Ephemera

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Full article:
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/11/global-bully-rudd-fights-for-foreign-committee-against-citizens/

[ emphasis mine ]

By Joanne Nova

The world is considering a new financial market larger than any commodity, it’s “based on science” but if you ask for evidence, you’re called names - “Denier”, and by our Prime Minister, no less. This is supposed to pass for reasoned debate?

In 6000 words Rudd uses ad hominem attacks, baseless allegations, argument from authority, mindless inflammatory rhetoric and quotes not a single piece of evidence that carbon drives our climate. He repeats quote after quote of sensible, ordinary points from his opponents as if it shows they are confused. Yet he can’t point out how any of them are wrong. It shows the depth of his own delusions - that he thinks merely questioning “the UN committee” is a flaw in itself.

It’s as if being a sceptic is a bad thing, yet the opposite of sceptical is gullible. Rudd throws baseless innuendo when he claims vested interests are at work. The truth is the exact opposite. Exxon spent $23 million on sceptics, but the US government spent $79 billion on the climate industry. Big Government outspent big-oil 3000 to 1. Worse, carbon trading last year was $126 billion dollars. That’s for just one year. The real vested interests stand in the open like signposted black holes hidden in plain view by a legal disclaimer. The singularities at the centre of the climate change galaxy have names like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, ABN Amro, Deutsche Bank, and HSBC.

The banks want us to trade carbon.

And the career scientists like their “rock-star” status. “Call us heroes”. “Thanks for the institute. Ta.”

******​

 

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This is sad but it is just fuckin' classic. How many times have you heard stories about a government bureaucracy desperate to figure out a way to fire or somehow get rid of an incompetent?

Administrators petrified of running afoul of some protected category of employee or just burned out from being required to abide by a thicket of "Catch 22-like" rules simply throw up their hands and give up. Nobody wants responsibility. This is where apocryphal tales of the promotion or transfer of utter mediocrities and incompetents come from. It is, unfortunately, beginning to look like the bureaucrats in the U.S. Army engaged in what Warren Buffet calls "thumb sucking." They made Nidal Hasan somebody else's problem.

It's classic bureaucratic behavior.


Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120313570


Walter Reed Officials Asked: Was Hasan Psychotic?
by Daniel Zwerdling

Starting in the spring of 2008, key officials from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences held a series of meetings and conversations, in part about Maj. Nidal Hasan, the man accused of killing 13 people and wounding dozens of others last week during a shooting spree at Fort Hood. One of the questions they pondered: Was Hasan psychotic?

"Put it this way," says one official familiar with the conversations that took place. "Everybody felt that if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not want Nidal Hasan in your foxhole."

In documents reviewed by NPR and conversations with medical officials at Walter Reed and USUHS, new details have emerged regarding serious concerns that officials raised about Hasan during his time at both institutions.

Hasan spent six years as a psychiatrist at Walter Reed, beginning in 2003, and he had a fellowship at USUHS until shortly before he went to Fort Hood in the summer of 2009. A committee of officials from both places regularly meets once a month to discuss pressing topics surrounding the psychiatrists and other mental health professionals who train and work at the institutions.

NPR spoke with military psychiatrists and officials who worked closely with Hasan, as well as those who monitored the committee and/or student and faculty matters. None would allow their names to be used, because of the criminal investigation into the Fort Hood shootings.

Deeply Troubling, Schizoid Behavior
When a group of key officials gathered in the spring of 2008 for their monthly meeting in a Bethesda, Md., office, one of the leading — and most perplexing — items on their agenda was: What should we do about Hasan?

Hasan had been a trouble spot on officials' radar since he started training at Walter Reed, six years earlier. Several officials confirm that supervisors had repeatedly given him poor evaluations and warned him that he was doing substandard work.

Both fellow students and faculty were deeply troubled by Hasan's behavior — which they variously called disconnected, aloof, paranoid, belligerent, and schizoid. The officials say he antagonized some students and faculty by espousing what they perceived to be extremist Islamic views. His supervisors at Walter Reed had even reprimanded him for telling at least one patient that "Islam can save your soul."

