Scott Spiegel

As the Senate gears up to introduce its version of the House’s cap-and-trade global warming legislation next week, it’s instructive to consider the impact of myriad geological, meteorological, and astronomic effects on climate change, as exhaustively chronicled in Australian scientist Ian Plimer’s essential new book Heaven and Earth: Global Warming: The Missing Science.

Plimer’s book, published last year, boasts 2,000 footnotes from an array of sources including top peer-reviewed journals such as Nature, Science, and Geophysical Research Letters; journals on solar physics, hydrological science, and glaciology; books on climate change, environmentalism, and the history of science; and research by dozens of climate change skeptics.  Plimer also dissects the various contradictory iterations of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports.

His evaluation of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis?  Pure, unadulterated waffle.

If “agnostic” is to “atheist” what “skeptic” is to “denier,” then Plimer would happily plant himself in the denier camp.

Plimer demolishes AGW by broadening the scientific timeline under consideration to incorporate thousands, at times millions, of years to show how climate has been changing through hot and cold swings much wider than anything we’ve seen in recent centuries, and all in the absence of disposable Starbucks cups.

In graph after graph, Plimer depicts the cyclical effects of sunspots, glaciation, tilts in the earth’s orbit, ocean currents, CO2 reabsorption by the oceans, plate tectonics, clouds, and volcanic eruptions on global temperature.  He covers the Medieval Warming period from 900 to 1300 AD, which was warmer than today, and points out the vastly higher concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere during previous Ice Ages.  He details the beneficial effects that warmer periods historically have had on crop growth, species survival, and human longevity.  He documents the inadequacy and inconsistency of land temperature measurements, relative to satellite measurements, the latter of which show global cooling.  He notes the utter failure of any global warming model to correctly predict that the earth would start cooling in 1998.

Plimer mentions Al Gore’s camp classic An Inconvenient Truth, and cites a British court’s 2007 ruling that there are nine major factual errors in the movie, and that in order to be shown in public classrooms the film has to be accompanied by a written manual and teacher instruction to correct all of the alarmist falsehoods.  One of the nine gaffes is the movie’s failure to note that CO2 emissions have not been shown to cause temperature increases, but rather have historically lagged behind temperature increases.  That’s right—a British court actually ruled that there is no evidence that carbon dioxide emissions, human or otherwise, cause or even precede temperature increases—only that they lag slightly behind.

And Plimer’s book was published before last November’s Climategate, in which a whistleblower in the UK publicly exposed researchers from one of the three leading climate data collection centers in the world as having evaded Freedom of Information requests, colluded to keep skeptics’ research from being published, and failed to be able to reconstruct tortuous data manipulations they had applied in order to generate the conclusions they wanted.

Lest closed-minded warmists dismiss Plimer as a religious, right-wing knuckle-dragger, Plimer has also authored books deconstructing the scientific case for creationism, and has received criticism from conservatives for this line of work.

Plimer’s thesis also happens to be perfectly embodied by last week’s historic volcano eruption in Iceland.  The eruption at Eyjafjallajökull, whose name is almost as long and complicated as the House’s cap-and-trade bill, left Europe covered in clouds of dark ash and shut down virtually all air transportation across the continent.

In his book, Plimer delineates the historic effects of volcanic activity on climate.  For example, in just a few days, a major volcano can spew more CO2, dust, and sulfuric acid into the atmosphere than humans can in a year.  Yet significant volcanic eruptions typically lead to years-long drops in temperature, due to the extra cloud cover and solar reflection they create, which means that skiing in St. Moritz should be lovely this winter.

Last year the Australian parliament considered and, in large part thanks to the efforts of Plimer and other skeptics, narrowly rejected a cap-and-trade scheme that would have crippled the continent’s energy production systems.

Due to U.S. Congressional Democrats’ politically suicidal stubbornness, cap-and-trade is evidently going to be this year’s health care reform.

To reiterate the point crystallized in Plimer’s book: if there’s so much uncertainty regarding whether human carbon dioxide emissions have any measurable influence on temperature increases, and a greater probability that temperature increases are beneficial than harmful, why are we rushing to shoot the world’s greatest economies in the foot?

Molecular biologist Henry Miller wrote in Forbes last week, “Every schoolchild these days seems to be a devoted environmentalist, able to spell ‘sustainable’ before ‘dog.’  However, much of the indoctrination about environmentalism—especially in schools—is of the passion-is-more-important-than-fact variety…  Too often the objective of student projects seems to be ‘empowering’ the kids and giving them a feeling of accomplishment instead of getting the right answer and learning scientific principles.”  In other words, the first step to “empowerment” in the natural world is learning what you can and can’t change through being empowered.  It seems many adults have yet to learn that lesson.

