• Please join us this Thursday, April 21 at 4:00 p.m. Eastern for a book forum and debate on “green energy” policy, following the recent release of the Cato book The False Promise of Green Energy. On Thursday, University of Alabama Professor of Law and Business Andrew P. Morriss (one of the book’s authors) and Center for American Progress Vice President for Energy Policy Kate Gordon will debate the merits of the “green” economic agenda, moderated by Cato Institute Senior Fellow Jerry Taylor. Complimentary registration is required of all attendees by noon TOMORROW, Wednesday, April 20. We hope you can join us in person and for the reception following the event–if you cannot attend in person, we hope you’ll tune in online or on Facebook.
• “Nothing in international law, however, can change the United States Constitution’s procedures for when the United States can go to war — which require the consent of Congress.”
• Nothing says it’s time to convert Medicaid to block grants like letters from 17 governors opposing the idea.
• Nothing would spur economic recovery like a “liberate to stimulate” regulatory agenda.
• Nothing says “failure” like 37,000 dead and climbing.
• Nothing is more complicated and convoluted than the U.S. tax code, which changed 579 times in the last year–more than one change every day:

Tuesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• One thing is clear after President Obama’s speech yesterday: He envisions a smaller national debt, but a much bigger government.
• One percent is better than nothing, but it’s still pretty close to nothing.
• One thing is clear about climate change: it’s causing a rising tide of red ink in Washington. See the forthcoming book Climate Coup: Global Warming’s Invasion of Our Government and Our Lives and join us for the accompanying book forum, featuring MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen and American Meteorological Society fellow Bob Ryan, on Wednesday, May 4 at 4:00 p.m. Eastern. Complimentary registration is required of all attendees by 12:00 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, May 3. If you cannot join us in person, we hope you’ll watch live online.
• One cannot be serious about reining in reckless spending without putting the Pentagon on the chopping block.
• One need not look very far to see how similar Republicans and Democrats are:

Thursday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

That’s the topic of my Washington Examiner column this week. In it, I discuss last week’s budget battle and the failure of “policy riders” designed to rein in the Obama EPA’s attempts to regulate greenhouse gases without a congressional vote specifically authorizing it. The Obama team believes it has the authority to implement comprehensive climate change regulation, Congress be damned. Worse still, under current constitutional law–which has little to do with the actual Constitution–they’re probably right. Thanks to overbroad congressional delegation, “the Imperial Presidency Comes in Green, Too.” At home and abroad, the legislative branch sits on the sidelines as the executive state makes the law and wages war, despite the fact that “all legislative powers” the Constitution grants are vested in Congress, among them the power “to declare War.”

Yet, as I point out in the column, Congress retains every power the Constitution gave it–powers broad enough that talk of “co-equal branches” is a misnomer. Excerpt:

The constitutional scholar Charles Black once commented, “My classes think I am trying to be funny when I say that, by simple majorities,” Congress could shrink the White House staff to one secretary, and that, with a two-thirds vote, “Congress could put the White House up at auction.” (I sometimes find myself wishing they would.)

But Professor Black wasn’t trying to be funny: it’s in Congress’s power to do that. And if Congress can sell the White House, surely it can defund an illegal war and rein in a runaway bureaucracy.

If they don’t, it’s because they like the current system. And why wouldn’t they? It lets them take credit for passing high-minded, vaguely worded statutes, and take it again by railing against the bureaucracy when it imposes costs in the course of deciding what those statutes mean.

Last year, in the journal White House Studies [.pdf], I explored some of the reasons we’ve drifted so far from the original design:

Federalist 51 envisions a constitutional balance of power reinforced by the connection
between “the interests of the man and the constitutional rights of the place.” Yet, as NYU‘s Daryl Levinson notes, ―beyond the vague suggestion of a psychological identification between official and institution, Madison failed to offer any mechanism by which this connection would take hold…. for most members, the psychological identification with party appears greatly to outweigh loyalty to the institution. Levinson notes that when one party holds both branches, presidential vetoes greatly decrease, and delegation skyrockets. Under unified government, “the shared policy goals of, or common sources of political reward for, officials in the legislative and executive branches create cross-cutting, cooperative political dynamics rather than conflictual ones.”

Individual presidents have every reason to protect and expand their power; but individual senators and representatives lack similar incentive to defend Congress’s constitutional prerogatives. “Congress” is an abstraction. Congressmen are not, and their most basic interest is getting reelected. Ceding power can be a means toward that end: it allows members to have their cake and eat it too. They can let the president launch a war, reserving the right to criticize him if things go badly. And they can take credit for passing high-minded, vaguely worded statutes, and take it again by railing against the executive-branch bureaucracy when it imposes costs in the course of deciding what those statutes mean.

In David Schoenbrod’s metaphor, modern American governance is a “shell game,” with We the People as the rubes.  That game will go on unless and until the voters start holding Congress accountable for dodging responsibility.

Congress: The Least Dangerous Branch is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.

The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.

**********

 The recent publication of two articles in Nature magazine proclaiming a link to rainfall extremes (and flooding) to global warming, added to the heat in Russia and the floods in Pakistan in the summer of 2010, and the back-to-back cold and snowy winters in the eastern U.S. and western Europe, have gotten a lot of public attention.  This includes a recent hearing in the House of Representatives, despite its Republican majority.  Tying weather extremes to global warming, or using them as “proof” that warming doesn’t exist (see: snowstorms), is a popular rhetorical flourish by politicos of all stripes.  

The hearing struck many as quite odd, inasmuch as it is much clearer than apocalyptic global warming that the House is going to pass meaningless legislation commanding the EPA to cease and desist from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.  “Meaningless” means that it surely will not become law.  Even on the long-shot probability that it passes the Senate, the President will surely veto, and there are nowhere near enough votes to override such an action.

Perhaps “wolf!” has been cried yet again.  A string of soon-to-be-published papers in the scientific literature finds that despite all hue and cry about global warming and recent extreme weather events, natural climate variability is to blame.

Where to start?  How about last summer’s Russian heat wave?

The Russian heat wave (and to some degree the floods in Pakistan) have been linked to the same large-scale, stationary weather system, called an atmospheric “blocking” pattern. When the atmosphere is “blocked” it means that it stays in the same configuration for period of several weeks (or more) and keeps delivering the same weather to the same area for what can seem like an eternity to people in the way.  Capitalizing on the misery in Russia and Pakistan, atmospheric blocking was added to the list of things that were supposed to be “consistent with” anthropogenically stimulated global warming which already, of course included heat waves and floods. And thus the Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 became part of global warming lore.

But then a funny thing happened – scientists with a working knowledge of atmospheric dynamics started to review the situation and found scant evidence for global warming.

The first chink in the armor came back in the fall of 2010, when scientists from the Physical Sciences Division (PSD) of the Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) presented the results of their preliminary investigation on the web , and concluded that “[d]espite 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.”

The PSD folks have now followed this up with a new peer-reviewed article in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that rejects the global warming explanation. The paper is titled “Was There a Basis for Anticipating the 2010 Russian Heat Wave?” Turns out that there wasn’t.

To prove this, the research team, led by PSD’s Randall Dole, first reviewed the observed temperature history of the region affected by the heat wave (western Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine, and the Baltic nations). To start, they looked at the recent antecedent conditions: “Despite record warm globally-averaged surface temperatures over the first six months of 2010, Moscow experienced an unusually cold winter and a relatively mild but variable spring, providing no hint of the record heat yet to come.” Nothing there.

Then they looked at the long-term temperature record: “The July surface temperatures for the region impacted by the 2010 Russian heat wave shows no significant warming trend over the prior 130-year period from 1880 to 2009…. A linear trend calculation yields a total temperature change over the 130 years of -0.1°C (with a range of 0 to -0.4°C over the four data sets [they examined]).” There’s not a hint of a build-up to a big heat wave.

And as to the behavior of temperature extremes: “There is also no clear indication of a trend toward increasing warm extremes. The prior 10 warmest Julys are distributed across the entire period and exhibit only modest clustering earlier in this decade, in the 1980s and in the 1930s…. This behavior differs substantially from globally averaged annual temperatures, for which eleven of the last twelve years ending in 2006 rank among the twelve warmest years in the instrumental record since 1850….”

With regard any indication that “global” warming was pushing temperatures higher in Russia and thus helped to fuel the extreme heat last summer, Dole et al. say this: “With no significant long-term trend in western Russia July surface temperatures detected over the period 1880-2009, mean regional temperature changes are thus very unlikely to have contributed substantially to the magnitude of the 2010 Russian heat wave.”

Next the PSD folks looked to see if the existing larger-scale antecedent conditions, fed into climate models would produce the atmospheric circulation patterns (i.e. blocking) that gave rise to the heat wave.  The tested “predictors” included patterns of sea surface temperature and arctic ice coverage, which most people feel have been subject to some human influence.  No relationship: “These findings suggest that the blocking and heat wave were not primarily a forced response to specific boundary conditions during 2010.”

