ADAMANT

KICKING THE BUCKET

Cut and paste data splicing is a scientific norm in palaeoclimatology, where temperatures antedating the development of the thermometer  must be inferred from proxies as various as tree rings ,coral. and wine vintages. The lack of an ancient instrumental temperature  record has led to much recrimination,  like the Hockey Stick fracas, but  it is often assumed that the modern record stands in contrast as a sterling example of the hard data  science prefers as the basis for theory.

Not quite. One of the most conspicuous glitches in the slow-changing record of global climate is the .3 degree downturn in the record of global warming that the literature records for 1945. It has been unconvincingly attributed to everything from the Hiroshima bomb to postwar chaos in Pacific weather reporting, homeward bound fleets having somehow missed an El Nino event en route.

A new paper by David Thompson and othe NOAA atmospheric scientists in  Nature reports a different explanation .Most of the wartime measurements of sea temperatures factored int the global average  came from US warships, which unlike the British navy tended to log engine room  water intake thermometer readings  as representing the temperature of the sea. 

The hardy jack tars who returned to meteorological duty as the war wound down instead relied as always on the time honored method of throwing a bucket over the side ,hauling it in , and putting it on deck for  a  thermometer wielding chief or officer to measure . The  late Victorian change from  oaken buckets to galvanized steel   was  compounded before World War II,  when not just British, but Dutch and Japanese hydrographers were issued porous and hence cooling-prone canvas seawater scoops , a Bad Idea since the wind is generally brisk on a moving vesse.  Inevitably,  the seawater sampled tended to cool - evidently measurably, in the time it took to present it on deck  for measurement.

Between this newly detected  bias and  the already known disparity between  modern ships ' intakes ( warm)  and ocean measurement buoys (cold)  expect a lot of  dithering as the record is massaged in the year to come.As  to the Royal Navy,  it ultimately solved the problem- behold the wondrous evolution of  the New Model Navy Insulated Thermometer Bucket --

Hot Ticket

       Milan's  famed La Scala has commissioned  Veronese composer 
             Georgio Battistelli to draft  a full length opera based on
          An Inconvenient Truth        
to premiere in 2011.  Here is a sneak preview of   Il Inconveniente Verita :

    Expecting  star performer  PLACIDO URSINO ,  shown above, to be extinct by 2011,
The Committee For Climate Opera At Aspen  has hired The Brokeback Mountain OK Chorale  to fill in  for the  rest of  the season.  While  Green Opera  maestro Giuseppe Verdi's   Hottello ,  and   fauve verte composer Hector Berlioz's chilling masterpiece,  The Damnation Of Frost are sold out,  boxes are still available for
         The Advection From The Seraglio
                La Forza del Beauforta
                   Orpheus and IPCC
               La Clemenza del Clima
                              and
          Die Fliegender Meistermodler

Featuring the Bali Global Village gamelan and
  Former Next Countertenor Algiorno Tennessi
   as the Meistermodler's faithful companion
     and carbon futures broker , Unterhund

           For younger patrons,

The Sesame Street Opera of the Deaf

               will present an alfresco performance of

                      The Madama Butterfly Effect

                                Excerpts from the beloved goratorio
                           Hansen's Messiah

               And the Brokeback Mountain Chorale's stirring rendition of

                                Sheep May Safely Graze In Greenland

                                Curtain at 8

                 Coaches  & Sedan Chairs at 11:30

                   No internal combustion engines

                   or carbonated beverages please.

The Uses Of Doubt

The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists has published an admirably candid collation of what some high profile climate modelers have to say to each other
The uncertainty in climate modeling   Some  cautionary excerpts follow, but  best read the whole thing

Climate prediction works well for some variables and poorly for others
James Murphy
" are the results too dependent on debatable expert assumptions for some variables, hence precluding predictions that are more than a "best guess" and an uncertainty range?

In practice, the answer is likely to differ from variable to variable, possibly even from season to season. Probability distributions for average future changes in surface temperature and precipitation, for instance, may be within reach, because the main processes expected to drive such changes are captured in the current generation of climate models.

On the other hand, changes in, say, surface evaporation or wind speed are too dependent on basic physical assumptions, which vary between different models--the problem being that we currently lack the detailed observations and understanding needed to distinguish which of the different assumptions is correct. In the latter case, we might decline the challenge of probabilistic prediction. The important thing is to have quantitative methods of determining where to draw the line, rather than relying purely on expert judgement.

In UKCIP08, for example, we are handling this problem by combining results from two different types of ensemble data: .... For some climate variables this works reasonably well, implying that probabilities can reasonably be estimated. For other variables we find much wider divergence between the two types of ensemble data, implying that probabilistic predictions aren't yet feasible.

... We can only judge credibility by assessing whether climate models capture the relevant processes on a case-by-case basis.....t the potential benefits of waiting for better information from future generations of models needs to be made very clear.

Climate modeling is still an abstraction of reality
Leonard A. Smith
... I doubt we can blame the media for many problems climate science seems set to bring upon itself. .., the pivotal question is whether today's models are able to provide additional relevant information, and if so, on what scales?

... Suppose a cup of coffee slips from my hand. I know enough physics to predict that it will fall to the floor. I'm also confident that if I reduce the distance it falls, it's less likely to shatter and create a mess. We know with this kind of certainty that the greenhouse effect has initiated global warming. Yet, I also understand that I don't know enough physics to predict how many shards will result if the cup shatters or where exactly the coffee will splatter. Nor can I usefully estimate a "critical height" below which the cup has an acceptably small chance of shattering. The fact that I know I don't know these things is valuable information for evidence-based decision support: It keeps me from making overconfident plans based on the "best available information." Instead, I act based upon what I do know--the cup is likely to shatter, and therefore, I plan to jump left.

But what if the physicist next to me offers to sell me a probability distribution from his state-of-the-art "falling fluid container" model? His implied probabilities describe whether or not my cup will shatter, what the shards will do if it does, and the trajectory of various drops of coffee after the cup lands (so we know which direction to move to avoid coffee splatter). High-resolution MPEG movies of the model are available for a small extra charge, and they look great!

Should I pay attention to him?
Do we believe that today's models can provide decision-relevant probabilities at a resolution of tens of square kilometers for the year 2060--or even 2020 for that matter? No.... to accept a naive realist interpretation of model behaviors cast as a Bayesian probability distribution is, as mathematician and philosopher Alfred Whitehead surmised, to mistake an abstract concept for concrete reality....Shorn of this context, model results have an aura of exactitude that can be misleading.

Interpreting climate predictions should be collaborative
Claudia Tebaldi
We all seem to agree that our state-of-the-art models aren't satisfactory representations of climate on Earth--at least not to the degree required to make decisions with them. We also agree that people are concerned with climate change ...
Beyond this common ground, we fall on different points of the spectrum between James's pragmatic approach, where he proposes giving decision makers information as our "best guess" about future outcomes nonetheless, and Lenny's highly skeptical position--namely, there's no hope in approximating the real world in any useful sense.

The reader who doesn't dabble in climate modeling or statistics is probably asking herself, "What am I to make of all this?" To which I would say, "That's exactly what I want you to think!"

Let me explain: If I can say anything for sure, it's that I don't want anyone to take a precooked climate projection--whether a single model or a multi-model ensemble, probabilistic or not--and run with it. Any decision will be best served by looking at the available observational and modeled information and listening to the opinion of climate modelers and climatologists. The experts will be able to form an integrated evaluation based on changes already observed,...
... By doing so, we may get closer to a full characterization of the uncertainties that we know exist....As for the unknown unknowns. . . There's no way around those.

Probabilities aren't so scary
James Murphy
Policy makers and planners now accept the reality of man-made climate change and are turning their thoughts toward adaptation. Should they make their decisions now, or wait to see if better climate models can provide more precise information? .... Modeling centers have worked incredibly hard on this during the past decade, yet the range of projections hasn't changed much....There's no obvious reason to expect more than gradual progress,

The scientific credibility of a probability distribution function therefore depends not on having near-perfect, error-free models, but on how well the methodology used to sample the uncertainties and convert the model results into probabilities summarizes the risk of alternative outcomes. This is by no means an easy hurdle, but one I believe we are capable of overcoming.

Of course, the probabilities must be accompanied by sensitivity analyses that educate users not to interpret the probabilities to too high a degree of precision.  room should be made for changing forecasts in the future....perhaps we can be less frightened of telling users what we believe--and perhaps we can credit them with the intelligence not to interpret our current beliefs as everlasting promises.

In planning for the future, make room for changing forecasts
Leonard A. Smith

...Seeking a perfect relationship that would bring decision-support bliss might hinder the development of our warts-and-all models, which, while improving, are in no way converging towards perfection....Gavin notes that the average of many models is frequently "closer to the observations" than any individual model. While true, this doesn't suggest that such an average can support good decision making. Even when the model is perfect, averaging can be a bad idea. Consider the parable of ... three...statisticians who cannot swim but desperately need to cross a river.

Each has a forecast of the change in the river’s depth from one bank to the other; in each forecast, there's a different point at which the river is so deep that the statisticians will drown. According to the average of their forecasts, it’s safe to ford the river. Even though the average is closer to the actual depth profile of the river than any one of the forecasts, action based on that information is not safe--if they cross the river, they’ll drown. .... there are few, if any, examples of purely model-based probability forecasts supporting good decision-making ...

Not all climate models are created equal
Claudia Tebaldi

It's exhilarating to see the fruits of climate research achieve such prominence in the media, political debate, and concerns of industrial and municipal stakeholders. As scientists, though, it's incumbent upon us not to mislead the lay audience...., I wholeheartedly agree with Gavin that these kinds of probabilistic projections aren't appropriate for risk analysis and decision making under uncertainty and won't be for a long time.

Climate models produce projections, not probabilities
Gavin Schmidt

"I'm just a model whose intentions are good, Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood," Nina Simone may as well have sung. Models are fundamentally necessary in all sciences. They exist to synthesize knowledge, to quantify the effects of counteracting forces, and most importantly, to make predictions--the evaluation of which is at the heart of the scientific method...

Climate models are amalgams of fundamental physics, approximations to well-known equations, and empirical estimates (known as parameterizations) of processes that either can't be resolved (because they happen on too small a physical scale) or that are only poorly constrained from data.... models are all limited by similar computational constraints and have developed in the same modeling tradition. Thus while they are different, they are not independent in any strict statistical sense.

