The following items appear in the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation Newsletter, August 15, 2007:

For openers, a cardinal explains the connection between religious faith (or unbelief) and public discourse:

Some of the hysteric and extreme claims about global warming are also a symptom of pagan emptiness, of Western fear when confronted by the immense and basically uncontrollable forces of nature. Belief in a benign God who is master of the universe has a steadying psychological effect, although it is no guarantee of Utopia, no guarantee that the continuing climate and geographic changes will be benign. In the past pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain attempts to placate capricious and cruel gods. Today they demand a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.

--Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, in a speech last year at Naples, Florida

A number of very significant developments have taken place just recently relative to the debate about manmade catastrophic global warming. To put it bluntly, the paradigm is falling apart as piece after piece goes missing. For a general overview, see Cornwall Alliance colleague (and University of Alabama climatologist and senior research scientist) Roy Spencer’s reader-friendly summary here.

Just last week three events occurred that should give Al Gore and other GW activists the chills (but probably won’t because they aren’t listening):

First, the ubiquitous claim that 1998 was the hottest year on record and the 1990s were the hottest decade on record for United States surface temperatures got thoroughly debunked. Instead, it turns out that 1934 is the hottest year and the 1930s were the hottest decade. The ten hottest years since 1880 are now, in descending order, 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939, with three of the top ten in the last decade but four in the 1930s. NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies has quietly--no press release, no public announcement, no explanation offered on the website--changed its posted graph to show the new data. You can see the raw data here, and here’s a plot of it, the blue line showing annual figures, the black a five-year mean, of variations from a longer mean:

The significance of this is not immediately obvious. Certainly it reminds of the tentative nature of all scientific data and of the ease of human error. The mistake in the NASA data should have been obvious because it resulted in a major, sudden jump in the data--something that alerts statisticians to contamination of data. One graph, taken from here, depending on the old data that shows the jump clearly is this:



The correction of the GISS data also indicates that, for US surface temperature since 1880, there is no significant period-long trend. Is this significant only for US surface temperature and insignificant on a global scale? Good question. Probably not. It certainly raises the question whether similar data contamination affects other major regional data sets. It reminds also of the dubious credibility of all surface temperature records granted urban heat island effect, movement of measuring stations, changes of measuring equipment, etc.--problems critics have often raised. More immediately, however, even without such similar errors in other data, it suggests the need to reduce estimates of warming on the global scale. This is because (a) the Southern Hemisphere already showed no significant warming trend, and (b) the US data have always been an important part of the data for the Northern Hemisphere. This entails that the data for the Northern Hemisphere need to be scaled downward proportionally, although DailyTech blogger Michael Asher suggests probably only by about 1-2 percent.

For some good discussions of this, see these links:
1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6.

In a related event, hackers apparently distressed by the revelation of NASA’s errors--a revelation that stemmed from investigations by manmade global warming critic Steve McIntyre--launched a DDOS (Denial of Service) attack on McIntyre’s website knocking it off the Internet. (Its webmaster expects to have the site back up again at a different server with a better firewall soon. Try it from time to time till you get through.) If you can’t refute your opponent’s argument, you can always punch him in the mouth--or knock him off the Internet! (I.e., DDOS is the high-tech equivalent of argumentum ad bacculam, appeal to force. For more of the other side’s appeal to force, item #4, “Hot Head,” among the numbered stories below.)

Second, University of Alabama Senior Research Scientist Roy Spencer (a Cornwall Alliance contributing scientist) and co-authors published an article in Geophysical Research Letters that seriously undermines the credibility of computer climate models. Every model assumes that tropical-region cirrus cloud cover, which has a net warming effect on surface temperatures, increases with increasing surface temperature--making it a positive feedback. But six years’ data from three NASA satellites shows precisely the opposite: that the cirrus cloud cover diminishes instead--making it a negative feedback. Consequence? The models don’t just get the magnitude of the feedback wrong, they get its sign wrong. Rather than magnifying whatever warming takes place, the response of tropical cirrus cloud cover is to reduce it. This both supports the theory by MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen and co-authors that cloud response to warming acts similarly to the eye’s iris, opening to let more heat radiate out to space as temperature rises and closing to hold more heat in as temperature falls, and generally supports the understanding that Earth’s climate is self-regulating and therefore not prone to a “tipping point” or a “runaway greenhouse effect” or “catastrophic warming.” How significant is this finding? Says Spencer, “To give an idea of how strong this enhanced cooling mechanism is, if it was operating on global warming, it would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent. The big question that no one can answer right now is whether this enhanced cooling mechanism applies to global warming.” See abstract of the GRL article here, the full article in PDF, a University of Alabama press release about it here and here. By the way, keep this finding in mind when you consider the recent news headlines about a paper claiming--on the basis of computer climate models, all of which wrongly treat cirrus as a positive feedback--that global warming will ramp up significantly after 2009, as reported here and here.

