Marlo Lewis

Despite climategate, the death of cap-and-trade, the 17-year warming pause, the epic failure of climate models, and the growing popularity of skeptic blogs, Hockey Stick inventor Michael Mann still tries to pull rank and tell policymakers what to do because, after all, he and his “colleagues” in the climate alarm movement are “scientists.”

In a recent column inveighing against the Keystone XL pipeline, Mann notes or alludes to his scientific credentials in five places. He remains blithely unaware that scientism — the overreach of experts who try to turn science into a debate-stopping “consensus” and who claim scientific status for partisan and ideological agendas — is off-putting to many Americans and energizes the skeptic movement he despises.

In his recent column in the Guardian, Mann warns that building the Keystone XL pipeline would “greaten the risk of dangerous and potentially irreversible climate changes.” This, we shall see, is nonsense.

After taking obligatory swipes at GOP Senators and the Koch Brothers, Mann scolds Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, because she has difficulty understanding why opponents consider Keystone “such a big deal.”

Sen. Landrieu is right to be perplexed. The KXL controversy is completely artificial, a creature of green politics. As noted previously on this blog, the lifestyles of Al Gore, Bill McKibben, and IPCC scientists like Michael Mann are among the most oil-fueled in the world. If even they need oil, ordinary folks do too. And if oil is an essential commodity, then it should be brought to market by the most efficient and safest means. In the case of Canadian crude, that best delivery option is the Keystone XL pipeline. It’s this simple logic that Keystone bashers either can’t wrap their heads around or refuse to acknowledge. [click to continue…]

A new study by researchers at Brigham Young University finds that the Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s barely makes the top 10 list of the worst droughts of the past 576 years in southern Utah. The study also finds a 17th century wet period that exceeds any period of heavy rainfall in the 20th century and “dwarfs the 1980s wet period that caused significant flooding along the Wasatch Front.”

From the abstract:

We present a 576-year tree-ring-based reconstruction of streamflow for northern Utah’s Weber River that exhibits considerable interannual and decadal-scale variability. While the 20th Century instrumental period includes several extreme individual dry years, it was the century with the fewest such years of the entire reconstruction. Extended droughts were more severe in duration, magnitude, and intensity prior to the instrumental record, including the most protracted drought of the record, which spanned 16 years from 1703 to 1718. Extreme wet years and periods are also a regular feature of the reconstruction. A strong early 17th Century pluvial exceeds the early 20th Century pluvial in magnitude, duration, and intensity, and dwarfs the 1980s wet period that caused significant flooding along the Wasatch Front.

BYU’s press release, which provides more detail, follows. It includes a short video in which lead author Matthew Bekker explains how his team extracts and analyzes tree ring samples to estimate drought conditions prior to modern stream flow records. [click to continue…]

Has global warming made heat waves more lethal in Sweden? That’s the conclusion of a study by Swedish scientist Daniel Oudin Åström and colleagues, published last October in Nature Climate Change (NCC). The researchers examined the association of mortality and extreme temperatures in Stockholm. They found that the number of “heat extremes” increased from 220 in 1900-1920 to 381 in 1980-2009. After adjusting for urban heat-island effects, they conclude that climate change was responsible for 288 out of 689 heat-related deaths in the latter period.

Why mention this now? Last week, NCC published a rebuttal by Chip Knappenberger, Patrick Michaels, and Anthony Watts. The authors also posted commentaries on their respective blogs.

One thing that puzzled me right off the bat is Åström et al.’s definition of “heat extreme”: any two-day period when the temperature exceeds 67.2ºF. To some of us who hail from the Sun Belt, 67°F is still sweater weather.

Knappenberger et al. find two major flaws in the Åström study. First, the Swedish scientists mistakenly assume that all warming not due to urban heat islands must be due to anthropogenic climate change. But Stockholm’s climate is also affected by a natural mode of climate variability called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. The AMO was primarily in its negative (cold) phase during 1900-1929 and primarily in its positive (warm) phase during 1990-2009. The difference between the two phases “is likely to be responsible for some portion of the increase in extreme-heat events identified by Åström et al. and inappropriately attributed to global climate change,” Watts writes.

Second, and more importantly, the Åström team ignores a relevant finding from another Åström et al. study on extreme temperatures and mortality in Stockholm. The key concept here is “relative risk” — an estimate of how much likelier an individual is to die from exposure to a particular risk factor relative to individuals who are not exposed.

In that study, Åström and colleagues found that the relative risk of dying from extreme heat in Stockholm was about 20% in the beginning of the 20th century. But in the NCC study, they estimate that the relative risk of dying from extreme heat in 1980-2009 was 4.6%. In other words, people in Stockholm today are only about one-fourth as likely to die during heat waves than was the case in the early 20th century. [click to continue…]

On Friday last week (April 25), climate economists Richard Tol of Sussex University and Robert Stavins of Harvard University separately posted critiques of the process by which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) drafts, edits, and approves the Summaries for Policy Makers (SPMs) of its huge assessment reports.