Does agreement on a particular phenomenon across multiple models with various underlying assumptions affect your opinion on whether or not it is a robust projection? The answer, almost certainly, is yes. Such agreement implies that differences in the model inputs, including approach (e.g. a spectral or grid point model), parameterizations (e.g. different estimates for how moist convective plumes interact with their environment), and computer hardware did not materially affect the outcome, which is thus a reasonable reflection of the underlying physics.

Does such agreement "prove" that a given projection will indeed come to pass? No... the assumed changes in forcings in the future may not transpire...

So how should one interpret future projections from climate models? I suggest a more heuristic approach. If models agree that something (global warming and subtropical drying for instance) is relatively robust, then it is a reasonable working hypothesis ... while it is seductive to attempt to corner our ignorance with the seeming certainty of 95-percent confidence intervals, the comfort it gives is likely to be an illusion. Climate modeling might be better seen as a Baedeker for the future, giving some insight into what might be found, rather than a precise itinerary."

Moving Target

Jim Hansen's latest estimate of the sensitivity of climate to approximately doubling CO2 is bound to arouse controversy,  so I've revised this precis of past estimates- the original compilation by Levenson did not include Arrhenius second estimate, published a decade after his first set this Victorian roller coaster in motion.

19th century climate sensitivity estimates were woefully uncertain, meandering over a range of nearly ten degrees F per decade.

But thanks to modern science -- 112 years of continuous  theoretical progress, ever more accurate instruments, exponentially growing computer power and sophisticated  climate models, expert estimates can now shift by nearly ten degrees F in a single year! Hence the importance of the latest result.  

Hansen's estimate enables Al Gore to declare that CO2 sensitivity  being worse than it was in 1896, the debate has been over for three centuries!

Who would be so cynical as to point out that starting in 2005, the misallocation of emissions quotas by the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme led to a collapse in the price of carbon  permits--a market Al has been instrumental in  establishing -- from $40 to 40 cents?

At which price no incentive to reduce emissions exists. Except for newer and more elegant estimates of climate sensitivity , conveniently blasting off in the direction carbon traders would like to see the market travel. Stay tuned for the next exciting statistic, and the sequel to Six Degrees coming soon to a PBS channel near you.

Right now I have to run off to  Harvard's Kennedy School for Prices vs. Quantities vs. Bankable Quantities for Stock Pollutants by  William Pizer of  Resources for the Future; next week's seminar will be  Measuring the Distributional Impacts of Carbon Pricing  http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k19826.

 

Robert Jastrow : A Tribute By Jim Hansen

If only scientific adversaries would treat their living opponents as well --

The Few, The Green, The Proud

AHEAD OF THE CURVE IN MAKING C02 HISTORY

The New York Times'  Andy Revkin complains :

'Some libertarian critics have implied I’m supporting a Draconian push back to sweaters and bicycles (see Ron Bailey’s recent critique of my “Unnecessary Things” post). [UPDATE: Draconian by some of their standards, not mine.] Some environmentalists say I’m too gloomy about the chances that humanity will resolve to share responsibility for limiting climate risks.'

Like politics, all gloom is local. To keep Carbon Dioxide levels rising by a  part per million per year, everyone on Earth must burn fuel enough to provide  ~782 kilograms, or 1,745 pounds per capita. The citizens of many nations easily exceed this  ~ ¾ metric tonne criterion-- Americans generate over 20 tonnes of CO2   each,  Kazakhstanis over 13 , Israelis over 10. Even the French, sorely handicapped by their nuclear electric system, manage a respectable 6.

 Still, there are laggards, nations so backward that they are not pulling their weight in the race to keep up with nature as a source of climate change. Despite India's burgeoning economy, its billion citizens only managed to add a feeble 1.5 parts per million  of CO2 to their share of the world’s air last year, while Pakistan barely made the cut  with 1.02 parts per million.

Deep Greens of course esteem the Pakistani life style shockingly profligate in terms of greenhouse gas emission. They seek to stop and reverse increases in gases that tend to warm the planet, and applaud  Al Gore’s demand  for a 90% cut in US CO2 emissions by 2050.  This means surpassing the fuel economy of  sunny  Iraq  at ~ 3 tonnes per capita , or Cuba at ~2, and emulating the few, the proud nations that took Earth Day 1970 seriously, and  are showing the world the way things ought to be, providing  so-called ‘developed’ nations with an exemplary spectrum of  low carbon footprint  lifestyles.

 Which one the next president of the United States will elect to aim for is for democracy to determine, so before you vote, or emigrate, take your pick from this list of ten nations whose cool example America can follow into a Greenhouse gas and central heating free future :

Less Than 1 PPM Global CO2 Growth Per Year

      CO2 per capita  KG                     LIFE EXPECTANCY
 

• Paraguay        742                              78.0 

• Angola           505                               38.6

• Sudan              287                              50.3

• Zambia           204                              38.5

• Ethiopia        103                               50.4

>>1 PPM Global CO2 Growth Per Decade!

• Rwanda             63                 50.1

• Cambodia         39                 63.4

• Afghanistan     29                43.9

• Chad                  13                  48.3   

• Somalia               3                 50.7

It might broaden the horizons of those who take passive solar tea  with Amory Lovins, if  the Aspen Institute and Guggenheim Foundations were to cycle their annual meeting venues through the above list, in ascending order.   

Source: United Nations statistics last updated August 2007

 

HELL FREEZES OVER

And My Latest Climate Wars  Essay Is Linked On:

---

' If we're on the road to climate hell, then it's sure in the slow lane. Warming of 1/10 degree per decade makes isotherms move poleward less than half a mile per year...continue »'

Should you find yourself in Hell,
and wish to send souvenirs home,
" Gods Expedition " is Down East 
Norwegian for " Cargo Dispatch "

View Larger Map

"Science in presidential debates? "

      ' Absolutely.  A science debate?  Not so sure. '
         Commences Nature 's  lead editorial  this week, but it goes on to observe :

Many of the great and good in US science... have joined an initiative calling for the American election campaigns to feature a science debate. Such is the groundswell of support that their call is starting to feel like an idea whose time has come, and indeed it may prove to be so...But in true scientific spirit, the proposal itself requires critical scrutiny....the campaign's website goes too far in saying that science and technology "may be the most important social issue of our time".

In reality, science and technology are a factor in many issues, sometimes a defining one, but most often not. They can and must inform political debate, but will rarely be at its centre. Take the key issue of climate change, which is at the top of the science debate list. The Bush administration's self-interested denialism and subsequent heel-dragging have infuriated informed opinion at home and abroad. But this anger, widely felt by scientists and others, should not lead us to raise science above other concerns out of a sense of slight.

The science of the Earth system is crucial to understanding climate change; that does not mean that climate is best debated as a science issue. Climate change should indeed be debated by the ultimate contenders for the presidency... with expert interlocutors able to challenge claims and highlight both common ground and inconsistencies.

Scientific issues — how to deal with the uncertainties of climate sensitivity when deciding goals for emissions, or how far to shift federal research priorities towards near-to-medium-term innovation in alternative-energy systems — would play a key role in such a debate. But they would not be the whole story: tax policy, international trade, treaty law and foreign policy are just as crucial.

These doubts clearly reflect the debut in Nature of David Goldston s 'Party Of One ' column.  He was  chief of staff on the House Science Committee under its Republican chairman, Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New YorK. Asked by Andrew Revkin of the Times : "Couldn’t an argument be made that simply by having candidates in this forum it’d send message that science is important in many realms of policy?"  Golston replied

" Who needs that message, and at what cost? Do either the public or the candidates not think science is important? I don’t think so... Scientists feel slighted that they’re not mentioned all the time. But actually, scientists are treated with a unique kind of deference... And a debate may not help in that regard. There are lots more reasons a debate could be problematic... putting science in an inherently divisive political context — exactly what scientists usually say they want to avoid...the questions that have been offered for a debate tend to be either
1) questions that aren’t really about science,
2) questions on which one would not want to encourage snap judgments by candidates,
3) questions that while important, are so in the weeds that Presidents usually don’t get involved with them even when they’re in office, or
4) questions likely to elicit platitudes.
.... badgering lawmakers can be a more organized and effective activity than that choice of words might imply. But I’d list a number of things...educating students and the public; writing editorials, op-eds, blogs; advising political figures; participating... as individual citizens as opposed  scientists..how...NASA supporters have used e-mail campaigns to affect Obama’s position on space is interesting.

Sunk Science : If At First You Don't Believe

......................DENY, DENY, AGAIN

PLANET GORE  , National Review's  climate blog  for true disbelievers , is back at the forefront of cognitive dissonance with Roy Spencer asking:

'Global Warming' Deniers? What About The 'Reality Deniers' 
Everyone has heard of "global warming deniers," which is what Al Gore (in his usual half-truth fashion) likes to call those of us who believe that current global warmth might not be man-made. Well, in my view the truly dangerous group of people out there are the "Reality Deniers" — those who not only believe that global warming is man-made, but also think that we can do something significant about it in the next 20 years or so. Given today's Michigan Primary, people should know that some politicians (e.g. John McCain) have bought into this policy falsehood."   01/15 08:16

Climate modelers often deserve to be taken to task for eliding illusion and reality.  But computer modeling has become as much  a technological fact of life as the internet --adducing the output of the video games climatologists play as a policy guide is little different from the Fed using its elaborate econometric models as indicators of what inflation is up to. Both take care to keep garbage from going in, and to minimize the amount ground out as well, and both caution against projecting  black and white  outcomes on the banks of plausible fog  that statistical models generate.

Hollywood revels in turning  equations into screen monsters by rendering them as computer animations, and many of the horrors excitable Greens (and Gold Bugs) point to are still just ghosts in a machine. But even science fiction has its limits. When it comes to the interaction of  man and climate, It goes beyond  the outer limits of scientific plausibility to assert that nothing can result from doing anything for a generation- " the next 20 years or so ",  because both technology's ability to physically change the world, and computation's capacity to integrate the results, are growing exponentially. Roy Spencer has editorially declared :

" I believe that, through various negative feedback mechanisms, the atmosphere "decides" how much of the available sunlight will be allowed in,...and what the average temperature will be...

I believe that when the stabilizing effects of precipitation systems are better understood and included into the models, predictions of global warming will be scaled back."

It's not a  very comforting thought, because "for 20 years or so" he failed to detect the instrumental and software bias against climate change built into in the satellite data base he was tasked to manage, and which he pointed to as the ultimate arbiter of the question of man made cliate change:

"But how good is the evidence, and how likely is substantial global warming? When might it happen? Applying the customary standards of scientific inquiry, one must conclude that there has been more hype than solid facts ... . New, precise satellite data raise further questions about warming.