In fact, the climate models exhibited no predilection for projecting increases in the frequency of atmospheric blocking patterns over the region as greenhouse gas concentrations increased. Just the opposite: “Results using very high-resolution climate models suggest that the number of Euro-Atlantic blocking events will decrease by the latter half of the 21st century.”

At this point, Dole and colleagues had about exhausted all lines of inquiry and summed things up:

 Our analysis points to a primarily natural cause for the Russian heat wave. This event appears to be mainly due to internal atmospheric dynamical processes that produced and maintained an intense and long-lived blocking event. Results from prior studies suggest that it is likely that the intensity of the heat wave was further increased by regional land surface feedbacks. The absence of long-term trends in regional mean temperatures and variability together with the model results indicate that it is very unlikely that warming attributable to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations contributed substantially to the magnitude of this heat wave.

Can’t be much clearer than that.

But that was last summer. What about the past two winters? Both were very cold in the eastern U.S. with record snows events and/or totals scattered about the country.

Cold, snow, and global warming? On Christmas Day 2010, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Judah Cohen, a long-range forecaster for the private forecasting firm Atmospheric and Environmental Research, outlining his theory as to how late summer Arctic ice declines lead to more fall snow cover across Siberia which in turn induces atmospheric circulation patterns to favor snowstorms along the East Coast of the U.S. Just last week, the Union of Concerned Scientists held a news conference where they handed out a press release  headlined “Climate Change Makes Major Snowstorms Likely.” In that release, Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, laid out his theory as to how the loss of Arctic sea ice is helping to provide more moisture to fuel winter snowstorms across the U.S. as well as altering atmospheric circulation patterns into a preferred state for big snowstorms. Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters chimed in with “Heavy snowstorms are not inconsistent with a warming planet.”

As is the wont for this Wisdom, let’s go back to the scientific literature.

Another soon-to-be released paper to appear in Geophysical Research Letters describes the results of using the seasonal weather prediction model from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) to help untangle the causes of the unusual atmospheric circulation patterns that gave rise to the harsh winter of 2009-2010 on both sides of the Atlantic. A team of ECMWF scientists led by Thomas Jung went back and did experiments changing initial conditions that were fed into the ECMWF model and then assessed how well the model simulated the known weather patterns of the winter of 2009-2010. The different set of initial conditions was selected so as to test all the pet theories behind the origins of the harsh winter.  Jung et al. describe their investigations this way: “Here, the origin and predictability of the unusual winter of 2009/10 are explored through numerical experimentation with the ECMWF Monthly forecasting system. More specifically, the role of anomalies in sea surface temperature (SST) and sea ice, the tropical atmospheric circulation, the stratospheric polar vortex, solar insolation and near surface temperature (proxy for snow cover) are examined.”

Here is what they found after running their series of experiments.

Arctic sea ice and sea surface temperature anomalies.  These are often associated with global warming caused by people. Finding:  “These results suggest that neither SST nor sea ice anomalies explain the negative phase of the NAO during the 2009/10 winter.”

(NAO are the commonly used initials for the North Atlantic Oscillation – and atmospheric circulation pattern that can act to influence winter weather in the eastern U.S. and western Europe. A negative phase of the NAO is associated with cold and stormy weather and during the winter of 2009-10, the NAO value was the lowest ever observed.)

A global warming-induced weakening stratospheric (upper-atmosphere) jetstream. “Like for the other experiments, these stratospheric relaxation experiments fail to reproduce the magnitude of the observed NAO anomaly.”

Siberian snow cover.  “The resulting [upper air patterns] show little resemblance with the observations…. The implied weak role of snow cover anomalies is consistent with other research….”

Solar variability.  “The experiments carried out in this study suggest that the impact of anomalously low incoming [ultraviolet] radiation on the tropospheric circulation in the North Atlantic region are very small… suggesting that the unusually low solar activity contributed little, if any, to the observed NAO anomaly during the 2009/10 winter.”

Ok then, well what did cause the unusual weather patterns during the 2009-10 winter?

The results of this study, therefore, increase the likelihood that both the development and persistence of negative NAO phase resulted from internal atmospheric dynamical processes.

Translation: Random variability.

To drive this finding home, here’s another soon-to-be-released paper (D’Arrigo et al., 2001) that uses tree ring-based reconstructions of atmospheric circulation patterns and finds a similar set of conditions (including a negative NAO value second only to the 2009-10 winter) was responsible for the historically harsh winter of 1783-84 in the eastern U.S. and western Europe, which  was widely noted by historians. It followed the stupendous eruption of the Icelandic volcano Laki the previous summer. The frigid and snowy winter conditions have been blamed on the volcano. In fact, Benjamin Franklin even commented as much.

But in their new study, Roseanne D’Arrigo and colleagues conclude that the harshness of that winter primarily was the result of anomalous atmospheric circulation patterns that closely resembled those observed during the winter of 2009-10, and that the previous summer’s volcanic eruption played a far less prominent role:

Our results suggest that Franklin and others may have been mistaken in attributing winter conditions in 1783-4 mainly to Laki or another eruption, rather than unforced variability.

Similarly, conditions during the 2009-10 winter likely resulted from natural [atmospheric] variability, not tied to greenhouse gas forcing… Evidence thus suggests that these winters were linked to the rare but natural occurrence of negative NAO and El Niño events.

The point is that natural variability can and does produce extreme events on every time scale, from days (e.g., individual storms), weeks (e.g., the Russian heat wave), months (e.g., the winter of 2009-10), decades (e.g., the lack of global warming since 1998), centuries (e.g., the Little Ice Age), millennia (e.g., the cycle of major Ice Ages), and eons (e.g., snowball earth).

Folks would do well to keep this in mind next time global warming is being posited for the weather disaster du jour. Almost assuredly, it is all hype and little might.

Too bad these results weren’t given a “hearing” in the House!

References:

D’Arrigo, R., et al., 2011. The anomalous winter of 1783-1784: Was the Laki eruption or an analog of the 2009–2010 winter to blame? Geophysical Research Letters, in press.

Dole, R., et al., 2011. Was there a basis for anticipating the 2010 Russian heat wave? Geophysical Research Letters, in press.

Jung et al., 2011. Origin and predictability of the extreme negative NAO winter of 2009/10. Geophysical Research Letters, in press.

Min, S-K., et al., 2011. Human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes. Nature, 470, 378-381.

Pall, P., et al., 2011. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas contribution to flood risk in England and Wales in autumn 2000. Nature, 470, 382-386.

The Current Wisdom: Overplaying the Human Contribution to Recent Weather Extremes is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As Congress debates cap-and-trade, new fuel standards, and subsidies for “green” companies, some still feel that political solutions to global warming are not moving fast enough. In the present case, American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut, eight states and New York City sued several public utilities (including the federal Tennessee Valley Authority), alleging that their carbon dioxide emissions contribute to global warming.

This is the third major lawsuit to push global warming into the courts (another being Comer v. Murphy Oil USA, in which Cato also filed a brief). All of these suits try to use the common law doctrine of nuisance—which, for example, lets you sue your neighbor if his contaminated water flows onto your land and kills your lawn—to attack carbon emitters. None of them had gotten very far until the Second Circuit vacated a lower-court ruling and allowed the claims here to proceed.

But the judiciary was not meant to be the sole method for resolving grievances with the government—even if everything looks like a nail to lawyers who only have a hammer. After all, there are two other co-equal branches, the legislative and executive, which are constitutionally committed to unique roles in our system of separation of powers. The doctrine of “standing” exists in part to ensure that the judiciary is not used to solve issues that properly belong to those other branches. Toward this end, the Constitution allows courts to hear only actual “cases or controversies” that can feasibly be resolved by a court.

Cato thus filed a brief supporting the defendant utilities’ successful request for Supreme Court review, and has now filed another brief supporting their position before the Court. Cato’s latest brief first argues that no judicial solution is possible here because the chain of causation between the defendants’ carbon emissions and the alleged harm caused by global warming is so attenuated that it resembles the famed “butterfly effect.” Just as butterflies should not be sued for causing tsunamis, a handful of utility companies in the Northeastern United States should not be sued for the complex (and disputed) harms of global warming.

Second, we contend that, even if the plaintiffs can demonstrate causation, it is unconstitutional for courts to make nuanced policy decisions that should be left to the legislature—and this is true regardless of the science of global warming. Just as it’s improper for a legislature to pass a statute punishing a particular person (bill of attainder), it’s beyond courts’ constitutional authority—under the “political question doctrine”—to determine wide-ranging policies in which numerous considerations must be weighed in anything but an adversarial litigation process.

If a court were to adjudicate the claims here and issue an order dictating emissions standards, two things will happen: 1) the elected branches will be encouraged to abdicate to the courts their responsibilities for addressing complex and controversial policy issues, and 2) an already difficult situation would become nearly intractable as regulatory agencies and legislative actors butt heads with court orders issued across the country in quickly multiplying global warming cases. These inevitable outcomes are precisely why the standing and political question doctrines exist.

