Bet hedging

Latest news from the climate world

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center has announced that projected climate conditions point to a near- or above-normal hurricane season in the Atlantic Basin this year. The Atlantic hurricane season begins officially on 1 June.

So, if the season is anything other than very benign, NOAA can claim "We told you so" and "See? We can predict hurricanes after all!" and "Now you have to believe our predictions of impending doom".

An opportunity for Roger Harrabin

Leading hurricane expert Kerry Emmanuel has published a new paper in which he reports that his models suggest that global warming will cause a reduction in the number of hurricanes (with a slight rise in hurricane intensity in some regions).

Steve McIntyre notes that the results have been strangely ignored by the mainstream media, and wonders if this is because Emmanuel's university - MIT- has failed to publish a press release. This is odd, because as Steve M notes, they weren't so reticent for an earlier Emmanuel paper which predicted an increase in hurricanes.

This should be a great opportunity for the BBC's Roger Harrabin to redeem his reputation by telling the world about the Emmanuel paper. Come on Roger, show us that you're not actually a mouthpiece for the green movement...... 

More food riots

There have been more riots triggered by food price rises driven by biofuels policy and crop failures due to the cold.

Haiti

Hédi Annabi told the 15 members of the U.N. Security Council that recent deadly riots in parts of Haiti over rising food prices also appear to have a political dimension, and could undermine the government as well as the public's confidence.

Egypt

Ahmed Ali Hammad, 15, died from gun shot wounds Tuesday morning in the Mahalla hospital, said a security official on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press. The gritty industrial city has been the scene of two days of violent clashes between police and residents angered over rising food prices.

The Times fears that unrest will spread to the Far East. 

One side of the story

The BBC is trumpeting a UN report on the loss of ice from glaciers.

The rate at which some of the world's glaciers are melting has more than doubled, new data says.

Which begs the question of what has happened to the others. Has the rate more than halved? Or are they in fact growing. Helpfully, Biased BBC points out that Arctic Sea ice is back to normal and the world has endured its coldest winter for decades, so it's probably fair to say that global catastrophe is not yet upon us.

Ah, but the UN are talking about glaciers, not icecaps, I hear you say. Well, take a look at this report from the Washington Post back in 1922 (H/T Anthony Watts).

 

Here's the text in more legible form:

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

 Perspective is a wonderful thing.

Any lawyers out there?

Via here, I found this article in the Guardian by Dr Simon Lewis, who is a geographer working in the field of biodiversity.

In April last year a group of environmentalists shut down E.ON's coalfired power station in Ratcliffe-on-Soar. The goal: to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and, in their words, "save lives". Yesterday judge Morris Cooper presented a 20-page judgment accepting there was an "urgent need for drastic action", but convicted them of aggravated trespass, saying their defence, that their crime was necessary to save lives, could not be substantiated.

In the trial, for which I was an expert witness, crucial questions were how many people does climate change kill, and what proportion is the UK responsible for? I was surprised to discover that nobody knows.

This is a surprising thing to say, firstly because it's patently obvious that nobody knows - how could they? But secondly, if he had to go away and find out the answers to these questions it rather suggests that he's not actually an expert at all. Dr Lewis, as I've mentioned is an ecologist, not an epidemiologist. It makes the court system look rather silly to call someone as an expert on one thing whose expertise is in something completely different. 

So my first question for lawyers is this: do UK expert witnesses actually have to demonstrate some expertise in the relevant field? Or can the defence just put up some random green with letters after their name?

There's more about the trial here - this appears to be a site run by one of the defendants or perhaps one of their supporters. What intrigued me were the notes of Dr Lewis's testimony, and in particular this:

defence lawyer:  IPCC reports, how are they viewed in the scientific community?

 [Dr Lewis] IPCC - a consensus document, made up of thousands of scientists' reviews of the literature. That no scientist holding a position in an academic university who disagrees with on record.

Now this statement, as set out here, is manifestly untrue. Richard Lindzen, anyone? Professor of Meteorology at MIT? From his Wikipedia page:

Lindzen stated that "there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them" and "I cannot stress this enough -- we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future. That is to say, contrary to media impressions, agreement with the three basic statements tells us almost nothing relevant to policy discussions."

So my second question for any lawyers reading is this: if Dr Lewis gave evidence along the lines of the statements attributed to him above, has he committed perjury?

And question three is this: can anyone lay their hands on a copy of the trial transcript?.   

