William Yeatman

Canadian emissions outpacing U. S.

by William Yeatman on September 14, 2004

in Politics, Science

 According to Torontos Globe and Mail (Sept. 8), Canadas greenhouse gas emissions have increased at a faster rate than in the United States since 1990.  The figures, agreed by both governments, show that Canadas emissions have grown by 20 percent, while Americas have risen by only 14 percent.  If emissions generated by Canadian energy exports to the U. S. are removed, then the Canadian rise drops to 15 percent.

 Harlan Watson, chief climate negotiator for the U. S. State Department, said the figures showed how difficult emissions reductions are.  He told the Globe and Mail, As we say, actions speak louder than signing pieces of paper.  I don’t want to be harsh on Canada.  We have some of the most self-righteous folks in Europe, of course, and they’re [also] having a great deal of difficulty.  Energy use accounts for something in the order of 80 per cent of the emissions.  Until we get a handle on that, there’s no way to get from here to there, absent an economic collapse.

McCain holds rally for alarmists

by William Yeatman on September 14, 2004

in Politics, Science

 Senator John McCain (R-Az.) on September 15 held another pep rally to build support for his energy rationing legislation, the so-called Climate Stewardship Act (S. 139).  The event was advertised as a hearing before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, which McCain chairs.

 The hearing focused on junk science studies on regional impacts of global warming.  As has become his custom, McCain solicited testimony only from witnesses who support his alarmist views on global warming. 


 According to Greenwire (Sept. 13), Asked about his strategy, McCain said last week he is looking to get a vote, get a vote, get a vote on S. 139.  However, it now looks unlikely that he will be able to get a floor vote during the remainder of the 108th Congress.


 At a briefing held the same day in the Senates Russell Building and sponsored by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, Dr. Richard Alley, the Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Pennsylvania State University, discussed abrupt climate changes and their possible connection to anthropogenic global warming. 


 Although the information he presented suggested that abrupt climate shifts occur much more frequently during ice ages, Alley used an analogy to imply that human activities could cause sudden climate change.  Mankind is rocking the canoethe canoe being the global climate system.  When a canoe is rocked, most of the time it rocks back and forth and eventually steadies itself, but occasionally it flips over and sinks.   Alley said that by increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere we were rocking the canoe and that at some point it might tip over.  This is a new and more sophisticated version of the well-known scientific theory that the global climate is a sleeping beast that mankind is poking with a stick (in the form of greenhouse gas emissions).  It is not clear whether flipping over the canoe will have worse consequences than waking the sleeping beast.

British Tory leader pledges to do more on climate than Blair

by William Yeatman on September 14, 2004

in Kyoto Negotiations, Politics

 On September 13, the day before Prime Minister Blairs speech outlined above, the leader of Britains opposition Conservative Party gave a major speech that accused Blair of not doing enough on global warming.  Michael Howard, M. P., pledged that a future Tory government would do much more to implement policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the United Kingdom and internationally.

 Howard said, The instinct of our prime minister is to lecture people.  But on his watch CO2 emissions have actually risen.  He has set ambitious long-term targets for CO2 emissions reductions, but few people outside government believe that there is a coherent plan for achieving them.


 The Conservative leader also contrasted Blairs failure to persuade the Bush Administration to ratify the Kyoto Protocol with his success in 1992 in persuading President George Bush to attend the Earth Summit and to sign the U. N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.  One of the greatest challenges I faced as Secretary of State for the Environment was to persuade the Americans to participate in the first Earth Summit.  I vividly remember my 24 hours of shuttle diplomacy in Washington before the Rio Summit, ending with me in the White House persuading the Americans not just to attend, but to sign up to the climate change convention, the forerunner of Kyoto.


 Howard then laid out his plans to address global warming if his party were voted into office at the next election.  They include re-asserting [Britains] international leadership, creating a global cap-and-trade emissions scheme, renewing the drive for a diverse renewable energy sector, and re-focusing on increased energy efficiency.  His government would demand that global carbon trading be rigorously policed.  In addition, Howard promised to phase out by 2014 the use of hydrofluorocarbons, which replaced chlorofluorocarbons in refrigeration and air conditioning as a result of the Montreal Protocol.