Participants in the spring meeting and in subsequent conversations about Hasan reportedly included John Bradley, chief of psychiatry at Walter Reed; Robert Ursano, chairman of the Psychiatry Department at USUHS; Charles Engel, assistant chair of the Psychiatry Department and director of Hasan's psychiatry fellowship; Dr. David Benedek, another assistant chairman of psychiatry at USUHS; psychiatrist Carroll J. Diebold; and Scott Moran, director of the psychiatric residency program at Walter Reed, according to colleagues and other sources who monitor the meetings.

NPR tried to contact all these officials and the public affairs officers at the institutions. They either didn't return phone calls or said they could not comment.

But psychiatrists and officials who are familiar with the conversations, which continued into the spring of 2009, say they took a remarkable turn: Is it possible, some mused, that Hasan was mentally unstable and unfit to be an Army psychiatrist?

One official involved in the conversations had reportedly told colleagues that he worried that if Hasan deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, he might leak secret military information to Islamic extremists. Another official reportedly wondered aloud to colleagues whether Hasan might be capable of committing fratricide, like the Muslim U.S. Army sergeant who, in 2003, killed two fellow soldiers and injured 14 others by setting off grenades at a base in Kuwait.

Bureaucratic And Other Obstacles
So why didn't officials act on their concerns and seek to remove Hasan from his duties, or at least order him to receive a mental health evaluation? Interviews with these officials suggest that a chain of unrelated events and factors deterred them.

For one thing, Walter Reed and most medical institutions have a cumbersome and lengthy process for expelling doctors, involving hearings and potential legal battles. As a result, sources say, key decision-makers decided it would be too difficult, if not unfeasible, to put Hasan on probation and possibly expel him from the program.

Second, some of Hasan's supervisors and instructors had told colleagues that they repeatedly bent over backward to support and encourage him, because they didn't have clear evidence that he was unstable, and they worried they might be "discriminating" against Hasan because of his seemingly extremist Islamic beliefs.

Third, the officials involved in deliberations this year reportedly were not aware, as some top Walter Reed officials were, that intelligence analysts had been tracking Hasan's e-mails with at least one suspected Islamic extremist since December 2008.

And finally, Hasan was about to leave Walter Reed and USUHS for good and transfer to Fort Hood, in Texas. Fort Hood has more psychiatrists and other mental specialists than some other Army bases, so officials figured there would be plenty of co-workers who would support Hasan — and monitor him.

 

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=a1dWw6lHCAJQ

Desire Drug May Prove Sex Really Is All in Her Head
By Naomi Kresge


Nov. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH is banking on sex really being all in women’s heads.

The German drugmaker is putting the finishing touches on a pill designed to reawaken desire by blunting female inhibitions. Unlike Viagra, which targets the mechanics of sex by boosting blood flow to the penis, this drug works on the brain.

The desire drug, the focus of a meeting on sexual disorders in Lyon next week, has the potential to revolutionize sexual medicine much as Pfizer Inc.’s blue pill did a decade ago. That could put family-owned Boehringer at the center of a debate about whether the medicine is a chemical shortcut around a complex dysfunction involving body and mind -- or whether disinterest in sex is a legitimate medical condition.

“This drug has the potential to finally open the door to acceptance of the idea that decreased desire can be something that involves a dysfunctional way the brain works, and not only a bad partner,” said Jim Pfaus, a neurologist at Concordia University in Montreal, who conducted early tests of the drug in rats. “Of course it’s in your head.”

The U.S. market for medicines to rekindle female libido could be bigger than the $2 billion a year in U.S. sales for erectile dysfunction treatments because more women report sexual problems, BioSante Pharmaceuticals Inc. Chief Executive Officer Stephen Simes estimated last year.

Showing It Works
Boehringer, based in the German town of Ingelheim on the Rhine’s west bank, was searching for a depression treatment in the 1990s when it stumbled on the compound, called flibanserin. By 2002, Boehringer found the drug wasn’t lifting patients’ mood. The company says researchers were startled when test subjects rated one measure of well-being, sexual appetite, consistently higher than the others.

After what Pfaus described as an initial period of hesitation about developing a sex pill, Boehringer decided to move forward. The company needs new drugs because it faces the loss of 1 billion euros ($1.5 billion) in annual revenue when two older medicines, Mirapex for Parkinson’s disease and Flomax to treat enlarged prostate, lose patent protection next year.