From 1979 to 1988 large temperature variability was recorded, but no obvious temperature trend was noted during the 10-year period...What should be the national response to the above uncertainties?...Whatever we do should he based on well-thought-out long-range goals. It should not result from a half-baked political response. '
                                    --R.W. Spencer & J. R. Christy
Precise Monitoring of Global Temperature Trends from Satellites , Science 247 (March 30, 1990): 1558

This failure of oversight, like that of  Fred Singer, who styles himself "first  Director of the National Weather Satellite Service' rendered policy analysts reluctant to acknowledge the scientific outcome of the atmosphere's answer to inflation. The climate policy debate is about the upward forcing of radiative equilibrium by a continuing increase in the CO2 supply.

Thirty years ago, global climate and macroeconomics had much in common. It  could be said with reasonable confidence that nobody knew what either was doing. Today we are not so sure. It is no longer seemly for the co-author of one of the capital errors of a generation ago to invoke his own authority in insisting that as civilization moves from technological strength to strength, it cannot do by design what it has already accomplished by accident. This has naturally given rise to a new intellectual cottage industry in the nation's capital.

 

SunkScience .com

"Sunk science" is an all too  objective description of the farrago of  faulty scientific data and analysis K-Street lawyer and Disinformation artiste Steve " The Science Junkman " Milloy is paid to  merchandise as dittohead fodder and idiotarian advertorial content. Though he caters to newspapers lacking fact checkers and science editors. It is unfair to characterize the products of this transparently mercenary enterprise as 'politicized science ' for though  junkScience.Com customarily fails to mention  its client’s corporate or religious agendas, its products scientific content is negligible. Here with thanks to Steve for  the most lucid  format seen since the freeze movement paid Porter Novelli to merchandise Nuclear Winter, is a precis of The JunkScience.Com bill of fare modified to reflect the semiotic reality of today. The sunk science "mob" includes:

• The NONMAINSTREAM MEDIA may use sunk science for  sensational headlines and programming designed to distract  The Base from science itself. Many beltway boys use sunk science to advance their and their employers' social and political agendas.
• CAMPUS LAWYERS may use sunk science to bamboozle alumni into awarding huge grants to promote their take on  political correctness, which is to complain that they are not able to      impose their own. Large headlines may then be used to extort even greater sums from  foundations fearful of riling The Base.
• LEGAL ACTIVISTS, such as the " Front Page Front," environmental know-nothings , and Oklahoma gun enthusiasts denied professorships for packing , may use sunk science to achieve tenure and hit Henry Regnery for book advances .
• GOVERNMENT DEREGULATORS may use sunk science to expand their grantsmanship and to increase their lobbying  budgets.
• BUSINESSES may  lawfully use sunk science to bad-mouth competitors who have actual scientists on their payrolls and pay attention to astute customers , or to make bogus claims about their own products.
• POLITICIANS may use sunk science to curry favor with special interest groups or to be "politically      correct."
• INDIVIDUALSCIENTISTS may use sunk science to achieve fortune at considerable cost in infamy . mercifully few volunteer, so sunk science relies  heavily on meme recycling

INDIVIDUALS too innumerate  to read the scientific literature may use sunk science  to demonstrate the futility of  non-faith based policies relying on such avatars of  scientific fundamentalism TM as global warmism, molecular geneticism, germ theory of diseasism  and disbelief in the ability of beets to cure AIDS and the common cold.

DUE DILIGENCE : The 10 Climate Questions

HERE IS WHAT  THE BBC   SAYS BOTH SIDES ARE  SAYING

     Fred Singer contributed                          & Gavin Schmidt  

       The 'Skeptical' View                            The IPCC 'Consensus'   
                 Compiled by  Richard Black  of the BBC

             IT WOULD OF COURSE BE MORE SPORTING IF DICK LINZEN
                    WOULD PITCH IN AND REWRITE SINGER'S HALF

1. It Is unclear what climate has been doing for the last century
Singer: Instruments show there has been some warming of the Earth's surface since 1979, but the actual value is subject to large errors. Most long-term data comes from surface weather stations. Many of these are in urban centres which have expanded in both size and energy use. When these stations observe a temperature rise, they are simply measuring the "urban heat island effect". In addition, coverage is patchy, with some regions of the world almost devoid of instruments. Data going back further than a century or two is derived from "proxy" indicators such as tree-rings and stalactites which, again, are subject to large errors.

Schmidt Warming is unequivocal. Weather stations, ocean measurements, decreases in snow cover, reductions in Arctic sea ice, longer growing seasons, balloon measurements, boreholes and satellites all show results consistent with the surface record of warming. The urban heat island effect is real but small; and it has been studied and corrected for. Analyses by Nasa for example use only rural stations to calculate trends. Recently, work has shown that if you analyse long-term global temperature rise for windy days and calm days separately, there is no difference. If the urban heat island effect were large, you would expect to see a bigger trend for calm days when more of the heat stays in the city. Furthermore, the pattern of warming globally doesn't resemble the pattern of urbanisation, with the greatest warming seen in the Arctic and northern high latitudes. Globally, there is a warming trend of about 0.8C since 1900, more than half of which has occurred since 1979.

All Of The Data All Of The Time

Has global warming gone on vacation ?  Headlines to that effect  have appeared on the basis of  one very legible graph of one eight year statistical trend. But does it depict Weather or Climate ?

Both sides in the Climate Wars devote a lot of time and vitriol to accusing each other of Cherry Picking- the statistical crime of choosing particular data intervals in order to amplify or play down whatever point they are trying to make. One sovereign remedy for this sort of statistical Gamesmanship is to bloody well lay out all of the choice intervals the players choose on one unforgiving graph, to let disinterested eyeballs do the walking through recent climatic history and arrive at whatever judgment they may.

This is the core of a current disputation between Gavin Shmidt and Roger Pielke Jr, Schmidt havibf fielded the graph below- Pielke delivers a running commentary in his replies on the link at the end of the caption by Schmidt:

"The red line is the annual global-mean GISTEMP temperature record (though any other data set would do just as well), while the blue lines are 8-year trend lines - one for each 8-year period of data in the graph. What it shows is exactly what anyone should expect: the trends over such short periods are variable; sometimes small, sometimes large, sometimes negative - depending on which year you start with. The mean of all the 8 year trends is close to the long term trend (0.19ºC/decade), but the standard deviation is almost as large (0.17ºC/decade), implying that a trend would have to be either >0.5ºC/decade or much more negative (< -0.2ºC/decade) for it to obviously fall outside the distribution. Thus comparing short trends has very little power to distinguish between alternate expectations."

So, it should be clear that short term comparisons are misguided, but the reasons why, and what should be done instead, are worth exploring.

Aristotle Shrugged

THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR

Reader Mail                                   Published 1/10/2008

UNEVOLVED CONSERVATIVES SPEAK
Re: George Neumayr's Standing Athwart Huckabee, Yelling Stop:
Mr. Neumayr...admits that Huckabee is a "heterodox Republican on some issues," but asks, "So what? Who isn't amongst the leading contenders in this primary race?"

It's no great compliment to Huckabee.... In addition, Huckabee's rejection of Darwinism is supposedly too much for sophisticated conservatives.

...As a conservative and Christian, I reject the truth-claims of Darwinism. It might be said that 99 percent of scientists believe in the theory, and that conservatives shouldn't disagree with scientists. My reply would be that 99 percent of scientists are insane -- one percentage point behind mathematicians.

...that's neither here nor there. I do not ask what a candidate thinks of Darwinian claims, any more than I care what he thinks of Britney Spears's musical talents...it was Leibniz who said that this is the best of all possible worlds. The deity could not have created a better world, given the materials he had to work with. He had to make do.

Politics is a lot like that, too.
-- C. V. Crisler
Gilbert, Arizona

Six more letters in a similar vein precede mine:

Candle In The Wind

It's not enough that The Vatican has enlisted on the side of carbon neutrality in the Climate Wars. The Jerusalem Post reports :

" a campaign that has spread like wildfire across the Internet... encouraging Jews around the world to light at least one less candle this Hanukka to help the environment.

"The founders of the Green Hanukkia campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide. If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere.

Tom Wegner,  who heads the public relations firm Update Marketing Media, spread the campaign via mass e-mails "To tell a child on the eighth day that we are not lighting the last candle as a sacrifice for the environment ... will prevent the release of a huge amount of carbon dioxide."

While one rabbi "warned that the campaign would take away from the light of Torah that each and every candle symbolizes" another "called the environmentalists "crazy people...they should encourage people to light one less cigarette instead,"

Either seems unlikely  to threaten an Ice Age. With  3.3  million Jewish households globally, the 26 million candle savings could translate into a maximum of ~ 400 tons of CO2, while owing to the low carbon content of tobacco relative to paraffin candles, the cigarette alternative would  reduce emissions by at most 16.

However, the Lord moveth in mysterious ways his carbon footprint to reduce. In an apparent demonstration of Intelligent Design,  both carbon dioxide sources are completely offset by  the Sabbatarian   nation's  statistically  conspicuous drop in fossil fuel  consumption on its Biblical day off.

Meanwhile back in Bethlehem,  though 'tis the season for anti-smoking activists to complain about cathedrals full of second-hand Frankincense and Myrrh, traditional church candles have largely escaped Green ire.  Beeswax is, after all, a biofuel.

That does not get Aloes off the hook.  Incense from the wild Aqullaria tree is an ecumenical object of desire, and unsustainable Christan, Muslim, Buddhist and Shinto demand has seen it banned in 169 countries by the CITES Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. Lord knows what will be next-- Balm of Gilead, Goper Wood?  Or will the neoGrinches go gunning for bigger game, like partridge-bearing pear trees and flaming plum puddings?

I've helped light two dozen tapers on a bona fide London Christmas tree whose balsamic glow expanded as its needles warmed --the tapers probably totaled a couple of hundred watts. I suppose a lump of coal in a Christmas stocking may reasonably approximate the carbon footprint of a single Chanukah candle, but  there are other holidays to consider. Igniting tar barrels on Guy Fawkes Day may not long survive, and  If Greens set their sights on The Great Pumpkin, and mandate renewable jack-O'lantern lights, kids  may end up foraging for candy on All Tallows Eve.

These are waters deep as Galliee , and I think I'll drop mathematics in favor of eggnog until somebody can tell me how many candlepower equal  a Yule log, and how many cords add up to a pillar of fire? 

