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.

In a recent study published in Procedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), NASA scientist James Hansen and two colleagues find that whereas “extremely hot” summer weather ”practically did not exist” during 1951-1980, such weather affected between 4% and 13% of the Northern Hemisphere land area during 2006-2011. The researchers infer that human-caused global warming is “loading” the “climate dice” towards extreme heat anomalies. They conclude with a “high degree of confidence” that the 2003 European heat wave, the 2010 Russian heat wave, and the 2011 Texas-Oklahoma drought were a “consequence of global warming” and have (as Hansen put it in a recent op-ed) ”virtually no explanation other than climate change.”

In a recent post, I reviewed studies finding that the aforementioned anomalies were chiefly due to natural variability. In another post, I summarized an analysis by Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger, who conclude that “the 2012 drought conditions, and every other [U.S.] drought that has come before, is the result of natural processes, not human greenhouse gas emissions.”

But what about the very hot weather afflicting much of the U.S. this summer? Greenhouse gas concentrations keep rising, heat spells are bound to become more frequent and severe as the world warms, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that July 2012 was the hottest July ever in the U.S. instrumental record. Isn’t this summer what greenhouse warming “looks like“? What else could it be?

University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) climatologist John Christy addressed these questions last week in a two-part column. In Part 1, Christy argues that U.S. daily mean temperature (TMean) data, on which NOAA based its report, ”do not represent the deep atmosphere where the enhanced greenhouse effect should be detected, so making claims about causes is unwise.” A better measure of the greenhouse effect is daily maximum temperature (TMax), and TMax records set in the 1930s remain unbroken. In Part 2, Christy argues that Hansen’s 10% estimate of the portion of land affected by extreme heat during 2006-2011 shrinks down to 2.9% when anomalies are measured against a longer, more representative climate baseline. 

NOAA’s claim that July 2012 was the hottest July ever is based on daily mean temperature (TMean) data. TMean is the average of daytime maximum temperature and nighttime minimum temperature (TMax + TMin/2). Whereas TMax “represents the temperature of a well-mixed lower tropospheric layer, especially in summer,” TMin “can warm over time due to an increase in turbulent mixing” near the surface. Land use changes such as urbanization, agriculture, and forestry tend to disrupt the natural formation of a shallow layer of cool nighttime air. There has been a lot of population growth and development in the U.S. since 1980, the last year of Hansen’s baseline period. Not coincidentally, most of the surface warming in the U.S. during the past three decades has been in TMin rather than TMax (see second graph below).

The point? TMin warming is not primarily due to the accumulation of heat in the deep atmosphere (i.e. the greenhouse effect). Consequently, averaging TMin with TMax produces a composite (TMean) that inflates the appearance of the greenhouse effect.

Christy’s colleague Roy Spencer produced a chart of TMax using the same weather stations as NOAA. Spencer found that July 2012 was very hot, but not as hot as the summers of 1936 and 1934. More importantly, far more all-time TMax records were set in the 1930s than in any recent decade.

In contrast, about as many TMin records were set in recent years as in the 1930s.

Christy comments:

There has been a relatively steady rise in high TMin records (i.e. hot nights) which does not concur with TMax, and is further evidence that TMax and TMin are not measuring the same thing. They really are apples and oranges. As indicated above, TMin is a poor proxy for atmospheric heat content, and it inflicts this problem on the popular TMean temperature record which is then a poor proxy for greenhouse warming too.

Although TMax is a better proxy than TMin for the greenhouse effect, only satellites can provide “direct and robust” measurements of the heat content of the global atmosphere. UAH satellite data do show that the Earth has been in a long-term warming trend (+ 0.14°C per decade since November 1978). However, the data also show that July 2012 was not the hottest July in the 34-year satellite record either for the continental U.S., the Northern Hemisphere, or the world.

Christy finds two main weaknesses in Hansen’s study. First, it assumes that changes in TMean accurately represent the effect of extra greenhouse gases. Second, it assumes that the distribution (bell curve) of weather anomalies during single 30-year period (1951-1980) represents natural climate variability over the past 10,000 years or so.

As discussed above, TMean “misrepresents the response of the climate system to extra greenhouse gases.” So Christy uses TMax data to estimate trends in hot weather anomalies. In addition, he calculated the spatial extent of North Hemisphere extreme heat anomalies during 2006-2011 using both Hansen’s baseline (1951-1980) and a somewhat longer baseline that includes the 1930s and 1940s (1931-1980). Christy’s results are much less dramatic than Hansen’s.

In the figure above, the top line (black-filled circles) shows the percentage of the Northern Hemisphere land area that the Hansen team calculated to have experienced anomalously high heat during 2006-2011. The next line (gray-filled circles) assumes the same base period (1951-1980) for gauging anomalies, but uses TMax from the quality-controlled Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) station data. Although the “correlation between the two is high,” the spatial coverage drops by more than half, ”from Hansen’s 6-year average of 12 percent to this analysis at 5 percent.”