Food security

Food security is a subject that's enjoyed a little splurge of interest in the last couple of days. The government's new science adviser, Professor John Beddington, is reported as saying that the food shortages are likely to affect us long before climate change.

This is interesting, because one of the main factors behind the increase in food prices has been the diversion of farming land to biofuels production, ostensibly as a contribution to the "fight against global warming". So here's a classic case of the cure being worse than the affliction. Thank-you, greens.

Of course, no government scientific adviser is allowed out in public without a genuflection before the global warming goddess, and Beddington is no exception. His comments include the obligatory reference to climate change which is (obviously) going to make things much worse. It always does, doesn't it?

Now, there is a bit of evidence that warming will reduce crop yields, but these claims are not generally accepted, not least because historically warming has lead to times of plenty while colder climate has lead to shortage. There is much more certainty over the fertilising effect of more CO2 in the atmosphere. With CO2 levels continuing to go up, and temperatures steady for the last ten years, we should actually be expecting higher yields. And that's before you factor in the impact of genetic modification which is now pretty widespread, outside backward places like Europe.

It's certainly true to say that crop yields have been rising dramatically in recent years, at least in the US:

If you look at the chart, it's clear that in the last fifty years yields have nearly quadrupled. Given that agriculture in much of the rest of the world is nowhere near this productive, there would appear to be enormous scope to increase production.

All we need to happen is for governments to stop interfering, to stop putting up barriers to trade, so that surpluses find their way to places of shortage, to stop the roll out of GM crops so that the benefits can be enjoyed by farmers and consumers everywhere, and for government chief scientists to stop playing the Cassandra and stick to the facts.  

Wildlife in pay of big oil

The Telegraph reports that flocks of siskins have been arriving in the UK, a sign which is apparently taken to portend a cold winter ahead. The arrival of the pink-footed geese was also apparently earlier than usual.

They are global warming DENIERS, I tell you! DENIERS!! The tentacles of big oil get everywhere, EVERYWHERE...

The warming of the past

I picked this up via a weather forum. A commenter called Duncan MacAlister noticed that a graph of Atlantic Sea Ice extent had changed. He was comparing the graph according to to The Cryosphere Today's website with the same page on the Wayback Machine.

The two graphs were posted by a later commenter, and I've ripped them and reposted here:

 

So somewhere between the end of last year and now, something like a million square miles of sea ice have suddenly disappeared.

Global warming is pervasive stuff. It can even heat up the past. 

IPCC accused of falsifying figures

A Swedish paleogeophysicist has accused the IPCC of cherrypicking data and falsifying results in order to exaggerate sea level rise. Professor Nils Axel Mörner of Stockholm University has studied sea levels for four decades.

He points out the cherrypicking of tide gauge data

Tide gauging is very complicated, because it gives different answers for wherever you are in the world. But we have to rely on geology when we interpret it. So, for example, those people in the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], choose Hong Kong, which has six tide gauges, and they choose the record of one, which gives 2.3 mm per year rise of sea level. Every geologist knows that that is a subsiding area. It’s the compaction of sediment; it is the only record which you shouldn’t use. And if that figure is correct, then Holland would not be subsiding, it would be uplifting. And that is just ridiculous. Not even ignorance could be responsible for a thing like that.

Then, he accuses them of introducing arbitrary adjustments to the satellite measurements of sea level - a sleight of hand which will be familiar to anyone who has followed the debate over the surface temperature records.

Now, back to satellite altimetry, which shows the water, not just the coasts, but in the whole of the ocean. And you measure it by satellite. From 1992 to 2002, [the graph of the sea level] was a straight line, variability along a straight line, but absolutely no trend whatsoever. We could see those spikes: a very rapid rise, but then in half a year, they fall back again. But absolutely no trend, and to have a sea-level rise, you need a trend.

Then, in 2003, the same data set, which in their [IPCC's] publications, in their website, was a straight line—suddenly it changed, and showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 mm per year, the same as from the tide gauge. And that didn't look so nice. It looked as though they had recorded something; but they hadn't recorded anything. It was the original one which they had suddenly twisted up, because they entered a “correction factor,” which they took from the tide gauge. So it was not a measured thing, but a figure introduced from outside. I accused them of this at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow —I said you have introduced factors from outside; it's not a measurement. It looks like it is measured from the satellite, but you don't say what really happened. And they answered, that we had to do it, because otherwise we would not have gotten any trend!

