GWPF | 12 March 2015
Cliff Asness: Global Warming Isn’t A Danger Anytime Soon
Global conflict experts say the Obama administration’s recent focus on climate change as a national security threat may be misguided. “The link between global warming and national security needs is tenuous at best, though the Arctic might be an exception, if [Russian President Vladimir] Putin continues his revanchist ways,” Harvard psychology professor and best-selling author Steven Pinker said in a recent e-mail interview. “Most wars have nothing to do with climate, and vice versa.” –David O. Williams, Real Vail, 11 March 2015
One of Wall Street’s most successful hedge fund managers is once again wading into the climate change debate. His conclusion: It’s not as big of a problem as some suggest. –Stephen Gandel, Forbes, 11 March 2015
1) Conflict Experts Dispute Impact Of Global Warming On National Security – Real Vail, 11 March 2015
2) Cliff Asness: Global Warming Isn’t A Danger Anytime Soon – Forbes, 11 March 2015
3) Clifford Asness & Aaron Brown: Climate Data And The Warming Trend – Stumbling On Truth, 10 March 2015
4) Global Temperature “Pause” To End Dramatically, New Paper Claims – Global Warming Policy Forum, 12 March 2015
5) UN Threatens To Set Up International Climate Tribunal – The Washington Times, 8 March 2015
This essay is not about the science of climate change, it’s about what the data say on their own. In particular, we think it is important to distinguish the level of worry you might have from looking at this chart, versus the level of worry you might have from complex climate models. Yes, over the last 135 years the Earth has warmed, but not nearly to the danger point and if we continue at this pace (the crux of the issue) it won’t become scary until more than 500 years from now. That’s quite a different message from what we’ve read in the articles accompanying the original version of this chart. –Clifford Asness & Aaron Brown, Stumbling On Truth, 10 March 2015
You have to be very careful with averages, they are not as simple as you might think. That thought was uppermost in my mind when I was reading a recent paper in Nature Climate Change. It had been written up by the Press Association (PA) and repeated by the Guardian, I guess that its multitude of environmental reporters-editors-heads had the day off. –Dr David Whitehouse, Global Warming Policy Forum, 12 March 2015
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change () recently circulated an email breathlessly titled, “Governments on Track to Reaching Paris 2015 Universal Climate Agreement — Negotiating Text Officially Published.” This text agreed to for negotiation by the federal government includes a remarkable proposal. Buried deep inside, it proposes an “International Climate Justice Tribunal in order to oversee, control and sanction the fulfilment [sic] of and compliance with the obligations of Annex I and Annex II Parties under this agreement and the [1992 UNFCCC climate treaty].” Translated, this means that even if the Obama administration refuses to call the Paris agreement a treaty, as it already telegraphed its position: A new climate court would hold us to its terms — even the terms of a prior, “voluntary” agreement. –Chris Horner, The Washington Times, 8 March 2015
1) Conflict Experts Dispute Impact Of Global Warming On National Security
Real Vail, 11 March 2015
David O. Williams
Global conflict experts say the Obama administration’s recent focus on climate change as a national security threat may be misguided.
“The link between global warming and national security needs is tenuous at best, though the Arctic might be an exception, if [Russian President Vladimir] Putin continues his revanchist ways,” Harvard psychology professor and best-selling author Steven Pinker said in a recent e-mail interview. “Most wars have nothing to do with climate, and vice versa.”
The Obama administration’s 2015 National Security Strategy emphasizes climate change as a long-term national security threat that must be balanced with more immediate concerns such as terrorism. In aninterview last month with Vox, Obama added that media tend to overstate terrorism as a threat compared to climate change.
Joshua Goldstein, professor emeritus at American University and a political science research scholar at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, said in an e-mail interview said there’s a dubious connection between global climate change and armed conflict.
’Climate change is a terrible crisis that needs all our attention, but it’s not really war that will be the problem we’ll have to deal with,” Goldstein wrote in an e-mail. “As for the U.S. government, it’s always going to be on the lookout for threats that justify ongoing high military budgets, even when violence is declining historically — though of course increasing modestly in the past five years [due to Syria].
“I think the officials genuinely think this is a threat they must prepare for, but I also suspect that if it wasn’t this, it would be something else.”