The third line (open circles) gauges TMax anomalies in 2oo6-2011 against a 1931-1980 baseline. The result is that 2.9% of the Northern Hemisphere land area experienced extreme heat anomalies — about a quarter of the Hansen team’s results. “In other words,” says Christy, ”the results change quite a bit simply by widening the window back into a period with even less greenhouse forcing for an acceptable base-climate.”

The lowest line (open boxes) uses an 80-year baseline (1931-2010) to identify extreme hot weather anomalies during 2006-2011. In this case, only 1.3% of the land surface in 2006-2011 experienced anomalously high heat.

One might object that the 80-year baseline includes the most recent 30 years of greenhouse warming and, thus, masks the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the ‘natural’ climate. However, excluding the most recent 30 years, as Hansen does, is question-begging – it assumes what Hansen sets out to prove, namely, that the current climate is outside the range of natural variability. That assumption conflicts with studies finding that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer than present for several decades during the Medieval Warm Period and Roman Warm Period and for thousands of years during Holocene Optimum. Christy asks:

What is an accurate expression of the statistics of the interglacial, non-greenhouse-enhanced climate? Or, what is the extent of anomalies that Mother Nature can achieve on her own for the “natural” climate system from one 30-year period to the next? I’ll bet the variations are much greater than depicted by 1951-1980 alone, so this choice by Hansen as the base climate is not broad enough. In the least, there should be no objection to using 1931-1980 as a reference-base for a non-enhanced-greenhouse climate.

Last week, I posted a commentary on NASA scientist James Hansen’s study and op-ed, which attribute recent extreme weather to global climate change. In the op-ed, Hansen stated:

The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change. And once the data are gathered in a few weeks’ time, it’s likely that the same will be true for the extremely hot summer the United States is suffering through right now.

My commentary concluded: “Hansen’s sweeping assertion that global warming is the principal cause of the European and Russian heat waves, and the Texas-Oklahoma drought, is not supported by event-specific analysis and is implausible in light of previous research.”

Although Hansen does not explicitly attribute the ongoing U.S. drought to global warming, he does blame global warming for both the 2011 Texas-Oklahoma drought and the current summer heat. And in his study, Hansen states: “With the temperature amplified by global warming and ubiquitous surface heating from elevated greenhouse gas amounts, extreme drought conditions can develop.”

This week on World Climate Report, Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger argue that the current U.S. drought “is driven by natural variability not global warming.” Their post (“Hansen Is Wrong“) is concise and layman-friendly. Here I offer an even briefer summary.

A standard measure of drought in the U.S. is the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), which measures the combined effects of temperature (hotter weather = more soil evaporation) and precipitation (more rainfall = more soil moisture). “The more positive the PDSI values, the wetter conditions are, the more negative the PDSI values, the drier things are.” The PDSI for the past 117 years (1895-2011) shows a small non-significant positive trend (i.e. towards wetter conditions). There is no greenhouse warming signal in this data.

What Hansen is claiming, however, is not that U.S. temperatures are causing drought but that global warming is causing drought. So Pat and Chip attempt to determine the influence of global temperatures on U.S. temperatures. They find that about 33% of U.S. temperature trends is explained by global temperature variations, although there is little relationship from year to year.

Figure explanation: The observed annual U.S. temperatures from 1895 through 2011 (open circles) and that part of them which is explained by global temperatures (black circles).

Pat and Chip then compare the black part of the chart above (the portion of U.S. temperatures influenced by global temperatures) with the PDSI. They find no relationship between global temperature variations and U.S. drought conditions (graph below, left) but a significant relationship between PDSI and non-global warming factors (graph below, right).

Pat and Chip conclude: “In other words, the situation is as it always has been. And the 2012 drought conditions, and every other drought that has come before, is the result of natural processes, not human greenhouse gases emissions.”

A study by NASA’s James Hansen and two colleagues, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), finds that during the past 30 years, extreme hot weather has become more frequent and affects a larger area of the world than was the case during the preceding 30 years. Specifically, the study, “Perception of climate change,” reports that:

• Cool summers occurred one-third of the time during 1951-1980 but occurred only 10% of the time during 1981-2010.
• Very hot weather affected 0.2% of the land area during 1951-1980 but affected 10% of the land area during 1981-2010.

Hansen is the world’s best known scientist in the climate alarm camp and a leading advocate of aggressive measures to curb fossil-energy use. He and his co-authors are up front about the policy agenda motivating their study. The “notorious variability of local weather and climate from day to day and year to year” is the “great barrier” to “public recognition” of man-made climate change and, thus, to public support for policies requiring “rapid reduction of fossil fuel emissions.” When heat waves or drought strike, the authors want the public to perceive global warming. On Saturday, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Hansen summarizing the study’s results.