The world’s largest closely held pharmaceutical company has been studying flibanserin for more than a decade and it has yet to publish clinical test results showing the drug is effective. The company will lift its veil of secrecy on Monday at the European Society for Sexual Medicine conference with data from trials of more than 5,000 European and U.S. women.

Women’s Distress
The main criterion for the clinical trials, which the company named after flowers, was how many “satisfying sexual events” women said they had experienced after starting treatment. If the results are good, the so-called Bouquet studies, dubbed Violet, Daisy, Dahlia and Orchid, could form the basis for applications to U.S. and European regulators.

The German company is taking a page from Pfizer’s book. The U.S. drugmaker broadened the appeal of Viagra in 1998 by steering clear of the word “impotence” and saying the blue pill addressed a disease called erectile dysfunction. Boehringer is avoiding potentially offensive words such as frigidity and refers to the problem its pill cures by its clinical name, hypoactive sexual desire disorder, or HSDD.

“An increasing body of evidence shows that hypoactive sexual desire disorder causes substantial emotional distress,” said Heike Specht, a spokesman for the company. The drugmaker “has conducted late-stage clinical trials in over 5,000 women from which we hope will result the first available pharmaceutical treatment.”

A Boehringer survey of 31,000 U.S. women aged 18 and above found that one in 10 expressed distress because of diminished sex drive.

Ideological Battle
A sluggish libido is “a real problem,” and early clinical results so far suggest Boehringer’s drug can help, according to Stephen Stahl, a psychopharmacologist and chairman of the Neuroscience Education Institute in Carlsbad, California. Stahl, who has been a consultant for Boehringer, sees a growing role for drugs in treating sexual disorders.

Not everyone agrees there is a disorder to begin with.

In 2003, a year after Boehringer started the Bouquet clinical trials, an article written by Ray Moynihan in the British Medical Journal called female sexual dysfunction “the freshest, clearest example we have” of a disease created by pharmaceutical companies to make healthy people think they need medicine.

“This is for some an ideological battle,” said psychiatrist Michael Berner of the Freiburg University Clinic, who had patients in Boehringer’s studies. “One view is the multi-dimensional view you get from people like me. And then you have these people that say you should work only on relationship issues and that medication cannot have a place.”

‘Like Dancing’
Researchers don’t know why some women’s libido falters, said Pfaus, who has tested compounds in rats for Pfizer, Boehringer and Palatin Technologies Inc. by gauging whether they spur female rats to solicit sex from males.

“An erection is obvious, it’s easy,” Pfaus said. “But desire -- how do you get at that?”

The explanation may be partly evolutionary, according to Berner, who says male primates are driven by a need to spread their semen, while for females it’s important to be able to care for and rear the offspring.

Some researchers believe the social components of intercourse mean that sexual problems can’t be addressed in the same way as heart failure or cancer.

Sex is a “historical and cultural phenomenon,” said Leonore Tiefer, a psychiatry professor at New York University. There’s no baseline of normalcy by which to define a disorder, she contends.

“It’s like dancing, or music, or piano-playing,” Tiefer said. “You do it with the body, but the part the body plays isn’t the largest part.”

Over the Wall
Flibanserin works on the brain by putting “two feet on the brakes” to block the release of a chemical called serotonin, which regulates mood, appetite, sleep and memory, Pfaus said. In time, the process should trigger the production of dopamine, a chemical that, among other jobs, helps stimulate desire.

The drug differs from testosterone, a hormone that’s also been tested to reawaken women’s desire. Berner, interviewed at his study in Freiburg, sketched the picture of a wall to explain how flibanserin works.

“You’re standing here, sad, inhibited,” he said, drawing a stick figure next to the wall on a scrap of paper. “Testosterone would give you a little bit more excitement, so you’d climb over. Flibanserin would take away one of the stones.”

Once a Day
The compound takes three to six weeks to kick in. The pill has to be taken daily, and some women taking part in the clinical trials reported feeling tired, Berner said.

Boehringer recruited women for clinical studies using print advertisements. Berner said his patients were largely professionals in their early 30s to mid-40s, and most chose to continue in the trial in a subsequent phase that ensured they would get the real drug instead of a placebo. Boehringer is recruiting older women for a follow-up study.

Women can be diagnosed with hypoactive sexual desire disorder if they feel concerned, bothered or frustrated by a lack of desire -- or if it’s hurting their relationships.