Critical Theory & Climate Modeling

Lexical Forcing Of  Optical Depth & Metaphoric .Breadth In The Op-Editorial Climate Optimum
 

Journal Of The Modem Language Association Vol XVII. Winter 2007-8, p 79-81

In today's climate of opinion, the One Dimensional  Editorial  Language Model (ELM) articulated by Marcuse finds new pertinence in globally reifying Hansen's thesis that “Truth is responsible for warming.”

Yet the George Mason school of semiotics( CF Michaels & Singer, 2005)maintains it is less truth that is responsible for carbon dioxide than the warming paradigm, and eventually the futility, of worrying about the signification of water vapor in the work of Lindzen and Fish. 25 years ago, long before the term “global warming” became chic, semioticians focused on the prospect of a mini-Ice Age in consequence of MacLuhans postulation of cool media. Not until Lacan promoted the use of post-ecologistant reading to read and attack The American Meteorological Society did many realize that in the end, all temperature is text.

In the post-Althuserian work of Baliunas, a predominant concept is the concept of capitalist climate culture. In a sense, this mirrors Idoru, in which Gibson deconstructs climate constructivism; and the ELM computer modeling paradigm finds visual reification in the solarized scenes of The Matrix Reloaded. This is not lost on Vienna Circle structuralists like Singer, and the naive realists of the Frankfurt School, denying the Ibsonian angst of An Inconvenient Truth, affirm capitalist subdialectic stratosphere theory as a medium of semiosis.

Even if we were to concede the alarmists’ claim that the earth’s temperature might rise one degree Fahrenheit in the next century, pre-Lacanian models would still have failed to predict the significant cooling or lexical forcing of optical depth and metaphoric breadth the oceans have undergone. This is antithetic to how global warming would be construed in popular culture were readers to choose between Derridaist reading and the formalized carbonist nihilism of Viscount Monckton and Lord Bertrand Russell.

Why require the nations of this planet to spend the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary to reduce carbon dioxide and other emissions when it invites Althuserian anomie, and  we don’t even know if the earth’s climate is getting permanently hotter or if that temperature change is caused by human activity or if that change is even more dangerous than transgressive texts entering the scientific canon?

“Consciousness is fundamentally dead,” says Foucault; however, with the advent of Artificiality computer models of climate may singularize into generators of their own hermeneutic hierarchy. According to Albi , it is not so much consciousness that is fundamentally dead, but rather the paradigm, and embodying parametric atmospheric models in sentient algorithms. This, Legates and McIntyre would say, embodies the absurdity of consciousness as a post-modeling condition. Therefore, Bataille uses the term ‘capitalist discourse’ to denote the difference between global warmism, sexual identity and culture in the Cold War era.

The main theme of the works of Hansen is transgressive because  the role of the climate  software  writer as observer. Hence the feminist discourse of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit, who lost it when he claimed that oil companies and the coal companies in the U.S. have joined in a conspiracy to hire pseudo scientists to deny the facts in denial of  Habermas teaching that there are in fact none to falsify, since  the universality of rubber graph paper has concretized McLuhan's global village even while leading to ozone depletion in the cybersphere. 

The primary theme of Buxton’s model of the climate of capitalist subdialectic theory is the bridge between society and sexuality. Thus, the premise of constructivism states that society, surprisingly, has objective value. If  the Derridaist reading  of Gore's thesis holds, we have to choose between the  subconceptualist textual theory of logocentric  radiative variability  espoused by Spencer, and a postcultural theory in which anthropogenic warming is no longer the signifier.  If Heidigger never know that ancient lexa reduce to semantic monads, it is because in 1998, Willie Soon et al. of the Harvard-Smithsonian center for Astrophysics published a paper in the Oregon Journal of Intertextual Climate Research, arguing that there really had been a Medieval warm period.

How  has this anachronality of juxtaposition as dasein obviates temporal and lexical space in culturally framed post-Aristotelian models in contemporary America become a predominant concept in the distinction between figure and ground in the popular imagination Fish might say that Sontag uses the term ‘capitalist subdialectic theory’ to denote a self-falsifying  ELM paradox like "global warmism" in ways paralleling the multi-dimensional nature of the IPCC paradigm, but reflecting Marcuse’s one dimensional man , Milloy and Limbaugh therefore imply that we have to choose between climatic relativism and modernist pretextual theory ,or else face the consequences of Moore's law as the climate of opinion faces hermeneutic decay in the emerging era of cyberclimate.

The post-structuralist alternative to a Web 3.0 view of the climate debate is too horrible to contemplate- Al Gore's Nobel could inspire Rupert Murdoch to run for one too. To deconstruct that contingency, we have devised a transgressive textual canon by running random excerpts from a decade of Wall Street Journal editorials on climate change through the PoMo jargon generator so kindly linked by Arts And Letters Daily. 

Next week, weather permitting, Adamant readers with access to data compression software are invited to submit 17 syllable renderings of the IPCC report as a winter haiku.

 

The Green's Black Secret

Why Bother Thinking About Coal?

No one finds the truth more inconvenient that true believers. In Bali, Al Gore's Peace Prize only drove him to greater rhetorical violence in denouncing  America's dependence on its largest energy resource.

Al may go on bellowing about the world's immanent crucifixion on a cross of coal, even as Deep Greens dream of its becoming a road kill on the information superhighway. Yet despite decades of alternative energy evangelism, the wretched low tech fuel remains the mainstay of America's power supply, lighting half the nation's lamps and laptops from reserves reckoned in centuries.

That's what the National Academy of Science told Congress to expect at the height of the "Energy Crisis" a generation ago.  But while coal lingers in parental memory, the post-modern power industry has hunkered down so far that few children would recognize a lump of the black stuff if it fell out of a Christmas stocking.  Nor is solid fuel on Europe's domestic mind--most homes there are heated by Russian natural gas. Yet from Berlin to Bilbao, coal figures in executive nightmares. Carbon taxes mean Euros going up in smoke.

When natural gas burns, the exhaust gas is two thirds water vapor. But what you see coming out of a coal-fired power station plume may be less than half CO2,  because the hydrogen that makes natural gas "Green" is present in coal as well. The burning question is how much ?

The answer is  surprising.  Enough to matter --a lot.

Coal composition ought to concern to  environmental realists because  China, and India are set to build nearly 850 new plants to burn the stuff. These threaten to  bury Kyoto by creating  up to five times as much carbon dioxide as the Protocol seeks to reduce--2.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2012. Another 58  nations have 340 new coal-fired plants under development. Even Green Germany plans to build 26, while Russian coal demand is expected to triple by 2020 as thermal plants double their share of the electricity market.

The world can no longer afford to ignore what coal is  made of, for its low free market cost--just 12%  that of natural gas, assures  its growing use even in Green Europe, where a permit to burn a truckload can rival the cost of an ounce of gold.

While commonsense dictates a rebate for any CO2  saving  strategy, Green polemics have driven regulation in the opposite direction by equating coal and carbon. To do so is to ignore material reality-- coal is never pure carbon, it contains from roughly 50 to 90% on a dry weight basis. This variability has real implications for managing coal's impact on climate. Though high carbon 'hard coal' called anthracite exists-- anthrax is Greek for coal, it is as rare as high-hydrogen bituminous coal is common. Within this broad spectrum of fuels, the content of hydrogen rich volatiles varies by a factor of nine.

Among American coals that produce virtually the same amount of thermal energy per ton, some yield 40% less CO2 than others. An 8% improvement in what power plants burn would cut CO2 emissions as much as replacing half the nation's cars with the Prius !

America has high-volatile coal in abundance, and the hydrogen it contains already generates a considerable fraction of the nation's electrical power. How much more is possible?  Right now, the inconvenient truth is that nobody knows.

Half the available data are antique, lumping together hydrogen in hydrocarbons with the H in H2O.  So to avoid the risk of crucifixion for sharp analytical practice, I've had to lower my policy sights, from a geochemically possible 40%,to a very conservative  8%  goal.  Whatever the true numbers turn out to be, coal quality scarcely figures in the global warming debate, for though coal may be superabundant, chemical literacy is an all too rare political commodity.

Few Greens understand the geochemical paradox of rocks containing  volatile hydrogen, and fewer journalists grasp the elementary fact that, carbon atoms being twelve times heavier than those of hydrogen, coals containing nearly 90% carbon by weight can still be nearly half hydrogen.At its best , the atomic ratio of hydrogen to carbon in this solid fuel can approach that of liquid benzene or acetylene welding gas.

Atoms matter because they  burn one at a time. CO2 emissions can't be reckoned by  fuel weight alone because of  the twelve-fold difference between the number of atoms in a ton of hydrogen and one of carbon . This means switching from low to high hydrogen coal can redouble the CO2 saved by conserving electricity. Growing America's economy  will require far more electricity than  screw-in fluorescents can save. One way to accommodate growth while containing  greenhouse gas inflation is to reduce the CO2 emissions of  existing power plants by switching their fuel source to better coal fields.

Business as usual dictates that coal companies balk at this idea, but Big Coal lobbyists have not been alone in keeping this issue off the policy table. Natural gas spokesmen and Green activists share the responsibility. Solid fuel is easier to demonize than explain, and neither group stands to benefit from a shift to higher hydrogen coal. This has created a research vacuum. Billions are being spent to advertise the possibilities of alternative energy,but even hydrogen enthusiasts remain clueless as to how much of their favorite element the nation's hundreds of coal deposits each contains.

Only a few per cent of America's are being mined , and elementary geochemistry suggests the idle ones contain an opportunity for  CO2 reductions rivaling one of the giant "wedges"  made famous by An Inconvenient Truth. Yet  when it comes to  the potential  environmental merits of 'black hydrogen.' ardent Greens seem avatars of denial ,finding  It simply too far off message for ideological comfort.

In Uncommon Carriers, New Yorker writer John McPhee shrewdly pointed  out that transport cost has always dictated which coal gets dug first. What we burn now is a matter not of policy, but past economic contingency ,leaving  geological room for improvement even in Dick Cheney's back yard--some of the highest hydrogen seams in Wyoming's producing coal fields remain untouched. High infrastructure  costs make Big Coal's reluctance to move mining operations understandable, but the silence of the Greens is perplexing. With good coal so abundant, the specter of carbon taxes may help drive the bad out of circulation in the developed world, even as  hydrogen rebates for burning better coal help stem the flux of CO2 from nations that,  in the economic here and now, cannot afford the luxury of the fuels of the future.