Dissatisfaction with the decisions and pace of government does not give someone the right to sue over anything. Or, as Chief Justice Marshall once said, “If the judicial power extended to every question under the laws of the United States . . . [t]he division of power [among the branches of government] could exist no longer, and the other departments would be swallowed up by the judiciary.”

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut on April 19.

Special thanks to Trevor Burrus, who contributed to this post.

Supreme Court Takes Up Butterfly Effect is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.

The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.

***********

It seems like everyone, from exalted climate scientists to late-night amateur tweeters, can get a bit over-excited about short-term fluctuations, reading into them deep cosmic and political meaning, when they are likely the statistical hiccups of our mathematically surly atmosphere.

There’s been some major errors in forecasts of recent trends. Perhaps the most famous  were made by NASA’s James Hansen in 1988, who overestimated warming between then and now by a whopping 40% or so.

But it is easy to  get snookered by short-term fluctuations.  As shown in Figure 1, it is quite obvious that there has been virtually no net change in temperature since 1997, allowing for the fact that measurement errors in global average surface temperature are easily a tenth of a degree or more. (The magnitude of those errors will be considered in a future Current Wisdom).

Figure 1. Annual global average surface temperature anomaly (°C), 1997-2010 (data source: Hadley Center).

Some who are concerned about environmental regulation without good science have seized upon this 13-year stretch as “proof” that there is no such thing as global warming driven by carbon dioxide.  More on that at the end of this Wisdom.

Similarly, periods of seemingly rapid warming can prompt scientists to see changes where there aren’t any.

Consider a landmark paper published in 2000 in Geophysical Research Letters by Tom Karl, a prominent researcher who is the head of our National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and who just finished a stint as President of the American Meteorological Society.  He couldn’t resist the climatic blip that was occurred prior  to the current stagnation of warming, namely the very warm episode of the late 1990s. 

Cooler heads at the time noted that it was an artifact of the great El Nino of 1997-98, a periodic warming of the tropical Pacific that has been coming and going for millions of years. 

Nonetheless, the paper was published and accompanied by a flashy press release titled “Global warming may be accelerating.”  

What Karl did was to examine the 16 consecutive months of record-high temperatures (beginning in May, 1997) and to calculate the chance that this could happen, given the fairly pokey warming rate—approximately 0.17°C (0.31°F) per  decade, that was occurring.  He concluded there was less than a five percent probability, unless the warming rate had suddenly increased.

From the press release:

Karl and colleagues conclude that there is only a small chance that the string of record high temperatures in 1997-98 was simply an unusual event, rather than a change point, the start of a new and faster ongoing trend.

He also gave a number:  “…the probability of observing the record temperatures is more likely with high average rates of warming, around 3°C [5.4°F]/century,” which works out to 0.3°C per decade.

Our Figure 2 shows what was probabilistically forecast beginning in May, 1997, and what actually happened.  Between then and now, according to this paper, global temperatures should have warmed around 0.4°C (0.7°F).  The observed warming rate for the last 13.5 years—which includes the dramatically warming temperatures beginning in 1997—was a paltry 0.06°C (0.11°F) per decade. 

Figure 2. Prior to mid-1997, the observed warming trend (dashed line) was 0.17°/decade.  Karl said there was a greater than 95% probability that 1997-8 would mark a “change point”, where warming would accelerate to around 0.30°/decade.  Since then, the rate has been 0.06°/decade, or 20% of what was forecast.

Karl did provide some statistical wiggle room.  While noting the less than 5% chance that the warming rate hadn’t increased, he wrote that “unusual events can occur” and that there still was a chance (given as less than 5%) that 97-98 was just a statistical hiccup, which it ultimately proved to be.

The press release couldn’t resist the “it’s worse than we thought” mindset that pervades climate science:

Since completing the research, the data for 1999 has been compiled.  The researchers found that 1999 was the fifth warmest year on record, although as a La Nina year it would normally be cooler” [than what?ed].

“La Nina” is cool phase of El Nino, which drops temperatures about as much as El Nino raises them. What the press release and the GRL paper completely neglected to mention is that the great warm year of 1998 was a result of the “natural”  El Nino superimposed upon the overall slight warming trend.

In other words, there was every reason to believe at that time that the anomalous temperatures were indeed a statistical blip resulting from a very high-amplitude version of a natural oscillation in the earth’s climate that occurred every few years.

Now, back to the last 13 years. The puny recent changes may also just be our atmosphere’s make-up call for the sudden warming of the late 1990s, or another hiccup.

It is characteristic for climate models whose carbon dioxide increase resembles that which is being observed to produce constant rates of warming.  There’s a good reason for this.  Temperature responds logarithmically—i.e.less and less—to changes in this gas as its concentration increases.  But the concentration tends to increase exponentially—i.e. more and more.  The combination of an increasingly damped response to an ever increasing rate of input tends to resemble a straight line, or a constant rate of warming.

Indeed, Karl noted in his paper (and I have noted in virtually every public lecture I give), that “projections of temperature change in the next [i.e. the 21^st] century, using [the United Nations’] business as usual scenarios…have relatively constant rates of global temperature increase”.  It’s just that their constant rates tend to be higher than the one that is being observed.  The average rate of warming predicted for this century by the UN is about 2.5°C, while the observed value has been, as predicted, constant—but with a lower value of 1.7°.  As Figure 3 shows, this rate has been remarkably constant for over three decades.

Figure 3. Annual global average surface temperature anomaly (°C), 1976-2010 (data source: Hadley Center).  It’s hard to imagine a more constant trend, despite the 1998 peak and the subsequent torpid warming.

The bottom line is that short-term trends are not your friends when talking about long-term climate change.

References

Hansen, J.E., et al., 1988. Global climate changes as forecast by Goddard Institute for Space Studies three-dimensional model. Journal of Geophysical Research, 93, 9341-9364.

Karl, T. R., R. W. Knight, and B. Baker, 2000. The record breaking global temperatures of 1997 and 1998” Evidence for an increase in the rate of global warming? Geophysical Research Letters, 27, 719-722.

Michaels, P. J., and P. C. Knappenberger, 2009. Scientific Shortcomings in the EPA’s Endangerment Finding from Greenhouse Gases, Cato Journal, 29, 497-521, http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj29n3/cj29n3-8.pdf.

The Current Wisdom: The Short-Term Climate Trend Is Not Your Friend is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.

The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.

Better Model, Less Warming

Bet you haven’t seen this one on TV:  A newer, more sophisticated climate model has lost more than 25% of its predicted warming!  You can bet that if it had predicted that much more warming it would have made the local paper.

The change resulted from a more realistic simulation of the way clouds work, resulting in a major reduction in the model’s “climate sensitivity,” which is the amount of warming predicted for a doubling of  the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide over what it was prior to the industrial revolution.

Prior to the modern era, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, as measured in air trapped in ice in the high latitudes (which can be dated year-by-year) was pretty constant, around 280 parts per million (ppm).  No wonder CO₂ is called a “trace gas”—there really is not much of it around.

The current concentration is pushing about 390 ppm, an increase of about 40% in 250 years.  This is a pretty good indicator of the amount of “forcing” or warming pressure that we are exerting on the atmosphere.  Yes, there are other global warming gases going up, like the chlorofluorocarbons (refrigerants now banned by treaty), but the modern climate religion is that these are pretty much being cancelled by reflective  “aerosol” compounds that go in the air along with the combustion of fossil fuels, mainly coal.

Most projections have carbon dioxide doubling to a nominal 600 ppm somewhere in the second half of this century, absent no major technological changes (which history tells us is a very shaky assumption).  But the “sensitivity” is not reached as soon as we hit the doubling, thanks to the fact that it takes a lot of time to warm the ocean (like it takes a lot of time to warm up a big pot of water with a small burner).

So the “sensitivity” is much closer to the temperature rise that a model projects about 100 years from now – assuming (again, shakily) that we ultimately switch to power sources that don’t release dreaded CO₂ into the atmosphere somewhere around the time its concentration doubles.

The bottom line is that lower sensitivity means less future warming as a result of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. So our advice… keep on working on the models, eventually, they may actually arrive at something close puny rate of warming that is being observed

At any rate, improvements to the Japanese-developed Model for Interdisciplinary Research on Climate (MIROC) are the topic of a new paper by Masahiro Watanabe and colleagues in the current issue of the Journal of Climate. This modeling group has been working on a new version of their model (MIROC5) to be used in the upcoming 5^th Assessment Report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due in late 2013. Two incarnations of the previous version (MIROC3.2) were included in the IPCC’s 4^th Assessment Report (2007) and contribute to the IPCC “consensus” of global warming projections.