Blair puts global warming at top of international agenda

by William Yeatman on September 14, 2004

in Kyoto Negotiations, Politics

 In a major speech delivered September 14, British Prime Minister Tony Blair detailed his plans to use the British positions as chair of next years G8 summit and president of the European Union during 2005 to put action to prevent global warming back at the top of the international agenda.

 Mr. Blair began his speech by saying, What is now plain is that the emission of greenhouse gasesis causing global warming at a rate that began as significant, has become alarming, and is simply unsustainable in the long-term.  And by long-term I do not mean centuries ahead.  I mean within the lifetime of my children certainly; and possibly within my own.  And by unsustainable, I do not mean a phenomenon causing problems of adjustment.  I mean a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power, that it alters radically human existence.


 After laying out the evidence for these assertions, Blair said, Even if there are those who still doubt the science in its entirety, surely the balance of risk for action or inaction has changed.  If there were even a 50% chance that the scientific evidence I receive is right, the bias in favor of action would be clear.  But of course it is far more than 50%.


 And in this case, the science is backed up by intuition.  It is not axiomatic that pollution causes damage.  But it is likely.  I am a strong supporter of proceeding through scientific analysis in such issues.  But I also, as I think most people do, have a healthy instinct that if we upset the balance of nature, we are in all probability going to suffer a reaction.  With world growth, and population as it is, this reaction must increase.


 We have been warned.  On most issues we ask children to listen to their parents.  On climate change, it is parents who should listen to their children.  Now is the time to start.


 According to the prime ministers official spokesman, Blairs plan includes three major goals.  First, Blair intends to seek an international agreement on the science and the threat posed by global warming.  Second, he will seek to obtain agreement on a process to identify the science and technology measures necessary to meet the threat.  And third, he will seek the active involvement of major developing nations, particularly China and India, in cutting greenhouse gas emissions.


 The British prime minister also announced plans for a scientific conference preparatory to the G8 meeting: Prior to the G8 meeting itself we propose first to host an international scientific meeting at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter in February.  More than just another scientific conference, this gathering will address the big questions on which we need to pool the answers available from the science:  What level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is self-evidently too much? and What options do we have to avoid such levels?


 Mr. Blair took pains not to personalize the issue as a disagreement with President Bush.  Referring to American concerns over Kyoto, he said, Our efforts to stabilize the climate will need, over time, to become far more ambitious than the Kyoto Protocol.  Kyoto is only the first step, but provides a solid foundation for the next stage of climate diplomacy.  If Russia were to ratify that would bring it into effect.  We know there is disagreement with the U. S. over this issue.  In 1997 the U. S. Senate voted 95-0 in favor of a resolution that stated it would refuse to ratify such a treaty.  I doubt time has shifted the numbers very radically. 


 But the U. S. remains a signatory to the U. N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the U. S. National Academy of Sciences agree that there is a link between human activity, carbon emissions, and atmospheric warming.  Recently the U. S. Energy Secretary and Commercial Secretary jointly issued a report again accepting the potential damage to the planet through global warming.

Global jockeying over global warming

by William Yeatman on September 13, 2004

in Politics

British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s call for America to ratify the Kyoto Protocol this week tacitly acknowledges that Russian ratification, thought by then-Commissioner Wallstrom to have been secured by EU concessions on Russian World Trade Organization membership earlier this year, is no longer a serious prospect.


 


Instead, European eyes are turning once again to the United States.  However, with John Kerry on record as saying the Kyoto protocol is “not the answer” and the U.S. Senate standing by its 1997 refusal by 95-0 to not ratify Kyoto, there appears to be little hope for Blair, Wallstrom, and their colleagues. Even a move by high officials of several American states sympathetic to them has been criticized by their usual allies.

In the meantime, the state attorneys general of California, Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, and Wisconsin, and the counsel for New York City, filed a complaint on July 21 in federal district court in Manhattan, alleging that five leading electric power generators in the United States had created a “public nuisance” by emitting carbon dioxide, thereby contributing to global warming.  All but one of the officers who brought the suit are Democrats.  Key environmental pressure groups criticized the move.

UHIE? UHIE who?

by William Yeatman on September 9, 2004

in Science

Not who but what


UHIE is the acronym for Urban Heat Island Effect.

So what is it?


