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One of my favorite moments in An Inconvenient Truth (AIT) is when Al Gore blames global warming for a record-breaking downpour in Mumbai, India.

“July 2005, Mumbai, India, received 37 inches of rain in 24 hours—the largest downpour any Indian city has received in one day,” Gore wrote in the book version of the film (p. 110). Clear evidence (in his mind) that the world’s weather was going crazy and fossil fuel emissions were the culprit.

I looked into this back in 2007. Since it is unscientific to attribute any particular weather event to a gradual increase in global average atmospheric temperatures, I reasoned that if global warming were influencing rainfall in Mumbai, we would see it in long-term precipitation records. Through a quick Web search I found that Mumbai had not one but two weather stations, and each had a program allowing site visitors to access and plot historic weather data.

So for each station, I directed the program to plot rainfall in Mumbai for the month of July as far back as data were available (1959). In neither case was there any discernible precipitation trend over the previous 45 years.

Why rehash this ancient history now? [click to continue…]

This post is adapted from a talk I recently gave to CEI’s Summer 2013 interns. I made the following points:

• “Worse than we thought” is a political mantra pretending to be a scientific finding. The state of the climate is better than they told us.
• Recent research indicates climate sensitivity is significantly lower than “consensus” science assumed. Lower sensitivity means less warming and smaller impacts.
• IPCC models project about 50% more warming than actually observed in the tropical atmosphere.
• The scariest parts of the “planetary emergency” narrative – ocean circulation shutdown triggering a new ice age, ice sheet disintegration raising sea levels 20 feet, malaria epidemics in industrialized countries, runaway warming from melting frozen methane deposits – are implausible and not supported by scientific research.
• The only card left in the alarmist deck is extreme weather.
• However, there has been no long term trend in the strength or frequency of hurricanes, tornadoes, U.S. floods or drought.
• The one exception is heat waves, but, paradoxically, the more common hot weather becomes, the more heat-related mortality declines: People adapt!
• There is no long-term trend in “normalized” extreme weather damages (losses adjusted for increases in wealth, population, and consumer price index).
•  Globally, mortality rates and aggregate mortality related to extreme weather have declined by 98% and 93%, respectively, since the 1920s.
• The state of the world keeps improving as CO2 emissions increase.

Since giving the talk, I have tweaked my Power Point presentation in hopes of making it fully referenced and self-explanatory. To view the slide show, click on Climate Change: Be Not Afraid!

DOI Secretary Sally Jewell told employees today that combatting climate change is a “privilege” and “moral imperative,” adding: “I hope there are no climate change deniers in the Department of Interior,” E&E News PM (subscription required) reports.

Such moralizing would be funny were it not for the chilling effect it is bound to have in an agency already mired in group think.

What does she mean by “denier” anyway? Is it literally someone who denies that greenhouse gas emissions have a greenhouse (warming) effect? Or is a “denier” merely someone who thinks climate change is not a “crisis,” or who regards the usual panoply of climate policies — carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, other market-rigging interventions — as a ‘cure’ worse than the alleged disease?

In recent testimony before House Energy and Commerce, University of Alabama in Huntsville climatologist Roy Spencer unhesitatingly included himself among the alleged 97% of scientists who BELIEVE. He explained:

It should also be noted that the fact that I believe at least some of recent warming is human-caused places me in the 97% of researchers recently claimed to support the global warming consensus (actually, it’s 97% of the published papers, Cook et al., 2013). The 97% statement is therefore rather innocuous, since it probably includes all of the global warming “skeptics” I know of who are actively working in the field. Skeptics generally are skeptical of the view that recent warming is all human-caused, and/or that it is of a sufficient magnitude to warrant immediate action given the cost of energy policies to the poor. They do not claim humans have no impact on climate whatsoever.

Would Spencer, who challenges the climate sensitivity assumptions underpinning the global warming scare, be welcome at DOI? Not a chance on Jewell’s watch.

The problem with trying to turn climate activism into a moral imperative is that coercive carbon reduction poses risks of its own to public health, human welfare, and biodiversity.