The company used personal digital assistants to check whether the pill was working. Participants were beeped once a day and asked to rate their level of desire and say whether they had been sexually active and whether it was enjoyable.

Potential Rivals
If flibanserin makes it to market, it will be the first success after a series of failures from drugmakers including Procter & Gamble Co. and Pfizer. The New York-based maker of Viagra abandoned efforts to adapt its pill for women in 2004 and closed sex-health research at the end of last year.

The only female sexual dysfunction therapy approved in the U.S. is Eros-CTD, from NuGyn, Inc., a suction pump that fits over the clitoris much like the erection pumps that predated Viagra. Intrinsa, a testosterone patch from Noven Pharmaceuticals Inc. licensed by Procter & Gamble, is sold in Europe for women whose uteruses have been removed. A U.S. version was put on hold in 2004 on concern about whether it is safe for long-term use.

Still in clinical trials are a new version of the P&G patch; LibiGel, a testosterone gel from BioSante; and bremelanotide, an injected therapy from Palatin Technologies.

Researchers around the world will be watching Boehringer’s results in Lyon, according to Pfaus. “There are probably a lot of companies holding their breath,” he said.

 

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Transcript: http://www.kusi.com/weather/colemanscorner/43480232.html

GLOBAL WARMING HAS FAILED THE SCIENTIFIC TEST
By John Coleman
April 22, 2009

There is no significant man-made global warming at this time. There has not been any in the past. There is no reason to fear any in the future.

I am certain of what I just said; as certain as an educated, informed person can be.

I have held professional level membership in the American Meteorological Society and been honored as the society's Broadcast Meteorologist of the Year. I have predicted the weather daily for 55 years. I read the professional American Meteorological Society publications. I have read and studied the documents of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I am qualified to make the scientific conclusions I have made. And, I am a graduate Journalist with many years of experience. So I adhere to the requirement that I avoid any biases and avoid promoting a personal agenda. I remain confident of the absolute conclusions I have reached.
Significant Man-Made Global Warming is a myth based on bad science.

I do not hate Al Gore and give him credit due for serving with honor as the Vice President of the United States and I acknowledge that he garnered at impressive 52 million votes for President of the United States.

However, he is no scientist and he has made an absolute mess of things with his global warming campaign. His science is wrong, dead wrong, and his fear mongering diatribes are inexcusable. Ladies and gentleman, I must conclude that Al Gore is full of prunes.

I am asking, I am begging, all of you to set your political and environmental agendas aside for a few moments and hear me out on my only point: the science behind the global warming frenzy is wrong.

The foundation of the global warming hypothesis is that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that causes temperatures to rise. The carbon dioxide in question is the CO2 that goes into the air as a result of our burning of fossil fuels which is the primary source of energy to power our daily lives. The lights, heat and a/c, our PA system, our computers, our cell phones, our TVs and radios and our automobiles and airplanes are all dependent on fossil fuels. We are decades away from being able to maintain our modern way of life without it. Solar and wind, geothermal and biomass all can be expanded and further refined, but they cannot power our modern civilization for decades. We continue the quest for the 21st century replacement for the internal combustion engine, but we have not found it yet.

Yet we are told we must carry guilt for our carbon footprints; and cease and desist our use of fossil fuels or pay a tax as a penalty for using it. Al Gore and his friends lecture us that the carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere to support our daily lives will destroy our planet.

On the state and federal levels carbon dioxide, CO2, is on the verge of being classified as a pollutant. This is based on the claim that CO2 is a significant greenhouse gas and produces significant global warming and far reaching side effects from flooding to drought, from deadly storms to death by heat and disease.

I conclude that this entire anti-carbon dioxide [crusade] is based on bad science. CO2 is not evil. Quite to the contrary, carbon dioxide is absolutely required for life on Earth. If there is no carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, photosynthesis, the process that makes plants green and keeps them alive could not happen. And without plants, animal life, including human life, would perish.

So how did CO2, carbon dioxide, go from required for life to a curse and the evil gas of global warming? It is an amazing story of science gone bad.

Before I tell that story, let me be certain we all have the basic facts about CO2. Carbon Dioxide has always been in the atmosphere of Earth. It has increased and decreased with climate shifts though the four billion years the Earth has existed. In his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore stands on a lift platform and moves along a graph of the changing temperature and carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere of Earth through the eons. He claims the CO2 is driving temperature changes, but in fact his graph shows clearly that the temperatures changes happen first and then the CO2 increases or decreases. He has the cause and effect totally backward.