Tol caused a stir last month when Reuters reported that, in September 2013, he quit the 70-member team authoring the SPM of Working Group II (Impacts) of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). Tol said he pulled out because, “The drafts became too alarmist.”

According to Reuters (Mar. 27):

Tol said the IPCC emphasized the risks of climate change far more than the opportunities to adapt. A Reuters count shows the final draft has 139 mentions of “risk” and 8 of “opportunity”.

Tol said farmers, for instance, could grow new crops if the climate in their region became hotter, wetter or drier. “They will adapt. Farmers are not stupid,” he said.

He said the report played down possible economic benefits of low levels of warming. Less cold winters may mean fewer deaths among the elderly, and crops may grow better in some regions.

“It is pretty damn obvious that there are positive impacts of climate change, even though we are not always allowed to talk about them,” he said. But he said temperatures were set to rise to levels this century that would be damaging overall.

In an op-ed a few days later (Mar. 31), Tol explained his basic disagreement with the SPM perspective on climate impacts: “The idea that climate change poses an existential threat to humankind is laughable.”

[click to continue…]

Energy In Depth (EID), a project of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, has posted an informative Earth Day Video: U.S. Slashes CO2 Emissions, Thanks to Shale.

The video includes comments from EPA’s Gina McCarthy, the IPCC, the International Energy Agency, and other analysts and policymakers, all of whom credit fracking and shale gas for reducing U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to a 20-year low.

Although eco-activists claim CO2-induced climate change is the greatest environmental peril facing humanity, they have only scorn for EID’s call to celebrate fracking on Earth Day.

The NRDC called the video “beyond offensive,” while the green blog EcoWatch said the video was “appalling.”

NRDC offers no argument, so their reaction is just name-calling. EcoWatch says the “remarks and data” from Gina McCarthy, IPCC, etc. are “out of context.” That’s an argument, sort of, but completely baseless. Watch the video and judge for yourself.

Former President Jimmy Carter and nine other Nobel Peace Prize winners this week called upon President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry to “do the right thing” and “reject” the Keystone XL Pipeline. The Nobel Laureates’ open letter, published in Politico, is worth reading because it epitomizes the intellectual poverty of the anti-Keystone faction.

Asserting that Obama and Kerry’s stand on Keystone XL will “define” their “legacy” on climate change, the Nobels claim that rejection of the pipeline would (1) “have meaningful and significant impacts in reducing carbon pollution,” (2) “pivot our societies away from fossil fuels and towards smarter, safer and cleaner energy,” and (3) “signal a new course for the world’s largest economy.” Wrong on all counts.

As Cato Institute scientist Chip Knappenberger shows, using an EPA climate model, even under the totally unrealistic scenario that all Keystone crude is additional petroleum that would otherwise not be extracted from Canada’s oil sands, running the pipeline at full capacity for 1,000 years would add less than 1/10th of a degree Celsius to global warming. Climatologically, Keystone XL is irrelevant.

The Nobels might reply that the pipeline’s emissions are not the issue. According to them, Keystone XL is the “linchpin for tar sands [oil] expansion,” hence approving the pipeline would commit the world to a “dangerous” development path while rejecting it would move the world towards a new, cleaner path. Okay, time for a restatement of the obvious.

The U.S. economy is in the midst of a revolution in unconventional oil and gas, and the global appetite for oil and gas is growing by leaps and bounds. These trends are determined by basic economic and technological realities, not by a political decision about one infrastructure project. The Nobels’ conceit that Keystone XL is a “pivot” for the global economy and, thus, for the climate system is a reversion to the magical thinking of children.

The Nobels assert that, “The myth that tar sands development is inevitable and will find its way to market by rail if not pipeline is a red herring.” But alternate delivery via rail is not a myth, it’s a massive and growing reality. Maybe before writing to Secy. Kerry, the Nobels should read the State Department’s Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (FSEIS) on Keystone XL, especially Chapter 4: Market Analysis.

As in the 2011 Final EIS and 2013 Draft Supplemental EIS, State again concludes that “the proposed Project is unlikely to significantly affect the rate of extraction in oil sands areas (based on expected oil prices, oil-sands supply costs, transport costs, and supply-demand scenario).” A big difference, though, is that whereas the 2011 and 2013 reports “discussed the transportation of Canadian crude by rail as a future possibility,” the FSEIS “notes that the transportation of Canadian crude by rail is already occurring in substantial volumes.” Indeed, from January 2011 through November 2013, rail transport of Canadian crude to U.S. refineries increased from practically zero barrels per day (bpd) to 180,000 bpd.

The completed Keystone XL Pipeline is estimated to have a capacity to deliver 830,000 bpd of crude oil. According to the FSEIS, rail-loading facilities in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin (WCSB) are already “estimated to have a capacity of approximately 700,000 bpd of crude oil, and by the end of 2014, this will likely increase to more than 1.1 million bpd.”  [click to continue…]