August 2013

Congress is in the middle of its August recess, so it was up to Al Gore to provide a little light relief in Washington this week.  He didn’t disappoint.  The Washington Post’s soft lefty blogger Ezra Klein asked the former Vice President some easy questions last week, and once again Mr. Gore made it clear why he’s seldom let out of his box without adult supervision. He claimed that “in quite a few countries in the world and some parts of the United States we’ve crossed that threshold” where electricity produced by windmills and solar panels is cheaper than from coal.  (Which is, I guess, why President Obama wants to make wind and solar tax subsidies permanent.)

Mr. Gore sees a number of signs and portents that the global warming debate is shifting in favor of the alarmists’ energy-rationing agenda.  For one thing, “The appearance of more extreme and more frequent weather events has had a very profound impact on public opinion in countries throughout the world.”

That may be true, but Mr. Gore doesn’t stop there.  He goes on to claim: “There has been a 100-fold increase in the number of extreme, high-temperature events around the world in the distribution curve.  And people have noticed for themselves — the rain storms are bigger, the droughts are deeper and the fires are more destructive…. Every night on the news, it’s like a nature hike through the book of revelations. Eleven states today are fighting 35 major fires!”

According to Mr. Gore, the “leading scientists” now agree that “every extreme weather event now has a component of global warming in it.”  Furthermore: “The extreme events are more extreme. The hurricane scale used to be 1-5 and now they’re adding a 6. The fingerprint of man-made global warming is all over these storms and extreme weather events.”

Even the Union of Concerned Scientists saw that “adding a 6” to the hurricane scale was making the fantasy a little too specific and thus open to contradiction by a simple fact check.  So UCS’s Gretchen Goldman gently corrected the former Vice President’s little mis-statement, while adding that “the rest of the interview included accurate and important information and it’s unfortunate that this blip made its way in.”

For the record, rather than a “100-fold increase” there has been no upward trend in hurricanes or other extreme weather events. The increased number of catastrophic fires in the West is due almost entirely to criminally negligent federal mismanagement of our National Forests.  See my CEI colleague Marlo Lewis’s recent summary of current climate science to see how very far from reality are Mr. Gore’s claims.

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Earlier today I received an email out of the blue from a Russian journalist inquiring what the impact on the Chinese economy might have been if, at the Kyoto climate conference of Nov.-Dec. 1997, Beijing had agreed to limit China’s greenhouse gas emissions and actually implemented such limits. Here’s the gist of my response:

The average emissions limitation for Annex I (industrial) counties under the Kyoto Protocol is a 5% reduction below 1990 levels during a 2008-2012 commitment period. China’s CO2 emissions in 1990 were about 2.4 billion metric tons per year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). China’s emissions in 2012 were 8.994 billion metric tons – 274% larger. China could not comply with the Kyoto Annex I target without de-industrializing its economy.

What about the impacts of milder versions of the Annex I target such as limiting China’s emissions growth to, say, 15%, 20%, or 25% above 2005 levels (the year Kyoto entered into force)? Even these ‘soft’ Kyoto targets, if actually implemented, would have devastated China’s economy.

A recent report (p. 16) commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy notes that the increase in China’s coal consumption more than tripled from 3.6% per year during 1980-1999 to 12.2% per year during 2000-2012. Oil and gas consumption also increased dramatically. According to the EIA’s country report on China, oil consumption in China increased from about 6.5 million barrels per day in 2005 to 12 million barrels per day in 2012 — an 84% increase; gas consumption increased from 2.0 trillion cubic feet in 2005 to 4.6 trillion cubic feet in 2011 – a 130% increase.

Yes, China in recent years has also made large investments in hydropower, nuclear, and renewables. Nonetheless, as of 2009, fossil fuels accounted for 93% of the country’s energy consumption. China’s economic development is overwhelmingly fossil-fueled.

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A visitor to Anthony Watt’s blog, Watts Up With That, who identifies himself simply as “Craig,” today posted one of the funniest comments I’ve ever seen in a debate where 97% of scientists seem to have no sense of humor. Enjoy!

STUDY: Climate change causing climate models to become less reliable

A groundbreaking new study has shown that climate change is the underlying cause of increasingly frequent and severe climate model failures. Researchers at Pennsylvania State Community College have discovered a critical link between atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration and general circulation model errors.

“Climate change has made it increasingly difficult to predict climate change,” says Dr. Manyard Michael, the lead scientist behind the study. “The current 16 year pause in global warming illustrates just how serious this situation has been; if not for climate change, we now know that we would have been able to accurately predict the current break in warming and clearly show that climate change is actually accelerating faster than forecast – not stopping as climate change is making it appear to those outside of the climate science community.” Dr. Michael also noted that they stumbled on this important finding almost by accident. “We just happened to notice that the higher carbon dioxide concentrations climbed, the more we had to adjust the data to get the results we knew to be right, and the more we adjusted the data, the bigger the error in the models. It’s a very strong positive feedback.” [click to continue…]

“Can climate models explain the recent stagnation in global warming?” That is the title of a new discussion paper by Hans von Storch, Professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg.

Storch stated the problem his paper explores in a recent (June 20, 2013) interview with Der Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: Just since the turn of the millennium, humanity has emitted another 400 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, yet temperatures haven’t risen in nearly 15 years. What can explain this?

STORCH: So far, no one has been able to provide a compelling answer to why climate change seems to be taking a break. We’re facing a puzzle. Recent CO2 emissions have actually risen even more steeply than we feared. As a result, according to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 years. That hasn’t happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) — a value very close to zero. This is a serious scientific problem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will have to confront when it presents its next Assessment Report late next year.

The abstract of Storch’s new paper outlines three possible causes of the divergence between observations and model projections of near-surface global annual mean temperatures:

Of the possible causes of the inconsistency, the underestimation of internal natural climate variability on decadal time scales is a plausible candidate, but the influence of unaccounted external forcing factors or an overestimation of the model sensitivity to elevated greenhouse gas concentrations cannot be ruled out. The first cause would have little impact of the expectations of longer term anthropogenic climate change, but the second and particularly the third would. [click to continue…]