The accusations of IPCC scientists involving themselves in illegitimate data adjustments, cherrypicking and deception are coming thick and fast. It's high time that the mainstream media started to involve themselves in this scandal.

Still more cackhanded greenery

The greens have got it wrong again!

Kevin Vranes, writing on the Nature Climate Feedback blog recounts the sad tale of some more perverse results of the Kyoto Protocol. It's like this. Rich countries that can't meet their Kyoto obligations pay poor countries to reduce their emissions instead. While this might be doneby means of something obvious like building biomass incinerators or windfarms, one outlet that has proved very lucrative for the third world has been the burning of a chemical called HFC-23.

Now, HFC-23 is the by-product of the manufacture of a refrigerant with the equally romantic moniker of HCFC-22. Both of these substances are chlorofluorocarbons and therefore can damage the ozone layer. Despite this their manufacture is still allowed, under a developing country exemption from the Montreal Protocol.  When Kyoto was put in place however, the developing countries discovered that as well as depleting the ozone layer, both chemicals were also greenhouse gases. In particular HFC-23, the by-product, turned out to have a very long lifetime in the atmosphere. Because of this Kyoto was going to reward them, and reward them big-time, for burning it rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. As Vranes puts it:

[P]roducers of HCFC-22 now make more money burning HFC-23 than they do selling HCFC-22. Imagine what being paid handsomely to burn your waste does to your incentive to reduce your waste. If your waste stream costs you to dispose of it, you might try to improve your production to reduce waste and thus save money. And even if you did get paid to burn your waste, it might make financial sense to reduce waste anyway if your efficiency improvements paid more in reduced operating expenses than burning waste generated in income. But neither is the case for HCFC-22 factories. For them a double financial incentive now exists: keep making HCFC-22 in copious amounts at a profit, which will produce HFC-23 as a now-valuable waste product. And since HCFC-22 producers need not even lift a finger to burn their HFC-23 (those funding the CDM project fund the capture and burn device), any incentive for switching away from the ozone-depleting HCFC-22 as a refrigerant is also destroyed.

 The great law of unintended consequences strikes again. Now just explain to me again why Mr Bush was so wicked for not signing Kyoto?

Fewer hurricanes now, lower temperatures to come

Leading expert on hurricanes, Bill Gray, points out that a warmer earth makes it more difficult for hurricanes to form. He is too polite to point out that Al Gore is talking a load of testicles when he says the opposite. I'm not though.

Gray also says that he expects global temperatures to start falling soon. 

Reading the news backwards

It's said by many expert investors that the best way to read a set of annual accounts is backwards. This is because the bits that management don't want you to notice are tucked away right at the end. They hope that by the time you've read the three pages on pension schemes, you'll be fast asleep and will completely miss the contingent liability that's about to swallow the company.

It might well be advisable to read press reports on global warming in the same way. Here's a classic of the kind from the Associated Press on the subject of land loss on the east coast of England:

Climate change spurs coastal defense retreat yells the headline in the Courier News, reporting from Happisburgh in Norfolk. We're all doomed!! seems to be the subplot. There are lots of stories of houses falling into the sea, land no longer being protected because sea levels are going to rise, concerned villagers feeling cheated. It's all because of global warming you see! Cue interviews with European environment official, quote from Stern review and so on. Cause and effect duly insinuated into readers' heads (but no outright declaration of course)...

...and then right at the end the get out:

Happisburgh, on the East Anglia coast, always has been vulnerable, and accounts of houses, lighthouses or farmland collapsing into the sea date back to the early 19th century.

I call this dishonest, but then I'm just a heretic.

Can we trust anything the BBC says?

Certainly not on environmental matters, anyway. I've just heard some idiot reporter on the 10 o'clock news declaring that rising sea levels around Norfolk are causing the land to fall into the sea. This completely flies in the face of the well-understood fact that the east of England is sinking.

Incidentally, I posted the following onto the editor's blog on the BBC website:

It is worth remembering Jeremy Paxman's now legendary quote on the BBC's attitude to the climate change debate.

"People who know a lot more than I do may be right when they claim that [global warming] is the consequence of our own behaviour. I assume that this is why the BBC's coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago"

The BBC is an environmental campaigning organisation. Full stop.

It didn't make it past the moderators, despite the fact that there were only 12 comments (now 18).  This is what a public service broadcaster does, apparently.