Very simply, UHIE is the result of buildings and pavement absorbing greater amounts of broad spectrum solar radiation than vegetation does. This makes a difference because the atmosphere does not absorb solar radiation across the spectrum but greenhouse gasses (GHGs such as water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane…) absorb infrared. As buildings and pavement re-radiate absorbed broad spectrum radiation in the infrared band absorbable by GHGs we get an increase in the solar energy available to warm the air in cities and towns. With perpendicular walls increasing collector area, acting as trombe walls (storing and re-radiating energy at night) and excluding cooling breezes and with blacktop paved areas reducing surface albedo (reflection), cities and towns have become highly effective accumulators of solar warmth.

Doesn’t this prove global warming is true?


In a word – no. All it does is remind us of something we’ve known and observed for ages – partially enclosed spaces warm up more in the sun than similar open spaces do.

How significant is UHIE?


It can be very significant. For example, here’s a NASA item on “Hotlanta” stating that urban Atlanta can reach 5 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit (~2.8 to 4.4C) or higher than surrounding rural areas. It’s been quite topical too, “HOT-LANTA EFFECT – Urban heat: Growing season, hardiness affected” – “Heat from cities is lengthening the growing season and allowing for more warm-weather plants” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) – see Urban Heat Islands Make Cities Greener (NASA GSFC release).

The above release suggests that UHIE exerts an influence over an area almost 2.5 times the size of the city and we surmise it’s likely to be similar for towns and villages too. This suggests that (being generous) up to 10% of the Earth’s non-ice land surface may be affected to some extent – perhaps 3% of the total globe surface. Because the atmospheric column is not uniformly affected, merely the near-surface portion over the city and tapering off on the downwind “plume,” significantly less than 3% of the troposphere will exhibit UHIE.

To what extent this effect is mitigated by increased albedo from croplands where more absorptive forest and scrub once grew is difficult to establish but anyone who has stood in the midst of a few thousand acres of ripe wheat on a hot summer’s day can tell you that the albedo is indeed significant.

How global is the near-surface temperature recording coverage?


According to the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis page, not very:

“The Figures below indicate:
(a) the number of stations with record length at least N years as a function of N ,
(b) the number of reporting stations as a function of time,
(c) the percent of hemispheric area located within 1200km (~750miles) of a reporting station.

”

Compared with the near-global coverage of NOAA satellite-mounted MSUs (the “satellite record”), reporting stations on a grid of about 1500miles is not particularly good coverage. Given that so many near-surface stations are located in urban settings and even airports it is unavoidable that the near-surface record is affected by UHIE.

Could UHIE create the illusion of “global warming’?


It is difficult to see how it could not. The late John L. Daly explored this problem in a report to the Greening Earth Society “The Surface Record: Global Mean Temperature and how it is determined at surface level”

Is UHIE the reason for the increasing discrepancy between the MSU record and GISS GISTEMP?


As the above graph indicates, the only time in the last decade that agreement between the records has improved was when the troposphere reacted to the powerful 1997/98 El Nio event. With the MSU record in good agreement with data from radio-sonde balloons and satellite-mounted instruments giving significantly greater global coverage than the GISTEMP near-surface record it seems reasonable to wonder whether most recorded warming is global or merely urban.

Cool summers give global warmers the freeze

by William Yeatman on September 9, 2004

in Science

It’s been a disappointing summer for global warming alarmists.

Hollywood, Mother Nature and the media just haven’t cooperated. Even with the unusual situation of two successive hurricanes pounding Florida and another bearing down imminently, global warming hysteria seems to be on ice for now.


The summer began with so much promise for the climate control crowd with the release of the global warming disaster movie, “The Day After Tomorrow.” While the movie made plenty of money, global warming activists wanted much more than that. They hoped the movie would foment global warming hysteria in the same way that “The China Syndrome” and “Silkwood” contributed to public sentiment against nuclear power plants.


Instead, the movie was so over-the-top with implausible weather phenomena that no one not even the usually global warming-sympathetic media took it seriously. Then, unlike the movie, the real “day after tomorrow” turned out to be pretty nice.


Across the U.S., summer temperatures were cooler than normal. Aberdeen, S.D., experienced its coolest August in 115 years with an average temperature seven degrees below normal (63.4 vs. 70.5).


Michigan officials attribute a dip in visits to state parks and other outdoor attractions to cooler weather.


“The water temperature along the [Lake Michigan] beach usually is in the 60s from Memorial Day to Labor Day, reaching the low 70s during the hottest days of July and August. Except for a few days in early July and again in mid-August, the water temperature never reached 70 this year,” a Michigan official told The Associate Press.


