GWPF | 4 Jan 2016
Despite the warm end to the year, the annual CET ended up pretty close to the long term average. As I have pointed out before, the Met Office only like to show the CET since 1772. For some reason, they don’t like people to see the full picture, which just happens to include the much bigger and faster rise in temperatures in the early 18thC! If we focus in on the period since 1980, we can see more clearly the step change in the late 1980’s, but, just as significantly, the flatlining since. Indeed, the 10-Year average has actually been declining since 2007. –Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 2 January 2016
Arctic ice declined in the decade prior to 2007, but has not declined since. What we have seen in the last decade is a plateau in Arctic ice extent, analogous to the plateau in surface temperatures. –Ron Clutz, Science Matters, 1 January 2016
1) Central England Temperature Pause Now 17 Years Long – Not A Lot Of People Know That, 2 January 2016
2) Happy Arctic Ice Year! – Science Matters, 1 January 2016
3) Matt Ridley: Don’t Blame Climate Change For UK Floods – The Times, 4 January 2016
4) The Fishy ‘Science’ Of Ocean Acidification – Quadrant Online, 1 January 2016
5) What Causes El Nino Warmth? – Roy W Spencer, 1 January 2015
6) Nico Stehr: Good Climate, Bad Democracy – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 December 2015
7) Joel Kotkin: How Liberals Are The New Autocrats – Daily Beast, 3 January 2016
You have been asked to review why Britain has yet again been hit by extremely damaging floods, as it was in Staines in 2014, Somerset in 2013, Cockermouth in 2009, Gloucester in 2007, Carlisle in 2005, Boscastle in 2004 and York in 2000. You will get a lot of advice, much of it delivered by hobby horse. You’ll need to decide how to allocate blame between four things: extreme weather, budget cuts, green priorities and land management. Please resist the cheap excuse of climate change. It was Britain’s second wettest December: the same month in 1929 was wetter, so this kind of saturation could easily have happened even if climate change was not occurring. Besides, if global warming does exacerbate flooding slightly, we still have to deal with it. –Matt Ridley, The Times, 4 January 2016
With an obstinate atmosphere failing to warm as predicted, another peril was needed to sustain the junk-science industry and keep lazy reporters supplied with bogus scoops. No problem! Conscript a Disney character, garnish with misrepresentations and there you have it: ocean acidification. “Ocean Acidification,” the evil twin of global warming, is scary because the chemistry is so simple. For example, the Australian Academy of Science in its curriculum for secondary schools, organizes an experiment for 16-year-olds where crushed ocean shells go into a test tube of sea water. You add acid or vinegar or something, and then watch the shells fizz and dissolve! –Tony Thomas, Quadrant Online, 1 January 2016
Dick Lindzen suggested to me recently that this might be a good time to address the general question, “what causes the global-average warmth during El Nino?” Some of you might say, “the sun, of course”. Yes, the sun’s energy is the ultimate source of energy for the climate system, but it really doesn’t explain why El Nino years are unusually warm…or why La Nina years are unusually cool. The answer lies in the circulation of the Pacific Ocean, more specifically the vertical circulation of that ocean basin. The short answer is that, during El Nino, there is an average decrease in the vertical overturning and mixing of cold, deep ocean waters with solar-heated warm surface waters. The result is that the surface waters become warmer than average, and deeper waters become colder than average. The opposite situation occurs during La Nina. —Roy W Spencer, 1 January 2015
An increasing number of climatologists are critics of democracy. Only autocratic governments could avert catastrophe, they believe. “We need an authoritarian form of government to implement the scientific consensus on greenhouse gas emissions,” the Australians David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith emphasise in their book The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy. –Nico Stehr, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 December 2015
As the Obama era grinds to its denouement, grassroots democracy, once favored by liberals, is losing its historic appeal to the left. Important progressive voices like Matt Yglesias now suggest that “democracy is doomed.” Other prominent progressives, such as American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner, see the more authoritarian model of China as successful while the U.S. and European political systems seem tired. Increasingly the call is not so much for a benevolent and charismatic dictator, but for an impaneled committee of experts to rule over our lives. Former Obama budget adviser Peter Orszag and Thomas Friedman argue openly that power should shift from naturally contentious elected bodies—subject to pressure from the lower orders—to credentialed “experts” operating in Washington, Brussels, or the United Nations. –Joel Kotkin, Daily Beast, 3 January 2016
1) Central England Temperature Pause Now 17 Years Long
Not A Lot Of People Know That, 2 January 2016
Paul Homewood,
Despite the warm end to the year, the annual CET ended up pretty close to the long term average.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/index.html
As I have pointed out before, the Met Office only like to show the CET since 1772. For some reason, they don’t like people to see the full picture, which just happens to include the much bigger and faster rise in temperatures in the early 18thC!
