In An Inconvenient Truth (pp. 280-281), Al Gore enthused about a Science magazine study by Princeton economists Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala. The study concluded that, “Humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know how to solve the carbon and climate problems for the next half century.” Gore claimed the policies Socolow and Pacala recommend, “all of which are based on already-existing, affordable technologies,” could reduce emissions below 1970s levels.

But Gore could not know the solutions are “affordable,” because the authors did not attempt to estimate costs. The study basically shows that if political leaders can somehow coerce everybody to use less energy and adopt low- or zero-carbon energy technologies regardless of cost, they can significantly reduce emissions by 2054. We needed Princeton professors to tell us that?

If An Inconvenient Truth were a balanced presentation rather than a CGI-embellished lawyer’s brief, Gore would have mentioned that Socolow and Pacala’s (S&P) study was a response to an earlier analysis, also published in Science, by New York University Prof. Martin Hoffert and 17 colleagues.

Hoffert et al. found that all existing energy technologies “have severe deficiencies that limit their ability to stabilize global climate.” They specificially took issue with the UN IPCC’s claim that “known technological options” could stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels at 550 parts per million (ppm) or even 450 ppm over the next 100 years. Noting that world energy demand could triple by 2050, they found that zero-carbon technologies that can produce 100 to 300% of present world power consumption “do not exist operationally or as pilot plants.” Bottom line: “CO2 is a combustion byproduct vital to how civilization is powered; it cannot be regulated away.” They concluded that it is not possible to stabilize atmospheric CO2 concentrations and meet global energy needs “without drastic technological breakthroughs.”

I review this ancient history because Environmental Research Letters just published a study ‘updating’ (i.e. rebutting) the S&P analysis. The lead author is UC Irvine Prof. Steven Davis. One of three other co-authors is Martin Hoffert.

S&P estimated that seven ”stabilization wedges” could limit atmospheric CO2 concentrations to 500 ppm by 2054. The Davis team estimates it will take 19 and possibly 31 wedges to solve the climate ‘problem.’ In other words, the challenge is much more difficult than S&P believed.

But what, you may be wondering, is a “stabilization wedge”?

S&P depicted mankind’s emission trajectory on a graph. They estimated that if emissions could be held constant at 2004 levels, then atmospheric concentrations could be stabilized at 500 ppm in 2054. The area on the graph representing the growing gap between 2004 emissions and the projected increase in emissions over the next 50 years forms a triangle. S&P divide the triangle into seven wedges, each representing 1 gigaton of carbon (1 GtC) emissions in 2054 and 25 GtC in cumulative emissions over 50 years. Mankind could solve the climate ‘problem,’ S&P reasoned, by scaling up seven low- and zero-carbon technologies to the point where each avoids a cumulative 25 GtC by 2054.

Easier said than done! One of S&P’s strategies to achieve a stabilization wedge is to add double the current global nuclear capacity to replace coal-based electricity. However, although once predicted to be “too cheap to meter,” nuclear power is still not viable without subsidies and is not competitive with gas-fired electricity. The environmental movement, moreover, remains staunchly “no nukes,” and is unlikely to rethink its ideology in the post-Fukushima political climate.

Another strategy is to deploy carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology at coal power plants. Despite billions of dollars in government R&D support, no commercial-scale CCS coal power plant has been built. None today could operate without hefty subsidies. If hit with a carbon tax or a CO2 emissions standard, most utilities would find it cheaper to build new natural gas power plants than to build new coal plants with CCS.

A third S&P strategy is to increase wind capacity by 50 times relative to the mid-2000s, for a total of 2 million large windmills. The word boondoggle leaps to mind. If wind energy is such a great buy for consumers, why do 29 states have to mandate it? If it’s truly ’sustainable,’ why did the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) assert that, despite enjoying government-guaranteed markets in more than half the states, the industry would crash unless Congress ponied up another $12.1 billion in special tax breaks?

Another strategy is to increase ethanol production 50 times. Subsequent research indicates that land conversions induced by ethanol production emit more CO2 than the petroleum displaced by ethanol consumption. Besides, even if ethanol were a low-carbon fuel, the scale up proposed – biomass plantations covering “an area equal to about one-sixth of the world’s cropland” – would intensify the already perilous fuel vs. food tradeoff and decimate millions of acres of forest and other wildlife habitat.

In the new study, “Rethinking Wedges,” Davis et al. note that since S&P was published in 2004, ”annual emissions have increased and their growth rate has accelerated, so that more than seven wedges would now be necessary to stabilize emissions.” More importantly, stabilizing emissions at current levels for 50 years would not be enough to limit CO2 concentrations to 500 ppm and, thus, avoid ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference,’ defined by climate negotiators as a warming of 2°C or more.*

So what would “solve the carbon and climate problem,” according to Davis et al.? You guessed it — “sharply reducing CO2 emissions over the next 50 years,” indeed, deploying enough wedges to achieve “near-zero emissions.” They estimate:

Given the current emissions trajectory, eliminating emissions over 50 years would require 19 wedges: 9 to stabilize emissions and an additional 10 to completely phase-out emissions. And if historical, background rates of decarbonization falter, 12 ‘hidden’ wedges will also be necessary, bringing the total to a staggering 31 wedges.

Figure explanation (from Davis et al. 2013): Idealization of future CO2 emissions under the business-as-usual SRES A2 marker scenario. Future emissions are divided into hidden (sometimes called ‘virtual’) wedges (brown) of emissions avoided by expected decreases in the carbon intensity of GDP by ~1% per year, stabilization wedges (green) of emissions avoided through mitigation efforts that hold emissions constant at 9.8 GtC y beginning in 2010, phase-out wedges (purple) of emissions avoided through complete transition of technologies and practices that emit CO2 to the atmosphere to ones that do not, and allowed emissions (blue). Wedges expand linearly from 0 to 1 GtC y from 2010 to 2060. The total avoided emissions per wedge is 25 GtC, such that altogether the hidden, stabilization and phase-out wedges represent 775 GtC of cumulative emissions.

