A Climate of Scepticism - Part 1

I recently had a piece in Anthony Watt's  Watts Up With That blog.  It attracted a few hundred comments, which was gratifying.  It was written in ordinary language, so used some inexactitudes because I felt that communication was more important, in this case, than precision. Some suggested it should be republished elsewhere - so this is the first part of a long story.

The world has been getting slightly warmer.  Of that there is little doubt.  The measurements by which we know that it is warming are poor.  The figures are not accessible, and keep on changing[i].  Many points at which temperature is measured are badly sited, and bound to give misleading results[ii].  Nevertheless, almost everyone agrees that the world is warmer today than it was 150 years ago.

There are some fairly clear signals of a warmer world.  The Arctic ice is less than it was[iii]. Many glaciers are retreating[iv].  Some glaciers – for instance, those on Kilimanjaro – are shrinking because the long-term precipitation is less than it was 150 years ago, not because it is warmer[v]. Others seem to be shrinking from a warmer climate. There are, however, little data on this[vi].

Where the sceptic differs from many other scientists is in ascribing the warming to human activities – specifically, the burning of fossil fuels and the concomitant rise in the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere.  The hypothesis is that the carbon dioxide traps infra-red radiation that would otherwise escape to space.  This means that some of the energy received from the sun is not lost, and the trapped energy leads to a warming of the globe. 

The physics of how carbon dioxide traps infra-red radiation is well known[vii].  But there are other molecules in the atmosphere that also trap infra-red radiation.  Water vapour is the predominant “greenhouse gas”[viii]. What is not so clear is the extent to which the trapping of energy causes heating.  There are wonderful mathematical models that claim to show how heating occurs.  Unfortunately, all the models suffer from identifiable flaws, a point considered later.

A prime difficulty with the anthropogenic warming thesis is that it is not known how much of the warming is natural and how much might be caused by carbon dioxide.  It is simple to illustrate this. Figure 1 shows the global temperature record as kept by the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia[ix].

Figure 1 Global temperatures, relative to 1950-1990 average

The global temperature dropped from 1850 to 1860; rose until 1880; dropped until 1910; rose until 1945; dropped until 1980; rose until 2000; and has dropped slightly since then.

Figure 2 shows the carbon dioxide record. Careful measurements have been made at Mauna Loa on Hawaii since 1958[x].  The pre-industrial level of CO₂ in the atmosphere is generally accepted to have been about 280ppm[xi]. Figure 2 shows a reasonable extrapolation of the data back to about 280ppm in 1800.

Figure 2 Atmospheric CO2 concentrations, measured and estimated.

It is a reasonable assumption that the measured rise is the result of fossil fuel consumption.  Figure 3 shows annual CO₂ emissions over time[xii].  It only exceeded 5 billion tons per annum in the later 1940’s.  Thereafter it grew rapidly, passing 10 billion tons in 1963, 15 billion in 1971, 20 billion in 1986 and 30 billion in 2006.

Figure 3 Annual CO2 emissions from fossil fuel consumption.

Comparison of Figures 2 and 3 makes it clear that the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is very likely directly related to the emissions from fossil fuels.  However, the low levels of emissions up until about 1945 make it clear that the impact of the fossil fuel combustion prior to 1945 must have been very small if not negligible.  Therefore the changes in global temperatures prior to 1945, shown in Figure 1, were largely natural. The additional carbon dioxide from human activities cannot have played a significant part in the changes prior to 1945.

If most of the temperature changes before 1945 were largely natural, then there is great difficulty in determining how much of the temperature change after 1945 is natural and how much might be driven by increasing carbon dioxide.  This raises the question of what the natural variation in temperature might be.

To answer this question, consider the Vostok ice core record over the past 9000 years[xiii].  The core was sampled every metre of depth, which represented ~20 years of accumulation in the upper layers and ~50 years in the lower levels.  The temperature was estimated from differences in the oxygen isotope ratios.  While a point measurement such as this cannot give a good measure of the average global temperature, it is a reasonable measure of changes in global temperature, and it is primarily temperature changes that are of interest.

The data are shown in Figure 4. There has been a slight cooling over the past 9 millennia, as shown by the least-squares line.  The data were therefore detrended before further analysis – the mean temperature at any one date was added to the reported relative temperature.  The detrended temperatures were what is known as “normally distributed”, i.e. there was nothing abnormal or skewed about them. Then the rate of change between each detrended temperature and the temperature approximately 100±20 years earlier was calculated and expressed as a rate per century.  The results were also normally distributed, with a standard deviation of 0.94^oC per century.