The author has written on science technology and energy policy in Nature, Physics Today and Forbes. Copyright 2007 Russell Seitz

The Sceptical Recycler

Geoengineering may be a Hot Topic, but just how new is it ?

California's Cool Cities initiative makes microclimate modification  with paint and shade trees sound like a  cutting edge discovery , but dig around and you'll find the first such municipal ordinance was drafted by Solon The Lawgiver circa 780 BC, , and  that in 1498, Christopher Columbus complained that Jamaica  was getting hotter because trees were being cut down.

I didn't have to dig that far to uncover a certain lack of novelty in Bjorn Lomborg's  last Guardian article, though I'm in no position to complain of his choice of subject -- I've invited Bjorn to dig around in Adamant 's Geoengineering sidebar for some more columns 

   FORBES    08.21.00                      GUARDIAN  11.18.07

PAINT THE TOWN WHITE           PAINT  IT WHITE

     RUSSELL SEITZ                          BJORN LOMBORG           
the greenhouse effect is not driven by fossil fuel burning, but by the power of the sun..The real problem is Earth's low albedo--it reflects only a small fraction of the sun's energy because most of its surface is dark compared to a snowfield or a coat of white paint.

Although it may seem almost comically straightforward, one of the best temperature-reducing approaches is very simple: paint things white.

Such white surfaces reflect three times as much as bare rock or desert soil, and up to ten times as much as deep water or black asphalt paving.

Cities have a lot of black asphalt and dark, heat-absorbing structures. By increasing reflection and shade, a great deal of heat build-up can be avoided.

we could lighten up the hundreds of thousands of square miles of roofs and roadways that already exist, starting with those expanses of asphalt that already contribute to cities being warmer than the countryside.

By increasing reflection and shade, a great deal of heat build-up can be avoided. Paint most of a city and you could lower the temperature by 10C.

this "White House Effect"...can suffice to raise the reflectiveness of most natural surfaces from 25% or less to 75% or more, at a materials cost on the order of around $250,000 per square mile. America's annual per capita share of such a global solution would cost as much as a couple of gallons of gas.... some things are cheaper than energy conservation.

These options are simple, obvious, and cost-effective. Consider Los Angeles. Reroofing... would lower air conditioning costs by about $170m and...lower LA temperatures by about 3C - or about the temperature increase envisioned for the rest of this century...we don't hear much about the smartest choices when it comes to addressing global warming.

Rush To Judgment

A Throwback To The Plasticine Era?

Shoddy targets invite cheap shots. This week, a non-existent article in a non-existent learned journal was dangled as blogosphere bait to lure pundits onto the scientific rocks.
It succeeded.

The pseudo-study,complete with bogus equations, suggested man-made CO2 does not cause global warming, and sure enough, within 48 hours Rush Limbaugh was repeating it to his  20 million followers as scientific gospel just as he has regurgitated  the assertions of climatological boiler room operators before.

What makes this episode richly comic is less K Street gurus finding pure gibberish:

4δ161x Λ³Жญ5,6,1,8Φ-4 = {(ΣΨ²Њyt3-14๖P9) x 49}/2β x ⅜kxgt-§
"very convincing "and swallowing references to fossils from the "Miocene, Pliocene and Plasticine" eras, but that Limbaugh refused to disbelieve the wheeze even when bona fide scientists told him it was a joke.

Scientifically illiterate Limbaugh staffers like Marc Morano infamously insist global warming is a "hoax", but this time Limbaugh moved beyond shaping the ignorance of his listeners to ignoring the warnings of his own "expert climatologist here on staff." who issued this disclaimer--

TO: Listeners of Rush Limbaugh on Thursday, November 8, 2007
FROM: Roy W. Spencer
RE: GLOBAL WARMING STUDY HOAX

"Yesterday (11/7/07), a "research study" was circulating on the internet which claimed to have found the "real" reason for global warming. Even though the hoax was quite elaborate, and the paper looked genuine, a little digging revealed that the authors, research center, and even the scientific journal the study was published in, did not exist. I sent an e-mail to Rush about the issue regarding the hoax, with a copy of the "research study."  Unfortunately...he thought that I was calling global warming a hoax, rather than the study" --Roy W. Spencer                

Unfortunately for Roy, who far from being "here on staff" is Professor at the University of Alabama,  Rush puts a scientific foot in his atmospheric mouth almost monthly, witness his 27 September effort to shred the Montreal Convention :

"This is the big news today, and this is oh-my-God big news.  The atmospheric chemists... It now turns out -- and this is a story from the journal Nature.com.  It turns out that a key chemical reaction that was part of the theory that manmade chemicals are causing destruction of stratospheric ozone has been found to be almost ten times weaker than assumed... these scientists are nevertheless circling the wagons around the Freon ban ...Yes, there are biased scientists out there "

He earlier told millions that ozone depletion stems not from freons, but  an Antarctic volcano , whose chlorine output he exaggerated by four orders of magnitude .

While biowags threaten to name a life form in Limbaugh's honor-- Bombastacter oxycontinans is up for grabs,  Al Gore remains competitive in climate hype,  qualifying for Journal of Geoclimatic Studies editorship by learnedly informing Congress that CO2 has turned Venus "hotter than the boiling point of lead"

Considering how much of the toxic heavy metal has been strip mined from the Tennessee environmentalist's family estate, he ought to know better.

Run It Up The Flagpole And See If It Burns

Ten days after the announcement of the Nobel peace prize, network TV lit up like strobe with an avalanche of prime time advertisements on Green Themes. Not just Timberland's recycled shoes, but Honda's low-emission cars.  What advertising firms do on behalf of their clients  is their own business, but when they do it is a fit  object of public curiosity.

While the normative Nobels have an airtight  record of  keeping winners secret, the political milieu awarding the the Peace Prize leaks like the Senate Intelligence Committee-- at least one  US political journal ran a story announcing  Al's win the night before he got the call.

A dozen-odd  Laureates coincidentally gathered in Potsdam at a UNEP  "Global sustainability A Nobel cause'  conference  were shocked , shocked to learn of the award the following morning , former IPCC chairman Robert Watson so deeply  that it took him  several seconds to spontaneously  declaim:

" Al Gore is a tireless fighter for the cause of climate who thoroughly deserves the prize for bringing this serious issue...." and whole minutes for IPCC working group co-chair Susan Solomon of NOAA to add :

" I don't think he has tried to promote a political agenda."

Given the Advertising Council's self-advertising of its corporate consciousness raising  efforts on UNEP and the IPCC's behalf , how curious campaigns of a caliber taking months to shoot should be good to go, with pre-positioned network airtime buys in place, 48 hours after the Oslo announcement.

How To Lose A Science War

Nothing illustrates the  power of advertising, or the incompetence of the losing side in the climate wars better than this frankly brilliant--if dishonestly edited--video collage.

It remind us that what both sides are dishing out is not science, but merely what their sponsors' focus groups want. None of these sound bites appeared on PBS, and really sound science is anathema to Fox.  But Fox serves a broad demographic base , and what viewers  with three digit IQ's will take if given half a choice could differ from Yack T V's sorry excuse for ' science '  in revenue enhancing ways.

Rupert Murdoch can find out the difference any time he wants: .

To halt the present rout, the White House need only engage the gentleman on the right to deliver a two word public service message to many who star in this clip>>
...

As to how well climate neocontrarians have managed their media portfolio to date, National Review reports Al Gore now has an 85% chance of winning the  Presidency if he runs,  while the price of oil has risen to  $86

Raiders Of The Faux Ark

Last season , TV viewers saw an assortment of  SWAT team members, ghost busters, self-styled prophets and  parapsychology adepts, none of them archeologists, presented as the discoverers of The Lost Tomb of Jesus, a compact version of  His sarcophagus, The Ark of the Covenant and The Garden of Eden. Not a year goes by without zealous amateurs and rapacious con men raising millions for one more go at putting Noah's Ark on prime time.

For all the grandiose claims these programs make, it is vain to go in search of  evidence for these 'discoveries' in the dry and dusty  literature of archaeology. Belief in them is sustained not by the contents of museum basements, or potsherds in plain sight in the Holy Land, but by vanity presses, PR handouts and self-serving websites on that new arbiter of truth and received wisdom, the Internet.

Yet Biblical archeology is not the foremost locus of media fraud, dubious science, and crackpot theorizing. There is a larger field  in play - just look out the window. Climate science has become the foremost plaything of the Broadband  Gods.

.......As Televised, Climate Science And  Biblical Archaeology
....................Have  Entirely Too Much In Common

The reason is simple - the stakes are very high. There is no money in archaeology , but climate policy has trillion dollar potential - taking CO2 out of the air could evolve into a physically and financially bigger business than digging up fossil fuels. Little wonder that just as frankincense scented Biblical discoveries like the Jesus and James ossuary invite accusations of forgery, rising levels of CO2 lead Senators to pitch cries of 'hoax' at scientists bearing less than joyful  tidings to the oil patch.

Greens too are blackening science's reputation. They evangelize worthy foundations, raising untold amounts of money from gullible trustees eager to  listen to tales of how they can save the world , whether spun by guileful professionals ,  sincere amateurs or rapacious con men out to make a fast buck waylaying  good Samaritans on the soft energy path-- it is not always easy to tell them all apart.

Real biblical archaeologist can use the tools of modern science, from isotopes  to precise excavation, to beat off their tendentious opponents , but predicting the fate of the Earth's climate has an odor of metaphysics about it.  Projecting the technological future is a lot  harder than stratifying the Biblical past, and without knowing the economic future,  science cannot rigorously predict what the technical economy will do to climate and weather. So it is cautionary to compare the abuse of archaeology in the media with the claims made there by  pundits representing both sides in the Climate Wars.

In a thoughtful piece entitled ' Raiders Of The Faux Ark,' archaeology department chairman Eric  H. Cline says something both Liberal foundation executives and  Conservatives with a religious bent should heed , for it bears acutely on what their ideological brethren are doing in the climate debate :

" the amateurs are taking in the public's money to support ventures that offer little chance of furthering the cause of knowledge. With their grand claims, and all the ensuing attention, they divert the public's attention from the scientific study of the Holy Land - and bring confusion, and even discredit, to biblical archeology.