What it means is that you can’t get there from here without fundamental technology breakthroughs — exactly what Hoffert et al. concluded in 2002. Over the next four decades the world will need multiple terawatts (trillions of watts) of new energy. None of the existing zero-carbon energies is up to the challenge:

CCS has not yet been commercially deployed at any centralized power plant; the existing nuclear industry, based on reactor designs more than a half-century old and facing renewed public concerns of safety, is in a period of retrenchment, not expansion; and existing solar, wind, biomass, and energy storage systems are not yet mature enough to provide affordable baseload power at terawatt scale. Each of these technologies must be further developed if they are to be deployed at scale and at costs competitive with fossil energy.

Filling up 31 wedges will require “deploying tens of terawatts of carbon-free energy in the next few decades.” That will entail “a fundamental and disruptive overhaul of the global energy system.” In short, “Current technologies and systems cannot provide the amounts of carbon-free energy needed soon enough or affordably enough to achieve this transformation.”

Davis et al. recommend an “aggressive set of policies” to “support energy technology innovation across all stages of research, development, demonstration, and commercialization.”

But if existing zero-carbon technologies cannot affordably be scaled up to meet current and projected global energy needs, how likely is it that technologies either not yet invented or as yet prohibitively expensive can affordably replace the world’s fossil-fuel infrastructure? And aren’t there significant risks to public health and welfare from policies “aggressive” enough to implement a “disruptive overhaul” of the energy infrastructure that supports the lives and livelihoods of billions of human beings? Rethinking Wedges is a mix of realism and wishful thinking, environmental precaution and regulatory recklessness.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

* Here Davis et al. follow the self-anointed ‘scientific consensus.’ For an alternative assessment of climate sensitivity (how much warming results from a given increase in CO2 concentrations), see Chip Knappenberger’s Lower Climate Sensitivity Estimates: Good News, Another Lower Climate Sensitivity Estimate (with Pat Michaels), and Climate Sensitivity Going Down. For an alternative assessment of climate change impacts, see Indur Goklany’s Trapped Between the Falling Sky and the Rising Seas: The Imagined Terrors of the Impacts of Climate Change.

In a fiery speech yesterday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) ”calls out” “climate deniers.” In the first half of the speech he goes ad hominem, attacking opponents as “front groups” who take payola from “polluters” to “confuse” the public by selling “doubt” as their product.

First a bit of free advice for the good Senator:

Your team has been playing nasty from day one. It didn’t get you cap-and-trade, it didn’t get you Senate ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, and it’s not going to get you a carbon tax.  

Vilification doesn’t work because biomass, wind turbines, and solar panels are not up to the challenge of powering a modern economy, and most Americans are too practical to believe otherwise.

So by all means, keep talking trash about your opponents. The shriller your rhetoric, the more skeptical the public will become about your bona fides as an honest broker of “the science.”

Okay, let’s examine Sen. Whitehouse’s argument. He accuses skeptics of peddling “straw man arguments,” such as that “the earth’s climate always changes; it’s been warmer in the past.” Well, it does, and it has! Many studies indicate the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was warmer than the current warm period (CWP). A study published in July in Nature Climate Change concludes the Roman Warm Period (RWP) was warmer than both the MWP and CWP. The Northern Hemisphere was substantially warmer than the present for thousands of years during the Holocene Climate Optimum (~5,000-9,000 years ago). Arctic summer air temperatures were 4-5°C above present temperatures for millennia during the previous interglacial period.

None of this is evidence man-made global warming is not occurring, but Sen. Whitehouse sets up his own straw man by making that the main issue in dispute. What the paleoclimate information does indicate is that the warmth of the past 50 years is not outside the range of natural variability and is no cause for alarm. The greater-than-present warmth of the Holocene Optimum, RWP, and MWP contributed to improvements in human health and welfare. 

Sen. Whitehouse says skeptics also knock down a straw man when they deny extreme weather events prove the reality of climate change. “No credible source is arguing that extreme weather events are proof of climate change,” he states. Again, it’s Sen. Whitehouse who whacks a man of straw. The problem for skeptics is not that people like Al Gore or the editors of Bloomberg cite Hurricanes Katrina or Sandy as “proof” of global warming, it’s that they blame global warming (hence “polluters”) for Katrina and Sandy. They insinuate or even assert that were it not for climate change, such events would not occur or would be much less deadly. As the Senator does when he says climate change ”loads the dice” in favor of events like Sandy and is “associated with” such events.

I freely grant that heat waves will become more frequent and severe in a warmer world (just as cold spells will become less frequent and milder). However, there is no persuasive evidence global warming caused or contributed significantly to the European heat wave of 2003, the Russian heat wave of 2010, the Texas drought of 2011, or the U.S. midwest drought of 2012. A slew of scientific papers finds no long-term trend in Atlantic hurricane behavior, including a recent study based on 370 years of tropical cyclone data. Similarly, a U.S. Geological Survey study finds no correlation between flood magnitudes and atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in any region of the continental U.S. over the past 85 years.

More importantly, despite long-term increases in both CO2 concentrations and global temperatures since the 1920s, global deaths and death rates related to extreme weather declined by 93% and 98% respectively. The 93% reduction in annual weather-related deaths is particularly noteworthy because global population increased more than 300% since the 1920s.

Although weather-related damages are much bigger today, that is because there’s tons more stuff and lots more people in harm’s way. For example, more people live in just two Florida counties, Dade and Broward, than lived in all 109 coastal counties stretching from Texas to Virginia in the 1930s. When weather-related damages are adjusted (“normalized”) to account for changes in population, wealth, and inflation, there is no long-term trend. So although a “greenhouse signal” may some day emerge from weather-related mortality and economic loss data, at this point global warming’s influence, if any, is undetectable.

Sen. Whitehouse dismisses as a “gimmick” skeptics’ observation that there has been “no warming trend in the last ten years” (actually, the last 16 years).  He contends that the 20 warmest years in the instrumental record have occurred since 1981 ”with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years.” That may be correct, but it is beside the point. A decade and a half of no net warming continues the plodding 0.14°C per decade warming trend of the past 33 years. These data call into question the climate sensitivity assumptions underpinning the big scary warming projections popularized by NASA scientist James Hansen, the UN IPCC, and the UK Government’s Stern Review report.