Globally, poverty remains the leading cause of preventable illness and premature death. Poor countries require affordable energy to fuel their growth out of poverty. For the foreseeable future, that chiefly means carbon-based energy. Is eliminating poverty a moral imperative, Ms. Jewell? If so, then opposing the imposition of carbon caps or taxes on developing countries is a moral imperative.

Even in industrialized nations, carbon taxes, caps, and renewable electricity mandates can destroy jobs and income, and an abundant literature confirms the widespread intuition that poverty and unemployment imperil life and health. Is improving public health and welfare a moral imperative? If so, then opposing domestic carbon suppression policies is a moral imperative. [click to continue…]

In 1977 amendments to the Clean Air Act, the Congress created the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), a body of scientists whose job is to advise EPA on the setting of National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS).

NAAQS is the primary regulatory regime established by the Clean Air Act. The regulation does exactly what its name suggests–it establishes numerical nation-wide ambient air standards for “criteria” pollutants (sulfur dioxide, lead, particulate matter, ozone, nitrogen oxides, and carbon monoxide). There are two types of NAAQS: primary and secondary. Primary NAAQS are set at levels requisite to protect public health, with an adequate margin of safety, while secondary NAAQS are set at levels necessary to protect public welfare.

EPA is required to take CASAC’s advice into account, and, when it publishes any NAAQS, the agency must explain any differences it had with CASAC’s advice. In 2006 and 2008, George W. Bush’s EPA promulgated revised primary NAAQS for particulate matter and ozone, respectively. Both of the regulations were set at levels that were less stringent than the range recommended by CASAC.

In a 2009 ruling, American Farm Bureau Federation v. EPA, the D.C. Circuit Court rejected Bush’s 2006 primary NAAQS for particulate matter. The court reasoned that the agency had inadequately explained its differences with CASAC’s advice.

In a ruling announced last Monday, Mississippi et al. v. EPA, this same court upheld Bush’s 2008 ozone primary NAAQS, despite the fact that it was less stringent than what CASAC had recommended. This time, the court found that EPA had adequately explained the difference.

By the Court’s own admission in the Mississippi et al. v. EPA opinion, there are no clear cut criteria by which EPA’s reasoning is judged. The primary standard seems to be derivative of whether CASAC’s advice is rooted in science versus policy considerations. The former (science considerations) is construed as pertaining to the component of the primary NAAQS that is requisite to protect public health. The latter (policy considerations) is the component of the primary NAAQS that represents an adequate margin of safety. The Court reasoned that EPA’s discretion rises along a decision-making continuum, from “science” to “policy” differences with CASAC. CASAC’s judgment matters more for science–in practice, determining a NAAQS level requisite to protect public health. EPA’s judgement matters more for policy–in practice determining the NAAQS level necessary to achieve an adequate margin of public safety. In this instance, the judges found that CASAC hadn’t explicitly stated which parts of its recommended ozone NAAQS were science-based reasoning, and which parts were policy-based reasoning. In the face of this uncertainty, EPA’s explanation met the low bar by which an agency’s decision is deemed reasonable.

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When it comes to extreme weather, climate activists want to have their cake and eat it. Many acknowledge that it is unscientific to attribute any particular weather event to global warming. But then, in the same breath, they’ll say that this or that drought, flood, or hurricane is “consistent with” the types of weather “scientists” predict will become more frequent in a warming world.

Or they’ll say that such weather is “exactly what global warming looks like.” Or they’ll say that because “all weather events are affected by a warming planet,” the burden of proof is now on skeptics to show that climate change did not cause or contribute to a particular weather-related disaster.

Some activists, though, simply come right out and assert what others insinuate. Plaintiffs in Comer v. Murphy Oil, a case that made it all the way to a federal appeals court, claimed that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from ExxonMobil, American Electric Power, and other U.S. energy and power companies contributed to global warming, which intensified Hurricane Katrina, which in turn wrought death and destruction upon the citizens of New Orleans.