If we focus in on the period since 1980, we can see more clearly the step change in the late 1980’s, but, just as significantly, the flatlining since. Indeed, the 10-Year average has actually been declining since 2007.
Perhaps a better way to look at the “pause” is to consider the trend over the last twenty years. The red line shows the mean.
Last year was an insignificant 0.1C above the 20-year mean, whilst five of the years in the last eight have been below average.
Which brings us back back to that step change in the 1980’s. Whilst correlation does not prove causation, one cannot avoid the connection between that step change in temperature and the sharp rise in the AMO at the same time.
2) Happy Arctic Ice Year!
Science Matters, 1 January 2016
Ron Clutz
Arctic ice declined in the decade prior to 2007, but has not declined since. What we have seen in the last decade is a plateau in Arctic ice extent, analogous to the plateau in surface temperatures.
This year end report shows there is no reason to worry about Arctic ice melting. Against the odds, 2015 recovered from:
The blob melted Bering Sea a month early; it’s now well ahead of 2014.
An August storm pushed extent down for 28 days; it now nearly matches 2014.
MASIE measurements show that 2007 ice extent was lower than any year since. It is now confirmed that 2015 average annual extent exceeds 2007 by about 400,000 km2. That difference arises from comparing 2007 annual average of 10.414 M km2 with 2015 average through day 365 of 10.808. That makes 2015 virtually tied with 2009 for fourth place in the last ten years.
3) Matt Ridley: Don’t Blame Climate Change For UK Floods
The Times, 4 January 2016
You have been asked to review why Britain has yet again been hit by extremely damaging floods, as it was in Staines in 2014, Somerset in 2013, Cockermouth in 2009, Gloucester in 2007, Carlisle in 2005, Boscastle in 2004 and York in 2000. You will get a lot of advice, much of it delivered by hobby horse. You’ll need to decide how to allocate blame between four things: extreme weather, budget cuts, green priorities and land management.
First, I hope you will give the Environment Agency a hard time. The rain is not its fault, of course, and the quango seems to have done a reasonable job of responding. The fact that its chairman flew off to his home in Barbados between visits to the north of England is a red herring.
But if this were a private company, chartered to manage rivers, it would lose the contract. After York was inundated in 2000, Carlisle in 2005 and Cockermouth in 2009, the least we could expect is that the agency responsible for flood management would either prevent a re-occurrence, or publicly admit that this was impossible. Instead, it spent a fortune on measures that it said would work and didn’t. This is what an EA spokesman told the BBC in January last year: “You can never say never to flooding happening, but what we can say is Carlisle is a well-protected city. The flood defences we have put in place would accommodate and defend against the flooding of 2005. The city would be safe from flooding.”
While thinking about budgets, please have a really good look at the change in priorities that came with this country’s gold-plated implementation in 2000 of the EU Water Framework Directive. In my experience, the EA talks of little else, and explicitly admits that it and other directives changed its incentive from river management to biodiversity and water quality. Here’s what the National Flood Risk Management Strategy says: “In all instances, flood and coastal risk management should avoid damaging the environment . . . and wherever possible work with natural processes and always seek to provide environmental benefit, as required by the Habitats, Birds and Water Framework Directives.”
The directive was one of the first times the European Union invited the big green environmental organisations to get directly involved in policymaking. As one study of the episode concluded: “The environmental lobby was swift to capitalise on recent changes, and is in as strong a position as it has ever been to shape European water policy.”