The high resolution version (MIROC3.2(hires)) was quite a doozy – responsible for far and away the greatest projected global temperature rise (see Figure 1). And the medium resolution model (MIROC3.2(medres)) is among the Top 5 warmest models. Together, the two MIROC models undoubtedly act to increase the overall model ensemble mean warming projection and expand the top end of the “likely” range of temperature rise.

FIGURE 1

Global temperature projections under the “midrange” scenario for greenhouse-gas emissions produced by the IPCC’s collection of climate models.  The MIROC high resolution model (MIROC3.2(hires)) is clearly the hottest one, and the medium range one isn’t very far behind.

The reason that the MIROC3.2 versions produce so much warming is that their  sensitivity is very high, with the high-resolution  at 4.3°C (7.7°F) and the medium-resolution  at  4.0°C (7.2°F).  These sensitivities are very near the high end of the distribution of climate sensitivities from the IPCC’s collection of models (see Figure 2).

FIGURE 2

Equilibrium climate sensitivities of the models used in the IPCC AR4 (with the exception of the MIROC5). The MIROC3.2 sensitivities are highlighted in red and lie near the upper und of the collection of model sensitivities.  The new, improved, MIROC5, which was not included in the IPCC AR4, is highlighted in magenta, and lies near the low end of the model climate sensitivities (data from IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Table 8.2 and Watanabe et al., 2010).

Note that the highest sensitivity is not necessarily in the hottest model, as observed warming is dependent upon how the model deals with the slowness of the oceans to warm.

The situation is vastly different in the new MIROC5 model.  Watanabe et al. report that the climate sensitivity is now  2.6°C (4.7°F) – more than 25% less than in the previous version on the model.[1] If the MIROC5 had been included in the IPCC’s AR4 collection of models, its climate sensitivity of 2.6°C would have been found near the low end of the distribution (see Figure 2), rather than pushing the high extreme as MIROC3.2 did.

And to what do we owe this large decline in the modeled climate sensitivity?  According to Watanabe et al., a vastly improved handling of cloud processes involving “a prognostic treatment for the cloud water and ice mixing ratio, as well as the cloud fraction, considering both warm and cold rain processes.”  In fact, the improved cloud scheme—which produces clouds which compare more favorably with satellite observations—projects that under a warming climate low altitude clouds become a negative feedback rather than acting as positive feedback as the old version of the model projected.[2] Instead of enhancing the CO2-induced warming, low clouds are now projected to retard it.

Here is how Watanabe et al. describe their results:

A new version of the global climate model MIROC was developed for better simulation of the mean climate, variability, and climate change due to anthropogenic radiative forcing….

MIROC5 reveals an equilibrium climate sensitivity of 2.6K, which is 1K lower than that in MIROC3.2(medres)…. This is probably because in the two versions, the response of low clouds to an increasing concentration of CO2 is opposite; that is, low clouds decrease (increase) at low latitudes in MIROC3.2(medres) (MIROC5).[3]

Is the new MIROC model perfect? Certainly not.  But is it better than the old one? It seems quite likely.  And the net result of the model improvements is that the climate sensitivity and therefore the warming projections (and resultant impacts) have been significantly lowered. And much of this lowering comes as the handling of cloud processes—still among the most uncertain of climate processes—is improved upon. No doubt such improvements will continue into the future as both our scientific understanding and our computational abilities increase.

Will this lead to an even greater reduction in climate sensitivity and projected temperature rise?  There are many folks out there (including this author) that believe this is a very distinct possibility, given that observed warming in recent decades is clearly beneath the average predicted by climate models. Stay tuned!

References:

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007.  Fourth Assessment Report, Working Group 1 report, available at http://www.ipcc.ch.

Watanabe, M., et al., 2010. Improved climate simulation by MIROC5: Mean states, variability, and climate sensitivity. Journal of Climate, 23, 6312-6335.

[2] Whether enhanced cloudiness enhances or cancels carbon-dioxide warming is one of the core issues in the climate debate, and is clearly not “settled” science.

[3] Degrees Kelvin (K) are the same as degrees Celsius (C) when looking at relative, rather than absolute temperatures.

The Current Wisdom: Better Model, Less Warming is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.

The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.

History to Repeat:  Greenland’s Ice to Survive, United Nations to Continue Holiday Party

This year’s installment of the United Nations’ annual climate summit (technically known as the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change) has come and gone in Cancun. Nothing substantial came of it policy-wise; just the usual attempts by the developing world to shake down our already shaky economy in the name of climate change.   News-wise probably the biggest story was that during the conference, Cancun broke an all time daily low temperature record.  Last year’s confab in Copenhagen was pelted by snowstorms and subsumed in miserable cold.  President Obama attended, failed to forge any meaningful agreement, and fled back to beat a rare Washington blizzard. He lost.

But surely as every holiday season now includes one of these enormous jamborees, dire climate stories appeared daily.  Polar bear cubs are endangered!  Glaciers are melting!!

Or so beat the largely overhyped drums, based upon this or that press release from Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund.

And, of course, no one bothered to mention a blockbuster paper appearing in Nature the day before the end of the Cancun confab, which reassures us that Greenland’s ice cap and glaciers are a lot more stable than alarmists would have us believe.  That would include Al Gore, fond of his lurid maps showing the melting all of Greenland’s ice submerging Florida.

Ain’t gonna happen.

The disaster scenario goes like this:  Summer temperatures in Greenland are warming, leading to increased melting and the formation of ephemeral lakes on the ice surface.  This water eventually finds a crevasse and then a way down thousands of feet to the bottom of a glacier, where it lubricates the underlying surface, accelerating the seaward march of the ice.  Increase the temperature even more and massive amounts deposit into the ocean by the year 2100, catastrophically raising sea levels.

According to Christian Schoof of the University of British Columbia (UBC), “The conventional view has been that meltwater permeates the ice from the surface and pools under the base of the ice sheet….This water then serves as a lubricant between the glacier and the earth underneath it….”

And, according to Schoof, that’s just not the way things work. A UBC press release about his Nature article noted that he found that “a steady meltwater supply from gradual warming may in fact slow down the glacier flow, while sudden water input could cause glaciers to speed up and spread.”

Indeed, Schoof finds that sudden water inputs, such as would occur with heavy rain, are responsible for glacial accelerations, but these last only one or a few days.

The bottom line?  A warming climate has very little to do with accelerating ice flow, but weather events do.

How important is this?  According to University of Leeds Professor Andrew Shepherd, who studies glaciers via satellite, “This study provides an elegant solution to one of the two key ice sheet instability problems” noted by the United Nations in their last (2007) climate compendium.  “It turns out that, contrary to popular belief, Greenland ice sheet flow might not be accelerated by increased melting after all,” he added.

I’m not so sure that those who hold the “popular belief” can explain why Greenland’s ice didn’t melt away thousands of years ago.  For millennia, after the end of the last ice age (approximately 11,000 years ago) strong evidence indicates that the Eurasian arctic averaged nearly 13°F warmer in July than it is now.

That’s because there are trees buried and preserved in the acidic Siberian tundra, and they can be carbon dated.  Where there is no forest today—because it’s too cold in summer—there were trees, all the way to the Arctic Ocean and even on some of the remote Arctic islands that are bare today. And, back then, thanks to the remnants of continental ice, the Arctic Ocean was smaller and the North American and Eurasian landmasses extended further north.

That work was by Glen MacDonald, from UCLA’s Geography Department. In his landmark 2000 paper in Quaternary Research, he noted that the only way that the Arctic could become so warm is for there to be a massive incursion of warm water from the Atlantic Ocean.  The only “gate” through which that can flow is the Greenland Strait, between Greenland and Scandinavia.

So, Greenland had to have been warmer for several millennia, too.

Now let’s do a little math to see if the “popular belief” about Greenland ever had any basis in reality.

In 2009 University of Copenhagen’s B. M. Vinther and 13 coauthors published the definitive history of Greenland climate back to the ice age, studying ice cores taken over the entire landmass. An  exceedingly conservative interpretation of  their results is that Greenland was 1.5°C (2.7°F) warmer for the period from 5,000-9000 years ago, which is also the warm period in Eurasia that MacDonald detected.  The integrated warming is given by multiplying the time (4,000 years) by the warming (1.5°), and works out (in Celsius) to 6,000 “degree-years.” 

Now let’s assume that our dreaded emissions of carbon dioxide spike the temperature there some 4°C.  Since we cannot burn fossil fuel forever, let’s put this in over 200 years.  That’s a pretty liberal estimate given that the temperature there still hasn’t exceeded values seen before in the 20^th century.  Anyway, we get 800 (4 x 200) degree-years.

If the ice didn’t come tumbling off Greenland after 6,000 degree-years, how is it going to do so after only 800?  The integrated warming of Greenland in the post-ice-age warming (referred to as the “climatic optimum” in textbooks published prior to global warming hysteria) is over seven times what humans can accomplish in 200 years.  Why do we even worry about this?

So we can all sleep a bit better.  Florida will survive.  And, we can also rest assured that the UN will continue its outrageous holiday parties, accomplishing nothing, but living large.  Next year’s is in Durban, South Africa, yet another remote warm spot hours of Jet-A away.