But Big Al is right about one thing, since mankind began burning fossil fuels there has been a steady increase in the CO2 content of the atmosphere. And, that is his focus. He claims it is going to lead to climate mayhem. But here are the facts:

First, even after over 200 years of burning fossil fuels CO2 remains a tiny trace gas in the atmosphere, about 38 molecules of CO2 out of 100,000 molecules of atmosphere. How can that tiny trace gas have such a profound impact on temperature? It can't. But this is where the science has become science fiction. The scientists have come up with a theory of what they call radiative forcing, where CO2 compounds the greenhouse effect of water vapor and temperatures soar. We taxpayers have spent billions and billions supporting this research and computer modeling to prove this concept. But, in the end, it has failed.

The man who launched the whole global warming movement was named Roger Revelle. An award named in his honor was recently bestowed on Al Gore at a ceremony at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in San Diego, my home town. This provided the news hook for me to get part of this story on television as you will see in this report.

(VIDEO: GORE AND REVELLE)
http://www.kusi.com/weather/colemanscorner/40867912.html?video=pop&t=a

Now, let me get back to the big question: How do I know that the scientific theory about carbon dioxide being a super-duper greenhouse gas is wrong? Let me explain where it comes from. Several different teams of Ph.D. scientists followed Roger Revelle's lead and over the years produced mathematical equations that depict how CO2 interacts with water vapor to multiply its greenhouse impact. The government research dollars were flowing and the work multiplied. Each team would start with prior group's work and try to further explain the theory and refine the radiative forcing formula. They peer reviewed each other's papers. The papers were then published in the scholarly journals of various scientific organizations.

Eventually the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change melded the papers into a final theory and formula. The panel's reviewers made comments; some good and some that raised concerns. Eventually the members of the Panel voted to accept the theory. That, they claimed was consensus, and that made their theory valid.

Computer modelers who were a part of the IPCC and the government funded research centers at Universities and Research labs developed what is known as general circulation models of the Earth's atmosphere. They put the accepted CO2 radiative forcing formula into the computers and produced projections for the next 100 years. The results showed a steady rise in Earth's atmospheric temperatures as the CO2 increased in the atmosphere. They fine tuned the models by starting the predictions back around 1980 and comparing the output with actual global temperatures for the 80s and 90s. They adjusted the models until they got a predicted output that matched reality for those 20 years and announced that was proof of the greenhouse theory.

All of this was good enough for the IPCC, Al Gore, the environmentalists and politicians. The media jumped aboard and the frenzy began.

So what was wrong with all of this? It turns out, plenty.

First, a vote of the panel is not consensus of the scientists of the world. There were all along, plenty of scientists who did not buy into the radiative forcing theory. It is just they were being shut out of the scientific journals and meetings by the well funded group in control. Their careers, their funding and their success depended on global warming.

Next, when you dig into the IPCC panel you discover only about 55 scientists actually ever read, studied and understood the CO2 research. Many members of the panel are from other science disciplines or are government bureaucrats or environmental activities and did not care to read or understand the science because they had anti fossil fuel agendas.

Furthermore, there was the historic temperature and CO2 records that did not jive with radiative forcing theory at all and the IPCC offered no sensible explanation of that disconnect.

Eventually, scientists who questioned the CO2 science began to start websites on the internet, post blogs, sign petitions, write books, send letters, testify at hearings and so on and the word began to get out that there was a good reason Al Gore would not debate or take questions. He did not have the answers.

And, the whole case began to unravel in 1998 when the temperatures stopped rising. By 2002 they had begun to fall. And, now seven years later, global average temperatures are falling like a rock.

It turns out, the IPCC computer models did not account for the impact of the solar cycles. In the 80s and 90s when a solar cycle was peaking and temperatures were rising, the IPCC said that was from radiative forcing. Now that the Sun has gone into a very quiet phase and the Earth is cooling, there is a dramatic diversion between the IPCC temperature forecasts for continued rising and the cold spell. Al Gore says the Earth has a fever. He is dead wrong; the Earth has a chill. Astronomers and Climatologists now tell us it will last for the next 20 years. So Al Gore's and the UN's proof of global warming has gone "poof".

