April 2008

One of the striking features of how concern over global warming has risen to the top of our political agenda is the extraordinary unanimity with which it has been taken up by our political establishment.

Imagine, there is a UN climate conference, and hardly anybody seems to note or care. This is what appears to have happened with the latest round of post-Kyoto negotiations that ended in Bangkok last Friday. While delegates from more than 160 nations met at yet another United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change confab in the Thai capital, much of the media seemed indifferent to its deliberations or did not bother to report about it.

Global temperatures for 2008 will be slightly cooler than last year as a result of the cold La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said.

Wheat production is down in the world’s breadbaskets, like the United States, as farmland shifts away from wheat to ethanol production.  Ethanol production has increased because of government ethanol mandates and costly ethanol subsidies.   In Egypt, a major wheat importer, the fall in worldwide wheat production has triggered bread shortages and unrest as poor people find it difficult to get enough to eat.  The unrest is strengthening support for Islamic extremists opposed to Egypt’s relatively pro-American government.

From ICECAP.us

The BBC, UK Met Office and UN IPCC had to acknowledge that global temperatures have at least for the time being decoupled from the CO2 rise and levelled off or fallen (6-7 years). They are blaming the cooling on La Nina. They are of course correct, La Ninas global cooling just as El Ninos brings global warming. It must have pained them to do so as they have previously discussed these factors as being secondary to greenhouse gases and with impacts that were mainly regional in nature.

They promise once this event ends, their predicted warming will resume. It is likely that temperatures will bounce as the La Nina weakens but the real key as to where temperatures go over the next few years and decades is not increasing greenhouse gases but whether the multidecadal cycle in the Pacific (PDO) has transitioned back to the cold mode it was in when the earth cooled from the 1940s to the 1970s (and what happens with solar cycles 24 and 25, which many solar scientists the world over feel will revert back to the quiet modes of the so called Dalton Minimum in the early 1800s or possibly worse.)

The PDO warm phase from 1977 to 1997 was dominated by mostly El Ninos (see why here) and since they correlate with warmer global mean temperatures, it is not surprising global temperatures rose. Alarmists blamed greenhouse gases but it was likely the PDO and the Grand Maximum of the longer term solar cycles.  The prior three decades had mainly La Ninas with cold temperatures like this year in more years than not and solar cycle 20 which peaked around 1970 was relatively weak and longer in length. Not surprisingly global temperatures declined.

Wolter’s Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI). Red spikes with magnitudes >0.5 are El Ninos, dips in blue with magnitudes in excess of -0.5 La Ninas.  See larger graph here

Then with the Great Pacific Climate Shift in 1977, the Pacific warmed and PDO turned positive. El Ninos dominated. You can see how the El Ninos in the satellite era since 1979 have been associated with global warmth.

Note how El Ninos are invariably warm globally and La Ninas cool. Major volcanism in the early 1980s and 1990s are also seen producing cooling. See larger graph here

The PDO and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) have also been implicated in drought probabilities in an excellent paper done by Gregory J. McCabe, Michael A. Palecki, and Julio L. Betancourt in 2004. They found More than half (52%) of the spatial and temporal variance in multidecadal drought frequency over the conterminous United States is attributable to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). Recent droughts with broad impacts over the conterminous U.S. (1996, 1999-2002) were associated with North Atlantic warming (positive AMO) and northeastern and tropical Pacific cooling (negative PDO) (the bottom right map in the figure below). That is the case this summer.

Warm Atlantic (warm AMO) tend to favor drought, the PDO determines where. See larger image here

The Washington Post still can’t bring itself to openly address the reality of greenhouse gas emissions vs. the rhetoric. Instead, they obsess with serially nasty editorials complaining specifically about our lack of European-style promises, all of which pieces (and their news articles) have consistently ignored how the U.S. has led the world in growing the economy while reducing the rate of growth of emissions.

Sunday’s story went with the following: “Even developed countries are not cutting greenhouse gases as fast as they had anticipated.”

The obvious implication is that, unlike the U.S., these countries are cutting greenhouse gas emissions, if not as fast as they had anticipated. Actually, not one developed country is actually cutting emissions at all since making the Kyoto promise a decade ago. The U.S. approach – in practice – has shown far superior to Europe’s “cap” approach, Japan’s various efforts, Canada’s…well, Canada hasn’t done a whole lot policy-wise but they have increased emissions quite a bit, but without the economic downsides of a more interventionist policy.

But in typical Washington fashion, the Post reveals a dogma that “doing something” has nothing to do with what is actually done, by the wealth-creating private sector of the economy, but about how deeply the regulators insert themselves. This is why journalists should stick to things other than governance; getting back to the basics of journalism is a good place to start.

As if on cue, the New York Times also weighed in today with the editorial “It’s about laws, not light bulbs,” with the risible construction:

“As it has for years, America's inertia remains in sharp contrast to the work by Europe, which took an early lead in efforts to curb global warming by establishing the world's most comprehensive carbon management system. Recently, Europeans pledged to cut emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.”

Again, notice how they cleverly elide actual discussion about who is doing what in favor of obsessing about who is saying what. This would put “America’s inertia in sharp contrast to the work by Europe,” indeed, but in a more accurate light. And we can’t have that.

The House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing on Wednesday on Big Oil's big profits and record-high gasoline prices.  Senior executives from the five largest publicly-owned oil companies testified.  Chairman Edward Markey (D-Mass.) criticized them for making record profits as a result of record gas prices.  I note that Mr. Markey is one of the House's most enthusiastic promoters of cap-and-trade legislation, which will raise energy prices for consumers far above current levels. 

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee also held a hearing  on Wednesday to discover why the Secretary of the Interior has not yet decided whether to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.  Since Secretary Dirk Kempthorne declined to testify, Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and the other members of the committee didn't discover why.  But the hearing did provide an opportunity for newspapers around the country to run photos of polar bears looking threatened by melting ice.  I couldn't find any photos of polar bears eating seals, but here's a link to a video on You Tube

California Energy Policy: A Cautionary Tale for the Nation, by Tom Tanton, has been posted online at www.cei.org.

Key lawmakers are now promoting California’s energy and global warming policies as a model for the federal government and other States to follow.  Thomas Tanton’s paper reviews California’s policies and show that they have had significant costs as well as other detrimental effects and are likely to have even higher costs and even worse effects in the future.  California’s policies have led to the highest electricity and gasoline prices in the continental U. S. and contributed to the de-industrialization of California.  While per capita electricity consumption has remained flat, total electricity demand has increased 65% since 1980.