Sen. Whitehouse says ”deniers tend to ignore facts they can’t explain away.” He continues: “For example, the increasing acidification of the oceans is simple to measure and undeniably, chemically linked to carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. So we hear nothing about ocean acidification from the deniers.” Not so. CO2Science.Org, a leading skeptical Web site, has an extensive (and growing) ocean acidification database. Almost every week the CO2Science folks review another study on the subject. Cato Institute scholars Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger also addressed the issue on their old Web site, World Climate Report. They don’t share Sen. Whitehouse’s alarm about ocean acidification, but they do not ignore it. The Senator should check his facts before casting aspersions.

Sen. Whitehouse quotes NOAA stating that the rate of global sea level rise in the last decade “was nearly double” the 20th century rate. That is debatable. Colorado State University researchers find no warming-related acceleration in sea-level rise in recent decades.

Here’s the big picture. Scary projections of rapid sea-level rise assume rapid increases in ice loss from Greenland. In a study just published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists used satellite gravity data to measure changes in Greenland’s ice mass balance from April 2002 to August 2011. The researchers estimate Greenland is losing almost 200 gigatons of ice per year. It takes 300 gigatons of water to raise sea levels by 1 millimeter, so Greenland is currently contributing about 0.66 mm of sea-level rise per year. At that rate, Greenland will contribute 6.6 centimeters of sea level rise over the 21st century, or less than 3 inches. Apocalypse not.

Sen. Whitehouse concludes by castigating Republicans for inveighing against unchecked entitlement spending and the fiscal burdens it imposes on “our children and grandchildren” while turning a blind eye to the perils climate change inflicts on future generations. But such behavior is not contradictory if the risk of fiscal chaos is both (a) more real and imminent than Al Gore’s “planetary emergency” and (b) more fixable within the policy-relevant future.

Here are two facts Sen. Whitehouse should contemplate. First, even if the U.S. were to stop emitting all CO2 tomorrow, the impact on global temperatures would be a reduction of “approximately 0.08°C by the year 2050 and 0.17°C by the year 2100 — amounts that are, for all intents and purposes, negligible,” notes Chip Knappenberger, whose calculations are based on IPCC climate sensitivity assumptions. Similarly, a study in Nature Climate Change concludes that aggressive climate change ”mitigation measures, even an abrupt switch to zero emissions, have practically no effect on sea level over the coming 50 years and only a moderate effect on sea level by 2100.”

Whether under a carbon tax, cap-and-trade, or EPA regulation, the U.S. would keep emitting billions of tons of CO2 annually for a long time. So whatever climate policies Sen. Whitehouse thinks Republicans should support would have no discernible impact on climate change risk. The costs of such policies would vastly exceed the benefits. Rejecting policies that are all pain for no gain is exactly what the custodians of America’s economic future are supposed to do.

Carbon tax advocates say Congress should slap a price penalty on fossil fuels to make consumers bear the “social cost of carbon” (SCC) — the damage carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions allegedly inflict on public health and welfare via their presumed impacts on global climate.

What is the SCC? Depends on who you ask. Climate “hot heads” like Al Gore think the SCC is huge. “Lukewarmers” like Patrick Michaels think the SCC is less than the cost of the tax or regulatory burden required to make deep cuts in CO2 emissions. “Flatliners” like Craig Idso think the SCC is negative (i.e. CO2′s net impact is beneficial), because a moderately warmer climate is healthful and CO2 emissions nourish the biosphere.

In February 2010, the EPA and 11 other agencies issued a Technical Support Document (TSD) on the SCC. The TSD’s purpose is to enable federal agencies to incorporate the “social benefit” of CO2 emission reductions into cost-benefit estimates of regulatory actions.

The TSD recommends that agencies, in their regulatory impact analyses, use four SCC estimates, ranging from $5 per ton to $65 per ton in 2010:

For 2010, these estimates are $5, $21, $35, and $65 (in 2007 dollars). The first three estimates are based on the average SCC across models and socio-economic and emissions scenarios at the 5, 3, and 2.5 percent discount rates, respectively. The fourth value is included to represent the higher-than-expected impacts from temperature change further out in the tails of the SCC distribution.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Both the federal and state governments levy taxes on motor fuel. Motor fuel taxes are not called carbon taxes but their economic effect is the same – impose a price penalty on consumption. Moreover, via simple arithmetic any carbon tax can be converted into an equivalent gasoline tax and vice versa.

The point? Americans in every state except Alaska already pay a combined federal and state gasoline tax that is higher than a carbon tax set at $5, $21, or $35 per ton. Americans in five states pay a combined gasoline tax that is higher than a $65 per ton carbon tax. Americans in several other states pay a combined gasoline tax that is nearly as high as a $65 per ton carbon tax.   

Carbon taxes are assessed per metric ton of CO2 emitted. Carbon taxes convert into gas taxes as follows. One gallon of gasoline when combusted yields 8.91 kilograms of CO2. One metric ton = 1,000 kilograms. Therefore, the quantity of CO2 emitted by a gallon of gasoline is 0.891% of a metric ton. If a carbon tax is set at $5, $21, or $35 per metric ton, then the carbon tax for gasoline, reflecting the estimated SCC, is about 4¢, 19¢, or 31¢ per gallon, respectively.

At 18.4¢ per gallon, the federal gasoline tax alone exceeds the TSD’s $5 per ton (4¢ per gallon) SSC estimate and nearly equals the $21 per ton (19¢ per gallon) SCC estimate. The U.S. average combined state and federal gasoline tax is 48.9¢ per gallon, 57% higher than a fuel tax (31¢ per gallon) based on the $35 per ton SCC estimate. See the chart below.

Source: American Petroleum Institute

A carbon tax set at $65 per ton translates into a 58¢ per gallon gasoline tax. Motorists in five states pay more: California (67.7¢ per gallon), New York (67.7¢ per gallon), Hawaii (66.7¢ per gallon), Connecticut (63.4¢ per gallon ), and Illinois (62.8¢ per gallon). Americans in several other states (the other red states in the map) pay a combined gasoline tax that is nearly as high.