Heat waves will become more frequent and severe as the world warms; some areas will become drier, others wetter. Those hypotheses are not controversial.

What the Hansen team concludes, however, is controversial. The researchers contend that the biggest, baddest hot weather extremes of recent years — the 2003 European heat wave, the 2010 Russian heat wave, the 2011 Texas-Oklahoma drought, the ongoing Midwest drought – are a “consequence of global warming” and have “virtually no explanation other than climate change.”

There’s just one small problem. The reseachers do not examine any of those events to assess the relative contributions of natural climate variability and global warming. The study provides no event-specific evidence that the record-setting heat waves or droughts would not have occurred in the absence of warming, or would not have broken records in the absence of warming. 

The PNAS study (hereafter, “Hansen”) finds that the bell curve showing the distribution of extreme hot weather has steadily moved to the right as the planet has warmed from 1951 to 2011. Events that were once outliers (right hand tail) in 1951-1980 occur with increasing frequency in each subsequent decade, and today’s most extreme events did not occur in the baseline (1951-1980) period.

One question that springs to mind is whether 1951-1980 is an appropriate baseline for assessing trends in extreme weather. Consider the graph at the top of this page, which shows the U.S. Annual Heat Wave Index (source: U.S. Climate Change Research Program). In the U.S., the period of 1951-1980 was not representative or typical of prior decades.

In recent testimony before the Senate, University of Alabama in Hunstville climatologist John Christy made a by-the-numbers case that when data from the 1920s-1940s are included, there is no long-term trend in U.S. extreme heat events. Christy finds that:

• More state all-time high temperature records were set in the 1930s than in recent decades.
• More state all-time cold records than hot records were set in the decades since 1960.
• In a database of 970 weather stations, daily all-time high temperatures occurred more frequently before 1940 than after 1954.
• The 1930s set twice as many daily maximum temperature records than were set in the 1980s, 1990s, or 2000s.
• More Midwest daily maximum temperature records were set in the heat waves of 1911 and the 1930s than in the 2012 heat wave.
• The Palmer Drought Severity Index for the continental U.S. shows considerable interannual variability but no long-term trend from 1900 to the present.
• The upper Colorado River Basin experienced more frequent multi-decadal droughts in the 19th, 18th, 17th, and 16th centuries than in the 20th century.

Viewed in the context of Christy’s longer datasets, Hansen’s 1951-1980 baseline period looks anomalous, not the following three decades.

Hansen’s own plot of U.S. climate data going back to the 19th century also shows a period of pronounced warmth in the 1930s and 1940s, i.e. prior to his baseline.

Hansen is looking at all Northern hemisphere data whereas Christy is looking just at U.S. data. But the U.S. arguably has the best long-term weather data of any country in the world. What would have been the result had Hansen used only U.S. data and chosen an earlier period as the baseline, say 1925-1954, when there was far less greenhouse ‘forcing’ but many daily high temperature records? It is doubtful his statistical results would be anywhere near as dramatic.

Hansen argues that global warming, not weather patterns associated with drought (La Niña) and heat waves (atmospheric blocking), caused the 2003 European heat wave, the 2010 Russian heat wave, and the 2011 Texas-Oklahoma drought. La Niñas and blocking patterns ”have always been common, yet the large areas of extreme warming have come into existence only with global warming.” Therefore, Hansen concludes, today’s extreme anomalies have at least two causes, “specific weather patterns and global warming.”

This is spin, speculation, or ‘trust-me-I’m-the-expert’ assertion. Chase et al. 2006, a team of scientists from Colorado and France, found “nothing unusual” in the 2003 European heat wave that would indicate a change in global climate. Look at the global temperature map included in the study. During June, July, and August 2003, more than half the planet was cooler than the mean temperature from 1979 through 2003. Europe – a tiny fraction of the Earth’s surface – was the only place experiencing high heat. Does it make sense to attribute that local anomaly to global warming?

Figure explanation (courtesy of World Climate Report): 1000–500 mb thickness temperature anomaly for June, July, and August 2003. Green and blue tones indicate below-normal temperature anomalies.

Similarly, a National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) analysis found that the 2010 Russian heat wave “was mainly due to natural internal atmospheric variability.” The study specifically addressed the question of a possible linkage to anthropogenic climate change:

Despite this strong evidence for a warming planet, greenhouse gas forcing fails to explain the 2010 heat wave over western Russia. The natural process of atmospheric blocking, and the climate impacts induced by such blocking, are the principal cause for this heat wave. It is not known whether, or to what extent, greenhouse gas emissions may affect the frequency or intensity of blocking during summer. It is important to note that observations reveal no trend in a daily frequency of July blocking over the period since 1948, nor is there an appreciable trend in the absolute values of upper tropospheric summertime heights over western Russia for the period since 1900.