Portland, Maine’s high temperature of 82 degrees in July was the coldest high temperature ever recorded for the month, and the average daily high was four degrees below normal at 74.6 degrees.


An apparent heat wave in Monterey, Calif., this week “is actually fairly typical, it just seems to stand out because we’ve had a particularly cool summer so far,” a National Weather Service spokesperson told the Monterey County Herald.


It’s hard to get people worked up about “global warming” when it’s too cool to get in the pool.


The final indignity of this summer forced upon the global warmers came this week with media reports on Hurricanes Charley, Frances and the coming Ivan. Though stronger, more frequent hurricanes are the sort of severe weather that activists want us to believe are attributable to global warming, meteorologists and the media just aren’t cooperating.


The Miami Herald interviewed National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologist Stanley Goldenberg and reported on Sept. 8: “Research Goldenberg conducted with NOAA scientist Chris Landsea, private expert William Gray and others found distinct patterns of low-activity hurricane periods and high-activity periods, each of which endured for decades. These patterns, unrelated to the current concern over global warming, are caused by regular cycles of oceanic and atmospheric phenomena, such as unusually warm water in hurricane breeding grounds.”


The New York Times reported on Sept. 5: “Global warming is not a significant factor in this year’s storminess, experts said. While some climate models predict that warming might eventually mean somewhat stronger hurricanes, that effect is expected to be very small compared to the natural hurricane cycle.”


The Washington Post began a Sept. 3 article with, “Bad luck, not global warming, is the best explanation for the arrival of two severe hurricanes on the Florida peninsula in three weeks, several experts said yesterday.”


These reports must be particularly bitter pills to swallow for the activists since the Times, Post and Herald don’t typically pass up opportunities to promote the agenda of global warmers. As the summer fades into fall, so too will fade the season for global warming polemics.


Steven Milloy is the publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and the author of “Junk Science Judo: Self-Defense Against Health Scares and Scams” (Cato Institute, 2001).

July was coldest month in four years

by William Yeatman on September 5, 2004

in Science

The global temperature report for July 2004 from the University of Alabama in Huntsville (USA) Earth System Science Center found that July 2004 was the planet’s coolest month in four and a half years and the coolest July in a dozen years.
 
The data show that the global temperature was 0.21C (about 0.38F) below the 20-year average for July.  This followed on from a June temperature about 0.02C below the average.  Only 3 months in the last 41 had been below this norm.
 
Dr. John Christy of UAH said, This was the coolest July since 1992, when global temperatures were cooled by dust thrown into the atmosphere by the Mount Pinatubo volcano.  A color map of temperature anomalies will be available at http://climate.uah.edu/ .
 
Regardless, new studies purportedly supporting alarmist, regional claims in the U.S. and Europe have been based on outputs from two models, including the Hadley Center Model, which reviewers admitted during the course of the National Assessment on Climate Change performed no better than a table of random numbers in predicting past climate.
 
One such study, Emissions pathways, climate change, and impacts on California, published in the August 24 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences garnered considerable press coverage in California and the rest of the nation on August 17.  The Associated Press coverage was typical:
 
Global warming could cause dramatically hotter summers and a depleted snow pack in California, leading to a sharp increase in heat-related deaths and jeopardizing the water supply, according to a study released Monday.
 
Under the most optimistic computer model, periods of extreme heat would quadruple in Los Angeles by the end of the century, killing two to three times more people than in heat waves today; the Sierra Nevada snow pack would decline by 30% to 70%; and alpine forests would shrink 50% to 75%.
 
The most pessimistic model projects five to seven times as many heat-related deaths in Los Angeles, with six to eight times as many heat waves.  Snow pack and high altitude forests would shrink up to 90%.  The scientists’ temperature projections are higher than previous estimates, particularly in summer. Their predictions of an extreme decline in snow pack, alpine forests and the spread of desert areas all exceed earlier projections.
  
In addition to its “random numbers problem”, the model was run on the basis of data from the discredited SRES scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that predict countries such as Zimbabwe, Vanuatu and North Korea overtaking the USA in per capita income by 2100.  There was no discussion of the appropriateness or robustness of these data choices in the published paper.