Motor vehicles, of course, are not the only source of CO2 emissions in the U.S. economy. The transport sector as a whole accounts for about 29% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Nonetheless, as motor fuel consumers, almost all Americans already pay a de facto carbon tax exceeding three out of four U.S. Government estimates of the social cost of carbon, and tens of millions of Americans pay an effectual carbon tax exceeding the government’s high-end social cost of carbon estimate.

Carbon tax proponents might say the foregoing analysis is not relevant because the purpose of gas taxes is to pay for roads while the purpose carbon taxes is to limit environmental impacts. This criticism is itself irrelevant. Whether the tax on motor fuel is called a carbon tax or a gasoline tax, it has the same effects on consumer behavior and business investment. What the revenues are used for — roads & bridges, green tech R&D, health care, deficit reduction — is a separate issue.

So the next time a warmista says we should pay a carbon tax, cheerfully reply, “Been there, done that, each time I fill up at the pump.”

If you follow global warming news at all, you’ve probably seen the NASA satellite images (above) many times. The images show the extent of Greenland surface ice melt on July 8 (left) and July 12 (right). In just a few days, the area of the ice sheet with surface melting increased from about 40% to 97%, including Summit Station, Greenland’s highest and coldest spot.

NASA took a drubbing from Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger at World Climate Report (“Illiteracy at NASA“) for describing the ice melt as “unprecedented” in the title of the agency’s press release. The word literally means without precedent, and properly refers to events that are unique and never happened before. In reality, as one of NASA’s experts points out in the press release, over the past 10,000 years, such events have occurred about once every 150 years:

“Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time,” says Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist and a member of the research team analyzing the satellite data.

Equating ’rare yet periodic’ with ‘unprecedented’ is incorrect and misleading. “But apparently,” comment Michaels and Knappenberger, “when it comes to hyping anthropogenic global warming (or at least the inference thereto), redefining English words in order to garner more attention is a perfectly acceptable practice.” New York Times blogger Andrew Revkin also chided NASA for an “inaccurate headline” and the associated “hyperventilating coverage,” but for a different reason: NASA provided “fodder for those whose passion or job is largely aimed at spreading doubt about science pointing to consequential greenhouse-driven warming.”

Enough on the spin. Let’s examine the real issues: (1) Did anthropogenic global warming cause the extraordinary increase in surface melting between July 8 and July 12? (2) How worried should we be about Greenland’s potential impact on sea-level rise?

The answer to question (1) is that greenhouse warming does not appear to be the cause. Revkin links to a graph that shows similar melting events at Summit Station not only in 1889 but also in Medieval times, centuries before the advent of SUVs and coal-fired power plants.

NASA, moreover, ascribes the rapid expansion in surface ice melt to a high pressure blocking pattern, the same phenomenon that produced the recent heat wave and drought in the U.S. Midwest. NASA reports:

This extreme melt event coincided with an unusually strong ridge of warm air, or a heat dome, over Greenland. The ridge was one of a series that has dominated Greenland’s weather since the end of May. “Each successive ridge has been stronger than the previous one,” said [Thomas] Mote [a climatologist at the University of Georgia]. This latest heat dome started to move over Greenland on July 8, and then parked itself over the ice sheet about three days later.

There is no known link between such blocking patterns and global climate change. It’s also worth noting that the dramatic surface ice melt began to reverse around July 14th. Greenland did not shift into a new climate regime.

If such events start to occur more frequently than once every 80-250 years, a global warming link would be more credible. As Prof Eric Wolff of the British Antarctic Survey told BBC News: “While this is very unusual, as always we cannot attribute any individual extreme event to climate change: We will have to wait and see if more such events occur in the next few years to understand its significance for both the climate and the health of the ice sheet.”

On to question (2): How much ice is Greenland shedding, and what are the implications for global sea-level rise? A study published in Science magazine in 2006 by Scott Luthcke of NASA and colleagues used satellite gravity measurements to estimate annual net ice loss in Greenland from 2003 to 2005. The researchers estimated that the ice sheet gained 55 gigatons per year from snowfall at higher elevations and lost 155 gigatons per year at lower elevations, yielding a net annual ice loss of 101 gigatons. That translates into an annual loss of 27 cubic miles of ice per year, or 2,700 cubic miles per century. Sounds huge — until you compare it to Greenland’s total ice mass. The Greenland Ice Sheet holds 706,000 cubic miles of ice. So at the 2003-2005 ice loss rate, Greenland will lose less than 4/10th of 1% of its ice mass in the 21st century. Apocalypse not.

Pat Michaels reviews a more recent gravity measurement study (Wu. et al. 2010, published in NatureGeoscience) that estimates ice mass balances in both Greenland and Antarctica from 2002 to 2008. Similar to the Luthcke study, the Wu team finds that Greenland’s net ice loss is 104 gigatons per year. They also estimate that Antarctica is losing 87 gigatons per year. What does it mean for sea-level rise? Pat comments:

It takes about 37.4 gigatons of ice loss to raise the global sea level 0.1 millimeter—four hundredths of an inch. In other words, ice loss from Greenland is currently contributing just over one-fourth of a millimeter of sea level rise per year, or one one-hundreth of an inch.  Antarctica’s contribution is just under one-fourth of a millimeter per year.  So together, these two regions—which contain 99% of all the land ice on earth—are losing ice at a rate which leads to an annual sea level rise of one half of one millimeter per year. This is equivalent to a bit less than 2 hundredths of an inch per year.  If this continues for the next 90 years, the total sea level rise contributed by Greenland and Antarctica by the year 2100 will amount to less than 2 inches.

Couple this with maybe 6-8 inches from the fact that the ocean rises with increasing temperatures, and 2-3 inches from melting of other land-based ice, and you get a sum total of about one foot of additional rise by century’s end.

An additional foot of sea level rise is less than a third the amount (“more than a meter“) forecast by a group of alarmist scientists calling themselves the “Copenhagan Consensus.” It is small potatoes compared to the 18-20 feet of sea-level rise Al Gore warned us about in An Inconvenient Truth. An additional foot of sea level rise is about twice the amount the world has experienced since 1880. There were surely costs associated with sea-level rise in the 20th century, but as a factor affecting public health and welfare it was so trivial most people never noticed. Our wealthier, more mobile, and more technologically advanced children’s children’s children should be able to adapt to 12 inches of sea-level rise and do just fine.

