There have been a few news stories out of Durban suggesting that China (the worlds largest CO2 emitter) has turned a corner on carbon emissions and has tentatively agreed to limit them, with Bloomberg running an article titled “China Climate Plan Makes ‘Excited Buzz’ as U.S. Lags: UN Envoy.” What did China actually say?

Ron Bailey, Reason magazine science correspondent reports:

So here’s what China apparently wants the rest of the world to do: (1) agree that China’s greenhouse gas targets can be different from those imposed on rich countries, (2) agree that for the next 9 years rich countries will continue to cut their greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol while China’s continue to grow, (3) agree that no negotiations take place on targets until a scientific review is finished in 2015, and (4) agree that rich countries begin showering poor countries with $100 billion in climate reparations annually. If the rich countries will just do that, China will consent to begin negotiating some kind of “legally binding” treaty after 2020. Frankly, with these preconditions, it seems that China’s current position actually remains pretty much what it has always been: It will accept legally binding limits on its greenhouse gas emissions when Hell freezes over.

China’s best offer is to consider limiting emissions after 2020, still almost a decade away, and only if all the other countries continue to play this game until then. Who can blame them — they are rapidly industrializing and getting wealthier, which requires massive amounts of fossil fuels.

What if future negotiations aren’t successful? China is currently ‘negotiating’ with other countries regarding their annual emissions, it just so happens they are offering zero emissions reductions. Where is the evidence that they will agree to anything sufficient in 2020, when their per capita incomes will still be markedly lower than other developed countries?

The individual (or individuals) who, in November 2009, released 1,000 emails to and from IPCC-affiliated climate scientists, igniting the Climategate scandal, struck again earlier this week. The leaker(s) released an additional 5,000 emails involving the same cast of characters, notably Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, and Michael Mann, creator of the discredited Hockey Stick reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperature history. The blogosphere quickly branded the new trove of emails “Climategate 2.0.”

The timing in each case was not accidental. The Climategate emails made painfully clear that the scientists shaping the huge – and hugely influential – IPCC climate change assessment reports are not impartial experts but agenda-driven activists. Climategate exposed leading U.N.-affiliated scientists as schemers colluding to manipulate public opinion, downplay inconvenient data, bias the peer review process, marginalize skeptical scientists, and flout freedom of information laws. Climategate thus contributed to the failure of the December 2009 Copenhagen climate conference to negotiate a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol. Similarly, Climategate 2.0 arrives shortly before the December 2011 climate conference in Durban — although nobody expects the delegates to agree on a post-Kyoto climate treaty anyway.

Excerpts from Climategate 2.0 emails appear to confirm in spades earlier criticisms of the IPCC climate science establishment arising out of Climategate. My colleague, Myron Ebell, enables us to see this at a glance by sorting the excerpts into categories.

They know the climate models are junk, but say the opposite in the IPCC reports:

<0850> Barnett:

[IPCC AR5 models] clearly, some tuning or very good luck involved.  I doubt the
modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer

<5066> Hegerl:

[IPCC AR5 models]
So using the 20th c for tuning is just doing what some people have long
suspected us of doing [...] and what the nonpublished diagram from NCAR showing
correlation between aerosol forcing and sensitivity also suggested.

<4443> Jones:

Basic problem is that all models are wrong – not got enough middle and low
level clouds.

<1982> Santer:

there is no individual model that does well in all of the SST and water vapor
tests we’ve applied.

Intentional cherry picking of data:

<2775> Jones:

I too don’t see why the schemes should be symmetrical. The temperature ones
certainly will not as we’re choosing the periods to show warming.

<5111> Pollack:

But it will be very difficult to make the MWP go away in Greenland.

<5039> Rahmstorf:

You chose to depict the one based on C14 solar data, which kind of stands out
in Medieval times. It would be much nicer to show the version driven by Be10
solar forcing

<0953> Jones:

This will reduce the 1940-1970 cooling in NH temps. Explaining the cooling with
sulphates won’t be quite as necessary.

<4165> Jones:

what he [Zwiers] has done comes to a different conclusion than Caspar and Gene!
I reckon this can be saved by careful wording.

<3994> Mitchell/MetO

Is the PCA approach robust? Are the results statistically significant? It seems
to me that in the case of MBH the answer in each is no

<4241> Wilson:

I thought I’d play around with some randomly generated time-series and see if I
could ‘reconstruct’ northern hemisphere temperatures.
[...] The reconstructions clearly show a ‘hockey-stick’ trend. I guess this is
precisely the phenomenon that Macintyre has been going on about.

<4758> Osborn:

Because how can we be critical of Crowley for throwing out 40-years in the
middle of his calibration, when we’re throwing out all post-1960 data ‘cos the
MXD has a non-temperature signal in it, and also all pre-1881 or pre-1871 data
‘cos the temperature data may have a non-temperature signal in it!