References:

MacDonald, G. M., et al., 2000.  Holocene treeline history and climatic change across Northern Eurasia.  Quaternary Research 53, 302-311.

Schoof, C., 2010. Ice-sheet acceleration driven by melt supply variability. Nature 468, 803-805.

Vinther, B.M., et al., 2009.  Holocene thinning of the Greenland ice sheet. Nature 461, 385-388.

The Current Wisdom is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

November’s Scientific American features a profile of Georgia Tech atmospheric scientist Judith Curry,  who has committed the mortal sin of  reaching out to other scientists who hypothesize that global warming isn’t the disaster it’s been cracked up to be.  I have personal experience with this, as she invited me to give a research seminar in Tech’s prestigious School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in 2008.  My lecture summarizing the reasons for doubting the apocalyptic synthesis of climate change was well-received by an overflow crowd.

Written by Michael Lemonick, who hails from the shrill blog Climate Central, the article isn’t devoid of the usual swipes, calling her a “heretic,, which is hardly at all true.  She’s simply another hardworking scientist who lets the data take her wherever it must, even if that leads her to question some of our more alarmist colleagues. 

But, as a make-up call for calling attention to Curry, Scientific American has run a poll of its readers on climate change.  Remember that SciAm has been shilling for the climate apocalypse for years, publishing a particularly vicious series of attacks on Denmark’s Bjorn Lomborg’s Skeptical Environmentalist.  The magazine also featured NASA’s James Hansen and his outlandish claims on sea-level rise. Hansen has stated, under oath in a deposition, that a twenty foot rise is quite possible within the next 89 years; oddly, he has failed to note that in 1988 he predicted that the West Side Highway in Manhattan would go permanently under water in twenty years.

SciAm probably expected a lot of people would agree with the key statement in their poll that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is “an effective group of government representatives and other experts.”

Hardly. As of this morning, only 16% of the 6655 respondents agreed.  84%—that is not a typo—described the IPCC as “a corrupt organization, prone to groupthink, with a political agenda.” 

The poll also asks “What should we do about climate change?” 69% say “nothing, we are powerless to stop it.” When asked about policy options, an astonishingly low 7% support cap-and-trade, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in June, 2009, and cost approximately two dozen congressmen their seats.

The real killer is question “What is causing climate change?” For this one, multiple answers are allowed.  26% said greenhouse gases from human activity, 32% solar variation, and 78% “natural processes.” (In reality all three are causes of climate change.)

And finally, “How much would you be willing to pay to forestall the risk of catastrophic climate change?”  80% of the respondents said “nothing.”

Remember that this comes from what is hardly a random sample.  Scientific American is a reliably statist publication and therefore appeals to a readership that is skewed to the left of the political center.  This poll demonstrates that virtually everyone now acknowledges that the UN has corrupted climate science, that climate change is impossible to stop, and that futile attempts like cap-and-trade do nothing but waste money and burn political capital, things that Cato’s scholars have been saying for years.

The Shocking Truth: The Scientific American Poll on Climate Change is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

NOTE:  This is the first in a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.

The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.

The Iceman Goeth:  Good News from Greenland and Antarctica

How many of us have heard that global sea level will be about a meter—more than three feet—higher in 2100 than it was in the year 2000?  There are even scarier stories, circulated by NASA’s James E. Hansen, that the rise may approach 6 meters, altering shorelines and inundating major cities and millions of coastal inhabitants worldwide.

Figure 1. Model from a travelling climate change exhibit (currently installed at the Field Museum of natural history in Chicago) of Lower Manhattan showing what 5 meters (16 feet) of sea level rise will look like.

Researchers and the media need to stop suggesting that Manhattan or even Miami will be lost to a rising sea. That’s not realistic; it promotes denial and panic, not a reasoned consideration of the future.

Titus was commenting upon his 2009 publication on sea-level rise in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The number one rule of grabbing attention for global warming is to never let the facts stand in the way of a good horror story, so advice like Titus’s is usually ignored.

The catastrophic sea level rise proposition is built upon the idea that large parts of the ice fields that lay atop Greenland and Antarctica will rapidly melt and slip into the sea as temperatures there rise.  Proponents of this idea claim that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its most recent (2007) Assessment Report,  was far too conservative in its projections of future sea level rise—the mean value of which is a rise by the year 2100 of about 15 inches.

In fact, contrary to virtually all news coverage, the IPCC actually anticipates that Antarctica will gain ice mass (and lower sea level) as the climate warms, since the temperature there is too low to produce much melting even if it warms up several degrees, while the warmer air holds more moisture and therefore precipitates more snow. The IPCC projects Greenland to contribute a couple of inches of sea level rise as ice melts around its periphery.

Alarmist critics claim that the IPCC’s projections are based only on direct melt estimates rather than “dynamic” responses of the glaciers and ice fields to rising temperatures.

These include Al Gore’s favorite explanation—that melt water from the surface percolates down to the bottom of the glacier and lubricates its base, increasing flow and ultimately ice discharge. Alarmists like Gore and Hansen claim that Greenland and Antarctica’s glaciers will then “surge” into the sea, dumping an ever-increasing volume of ice and raising water levels worldwide.

The IPCC did not include this mechanism because it is very hypothetical and not well understood.  Rather, new science argues that the IPCC’s minuscule projections of sea level rise from these two great ice masses are being confirmed.

About a year ago, several different research teams reported that while glaciers may surge from time to time and increase ice discharge rates, these surges are not long-lived and that basal lubrication is not a major factor in these surges. One research group, led by Faezeh Nick and colleagues reported that “our modeling does not support enhanced basal lubrication as the governing process for the observed changes.” Nick and colleagues go on to find that short-term rapid increases in discharge rates are not stable and that “extreme mass loss cannot be dynamically maintained in the long term” and ultimately concluding that “[o]ur results imply that the recent rates of mass loss in Greenland’s outlet glaciers are transient and should not be extrapolated into the future.”

But this is actually old news. The new news is that the commonly-reported (and commonly hyped) satellite estimates of mass loss from both Greenland and Antarctica were a result of improper calibration, overestimating ice loss by  some 50%.

As with any new technology, it takes a while to get all the kinks worked out. In the case of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite-borne instrumentation, one of the major problems is interpreting just what exactly the satellites are measuring. When trying to ascertain mass changes (for instance, from ice loss) from changes in the earth’s gravity field, you first have to know how the actual land under the ice is vertically moving (in many places it is still slowly adjusting from the removal of the glacial ice load from the last ice age).

The latest research by a team led by Xiaoping Wu from Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory concludes that the adjustment models that were being used by previous researchers working with the GRACE data didn’t do that great of a job. Wu and colleagues enhanced the existing models by incorporating land movements from a network of GPS sensors, and employing more sophisticated statistics. What they found has been turning heads.

Using the GRACE measurements and the improved model, the new estimates of the rates of ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica  are only about half as much as the old ones.

Instead of Greenland losing ~230 gigatons of ice each year since 2002, the new estimate is 104 Gt/yr. And for Antarctica, the old estimate of ~150 Gt/yr has been modified to be about 87 Gt/yr.

 How does this translate into sea level rise?

 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 temperature,  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.

 This is about 1/3^rd of the 1 meter estimates and 1/20^th of the 6 meter estimates.

Things had better get cooking in a hurry if the real world is going to approach these popular estimates. And there are no signs that such a move is underway.

So far, the 21^st century has been pretty much of a downer for global warming alarmists. Not only has the earth been warming at a rate considerably less than the average rate projected by climate models, but now the sea level rise is suffering a similar fate.

Little wonder that political schemes purporting to save us from these projected (non)calamities are also similarly failing to take hold.

References:

Nick, F. M., et al., 2009. Large-scale changes in Greenland outlet glacier dynamics triggered at the terminus. Nature Geoscience, DOI:10.1038, published on-line January 11, 2009.

Titus, J.G., et al., 2009. State and Local Governments Plan for Development of Most Land Vulnerable to Rising Sea Level along the U.S. Atlantic Coast, Environmental Research Letters 4 044008. (doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/4/4/044008).

Wu, X., et al., 2010. Simultaneous estimation of global present-day water treansport and glacial isostatic adjustment. Nature Geoscience, published on-line August 15, 2010, doi: 10.1038/NGE0938.

The Current Wisdom is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I see that my colleague Sallie James has already blogged on the inherent protectionism in the Senate’s long-awaited cap-and-tax bill.  A summary was leaked last night by The Hill.

Well, we now have the real “discussion draft” of  “The American Power Act” [APA], sponsored by John Kerry (D-NH) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT).  Lindsay Graham (R-SC) used to be on the earlier drafts, but excused himself to have a temper tantrum.

So, while Sallie talked about the trade aspects of the bill, I’d like to blather about the mechanics, costs, and climate effects. If you don’t want to read the excruciating details, stop here and note that it mandates the impossible, will not produce any meaningful reduction of planetary warming, and it will subsidize just about every form of power that is too inefficient to compete today.