No — or, more precisely, not  yet — conclude R.M. Hirsch and K.R. Ryberg of the U.S. Geological Survey in a recent study published in Hydrological Sciences Journal.

“One of the anticipated hydrological impacts of increases in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere is an increase in the magnitude of floods,” note Hirsch and Ryberg. Righto! Google “global warming” and “flood predictions,” and you’ll find more than 2.7 million sites where this hypothesis is affirmed or at least discussed. The researchers explain:

Greenhouse gases change the energy balance of the atmosphere and lead to atmospheric warming, which increases the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere, which in turn, potentially changes the amount of precipitable water.

Sounds plausible, but all weather is local or regional, and a lot more goes into making weather than average global temperature.  In addition, all flooding is local or regional, and a lot more goes into determining flood risk than local or regional weather patterns.

As Hirsch and Ryberg point out, “human influences associated with large numbers of very small impoundments and changes in land use also could play a role in changing flood magnitude,” and “at time scales on the order of a century it is difficult to make a quantitative assessment of the changes in these factors over time.”

That, however, did not stop good ol’ Al Gore from claiming that global warming is responsible for a decade-by-decade increase in the number of large floods around the world (An Inconvenient Truth, p. 106). Gore’s source was a chart from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (Figure 16.5, p. 448):

The chart does appear to show significant decadal increases in the number of floods. However, what the chart actually measures is the number of “damaging” floods, and whether or not a flood is classified as “damaging” is influenced by socio-economic and even political factors. As the MEA report explains:

Only events that are classified as disasters are reported in this database. (An event is classified as a disaster if it meets at least one of the following criteria: 10 or more people reported killed; 100 or more people reported affected; international assistance was called; or a state of emergency was declared . . .

Obviously, the database is going to be skewed towards more events in later decades simply because of better reporting, more declared states of emergency, and more calls for international assistance. As the MEA report observes, “although the number has been increasing, the actual reporting and recording of floods have also increased since 1940, due to the improvements in telecommunications and improved coverage of global information.”

The MEA report also identifies several non-climatic factors that influence flood damage risk: wetlands loss and deforestation, changes in engineering practices, irrigation, urbanization, and, perhaps most importantly, population growth and economic development in flood plains.

In short, teasing out a greenhouse warming “signal” from flood damages influenced by both natural climate variability and a host of societal factors is a daunting task. Yet Gore treats flood damage data as unambiguous evidence of a warming-ravaged planet.

Okay, let’s get back to the USGS scientists. Hirsch and Ryberg acknowledge they cannot entirely filter out “reservoir storage, urban development, or other human activities in the watersheds” without narrowing their study “almost entirely to very small watersheds, typically in remote and often mountainous areas.” As a reasonable compromise, they examined flood data from “200 streamgauges operated by the US Geological Survey (USGS) in the coterminous USA, of at least 85 years length through water year 2008, from basins with little or no reservoir storage or urban development (less than 150 persons per square kilometre in 2000).”

What did they find? From the paper’s abstract:

In none of the four regions [Northeast, Southeast, Northwest, Southwest] defined in this study is there strong statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing with increasing GMCO2 [global mean carbon dioxide concentration]. One region, the southwest, shows a statistically significant negative relationship between GMOC2 and flood magnitudes.

For further reading, the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change summarizes the results of 21 peer-reviewed studies on flooding and climate variability in North America. The Center concludes:

Taken together, the research described in this Summary suggests that, if anything, North American flooding tends to become both less frequent and less severe when the planet warms, although there have been some exceptions to this general rule.  Hence, although there could also be exceptions to this rule in the case of future warming, on average, we would expect that any further warming of the globe would tend to further reduce both the frequency and severity of flooding in North America, which, of course, is just the opposite of what the world’s climate alarmists continue to claim would occur.

Last month, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (BOEMRE) suspended wildlife biologist Charles Monnett, who is being investigated by the Department of Interior’s (DOI’s) inspector general (IG). Monnett is the lead author of a 2006 study (linking loss of Arctic sea ice to the first documented finding of drowned polar bears.  The paper helped galvanize support for DOI’s listing of the bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Al Gore touted the study in An Inconvenient Truth.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) condemned the IG investigation as a “witch hunt” (Greenwire, Aug. 10, 2011, subscription required). Last week, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and Greenpeace sent a letter to DOI Secretary Ken Salazar accusing BOEMRE of trying to muzzle scientists whose research may impede the granting of permits to drill for oil and gas in the bear’s Arctic habitat.

The transcript of the IG’s February 23, 2011 interrogation of Monnett shows that the IG “sent agents with no scientific training to ask decidedly unscientific questions about bizarre allegations relating to the polar bear paper,” CBD and Greenpeace contend. I can’t help but agree. What’s going on?

DOI officials say the investigation has nothing to do with drilling permits or the scientific integrity of Monnett’s research. As Greenwire reported last week:

BOEMRE spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz in an email said that the investigation has nothing to do with drilling. “There is absolutely no connection between any aspect of our review and approval of Shell’s Exploration Plan and Dr. Charles Monnett,” she said. “As we stated last week, the agency placed Dr. Monnett on administrative leave for reasons having nothing to do with scientific integrity, his 2006 journal article, or issues related to permitting. Any suggestions or speculation to the contrary are wrong.”

According to yesterday’s Greenwire, “a leaked memo to Monnett from the IG referenced possible procurement violations related to an ongoing study at the University of Alberta called Populations and Source of Recruitment in Polar Bears: Movement Ecology in the Beaufort Sea.”

But during the Feb. 23 interrogation, the IG agents do not discuss procurement issues. Rather, they claim to be investigating “allegations of scientific misconduct,” which one agent describes as “basically, uh, wrong numbers, uh miscalculations” (p. 83). Most of the questions relate to the polar bear study — the Monnett team’s observational M.O., their data, and assumptions.

