Month: June 2018

Daily News 23 Jun 2018

Crunch Time: Australia’s Self-Inflicted Energy Crisis Down to Wind & Solar Obsession

At the heart of Australia’s self-inflicted power pricing and supply calamity is an obsession with intermittent and unreliable wind and solar. Mandated and massive subsidies – that those attempting to deliver electricity using nature’s wonder fuels have been wallowing in since the Australian Labor Party seriously upped the RE ante in 2010 – resulted in a … Continue reading "Crunch Time: Australia’s Self-Inflicted Energy Crisis Down to Wind & Solar Obsession"

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June 23, 2018 at 02:31AM

Daily News 23 Jun 2018

Scientists: 30 Years Of Data Show ‘Godfather’ Of Global Warming Was Wrong

Former NASA climate scientist James Hansen famously warned Congress almost 30 years ago to the day that human activities had put the world on the path to disaster, but two scientists now say the global warming “godfather’s” predictions were wrong.

Cato Institute scientists Patrick Michaels and Ryan Maue compared Hansen’s temperature predictions to real-world observations and found his supposedly “highly unlikely” forecast with the least amount of warming was the most accurate.

“Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000, discounting the larger-than-usual El Niño of 2015-16,” Michaels and Maue wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

“Assessed by Mr. Hansen’s model, surface temperatures are behaving as if we had capped 18 years ago the carbon-dioxide emissions responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect,” the two scientists wrote. “But we didn’t. And it isn’t just Mr. Hansen who got it wrong.”

“Models devised by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have, on average, predicted about twice as much warming as has been observed since global satellite temperature monitoring began 40 years ago,” they wrote.

Climate model accuracy has become a major source of debate as scientists realized predictions diverged greatly from observations over the last 15 years or so. Governments often rely on climate models to justify climate policies or regulations, meaning inaccurate models can yield bad policies.

Hansen laid out three global warming scenarios in 1988 at an iconic congressional hearing: a high-end one where the world warms about 1 degree Celsius by 2018, a middle-range of 0.7 degrees of warming and a low-end estimate with only a few tenths of a degree of warming. The hearing was held on a hot summer day and was organized by none other than former Democratic Rep. Al Gore of Tennessee.

Hansen wished he hadn’t been so accurate in predicting future warming, contradicting Michaels and Maue, he told the Associated Press on Monday. AP claimed Hansen’s predictions had “pretty much come true so far, more or less.”

“I don’t want to be right in that sense,” Hansen said, adding he wished “that the warning be heeded and actions be taken.”

Many other scientists the AP spoke with raved about Hansen’s predictions. Berkeley climate scientist Zeke Hausfather tweeted: “Hansen’s 1988 projections have largely been borne out.

However, Michaels and Maue said Hansen’s predictions only look correct because of the strong El Nino effect, a naturally occurring warming event, that began in 2015. Global temperatures have actually come down quite a bit since El Nino subsided.

“The problem with Mr. Hansen’s models — and the U.N.’s — is that they don’t consider more-precise measures of how aerosol emissions counter warming caused by greenhouse gases,” Michaels and Maue wrote.

“Several newer climate models account for this trend and routinely project about half the warming predicted by U.N. models, placing their numbers much closer to observed temperatures,” the two wrote. “The most recent of these was published in April by Nic Lewis and Judith Curry in the Journal of Climate, a reliably mainstream journal.”

The two Cato scientists also took on Hansen’s other failed predictions, including those about the Greenland ice melt, temperatures in the U.S. Midwest, hurricanes and tornadoes.

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June 23, 2018 at 02:25AM

Daily News 23 Jun 2018

30 Years On, Remembering James Hansen’s 1988 Congressional Testimony

With the Greenhouse scare turning thirty this summer, we remember the Congressional testimony that launched it in the USA.

James Hansen testifying to the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, 23 June 1988

Thirty years ago, on 23 June 1988, James Hansen testified to a Congressional committee that anthropogenic global warming has been detected—he claimed a 99% statistical certainty that greenhouse warming is happening now. Later, surrounded by reporters, Hansen urged an immediate policy response, thereby launching the greenhouse warming scare in the United States.

Motivation

The committee hearings were called to promote a climate bill introduced by the Democrats and to promote responses to the greenhouse threat in the environmental policy platform of the Dukakis presidential campaign. There had been a number of previous attempts to promote the issue at Congressional hearings—particularly persistent was Al Gore—so it does pay to ask why this one was so spectacularly successful.

Bold claims by a scientist

Undoubtedly important was the strength and confidence of the claims Hansen made under solemn oath. Where previously scientists were guarded and qualified and they avoided policy advice, Hansen made a strong and confident ‘detection’ claim followed by an unreserved call for action.

Hansen backed up his detection claim with startling new evidence. Already in April he had published a new graph of the global temperature trend, which showed how the recent warming had shot past the late-1930s peak.