Unfortunately, when fantastic claims are made, they largely go unchallenged by academics. There have been some obvious exceptions.... But much more common is a vast and echoing silence reminiscent of the early days of the debate over "intelligent design," when biologists were reluctant to respond to the neocreationist challenge. Archeologists, too, are often reluctant to be seen as challenging deeply held religious beliefs. And so the professionals are allowing a PR disaster to slowly unfold: yielding a field of tremendous importance to pseudoscientists, amateur enthusiasts, and irresponsible documentary filmmakers."

The Great Global Warming Hoax comes from the man who gave the world The Naked Pilgrim, and while Roland Emmerich is famed for The Day After Tomorrow, his first global deep freeze flick was The Noah's Ark Principle.

At a time when the world is increasingly divided by religion, both domestically and internationally, and when many people are biblically illiterate, legitimate inquiries ...have never been more important... We have an obligation to challenge the lies and the hype, to share the real data, so that the public discussion can be an informed one.

It is time we take back our field."

His essay deserves to be read not just by Former Next Presidents and politicians of both parties,  but  media executives who, the sight of God not being before their eyes, eschew fact checking in times when disinformation and Apocalyptic cant compete with ideology and bald denial in inviting policy disasters of Biblical proportions.

Strange Attractors

Climate change certainly  tends to attract the enthusiasm  of  statisticians.

One wonders if some might take time off from their duties  estimating the  longevity of tar sand  mines or the apoplexy prone to look at the correlation of place and  political utility of the sorts of scientific papers that, in the months following their publication, get cited in the press and blogosphere more frequently than in the peer reviewed  literature of the disciplines to which they pertain?

Some perceive the likelihood  of a paper achieving notoriety on the Green left to correlate non-randomly with authors in such places as  Colorado, Maryland and Cambridge Mass. while Alabama, Virginia and Livermore Cal. will more often ring a bell with those with TV's tuned to Fox

Publicists on both sides of the climate wars tend to be shy creatures, but science is supposed to be transparent. Adamant invites statisticians who weary of denigrating  each other's efforts at palaeoclimate reconstruction to apply themselves to the more contemporary,and easily deconvoluted  problem of where science is being politicized ?

One cannot accuse radical greens of seeking  to obscure their media strategy- given that so few are disposed to  pat attention to it - here , in a real blast from the past , is Regis Debray's marxisteant take on why Green Videocrats are riding roughshod over the  logotropic religious Right.

Armed Cant In The Climate Wars

Ecopop star Al Gore increasingly recalls another one speech man,  William Jennings Bryan, whose glittering oration ushered in the golden age of American demagogy. Today,  green fire blazes in Al’s belly bright as Bryan’s cross of gold, but what  he preaches  would crucify  the American economy - the levels of fossil fuel use he advocates were last seen in the days of Mark Twain.

Gore took no physics or chemistry courses at Harvard. Yet his native eloquence, polished by a year of Vanderbilt  divinity school, allows Christopher Hitchens to wonder " if Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize, will he run for president ?"  If voters listen raptly , it is because  An Inconvenient Truth is a galvanizing example of the rhetorical style Michael Lind terms "armed cant."

This factoid-rich  product of the advertising age overflowed from politics into science a generation ago, as double barreled Nobel laureates like Linus Pauling  pontificated about peace in the depths of the Cold War. Today, armed cant is distorting popular perceptions of climate  science as severely as Bryan's populist caricature of biology did Darwinism, but its ease of digestion has made it a cultural staple. TV advertising depends on the power of iteration, and by  rerunning science programs again and again, PBS can elevate whatever it elects to portray to the status of urban myth.

When amplified by television, the deployment of soft science by both armed camps in the Climate Wars makes sensible politics even harder. In the course of the  2000 election,  Gore' campaign economists disparaged Green proposals to knock America's energy economy back into the 1960's. Now  he seems to be reaching beyond Bryan’s incendiary speech, into the era of  constitutional flux that saw amendments abolishing slavery,  prohibiting  alcohol and establishing income taxation. With Al committed to coal  prohibition and punitive carbon  taxation, Deep Greens need not risk the failure of a constitutional amendment abolishing  fire.

A political Neanderthal like Bryan could only applaud the skill with which Al has eased the debate onto Amory Lovin's Soft Energy Path. Though riveting as Jurassic Park, the sermon Al delivers in An Inconvenient Truth apes Climate of Fear in its willingness to deprive viewers of polemically inconvenient scientific facts . That's show business--the Alley Oop constituencies on both sides of the political aisle haven't cracked a science textbook since the late Neolithic, and don't give a whoop about facts or factoid inflation in scientific journals the electorate at large can scarcely read.

Many are secretly relieved to see scientific debate downshift into the more popular media- why should they, or the voters who elect them need technical dictionaries when the Supreme Court of the United States can exhale a condemnation of CO2 without having to wrestle with  terms like " troposphere " and "radiative forcing" ?  In any forum, it is generally easier to score points by  citing The Whole Earth Catalog than The Handbook Of Chemistry and Physics.

 

Indulge Yourself With The IPCC

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KlimaFa's offset donation has reduced the carbon footprint of the shoes of the fisherman, turning the Vatican into "the world's first entirely carbon neutral sovereign state." and paving the way for carbon permit traders to securitize this ecclesiastic windfall from the IPCC

Derivatives are the life's blood of any growing futures market, and carbon permit trading is no exception. Would the Lord have created the Papal States carbon neutral if He did not intend Condittieri in the Climate Wars to trade on their neutrality? 

The surest path to environmental salvation is converting metaphysical carbon into deliverance from satanic gases. So don't catch hell from Greenpeace! Let the IPCC shrive you of Emissional Sin with an equity swap on fuel from the infernal regions.

Selling IPCC  indulgences may take the balls of a Medici banker, but they're worth it. By offsetting the CO2 from The Bonfire Of The Vanities, they turned
.. The Medieval Warm Period into the Little Ice Age !

.....Call your confessor or Bill Moyers for a test shrive today!

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A Dog Ate My Climate Model

One of the central problems of keeping a level head in the climate wars is maintaining  the bipartisan bandwidth of one's sense of humor.

Either side emits enough nonsense in a month to drive a case-hardened Hollywood gag writer to conceptual burnout . With world-saving ideologues and  K-Street gunsels working overtime to ridicule each others worst efforts, the underlying comedy of manners rarely surfaces, for the professional propagandists on  both sides are  focus group driven, and bent  on catering to down-market  factoid demand.

With  policy agendas to sell, the advertising and PR shops interest in scientific nuance is negligible,  because  while quantitative coherence is a nominal prerequisite for peer-reviewed publication ,  95% of the electorate has never picked up a copy of Science or Nature , and 99 % couldn't  make heads or tails of their contents if they did.

It follows that for all practical purposes , all scientific papers are created equal. Forget the indices of citation that funding agencies go by. In adressing polemics to a scientifically illiterate audience , there is no difference between views voiced  in  a letter to the Proceedings of the  Oregan Academy of Biology or The Biafran  Academy of Theosophy  and a review article in say , The  Proceedings of The  National Academy of Science. Worse,  it is a mere fact of the sociology of science  that activists gravitate to often partisan  foundation funding . When that gives rise to organized science journalism ,  serious journals that feature science news atop their scholarly content  can become strange attractors  of political commitment.

The resulting  asymmetry of discourse is  only exacerbated when ,as is the present case in America, one side or party  throws in the towel and goes off to concentrate its meager resources in a separate constellation of think-tanks that focus on reading each other's publications to the exclusion of the scientific literature at large.What they engender in competition with more established media  is best seen by comparing the scientific memes of PBS with the gonzo  alternatives adduced by Talk Radio.

It has long been observed that there is no scientific hypothesis so absurd that two Nobel laureates cannot be found to endorse it . There is likewise no paper touching upon the climate wars so daft  that one side or the other will not deem it ready for prime time. It is hard to say which is more damning- Republican failure to discriminate between serious and silly objections to the left's agenda-driven take on climate science , or the Democrat's refusal to acknowledge the polemic overkill of its own political spokesmen.

Last week, Bill Moyers was joined by  Harvard's avuncular doyen of  biology, E.O. Wilson in a PBS aimed at  calming the confrontation of science and religion. The sincerity of Wilson's respect for the Southern Baptist milleu of his childhood  makes one wonder what science could possibly  add to the Ten Commandments? High on the stone tablets the Greens are offering are :

Thou Shalt Not Use Fire and

Thou Shat Not Covet Another Species Ecological Niche.

I'd favor one more modestly focused on science as a manifestation of human nature :

Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Own Hypothesis.

Consider modeling climate change.  Available computer power is rising  rising  faster than global temperatures,  and The Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change has spent decades developing climate models that are  supposed to definitively inform environmental policy around the world. Forget about the politics what the models need to gain policy traction is the proven ability  to reproduce what climate actually did in the twentieth century ,in orderto render plausible their predictions of what the interaction of the atmosphere and  human civilization will yield in centuries to come .  But though past records of rising greenhouse gases cab help track real climate history,  the economic history of centuries to come remains unknowable . Lord knows what posterity will do.

In Nature Reports Climate Change , Stephen E. Schwartz  et al.  consider the 14 models the IPCC  has relied upon. They conclude they  did a respectable job of  relating the rise of greenhouse gases in the  last century  to observed warming, but note that that does not translate into cerain knowledge of the future. In this figure, the violet band of model results coincides well with the black line showing the century's actual warming , and lies well above the blue band of simulations run with model atmosphere's free of human emissions.

Figure 1 Not so certain. The uncertainty range in the modeled warming (red bar) is only half the uncertainty range (orange) of human influences. Graph courtesy of AAAS , as adapted from Schwartz Et Al.,

But Schwartz told Robert Kerr of Science last week that:' the close match between models and the actual warming is deceptive. The match "conveys a lot more confidence [in the models] than can be supported in actuality," says Schwartz.' The Nature Reports Climate Change paper notes the range of simulated warmings-- the width of the purple band--- to be only half as large as the large range of uncertainty in the parameter and variables driving climate change in the computer simulations.

"Climate scientists are used to skeptics taking potshots at their favorite line of evidence for global warming. It comes with the territory." observes Kerr, "But now a group of mainstream atmospheric scientists is disputing a rising icon of global warming, and researchers are giving some ground... Greenhouse-gas changes are well known, they note, but not so the counteracting cooling of pollutant hazes, called aerosols. Aerosols cool the planet by reflecting away sunlight and increasing the reflectivity of clouds. Somehow, the three researchers say, modelers failed to draw on all the uncertainty inherent in aerosols so that the 20th-century simulations look more certain than they should."