The Texas-Oklahoma drought of 2011 was a record breaker. According to NOAA (State of the Climate in 2011, p. 166), “Several climate divisions in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, as well as the Rio Grande and Texas Gulf Coast river basins, had record low values for the Palmer Hydrological Drought Index in the 117-year record.” For Texas, 2011 was also a year of record heat. However, this correlation is not evidence that global warming was the principal factor. Detection and — more importantly — measurement of the impact of global climate change on the Texas drought requires a long and complicated analysis.

Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon conducted a “preliminary analysis” of the role of global warming in the Texas drought. Although far from definitive, it is (to my knowledge) the most detailed and thorough analysis to date.  Nielsen-Gammon examines Texas drought and temperature data, climate modeling studies, and data on natural climate cycles (La Niña/El Niño, Pacific Decadal Oscillation, Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation) to estimate the potential contribution of global warming. Here are some of his findings:

• Some IPCC AR4 climate models “at one extreme” project precipitation to increase in Texas, while others project a substantial decrease. “The general model consensus is that precipitation is likely to decrease a bit, but it’s not a sure thing.”
• The model-projected change is “smaller in magnitude than the past observed multi-decade-scale changes,” which indicates that “global warming is not going to be the dominant driver of mean precipitation changes, at least for the next several decades.”
• From 1895 to 2010, precipitation in Texas increased overall, by more than 10%.
• There has been no net change in Texas precipitation variability since 1920.
• Although the 2011 drought was the most severe 1-year Texas drought, it was not the most severe in the instrumental record. That distinction belongs to the 1950-1957 drought. Aside from 2009 and 2011, all the droughts that rank as most severe in at least 1% of the State occurred in 1956 and earlier.
• Texas summer temperature in 2011 was record-breaking because of the drought rather than the other way around. “This record-setting summer was 5.4 F above average.  The lack of precipitation accounts for 4.0 F, greenhouse gases global warming accounts for another 0.9 F, and the AMO [Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation] accounts for another 0.3 F.  Note that there’s uncertainty with all those numbers, and I have only made the crudest attempts at quantifying the uncertainty.”

 Among Nielson-Gammon’s key conclusions:

So I conclude, based on our current knowledge of the effects of global warming on temperature and precipitation, that Texas would probably have broken the all-time record for summer temperatures this year even without global warming.

This drought was an outlier.  Even without global warming, to the best of my knowledge, it would have been an outlier and a record-setter.

* * *

Until we learn more, it is appropriate to assume that the direct impact of global warming on Texas precipitation interannual variability has been negligible, and that the future variability trend with or without global warming is unknown.

In short, Hansen’s sweeping assertion that global warming is the principal cause of the European and Russian heat waves, and the Texas-Oklahoma drought, is not supported by event-specific analysis and is implausible in light of previous research.

A concluding comment on what might be called Hansen’s political science is in order. Hansen believes the “great barrier” to aggressive action on climate change is the ”notorious variability” of weather and climate at local scales. But the public’s rejection of cap-and-trade, the collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen treaty agenda, and the GOP/Tea Party opposition to the Obama administration’s war on affordable energy are only partly related to public “perceptions” of climate change risk. More important is the fact that nobody knows how to run and grow a modern economy with zero-carbon energy.

The Breakthrough Institute develops this thesis in great detail in a collection of posts titled the “Death of Cap-and-Trade.” Because affordable energy is vital to prosperity and much of the world is energy poor, it would be economically ruinous and, thus, politically suicidal to demand that people abandon fossil fuels before cheaper alternative energies are available. But that is exactly what warmistas like Hansen urge the U.S. and other governments to do – lock up vast stores of carbonaceous fuel and penalize fossil energy use before commercially-viable alternatives exist.

As the Breakthrough folks argue, if you’re worried about climate change, then your chief policy goal should be to make alternative energy cheaper than fossil energy. Instead, the global warming movement has attempted to make fossil energy more costly than alternative energy, or to simply mandate the switch to alternative energy regardless of cost. Al Gore’s call in 2008 to “re-power America” with zero-carbon energy within 10 years is epitomizes this folly. More “moderate” variants would only do less harm, less rapidly.

The Heartland Institute plans to pay Indur Goklany, an expert on climate economics and policy, a monthly stipend to write a chapter on those topics for the Institute’s forthcoming mega-report, Climate Change Reconsidered 2012. Earlier this week, Greenpeace and Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) called for a congressional investigation of Goklany. In addition to being an independent scholar, Goklany is a Department of Interior employee. Federal employees may not receive outside income for teaching, writing, or speaking related to their “official duties.”

But as I pointed out yesterday on this site, climate economics and policy are (to the best of my knowledge) not part of Goklany’s “official duties.” It would be shocking if they were. Goklany is a leading debunker of climate alarm and opposes coercive decarbonization schemes. Why on earth would the Obama Interior Department assign someone like that to work on climate policy?