Click to enlarge and notice how the running 5-year mean climbs through 1987 and then seems to continue steeply up to a point for the first five months of 1988.

In that paper he quoted the 99% confidence level (i.e., that 1987 is abnormally warm at 3 standard deviations from the 1951-80 mean) but rejected any ‘causal connection’ with ‘the greenhouse effect’. In his testimony Hansen extended the graph by including incomplete trend data for 1988 (collected up to the previous month). This suggested that 1988 will be warmer than ever, and its inclusion created a striking visual effect. The 5-year running mean seems to continue on a steep rise into 1988 so that it looked like the line is about to burst through the top of the graph. (See testimony here.)

Extreme weather

Weather also played a part in the success of Hansen’s performance. The hearing followed a warm spring and a widely reported drought, which would continue through that long hot North American summer. In Washington summer opened with a stifling heatwave. The day before the hearing the thermometer topped 100^o F and the following day was not much cooler. The 22^nd of June 1988 was the warmest 22^nd of June on record. The day of the hearing also set the record for the 23^rd of June.

False claims of human intervention

Human intervention had accentuated the influence of the weather conditions in the crowded meeting room. At least, that claim was made on the good authority, but it has since been withdrawn.

The senator presiding over the hearing was Tim Wirth. In 2007 he told an interviewer how they had purposefully scheduled the hearing for a date that the Weather Service told them is likely to be the hottest day of summer. Then, the night before, they opened all the windows of the hearing room so that the air-conditioning would not be able to cope. With all the TV lights warming the room, this meant that ‘the wonderful Jim Hansen’, was ‘wiping his brow’ when he gave his ‘remarkable testimony’.

When skeptics first heard this story they were amazed as much at the audacity of the stratagem as at the boldness of this admission. Nevertheless, the story was accepted and widely repeated on the authority of Senator Wirth. This writer certainly accepted it and repeated it, even while holding reservations on two points. One was that the third day of summer is unlikely to be its statistical peak. The other was that the video footage in the news reports do not show Hansen or anyone else mopping sweat, or, indeed, noticeably uncomfortable with excessive perspiration. A recent fact check by The Washington Post has challenged every part of the story. Wirth himself even withdrew the claim about the opening of the windows and excused himself for repeating a boastful mythology. So, while the hot weather certainly served to fortify Hansen’s message, it now seems this was mostly fortuitous, with no one giving it a helping hand.

The response of the research community

The media and public response to the Hansen testimony is widely known, but not so the response of the research community. The overwhelming reaction was outrage and condemnation of the detection claim.

'Hansen vs. the World on the Greenhouse Threat' by Richard Kerr, Science; 2 June 1989, p. 1041

Tremendous hostility was directed towards James Hansen following his testimony. An article in Science by Richard Kerr reveals the acrimony that persisted one year later [2 June 1989, p. 1041].

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June 23, 2018 at 02:25AM

Daily News 23 Jun 2018

Burning Wood As Renewable Energy Threatens Europe’s Climate Goals

Scientists say a new EU policy on biomass is ‘simplistic and misleading’ and will increase CO2 emissions. U.S. forests are being turned into wood pellets to feed demand.

The European Union declared this week that it could make deeper greenhouse gas cuts than it has already pledged under the Paris climate agreement. But its scientific advisors are warning that the EU’s new renewable energy policy fails to fully account for the climate impacts of burning wood for fuel.

By counting forest biomass, such as wood pellets used in power plants, as carbon-neutral, the new rules could make it impossible for Europe to achieve its climate goals, the European Academy of Sciences Advisory Council (EASAC) wrote in a strongly worded statement.

The council said the renewable energy policy‘s treatment of biomass is “simplistic and misleading” and could actually add to Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions over the next 20 to 30 years. […]

The Math Doesn’t Add Up

The countries in the Paris treaty have been encouraged to adopt new, more ambitious goals in the next few years to further reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving global warming.

So, European nations, among the treaty’s strongest backers, have engaged in prolonged negotiations toward deeper emissions cuts. Over the past two weeks, they agreed to increase renewable energy to 32 percent of the power mix and set a goal of 32 percent energy efficiency savings.

The EU’s climate commissioner, Miguel Arias Cañete, told a meeting of environment leaders from Europe, Canada and China on Wednesday that the new policies would mean the European Union could increase its emissions reduction target from 40 percent to just over 45 percent by 2030.

But the renewable energy policy includes burning wood for fuel. Over a year ago, the EU’s science advisors published a comprehensive reportdebunking the logic behind treating all wood fuel as beneficial to the climate. Because burning wood gives off more CO2 than coal per unit of electricity produced, the climate math doesn’t add up, scientists say.

Large-scale forest harvests have a climate warming effect for at least 20 to 35 years, said University of Helsinki climate and forest scientist Jaana Bäck, who noted that scores of evidence-based studies all say basically the same thing.