Lord De Ramsey, who was the first chairman of the EA and retired in 1999, has this week criticised John Prescott’s decision to appoint the head of the RSPB as chief executive of the EA after he left, since she — Barbara Young — “put environmental concerns before timely maintenance”. This is a serious charge. […]
Finally, please resist the cheap excuse of climate change. It was Britain’s second wettest December: the same month in 1929 was wetter, so this kind of saturation could easily have happened even if climate change was not occurring. Besides, if global warming does exacerbate flooding slightly, we still have to deal with it.
As a group of 17 senior climate scientists said in 2013: “Blaming climate change for flood losses makes flood losses a global issue that appears to be out of the control of regional or national institutions. The scientific community needs to emphasise that the problem of flood losses is mostly about what we do on or to the landscape and that will be the case for decades to come.”
4) The Fishy ‘Science’ Of Ocean Acidification
Quadrant Online, 1 January 2016
Tony Thomas
With an obstinate atmosphere failing to warm as predicted, another peril was needed to sustain the junk-science industry and keep lazy reporters supplied with bogus scoops. No problem! Conscript a Disney character, garnish with misrepresentations and there you have it: ocean acidification.
How scary is “ocean acidification”? Very scary. The previously scary “global warming” stopped 19 years ago, but do stay scared because all that CO2 since 1997 has instead been “acidifying” the oceans. Please imagine baby oysters dissolving in the equivalent of battery acid, and hermit crabs raising a nervous feeler to discover that their protective shells have disappeared. Curse you, horrible human-caused CO2 emissions!
In one celebrated episode involving Climate Science™, a lone oyster farmer in Maine put his oysters into a bucket and then found that the bivalves at the bottom were crunched because their shells were weakened.[1] Can any reasonable person ask for better scientific proof of ocean “acidification”?
“Ocean Acidification”, the evil twin of global warming, is scary because the chemistry is so simple. For example, the Australian Academy of Science in its curriculum for secondary schools, organizes an experiment for 16-year-olds where crushed ocean shells go into a test tube of sea water. You add acid or vinegar or something, and then watch the shells fizz and dissolve!
Two years ago, I noticed in Melbourne’s Fed Square a $50,000 competition for schoolkids for the best drawing about ocean “acidification”, sponsored by the green Ocean Ark Group. The theme was “Imagine losing all this color and life”. Guidance text included,
There are approximately 10,000 Coral Reefs and we are destroying one every other day…Left unchecked Ocean Acidification could trigger a Great Mass Extinction Event…
Now that union corruption has been exposed, maybe our next Royal Commission should be into Abuse of Children’s Intelligence, and the Academy and Ocean Ark could justify their teachings under cross-examination.[2]
Meanwhile, a trans-Atlantic team of top “ocean acidification scientists” has published a scary op-ed in the New York Times. Congrats to skeptic blogger Steve Milloy at Junkscience.com for successfully obtaining under FOI the emails among them collaborating over the op-ed draft. This material runs to 440 admittedly repetitious pages.[3] The named authors were Richard W. Spinrad, chief scientist of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and Ian Boyd, chief scientific adviser to UK’s Department of Environment.
The trove of FOI emails include some beauties. Here’s what NOAA’s Dr Shallin Busch had to say, privately, to her NOAA colleague Madelyn Applebaum on September 30 about the draft. They had been asked by the New York Times to sex it up with some specific hurts allegedly being caused by all this acidification.
The editor asked,
It’s very interesting, but in order to work for us it needs to be geared more toward the general reader. Can the authors give us more specific, descriptive images about how acidification has already affected the oceans? Is the situation akin to the acid rain phenomenon that hit North America? What can be done to counteract the problem?
Dr Busch, who works for NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program and Northwest Fisheries Science Center at Seattle, responded to Ms Applebaum:
Unfortunately, I can’t provide this information to you because it doesn’t exist. As I said in my last email, currently there are NO areas of the world that are severely degraded because of OA or even areas that we know are definitely affected by OA right now. If you want to use this type of language, you could write about the CO2 vent sites in Italy or Polynesia as examples of things to come. Sorry that I can’t be more helpful on this!
5) What Causes El Nino Warmth?
Roy W Spencer, 1 January 2015
Dick Lindzen suggested to me recently that this might be a good time to address the general question, “what causes the global-average warmth during El Nino?”