A study released last week linked the ongoing war in Syria to a drought precipitated by climate change, but Goldstein says most extreme weather events and natural disasters – which are not all linked to climate effects — do not result in armed conflicts.
“There is some evidence that drought was a factor in Syria and some other scattered cases,” Goldstein said. “But the 2004 tsunami actually seems to have helped end the war in Aceh [Indonesia] and didn’t create a new war.
“The typhoon in the Philippines a year ago didn’t cause the war there to restart,” Goldstein added. “The terrible flooding in Eastern Europe a couple of years ago doesn’t seem to be connected to the Ukraine violence. In Somalia a few years ago there was a terrible drought and start of a famine, but it didn’t make the war worse — if anything, the opposite.”
Pinker, whose 2012 bestselling book Better Angels of Our Nature concludes armed conflict around the globe is on the decline, has consistently rejected climate change and any resulting scarcity of natural resources as likely causes of major wars in the future.
“Physical resources can be divided or traded, so compromises are always available; not so for psychological motives such as glory, fear, revenge, or ideology,” Pinker wrote in 2013. “There are many reasons to worry about climate change, but major war is probably not among them.”
The Department of Defense in October released its Climate Change Adaption Roadmap, with then Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel writing, “Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict.”
Pinker, however, points to several studies by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) that undermine the theory that climate change will lead to more armed conflicts.
“While population growth and density are associated with increased risks, the effects of land degradation and water scarcity are weak, negligible or insignificant,” one such PRIO report concludes. “The results indicate that the effects of political and economic factors far outweigh those between local level demographic/environmental factors and conflict.”
2) Cliff Asness: Global Warming Isn’t A Danger Anytime Soon
Forbes, 11 March 2015
Stephen Gandel
One of Wall Street’s most successful hedge fund managers is once again wading into the climate change debate. His conclusion: It’s not as big of a problem as some suggest.
Cliff Asness, who runs AQR, one of the largest hedge fund firms in the world, e-mailed out a research paper on Tuesday to reporters and others making his arguments on climate change. The paper is labeled “very preliminary,” and Asness asked that it not be directly quoted.
The paper focuses on a chart of the Earth’s surface temperatures going back to 1880. Asness, who wrote the paper along with his co-worker Aaron Brown, does not deny that global temperatures are rising. But he says temperatures are rising at much slower rate than many suggest. What’s more, Asness and Brown say, based on the current pace of global warming, it will take another 500 years before the changes become a real problem.
Asness writes that he is not trying to deny the science of climate change, but that he is just looking at the data and what it says on its own. He offers other observations about climate change, including that the decline in Arctic sea ice or rising sea levels could just be the result of a mild increase in temperatures and not a sign that the world is about to get dramatically warmer. […]
But many scientists say there is little question that the Earth is warming and that it is a serious problem. “I’m not sure about the idea of beating people about the head and shoulders, but within less than a year (sic!), you will look like complete fools (if you buy this crap),” e-mailed Columbia University environmental science professor James Hansen, who took a look at the Asness and Brown paper at Fortune’s request. […]
In the paper, Asness and Brown say that, at least so far, temperatures have risen much more slowly than scientists have predicted, and that we are still far away from the point at which rising temperatures would cause a problem. Asness admits that temperatures may rise more quickly in the future, but he argues that the data doesn’t show it. Asness asserts that if the next 135 years deliver similar temperature changes from what we saw in the past 135 years, we should be fine.
3) Clifford Asness & Aaron Brown: Climate Data And The Warming Trend
Stumbling On Truth, 10 March 2015
This essay is not about the science of climate change, it’s about what the data say on their own.
There is a graph you’ve probably seen a lot of lately. Articles everywhere feature it i), or the data behind it, or a closely related cousin to either, highlighting temperatures at a new high, a visually strong long-term trend, and no recent temperature “hiatus.” This historical series is usually presented as proof that warming must be quickly and vigorously fought or we will reach dangerously high temperatures in the next few decades. These data and the implications taken from them require careful statistical scrutiny. We emphasize statistical at the outset because we are not challenging climate science; we are not climate scientists. We are, however, pretty experienced at statistics and inference.