The number of scientists who object to the global warming theory is now rapidly increasing. At last count, 750 had made public statements noted by the U.S. Senate Environmental Committee. Thirty five thousand, 10 thousand with Ph.D.'s have signed a petition debunking global warming. The media is beginning to notice us. The latest poll data shows a growing significant percentage of the American public now questions the claims about man-made global warming...

http://www.kusi.com/weather/colemanscorner

 

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By: Art Horn, Professional Meteorologist

The inconvenient science:

1…Surface temperature records show that global temperature fell from 1875 to 1910. Temperature rose from 1911 to 1943. Temperature fell again from 1944 to 1976. Temperature rose from 1977 to 1998. There has been no warming since 1998. We are now in the 8th year of cooling. While all these changes were happening carbon dioxide levels did nothing but go up.

2… There are 5 major centers that collect global temperature data, Remote sensing systems, The University of Alabama Huntsville, The Goddard Institute for Space Studies, The Hadley Center and the Nation Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. All of these centers show no warming since 1998 and all show cooling to varying degrees for the last 8 years.

3…NASA said this summer that the oceans are warmer than ever before. This was accomplished by subtracting the satellite measured ocean temperature data. NASA also does not use the 3307 ARGO buoys deployed in the world oceans because they show ocean heat content has been falling since the buoys were deployed in 2003.

4…There is no statistical relationship between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and temperature during the last 150 years. There is a strong statistical relationship between the cyclic Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and global temperature. The PDO is a 60 year cycle of warming and cooling of the Pacific Ocean. In every instance over the last 150 years when the PDO was in the cool phase the global temperature went down. When the PDO was in the warm phase the temperature went up. The PDO has shifted back to cool and the air temperature is falling again.

5…The total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 3.8 one hundredth of a percent. The total increase by volume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the last 150 years is one hundredth of a percent. This increase has benefited agriculture, trees, flowers and other plants. They grow faster with more carbon dioxide.

6…Carbon dioxide is not pollution. Everything that grows on earth needs it. The source is irrelevant. Remove all the carbon dioxide from the air and the earth dies.

7…There are many large organizations including but not limited to environmental groups, corporations, universities, media outlets and political parties that have a strong financial interest in having you believe carbon dioxide is pollution. The saying “follow the money” was made for global warming. A vast carbon trading market is being generated around the world. This is being done to capitalize financially on the fear of global warming using the regulation of carbon emissions as the basis for establishing a market for carbon financial products. This is literally pulling money from thin air.

8…Ice cores show that increases in carbon dioxide in the past were the result of warmer temperature, not the cause of it. The laws of nature have not changed. Most of the increases in carbon dioxide in the air are the result of nature. The human component is very small, on the order of 3 percent per year. Carbon dioxide is 3.5 percent of the greenhouse effect. Water vapor is 95 percent. Since human activity only adds 3 percent a year the total human contribution to the greenhouse effect each year is about one quarter of one percent. Reducing this amount by some fraction will no effect on temperature.

9…There is a strong relationship between the strength of the solar wind and global temperature. Strong solar wind equals a warmer earth, weak solar wind equals a cooler earth. Variations in cosmogenic isotopes of carbon 14 and beryllium 10 in ice cores prove this. Right now the solar wind is weaker than anytime that NASA has been able to measure it, nearly 50 years and the earth is cooling. The solar magnetic index (AP) is the lowest since measurements began in 1932 and it’s continuing to go down. The Pacific Ocean is in it’s cool phase and will be for another 25 years. The Atlantic is showing signs of cooling. The sun is weak and will likely be so for the next two solar cycles. We are heading for colder temperatures, not warmer.

10…The cyclic downward trend in the amount of ice left in the Arctic at the end of the summer has ended. There is today 25 percent more ice than 2 years ago.

11…In the 1960s there were an estimated 5,000 polar bears, today there are 25,000. In a typical biased story in April of this year TIME magazine reported there were “only” 25,000 left. Once again this story had major input from environmental groups.

12…Satellite measurements show there is more ice in Antarctic than 30 years ago. News media reports only talk about shrinking ice in the Arctic, never about growing ice in Antarctica. They are selling fear.