APA reduces emissions to the same levels that were in the Waxman-Markey bill passed by the House last June 26.  Remember that one — snuck through on a Friday evening, just so no one would notice?  Well, people did, and it, not health care, started the angry townhall meetings last summer.  No accident, either, that Obama’s approval ratings immediately tanked.

Just like Waxman-Markey, APA will allow the average American the carbon dioxide emissions of the average citizen back in 1867, a mere 39 years from today.  Just like Waxman-Markey, the sponsors have absolutely no idea how to accomplish this.  Instead they wave magic wands for noncompetitive technologies like “Carbon Capture and Sequestration” (“CCS”, aka “clean coal”), solar energy and windmills, and ethanol (“renewable energy”), among many others.

Just like Waxman-Markey, no one knows the (enormous) cost.  How do you put a price on something that doesn’t exist?  We simply don’t know how to reduce emissions by 83%.  Consequently, APA is yet another scheme to make carbon-based energy so expensive that you won’t use it.

This will be popular!  At $4.00 a gallon, Americans reduced their consumption of gasoline by a whopping 4%.  Go figure out how high it has to get to drop by 83%.

Oh, I know. Plug-in hybrid cars will replace gasoline powered ones. Did I mention that the government-produced Chevrolet Volt is, at first, only going to be sold to governments and where it is warm because even the Obama Administration fears that the car will not be very popular where most of us live.  Did I mention that the electric power that charges the battery most likely comes from the combustion of a carbon-based fuel? Getting to that 83% requires getting rid of carbon emissions from power production.  Period.  In 39 years. Got a replacement handy?

Don’t trot out natural gas.  It burns to carbon dioxide and water, just like coal.  True, it’s about 55% of the carbon dioxide that comes from coal per unit energy, but we’ll also use a lot more more electricity over the next forty years.  In other words, switching to natural gas will keep adding emissions to the atmosphere.

Anyway, just for fun, I plugged the APA emissions reduction schedule into the Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-gas Induced Climate Change (MAGICC — I am not making this up), which is what the United Nations uses to estimate the climatic effects of various greenhouse-gas scenarios.

I’ve included two charts with three scenarios. One is for 2050 and the other for 2100.  They assume that the “sensitivity” of temperature to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide is 2.5°C, a number that many scientists think is too high, given the pokey greenhouse-effect warming of the planet that has occurred as we have effectively gone half way to a doubling already. The charts show prospective warming given by MAGICC.

The first scenario is “business-as-usual”, the perhaps too-optimistic way of saying a nation without APA.  The second assumes that only the US does APA, and the third assumes that each and every nation that has “obligations” under the UN’s Kyoto Protocol on global warming does the same.

As you can plainly see,  APA does nothing, even if all the Kyoto-signatories meet its impossible mandates.  The amount of warming “saved” by 2100 is 7% of the total for Business-as-Usual, or two-tenths of a degree Celsius. That amount will be barely detectable above the year-to-year normal fluctuations.  Put another way, if we believe in MAGICC, APA — if adopted by us, Europe, Canada, and the rest of the Kyotos — will reduce the prospective temperature in 2100 to what it would be in 2093.

That’s a big if.  Of course, we could go it alone. In that case, the temperature reduction would in fact be too small to measure reliably.

I’m hoping these numbers surface in the “debate” over APA.

So there you have it, the new American Power Act, a bill that doesn’t know how to achieve its mandates, has a completely unknown but astronomical cost, and doesn’t do a darned thing about global warming.  Such a deal!

Kerry and Lieberman Unveil Their Climate Bill: Such a Deal! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Kerry-Lieberman-Graham (is he still part of these efforts?) climate bill summary has been leaked. I’m sure my colleague Pat Michaels will weigh in on its contents soon, but in the meantime I thought I would comment on the trade-related aspects of the bill, or at least the summary that is now in the public domain.

As Scott Lincicome points out, the drafters have gone to great pains to emphasize that this bill is, like, totally about saving the environment.  (Which, by the way, is a bit of a turnaround). I’ve blogged before about why advocates of “border adjustment measures” need to be careful about the justification they offer.  In short, the World Trade Organization does not look too kindly upon disguised protectionism, and any legal challengers would probably use things like, say, press releases touting the (traditional) protective benefits of carbon tariffs as evidence of U.S. wrongdoing. The House bill fell short in that regard, with lots of talk about equalizing costs etc, and apparently the sponsors of the Senate bill have learned from warnings from trade experts. Not completely, though. Here’s Scott on their efforts to be more careful, and why they fall short:

The bill’s short summary (available here) also follows [a] new “green” road-map…:

In order to protect the environmental goals of the bill, we phase in a WTO-consistent border adjustment mechanism. In the event that no global agreement on climate change is reached, the bill requires imports from countries that have not taken action to limit emissions to pay a comparable amount at the border to avoid carbon leakage and ensure we are able to achieve our environmental objectives.

You couldn’t shoehorn more “environmental” references into this summary if you tried.  Only one small problem: this strictly “environmental” summary falls clearly under the main heading “Expanding America’s Manufacturing Base,” and the long summary of Sections 775-777 above comes under the main heading “Subtitle A – Protecting American Manufacturing Jobs and Preventing Carbon Leakage.”  So did the Senate drafters really just take all that time purging all of the scary “competitiveness” language from their new bill’s carbon tariffs provisions, only to keep them under a legislative subtitle that expressly denotes provisions dealing with domestic industrial competitiveness?

Scott’s right, but I found the heading in the bill’s long summary even more blatant: Title IV, under which the international provisions are explained, is called “Job Protection and Growth”. Call me overly cautious, but I don’t think having the phrase “job protection” as the first words in the title on border measures is a good way to hide your intent from the WTO or, for that matter, your increasingly-fractious trade partners.

Senate Climate Bill Trade FAIL is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last October, I blogged about Comer v. Murphy Oil USA, a lawsuit in Mississippi alleging that the defendant oil, coal, utility, and chemical companies emit carbon dioxide, which causes global warming, which exacerbated Hurricane Katrina, which damaged the plaintiffs’ property.  Mass tort litigation specialist Russell Jackson called the case “the litigator’s equivalent to the game ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.’”  In a brief that Cato was due to file this week, I framed the operative question as, “When a butterfly flaps its wings, can it be sued for the damage any subsequent tsunami causes?”

The plaintiffs asserted a variety of theories under Mississippi common law, but the main issue at this stage was whether the plaintiffs had standing, or whether they could demonstrate that their injuries were “fairly traceable” to the defendants’ actions.  The federal district court dismissed the case but a dream panel (for the plaintiffs) of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the plaintiffs could indeed proceed with claims regarding public and private nuisance, trespass, and negligence. 

In my blog post, I predicted that the Fifth Circuit would take up the case en banc (meaning before all the judges on the court, in this case 17) and reverse the panel.  And this was all set to happen — even though eight judges recused themselves, presumably because they owned shares of defendant companies – with en banc argument slated for May 24.  I was planning to head down to New Orleans for it, in part because the judge I clerked for, E. Grady Jolly, was going to preside over the hearing (the only two more senior active judges being recused).

But a funny thing happened on the way to legal sanity.  On Friday, not half an hour after I had finished editing Cato’s brief, the court clerk issued a notice informing the parties that one more judge had recused and, therefore, the en banc court lacked a quorum.  As of this writing, I still don’t know who this judge is and what circumstances had changed since the granting of the en banc rehearing to cause the recusal.  And indeed, by all accounts the Fifth Circuit is still figuring out what to do in this unusual (and, as far as I know, unprecedented) situation where a court loses a quorum it initially had — having already vacated the panel decision.

In short, the court could decide that the vacatur stands and either remand to a (now-confused) district court or rehear the case in a new random panel assignment.  More likely, however, the court will now reinstate the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad panel decision — and we’ll tweak our brief to make into one that supports the defendants’ inevitable cert petition.

All in all, an illustration of the absurdity both of litigating climate change politics in the courts and of forcing judges (including Supreme Court justices) to withdraw from cases for owning a few hundred dollars’ worth of stock.  If that’s all it takes to corrupt federal judges, we have bigger problems than trial lawyers run amok!

Of Butterflies, Tsunamis, and Draconian Recusal Standards is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Sen. John Kerry (D, MA) made an, er, interesting rhetorical case yesterday (as reported on E2 Wire, The Hill‘s Energy and Environment blog) that borrows heavily from the Bush playbook: your patriotism hinges on voting for his favored policy — in this case, a climate change bill. Not that the bill is really about climate change, of course. It’s about a list of goodies completely unrelated to the changing political winds:

What we are talking about is a jobs bill. It is not a climate bill. It is a jobs bill, and it is a clean air bill. It is a national security, energy independence bill,” he told reporters in the Capitol…

“And people are going to have to decide whether they are going to vote for America or against it,” he concluded.