Greenpeace and Grijalva have got the wrong target in their sites. The inquisition they propose might actually have some merit if directed at one of their heroes: Dr. James Hansen of NASA. Hansen has received upwards of $1.6 million in outside income. And it’s not unreasonable to assume that most or all of that income was for teaching, writing, and speaking on matters “related to” his “official duties.”

My colleague Chris Horner laid out the juicy details last November in a column posted on Watts Up With That. In “Dr. James Hansen’s growing financial scandal, now over a million dollars of outside income,” Chris argued that Hansen gets substantial outside income for activities related to his official duties and does not always comply with federal financial disclosure regulations:

NASA records released to resolve litigation filed by the American Tradition Institute reveal that Dr. James E. Hansen, an astronomer, received approximately $1.6 million in outside, direct cash income in the past five years for work related to — and, according to his benefactors, often expressly for — his public service as a global warming activist within NASA.

This does not include six-figure income over that period in travel expenses to fly around the world to receive money from outside interests. As specifically detailed below, Hansen failed to report tens of thousands of dollars in global travel provided to him by outside parties — including to London, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Tokyo, the Austrian Alps, Bilbao, California, Australia and elsewhere, often business or first-class and also often paying for his wife as well — to receive honoraria to speak about the topic of his taxpayer-funded employment, or get cash awards for his activism and even for his past testimony and other work for NASA.

Ethics laws require that such payments or gifts be reported on an SF278 public financial disclosure form. As detailed, below, Hansen nonetheless regularly refused to report this income.

Also, he seems to have inappropriately taken between $10,000 and $26,000 for speeches unlawfully promoting him as a NASA employee.

There’s more in Chris’s post, but you get the drift.

Now, I wondered whether Hansen, an employee of NASA, an independent agency, is subject to the same outside compensation rules as Goklany, an employee of an Executive Agency. The answer is yes. NASA’s guidelines on “outside employment” state that ”Employees should refer generally to the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch, 5 CFR Part 2635,” and must comply with Subpart H.

CFR Part 2365, Subpart H bars an employee from receiving compensation for speaking, teaching, or writing “that relates to the employee’s official duties.” Quite sensibly, though, the employee may receive compensation for speaking, teaching, or writing not related to his official duties:

Note: Section 2635.807(a)(2)(i)(E) does not preclude an employee, other than a covered noncareer employee, from receiving compensation for teaching, speaking or writing on a subject within the employee’s discipline or inherent area of expertise based on his educational background or experience even though the teaching, speaking or writing deals generally with a subject within the agency’s areas of responsibility.

This language seems to fit Goklany to a tee. The proposed chapter for Heartland on climate economics and policy is within Goklany’s discipline and area of expertise but it is not related to his official duties.

Can anyone with a straight face say the same about Hansen? How could Hansen’s teaching, speaking, and writing about climate change not be related to his official duties? How then could the outside income he has received for those activities not be unlawful?

Rep. Grijalva’s demand for a House Resources Committee “hearing” on Goklany is preposterous. A letter of inquiry would suffice even if there were evidence of improper conduct, which there is not.

My unsolicited advice to Committee Chair Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) is to politely reject Grijalva’s request but also to ask Grijalva, just for the record, whether he and Greenpeace think the Committee should investigate James Hansen’s million dollar-plus outside income.

Last week, after three years of environmental review, public meetings, and public comment, President Obama postponed until first quarter 2013 a decision on whether or not to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline — the $7 billion, shovel-ready project to deliver up to 830,000 barrels a day of tar sands oil from Canada to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries. Obama’s punt, which Keystone opponents hope effectively kills the pipeline, is topic-of-the-week on National Journal’s Energy Experts Blog. So far, a dozen ”experts” have posted, including yours truly.

Now, if you’ve been paying attention at all over the past 40 years, you may suspect that most Keystone opponents want to kill the pipeline just because they hate oil and oil companies — even as they fill up their tanks to drive to the next demonstration. Bill McKibben, lead organizer of the anti-Keystone protest rallies outside the White House, lives in Vermont. On the Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert asked McKibben: ”You’re from Vermont? Did you ride your bicycle down here? Or did you ride ox cart? How did you get down here? Or do you have a vehicle that runs on hypocrisy?”

If we take them at their word, McKibben and his climate guru, NASA scientist James Hansen, oppose Keystone because they believe it will contribute to global warming. How? The cutting-edge method for extracting oil from tar sands is a process called steam assisted gravity drainage. SAGD uses natural gas to heat and liquefy bitumen, a tar-like form of petroleum too viscous to be pumped by conventional wells, and burning natural gas emits carbon dioxide (CO2). So their gripe is that replacing conventional oil with tar sands oil will increase CO2 emissions from the U.S. transport sector. Maybe by only 1% annually,* but to hard-core warmists, any increase is intolerable.

Enter the Law of Unintended Consequences. If McKibben and Hansen succeed in killing the pipeline, petroleum-related CO2 emissions might actually increase!

Charles Drevna of the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association (NPRA) made this point on the aforementioned National Journal energy blog:

A study last year by Barr Engineering found that shipping more Canadian oil to Asia and shipping more oil from other parts of the world to the United States would increase greenhouse gas emissions, because of the long sea voyages. Barr Engineering called this the crude oil shuffle. So using more Canadian oil in the United States would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Barr Engineering study analyzes the impacts on CO2 emissions of a low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS) that effectively bars U.S. imports of Canadian tar sands oil. Because global petroleum demand is growing, Canada would continue to produce tar sands oil even if the USA adopts an LCFS. However, instead of shipping the oil to the USA, Canada would ship the oil to China. At the same time, to meet U.S. demand that the LCFS does not allow Canada to fill, Middle East countries would ship oil to the USA that would otherwise go to China. The Canadian oil re-routed to China and Mideastern oil re-routed to the USA would travel by tankers, which burn fuel and emit CO2. Longer transport routes mean higher CO2 emissions. From the report:

Under the base case, crude is transported approximately 8,500 to 9,000 miles from Edmonton [Canada] to Chicago and from Basrah [Iraq] to Ningbo [China]. Under the crude shuffle case, total transport distance nearly triples, with crude transported approximately 22,300 to 22,700 miles from Basrah to Chicago and from Edmongton to Ningbo. Resulting GHG emissions are approximately twice as high on a total basis (for any of the crude displacement scenarios considered). . . .Under all scenarios considered, the crude shuffle results in emissions that are approximately twice as great as the emissions associatd with current base-case crude transport patterns.

The figure above shows U.S. petroleum-related greenhouse gas emissions in a “base case” and a “crude shuffle case.” PADD II refers to the Midwest petroleum market.

Although killing Keystone would not ban imports of Canadian tar sands oil, as would an LCFS, it would effectively block much of the forecast 830,000 daily barrels of tar sands from reaching U.S. refineries. That, in turn, would induce similar re-routing of international oil flows. Each barrel “shuffled” to more distant markets would have a bigger carbon footprint than a barrel of Canadian crude shipped via Keystone to the USA.

* The State Department estimates that full operation of the Keystone pipeline would produce incremental greenhouse gas emissions of 3 million to 21 million metric tons of CO2 annually (ES-15). For perspective, the U.S. transport sector in 2009 generated 1,854.5 million metric tons of CO2.

It’s a trick employed by rhetoricians from time immemorial. When their case against an opponent is unpersuasive on the merits, they invoke the image of something their target audience fears or hates. Thus, for example, political pleaders have asserted that money, Dick Cheney, or Zionism ”is a cancer on the body politic.”

Perhaps the most influential use of this tactic in modern times is the attack on carbon dioxide (CO2) as “global warming pollution” and on CO2 emitters as “polluters.” Many who know better, including highly credentialed scientists, routinely couple the words “carbon” and “pollution” in their public discourse.

In reality, CO2 — like water vapor, the atmosphere’s main greenhouse gas — is a natural constituent of clean air. Colorless, odorless, and non-toxic to humans at 30 times ambient concentrations, CO2 is an essential building block of the planetary food chain. The increase in the air’s CO2 content since the dawn of the industrial revolution — from 280 to 390 parts per million – boosts the water-use efficiency of trees, crops, and other plants; helps protect green things from the damaging effects of smog and UV-B radiation; and helps make food more plentiful and nutritious. The many health and welfare benefits of atmospheric CO2 enrichment make CO2 unlike any other substance ever previously regulated as a “pollutant.”

A closely related abuse of the English languge is the oft-repeated claim that America is “addicted to oil.” Although popularized by a Texas oil man, former President G.W. Bush, the phrase is a rhetorical staple of the same folks who inveigh against “carbon pollution.” NASA scientist James Hansen, arguably the world’s most famous carbonophobe besides Al Gore, recently denounced the Keystone XL Pipeline as a “dirty needle” that, if approved, would feed our supposed oil addiction.

President Obama is expected later this year to approve or deny a permit allowing construction of the proposed 1,700 mile pipeline that would bring oil from Canada’s vast tar sands reserves to U.S. refineries in the Midwest and Gulf Coast. As reported in The New York Times, Hansen said that Obama has a rare opportunity, by denying the permit, to show that he is not a “hopeless addict.”

“If Obama chooses the dirty needle it will confirm that Obama was just greenwashing all along, like the other well-oiled coal-fired politicians, with no real intention of solving the addiction,” Hansen said.

Why does anyone listen to Hansen? Because he’s a highly credentialed scientist. But when he says stuff like this, he is only pretending to speak as a scientist. He is actually speaking as a political advocate, and with scant regard for facts or reason.