Some of you might say, “the sun, of course”. Yes, the sun’s energy is the ultimate source of energy for the climate system, but it really doesn’t explain why El Nino years are unusually warm…or why La Nina years are unusually cool.
The answer lies in the circulation of the Pacific Ocean, more specifically the vertical circulation of that ocean basin.
The short answer is that, during El Nino, there is an average decrease in the vertical overturning and mixing of cold, deep ocean waters with solar-heated warm surface waters. The result is that the surface waters become warmer than average, and deeper waters become colder than average. The opposite situation occurs during La Nina.
Importantly, the change shows up in global average ocean computations, based upon ocean temperature data (see our Fig. 3, here); this means that the changes centered in the Pacific are not offset by changes of the opposite sign occurring in other ocean basins.
The Details
Most of the depth of the world’s oceans is very cold, even in the tropics. Only the near-surface layers are warm, with the rest of the ocean depths being filled up over thousands of years by surface water chilled to low temperatures at high latitudes. (This leads to the interesting observation that the mass-weighted average temperature of the climate system is actually very cold).
This average state of warm surface (due to solar heating) and cold depths is continually being offset by vertical mixing processes (wind-driven wave-induced mixing, tidal flows over bottom topography, and other processes). When these processes slow down during El Nino, surface water (mainly the upper 100 meters) become warmer than normal. At the same time, the layers below 100 meters become colder than normal (100 m is the global-average depth of this demarcation).
In a sense, the deep ocean provides an air conditioner for the climate system, and during El Nino the air conditioner isn’t working as hard to cool the atmosphere. During La Nina, it’s working harder than normal, leading to global-average coolness.
Since the atmosphere responds to surface heating, anomalous warmth in the upper ocean layers gradually heats the atmosphere, mainly through increased precipitation heating in response to large rates of evaporation from the warm surface waters. This initially occurs in the tropics where the ocean circulation change is the strongest, but then spreads to higher latitudes as well. The warming is not uniform, of course, and a few regions can even experience below normal temperatures…but in the global average, there is warming.
The plot of 2015 temperature anomalies shown above reveals there are indeed other things happening (graphic courtesy of Weatherbell.com, annotated by me). It should be mentioned that the map projection greatly exaggerates the actual size of the polar areas compared to the tropics.
Note that I have not mentioned Pacific westerly wind bursts, or propagating Kelvin waves, or reduced ocean upwelling, since these are just regional manifestations of the whole process…
In the “big picture”, the cause of El Nino warmth is still a reduction in the overall vertical mixing of warm surface waters with cold deep waters. (Reduced upwelling of cold deep water must, by mass continuity, be accompanied by decreased downwelling of warm surface water, which just means an overall reduction in vertical mixing in the ocean.)
6) Nico Stehr: Good Climate, Bad Democracy
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 December 2015
An increasing number of climatologists are critics of democracy. Only autocratic governments could avert catastrophe, they believe.
Disasters, such as a refugee crisis, a stock market crash, an extreme weather event or the bursting of a speculative bubble seem to hit democratic societies almost always by surprise. Climate change is, however, no calamity, but it can be a political disaster. Therefore, climate change should not be seen primarily as an environmental or economic problem, but as a question of political governability of modern societies.
There are many threats to democracy these days. Not the least is the widespread feeling not to be heard or represented by the political class. This dissatisfaction ranges from the Tea Party movement in the United States, to Ukip in the UK, to the Pegida protesters in Germany and to the Front National in France.
There is also a change of mind among scientists today. Among climatologists, in climate policy and the news media, there is a growing impatience with the virtues of democracy in the face of robust findings about global warming. Their claim to urgency and the exceptional circumstances of our present environmental situation remain largely without precautionary response both politically and socially.
However, not only is the deep gulf between knowledge claims and political action deplored. Increasingly what is considered an annoyingly ineffective democracy is also condemned as guilty of inaction.