Do You or Do You Not Hate America? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

There are numerous possible reasons for UN climate chief Yvo de Boer’s decision to resign—from his inability to cobble together a new climate treaty last December in Copenhagen (where he wept on the podium), to recent revelations of his agency’s mishandling of climate change data.

What the climate science community and the public should focus on now are the ramifications of de Boer’s resignation.  For one thing, it signals that hope is dead for a UN-brokered global treaty that would have any meaningful effect on global temperatures.  It also means that the UN intends to keep its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pretty much intact under the leadership of the scientifically compromised Rajenda Pauchari, who should have resigned along with de Boer.

This development guarantees that the Obama administration will have an unmitigated mess on its hands when signatories to the Framework Convention sit down in Mexico City this November in yet another meeting intended to produce a climate treaty.  The Mexico City meeting convenes six days after U.S. midterm elections, in which American voters are fully expected to rebuke Obama for policies including economy-crippling proposals to combat climate change.

In short, Mexico City is about as likely to produce substantive policy decisions as the TV show ‘The View.’  Backers of radical climate change measures are now paying the price for over two decades of telling the public—in this case literally—that the sky is falling.

UN Climate Official Steps In It, Then Aside is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• The massive impact government spending has on job creation.

• Why climate change spurs whining about cold snaps.

• Beware the “Crusader Temptation”: “Afghanistan has become a target of aggressive pro-war activists in America, including feminists who believe in waging war to improve the status of women.”

• What happens when the only self-identified socialist in the U.S. Senate starts to look moderate when compared to his colleagues?

• Podcast: “Bush’s Budget-Busting Binge,” featuring Chris Edwards.

Monday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Politico asks, “Was he convincing?”

My response:

In Copenhagen this morning, President Obama convinced only those who want to believe — of which, regrettably, there is no shortage.  Notice how he began, utterly without doubt:  “You would not be here unless you, like me, were convinced that this danger is real.  This is not fiction, this is science.”  The implicit certitude is no part of real science, of course.  But then the president, like the environmental zealots cheering him in Copenhagen, is not really interested in real science.  Theirs, ultimately, is a political agenda.  How else to explain the corruption of science that the East Anglia Climate Research email scandal has brought to light, and the efforts, presently, to dismiss the scandal as having no bearing on the evidence of climate change?  If that were so, then why these efforts, or the earlier suppression of contrary or mitigating evidence that is the heart of the scandal?

We find such an effort in this morning’s Washington Post, by one of those at the center of the scandal, Penn State’s Professor Michael E. Mann.  Set aside his opening gambit — “I cannot condone some things that colleagues of mine wrote or requested” — this author of the famous, now infamous, “hockey stick” article seems not to recognize himself in Climategate.  That he then goes after Sarah Palin as his critic suggests only that on a witness stand, confronted by his real critics, he’d be reduced to tears by even a mediocre lawyer.  One such real critic is my colleague, climatologist Patrick J. Michaels, who documents the scandal and its implications for science in exquisite detail in this morning’s Wall Street Journal.

But to return to the president and his speech, having uncritically subscribed to the science of global warming, Mr. Obama then lays out an ambitious policy agenda for the nation.  We will meet our responsibility, he says, by phasing out fossil fuel subsidies (which pale in comparison to the renewable energy subsidies that alone make them economically feasible), we will put our people to work increasing efficiency in our homes and buildings, and we will pursue “comprehensive legislation to transform to a clean energy economy.”

Mark that word “legislation,” because at the end of his speech the president said:  ”America has made our choice.  We have charted our course, we have made our commitments, and we will do what we say.”  But we haven’t made “our choice” — cap and trade, to take just one example, has gone nowhere in the Senate — even if Obama has made “our commitments.”  And that brings us to a fundamental question:  Can the president, with no input from a recalcitrant Congress, commit the nation to the radical economic conversion he promises?

Environmental zealots say he can.  Look at the report released last week by the Climate Law Institute’s Center for Biological Diversity, “Yes He Can: President Obama’s Power to Make an International Climate Commitment Without Waiting for Congress,” which argues that in Copenhagen Obama has all the power he needs under current law, quite apart from the will of Congress or the American people, to make a legally binding international commitment.  Unfortunately, under current law, the report is right.  I discuss that report and the larger constitutional implications of the modern “executive state” in this morning’s National Review Online.

There is enough ambiguity in the president’s remarks this morning to suggest that he may not be prepared to exercise the full measure of his powers.  But there is also enough in play to suggest that it is not only the corruption of science but the corruption of our Constitution that is at stake.

Obama’s Copenhagen Speech is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Pat Michaels and others are working heroically to save America from global central planning for purposes of combatting global warming (or climate change, or whatever they’re calling it now). But let’s also be thankful this holiday season for our Founding Fathers, who wisely created a system based on separation of powers. If the United States had a parliamentary system, there would be no hope of derailing some of the statist schemes being discusssed in DC, even if Pat worked 24 hours a day.

The secretary of state, for instance, is issuing pronouncements about putting American tapxayers on the chopping block to help finance $100 billion per year of new “climate change” foreign aid. This money can only be squandered, however, if the House and Senate agree to do so. That’s a real possibility, of course, but at least there’s some hope that common sense will prevail since the fiscal burden of government already is far too large.

Here’s a NY Daily News report on what’s happening in Copenhagen, including worrisome signs that politicians who don’t pay for their own travel are planning to make the rest of us pay more for ours:

The U.S. is prepared to work with other countries toward a goal of jointly mobilizing $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the climate change needs of developing countries,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said.

…While she would not disclose how much the U.S. would be contribution to the climate fund, Clinton said there would be a fair amount contributed to the pot that would be made available in 2020. The finances will reportedly be raised partially by taxing aviation and shipping, as proposed by the European Union.

The Global Warming Shakedown is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yesterday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA), of which I am President, issued a study (in Russian), “How Warming Is Being Made: The Case of Russia.” The report, prepared by IEA director Natalya Pivovarova, suggests that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) and the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (CRU) in Norwich (England) apparently cherry-picked Russian climate data.

The IEA report shows that Russian meteorological-station data in the last 130 years did not substantiate the rate of warming on Russian territory suggested by the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature (HadCRUT) database, which has now been partially released.

IEA analysts point out that Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, while the HadCRUT used data from only 25% of such stations in their calculations. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in their global temperature calculations even though there was no lack of meteorological stations and observations. The data of stations located in areas not listed in the HadCRUT survey often shows slight cooling or no substantial warming in the second part of the 20th century and the early 21st century.

The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing shorter observations and incomplete data highlighting the warming process, rather than stations providing longer and uninterrupted observations not demonstrating significant warming. On the whole, HadCRUT specialists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations. IEA analysts found that the climatologists used the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the “urban heat effect” more frequently than the unbiased data from the stations located in less populated places.

The IEA authors calculated that the scale of actual warming for the Russian territory in 1877-1998 was probably exaggerated by 0.64°C. Since Russia accounts for 12.5% of the world’s land mass, such an exaggeration for Russia alone should have an impact on the IPCC claim that the global temperature in the last century has risen by 0.76°C.

If similar procedures have been used for processing climate data from other national data sources, the impact on the rate of change in global temperature would be considerable.

The IEA report concludes that it is necessary to recalculate all global temperature data in order to assess the real rate of temperature change during the last century. Global temperature data will have to be modified because the calculations used by Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change analysts are based on HadCRUT research.

New Study: Hadley Center and CRU Apparently Cherry-picked Russia’s Climate Data is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As the Copenhagen Climate Conference is taking place, it is appropriate to clarify once again what is more or less accurately known about the climate of our planet and about climate change.

Obviously, a brief post can not substitute for detailed studies of professionals in a variety of scientific disciplines – climatology, atmospheric physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, and economics. However, a short post can summarize basic theses on the main trends in climate evolution, on its forecasts, and on its actual and projected effects.

1. The Earth’s climate is constantly changing. The climate was changing in the past, is changing now and, obviously, will be changing in the future – as long as our planet exists.

2. Climatic changes are largely cyclical in nature. There are various time horizons of climatic cycles – from the annual cycle known to everyone to cycles of 65-70 years, of 1,300 years, or of 100,000 years (the so called Milankovitch cycles).

3. There is no fundamental disagreement among scientists, public figures and governments about the fact that the climate is  changing. There is a broad consensus that climate changes occur constantly. The myth, created by climate alarmists, that their opponents deny climate change is sheer propaganda.

4. Current debate among climatologists, economists and public figures is not about the fact of climate change, but about other issues. In particular, disagreements exist on:
- Comparative levels of modern day temperatures (relative to the historically observed),
- The direction of climate change depending on the length of record,
- The extent of climate change,
- The rate of climate change,
- Causes of climate change,
- Forecasts of climate change,
- Consequences of climate change,
- The optimal strategy for human beings to respond to climate change.