Spencer has been busy lately. He also published a paper, “Global Warming: What You Haven’t Been Told,” through the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute, available in PDF here.

Third, it was revealed that a paper on which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change heavily relied for its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report’s estimate of surface temperature change was “based on fabricated data.” The paper (Jones P.D., Groisman P.Y., Coughlan M., Plummer N., Wang W.-C., Karl T.R. (1990), “Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land”, Nature, 347: 169-172.) “is one of the main works cited by the IPCC to support its contention that measurement errors arising from urbanization are tiny, and therefore are not a serious problem.” Jones et al., in turn, relied on another paper by one of its own authors (Wang W.-C., Zeng Z., Karl T.R. (1990), “Urban heat islands in China”, Geophysical Research Letters, 17: 2377-2380). The problem at issue is the claim of both papers that they carefully used data only from meteorological stations “with few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times”--important because changes in any of those result in data that cannot properly be compared over time. Those two papers in turn cite as their source a report resulting from a project done jointly by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

But that report explicitly said that station histories were not available for 49 (58 percent) out of the 84 Chinese meteorological stations used. “For those 49 stations, then, the above-quoted statements from the two papers are impossible,” points out Douglas J. Keenan, who goes on to point out serious discontinuities in the remaining 35 stations as well. Keenan concludes: “The essential point here is that the quoted statements from Jones et al. and Wang et al. cannot be true and could not be in error by accident (emphasis added). The statements are fabricated,” adding: “The conclusions are clear. First, there has been a marked lack of integrity in some important work on global warming that is relied upon by the IPCC. Second, the insignificance of urbanization effects on temperature measurements has not been established as reliably as the IPCC assessment report assumes.” Keep this in mind the next time you hear of the IPCC as a peer-reviewed process--and indeed the next time you think peer review ensures accuracy. For the full story on this issue, see:
1; 2 (PDF); 3.

Since early July, four other major developments have occurred that point away from GW alarmism:

Fourth, a new study revealed that severe global warming reduction policies sought by GW activists would cost two to three times the benefits they would achieve. Yale University’s Sterling Professor of Economics William Nordhaus, probably the world’s foremost authority on the economic effects of climate change and climate policy, released the study July 24. The study assumes the reality of manmade warming and the IPCC’s projections of the climate effects of rising greenhouse gases, then projects the economic effects of those climatic changes, and then projects the climate and economic effects of various policies proposed to reduce climate change. Ronald Bailey in Reason Online August 14 summarizes well:

What is the optimal climate change policy-the one that sets future emissions reductions to maximize the economic welfare of humans? Yale University economist William Nordhaus, perhaps the world’s leading expert on the economics of climate change, has just released a new study, The Challenge of Global Warming: Economic Models and Environmental Policy, which estimates the costs of various proposed trajectories for limiting carbon dioxide over the next couple of centuries.

Nordhaus and his colleagues have developed a small but comprehensive model that combines interactions between the economy and climate called DICE-2007, short for Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy. Nordhaus first computes a baseline that assumes that humanity does essentially nothing to limit its output of carbon dioxide. By 2100 CO2 atmospheric concentrations would rise from the pre-industrial level 280 parts per million (ppm), to 380 ppm today, to 685 ppm in 2100. Global average temperature would rise by 2.4 degrees Celsius by 2100. In this baseline scenario, the DICE-2007 model estimates that the present value of climatic damages is $22.6 trillion. DICE-2007 includes damage to major sectors such as agriculture, sea-level rise, health, and non-market damages.

Nordhaus then uses his model to assess the ambitious CO2 reduction proposals made by British economist Nicholas Stern and former Vice President Al Gore. Nordhaus calculates that the Stern and Gore proposals for steep immediate emissions reductions produce very similar cost/benefit results. Nordhaus also evaluates explicit temperature and concentration goals, e.g., limiting average temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above current levels or greenhouse gas concentrations to no more than 1.5-times pre-industrial CO2 atmospheric concentrations.