Figure 4. Relative temperatures over the past 9000 years.

Thus there is about a 2:1 chance that the temperature may vary by up to 1^oC per century from natural causes, but only about a 1 in 10 chance that it will vary by more than 1.9^oC naturally. Between 1900 and 2000, it varied by about 0.9^oC, which is therefore within the range of natural variation.

And that, in simple terms, is why there is scepticism about the thesis that carbon dioxide is causing global warming – there is no clear signal of any such warming effect.

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[i] http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc0102.htm Accessed January 2013

[ii]http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/watts-et-al_2012_discussion_paper_webrelease.pdf Accessed January 2013

[iii] http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent_L.png Accessed January 2013

^[iv] Paul, F., Kääb, A. and Haeberli, W. Recent glacier changes in the Alps observed by satellite: Consequences for future monitoring strategies, Global and Planetary Change, Volume 56, Issues 1–2, March 2007, Pages 111-122, ISSN 0921-8181, 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2006.07.007.

(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818106001603) Accessed January 2013

[v] Mölg, T., and D. R. Hardy (2004), Ablation and associated energy balance of a horizontal glacier surface on Kilimanjaro, J. Geophys. Res., 109, D16104, doi:10.1029/2003JD004338.

[vi] UNEP Global glacier changes: facts and figures. World Glacier Monitoring Service, 2008

[vii] http://scienceofdoom.com/roadmap/atmospheric-radiation-and-the-greenhouse-effect/ Accessed January 2013

[viii] http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/gases.html Accessed January 2013

[ix] http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/ Accessed January 2013

[x] http://co2now.org/Current-CO2/CO2-Now/noaa-mauna-loa-co2-data.html Accessed January 2013

[xi] http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2005/s2412.htm Accessed January 2013

[xii] http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/glo.html Accessed January 2013

[xiii] http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/antarctica/vostok/vostok.html Accessed January 2013

Severe weather events

It is one of the great perceived truths of today, that severe weather events are on the increase.

If this were so, one would expect more and more people to be dying as a result of floods, hurricanes, typhoons, lightning, snow and all the rest.  There are, after all, many more people than there used to be, so even if the severity of the weather were not on the increase, one would expect more to lose their lives.  Add more people to a hypothetical greater severity, and you would expect many more fatalities - right?

Wrong! Very wrong.  Not only has the risk of being killed fallen, but the absolute numbers dying from extreme events has also fallen:

Source

The average dying each year from extreme weather has fallen from nearly half-a-million a year in the 1920's to about 30 000 a year today.  Extreme events may indeed be getting more frequent, but we engineers have become better at coping with the forces of nature.  So do not be panicked into striving unnecessarily for a low-carbon world - we engineers have already taken the essential precautions!

Something missing!!

The Second Order Draft of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report has now been published (http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/12/13/ar5-second-order-draft-leaked.html). 

There is definitely something missing.  The IPCC is supposed to assess the latest peer-reviewed literature and provide a reasoned and balanced review of any differences of opinion.  In the Fourth Assessment, they made much of a prediction that the temperature in the upper troposphere (around 10-12km above the surface) would rise faster than the surface.  Indeed, their models suggested the upper troposphere between about 30 deg N and 30 deg S could warm as  much as 0.6 deg C per decade.  

However, we have been flying weather balloons with thermometers into this region for over 60 years. The measurements show no such warming.  The temperature can also be inferred from some satellite records, extending about 30 years back. These inferred measurements show slight warming, but nothing like 0.6 deg C per decade (and there is also quite a debate about the reliability of the models used to infer temperatures from satellite data).

So all the experimental evidence is against the IPCC's models.  This is particularly surprising, because the physical reasons for a more rapid warming seem sound. 

I would have expected the IPCC to consider this problem in depth.  There are recent publications drawing attention to the problem. For instance, Singer, S Fred, (2011). "Lack of Consistency Between Modeled and Observed Temperature Trends," Energy & Environment, 22, 375-406 stressed the fact that "The US Climate Change Science Program [CCSP, 2006] reported, and Douglass et al. [2007] and NIPCC [2008] confirmed, a 'potentially serious inconsistency' between modeled and observed trends in tropical surface and tropospheric temperatures." He noted further that "Santer's key graph --- misleadingly suggests an overlap between observations and modeled trends. His 'new observational estimates' conflict with satellite data. His modeled trends are an artifact, merely reflecting chaotic and structural model uncertainties that had been overlooked. Thus the conclusion of 'consistency' is not supportable and accordingly does not validate model-derived projections of dangerous anthropogenic global warming." 