Modeler Jeffrey Kiehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, reached the same conclusion by a different route... He found that the more sensitive a model was, the stronger the aerosol cooling that drove the model. The net result of having greater sensitivity compensated by a greater aerosol effect was to narrow the apparent range of uncertainty, as Schwartz and his colleagues note.

"I don't want certain interests to claim that modelers are dishonest," says Kiehl. "That's not what's going on. Given the range of uncertainty, they are trying to get the best fit [to observations] with their model." That's simply a useful step toward using a model for predicting future warming. IPCC modelers say they never meant to suggest they have a better handle on uncertainty than they do. They don't agree on how aerosols came to narrow the apparent range of uncertainty, but they do agree that 20th-century simulations are not IPCC's best measure of uncertainty... It would seem... IPCC could improve its communication of climate science."

Amen to that. But how ? A lot of things are subject to change in response to human intervention. Some results are proverbial no-brainers, others utterly unpredictable. But this much is certain- human language is malleable. If policy goals drive research funding, scientific results will tend to converge in ways amenable to the justification of policy, because Big Bureaucracy tends to get what it pays for and pay for what it gets, scientific services included. The same iron laws and revolving doors observed to plague defense procurement around the world are in effect in the domain of climate policy. Or for that matter , dog or pigeon breeding.

Lord knows what climate modelers would come up with if they were all independently wealthy. Left to their own devices , pooches are observed in a matter of a few generations to converge on a sort of golden mean- your basic yellow dog, as found in tail wagging packs everywhere from the Australian outback to the urban jungles of the Bronx. But human communities of interest, from the American Kennel Club to the International Panel on Climate Change have ideas of their own.

The results can be a bewildering, but by no means mindless proliferation of decidedly unnatural results, from Paris Hilton's long-suffering string of Chihuahuas to gargantuan Saint Bernards and Irish Setters likely to be knocked over by a stiff breeze. They all are dogs, products of nature and nurture, yet no global model of doggy population ecology would predict their arising from what people do to the environment. They represent not the science of evolution, but human taste. The same can be said for what goes into climate models , for the unpredictable taste of future generations in technology-- and economics-- will determine what gets added to , or extracted from , the atmosphere as human civilization evolves.

Considering that scientists brag lees about climate  model's modest gifts of prophecy than do politician, a Twelfth Commandment seems in order--  Thou Shalt Not Declare A Scientific Debate Over Before It Has Fairly Begun. Let us call this "The Precautionary Principle." I realize that his expression has been floated before, but like  the information superhighway, it requires constant reinvention to remain of practical utility.

China's Cold Wars

Between 1000 and 1911, notes University of Hong Kong Earth scientist David Zhang,  eastern China witnessed 899 wars.

A study by Zhang's team published in Human Ecology classified  the conflict level of successive  decades  over nine centuries as 'very high' :more than 30 wars, ' high ':15-30 wars, or 'low' ; less than 15 wars.

Eastern China is where most of the country's food is grown. Over the same period, the  climate data for the Northern Hemisphere Zhang et al. adduce show six major cycles of warm and cold phases. Chinese crop and livestock production dropped significantly during the cold phases.

All four decades of very high conflict, and most periods of high conflict, coincided with cold phases, they found. Warfare generally lagged 10-30 years behind the start of a cold phase.

"In situations of ecological stress, warfare could become the ultimate means of redistributing shrinking resources,"--

Zhang,  D. D., Zhang,  J., Lee,  H. F. &  He,  Y.-Q. Hum. Ecol. 35, 403-414 (2007). You can read a precis in Nature.   Don't be surprised if the usual suspects on K-Street try to bend the  hypothesis to fit  The  Warring States Period  and the overthrow of the Mao dynasty.

A Lamp Unto My Carbon Footprint

The familiars of that peculiar Second Millennium sect, The Academy of Humanism, have been canoodling with their Green opposite numbers in the Papal Scientific Secretariat ever since Steve Gould and Carl Sagan's improbable pilgrimage to the Vatican Observatory  in 1986 , seeking the confirmation of the nuclear winter hypothesis as canon law.

Latter day eco-evangelists are angling for the Mother Of All Ecumenical Endorsements for carbon offsets. Most PR overtures are rebuffed by the Holy See, but now California's Planktos corporation claims their effort to reduce the carbon footprint of the shoes of the fisherman is a Done Deal.

With their Cold Fusion stock offerings dead in the water,  Planktos Corporation execs have spun off  KlimaFa, transitioning from alternative energy to ecclesiastic polity with a press release announcing :

' The New Vatican Climate Forest Initiative to Fully Green the Holy See.'

San Francisco -- July 12, 2007 --

By agreement with the Vatican, Planktos/KlimaFa is now pleased and honored to announce that the Vatican plans to become the world's first entirely carbon neutral sovereign state, and it has accepted KlimaFa ecorestoration offsets to achieve this historic goal. In a brief ceremony on July 5th the Vatican declared that it had gratefully accepted KlimaFa's offer to create a new Vatican Climate Forest in Europe that will initially offset all of the Vatican City State's CO2 emissions for this year.

His Most Reverend Eminence Cardinal Paul Poupard presided at the event and stated, As President of the Pontifical Council of Culture; I am honored to receive this donation from the leaders of Planktos-KlimaFa. This donation means an entire section of a national park in central Europe will be reforested.

Planktos might better do the Lord's work by telling Rome about Los Angeles Cool Cities Initiative. If the City of the Angels can crop degrees off its microclimate  by planting shade trees,and promoting pale paint and pavements to reduce solar heating, why shouldn't  all the campaniles in Christendom sprout windmills overlooking un-leaded cathedral roofs Adventitiously attired in green turf?

 

Climate of Weird

IT'S MORE FUN THAN WATCHING RERUNS OF AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH

If it hadn't happened,  South Park would have had to invent it.  Invoking the authority of Fox TV regular Pat Michaels, Gonzo Climatology Sweepstakes entrant Alexander Cockburn has called man's impact on climate "a fart in a hurricane" and declared:
" the human carbon footprint is of zero consequence"

Is Cockburn , an Old Labour Lefty ,bent on becoming  the first  Really Red Red State Climatologist ? He's been amplifying Rush Limbaugh's effort to liberate benighted geoscientists from the delusional belief that a billion years carbon accumulation can possibly have created enough fossil fuel  to upset the chemistry of the Earth's atmosphere. To him, scientists are just poseurs wielding  " primitive rhetorical pandybats."

He dismisses the contradictory evidence of geochemistry with the elan of a creationist denouncing   Carbon -14 dates older than 4004 BC as the Devils work. Rejecting the reactionary first law of thermodynamics ,  which insists that hot things tend to grow cold over time, Cockburn insists global warming's real cause  is 'the Earth's increasingly hot molten core."

Untroubled by the conservation of mass , or the variability of the Earth's orbit, he avers that:

" Once again, the greenhousers have got it ass-backward. The 100 ppm increase in CO2 can't be uniquely attributed to humans because at least as plausibly it could be the effect, not the cause, of the warming that started after the Little Ice Age."

Never mind CO2's subversive failure to spike in response to the Medieval Warm Period.

The late  Revered Falwell warned that global warming is  "Satan's attempt to redirect the church's primary focus," Cockburn's Beat The Devil column cottons to old time religion too. He could be the  man the left needs to rally  Moonies, Marxists and moonbats to  forge a weird new populism  from  Opinion Journal's anti-elitism and  the dim politicization of popular science on PBS. if the threshold of scientific expectation in the Climate Wars falls, and  warming  drives Siberia's collective farm die hards to plant popcorn, expect to see  Cockburn  demanding  the seed be vernalized in fulfillment of Comrade Lysenko's anti-Deviationist  five year plan.

Last year , his hosts at The Nation castigated those who deny a jet liner struck the Pentagon  for sinking into self parody as they   :

"proffer what they demurely call "disturbing questions", though they disdain all answers but their own. They seize on coincidences and force them into sequences they deem to be logical and significant. Like mad Inquisitors, they pounce on imagined clues... torturing the data ­- as the old joke goes about economists -- till the data confess. Their treatment of eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence is whimsical. Apparent anomalies that seem to nourish their theories are brandished excitedly; testimony that undermines their theories... is contemptuously brushed aside.

Cockburn really should reread this- after all. he wrote it.

New Maps Of Hell

Alexander Cockburn drags the Earth's core into The Nation 's no spin zone

Rush Limbaugh and Fox TV have long accused climate physicists of fundamentalist zeal. That  tabloid science meme has  now moved on from Drudge to take fire in The Nation, where the patriarch of  CounterPunch, beet-faced at Green heretics fraternizing with capitalists , cocks a left hook at the first law of thermodynamics in this Jeremiad :

"In a couple of hundred years, historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century...Then as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic Church was a bank whose capital was secured by the infinite mercy of Christ...and so...The sinners established a line of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning. Today a world market in "carbon credits" is in formation. Those whose "carbon footprint" is small can sell their surplus carbon credits to others, less virtuous than themselves.

The modern trade is as fantastical as the medieval one. There is still zero empirical  evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend...Poseidon should go hunting for carbon credits...the human carbon footprint is of zero consequence...not even to mention the role of the giant reactor beneath our feet: the earth's increasingly hot molten core"

Whoever mixes The Nation's cocktails these days, Chris Hitchens has a duty to steal the recipe for Cockburn's inspirational punch and share it with the Real Climate crew.

It must be powerful good-- "the earth's increasingly hot molten core" is the most radical new idea in tipping points so far this publishing season. Superstitous belief in the conservation of energy is no excuse--The Nation has spoken.

The American Geophysical Union must demand Congress stop core warming before melting of  the mantle beneath Greenland and Antarctica's rocky basement leads to parboiled polar bears , wholesale penguin mortality , global sea level rise , and , Lord help us, a catastrophic outburst of Waterworld sequels.

[postscript--the gargling continues in Cockburn's current Nation column]

The Iron Shore Of Science Journalism

Nature News downplays a message found in a seawater bottle

The gap between environmental science and its representation to the public continues to widen. The prospective use of iron to reduce CO2 by enhancing  plankton blooms at sea has created one of the warmer fronts in the Climate Wars , so consider  Nature's online coverage of the discovery that "Each atom of iron supplied from below pulled more than 100,000 atoms of carbon out of the atmosphere by stimulating plankton growth. "

This startling fact appears in Nature in a peer reviewed study of the annual outburst of sea life that teems in the waters upwelling around Kerguelen Island : Effect of natural iron fertilization on carbon sequestration in the Southern Ocean.