Slow democracies
Leading climate scientists are right to stress that humanity is at a historic crossroad. Should we continue economically and politically as before, they claim, our path would lead inevitably to the disaster that endangers the survival of mankind (sic). In order to realise a globally sustainable lifestyle, we would need an immediate “great transformation”, as demanded by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
However, what exactly is meant by this transformation often remains vague. Part of the solution of this ‘great transformation’, if not at its core, is a new political order, according to some climate scientists – and others who have been participating in the debate. “We need an authoritarian form of government to implement the scientific consensus on greenhouse gas emissions,” the Australians David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith emphasise in their book The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy.
The American climatologist James Hansen, disillusioned and inaccurately adds that the democratic process is not working when it comes to climate change. And in his book The Vanishing Face of Gaia James Lovelock even demanded to give up democracy in order to meet the challenges of climate change since we were in a state of war. The British historian Eric Hobsbawm doubted that democracies were in a position to meet challenges such as climate change, considering their slowness and lack of political coverage.
Enemies of freedom
Why is this radical political change seen as necessary at all cost? The question is rather whether this is the only possible policy approach dealing with the consequences of climate change. Firstly, both national and global climate policies are evidently unable to implement their own modest goals, such as those laid down in the expiring Kyoto Protocol for example. There are also insights into the more and more compelling causes and consequences of human-induced climate change.
Both factors are increasing the scepticism about democracy among climatologists.
It is important to recognise that a diagnosis of unsuitable climate policy is focused primarily on its causes, that is, on the reduction of greenhouse gases. By focusing primarily on this question, and only secondarily, if at all, focusing on the effects of warming, a socio-political question is largely reduced to a technical question.
One result of this often one-sided approach to the problem of climate change is its de-politicisation accompanied by a simultaneous politicisation of climate science. By emphasising mainly the aspects of mitigation, the impression is created that the solution to the climate issue would only need technical regulation and implementation. Given the already inevitable warming of the global climate in the medium-term, this is one of two dangerous fallacies.
One can describe the widespread scepticism like this: democracy is inappropriate to respond effectively to the challenges faced by politics and society, given the consequences of climate change. Democratically organised societies act neither timely nor comprehensive. Therefore, a strong state must make the big decisions and stop the endless debate in this way. ‘It is necessary to act now’, is their motto. In the eyes of these commentators democracy thus becomes an uncomfortable as well as an inconvenient democracy.
In another historical context, the economist and social philosopher Friedrich Hayek has called attention to the paradoxical development that the impression of a massive reduction of “ignorance” within science increases the belief of the public and some scientists that we could therefore aspire to “a comprehensive and conscious control of all human activities”. “And for this reason,” Hayek added resignedly, “the people, who are intoxicated by the progress of knowledge, so often become enemies of freedom.”
7) Joel Kotkin: How Liberals Are The New Autocrats
Daily Beast, 3 January 2016
Progressives may preach the joys of localism, but the trend in government is all the other way in everything from climate change to the economic complexion of your neighborhood.
The End of Localism
This could be how our experiment with grassroots democracy finally ends. World leaders—the super-rich, their pet nonprofits, their media boosters, and their allies in the global apparat—gather in Paris to hammer out a deal to transform the planet, and our lives. No one asks much about what the states and the communities, the electorate, or even Congress, thinks of the arrangement. The executive now presumes to rule on these issues.
For many of the world’s leading countries—China, Russia, Saudi Arabia—such top-down edicts are fine and dandy, particularly since their supreme leaders won’t have to adhere to them if inconvenienced. But the desire for centralized control is also spreading among the shrinking remnant of actual democracies, where political give and take is baked into the system.
The will to power is unmistakable. California Gov. Jerry Brown, now posturing as the aged philosopher-prince fresh from Paris, hails the “coercive power of the state” to make people live properly by his lights. California’s high electricity prices, regulation-driven spikes in home values, and the highest energy prices in the continental United States, may be a bane for middle- and working-class families, but are sold as a wonderful achievement among our presumptive masters.
The Authoritarian Impulse
Under President Obama, rule by decree has become commonplace, with federal edicts dictating policies on everything from immigration and labor laws to climate change. No modern leader since Nixon has been so bold in trying to consolidate power. But the current president is also building on a trend: Since 1910 the federal government has doubled its share of government spending to 60 percent. Its share of GDP has now grown to the highest level since World War II.