Similarly Douglass, D. H., Christy, J. R., Pearson, B. D. and Singer, S. F. (2008), "A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions". Int. J. Climatol., 28: 1693–1701 noted "Model results and observed temperature trends are in disagreement in most of the tropical troposphere, being separated by more than twice the uncertainty of the model mean." 

Neither of these critical references are quoted in the Second Order Draft.  Section 2.4.4.2 starting on page 36 of the Draft considers 'Intercomparisons of Various Long-Term Radiosonde and MSU Products.' It concludes that "the differences among the data sets, all of which are uncertain, means there can only be low confidence in the details of the upper air temperature trends."  In other words, because there are differences in the data, the discrepancy with the model predictions can be ignored.

This is not science as I know it.  The models represent a theory.  In my science, observations in conflict with the model show that the model is wrong and must be abandoned.  Here, the observations are being questioned and the model is assumed to be right.  

In a nutshell, at its present stage of development, the Second Order Draft is not to be trusted.  The politicians of this world seem far wiser than normal, in refusing to believe the IPCC's so-called "scientific assessment." These COP bun-fights, such as that just concluded in Doha, are clearly going nowhere while the advisers to the process (namely the IPCC) miss the absolute need to provide unbiased assessments.

Dohaha

So the gathering of climate politicians in Doha, also known as COP19, has come to an end with a whimper. Some will cheer the renewal of the Kyoto Protocol, hoping no-one will notice that less than a quarter of all nations have signed up.  It means some bureaucrats will remain employed for a few more years - which is probably a good thing, because otherwise they would have to return to their native land where, no doubt, they would regurgitate all the nonsense about global warming that has been keeping them employed since 1992.

But probably the greatest win will be the demise of a number of NGO's.   They have been an enormous force in the global warming debate.  They achieved their power by a form of blackmail.  Companies confessing to emitting carbon dioxide found it was cheaper to pay the NGO's than to make large cuts in their emissions.  Small cuts, by improving their efficiency for example, brought them some relief from the blackmail and actually improved the bottom line slightly.  But, of course, the NGO's kept asking for ever larger cuts, so the blackmail increased.  It was disguised as "social payments", which reduced the company's bottom line but looked good in the annual report. Overall the shareholders were impoverished but the NGO's got richer and richer.

The net result, however, was that the only people who could afford to go to meetings like the gathering in Doha were the NGO's.  I saw this in Durban two years ago. There were a few businesses, but they were relegated to 'side events'.  Municipalities gathered round the fringe, countries had stalls close to the heat of action, and the NGO's were there in the thick of things, usually as official delegates.

Not surprisingly, the real decision makers have become fed up with this charade.  They jet in for the last few days of such meetings, almost expected to rubber stamp the NGO's decisions reached in dark rooms.  They refuse to play ball; the meeting breaks up acrimoniously and late, and achieves nothing, zilch, nada. This has been the pattern of the last four meetings, and the only result has been ever shriller cries from the NGO's.  A few wimpish countries have made hand-waving promises, which has partly mollified the shrill, but achieving a lower carbon world is far removed.

The US has been mercifully sane in much of this.  It refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.  It stuck to business-as-usual.  And guess what - it has achieved what Western Europe and Australia, with all their carbon taxes and Clean Development Mechanisms and carbon trading and you-know-what have failed to do.  It has reduced its emissions to below 1992 levels by the simple application of appropriate technology.  As a result, it now has some of the cheapest energy in the world, and Western Europe is screaming that it can no longer compete on world markets.

So if we tend to laugh at Dohaha, it is with a strong sense of schadenfreude. Lower carbon emissions are not achievable.  Development has trumped ecological scaremongering.  Breathe deeply - CO2 is good for you!

 

How green can you be?

Last night I gave a talk to the SA Academy of Engineering on "The opportunities for low-carbon energy technology for power generation." This was to present preliminary findings on some work an international team and I had been doing for the International Council of Academies of Engineering.  Suppose you desired a lower carbon world.  What could be done to keep the lights on and not see the cost of doing so spiral out of control?

We concluded that, by 2050, it was probably technically feasible to double our use of electricity and yet emit a third less carbon than we currently do. It would mean taking about half our coal-fired power plants out of service, and replacing them by hydropower, nuclear power and some renewable energy. 

At question time there were some sensible questions.  Gratifyingly, my bit of kite flying was not completely shot down in flames.  

And then my heart sank.  A student started to spout the usual collection of green beliefs.  It didn't matter that I had carefully analysed the possibilities, that I had presented a wide range of facts which taken in their totality indicated that it should be possible to reduce carbon emissions without running out of either energy or money. 

