Squaring the Culture

Since my report on the economist/staffer at EPA who was gagged when he wanted to criticize the EPA’s blithe acceptance of the IPCC’s opinion regarding humans causing climate damage, I’ve been gathering recent research regarding climate science. There’s been some interesting forward progress on a number of fronts. None of it finally settles the issue, but all of it leans in the same direction: we’re not doing as much damage as it seemed in the 1990s. It is important to note that none of the information that follows was reflected in the IPCC’s latest report, which considered scientific data published only until the end of 2005.

First of all, Anthony Watts published the results of his survey of American surface temperature stations. Watts, if you recall, was the meteorologist who began surveying, photographing, and rating the temperature stations on which NASA relies for its surface temp readings (I reported on his work more than a year ago), and noting that urban heat elements had grown up around many of them since they were first established. This is particularly damaging when the station is classified by the National Weather Service as “rural,” since they use the readings from “rural” stations to adjust those from urban stations for known heat island effects. Watts’ survey of the stations in the US, which is considered the Cadillac of surface temp stations for the world, revealed that unexpected urban effects are biasing the temp readings upward. Says the cover note at the Heartland Institute, which published the survey:

This report, by meteorologist Anthony Watts, presents the results of the first-ever comprehensive review of the quality of data coming from the National Weather Service’s network of stations…

“We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.

“In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations–nearly 9 of every 10–fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements …”

The conclusion is inescapable: The U.S. temperature record is unreliable.

This conclusion pairs nicely with a paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research by Ross McKitrick and Patrick Michaels, which Michaels wrote about at the Cato Institute. The paper demonstrates that socioeconomic factors appear to affect the quality of temperature reading stations worldwide, and that the net bias is on the high side. Noting that surface temperature readings have been higher than satellite temperature readings that are unaffected by these factors, they adjust the surface readings for socioeconomic factors, and Lo! the resulting data actually match the satellite data! They conclude that roughly half of the global warming that we’ve measured is the result of bad surface readings. Michaels adds that the paper was ignored by the press.

I found this next report from DailyTech particularly interesting. The calculations for the gross greenhouse effect produced by atmospheric CO² were done in a laboratory back in 1922 by Arthur Milne, by shining infrared light through a gas-filled box and measuring what came out on the other side. It’s not clear to me that Milne’s results were ever thoroughly tested against real climate results; there seems to be a real greenhouse effect, but we don’t know exactly how strong it is.

In 2008, a Hungarian scientist named Ferenc Miskolczi, while working for NASA, re-evaluated Milne’s work and decided that Milne’s assumption of an “infinitely thick” atmosphere to simplify the differential calculus had distorted the final results (such assumptions are generally harmless, but apparently not this time.) The problem was that the old results suggested the possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect — which is inconsistent with the earth’s history. The earth has experienced CO² levels many times higher than current levels, and heating in the atmosphere did not run away, but rather reached equilibrium at temperatures cooler than the model would suggest.

Miskolczi re-created the greenhouse calculations with a new factor to show an atmosphere that is not infinite. His results show a strong, negative feedback effect as CO² rises that correlates better with the paleoclimatic record.

NASA refused to release his results, and eventually Miskolczi resigned in protest and had his work published by a peer-reviewed journal in Hungary. His complaint sounds remarkably similar to the complaint raised by economists Carlin and Davidson that I wrote about last week:

Miskolczi resigned in protest, stating in his resignation letter, “Unfortunately my working relationship with my NASA supervisors eroded to a level that I am not able to tolerate. My idea of the freedom of science cannot coexist with the recent NASA practice of handling new climate change related scientific results.”

There exists some reasonable skepticism that generally-accepted greenhouse coefficients will change on the basis of this new approach, but some scientists are finding his theory useful; apparently, it accurately models greenhouse warming on Mars as well as Earth, which was not possible before. Also, it comports well with results obtained by Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven National Labs, who recently used the earth’s heat-absorbtion capacity to calculate the total sensitivity of the earth’s climate to changes in CO² and obtained a sensitivity much lower than that reported by the IPCC. Schwartz, who is no friend of climate skepticism, is still awaiting peer comments on his work.

And of course, then we have the results from NASA’s Aqua satellite, which purports to measure the effect of atmospheric CO² on cloud formation, and the effect of cloud formation on greenhouse warming. The leader of the project, Dr. Roy Spencer, reported last year that the data from the satellite prove that the climate is much less sensitive to CO² than the IPCC models assume. This result, according to Australian biologist Jennifer Marohasy, has been generally accepted by the scientific community but so far not adjusted to.

The sum of the new information seems to be that humans may, in fact, be affecting climate by releasing CO², but not very much — something on the order of half a degree per century, which is far short of an amount that might cause some sort of climate disaster.

Perhaps this explains why the number of climate change “skeptics” appears to be growing. According to the Wall Street Journal’s recent report:

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. — 13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)

The collapse of the “consensus” has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

This possibly also explains why the Petition Project, which in 1998 collected close to 20,000 signatures of American scientists who opposed cooperation with the Kyoto Protocol on scientific grounds, has swelled to more than 30,000 signatories, and published an updated summary of peer-reviewed research claiming:

A review of the research literature concerning the environmental consequences of increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide leads to the conclusion that increases during the 20th and early 21st centuries have produced no deleterious effects upon Earth’s weather and climate. Increased carbon dioxide has, however, markedly increased plant growth. Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in hydrocarbon use and minor greenhouse gases like CO2 do not conform to current experimental knowledge.

The Obama administration’s rush to impose carbon caps on the American economy appears to be spurred by the growing possibility that the public simply will not believe that such measures are necessary in a few years. This suggests that their eagerness to impose such caps constitutes a triumph of ideology over science, as the science seems to be suggesting that such measures are not needed.