I see no signs of scientific misconduct in Monnett’s study, and the Feb. 23 interview brought none to light. Monnett and his team observed four drowned bears after an abrupt wind storm, three within the “transect” surveyed by their aircraft. Since the transect covers one-nineth (11%) of the total study area (640 square kilometers), the team concluded it is “likely that many other bears also drowned but were not seen.” How many? Well, 9 x 3 = 27.

This is the source of Al Gore’s claim, in An Inconvenient Truth (p. 146), that “A new scientific study shows that, for the first time, polar bears have been drowning in significant numbers.” Gore, naturally, indulges in rhetorical license. ”Shows” suggests empirical proof. Monnett’s team made clear that a “likely” body count of 27 drowned bears depends on the assumption that the transect they surveyed was typical of the larger study area. “Have been drowning” suggests an ongoing process. Monnett’s team observed four drowned bears on one day in September 2004. 

Surely it was inevitable that zealots like Gore would ignore the qualifications and exaggerate the certainity and magnitude of the drowning polar bear problem. Maybe Monnett hoped this would happen. Nonetheless, it is not scientific misconduct to present research that politicians and activists exploit for their own agendas. This was in fact the first recorded observation of drowned polar bears. It coincided with the biggest decline in polar sea ice coverage during the study period (1979-2004). It was worth reporting in a scientific study, and scientists are supposed to draw properly caveated inferences from what they observe.

Could BOEMRE or DOI’s IG be a hotbed of climate change skeptics or a cabal of “drill baby drill” advocates out to punish Monnett for his influential polar bear study? I have no idea. This much is abundantly clear:

• The IG agents’ claim to be investigating “allegations of scientific misconduct” flatly contradicts the DOI spokesperson’s claim that the investigation has “nothing to do with scientific integrity.”
• The IG agents in the Feb. 23 interview bumble and stumble over basic algebra and utterly fail to reveal evidence of scientific misconduct.
• If the transcript is indicative of the larger IG investigation, we may infer that Monnett is “likely” a target of political harassment.
• If that proves to be the case, climate change skeptics, many of whom have been on the receiving end of threats and bullying, should roundly condemn the abuse.

How long will scientists have to measure annual economic damages from hurricanes before they can confidently say that global warming is making storms stronger? In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore claimed the evidence is already clear in the damage trends of the last several decades. But a new study finds that any warming-related increase in hurricane damages won’t be detectable for a century a more.

Last week I blogged about a study (Bouwer, L.M. 2011) debunking a misconception — popularized in Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth — that we know global warming intensifies extreme weather events because economic damages from extreme weather keep going up, decade after decade.

Gore did not realize that the economic loss data he was looking at had not been adjusted (“normalized”) to take into account changes in socio-economic factors — notably population, wealth, and the consumer price index — that massively affect how much damage a particular weather event inflicts.

As discussed in last week’s post, Laurens M. Bouwer of the Institute for Environmental Research in the Netherlands analyzed 22 previous studies attempting to find an anthropogenic warming “signal” in normalized weather-related loss data. Bouwer’s key conclusion:

The studies show no trends in losses, corrected for changes (increases) in population and capital at risk, that could be attributed to anthropogenic climate change. Therefore, it can be concluded that anthropogenic climate change so far has not had a significant impact on losses from natural disasters.

But what about the future? Most IPCC climate models project an increase in the strength of tropical storms and hurricanes as the oceans warm. When will the climate-change contribution to hurricane-related economic losses (assuming there is one) be detectable in normalized loss data?

That is the question Ryan Crompton, Roger Pielke, Jr., and K. John McAneney explore in a recent study. The short answer is that nobody reading this post today will likely be around when (if) the warming signal emerges!

The researchers set out to determine “the time it would take for anthropogenic signals to emerge in a time series of normalized US tropical cyclone losses.” That is, they seek to determine the anthropogenic signal’s “emergence timescale.” By “cyclone,” the authors include all Atlantic tropical storms (up through category 5 hurricanes) with maximum sustained wind speeds of at least 63 kph.

To project changes in hurricane behavior over time, the authors used the IPCC’s 18-model ensemble plus other projections from four of the ensemble’s leading models (Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Japanese Meteorological Research Institute, Max Planck Institute, and Hadley Centre UK Meteorological Office).

Here’s what they found:

The emergence timescale of these anthropogenic climate change signals in normalized losses was found to be between 120 and 550 years. The 18-model-based ensemble signal emerges in 260 years.

The researches thus ”urge extreme caution in attributing short-term trends (i.e. over many decades and longer) in US tropical cyclone losses to anthropogenic climate change,” stating that “anthropogenic climate change signals are unlikely to emerge in US tropical cyclone losses on timescales of less than a century under the projections examined here.”

Note, the study does not mean scientists will not know for 120-550 years whether global warming intensifies hurricanes. As the authors write: “Our result confirms the general agreement that it is far more efficient to seek to detect anthropogenic signals in geophysical data rather than in loss data.” Nonetheless, if the study means what I think it does, it will be a long time before any “short-term” (multi-decadal) trend in hurricane losses can be attributed to global warming rather than to socio-economic factors and/or natural variability.

What is the policy implication? ”Our results argue strongly against using abnormally large losses from individual Atlantic hurricanes or seasons as either evidence of anthropogenic climate change or to justify actions on greenhouse gas emissions. There are far better justifications for action on greenhouse gases.” The authors don’t specify those “better justifications,” which presumably are outside the scope of their paper.

Although not mentioned by the authors, the study should pour cold water on some CO2 tort cases. In Comer v. Murphy Oil, for example, plaintiffs sued a wide range of energy, fossil fuel, and chemical companies for economic damages from Hurricane Katrina, alleging that the companies’ emissions contributed to global warming, which in turn increased the power of the storm.

Armed with the timescale emergence study, defendents in such a case could argue that their contribution to a hurricane’s power is not only undetectable today but will likely remain so for a century or more.

For a more technical review of the timescale emergence study, see “Detecting Footprint of Man in Tropical Cyclone Damage Data” at CO2Science.Org.