Though I regret the disruption caused by Eyjafjallajökull to Western Europe’s economies (such as they are), I have to chuckle at the fact that terrible, wasteful, carbon dioxide-emitting air travel has been suspended throughout the sacred Continent of the Greens—and during the same week as Earth Day, at that.  I only wish it had happened right before the Copenhagen summit.



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• US Senate climate bill to be unveiled April 26 (alertnet.org)
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• Iceland’s volcano: 9 strange facts (theweek.com)
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• A Seasoned Veteran’s View of the IPCC (nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com)

I hate to have to point out the obvious to the rosy-cheeked, starry-eyed eco-warriors heading en masse to the international global warming summit this week (OK—I love to point it out), but the fact is that the Copenhagen Climate Conference is going to be, on every level, a monumental failure.

As has been reported for months, the nations of the world have not agreed, and will not agree, to legally binding reductions or limits on carbon dioxide emissions at the conference.  The biggest “polluters” are least likely to volunteer to give up their 21st-century living standards (the U.S., Australia, Canada) or their efforts to achieve such (China, India, Brazil).

As George Will noted, the U.S. population in 2050 will have risen to 420 million, which means that if we honor Obama’s pledge to reduce our nation’s “carbon footprint” by then to 80% below 2005 levels, emissions per capita “will be about what they were in 1875.  That.  Will.  Not.  Happen.”

Even climate change alarmists admit that pledges hinted at by Obama for Copenhagen and outlined in the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed by the House this summer will have barely any effect on the earth’s climate.

And even if Obama decided to place some of his rapidly swelling political capital on the line and make a pledge for emissions reductions at Copenhagen, it wouldn’t be legally binding, because any treaty must be ratified by the U.S. Senate, which has already demonstrated its hostility to the less ambitious Waxman-Markey bill.

If all of this isn’t promising enough, Copenhagen delegates’ support from their constituencies for making firm commitments to reduce emissions will be diluted by several other factors.  One is the laughable hypocrisy on display in conference attendees’ lavish, luxury-filled, CO2 emission-intensive accommodations and entertainments.  The UK Telegraph documents that the summit, including jet and limousine travel, “will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of ‘carbon dioxide equivalent,’” about the same as the daily emissions of 30 smaller countries.  This is even after Al Gore canceled his talk in Copenhagen and the extra fuel required to fly him there was subtracted from the total.

Another lacuna in the alarmists’ scheme is that little matter known as “Climategate,” or, the fallout at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia from a whistleblower having leaked thousands of e-mails and other files documenting climate change “scientists” manipulating data, losing data, being unable to reconstruct data, and doing everything but counting “dimpled chads” to make the numbers come out the way they wanted.

Even before Climategate, polls showed that a majority of Americans believed climate change was primarily due to natural and not human causes and that such beliefs have been growing more common in recent years.  Yet Yvo de Boer, the UN’s top climate official, is worried only about people’s “perception” of the e-mails, not whether they reveal compromised data analysis.  Of the general public, he patronizingly states, “[W]hen they have the feeling… that scientists are manipulating information in a certain direction, then of course it causes concern in a number of people to say, ‘You see, I told you so, this is not a real issue.’”  Yes, Yvo—when people realize that the UN’s top climate official cares more about whether the little people discover the truth than he cares about discovering the truth, it does cast climate change alarmists in a suspicious light.

Then of course there’s the science, which is too complex for most non-climate scientists to follow (and now, we know, most climate scientists), but which infiltrates the public’s awareness from time to time, due to the efforts of honest climate scientists and tireless, usually unpaid fact-checkers, statisticians, and bloggers.  For example, these skeptics have helped publicize the well-documented Medieval Warming Period, during which temperatures were hotter than they are today, yet SUVs were still only in the test market phase.

Those over 40 remember the international scientific “consensus” in the early 1970s that the planet was cooling at an alarming rate and that humans were careening toward the next Ice Age.  More recently, those over 15 remember the catastrophic, government-fueled, technology-related Y2K predictions, none of which came true.  (Those over 9 months remember Obama’s promise that if we didn’t pass the $787 billion stimulus bill, unemployment might someday soar all the way to 8.0%.)

Acting in concert with Obama, the EPA on Monday released a declaration of intent to regulate and require permits from the largest U.S. emitters.  The timing of the announcement on the first day of the Copenhagen conference, which was a total coincidence, was meant to goad Congressmen into passing cap-and-trade legislation, lest the EPA effectively do it for them.

This usurpation of the legislature’s function is not sitting well with many in Congress, including even such Democrats and moderate Republicans as Russ Feingold, Blanche Lincoln, Byron Dorgan, and Olympia Snowe.  The working and middle classes will be none too happy, either: as Forbes’ Joel Kotkin notes, “Huge increases in energy costs, taxes and a spate of regulatory mandates will restrict their access to everything from single-family housing and personal mobility to employment in carbon-intensive industries like construction, manufacturing, warehousing and agriculture.”  Who ever said Democrats don’t look out for the little guy!

So Monday’s EPA ruling does not help, but actually undermines, any Copenhagen pledge in two ways: (1) the ruling undercuts the necessity of Obama’s making any public commitment in Copenhagen, because it allows the administration to enact its schemes more stealthily, yet (2) the ruling will not withstand the inevitable, prolonged legal challenges from every corner of society, or the public’s anger at an administration that would allow such an authoritarian agency to make this ruling, which will undermine the administration’s ability to carry out any pledge it makes at Copenhagen.  Paradoxically, Obama’s best prospect for restricting carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. is rescinding the EPA ruling and making no promises in Copenhagen, and taking his chances with Congress next year.

So in case it’s still not obvious to some, I’ll repeat it: Copenhagen will be a monumental failure on every level.

Bonus revelation: It deserves to be.

If you, like most Americans, doubt that scientists will ever demonstrate a direct causal link between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming, try wrapping your mind around any of the following deeply implausible scenarios in the wake of the recent Climategate scandal:

(1) The Climate Research Unit at the UK’s University of East Anglia, origin of the thousands of pages of leaked e-mails and computer code two weeks ago, will honor requests to release the CRU data used to produce results showing steady global temperature increases over the past 150 years.

Phil Jones, head of CRU, who resigned yesterday in light of the fraud, once e-mailed U.S. colleague Michael Mann, “[D]on’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them…  If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone…  We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.”

(2) The CRU physically possesses the data it has collected over the years and the programs used to generate its previously published results, or can figure out how to reproduce these programs.

Here are a few nuggets from the infamous “HARRY_READ_ME” text file containing three years’ worth of notes (2006-2009) documenting one CRU scientist’s attempt to reconstruct published temperature data using the center’s poorly documented datasets and computer code:

“I immediately found a mistake! Scanning forward to 1951 was done with a loop that, for completely unfathomable reasons, didn’t include months! So we read 50 grids instead of 600!!!”

“Wherever I look, there are data files, no info about what they are other than their names…  [T]he filenames… are identical, but the contents are not.”

“I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases.  There is no uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found.”

“I am seriously close to giving up, again.  The history of this is so complex that I can’t get far enough into it before my head hurts and I have to stop.  Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions…  I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections.”

(3) Phil Jones will come up with a convincing explanation for how his e-mail describing use of “Mike’s trick” to “hide the decline” references anything other than fraudulent manipulation of data to achieve a desired outcome.

The e-mail in question: “’I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 to hide the decline.”

Jones’ response to the leak: “The use of the term ‘hiding the decline’ was in an email written in haste.”  Note to Jones: So was your lame defense of that shifty e-mail.

The defense offered by Michael Mann, originator of the long-discredited “hockey stick” graph of global temperature increase, was not much better: Mann claimed that the word “trick” referred to a clever method of solving a problem “and not something secret.”  Not anymore, it’s not!

(4) The University of East Anglia, the BBC, and the international mainstream media will get more agitated about the implications of the hacked CRU e-mails than the fact that they were hacked.

The criminal penalties lying in wait for the scientists who conspired to alter, misrepresent, or delete data after FOIA requests, while spending millions in public grant money, are far greater than for the hacker who obtained the e-mails.  The implications of falsified data for global climate change regulations, taxes, and government takeover of industrial economies render the hacker’s moral breech moot.

(5) The New York Times’ Andrew Revkin and other environmental “reporters” will admit Climategate is a big deal.

The CRU is one of two centers that compile global land temperature data; the other is the U.S. Goddard Institute for Space Studies.  Roughly 50% of terrestrial temperature data has thus been demonstrated to be worthless—more than 50%, if you take into account the greater weight given the CRU data in the IPCC report, the close working relationship between the centers, and the documented bias and possible fraud in U.S. data.  Yet Revkin claims, “The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument.”  Case closed!

(6) Climategate will backfire against skeptics.