U.S. landfalling hurricanes – increasing with ‘global warming’?

by William Yeatman on September 3, 2004

in Science

It’s Hurricane Season and the claims are escalating faster than the storms. Already we’ve had Knight Ridder Newspapers claiming “The past nine years, from 1995 through 2003, mark the busiest, most intense nine-year storm period on record” based, apparently, on this Climate Prediction Center graphic. Of course, if you choose your “record” carefully enough you can prove anything – but it is not necessarily instructive to do so.

US_decadal.gif (6847 bytes) The National Hurricane Center provides a somewhat longer perspective online in U.S. Hurricane Strikes by Decade. From that table it is a simple matter to create a pretty graphic. The thumbnail at right links to a stacked column graph of U.S. landfalling hurricanes by Saffir-Simpson Category and decade. Counts are not labeled for category 5 storms, one occurring in each of the 30s, 60s and 90s (with Hurricane Andrew [1992] having been escalated from cat 4 to cat 5 on reanalysis in 2002).

UScount.gif (6531 bytes) On a raw count it appears the 1940s were pretty active while the 1970s were rather quiet. Naturally this doesn’t necessarily mean that the ferocity of these storms are comparable so we need to differentiate by some sort of composite rating.

Ferocity.gif (6654 bytes) A quick check on the numbers of more severe storms (cat 3-5), already tallied for us on the linked NHC page, indicates a similar high/low pattern but it would be nice to have something better than simple raw counts. How about using the storms’ Saffir-Simpson Category as a point system? This will give us an instant weighting system so we can accumulate both the number and severity of storms in any given decade – think of it as a sort of decadal hurricane ferocity score.

Activity.gif (6011 bytes) Perhaps an activity rating would be the more accurate description because the second half of the Twentieth Century does not appear as ferocious as the first.

Granted, this is a very rudimentary analysis but it does suffice to demonstrate the effect of record selection. It is entirely possible, in fact probable, that the Climate Prediction Center has only that length of record with sufficient data to perform their total energy analysis but it does not justify Knight Ridder‘s claim of “busiest, most intense” period on record.

According to The Most Intense Hurricanes in the United States 1900-2000 only 28 of the listed 65 events occurred since 1950. The Deadliest, Costliest, And Most Intense United States Hurricanes From 1900 To 2000 (And Other Frequently Requested Hurricane Facts) indicates that fully half the years when no hurricanes struck mainland U.S. are after 1950 (10 of 19). The most hurricanes to strike in one year were six in 1916 and 1985. There were five in 1933, and four in 1906, 1909, and 1964. Three hurricanes struck the U.S. in one year a total of sixteen times. Ten of these sixteen times occurred during the sixteen years from 1944 to 1959.

It would appear our rough and ready activity rating scheme of allocating and accruing points by Saffir-Simpson Category adequately reflects the relative severity of the hurricane cycle. While not fully represent the energy of the season a total event count obviously gives a rough approximation of the season severity.

The one thing we did not find is any suggestion of increasing hurricane season severity. The most active period within the Twentieth Century record is the 1930s-1960s with something of a lull subsequently. This is not supportive of the hypothesis that the globe is warming catastrophically or that there are more and more severe storms occurring.

International atomic agency regrets lack of progress on Kyoto

by William Yeatman on September 1, 2004

in Kyoto Negotiations, Politics

In a press release assessing the state of nuclear power worldwide, the International Atomic Energy Agency regretted the lack of progress on Kyoto.

The relevant section reads, From the viewpoint of the IAEA, no progress was made in 2003 on the Kyoto Protocol, which would help make nuclear powers avoidance of greenhouse gas emissions valuable to investors.  The next round of talks on energy and sustainable development is scheduled for the 13th session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development in 20062007.
 
A large increase in the supply of energy will be required in coming decades to power economic development, the IAEA recognizes, projecting that to the year 2030 the part nuclear power will play in the global energy supply will first grow and then decrease.
 
The agency estimates a 20 percent increase in global nuclear generation until the end of 2020, followed by a decrease, resulting in global nuclear generation in 2030 that will be only 12 percent higher than in 2002.  Nuclear powers share of global electricity generation is projected at 12 percent in 2030, compared with 16 percent in 2002, the IAEA said.
 
The agency expressed concern that the nuclear expertise that exists today might not be passed on to the next generation of scientists and engineers, now that the rapid nuclear expansion of the 1970s and 1980s has leveled off.

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