<0121> Jones:

[on temperature data adjustments] Upshot is that their trend will increase

Cherry picking of authors to get the right spin in the IPCC reports:

<0714> Jones:

Getting people we know and trust [into IPCC] is vital – hence my comment about
the tornadoes group.

<3205> Jones:

Useful ones [for IPCC] might be Baldwin, Benestad (written on the solar/cloud
issue – on the right side, i.e anti-Svensmark), Bohm, Brown, Christy (will be
have to involve him ?)

Subordinating science to a political agenda:

<4716> Adams:

Somehow we have to leave the[m] thinking OK, climate change is extremely
complicated, BUT I accept the dominant view that people are affecting it, and
that impacts produces risk that needs careful and urgent attention.

<1790> Lorenzoni:

I agree with the importance of extreme events as foci for public and
governmental opinion [...] ‘climate change’ needs to be present in people’s
daily lives. They should be reminded that it is a continuously occurring and
evolving phenomenon

<1485> Mann:

the important thing is to make sure they’re loosing the PR battle. That’s what
the site [Real Climate] is about.

<2428> Ashton/co2.org:

Having established scale and urgency, the political challenge is then to turn
this from an argument about the cost of cutting emissions – bad politics – to
one about the value of a stable climate – much better politics. [...] the most
valuable thing to do is to tell the story about abrupt change as vividly as
possible

<3332> Kelly:

the current commitments, even with some strengthening, are little different
from what would have happened without a climate treaty.
[...] the way to pitch the analysis is to argue that precautionary action must be
taken now to protect reserves etc against the inevitable

<3655> Singer/WWF:

we as an NGO working on climate policy need such a document pretty soon for the
public and for informed decision makers in order to get a) a debate started and
b) in order to get into the media the context between climate
extremes/desasters/costs and finally the link between weather extremes and
energy

<5131> Shukla/IGES:

["Future of the IPCC", 2008] It is inconceivable that policymakers will be
willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the
projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and
simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.

Intentional cover-up:

<2733> Crowley:

Phil, thanks for your thoughts – guarantee there will be no dirty laundry in
the open.

<2440> Jones:

I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself
and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the
process

<1577> Jones:

Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we
get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US
Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original
station data.

Candid comments not reflected in public statements:

<4693> Crowley:

I am not convinced that the “truth” is always worth reaching if it is at the
cost of damaged personal relationships

<4141> Minns/Tyndall Centre:

In my experience, global warming freezing is already a bit of a public
relations problem with the media

<1682> Wils:

[2007] What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural
fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably [...]

<3373> Bradley:

I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should
never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year
“reconstruction”.

Predictably, Michael Mann asserts that these excerpts are “taken out of context.” To my knowledge, neither Mann nor his comrades has supplied the context that supposedly puts these comments in a better light. Note too that Mann and all other Climategate malefactors assert that the leaked emails were “hacked” and “stolen.” There is no solid evidence to support this allegation. For all we know, the leaker was an insider — a whistle blower fed up with CRU’s refusal to comply with freedom of information laws. When they decry the “illegal hack” of the CRU server, they speak not as scientists weighing evidence but as partisans pushing spin. Exactly the portrait that emerges from the leaked emails.

Science reporter David Appell, hardly a climate change skeptic, writes that, “Even trying to guess at the context and keeping it in mind, some of these [Climatgate 2.0] excerpts are inexplicable.” In fact, Appell states, ”just reading the README file emails, these sound worse than I thought at first – their impact will be devastating.”

That the leaker opposes the IPCC agenda of climate alarm and energy rationing is obvious — why else release the emails in the run-up to U.N. climate conferences? But it is far from obvious — as IPCC apologists assume — that the leaker is a shill for Big Oil or King Coal. A possible explanation of motive may be infered from the README file’s opening lines:

/// FOIA 2011 — Background and Context ///

“Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day.”

“Every day nearly 16.000 children die from hunger and related causes.”

“One dollar can save a life” — the opposite must also be true.

“Poverty is a death sentence.”

“Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize
greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels.”

I would put it this way. There are risks of climate policy as well as of climate change, and the former may far outweigh the latter. More than one billion people on planet Earth live in energy squalor and struggle to survive without electricity, motor vehicles, and mechanized agriculture. Putting an energy-starved world on an energy diet is neither humane nor enlightened.

Via Steve McIntyre

Doesn’t seem to be a top priority, and I wouldn’t count on it anytime soon. The report released a month or so ago touting Renewable Energy: “Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation” intended to show that the world could easily meet 80% of its energy needs with renewable by 2050. It was widely discussed on a number of blogs and reported in news media.