I didn't realize, he claimed, what a disaster the world was facing; how it was not enough to start talking about 2050, action was needed now if the world was to survive. We were facing increasing climate disasters that might lead to starvation at the very least.  The Government of Australia and the IPCC had spoken! I should have listened. Instead, what I was proposing was too little, too late.

It was question time, so I hoped he would forgive me if I forgave him for not asking a question, but making a series of statements.  However, it meant I should be allowed to ask him a question.  If things were so desperate, why was it that the world's leaders had failed to reach a decision at Copenhagen four years ago; failed again at Cancun a year later; and decided last year in Durban to wait until 2015 before deciding on actions to be followed from 2020 onwards?  Were the world's leaders wrong? He spluttered something about the world's leaders being nothing but a collection of politicians, which seemed to me a lame response.

But still, the incident rankled.  For once, I had tried to make a positive contribution to what some see as the world's greatest problem.  I don't see climate change that way - I think there are far more present dangers, here and now - but I needed to get to grips with the problem, such as it was.  And here was a True Believer, saying in effect that I had failed miserably, and lecturing me and the hundred or so other members of the audience about his beliefs, his fears, his questionable view of the world.

There comes a time when being green seems to mean that you no longer have to listen to any other point of view - shout loudly enough, and the conversation will be one way, your way. Debate promptly dies, and our world is the poorer.

How many more must UNEP kill?

Dr Andrew Wakefield caused widespread alarm when he claimed that his research showed that the childhood vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella could cause autism.  In May 2010, he was banned from practicing medicine in Britain for ethical lapses, including conducting invasive medical procedures on children that they did not need. Part of the cost of Dr. Wakefield’s research was paid by lawyers acting for parents seeking to sue vaccine makers for damages.

His claimed link caused the use of the vaccine in Britain and elsewhere in the world to plummet, a development that has contributed to a sharp rise in childhood diseases in countries where the vaccine was in use. Measles alone killed over 150 000 worldwide in 2008. It took more than a decade and intensive research to prove that the vaccine was indeed safe. There are still parents who refuse to have their children inoculated. Being banned from practice in Britain seems a mild punishment indeed.

But what do you do about an international body that does something very similar? What do you do if it makes wild, unsubstantiated claims, which seem calculated to cause a less-than-expert public to forego real benefits for fear of harm? 

In September 2012, the UN Environment Program [UNEP] released a report “Global Chemicals Report – Towards the sound management of chemicals.” The report itself is not yet available, but the Synthesis Report for Policy Makers can be downloaded from http://www.unep.org/hazardoussubstances/UNEPsWork/Mainstreaming/GlobalChemicalsOutlook/tabid/56356/Default.aspx.  It is, of course, a major question why the synthesis should precede the report itself, but that is not the real problem.

The real problem is that the Synthesis Report makes a lot of serious claims that lack any form of substantiation.  What is one to make of a claim such as “The Global Chemicals Outlook states that of the 5.7 million metric tonnes of pollutants released in North America (United States, Canada and Mexico), close to two million were chemicals that are persistent, able to accumulate in humans and animals and are toxic. The report also deemed toxic a further million tonnes of substances that are linked with or have suspected links with cancer.” 

Guess what gives cancers? Car tyres! Yes, they contain “Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and 1,3-butadiene. Some PAHs are carcinogenic, and 1,3-butadiene is a known human carcinogen.” Indeed, tyres contain carbon black, and that has traces of PAH’s in it; and 1,3-butadiene is used in the manufacture of tyres.  However, during manufacture it is polymerised into polybutadiene. Polybutadiene is harmless and widely used for drinking water piping.

Agricultural chemicals come in for particularly strong condemnation. “Total pesticide expenditures in South Africa rose 59% over the period 1999 to 2009, and are projected to rise another 55% in the period 2009 to 2019.” “World consumption of fertilizers is estimated to grow 2.6% per year in the period 2010 to 2014.” So, if UNEP is to be believed, it is better to feed insects than to feed ourselves, and better to starve than to fertilize our crops.

When you dig a little further, you find, horror of horrors, “Products such as cell phones and laptops are being purchased and used in regions of the world recently thought to be too remote.” Ecopaternalism is rife.

But far rifer are the stories of gloom and disaster. “Despite ubiquitous exposure to chemicals in both developed and developing nations, little is known about the total disease burden attributable to chemicals. In 2011, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that globally, 4.9 million deaths

(8.3% of total) and 86 million Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) (5.7% of total) were attributable to environmental exposure and management of selected chemicals in 2004 for which data were available.” 