America is no more addicted to oil than our ancestors were to horse fodder. We use oil, as they used fodder, to get us where we want to go. What consumers care about is not the oil or the fodder, but the mobility it provides and the associated costs. Yes, those costs include environmental impacts. But, mile for mile, a horse is a far more polluting ‘technology’ than an automobile. As soon as an alternative fuel comes along that delivers more bang for our transportation buck than gasoline does, Americans will demand it, and competition will drive profit-seeking firms to supply it.

Yes, we depend on oil to fuel most of our cars, marine vessels, and aircraft. But dependence is not addiction. We also depend on electricity to power our lap tops, iPods, and cell phones, and we depend on food and water to sustain life. No sane person would say we are addicted to those things.

One quality of a typical addiction is that it is an appetite that grows with feeding. Nationally, our long-term oil consumption is growing. But that’s  due to population growth, which increases the number of motorists, and economic growth, which increases the supply of goods to be moved and expands opportunities to travel for business, education, and recreation. The long-term increase in “vehicle miles traveled” is not the result of some narcotic-like effect that gasoline consumption induces in motorists. It is a consequence of healthy development — more abundant life and more economic activity.

As my colleague Myron Ebell once said, nobody in America wakes in a cold sweat, sneaks out of the house late at night, and pays a road side pusher top off the tank with regular unleaded.

Former Vice President Al Gore is the gift that keeps on giving to opponents of global warming alarmism and energy rationing policies. He leads what I think of as the Dream Team: Gore is the public leader; James Hansen is the go-to scientist; Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) pushed through a cap-and-trade bill in the House that killed cap-and-trade; Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was the main promoter in the Senate; when he dropped the ball, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) was in charge for awhile; and she has now been replaced by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) with help from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

I used to think that we were just incredibly lucky that the alarmist movement was led by this group of second raters.   I now realize that it isn’t luck.  Global warming alarmism attracts incompetents, know-nothings, and looney tunes.

We have missed Al Gore in the debate, but luckily Kerry and Graham were fully up to sinking cap-and-trade in the Senate (not that it had much chance anyway) without any help from the leader of the forces of darkness. So it was good to see that Gore returned this week on a conference call sponsored by Repower America (aka the Alliance for Climate Protection).

Gore on the conference call acknowledged that cap-and-trade was dead and that the alarmists had lost in 2010.  He bitterly blamed the usual suspects: Big Oil, King Coal, right-wing media, and professional deniers (I believe that is where he would put me and CEI).  This is boilerplate nonsense.  Three of the big five oil companies (BP, Shell, and Conoco Phillips) support cap-and-trade, as well as most of the big electric utilities (Duke Energy, P G and E, Exelon, PNM Resources, Entergy, etc.) and many other major corporations, such as General Electric, Dow Chemical, General Motors, and Ford Motor.  Cap-and-trade died when the American people found out that it was a colossal transfer of wealth from them to corporate special interests (see the list in the previous sentence).

Gore even said that our system of government was not working as the founders intended it to work.  In fact, in the debate over cap-and-trade the system of checks and balances in the Constitution is working exactly as the founders intended.  It has prevented an elite from hijacking the economy for its own enrichment.

I can see why Gore is bitter.  His comparatively modest investments in green energy promised to make him a global warming billionaire if cap-and-trade were enacted. Unluckily for him, the American people have said no emphatically.

[This was originally posted on Politico's Energy Arena here.]

[This is a slightly-edited version of a blog first posted on Fox News Forum.]

The New York Times published a doozy of a front-page story by John M. Broder on Wednesday on the Climate-gate scientific fraud scandal. Those who have been lambasting our national “paper of record” for months for largely ignoring the scandal, while every London paper has run multiple big stories full of juicy new revelations, can now relax. The wise and good Grey Lady has finally taken notice.

Well, not exactly. Broder’s story, headlined “Scientists Take Steps to Defend Climate Work,” is all about how the climate science establishment have realized that they “have to fight back” against critics who have used the Climategate revelations to call into question the scientific case for global warming alarmism. Those whose only source of news for the past three months has been the Times will have a hard time figuring out exactly what they have to fight back against.
Broder’s analysis follows the party line that has been worked out among the leading alarmist climate scientists since the scandal broke on November 19, 2009. And Broder makes no effort to conceal where his sympathies lie. He writes: “But serious damage has already been done,” and then discusses polling data that shows increasing public disbelief in the global warming crisis. From my perspective, that’s serious good that has been done, not damage, but then I’m not an unbiased, fair-minded Times reporter.

Broder further opines on his own behalf: “The battle is asymmetric, in the sense that scientists feel compelled to support their findings with careful observation and replicable analysis, while their critics are free to make sweeping statements condemning their work as fraudulent.” That, of course, is not reporting, but agreeing with one of the alarmists’ talking points.

And it is untrue. Anyone who has ever seen some of the leading scientific proponents of alarmism in action knows that they are not about “careful observation and replicable analysis.” In fact, the major revelation of Climate-gate has been that top climate scientists refused to share their data and methodologies because they were concealing intentional data manipulation as well as incompetence. Which is exactly what their critics have maintained for years.