5. Unbiased answers to many of these issues are critically dependent on a chosen time horizon – whether it is 10 years, or 30 years, or 70 years, or 1000 years, or 10,000 years, or hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Depending on the time horizon, the answers to many of these questions may be different, even opposite.

6. The current level of global temperature in historical perspective is not unique. The average temperature of the Earth is now estimated at about 14.5 degrees Celsius. In our planet’s history there have been few periods when the Earth’s temperature was lower than the current – in the early Permian period, in the Oligocene, and during periodic glaciations in the Pleistocene. For most of the time during the last half billion years, the air temperature at the Earth’s surface greatly exceeded the current one, and for about half of this period it was approximately 25°C, or 10°C higher than the current temperature. Regular glaciations of cold periods during the Pleistocene era lasted for approximately 90,000 years, with a low temperature of approximately 5°C below that of the present, alternated by warm interglacial periods (for 4,000-6,000 years) with temperatures of 1-3°C higher than at present. Approximately 11,000 years ago the last significant increase in temperature began (of approximately 5°C), during which time a huge glacier, that covered a considerable part of Eurasia and America, had melted. Climate warming has played a key role in humanity’s acquisition of the secrets of agriculture and in its transition to civilization. Over the past 11,000 years there were at least five distinct warm periods, the so-called “climatic optima” when the temperature of the planet was at 1-3°C higher than at present.

7. The focus of climate change depends critically on the choice of time horizon. In the past 11 years (1998-2009 years) global temperature was flat. Before that, in the preceding 20 years (1979-1998 years) it increased by about 0.3°C. Before that, during the preceding 36 years (1940-1976 years) the temperature fell by about 0.1°C. Before that, for the preceding two centuries (1740 – 1940 years), the overall trend in global temperature was mainly neutral – with periodic warming, followed by cooling, and then again warming. Over the past three centuries (from the turn of 18th century), the temperature in the northern hemisphere has increased by approximately 1.3°C, from the trough of the so-called “Little Ice Age” (LIA) during the years 1500-1740 years, followed by the contemporary climatic optimum (CCO), which started around 1980. During the three centuries preceding the LIA, the temperature in the northern hemisphere was falling compared to the level it was during the medieval climatic optimum (MCO) in the 8th – 13th centuries. Depending on the chosen time frame the long-term temperature trend has a different trajectory. For periods of the last 2,000 years, the last 4,000 years, and the last 8,000 years, the trend was negative. For periods of the past 1,300 years, the last 5,000 years, and the last 9,000 years it was positive.

8. The rate of contemporary climate change is much more modest in comparison with the rate of climatic changes observed earlier in the history of the planet. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describes the increase in the global temperature by 0.76°C over the last century (1906-2005 years) as extraordinary. There is reason to suspect this temperature value is somewhat overstated. However, the main point is that previous rises in temperature were greater than those in the modern era. Comparable data demonstrate that the increase in temperature, for example, in Central England in the 18th century (by 0.97°C) was more significant than in the 20th (by 0.90°C). The climatic changes in Central Greenland over the past 50,000 years show that there were at least a dozen periods during which the regional temperature increased by 10-13°C. Given the correlation between changes in temperature at high latitudes and globally, those shifts in temperature regime in Greenland meant a rise in global temperature by 4-6°C. Such a rate was approximately 5-7 times faster than the actual (and, perhaps, slightly exaggerated) temperature increase in the 20th century.

9. The rate of current climate change (the speed of modern warming) by historical standards is not unique. According to IPCC data, the rate of temperature increase over the past 50 years was 0.13°C per decade. According to comparable data, obtained through instrumental measurements, a higher rate of temperature increase was observed at least three times: in the late 17th century – early 18th century; in the second half of the 18th century; and in the late 19th century – early 20th century. The centennial rate of warming in the 20th century is slower than the warming in the 18th century that was instrumentally recorded and slower than the warming in at least 13 cases over the past 50,000 years that were measured by palaeoclimatic methods.

10. Among the causes of climate change in the pre-industrial era there were hardly any anthropogenic factors – due to modest population size and mankind’s limited economic activities. But the range of climatic fluctuations and their rate and peak values in the pre-industrial era exceeded the parameters of climate change recorded in the industrial period.

11. During the industrial age (since the beginning of the 19th century) climate change is believed to be under the impact of both groups of factors – of natural and of anthropogenic character. Since the rate of climate change in the industrial age is so far noticeably smaller than at some time in the pre-industrial age, there is no basis for the assertion that anthropogenic factors had already become as significant as natural factors, even less for the assertion that they overwhelm natural factors.

12. Factors of anthropogenic climate change are rather diverse and can not be confined to carbon dioxide only. Mankind impacts local, regional and global climate by constructing buildings and structures, heating houses, industrial and public premises, by logging and planting forests, plowing arable land, damming rivers, draining and irrigating lands, leveling and paving territories, conducting industry, issuing aerosols, etc.

13. There is no consensus in the scientific community on the role of carbon dioxide in climate change. Some scientists believe that it is crucial, others believe that it is secondary to other factors. There are also serious disagreements on the nature and direction of possible causality between concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and temperature: some researchers believe the former causes temperature to rise, others argue the opposite – that fluctuations in temperature cause changes in carbon dioxide concentration.

14. Unlike carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO2) is harmless to humans; in contrast to aerosol, a harmful and dangerous substance, carbon dioxide does not pollute the environment. It has neither a color, nor a taste, nor a smell. Therefore, popularly used photos and videos showing factory chimney stacks emitting smoke and cars emitting exhaust to illustrate carbon dioxide are just misleading – CO2 is invisible; what is visible in those images are pollutants. It should also be noted that the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the air has a positive impact on the productivity of plants, including agricultural crops.

15. The relationship of the concentration of carbon dioxide to climate change remains a subject of intense scientific debate. True, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the past two centuries increased from 280 parts per million of air particles in the early 19th century to 388 particles in 2009. It is also true that the global temperature in that period rose by about 0.8°C. But whether these two factors are connected is unclear. The dynamics of CO2 concentration did not correlate well with the expected changes in temperature. The significant and rapid increases in global temperature during the interglacial periods of the Pleistocene, during the Medieval Climatic Optima, in the 18th century, were not preceded by an increase in carbon dioxide concentration. In the industrial age, an increase in carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was not always accompanied by a rise in global temperature. In 1944-1976 CO2 concentration increased by 24 units – from 308 to 332 particles, but the global temperature fell 0.1°C. In 1998-2009 CO2 concentration increased by 21 units – from 367 to 388 particles, but the global temperature trend remained flat. In the first half of the 1940′s the decline in the concentration of carbon dioxide by 3 units (as a result of the massive destruction caused by World War II) did not prevent the global temperature to rise by 0.1°C.

16. So far global climate models demonstrate their limited effectiveness. The complex nature of the climate system is not reflected adequately enough in the global climate models whose use has recently spread around the world. The projections developed on their basis in the late 1990s through the early 2000s predicted the global temperature to rise by 1.4-5.8°C till the end of the 21st century with a 0.2-0.4°C increase already in the first decade. In reality during 1998-2009 the temperature was flat at best.

17. Forecasts of global climate change made at the beginning of this decade by Russian scientists (from the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, the Voejkov Main Geophysical Observatory) predicted a fall in the global temperature by 0.6°C by 2025-2030 in comparison with a temperature peak reached at the end of the 20^th century. So far the actual temperature for the last decade has not risen.

18. Implications of climate change for human beings differ greatly depending on their direction, size and rate. An increase in temperature leads as a rule to a softer and moister climate, while a decline in temperature leads to a harder and drier climate. It was a climatic optimum in the Holocene period with temperatures 1-3°C higher than today that greatly contributed to the birth of civilization. Conditions for people’s life and economic activities in warmer climates are usually more favorable than in colder environments. In warmer climates there is usually more precipitation than in drier areas, the cost of heating and volume of food required to sustain human life is lower, while vegetation and navigation periods are longer, and crops’ yields are higher.

19. Methods “to combat global warming” by reducing carbon dioxide emissions suggested by climate alarmists are scientifically unfounded in the absence of extraordinary or unusual changes in climate during the modern era. Such measures, if adopted, are especially dangerous for mid- and lower income countries. Those measures would effectively cut those countries off the path to prosperity and hinder their ability to close the gap with more developed nations.

20. The impact of all anthropogenic factors (not only CO2) on climate is unclear when compared with factors of nature. Therefore, the most effective strategy for humanity in responding to different types of climate change is adaptation. That approach is exactly the way that humans have reacted to the larger-scale climatic changes in the past, even though they were less prepared then for such changes. Now mankind has greater resources to adapt to lesser climate fluctuations and it is better equipped for them scientifically, technically and psychologically. The adaptation of humanity to climate changes is incomparably less costly than other options being proposed and imposed by climate alarmists. Human society has already adopted to climate change and will continue to do so as long as economy and society are vibrant and free.

A Few Notes on Climate Change is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog