Tag: Joanne Nova

By Joanne Nova
Turkey, where the local climate is normal and where nothing unusual happened in the time since the green bandwagon hit the road, signed on to Kyoto and will most likely sign on to the Copenhagen compromise, Kyoto II. So there is a need to spread the word about that the science the media won’t mention, hence The Skeptics Handbook A 2007 survey showed that even in Turkey some 70% of people are familiarized with the theory that carbon affects the climate, which shows the remarkable reach of UN propaganda1. The UN may not have any evidence, but they have widespread influence. The Politburo would be impressed. Like most politicians, the Turkish representatives wouldn’t mind another excuse to tax everything that moves while being hailed as heroes (I ‘ll save you. Let me spend your money!). And with potential EU membership acting like a carrot with gold plating, there are reasons for Turkey to accept agreements it may not otherwise have chosen to. It’s a country caught in a patchwork of third world unmechanized farming and modern megopolis development. Pop music has arrived in a big way; mass produced electronics goods are finding markets; and satellite and cable TV is common, but at the same time, people still chant five times a day — only now the most fanatical can do it with Bang and Olufsen megaphones. This is “modern” third world style. Adaptive Bass Linearisation meets the Koran. The state may provide free hospital care, but you need to bring your own nurse. Seriously, family members may have to provide non-medical nursing. Sewers are still uncovered and storm drains are inadequate. Infant mortality is surprisingly serious. Babies born in places like Nicaragua or the Palestinian Territories have much better chances of survival. This is not a country where “going solar” is a top priority. People are dying from real preventable causes, and man-made climate change is not one of them. Most people live in rural villages, and are dependent on coal and wood in winter, and gas for their cars, so the chances of “alternate energy sources” being affordable are seriously close to zero. Turkey’s economy (like many others) hangs by a thread. It’s hard to imagine how they could seriously cut their emissions without crippling their economy. Current tax rates are at a level that almost every business struggles to meet. Income levels are much lower than the west, to the point where even children are breadwinners. Meanwhile unemployment is officially “above 13%”, and probably in reality, above 25%2. Those numbers have a special meaning in a land where there are no unemployment benefits. Hiking up food costs with an unnecessary carbon impost is dangerous for people already on a subsistence diet. Energy-wise, Turkey has big gas reserves near the north coast of the Marmara and a well developed gas infrastructure, though not, it seems, a terribly well developed electricity network, as blackouts are still regular. There is plenty of work to do to get fossil fuel powered electricity running reliably before the country rushes into unproven and more risky alternatives. Rather than establishing Research Centers in Atmospheric Chemistry, the Kurds in the east are more interested in establishing schools and hospitals, and, of course, their own government. This is a country that needs to spend money on health, on basic services, on education — not on inefficient energy sources, auditing carbon credits, or a new layer of bureaucrats. The word from a cyber friend who lives there is that there aren’t many skeptics, but nor are there many AGW fans either. As I suspected, Turks view this mostly as a western creation and a western problem. Once again, marvel at the worldwide grassroots network of volunteers. Email all your Turkish friends. Click on the image above to see The Turkish Skeptics Handbook. Thanks to Zulloch Ltd for the translation. They are a professional translation service in Istanbul, so this was an easy effortless process for me. I just had to give permission and the cogs turned… And just in case you ever need to arrange a Turkish translation: Zulloch Tercume (Translation and Print Services) Ltd, Istanbul.
Phone: (0212) 641 1840 – 41
Fax: (0212) 641 1839 The full printable top quality 17Mb version can be downloaded too. (For all your friends in Turkey with four color printing presses.) Finally! – I’ve got a translation in a language that Brian Valentine can’t read.

By Joanne NovaThe Exxon “Blame-Game” is a Distracting Side Show

Much media attention has relentlessly focused on the influence of “Big Oil”—but the numbers don’t add up. Exxon Mobil is still vilified for giving around 23 million dollars, spread over roughly ten years, to skeptics of the enhanced greenhouse effect. It amounts to about $2 million a year, compared to the US government input of well over $2 billion a year. The entire total funds supplied from Exxon amounts to less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in just the single year of 2008.

Apparently Exxon was heavily “distorting the debate” with a mere 0.8% of what the US government spent on the climate industry each year at the time. (If so, it’s just another devastating admission of how effective government funding really is.)

As an example for comparison, nearly three times the amount Exxon has put in was awarded to the Big Sky sequestration project to store just 0.1% of the annual carbon-dioxide output of the United States of America in a hole in the ground. The Australian government matched five years of Exxon funding with just one feel-good advertising campaign, “Think Climate. Think Change.” (but don’t think about the details).

Perhaps if Exxon had balanced up its input both for and against climate change, it would have been spared the merciless attacks? It seems not, since it has donated more than four times as much to the Stanford-based Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP).5, 6 Exxon’s grievous crime is apparently just to help give skeptics a voice of any sort. The censorship must remain complete.

The vitriol against Exxon reached fever pitch in 2005-2008. Environmental groups urged a boycott of Exxon for its views on Global Warming. It was labeled An Enemy of the Planet. James Hansen called for CEOs of fossil energy companies to be “tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.” In the next breath he mentioned Exxon.

Even The Royal Society, which ought to stand up for scientists and also for impeccable standards of logic, joined the chorus to implore Exxon to censor its speech. The unprecedented letter from the 350-year-old institution listed multiple appeals to authority, but no empirical evidence to back its claim that a link with carbon and temperature was beyond doubt and discussion. The Royal Society claims that it supports scientists, but while it relies on the fallacious argument from authority how will it ever support whistle-blowers who by definition question “authority?”

While Exxon has been attacked repeatedly for putting this insignificant amount of money forward, few have added up the vested interests that are pro-AGW. Where are the investigative journalists? Money that comes from tax-payers is somehow devoid of corrupting incentives; while any money from Big Oil in a free market for ideas, is automatically a “crime”. The irony is that taxpayers’ money is forcibly removed at the point of a gun, but Exxon has to earn its money through thousands of voluntary transactions.

Those who attack Exxon over just $2 million a year are inadvertently drawing attention away from the real power play and acting as unpaid PR agents for giant trading houses and large banks, which could sit a little uncomfortably with greenies and environmentalists. After all, on other days, some of these same groups throw rocks at big bankers.

The side show of blaming Big Oil hides the truth: that the real issue is whether there is any evidence, and that the skeptics are a grassroots movement that consists of well respected scientists and a growing group of unpaid volunteers.

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By Joanne Nova

The scientific process has become distorted. One side of a theory receives billions, but the other side is so poorly funded that auditing of that research is left as a community service project for people with expert skills, a thick skin and a passionate interest. A kind of “Adopt an Error” approach. Can science survive the vice-like grip of politics and finance? Despite the billions of dollars in funding, outrageous mistakes have been made. One howler in particular, rewrote history and then persisted for years before one dedicated fact checker, working for free, exposed the fraud about the Hockey Stick Graph. Meanwhile agencies like the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, can’t afford to install temperature sensors to meet its own guidelines, because the workers are poorly trained and equipped to dig trenches only with garden trowels and shovels. NOAA “adjust” the data after the fact—apparently to compensate for sensors which are too close to air conditioners or car parks, yet it begs the question: If the climate is the biggest problem we face; if billions of dollars are needed, why can’t we install thermometers properly?

How serious are they about getting the data right? Or are they only serious about getting the “right” data?

How serious are they about getting the data right? Or are they only serious about getting the “right” data? The real total of vested interests in climate-change science is far larger than just scientists doing pure research. The $30 billion in funding to the CCSP (graphed above) does not include work on green technologies like improving solar cells, or storing a harmless gas underground. Funding for climate technologies literally doubles the amount of money involved, and provides a much larger pool of respectable-looking people with impressive scientific cachet to issue more press releases—most of which have little to do with basic atmospheric physics, but almost all of which repeat the assumption that the climate will warm due to human emissions. In other words: a 30-billion-dollar cheer squad.

Lots of one-sided honest research does not make for fair debate

The scientists funded by governments don’t need to be dishonest for science to become distorted. They just need to do their jobs. If we ask 100 people to look for lizards in the jungle, would anyone be surprised if no one sees the elephant on the plain? Few people are paid or rewarded for auditing the IPCC and associated organizations. Where is the Department of Solar Influence or the Institute of Natural Climate Change?

Thousands of scientists have been funded to find a connection between human carbon emissions and the climate. Hardly any have been funded to find the opposite. Throw 30 billion dollars at one question and how could bright, dedicated people not find 800 pages worth of connections, links, predictions, projections and scenarios? (What’s amazing is what they haven’t found: empirical evidence.)

And scientists are human, they have mortgages and kids. If Exxon money has any pulling power, government money must also “pull”. I can’t say it better than Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. – Upton Sinclair, 1935 Ironically it was Al Gore himself who helped ensure there was copious funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) from 1993-2000. We’ve poured billions into focusing bright brains on one angle, one topic, one cause. That’s a lot of salaries.

The monopolistic funding “ratchet”

There doesn’t necessarily need to be a conspiracy. It doesn’t require any centrally coordinated deceit or covert instructions to operate. Instead it’s the lack of funding for the alternatives that leaves a vacuum and creates a systemic failure. The force of monopolistic funding works like a ratchet mechanism on science. Results can move in both directions, but the funding means that only results from one side of the equation get “traction.”
Ideas that question the role of carbon in the climate are attacked with a fine-tooth comb by large teams of paid researchers. If real flaws are found they are announced loudly and repeatedly, and if there are imagined or irrelevant flaws, these too are announced and sometimes with even more fanfare. But ideas that support the role of carbon in the climate are subject to a very different analysis. Those on Team-AGW check to see if they have underestimated the impact of carbon, or made an error so obvious it would embarrass “the Team.” Since there are few paid supporters of natural causes, or people who benefit from defending non-carbon impacts, there is no one with an a priori motive to dig deep for non-obvious mistakes. So the pro-AGW ideas may only be scrutinized briefly, and by unpaid retirees, bloggers running on donations, or government scientists working in other fields—like geologists, who have reason to be skeptical, but who are not necessarily trained in, say, atmospheric physics.

There doesn’t necessarily need to be a conspiracy. It doesn’t require any centrally coordinated deceit or covert instructions to operate. Instead it’s the lack of funding for the alternatives that leaves a vacuum and creates a systemic failure.

Normally this might not be such a problem, because the lure of fame and fortune by categorically “busting” a well-accepted idea would attract some people. In most scientific fields, if someone debunks a big Nature or Science paper, they are suddenly cited more often; are the next in line for a promotion and find it easier to get grants. They attract better PhD students to help, are invited to speak at more conferences, and placed higher in the program. Instead in climate science, the reward is the notoriety of a personal attack page on Desmog1, ExxonSecrets2 or Sourcewatch3, dedicated to listing every mistake on any topic you may have made, any connection you may have had with the fossil fuel industry, no matter how long ago or how tenuous. The attack-dog sites will also attack your religious beliefs if you have any. Roy Spencer, for example, has been repeatedly attacked for being Christian (though no one has yet come up with any reason why that could affect his satellite data). Ironically, the “activist” websites use paid bloggers. DeSmog is a funded wing of a professional PR group Hoggan4 and Associates (who are paid to promote clients5 like David Suzuki Foundation, ethical funds, and companies that sell alternative energy sources like hydro power, hydrogen and fuel cells.) ExxonSecrets is funded by Greenpeace6 (who live off donations to “save” the planet, and presumably do better when the planet appears to need saving). Most scientific fields are looking for answers, not looking to prove only one side of a hypothesis. There are a few researchers who are paid to disprove the hypothesis of Global Warming, and most of them are investigated and pilloried as if they were a politician running for office. This is not how science works, by ad hominem attack. The intimidation, disrespect and ostracism leveled at people who ask awkward questions acts like a form of censorship. Not many fields of science have dedicated smear sites for scientists. Money talks. Respected MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen7 has spoken out against the pressure to conform and laments the loss of good researchers:

Sadly, this is only the tip of a non-melting iceberg. In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.

The combination of no financial reward, plus guaranteed hostile scrutiny, and threats of losing employment would be enough to discourage many from entering the contentious side of the field or speaking their mind if they question the “faith.” Finally, volunteers and isolated researchers lack infrastructure. Even though the mainstream theory is exposed to some verification, most scientists who find flaws don’t have paid teams of public relations experts to issue multiple press releases or funding to put in the hours and months required to submit papers. So when a mistake is found, few people may hear about it outside the industry. The monopolistic funding ratchet ensures that even insignificant or flawed analysis of factors that drive the climate can be supported longer than they should be, while real problems are belittled, ignored, and delayed. In a field as new as climate science, many things can change over ten years. Progress in understanding the planetary climate has slowed to a crawl.

Where is the motivation to prove AGW is wrong?

How many experts would go out of their way to make their own expertise and training less relevant? With funding hinged on proving that carbon controls the climate and therefore that climate science itself is critically important, it’s a self-sanctioning circle of vested interests. Yes, smart climate scientists are employable in other fields. But if voters suddenly realized carbon emissions had a minor role and humans have little influence, thousands of people would have to change something about their employment, and change is painful. In any industry, it’s impossible to argue that the specialists would prefer to have half the funding and half the status. Most of them either won’t get the next pay-rise, could lose their employment, or at least some spending power. They don’t get the upgrade of equipment they want, or they just lose status, because, well, climatology is “important”, but if we can’t change the weather, we are not inviting said experts onto our committees and to as many conferences.

We can assume most scientists are honest and hardworking, but even so, who’s kidding that they would all spend as much time and effort looking to disprove AGW as they do to prove it?

We can assume most scientists are honest and hardworking, but even so, who’s kidding that they would all spend as much time and effort looking to disprove AGW as they do to prove it? If your reputation and funding are on the line, you sweat, struggle and stay up late at night to figure out why you’re right and they’re wrong. Competition brings out the best in both sides. Some claim that they trust the scientific process itself, and the right answers will prevail in the long run—which is probably true. But as John Maynard Keynes famously said: “In the long run we are all dead.” There are better ways than waiting for the post-mortem. Science delayed is science denied. Science slowed is propaganda perpetuated.

References

1 Lindzen wipes hands clean of oil and gas. http://www.desmogblog.com/lindzen-wipes-hands-clean-of-oil-and-gas. 2 http://www.exxonsecrets.org. 3 http://www.sourcewatch.org. 4 http://www.hoggan.com/sustainability/desmogblog/. 5 http://www.hoggan.com/what_we_do/clients/. 6 http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/exxon-secrets. 7 Wall St Journal “Climate Of Fear”, April 12, 2006. http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220. The short killer summary: The Skeptics Handbook. The most deadly point: The Missing Hot Spot.

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By Joanne Nova

The Summary

• The US government has provided over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, foreign aid, and tax breaks.
• Despite the billions: “audits” of the science are left to unpaid volunteers. A dedicated but largely uncoordinated grassroots movement of scientists has sprung up around the globe to test the integrity of the theory and compete with a well funded highly organized climate monopoly. They have exposed major errors.
• Carbon trading worldwide reached $126 billion in 2008. Banks are calling for more carbon-trading. And experts are predicting the carbon market will reach $2 – $10 trillion making carbon the largest single commodity traded.
• Meanwhile in a distracting sideshow, Exxon-Mobil Corp is repeatedly attacked for paying a grand total of $23 million to skeptics—less than a thousandth of what the US government has put in, and less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in just the single year of 2008.
• The large expenditure in search of a connection between carbon and climate creates enormous momentum and a powerful set of vested interests. By pouring so much money into one theory, have we inadvertently created a self-fulfilling prophesy instead of an unbiased investigation?

Read the Full Report at the Science and Public Policy Institute.

There doesn’t necessarily need to be a conspiracy. It doesn’t require any centrally coordinated deceit or covert instructions to operate. Instead it’s the lack of funding for the alternatives that leaves a vacuum and creates a systemic failure. The force of monopolistic funding works like a ratchet mechanism on science. Results can move in both directions, but the funding means that only results from one side of the equation get “traction”.

Billions in the Name of “Climate”

In total, over the last 20 years, by the end of fiscal year 2009, the US government will have poured in $32 billion for climate research—and another $36 billion for development of climate-related technologies. These are actual dollars, obtained from government reports, and not adjusted for inflation. It does not include funding from other governments. The real total can only grow.

In 1989, the first specific US climate-related agency was created with an annual budget of $134 million. Today in various forms the funding has leapt to over $7,000 million per annum, around 50 fold higher. Tax concessions add to this. (See below for details and sources.)

This tally is climbing precipitously. With enormous tax breaks and rescue funds now in play, it’s difficult to know just how far over the $7 billion mark the final total will stand for fiscal year 2009. For example, additional funding for carbon sequestration experiments alone amounted to $3.4 billion in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (not included in the $7 billion total above).

If carbon is a minor player in the global climate as the lack of evidence suggests, the “Climate Change Science Program” (CCSP), “Climate Change Technology Program” (CCTP), and some of the green incentives and tax breaks would have less, little, or no reason to exist. While forecasting the weather and climate is critical, and there are other good reasons to develop alternative energy sources—no one can argue that the thousands of players who received these billions of dollars have any real incentive to “announce” the discovery of the insignificance of carbon’s role.

Click on the graph for a larger image.

“Thousands of scientists have been funded to find a connection between human carbon emissions and the climate. Hardly any have been funded to find the opposite. Throw 30 billion dollars at one question and how could bright, dedicated people not find 800 pages worth of connections, links, predictions, projections and scenarios? (What’s amazing is what they haven’t found: empirical evidence.)”

By setting up trading networks, tax concessions, and international bureaucracies before the evidence was in, have we ensured that our understanding of the role of carbon in climate science would be sped up, but that our knowledge of every other aspect of climate science would be slowed down to an equal and opposite extent?

Monopolistic funding creates a ratchet effect where even the most insignificant pro-AGW findings are reported, repeated, trumpeted and asserted, while any anti-AGW results lie unstudied, ignored and delayed. Auditing AGW research is so underfunded that for the most part it is left to unpaid bloggers who collect donations from concerned citizens online. These auditors, often retired scientists, are providing a valuable free service to society, and yet, in return they are attacked, abused, and insulted.

The truth will come out in the end, but how much damage will accrue while we wait for volunteers to audit the claims of the financially well-fed?

The stealthy mass entry of bankers and traders into the background of the scientific “debate” poses grave threats to the scientific process. The promise of “trillions of dollars” on commodity markets—with all of that potential money hinging on finding that human emissions of carbon dioxide have a significant role in the climate—surely acts like blanket of mud over open dispassionate analysis.

All of this means we must be extra diligent in only focusing on just the evidence, the science, the empirical data. Illogic and unreason cloud a debate already loaded with bias. When there are so many incentives encouraging unclarity and overcomplexity, the simple truths need help to rise to the top. But who funds the counter-PR campaign—now that even Exxon has been howled out of the theater of science. There is hardly any money promoting Natural Causes of Climate Change, while billions upon trillions promote Unnatural Forces.

In this scientific debate, one side is gagged while the other side has a government-funded media campaign.
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Also see: Climate Money – Big Government Outspends Big Oil

By Joanne NovaThe world has not warmed since 2001. Team-AGW reply #1: In the last decade we’ve had six (or seven or eight) of the top ten hottest years ever recorded. Skeptics Say: True, but it doesn’t mean much. Clusters and longer trends are all that’s left when you can’t say ‘2009, or 2008, or 2007 was the hottest…’ The kicker is that the world has been warming since the Little Ice Age of the 1700’s, long before SUV’s. And records only started around 100 years ago. That’s not long. (See the Akasofu graph.) Plus, many records were set by ground based stations, and a lot of these can’t be trusted. The Urban Heat Island effect means thermometers in cities are really measuring parking-lot-warming, or the-air-conditioner-effect, not global warming. Satellites have circled the planet 24 hours a day for 30 years recording temperatures continuously. If temperatures were still rising, they would see it. AGW reply #2: This flat patch is just natural variation. Skeptics say: “Natural variation” is caused by something. And it’s more important than carbon dioxide, because it is overpowering any CO2 warming. Even if the temperatures start going up again, the flat trend for seven years tells us the models are missing something big.Conclusion: This doesn’t prove global warming is over, but it proves carbon dioxide is not the main driver. Something else is causing temperatures to change, something the computer models don’t include.

Read more here.