There was a major “anthropogenic” component to the New Orleans disaster — but it was not the emissions. Decade after decade, policymakers failed to improve a levee system “predicted to fail in a major hurricane,” as Cato Institute climatologist Patrick Michaels noted at the time.

Although always a staple of global warming advocacy, climate activists have turned up the rhetorical heat on extreme weather in recent years. The reasons aren’t hard to fathom. The 15-year pause in global warming makes it harder to scare people about warming itself. The two greatest terrors featured in An Inconvenient Truth — rapid ice sheet disintegration leading to catastrophic sea-level rise and ocean circulation shutdown precipitating a new ice age — have no credibility. Nobody takes seriously the prospect of warming-induced malaria epidemics either. If you want to scare people, extreme weather is the only card left in the climate alarm deck.

In addition, a rationally-ignorant public can easily be fooled into confusing climate change risk with plain old climate risk (the nasty surprises Mother Nature generates all on her own). Part of the reason is psychological. Due to their sheer magnitude and terror, natural catastrophes have an almost supernatural aspect. People are naturally inclined to imagine that natural disasters have non-natural causes. Thus, each time disaster strikes, pundits, especially those with scientific credentials, can plausibly blame fossil fuels — just as in earlier ages political or religious authorities blamed “sinners” (i.e., their adversaries) for floods, plagues, crop failures, and the like.

Perhaps the leading debunker of extreme-weather hype on the scene today is University of Colorado Prof. Roger Pielke, Jr., who testified last week before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee at a hearing titled “Climate Change: It’s Happening Now.”

As his testimony notes, Pielke, Jr. is not a climate change skeptic. He affirms, for example, that “Humans influence the climate system in profound ways, including through the emission of carbon dioxide via the combustion of fossil fuels.” However, he regards the oft-asserted linkage between global warming and recent hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and drought as “unsupportable based on research and evidence.” Highlights of his testimony appear below. [click to continue…]

Last week the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) held a hearing titled “Climate Change: It’s Happening Now.” That’s right folks, global warming is not going to strike “The Day After Tomorrow,” as alarmists previously predicted. It’s going to happen “Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow” — today. 

But before you sell the beach house, move to North Dakota, or join a survivalist group, you might want to read the testimonies by University of Colorado Prof. Roger Pielke, Jr., University of Alabama in Huntsville Prof. Roy Spencer, and Institute for Energy Research scholar Robert Murphy.

I’ll discuss Murphy’s testimony today and Pielke, Jr.’s later this week. (I covered the basic argument of Roy Spencer’s testimony in a previous post: Climate Models: “Epic Failure” or “Spot on Consistent” with Observed Warming?)

Murphy challenges the intellectual bona fides of the Obama administration’s May 2013 Technical Support Document (TSD) on the social cost of carbon (SCC). Climate activists increasingly invoke SCC estimates to justify the imposition of carbon taxes, fuel economy mandates, Soviet-style production quota for wind farms, fracking bans, and other interventions to rig the marketplace against reliable, affordable, fossil energy. They speak as if SCC estimates disclose an objective reality like the boiling point of water or the specific gravity of iron. In fact, SCC estimates are assumption-driven hocus-pocus or, as my colleague Myron Ebell prefers to say, “hogwash.”

SCC analysts purport to measure the damage, in monetary terms, that an incremental ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions inflicts on humanity and the biosphere. As discussed previously on this blog, SCC estimates depend on assumptions about highly speculative issues such as climate sensitivity (how feedback mechanisms, positive or negative, will amplify or damp down the direct warming effect of rising greenhouse gas concentrations), climate impacts (how projected warming will affect weather patterns, ice-sheet dynamics, and eco-system services), economic impacts (how projected changes in global temperature, weather, and sea-level rise will affect agriculture, forestry, tourism, and other climate-related activities), and technological change (how adaptive capacities will develop as climate changes).

Each layer of the analysis is fraught with uncertainty and is educated guesswork at best. By adjusting the assumptions, the SCC analyst can get pretty much any result he desires.

Murphy zeroes in on the simplest part of the analysis: Which discount rates federal agencies use to estimate the present value of future projected climate change damages.   [click to continue…]