above normal snowfall and fifteen out of the last nineteen Novembers have had above average snowfall. October was the sixth snowiest October on record and seven out of the last ten Octobers have had above average snowfall.

What thus comes over from the IPCC report, therefore, is that they are over-interpreting short-term data to draw conclusions which favour their premise, covering themselves with sufficient caveats as to make their work look scientifically plausible to the uninitiated.

Be that as it may, on the face of it, there would seem no case for adding "droughtgate" to the list of IPCC misdemeanours, although one could say that the arguments adduced by Sheppard are a useful antidote to the alarmism and amateurishness of WWF.

That, though, is without taking into account the Synthesis Report – Pachauri's "baby". There, we see: "Increases in the frequency and severity of floods and droughts are projected to adversely affect sustainable development" and sundry other like statements, which give no clue as to the uncertainties in the main reports.

One could easily suspect that WWF actually wrote the Synthesis Report and, had they done so, there could hardly be any difference between their version and the published copy.

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

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I always thought - by Richard...

... the man was an idiot. It's good of him to confirm it. 

But perhaps he is not as mad as he looks (and sounds). After all, as Delingpole points out, he has his City chums to look after, grabbing their £600 million-a-year share in the "low carbon economy".

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

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She's back - by Richard...

After a period of virtual silence, WWF groupie Louise Gray is back in print on one of her favourite subjects ... early springs, due to ... global warming. 

Her source is the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) and, as is her wont, little Louise has faithfully copied out the centre'spress release on a recently published study by Dr Stephen Thackeray and Professor Sarah Wanless.

Their research gathers together more than 25,000 long-term phenology trends for 726 species of plants and animals, over the period 1976 to 2005. It thus seems to have escaped the attention of these little darlings that it is now 2010.

Despite this, we get the statutory dollop of warmist propaganda, this time from Richard Smithers, of the Woodland Trust. He prattles about the "delicate ecosystems" being "the canary in the cage" of climate change. "The results of this new study make real our changing climate and its potential to have profound consequences for the complex web of life," he says. P-leeeeze!

As the global warming swirls round darkest Yorkshire, with heavy snow forecast, they might note that we have had three cold winters, each more severe than the last, and we're reverting to "normal" seasons, something little Louise herself wrote about last year.

In this current effort, though, the forgetful Louise is aided and abetted by a gullible headline writer who informs us: "Spring is coming 11 days earlier on average." An accurate portrayal of the CEH work, however, would have conveyed the information that the end point of the research was 2005. This is history, not news.

Of the "gate" controversies dominating blogosphere discussions on global warming, news there is none in The Daily Telegraph, demonstrating once again the extent to which this newspaper – like the political classes it serves – has lost the plot.

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD