‘Hide the Decline’ – Part Deux

CO2 Insanity

Here we go again. More questionable warmer data released, which only takes a short period of time to be discredited. Yet more unprecedented, irrefutable proof going down the global warming toilet. That this was touted as the “scientific study that ended the global warming debate once and for all” is laughable.

From the Daily Mail we get this information:

It was hailed as the scientific study that ended the global warming debate once and for all – the research that, in the words of its director, ‘proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer’.

Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and his colleagues from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST) claimed to have shown that the planet has warmed by almost a degree centigrade since 1950 and is warming continually.

Published last week ahead of a major United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, next month, their work was cited around the world as irrefutable evidence that only the most stringent measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can save civilisation as we know it.

Amazing timing these warmers appear to have . The inconvenient truth is conveniently published a mere week prior to the next global warming cabal with key words and phrases such as irrefutable, stringent and save civilization. So, what’s the problem with this irrefutable evidence?

Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis.

No scientific basis? My, what a big surprise! (Not!)

Like the scientists exposed then by leaked emails from East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit, her colleagues from the BEST project seem to be trying to ‘hide the decline’ in rates of global warming.

In fact, Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties – a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained.

UWA backs away from climate change debate

FarmWeekly
Travis King

Bill Crabtree said predictions of a four degree celsius
temperature increase and a reduction of 70mm rainfall for the
WA agricultural region needed to be tested.

AGRICULTURAL consultants have expressed disappointment at the University of Western Australia's (UWA) attitude towards a planned debate on global warming.

After hearing predictions of the impact that global warming could have on WA farming, Bill Crabtree and David Falconer approached UWA to hold a debate representing both sides of the global warming argument.

They said after getting the initial go-ahead from UWA's vice-chancellor Alan Robson they were told that no speakers could be found for the pro-global warming side and that the speakers the pair had organised to speak against global warming were not credible enough to speak at a debate on UWA grounds.

Mr Crabtree said the speakers that had been approached to question the degree of climate change were credible and included mathematician and engineer David Evans, who between 1999 to 2005 worked full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) modelling Australia's carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products.

William Kinnimoth, among other things, worked with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology for 38 years in weather forecasting, research and applied studies.

For 12 years until 1998 he was head of its National Climate Centre.

Mr Crabtree said he had heard predictions of a four degree celsius temperature increase and a reduction of 70mm rainfall for the WA agricultural region.

"If this prediction is true then it would have massive implications for farming in WA," Mr Crabtree said.

"These assertions are concerning but they need to be tested.

"This debate was to be part of that due diligence.

"I have clients that are concerned about climate change or global warming but are also confused about the science behind it and how these conclusions are reached.

German States Block Carbon Capture Law

Der Spiegel

The German government had hoped to push through a new law allowing the testing of underground greenhouse gas storage, in hopes of slowing climate change. But on Friday the country's states blocked the plans by rejecting the proposed bill. Germany could now face action by the European Union.

Plans in Germany to test underground carbon dioxide storage to combat global warming have been blocked by the country's upper legislative chamber. The Bundesrat, which represents the 16 federal states, rejected a bill on Friday that had already been passed by the German parliament , the Bundestag, in August. The law would have allowed testing for carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology at former gas storage facilities. The federal government wanted to put the technology to the test until 2017 in two or three locations, with a maximum capacity of three million tons of CO2 a year.

CCS works by liquefying the environmentally-unfriendly gas emitted by power plants and pumping it into underground cavities. The technology is considered a prerequisite for allowing coal-fired power stations to continue operating economically in Germany in the long run, as extra CO2 emission permits would otherwise have to be purchased on the open market.

The failure to pass the law in the Bundesrat means that Germany could now be subject to proceedings by the European Union, where CCS directive stipulates that the technology should have been made national law by June.

But there was also no majority in the Bundesrat for invoking the arbitration panel, which means the law can only be saved by a government initiative to bypass the decision. Still, the whole concept would remain in trouble due to serious resistance to CCS among the states.

Violent Protests
 

Critics point out that carbon dioxide is toxic in high concentrations, arguing that the escape of gas from underground storage facilities cannot be ruled out. In recent years several attempts at an agreement between the federal and state governments have failed. Storage sites require specific geological conditions found mainly in the German states of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, where there have been violent protests against the technology.

The federal government's law would give states extensive authority to prohibit CCS on their territory. Lower Saxony, therefore, says it supports the law -- but would not allow any CCS activity. This in turn has angered Brandenburg, which as the major brown coal-producing state, fears it would be the only one forced into storing CO2 in the long run.

There could also be problems with the implementation of CCS testing. Energy giant Vattenfall has complained that the law is only valid until 2016, and that the liability provisions force the operator to take on too much risk. Even if the law is passed, therefore, the conditions needed for the test plant at Jänschwalde to be constructed, using EU funds worth hundreds of millions of euros, would almost certainly not be present.
 

Environmental Advocates Use Racism to Dismiss Global Warming Skeptics

Reduced to desperate measures, proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) have resorted to formally identifying those who are skeptical of the global warming science as conservative white males.  

One inherent shortfall of the study is that it inadvertently celebrates the intelligence of conservative white males and denigrates every other race, gender and political background (including my own). 

Recently, mainstream media began the slow, tacit admission that global warming hasn't manifested in the way it was so definitively predicted 10 years ago.   This admission was presented last month through a recent study suggesting that Çhina's sulfur emissions were to blame for the lack of global warming.   Blaming China wasn't enough, so scientists scrambled to present the following two additional excuses for the foiled predictions of the past 10 years:

Volcanoes Now Blamed for Lack of Global Warming

Aerosols Blamed for Lack of Global Warming

Ironically, the aerosols article also blames the burning of fossil fuels for offsetting the effect of global warming.  Fossil fuels were initially blamed for global warming.

To understand how a group pushing human induced climate change could be reduced to conducting such a bizarre survey involving the socio-economic class of those who question the science of AGW, one has to look at the way they handle adverse information.

On a local level, anyone can make this discovery for themselves.  For example, If you have a group of environmentalists in your area that refer to global warming as one of the reasons for great ideas like localization, cleaning up the eco-sphere or reducing automobile exhaust, introduce some of the contradictory information involving climate change and see how they react to you. Pay close attention to the way they try to dismiss you or shape the argument away from what you present in support of recent conventional climate research. See if they actually answer your questions or address the specific points you present. Turning over this rock may involve an ugly discovery underneath.

An article describing this study indicates a comparison between conservative white males and the rest of the population.  Race, gender and political affiliation aside, the survey comes up with 39% "denying there's a scientific consensus".  White male conservatives boast a portion that is as high as 59%.  Not only does the scientific consensus of global warming have nothing to do with the science of global warming, the AGW movement is notorious for suppressing skeptical scientists.   The question should be, "Who is aware of the skeptical scientists being suppressed?"

The AGW climate scientists' tendency to suppress alternate views was revealed earlier through the hacked emails of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU).  Suppression was one red flag in addition to suggestions for "hiding the decline" of global temperatures and refusing requests to see the original data. 

Since this incident occurred in November of 2009, East Anglia's CRU hired a PR firm to help with their public image after the email scandal.  This is an unusual move by a research department because the science is expected to hold up to public scrutiny on its own.

In what is commonly called the "third party technique" among PR professionals, panels were put together on three occasions to examine the hacked emails.  The idea was to reassure the public that the inquiry was indeed independent and trustworthy.  All three "blue ribbon panels" exonerated East Anglia's CRU by downplaying the erroneous activity and declaring that none of the relevant data was affected.   Unfortunately for East Anglia, it appears that their PR department had a hand in this process.

Common sense would have the AGW movement take its blows, distance itself from the scientists involved with East Anglia, and allow newer cleaner research to emerge.  Instead, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seemed hell bent on protecting the research called into question with the hacked emails. 

For some reason, the AGW movement thought that the best tactics were to further corrupt the peer review process, 'conspiracy bait' those who question the severity of CO2's warming effects and chime together with the mantra of "scientific consensus".   In the short run, this strategy seemed to work, especially when the establishment joins in with the motivation of another market bubble - carbon derivative scams.  Banks love human-driven climate change.  Anthropogenic global warming enjoys the privilege of mainstream acceptance.   When contradictory information slips by, the story is typically interspersed with statements reaffirming "the reality of anthropogenic global warming".  Sometimes, the information is revealed in such a vague manner, one begins to wonder what the initial purpose of the story was supposed to be. 

But the recent avalanche of contradictory information and discrediting scandals seem to be overwhelming the self aggrandizing orthodoxy that is AGW.

Blockbuster: Planetary temperature controls CO2 levels — not humans

JoNova

There goes another “fingerprint”…

It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO2 levels.

Judging by the speech Murry Salby gave at the Sydney Institute, there’s a blockbuster paper coming soon.

 Listen to the speech: “Global Emission of Carbon Dioxide: The Contribution from Natural Sources”

Professor Murry Salby is Chair of Climate Science at Macquarie University. He’s been a visiting professorships at Paris, Stockholm, Jerusalem, and Kyoto, and he’s spent time at the Bureau of Meterology in Australia.

Over the last two years he has been looking at C12 and C13 ratios and CO2 levels around the world, and has come to the conclusion that man-made emissions have only a small effect on global CO2 levels. It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO2 levels.

The higher levels of CO2 in recent decades appear to be mostly due to natural sources. He presented this research at the IUGG conference in Melbourne recently, causing great discussion and shocking a few people. Word reached the Sydney Institute, which rushed to arrange for him to speak, given the importance of this work in the current Australian political climate.



The ratio of C13 to C12 (two isotopes of carbon) in our atmosphere has been declining, which is usually viewed as a signature of man-made CO2 emissions. C12 makes up 99% of carbon in the atmosphere (nearly all atmospheric carbon is in the form of CO2). C13 is much rarer — about 1%. Plants don’t like the rarer C13 type as much; photosynthesis works best on the C12 -type -of-CO2 and not the C13-type when absorbing CO2 from the air.

Prof Salby points out that while fossil fuels are richer in C12 than the atmosphere, so too is plant life on Earth, and there isn’t a lot of difference (just 2.6%) in the ratios of C13 to C12 in plants versus fossil fuels. (Fossil fuels are, after all, made in theory from plants, so it’s not surprising that it’s hard to tell their “signatures” apart). So if the C13 to C12 ratio is falling (as more C12 rich carbon is put into the air by burning fossil fuels) then we can’t know if it’s due to man-made CO2 or natural CO2 from plants.

Essentially we can measure man-made emissions reasonably well, but we can’t measure the natural emissions and sequestrations of CO2 at all precisely — the error bars are huge. Humans emits 5Gt or so per annum, but the oceans emit about 90Gt and the land-plants about 60Gt, for a total of maybe 150Gt. Many scientists have assumed that the net flows of carbon to and from natural sinks and sources of CO2 cancel each other out, but there is no real data to confirm this and it’s just a convenient assumption. The problem is that even small fractional changes in natural emissions or sequestrations swamp the human emissions.

UPDATE Inserted: E.M.Smith covered this point well in 2009

“It is often asserted that we can measure the human contribution of CO2 to the air by looking at the ratio of C12 to C13. The theory is that plants absorb more C12 than C13 (by about 2%, not a big signature), so we can look at the air and know which came from plants and which came from volcanos and which came from fossil fuels, via us. Plants are ‘deficient’ in C13, and so, then, ought to be our fossil fuel derived CO2.

The implication is that since coal and oil were from plants, that “plant signature” means “human via fossil fuels”. But it just isn’t that simple. Take a look at the above chart. We are 5.5 and plants are putting 121.6 into the air each year (not counting ocean plants). There is a lot of carbon slopping back and forth between sinks and sources. Exactly how closely do we know the rate of soil evolution of CO2, for example?”

Chiefio also found some interesting quotes pointing out that corn (a C4 plant) absorbs more C13, and our mass fields of corn might just muck up the stats… (it’s a good post).

The sources of CO2 don’t seem to be industrialized areas

Suspiciously, when satellites record atmospheric CO2 levels around the globe they find that the sources don’t appear to be concentrated in the places we’d expect — industry or population concentrations like western Europe, the Ohio Valley, or China. Instead the sources appear to be in places like the Amazon Basin, southeast Asia, and tropical Africa — not so much the places with large human emissions of CO2!

Uh oh, CO2 actually reverses temperature effect on rangelands

Watts Up With That?
Anthony Watts

The results of a USDA experiment called PHACE (Prairie Heating and CO2 Enrichment) where liquid CO2 is injected into the ground from a storage tank, then effects measure on grassland growth, shows a surprising result: increased range grass growth leading to retaining more soil moisture. I hate it when that happens. I’ll have to give them credit though, back in 2007 in the paper starting the project they theorized from models that:

Model results suggest that soil water content, plant production, soil respiration, and nutrient mineralization will increase for the high-CO treatment. Soil water content will decrease for all years, while nitrogen mineralization, soil respiration, and plant production will both decrease and increase under warming depending on yearly differences in water stress.

And the credit is, they followed through with a ground truth experiment to verify the model.

But reality turned out to be different than model output. Big surprise. More photos here From the United States Department of Agriculture – Research, Education and Economics
USDA scientists study effects of rising carbon dioxide on rangelands

Rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels can reverse the drying effects of predicted higher temperatures on semi-arid rangelands, according to a study published today in the scientific journal Nature by a team of U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and university scientists.

Warmer temperatures increase water loss to the atmosphere, leading to drier soils. In contrast, higher CO2 levels cause leaf stomatal pores to partly close, lessening the amount of water vapor that escapes and the amount of water plants draw from soil. This new study finds that CO2 does more to counterbalance warming-induced water loss than previously expected. In fact, simulations of levels of warming and CO2 predicted for later this century demonstrated no net change in soil water, and actually increased levels of plant growth for warm-season grasses.


“By combining higher temperatures with elevated CO2 levels in an experiment on actual rangeland, these researchers are developing the scientific knowledge base to help prepare managers of the world’s rangelands for what is likely to happen as climate changes in the future,” said Edward B. Knipling, administrator of the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), USDA’s principal intramural scientific research agency.

The results cover the first four years of the eight-year Prairie Heating and CO2 Enrichment (PHACE) experiment on native northern mixed grass rangeland. The study is being conducted by the ARS Rangeland Resources Research Unit (RRRU) at the High Plains Grasslands Research Station near Cheyenne, Wyo.

ARS plant physiologist Jack Morgan leads the study, which uses both CO2 pipelines and thermal infrared heaters to simulate global warming conditions predicted for the end of the century: 600 parts per million (ppm) of CO2—compared to today’s average 390 ppm—and day/night temperatures raised by 3 and 5 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively.

Based on these findings, warmer temperatures would likely play a role in changing the relative success of various grass types. “Only the warm-season grasses had their growth boosted higher by CO2 and warmer temperatures,” Morgan said. “If this leads to a competitive advantage for warm-season grasses, it may increase the challenges faced by ranchers who desire cool-season grasses for early-season forage.”

Elise Pendall and David Williams at the University of Wyoming at Laramie and Matthew Wallenstein at Colorado State University at Fort Collins also are participating in the study, which will be completed in 2013. Retired ARS soil scientist Bruce Kimball, designer of the infrared heater system, is helping conduct the study. Kimball serves as a research collaborator at the ARS U.S. Arid-Land Agricultural Research Center in Maricopa, Ariz.

Grass-dominated, dry rangelands account for approximately a third of the Earth’s land surface, providing most of the forage eaten by livestock. This research, the first of its kind on this scale for rangelands, supports the USDA priority of helping farmers and ranchers throughout the United States and the rest of the world best adapt production practices to variable climate patterns.

Morgan said more research is needed to determine how the water-savings effect applies over the long run and in other types of semi-arid rangelands as well as to croplands in semi-arid areas. “It is important to understand that CO2 only offset the direct effects of warming on soil water in this experiment, and that it is unlikely to offset more severe drought due to combined warming and reduced precipitation projected for many regions of the world,” he said.

###
In addition to ARS funding, the research is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, and USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

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