Repeat after me: “the media is too balanced on global warming, the media needlessly gives two-sided reports on global warming…..” When ordinary people learn why mainstream media journalists repeat this and where it originates, they will understand how the overall smear of skeptic scientists threatens to turn from the success it is into a failure that can bring the whole so-called global warming crisis to a halt.

What “balance”?! We’ve heard non-stop, one-sided coverage of our certain demise from man-caused global warming for the last decade! In my first American Thinker blog on this in late 2009, I pointed out the sheer lack of skeptic scientists appearing on the PBS NewsHour, while noting instances of this repeated ‘too much balance’ assertion going back to 1995. Eight months later, I was amazed to see a blogger link to a set of graphics supposedly proving skewed media reporting of global warming compared to an ‘overwhelming scientific consensus’, yet when I looked into it, I found immediate problems with the citation about the media researchers, the Boykoff brothers, and what certainly looked like a circular reference between the Boykoffs and the main promoter of the accusation saying skeptic scientists are corrupted by fossil fuel industry money, Ross Gelbspan. In a 2004 paper, the Boykoffs not only cited Gelbspan’s work four times, they also thanked him for his help in their acknowledgments section. I wrote about those problems at a pair of Heartland Institute blogs.

Such problems are incredibly easy to spot. Consider the following:

• A search of the words “balance in the media” turned up one of the most recent repetitions of it at Nature magazine on April 19, 2011, where it says,

Nisbet’s report, Climate Shift: Clear Vision for the Next Decade of Public Debate, published by American University, also analysed another common complaint of climate scientists, that attempts at ‘balance’ in the media gives too much coverage to the small minority of climate-change sceptics.

• The report author, Matthew Nisbet, used quotes from Al Gore’s movie to set up his premises about media balance in Chapter 3 of his study, the first sentence of which contains Ross Gelbspan’s infamous “reposition global warming” accusation phrase:

Gore then goes on to discuss an industry-linked memo that planned to “reposition global warming as a theory rather than fact.”

“There was another study of all the articles in the popular press,” says Gore, referring to a 2004 study by social scientists Max and Jules Boykoff. “Over the last 14 years they looked at a sample of 636. More than half of them said, ‘Well, we are not sure. It could be a problem, may not be a problem.’ So no wonder people are confused.”

Further in the chapter, Nisbet claims he replicated the Boykoffs’ study to determine that the same publications were now properly reporting the issue as settled, noting in footnote 19 how this remains true despite people like me who attempt to point out places where skeptic scientists have an audience:

…blog reading also is highly selective and strongly motivated by ideology and identity. If online users encounter information that is falsely balanced or outright misleading at a conservative blog such as Climate Depot, it likely serves to reinforce already strongly dismissive views on climate change.

Thanks for pointing out how I’m simply an ideologically motivated idiot. Nothing to see here, move along. But, back to the problems.

• Another internet search variation such as “two-sides approach” turns up a George Washington University 2003 Up Front article titled “Deciding Who Should Speak on Campus” (pdf file) by Deborah Tannen (bold emphasis added):

The two-sides approach creates a need to find spokespersons to represent “the other side,” even if it is a widely discredited position. For example, as Ross Gelbspan demonstrated in his book The Heat Is On, there is widespread agreement among experts and ample scientific evidence about the reality of global climate change, yet some Americans still consider this issue “controversial” because any article or program about it includes the same few fringe researchers who question its reality based on dubious research paid for by the fossil fuel industry.

She concludes her article with (bold emphasis added):

All individuals have a right to say what they want, but universities have no obligation to amplify the message of any particular individual by providing a platform and the credibility implied by the invitation to speak. On the contrary, all members of a university community have a responsibility to ensure that the halls of learning do not become an echo chamber for the spread of disinformation in the name of free speech.

• A combined search of her name and “ross gelbspan” results in her October 2004 Christian Science Monitor article lamenting the manner in which ‘voices of true opposition are muted by the din’ of balanced reporting. And she cites proof to back this up:

A single-minded devotion to “balance” also creates the illusion of equivalence where there is none. For example, as shown repeatedly by journalist Ross Gelbspan as well as in a recent article by Maxwell and Jules Boykoff…

• And then we have the Boykoff brothers’ own words in their November/December 2004 article at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (bold emphasis added):

…”balance” may allow skeptics – many of them funded by carbon-based industry interests – to be frequently consulted and quoted in news reports on climate change. Ross Gelbspan, drawing from his 31-year career as a reporter and editor, charges in his books The Heat Is On and Boiling Point that a failed application of the ethical standard of balanced reporting on issues of fact has contributed to inadequate U.S. press coverage of global warming…

• Last but certainly not least, Jules Boykoff told Environment Writer Bill Dawson in a December 2004 phone interview (bold emphasis added):

You’ve got 1,600 to 2,500 scientists …, saying global warming is a serious problem and needs serious actions. On the other side is a small collection of scientists, many of whom are funded by oil and … fossil-fuel interests.

To repeat that ‘the media gives too much equal weight to a minority of fossil fuel-funded skeptics as it does to the consensus of mainstream scientists’ is to repeat a strawman argument of epic proportions. It relies on outright faith that somebody actually quantified who the ‘scientific consensus’ is, that fossil fuel money is irrefutably proven to skew skeptic scientists’ reports, and that the media actually presented those skeptic viewpoints in equal proportion to the other side. And it is nothing more than a regurgitated 1991-era talking point. Ad-libs about Climate Depot, Rush Limbaugh, or Fox News pushing lies, or swipes about people like me being ignorant mind-numbed ideology-driven robots simply invites a two word response: Prove it!

Give “Pulitzer winner” Ross Gelbspan kudos for the 2004 brilliant admonition, and all its prior versions, “For many years, the press accorded the same weight to the “skeptics” as it did to mainstream scientists. This was done in the name of journalistic balance. In fact, it was journalistic laziness.” Can anyone guess how many journalists read those and vowed not to be lazy? Problem is, it goes beyond journalistic laziness into journalistic malfeasance when we see a long-term failure to report how Gelbspan never won a Pulitzer, he wasn’t the first to publicize coal industry memos proving skeptic climate scientists are corrupt, those memos prove nothing when they are read in their complete context…… and it turns out Al Gore received the memos long before Gelbspan, at his Senate office around 1991-92.

Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth bombarded audiences with image after image of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, forest fires, and drought, creating the impression of a world in climate chaos. Gore blamed the alleged upsurge in extreme weather on global warming, that is, mankind’s sins of emission. One of Gore’s mighty pieces of evidence was a dramatic increase in insurance payments for weather-related damages. As he writes in his best-selling book of the same title:

Over the last three decades, insurance companies have seen a 15-fold increase in the amount of money paid to victims of extreme weather. Hurricanes, floods, drought, tornadoes, wildfires and other natural disasters have caused these losses [An Inconvenient Truth, p. 101].

Gore presented a chart similar to this one:

Seeing is believing, right? The problem, of course, is not merely that correlation (warmer weather/bigger losses) does not prove causation. More importantly, the economic data depicted in the chart have not been adjusted (“normalized”) to offset increases in population, wealth, and the consumer price index.

Consider this fact: More people today live in just two Florida counties, Dade and Broward, than lived in all 109 coastal counties from Texas to Virginia in 1930. Florida’s population grew by more than 17.5% in the past decade alone and today is 48% larger than in 1980. There’s tons more stuff in harm’s way than there used to be. No wonder damages are bigger than in the good old days!

Most studies that “normalize” economic loss data find no evidence of a trend towards more violent or destructive weather. Here, for example, is a chart from a study on normalized hurricane damages by Pielke, Jr et al. 2008:

Figure description: U.S. hurricane damages, 1900-2005, if all hurricane strikes had hit the same locations but with year 2005 population, wealth, and consumer price index.

A study published earlier this year in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (Bouwer, L.M. 2011. Have disaster losses increased due to anthropogenic climate change?) examines 22 previous studies on the oft-asserted link between climate change and weather-related damages.

Here’s what the researcher, Laurens M. Bouwer of the Institute for Environmental Studies in the Netherlands, found:

All 22 studies show that increases in exposure and wealth are by far the most important drivers for growing disaster losses. Most studies show that disaster losses have remained constant after normalization, including losses from earthquakes (see Vranes and Pielke 2009). Studies that did find increases after normalization did not fully correct for wealth and population increases, or they identified other sources of exposure increases or vulnerability changes or changing environmental conditions. No study identified changes in extreme weather due to anthropogenic climate change as the main driver for any remaining trend.

Bouwer concludes:

The studies show no trends in losses, corrected for changes (increases) in population and capital at risk, that could be attributed to anthropogenic climate change. Therefore, it can be concluded that anthropogenic climate change so far has not had a significant impact on losses from natural disasters.

CO2Science.Org has an excellent review of the Bouwer study. On a related issue, World Climate Report reviews a recent study finding no long-term increase in the number of Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes over the past 130 years. The apparent increase in storm frequency turns out to be an artifact of the data, that is, a product of the increase in spatial coverage and accuracy of hurricane monitoring systems.

If you’ve been following the global warming debate for any length of time, you know how boringly predictable the “consensus” narrative has become. Global warming is good for bad things — poison ivy, ticks, toxic algae blooms, malaria-carrying mosquitoes – but bad for good things – polar bears, ski resorts, Vermont’s maple sugar industry, and the weather patterns on which agriculture (hence human survival) allegedly depend.

And supposedly, one of the cures for global warming is to “repower” America with zero-carbon energy, especially electricity generated from wind turbines.

But that creates a bit of a conundrum for warmists. If global warming is going to play havoc with the weather, how do we know that the best locations for siting wind farms today will remain optimal (or even marginally productive) in the allegedly topsy turvy greenhouse planet of tomorrow?

Never fear! A new study funded by the National Science Foundation finds that global warming will not significantly change America’s wind patterns over the next 50 years.  From the NSF’s press release:

Rising global temperatures will not significantly affect wind energy production in the United States concludes a new study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.

But warmer temperatures could make wind energy somewhat more plentiful say two Indiana University (IU) Bloomington scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

. . .

They found warmer atmospheric temperatures will do little to reduce the amount of available wind or wind consistency–essentially wind speeds for each hour of the day–in major wind corridors that principally could be used to produce wind energy.

. . .

“The models tested show that current wind patterns across the US are not expected to change significantly over the next 50 years since the predicted climate variability in this time period is still within the historical envelope of climate variability,” said Antoinette WinklerPrins, a Geography and Spatial Sciences Program director at NSF.

“The impact on future wind energy production is positive as current wind patterns are expected to stay as they are. This means that wind energy production can continue to occur in places that are currently being targeted for that production.”

“The greatest consistencies in wind density we found were over the Great Plains, which are already being used to harness wind, and over the Great Lakes, which the U.S. and Canada are looking at right now,” said [Principal Investigator Sara] Pryor.

Such predictions could prove crucial to American policymakers and energy producers, many of whom have pledged to make wind energy 20 percent of America’s total energy production by 2030. Currently only about 2 percent of American energy comes from wind.

So the world is not coming to an end after all – at least not if you are an investor in taxpayer-subsidized, state-mandated wind energy. Global warming will change the monsoon season in southeast Asia. It will cause drought and desertification in Africa. It will flood millions of people out of their homes in Bangladesh. But it will not — repeat not — change U.S. wind patterns. In fact, global warming will have a “positive impact” on the wind patterns “currently being targeted” for wind-energy “production.”

Climate change “threatens the survival of our civilization and the habitability of the Earth,” according to Al Gore. But climate change will not disturb U.S. wind patterns and may even improve them. How convenient for corporate rent seekers and their congressional patrons!

Verily, Gaia is great. She not only whips up hurricanes and tornadoes to punish our sins of emission, she also insulates the wind from our corrupting influence so that green job creators can begin the process of planetary healing.

Okay, if you find that farfetched, try this thought experiment. What would happen if the NSF study concluded that climate change would significantly reduce the efficiency of wind energy production in the Great Plains? Those same rent seekers and their congressional buddies would be up in arms.

And who funds NSF? Congress, of course. Anyone see a pattern here? Bob Dylan said it long ago: “You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows.”