So what did Nordhaus find? First, the Stern proposal for rapid deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would reduce the future damage from global warming by $13 trillion, but at a cost of $27 trillion dollars. That’s not a good deal. For an even worse deal, the DICE-2007 model estimates that the Gore proposal would reduce climate change damages by $12 trillion, but at a cost of nearly $34 trillion. As Nordhaus notes, both proposals imply carbon taxes rising to around $300 per ton carbon in the next two decades, and to the $600-$800 per ton range by 2050. A $700 carbon tax would increase the price of coal-fired electricity in the U.S. by about 150 percent, and would impose a tax bill of $1.2 trillion on the U.S. economy.

In addition, scenarios which attempt to keep the future average temperature increase below 1.5 degrees Celsius and concentrations below 1.5-times pre-industrial atmospheric concentrations are also not cost-effective. The DICE-2007 model calculates that both would cost more than $27 trillion in abatement costs and provide only about $13 trillion in reduced damages.

The optimal policy? Nordhaus reckons that the optimal policy would impose a carbon tax of $34 per metric ton carbon in 2010, with the tax increases gradually reaching $42 per ton in 2015, $90 per ton in 2050, and $207 per ton of carbon in 2100. A $20 per metric ton carbon tax will raise coal prices by $10 per ton, which is about a 40 percent increase over the current price of $25 per ton. A $10 per ton carbon tax translates into a 4 cent per gallon increase in gasoline. A $300 per ton carbon tax would raise gasoline prices by $1.20 per gallon.

Following this optimal trajectory would cost $2.2 trillion and reduce climate change damage by $5.2 trillion over the next century. “The net present-value global benefit of the optimal policy is $3.4 trillion relative to no controls,” writes Nordhaus. “While this is a large number absolutely, it is a small fraction, about 0.17 percent, of the discounted value of total future income.” Keep in mind that in this optimal scenario climate change damages would still accumulate to $17 trillion (lower than $22.6 trillion in the baseline case), but they are not abated because to do so would cost more than the benefits obtained.

For details on the Nordhaus study, see:
1; 2 PDF.

The study itself (second link) helpfully includes a “Summary for the Concerned Citizen” beginning on p. 10.

Fifth, scientists proposed a whole new theory to explain climate shifts. The gist of it is that, as synchronized chaos theory in mathematics explains, a periodic synchronization of known Earth ocean cycles (Pacific Decadal Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation, El Nino, and North Pacific Oscillation) can explain the major climate shifts observed thus far without reference to any trends in greenhouse gases. For more, see this and Tsonis, et al., “A new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts,” Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 34, L13705, doi:10.1029/2007GL030288, 2007 (PDF).

Sixth, additional studies appeared supporting solar variation as major climate driver:

1 (abstract)
2 (abstract)
3 (abstract)
4 (abstract)

Seventh, additional studies reduced forecasts of sea level rise to around 1.35 mm per year (or 5.4 inches per century).
1; 2.
But in a related story, NASA GW alarmist James Hansen is upset because, ironically, the scientific consensus on sea level is against him.

Strikingly, these seven substantive developments, all undermining claims of manmade catastrophic global warming, occurred almost simultaneously with an attack on critics by Newsweek in a cover story called “The Truth About Denial,” by Sharon Begley, which wrote off the “deniers” as bought and paid for. Forget about the fact that not a single leading scientific critic of manmade catastrophic global warming theory would say simply “Global warming is a hoax,” as they’re represented on the cover. All would instead say that global warming and global cooling are cyclical realities and that human influence on global climate is probably real but also probably minute.


Begley’s paradigmatic piece of yellow journalism unsurprisingly prompted replies by Paul Chesser in The American Spectator, Robert Ferguson, Mark Morano of the office of U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), and Noel Sheppard. Somewhat surprisingly, Investors Business Daily via CNNMoney.com rebuked Begley and Newsweek, pointing out errors and hypocritical bias. But most surprisingly of all, Begley’s piece drew a sharp rebuke from Newsweek contributing editor Robert J. Samuelson, who called it “highly contrived” and “fundamentally misleading”.

[Newsletter is continued in the following post.]