But blatant bias in news stories from the New York Times is not news. What makes Broder’s story unintentionally compelling is the cast of characters that he quotes to represent the calm, objective voice of establishment science.

First up is Dr. Ralph Cicerone, President of the National Academies of Science (NAS). That is an august position, and the principal reason Cicerone occupies it is because he is a wily political operator. As President of the NAS, he has worked overtime to enforce the alarmist “consensus”.
When Professor Michael E. Mann’s hockey stick graph came under suspicion, Cicerone craftily convened a National Research Council (or NRC—a government-funded scientific consulting company closely affiliated with the NAS) panel to investigate and appointed Professor Gerald R. North of Texas A. and M. University as chairman. The deceptively affable North has proven to be a reliable water carrier for whoever is in authority.

Cicerone did not share with the panel the probing questions that had been sent to him by then-Chairman of the House Science Committee and then the House’s leading green Republican, Sherwood Boehlert. Instead, Cicerone provided his own loaded questions.

When the panel’s report was nonetheless quite critical of the hockey stick research, Cicerone arranged a press release and conference that put a deceptive spin on the panel’s conclusions. Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media reported what they were told at the press conference.

Cicerone is now using the NRC to rush out a report to minimize Climate-gate and defend the alarmist establishment. A group of NAS members led by Stanford Professor Stephen H. Schneider, who has long been the alarmist scientists’ chief political organizer and strategist, asked Cicerone for the study. It is clear that it is intended to be a whitewash.

Broder’s story also quotes Dr. John P. Holdren, now the White House science adviser and a long-time collaborator with Stanford Professor Paul R. Ehrlich of Population Bomb fame. Holdren has made a career of bending science to support left-wing politics and has an unblemished forty-year record of wild doomsday predictions that have all proven wrong.

After a quick quote from Dr. Rajendra K Pachauri, the Chairman of the U. N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who is a railway engineer by profession, Broder concludes by consulting Dr. Gavin A. Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City:

“Climate scientists are paid to do climate science,” said Gavin A. Schmidt…. “Their job is not persuading the public.”

If only that were so, even in the case of Dr. Schmidt. True, his salary is paid by American taxpayers, but it is almost certainly the case that over the past few years he has been spending a good part of his time during office hours and using government equipment to produce political propaganda for RealClimate.org, a web site run by Schmidt and Michael E. Mann. RealClimate.org has received help from Fenton Communications, the key P.R. firm for the Soros-funded left.
Thus Broder portrays Schmidt as just a scientist trying to be left alone to do his job, but in fact Schmidt is primarily a modestly-skilled political operative working to promote global warming alarmism. Here is Broder quoting Schmidt again:

“What is new is this paranoia combined with a spell of cold weather in the U. S. and the ‘climategate’ release. It’s a perfect storm that has allowed the nutters to control the agenda.”

“Nutters” is English (and Schmidt is English) slang equivalent to “nut” in the sense of crazy person. Well, Schmidt should know—his boss is the director of GISS, Dr. James E. Hansen. Hansen is widely considered to be the leading scientific promoter of global warming alarmism and as such is a highly political animal. He is also increasingly kooky and extreme.

Hansen claimed a few years ago that the Bush Administration was censoring him. It turned out he had given over 1,300 interviews during the Bush years! Hansen predicted over twenty years ago that much of Manhattan would be under water by now as the result of sea level rise caused by global warming.

Last year, Hansen, a federal employee, was arrested for protesting at a coal mine in West Virginia. He has endorsed industrial sabotage as justified by the climate crisis we are facing and said that oil company executives should be put on trial for “high crimes against humanity and nature.”

So Schmidt has it right: the nutters are in control–of the global warming alarmist agenda. But don’t hold your breath waiting for the New York Times to publish that story.

(Myron Ebell is director of Freedom Action. Freedom Action is a Web-based grassroots activist group dedicated to putting freedom on the offensive. Mr. Ebell may be contacted at mebell@freedomaction.org.)

Last week’s House Ways & Means Committee hearing on “scientific objectives for climate change legislation” contained much grist for skeptical mills.

Dr. James Hansen did not challenge any of Dr. John Christy’s specific arguments that UN climate models overestimate climate sensitivity. Instead, he advised Congress to ask the National Academy of Sciences for an “authoritative” assessment, because the science is “crystal clear.”

Hansen was quite harsh in criticizing Kyoto (an “abject failure”) and carbon trading (a politically unsustainable hidden tax for the benefit of special interests). He outlined a proposal for what he calls carbon “Tax & Dividend,” whereby 100% of the revenues would be refunded to the American people via monthly deposits to their bank accounts.

As I discuss here, Hansen’s beguiling proposal could decimate coal-based power in a decade or two, pushing electricity prices up faster than dividend payments increase, and saddling the economy with a growth-chilling energy crisis.