Today climate change has become the killer app for expanding state control, for example, helping Jerry Brown find his inner Duce. But the authoritarian urge is hardly limited to climate-related issues. It can be seen on college campuses, where uniformity of belief is increasingly mandated. In Europe, the other democratic bastion, the continental bureaucracy now controls ever more of daily life on the continent. You don’t want thousands of Syrian refugees in your town, but the EU knows better. You will take them and like it, or be labeled a racist.
Already the disconnect between the hoi polloi and the new bureaucratic master race has spawned a powerful blowback, as evidenced by the rise of rightist, even quasi-fascist parties throughout the old continent. The people at the top—including much of the business leadership—may like the idea of a central European master-state, but support for the EU is at record low. Increasingly Europeans want, at the very least, to dial down the centralization and bring back some control to the local level, and something of the primacy of traditional cultures and what are still perceived as “European values.”
In some ways, the extreme discontent in America—epitomized by the xenophobic Trump campaign—reflects a similar opposition to bureaucratic overreach. This conflict can be expected to grow as new federal initiatives—initiatives that seek, among other things, to enforce racial and class “balance” in neighborhoods and high-density housing in low-density suburbs—stomp on even the pretense that cities might have any control over their immediate environment. This policy is being adopted already in some regions, notably Minnesota, where planners now seek to change communities that are too white and affluent populations need to meet new goals of class and economic diversity.
The Rule of the Wise-people
Historically, advocacy for the rule of “betters” has been largely a prerogative of the right. Indeed the very basis of traditional conservativism—epitomized by the Tory ideal—was that society is best run by those with the greatest stake in its success, and by those who have been educated, nurtured, and otherwise prepared to rule over others with a sense of justice and enlightenment. In this century, the idea of handing power to a properly indoctrinated cadre also found radical expression in totalitarian ideologies such as communism, fascism, and national socialism.
In contemporary North American and the EU, the ascendant controlling power comes from a new configuration of the cognitively superior, i.e., the academy, the mainstream media, and the entertainment and technology communities. This new centralist ruling class, unlike the Tories, relies not on tradition, Christianity, or social hierarchy to justify its actions, but worships instead at the altar of expertise and political correctness.
Ironically this is occurring at a time when many progressives celebrates localismin terms of food and culture. Some even embrace localism as an economic development tool, an environmental win, and a form of resistance to ever greater centralized big-business control.
Yet some of the same progressives who promote localism often simultaneously favor centralized control of everything from planning and zoning to education. They may want local music, wine, or song, but all communities then must conform in how they operate, are run, and developed. Advocates of strict land-use policies claim that traditional architecture and increased densities will enable us to once again enjoy the kind of “meaningful community” that supposedly cannot be achieved in conventional suburbs.
In the process, long-standing local control is being squeezed out of existence. Ontario, California, Mayor pro-tem Alan Wapner notes that powers once reserved for localities, such as zoning and planning, are being systematically usurped by regulators from Sacramento and Washington. “They are basically dictating land use,” he says. “We just don’t matter that much.”
The Road to Imperium
As the Obama era grinds to its denouement, grassroots democracy, once favored by liberals, is losing its historic appeal to the left. Important progressive voices like Matt Yglesias now suggest that “democracy is doomed.” Other prominent progressives, such as American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner, see the more authoritarian model of China as successful while the U.S. and European political systems seem tired.
Increasingly the call is not so much for a benevolent and charismatic dictator, but for an impaneled committee of experts to rule over our lives. Former Obama budget adviser Peter Orszag and Thomas Friedman argue openly that power should shift from naturally contentious elected bodies—subject to pressure from the lower orders—to credentialed “experts” operating in Washington, Brussels, or the United Nations.
The new progressive mindset was laid out recently in an article in The Atlantic that openly called for the creation of a “technocracy” to determine energy, economic, and land-use policies. According to this article, mechanisms like the market or even technological change are simply not up to the challenge. Instead the entire world needs to be put on a “war footing” that forces compliance with the technocracy’s edicts. This includes a drive to impose energy austerity on an already fading middle class, limiting mundane pleasures like cheap air travel, cars, freeways, suburbs, and single-family housing.