It turns out that the lead author of the report was an employee of Greenpeace, and relied heavily upon a joint Greenpeace/European Renewable Energy Council report — not exactly unbiased peer reviewed material:

Here’s what happened. The 80% by 2050 figure was based on a scenario, so Chapter 10 of the full report reveals, called ER-2010, which does indeed project renewables supplying 77% of the globe’s primary energy by 2050. The lead author of the ER-2010 scenario, however, is a Sven Teske, who should have been identified (but is not) as a climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace International. Even worse, Teske is a lead author of the IPCC report also – in effect meaning that this campaigner for Greenpeace was not only embedded in the IPCC itself, but was in effect allowed to review and promote his own campaigning work under the cover of the authoritative and trustworthy IPCC. A more scandalous conflict of interest can scarcely be imagined.

The ER-2010 study would count for me as ‘grey literature’, despite being published in a minor journal called Energy Efficiency (link to PDF here). This is because it was initially written as a propaganda report by Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council – the latter are are of course enthusiasts for renewable energy’s prospects because they make money from selling wind turbines and solar panels, so hardly count as an unbiased source. It is sadly ironic that the original ‘Himalayagate’ IPCC error was the result of an uncritical reliance on exactly this kind of campaigning ‘grey literature’. Then, however, the mistake was deeply buried in the report. This time, it was used to headline the entire thing – and the source was not obvious to media at the time because the full report was not even released. So the ’80% by 2050′ headlines were repeated far and wide with no-one realising their original true source.

Talk about not learning lessons.

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.

Paul Krugman, never one to mince words when writing about Republicans,  looks desperately for common ground on two unrelated issues in his latest column. As a result of a blog post (among other pieces) written by a Professor William Cronon of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin State Republican Party has requested copies of all communication that Cronon has made using his University e-mail related to the recent union struggle in Wisconsin.

They seem to be legally entitled to this information under a state law similar to the Freedom of Information Act. It’s not clear that Cronon’s e-mails could be construed as anything other than embarassing, as he isn’t directly involved in preparing policy summaries that have enormous political implications.

Regardless of how you feel about this specific issue, Krugman errs when he tries to relate this to Climategate, insinuating that they are at all similar:

The demand for Mr. Cronon’s correspondence has obvious parallels with the ongoing smear campaign against climate science and climate scientists, which has lately relied heavily on supposedly damaging quotations found in e-mail records.

Back in 2009 climate skeptics got hold of more than a thousand e-mails between researchers at the Climate Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia. Nothing in the correspondence suggested any kind of scientific impropriety; at most, we learned — I know this will shock you — that scientists are human beings, who occasionally say snide things about people they dislike.

…

After all, if you go through a large number of messages looking for lines that can be made to sound bad, you’re bound to find a few. In fact, it’s surprising how few such lines the critics managed to find in the “Climategate” trove: much of the smear has focused on just one e-mail, in which a researcher talks about using a “trick” to “hide the decline” in a particular series. In context, it’s clear that he’s talking about making an effective graphical presentation, not about suppressing evidence. But the right wants a scandal, and won’t take no for an answer.

You may feel that the Climategate e-mails don’t change the larger 30,000 foot view of climate science, but insisting that no wrong-doings occurred is inaccurate.

Here is an excellent 5 minute explanation of Climategate by Richard Muller, a UC Berkley physicist who is leading a larger project attempting to reconstruct temperature records. Muller believes that global warming is a potentially big problem. So this is someone who mostly supports the IPCC, yet refuses to compromise his ethics on what appeared in those e-mails.

Muller holds no punches for those involved in the Climategate e-mails. The whole presentation is worth watching, he takes a number of swipes at Al Gore and the IPCC, but if you’re in a hurry the explanation of Climategate only lasts 5 minutes (begins at 29m50s). A takeaway quote, “Quite frankly, as a scientist, I know have a list of people whose papers I won’t read anymore. You’re not allowed to do this in science.”

German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer gave an eye-opening interview to Neue Zürcher Zeitung (translated here), in which he said that “one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy….This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.” Mr. Edenhofer was appointed as joint chair of Working Group 3 at the Twenty-Ninth Session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Geneva, Switzerland.

This morning we received an update from friend at the Institut Hayek in France. Evidently, the French Academy of Sciences soon will release a paper that eviscerates the “beautiful certainties” espoused by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. To read Drieu Godefridi’s brief on the imminent report, click here. To visits the Institut Hayek website, click here.

Richard Morrison, Jeremy Lott and Brooke Oberwetter unite to bring you Episode 82 of the LibertyWeek podcast. In addition to our other stories, we cover Christopher Booker’s recent column on how Climategate has produced a perfect storm for the IPCC (segment begins ~10:20 in).

Richard Morrison, Jeremy Lott and Marc Scribner collaborate to give you Episode 81 of the LibertyWeek podcast. Among other topics, we look into the rising uncertainty about sea levels and other cousins of Climategate (segment starts ~16:20).

Richard Morrison, Jeremy Lott and the American Spectator’s Jim Antle collaborate on Episode 78 of the LibertyWeek podcast. Among other topics, we discuss Rajendra Pachauri and the IPCC’s shameless response to the Himalayan glacier scandal (segment starts ~17:00).