Debate about its future policy implications is already off to a false start. Science news is, by definition, new , and the research first surfaced on April 23 in Nature News . a free website more simply written and widely read than the erudite (and expensive) science journal it summarizes. Few will read what Stephane' Blain and forty-six colleagues wrote. What counts instead is headline hype. Quintin Schiermeier's news article leads off like a purple tyrannosaur lecturing tots in a nanny state nursery:
Only Mother Nature Knows How To Fertilize The Ocean
Its subheads are minor masterpieces of Green tabloid science . One :
'Natural input of nutrients works ten times better than manmade injections' dis-informs readers by inverting the math -- 'manmade injections' still enjoy 10,000 to 1 leverage in carbon sequestration. The other speaks for itself :
Geo-engineering the ocean won't work

Despite the headline , that's not the scientific article's subject--or its conclusion. It's about biogeochemistry from top to bottom ,and  Schiermeier's polemic dismissal of iron fertilization is a manifest example of op-ed engineering. Instead of

Please, Sir , May I have more Carbon Offsets ?

Back to Biafra in the name of climate change

Last year, an American Spectator  essay  ranked Nigeria as a liberal democracy because  52% of its literate citizens think highly of America. Now it features Pat Michaels lambasting the executive summary   of the latest UN global warming report for implicit racism in lowballing  21st century African economic prospects.

But one IPCC  report reviewer has already quit because , contrary to contrarian Michaels , he thinks climate modelers are on thin ice  high-siding  Africa's  21st century CO2 output . His essay in Spiked outlines out the deep societal roots of Africa's hundred year descent into being an economic basket case.

National Review columnist  Bill  Buckley , noting Nigeria's failed election and prospering  kleptocracy , asserts that paradigmatic African nation once again " needs a strongman"  As eyewitness to some of what its last few accomplished -- mass starvation in the short-lived Republic of Biafra , and the early flowering of Islamic fundamentalism in the sub-Saharan north , I fear the Spiked essayist has something of a point.

So whence Michaels' optimism ? Maybe he's been too diligent in reading his Nigerian  email.  If the number of offers of vast wealth for the courtesy of a reply I get is any guide ,  the estimate that 52% of Nigerians love America seem far too low. At least 65,000,000 million of them  must spend their days seeking to enrich us all. offering tens of millions of dollars for little more than our account details , social security numbers, a promise of confidentiality and a few hundred thousand dollars for incidental expenses.

This is a remarkable and positive change in attitude-- incoming flak and occasional strafing enlivened my edifying visit to Biafra , but not one offer of a ten million dollar commission for helping to settle an estate. Perhaps the low oil prices then prevailing had a chilling effect on the region's native generosity. Ingenious Texans have since remedied matters ,transforming the Niger Delta from a region of starvation and  malarial squalor to one of malarial squalor, malnutrition , and occasional scattered Kuwait Oil Fires. Banning DDT didn't help save this  rain forest.

Nigeria's Neronian synergy of kleptocracy and pyromania cannot explain why some there desire to siphon wealth into our pockets and others wish us even more. One , writing on behalf of "The All Seeing Eye , Mr Nick Webb, " offers "a Seat on the High Council of the Priory of Sion founded in 1815 by King Artour. We will also advice that these grant funds awarded to you which amount to $350,000.00 be used to better the lot of man through your own initiative and also we will go further to inform you that the open slot to become a Priory Of Sion is optional."

Maybe I should forward it to Michaels. Since the IPCC high council actively seeks Non-Governmental Organizations to expand its power base , having a State Climatologist should assure a Priory a priori of securing Biafra's vacant seat at the round table.

At Last- A Genuine Hoax!

H is for Hydrogen - the cleanest fuel there is . As long as it is made out of water. Which it is--right ?

Dream on- hydrogen produced from H2O is a rare and precious commodity , costing a quarter its weight in silver because of the high price of American electrical power-- most of which comes from coal. But don't count on cashing in the contents of your bathtub just yet . Though the hydrogen in a pound of water is worth $22 on paper, pure hydrogen produced by water electrolysis can't compete with the ordinary stuff, made from natural gas -- it sells for $6.00 a kilo liquefied . The two processes costs don't cross until electrical power gets  _almost _ too cheap to meter-- under thee tenths of a cent per kilowatt hour.

So when Alan Alda next  rhapsodizes as he drives yet another very special hydrogen car on a PBS Green TV special ,  you may want to ask where its fuel is coming from ?  And likewise the carbon fiber or titanium of its scarily pressurized gas tanks. The environmental economics of hydrogen are presently so preposterous as to serve as a sort of Found Advertising for Big Coal.

Neither Greens or Appalachian mountain scalpers can do a thing to reduce the energy cost of liquefying hydrogen, because thermodynamics dooms refrigerating the stuff to minus 400F to fearful inefficiency. When there's almost no heat to pump, heat pumps mostly spin their wheels.

So though energy in hydrogen made from methane costs only twice as much  money as that in  gasoline, there is another thermodynamic bill to pay.  Besides the carbon in the methane burned to CO2 to drive the  hydrogen production  process at the gas refinery, more fuel - mostly coal in the real world-- must  go up in smoke  to  liquefy the hydrogen , or cram it energetically it into storage. Put them together, and the bottom line is that today, a  hydrogen  fueled  compact  can end up putting more CO2 into the atmosphere than an evil SUV.

Materials science  will help solve the hydrogen storage problem , jsut as it is stuffing ever more charge into batteries, yet compared to CO2 capture at coal plants, hydrogen is a thermodynamic joke played at Gaia's expense.  Media  enthusiasm  for the subject  has  cost naive investors a bundle too . Kudos for candor to Reason's Ron Bailey for providing the bottom line at the end of  his recent review  of Robert Zubrin's expose' , 'The Hydrogen Hoax':

"Disclosure: I own a few shares of stock in two hydrogen fuel cell companies which have declined more than 90 percent in value since I purchased them 6 years ago. In fact, a shareholder suit against one of the companies just netted me something like $30 as compensation... If you run out and buy such stocks based on what you read here, you've clearly not understood the arguments... if you nevertheless feel like mandating or subsidizing hydrogen production, one side effect may be that value of my almost worthless stock will go up."

As to why the relative  and highly variable amount of hydrogen in coal will continue  to dwarf the Hydrogen Economy as a real-time  environmental variable for decades to come, You read it here first-    

Executive Summaries for Dummies

                             Adamant's Iron Law of Science and the Media:                    --( Copyright 2007 )  

              Reports universally referred to on
              Prime-time go universally unread.

reflects the fate of the last three UN global warming studies. Everyone on TV says the next one from the International Panel on Climate Change will be released , appropriately enough , on The Day After Tomorrow ,this being January 31st.

They're wrong.  What's being publicized high and low is the release of the gaudily illustrated  21 page " IPCC Executive Summary."   Not to be confused with the inch thick Summary For Policymakers, let alone the real 4,000 page and umpteen figure report that won't be available to go unread until May. The object of this week's prime-time ballyhoo is a political document. One even the IPCC's Director admits is designed to  "shock"  us.

Shock is rather hard to sustain for the time it takes to read 4,000 pages of leaden scientific prose laden with equations and laced with computer graphs, so an ultralight  Executive Summary precedes the ten kilogram tome. Which , given the level of scientific literacy prevailing inside the Beltway or at the UN might as well be written in cuneiform , translated into Esperanto , or carved in Sanskrit minuscule on the North Face of the Eiger.

This is a pity.What I've read of the IPCC opus as it has evolved on line over the last year-- most of some tranches, less of others-- suggests it contains over a pound of matter genuinely new and several ounces that merit universal approbation.

I cannot say as much of  the 3/4 ounce Executive Summary, for divorced as it is from the contents of the IPCC report--200 to 1 is not a data compression ratio designed to inspire confidence ,The ExSum will beget some predictably bizarre government responses. Yet it remains a real tree saver , and a great way to while away the time as the 7 PDF's of the Real Thing download, a process that left me  leisure enough to draft a First Corollary to the Iron Law:
                Accusations of stacking the deck are
          seldom avoided by printing your own cards

Of course the Real Thing is itself but a summary of a far more elaborate process, involving 1220 dickering authors and reviewers, about 1 in 100  of whom were invited to Paris to draft the ExSum. For those who just can't wait to dig in to the  4,000 pages they boiled down to 21 and will reflate to volumes of  hardcopy,the Federal Bureaucracy has magnanimously leaked its response in advance--its 14 page abstract is on line here. Unlike the Executive Summary authors, they did not have Madison Avenue's best and brightest sharpening their prose , but the difference will go undetected , because of the Iron Law's Second Corollary :
...Nobody reads anything
with a fourteen page abstract

Most people would sooner sit through a high budget movie starring a former Vice President. For those with stomachs strong enough to digest more than popcorn , The International Herald Tribune has a good account of what even  Real Climate's IPCC boosters are calling " the sausage making going on in Paris."

DECEMBER 2007 Update : The exceedingly green folks at Island Press have kindly confirmed Adamant's Iron  Law  by providing a Summary of the IPCC Summary of the Executive  Summary of the Summary For Policymakers: It is 32 pages long and roughly 64 times more turgid than the Magnum Opus itself

http://www.islandpress.org/ipcc/IPCC_03.pdf

A Long Row To Hoe

Proposals for an alcohol-fueled end to dependence on foreign oil do not sit lightly on the American landscape.

Can they fit within our borders at all?

State Of The Union speeches tend to cross using figures with speaking figuratively, and this hybrid rhetoric can bear strange fruit, like the switchgrass mania spreading up K Street like kudzu. Math has never been the Beltway's strongest suit, and it will take a while for many in DC to realize that biofuel, like the solar and wind energy franchises already on offer, suffers from sheer lack of real estate. A recent WSJ Op-ed devoted a thousand words to singing the praises of cellulose fermentation , but neglected to divide its rosy bottom line  projections by ethanol's depressingly low energy content - a barrel of the stuff falls so far short of  real gasoline-- over two million BTU's,that you'd need about ten gallons  extra to equal a tankful. Japan's last gasp in World War II was distilling biomass to get kamekaze fuel.

Solar ranching translates into paving areas the size of Massachusetts with silicon panels. But farming out the fuel supply means putting multiples of Texas under the plough. Even corn as tall as an elephant's eye yields less than half a gallon of ethanol per acre per day. And biotech might, at best, wring another quart out of fertile farmland.

That's just not enough...