Kenneth Trenberth, CRU crony and researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, insists—hold your laughter—that the hacked e-mails demonstrate “the integrity of scientists.”  Even George “Moonbat” Monbiot, global warming columnist for the UK Guardian—who bitterly wrote, “I apologise.  I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed.  I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely”—was ludicrously recalcitrant in his support for CRU researchers: “By comparison to his opponents, Phil Jones is pure as the driven snow.”

(7) Any climate change alarmists other than Monbiot will apologize for putting too much credence in CRU data without being able to independently verify it.

The shills at RealClimate.org, for example, write: “There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research… no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist-communist-vegetarian overlords.”  Apology accepted!

(8) Global warming alarmists will view the halt in statistically significant global warming over the last 15 years, the demonstrable global cooling over the last 9 years, and the projected global cooling over the next several decades by skeptics whose models correctly predicted both of the above, as evidence that might prove their climate change theories wrong.

See all of the above.

Paul Krugman says of the U.S. Representatives who recently voted against the climate change bill: “[I]if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians… carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided… they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.”

Well, that’s what one Australian Senator, Steve Fielding, recently did in advance of the Australian Senate’s vote on a national emissions trading scheme.  In addition to a fact-finding trip to the U.S., Fielding prepared a series of questions for Australia’s “Minister for Climate Change and Water,” Senator Penny Wong:

Is it the case that CO₂ increased by 5% since 1998 whilst global temperature cooled over the same period?

Wong: “When climate change scientists talk about global warming they mean warming of the climate system as a whole, which includes the atmosphere, the oceans, and the cryosphere (ice, snow and frozen ground)…  [A]t time scales of around a decade, natural variability can mask the atmospheric warming trend…”

Then how do we know warming is happening?  Do we know which factors are “masking” atmospheric warming and to what extent?  If not, how do we know atmospheric cooling isn’t taking place, and natural variability in the other direction isn’t “masking” that?

Wong adds, “[T]he year 1998 was unusually warm…  [T]he use of a highly unusual year to begin the trend analysis will also give misleading results.”  What about the period from the 1940s to the 1970s, during which emissions increased yet atmospheric temperature cooled?  Were the 1940s “a highly unusual decade”?

On ocean temperatures: “[O]nly about five percent of the warming since 1960 has taken place in the air…  Most of warming [sic] since 1960 (about 85 percent) has happened in the oceans.”

In an article last year, NPR reported, “Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message.  These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years” and have even cooled.  Their explanation: “[H]eat has actually been flowing out of the ocean and into the air”—you remember, the air that Wong admits has absorbed only 5% of all warming.

NPR continues: “One possibility is that the sea has, in fact, warmed and expanded—and scientists are somehow misinterpreting the data from the diving buoys.”  No doubt these same scientists would have been just as vigilant in calling into question their entire data collection operation had it produced exactly the results they had predicted!

NPR: “The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.”

Let’s see: the Earth has its own atmospheric intermediaries that can nullify the entire influence of mankind on Earth’s temperatures—or not, depending on factors no one understands; and just to be safe, we should destroy industrial civilization.  How about we postpone the obliteration of 21^st century living standards until climatologists get sick of playing with their cute diving robots and start measuring things that actually affect the climate?

With respect to the cryosphere, Wong writes, “Since 1998 there has been continued decline in Arctic sea ice, reduction in the area of snow and frozen ground, melting of glaciers and melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets.”

In May 2009, Czech physicist Luboš Motl documented that “global sea ice remains substantially above the normal” level for the month.  According to engineer Dennis Chamberland, as of 2009, glaciers are growing in: Norway, Canada, France, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Switzerland, Kirghizstan, and Russia.  Glaciers are growing in New Zealand, including all glaciers in the Southern Alps.  In the U.S., glaciers are growing in Colorado, Washington, California, Montana, and Alaska.  In Antarctica in 2007, ice had grown to record levels since data collection began.  Greenland’s icecap is growing at the rate of 7.2 miles a year.  Science magazine reported in 2005 that the Greenland ice sheet is growing thicker.

So Wong seems to have comprehensively flunked Fielding’s Question #1.

Is it the case that the rate and magnitude of warming between 1979 and 1998… was not unusual in either rate or magnitude as compared with warmings that have occurred earlier in the Earth’s history?

Wong: “[B]etween ice ages and warm inter-glacial periods temperatures increased by 4 to 7°C.  However this was a gradual process taking approximately 5,000 years…  Globally, the Earth has already experienced warming of 0.76°C since 1850…”

The period from 1850-2009 is 1/30^th the length of the 5,000-year period Wong references.  Presumably global temperatures over 5,000 years fluctuate.  So how do we know the global warming from 1850-2009—a “blink of an eye” by Wong’s standard—will continue at the same rate?  How do we know we’re not approaching a local maximum and that temperatures won’t start to decline soon?

Is it the case that all [climate] computer models projected a steady increase in temperature for the period 1990-2008, whereas in fact there were only 8 years of warming… followed by 10 years of stasis and cooling?

Wong: “It is not the case that all [climate] computer models projected a steady increase in temperature…”  Rather, simulations collectively predicted an increase “on average.”

I don’t know about you, but I’d really like to see which models predicted what actually happened and which didn’t, and what the models that were right predicted from 2008 on.

John Brignell recently compiled a list of 598 outcomes of global warming cited by environmental alarmists.  A few include: anxiety attacks, childhood insomnia, depression, early marriages, extreme changes to California, flesh-eating disease, heart attacks, lawsuits increasing, and psychiatric illness; all of which I propose had a causal influence in Michael Jackson’s death.

Maybe there’s a U.S. Senator brave enough to question and research the science of global warming before the Senate’s vote on the climate change bill.  If this thing is real, we can’t afford to lose too many more celebrities.

Paul Krugman’s recent column, “An Affordable Salvation,” gushes about how, now that the “junk science”-loving (and Nazi-hugging) former occupant of the White House is gone, we can finally start saving the planet.  And it won’t cost much, either!  That is, if only we can get cap-and-trade skeptics to stop practicing “junk economics.”

“The best available estimates,” according to Krugman, suggest that turning industrial civilization green will basically be painless, and in the end will actually be good for us.  Perhaps his “best available estimates” include the recent, breathless press release from the Environmental Defense Fund: “For about a dime a day we can solve climate change, invest in a clean energy future, and save billions in imported oil.”  New EDF slogan: Saving the planet and 90 cents will get you a cup of coffee!

In the Rube Goldberg scheme of alternative energy sources, permits, taxes, carbon credit swapping, and rebates known as “cap-and-trade,” I count at least six additional charges consumers will directly or indirectly face.  First, there is the cost of less efficient “green” energy production, which will be passed on to consumers.  Second, there is the charge for emissions permits, which will also be passed on to consumers.  Third, there are the private and governmental bureaucratic costs of administering this system.  Fourth, there are costs from lobbying and inefficient allocations of carbon credits to congressional districts in exchange for pro-cap-and-trade votes, to industries in exchange for union support, and to companies in exchange for campaign contributions.  Fifth, there are inefficiencies that will result from the illegal selling and trading of credits and the costs of prosecuting this corruption.  Finally, there’s the cost of industry leaders and investors’ uncertainty regarding possible cap-and-trade regulations the government could decide to introduce or expand any time it wants.

But, Krugman reassures us, carbon credits would become a “scarce” resource, just like oil, land, and water; he adds that the “magic” of the free market should allow it to “cope” with emissions limits just fine.

Any idiot realizes that natural resources are not the same thing as artificial, government-imposed restrictions.  The former allow us to be productive; the latter prevent it.  Legal leg irons are not amenable to expansion through scientific innovation.

Mocking laissez-faire capitalists for believing the free market is “magic” is a straw man—no one ever said the marketplace could compensate for unpredictable, industry-destroying, government-imposed limits, which preclude the very existence of the free market.  How’d the “magic” of the marketplace do in overcoming “scarce” resources in the former Soviet Union?

In case we’re still not persuaded that cap-and-trade isn’t suicidal folly, Krugman tempts us that “committing ourselves now might actually help the economy recover from its current slump.”  This, from an “economist” whose patron saint is John Maynard Keynes, who once famously said that the government could stimulate the economy by putting money in jars, burying them, and paying unemployed people to dig them up again.

If “green” business were profitable, wouldn’t companies already be doing it?  If alternative forms of energy were so efficient, would they need massive government subsidies to keep the companies that produce them from going bankrupt?

Krugman argues that cap-and-trade would “create major incentives for new investment—investment in low-emission power plants, in energy-efficient factories and more.”  All of which, of course, are less efficient and less preferable to investors.  Cap-and-trade might allow for “major technological innovation,” as he claims, but at the cost of discarding already profitable, more efficient innovation.

The “argument from economy” is designed to reassure those who think cap-and-trade is necessary that it is affordable, and those who think cap-and-trade is not necessary that it at least will not hobble our economy.  But those who are rightly skeptical of cap-and-trade should be aware that it is anything but a harmless indulgence.