The now famous graph shows global land-ocean annual mean surface temperatures since 1880 (the chart plots deviations from the 1951 – 1980 average) ii):
While visually impressive it’s our contention that most – we’d say “all” but we haven’t seen them all – of the recent articles forget to look at the vertical axis and to ask the simple question, “are these numbers big?”
This essay is not about the science of climate change, it’s about what the data say on their own. In particular, we think it is important to distinguish the level of worry you might have from looking at this chart, versus the level of worry you might have from complex climate models.
With a chart like this, whether about climate or anything else, a natural thing is to draw a straight line through the data (we used a linear least square regression, but you get about the same thing with other statistical techniques or just doing it by eye). This is a guess at what the long-term trend is, and could be a base case for thinking about how hot things are likely to get in the future (extrapolating a trend must be done with skepticism but it seems to be a reasonable starting point for discussion).
It shows a warming trend of 0.67° Celsius per century. That doesn’t sound too scary, and as we’ll see that if that remains the trend, according to the experts, it’s indeed not too scary. It’s surprising that in the myriad of recent articles highlighting this graph, pointing to the trend, the lack of a hiatus in warming, and the recent highs, none we’ve seen mention (we apologize to any we’ve missed!) that the actual magnitude of 0.67°C per century is quite small and itself doesn’t take us to a dangerous level until much farther in the future than climate scientists forecast.
Of course the real but rather small trend doesn’t prove that global warming is a minor issue, far from it. We’re just saying the graph taken on its own is actually pretty reassuring, at least compared to predictions, and declared danger points, of the IPCC and similar groups. If things continue along the way they have for the last 135 years, the point at which we reach dangerous temperatures is a very very long time from now. Those predicting that we face a big problem much sooner aren’t arguing this from these data, instead they have to be arguing that historical warming trends will change drastically in the near future; that they will not continue at the trend of the past hundred years or so. The historical record to date, and in particular this ubiquitous graph, can’t be the basis of an argument that we will hit dangerous levels soon. To argue that we will hit them in this, or even next century requires us to explain away this graph, to explain why the rate of warming will increase.
To see this, let’s take a step back and use larger axes. We’re going to drag the timeline (the horizontal axis) out another 50 years to 2065, and extend our trend line, and enlarge the scale (the vertical axis) to go up to the 4°C of warming that has been used as a somewhat arbitrary danger level since the 1970s (we call that the IPCC limit below – later, and in our end notes, we discuss what happens if this danger level is reduced to 2°C, a level we also show in the following graphs).
It says yes, over the last 135 years the Earth has warmed, but not nearly to the danger point (the top of the graph at 4.0 on the y-axis) and if we continue at this pace (the crux of the issue) it won’t become scary until more than 500 years from now (not by the end of the 50 years we’ve added to the x-axis). That’s quite a different message from what we’ve read in the articles accompanying the original version of this chart.
4) Global Temperature “Pause” To End Dramatically, New Paper Claims
Global Warming Policy Forum, 12 March 2015
Dr David Whitehouse
You have to be very careful with averages, they are not as simple as you might think. That thought was uppermost in my mind when I was reading a recent paper in Nature Climate Change. It had been written up by the Press Association (PA) and repeated by the Guardian, I guess that its multitude of environmental reporters-editors-heads had the day off.
The PA said we need to brace ourselves for accelerating climate change. It added that; “new evidence suggests the rate at which temperatures are rising in the northern hemisphere could be 0.25°C by 2020 – a level not seen for at least 1,000 years.” Given that the annual average global surface temperature hasn’t risen at all for about 18 years and that 2020 is only five years away great changes must be coming. Or are they?
The PA continued: “The analysis, based on a combination of data from more than two dozen climate simulation models from around the world, looked at the rate of change in 40-year long time spans.”
“Lead scientist Dr Steve Smith, from the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said: “We focused on changes over 40-year periods, which is similar to the lifetime of houses and human-built infrastructure such as buildings and roads.”
Firstly, why 40-years? It’s said to be “similar” to the lifetime of houses. So why not 30, or 50-years? I hope the analysis doesn’t confine itself to just 40-years? That would be too much like cherry-picking.
Alas it does. And there is the problem. Unless one performs the analysis over a range of averages then it is almost useless. Also when does one start? By calendar decades? What does nature know of decades and the arbitrary start points of our decades?
Warning bells must also ring for anyone averaging real world temperature data with its well known decadal changes (rising 1910-40, no change 1940-1980, rising 1980-late 90s, no change since) coupled with the IPCC view that human-induced climate changes were only really manifest after the 1950s.
Smith et al use their 40-year averaging on real world data and about two dozen climate models. They conclude that over the 900 years before the 20th century the 40-year average “rarely” exceeds 0.1°C per decade. I suppose the key word there is “rarely!”
In the paper the researchers say that sub-century rates of global surface temperature change have rarely been examined. I don’t think that is the case. They say that when averaging the temperature data over a 20-year period it is not easily to distinguish natural variability. I would argue that doubling the average period does not help that much either, particularly when one considers what the IPCC says about the onset of human influence on climate. Look at their 40-year data from climate models and HadCrut4, is there really a trend, and is it anthropogenic?
Also, looking at their Fig 3 their rate of temperature change per decade from CMIP5 simulations is (globally) more than 0.2°C greater than observational data. (Click on image to enlarge)
The result found by Smith et al (2015) must not be taken in isolation and, in my view, should not have been published in isolation, from a broader analysis. It over-emphasises the steep rise in global temperature seen in the 90s and distorts what has happened in the past 20-years to global surface temperatures. As I said, you have to be careful with averages, ask any bank manager.
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5) UN Threatens To Set Up International Climate Tribunal
The Washington Times, 8 March 2015
Chris Horner
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) recently circulated an email breathlessly titled, “Governments on Track to Reaching Paris 2015 Universal Climate Agreement — Negotiating Text Officially Published.”
The message triumphantly claimed that “Another key step towards a new, universal climate change agreement has just been taken as the negotiating text for the agreement was officially issued by the [UNFCCC].” This refers to the upcoming talks in Paris in December on a successor pact to the 1997 Kyoto global warming treaty. […]
This text agreed to for negotiation by the federal government includes a remarkable proposal. Buried deep inside, it proposes an “International Climate Justice Tribunal in order to oversee, control and sanction the fulfilment [sic] of and compliance with the obligations of Annex I and Annex II Parties under this agreement and the [1992 UNFCCC climate treaty].”
Translated, this means that even if the Obama administration refuses to call the Paris agreement a treaty, as it already telegraphed its position: A new climate court would hold us to its terms — even the terms of a prior, “voluntary” agreement.
This presumably seeks to address the problem our Constitution’s ratification requirement poses to any binding “climate change” treaty. In recent months, the Obama administration has made clear that whatever is agreed to in Paris won’t require two-thirds Senate approval. It will not because the president will say it’s not a treaty.
Do not confuse that with “not binding,” however. Creating a “climate justice tribunal” would purport to undercut such perception, by its own terms. Which is to say: Everyone but President Obama would think the document is, in fact, a treaty.
What “justice” would this climate court enforce? Technically, this is unknown until a final text is presented in December, though the actual purpose is to renew the expired Kyoto Protocol. That pact (a treaty) imposed caps on the use of reliable energy sources (“fossil fuels”) by a handful of countries.
Through clever construction and an overly enthusiastic Al Gore, that document gave Europe a largely free ride while targeting the United States, Canada and Japan. Since then, Canada and Japan (joined by Russia) have excused themselves from any such sucker deals going forward. Not the U.S.
What of the part about this climate court enforcing the 1992 UNFCCC, agreed to in Rio de Janeiro? That was the one that set the whole enterprise rolling by getting the targeted customers, such as the United States, nodding. The Rio treaty was merely aspirational, “non-binding” and “voluntary.” Yet even that required Senate ratification and — being “voluntary” — was approved by the Senate with embarrassing haste in that campaign year.
The Rio pact used the word “shall” 118 times in its commitments. Apparently, it is time to give those terms meaning.
Rio has been amended several times before, including by Kyoto. No one questioned whether those amendments required ratification. Why are we now to allow the president to commit us on his own authority? To a climate court, no less?
In a rational world, rather than alleviating the problem posed by the Constitution’s ratification requirement, even a failed attempt to slip a “climate justice tribunal” into any agreement would fatally wound the enterprise.