Now for the good news – “This figure includes indoor smoke from solid fuel use, outdoor air pollution and second-hand smoke, with 2.0, 1.2 and 0.6 million deaths/year. These are followed by occupational particulates, chemicals involved in acute poisonings, and pesticides involved in self-poisonings, with 375,000, 240,000 and 186,000 deaths/year respectively.” So of the 4.9 million deaths, most had causes other than what most would consider chemicals – smoke, air pollution and suicide.

Driving the message home are graphics straight out of the Greenpeace book of environmental photojournalism:

Nowhere is there any mention of the huge benefits chemicals have brought mankind. We enjoy clean water due to the chemical destruction of a wide range of pathogens – that in itself is worth tens of millions of lives annually.  We feed ourselves, we clothe ourselves, and our homes are warm and dry, thanks to the wonders of modern chemistry.  Yet UNEP would have us believe that all chemicals are bad, evil and to be avoided – particularly if you happen to be a developing nation. Forego the benefits, is the message – you don’t want to suffer as we in the developed world must, do you?

UNEP is the body behind the ban on the use of DDT. The ban may thicken the shells of the eggs of a few seabirds; but it causes the deaths of over one million Africans each year from that preventable disease, malaria.  

How many must UNEP kill before reason sets in and its leaders are charged with crimes against humanity?

There's something rotten in the State - - -

Recently there have been a couple of judicial decisions that have made my flesh creep. 

First, there was a few billion dollars (many billions of Rand) at stake over the award of a tender to administer social benefits to South Africa's poor on behalf of the South African Social Security Agency.

One of the banks, ABSA, had set up a company called AllPay that had successfully developed safe, secure systems for delivering social grants to some 13 million deserving citizens. After a few years, their contract came up for renewal.  Enter a company called Cash Paymaster Services, whose parent is a United States-listed Net1 UEPS.  Voila! It won the contract.

AllPay went to court.  Mr Justice Elias Matojane found that the Agency had:

•  "Irrationally and unfairly" lowered the scores of the losing bidder, AllPay;
• "Irrationally" over­looked the fact that Cash Pay­master Services had failed to follow the bid specifications;
• Not included a supply chain management expert on its bid evaluations committee as it was required to do; and
• "Unlawfully" made no assessment of Cash Paymaster's black economic empowerment partners.

Any sentient person would have concluded that Cash Paymasters should be given the boot.  But no! Mr Justice Matojane ruled that the tender should not be set aside. The contract was signed, expensive infrastructure was being rolled out and that could not be undone without prejudicing Cash Paymaster. Reissuing the tender might interrupt grant payments, which would be unacceptable.

Hang on!  "Without prejudicing Cash Paymaster"? The Agency had prejudiced AllPay, and then some. In my books, justice is balanced, and the question the good judge should have addressed is not whether Cash Paymaster might be prejudiced, but whether AllPAy had been! On his own findings, there is no doubt that there was no hypothetical prejudice, there was real, blatant, out-in-the-open prejudice, and the Agency had a case to answer to AllPay.

 Mr Justice Elias Matojane features again in the matter of Esorfranki. In 2010, the Mopani district municipality awarded a tender for a R217m pipeline contract to the Tlong Rea Trading SMN joint venture.  One of the partners in the joint venture, Tango Consultants CC was only registered two weeks after the tender was first advertised.  None of the parties in the joint venture had a Construction Industries Development Board rating of 9, which was one of the key conditions of the tender.  The CIDB is a statutory body established by Parliament to stimulate sustainable growth, reform and improve the construction sector. The joint venture's bid was also higher than Esorfranki's.

On August 29 this year, Judge Elias Matojane found in favour of Esorfranki, and ruled that the municipality and the joint venture had colluded unlawfully. He found the municipality had been biased; that there had been fraud in the awarding of the tender; and that the awarding of the tender had been unlawful. He declared the tender process had been illegal and invalid and set the process aside. 

However, despite the unequivocal findings, neither the Joint Venture nor the Municipality received any sanction. The Joint Venture was permitted to retain the tender while Esorfranki was to pay its own costs.

Such a result sends the most appalling signals.  Corruption is okay.  Even if you get caught, you won't be rapped over the knuckles - or sanctioned in any other way.  Taxpayers money can be squandered at will. Construction quality is of no concern. Oh, the list goes on and on.  

Ultimately, we rely upon the law to see that wrongs are righted.  When the law fails us, that is the time to get worried, very worried.