13…The melting of glaciers is not new. The “Little Ice Age” was from 1400 to 1850. The coldest temperatures were in the 1600s. Global temperature has been rising unevenly for 300 years. Glaciers have been retreating unevenly for at least 250 years.

14…Computer models say that there should be a rapid warming of the upper troposphere between 30 degrees north and south of the equator if global warming is proceeding as they predict. Measurements with weather balloons over the last 50 years so no such warming at all. This proves the computer models do not understand how the climate system works. They can’t predict the climate 50 to 100 years in the future. Computer model forecasts of warming are not evidence of climate change. They are marketing tools for research institutions and universities to continue their funding from our government.

15…Data from the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite show outgoing longwave radiation (heat) increased by 4 watts per square meter in the 1980s and 1990s while the oceans were undergoing a cyclic warming. Computer models predicted outgoing longwave radiation would decrease as oceans warmed. All the models used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were wrong. This means the models make the wrong assumptions about how the climate works and are useless in making any climate policy.

16…The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was formed in 1986 to prove human burning of fossil fuels causes global warming. It is not a scientific organization, it is political. Their true goal is to capture power through climate treaties. They will then redistribute wealth as they see fit using climate debt owed to third world countries due to the industrialized nations “polluting” the climate with carbon dioxide. They want to use global warming to blackmail the first world to extract money without having to work for it. Call it climate welfare. Recently the chairman of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri announced “We’re at a stage where the warming is happening at a much faster rate.” Apparently he does not look at real world data or he is lying.

17…Large environmental groups, political “leaders” and enviroactivists believe the climate system is so simple that it behaves like a room in your house. Simply turn down the thermostat ie: reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and we can regulate the world temperature. This is as stupid as getting in a car and saying “see it has a steering wheel. Just turn it on and it will steer itself.”

 

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It is one more in a series of great laboratory experiments complete with lab rats. Throughout my life, I have repeatedly witnessed people being taken in by fads promoted by charlatans and buncombe artists or simple-minded fools jumping on bandwagons. It has happened again and again and again. It astounds me. Most of the time, those who fall for them aren't very bright and I simply laugh at their astonishing credulity and gullibility. There were the complete idiots known to history as "hippies," an amazing, deluded bunch of drug-addled, pie-eyed buffoons. There were the Y2K doomsters. There were the lemmings who fell for the great Internet stock bubble. There were the fools who thought the way to prosperity was to buy homes using immense mortgages and no money down.

They believe the palpably false and the demonstrably untrue. They have no knowledge of history, no intellectual curiosity, and no ability to discriminate between fact and fiction. They have no knowledge of the basic constructs of science or economics. If you ask them to relate the second law of thermodynamics, you'll be greeted with a blank stare. If you ask them the difference between a greenhouse and the atmosphere, you'll get a bewildered look. They have the analytical acumen of anchovies. The words "albedo," "solar irradiance," "climate sensitivity," "geometric growth rate," "exponential growth rate," "auto-correlation," "Milankovitch cycle," "Pacific Decadal Oscillation," "solar wind," "Argos buoy system," "troposphere," "Dimethyl Sulfoxide," "Maunder minimum," and "Medieval Warm Period" mean nothing to them. Many are innumerate and most have no sense of orders of magnitude, no conception of scientific method, no knowledge of large institutions and the behavior of humans within those institutions. They've never manged anything as large as a lemonade stand.

If you ask them where electricity comes from, you'll likely be told, "From a socket." If you ask how much they pay for that electricity per kwh or how much they pay per mcf ( or BTU or therm ) of natural gas, you're not likely to get an accurate answer.

So, go on, ask if the polar bear population is threatened.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/get-file.php?report=national&image=timeseries02&byear=2009&bmonth=10&year=2009&month=10&ext=gif&id=110-00

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/modelEsrc/

 

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aWwPrRxeEoyk

Dollar’s Demise Traces Roots to U.S. Tax Trap
by Kevin Hassett

Nov. 16 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar has tanked this year, though the drop has been fairly steady and orderly. That may be about to change.

The history of financial markets suggests that crashes are painfully common. Steady bad news very often leads to a rout. Sadly, the scenario that turns the dollar’s bear market into a crash is beginning to look like a sure thing.

If a dollar crash were to occur, it might happen because foreign investors decide that the U.S. has fallen into a so- called tax trap. A tax trap occurs when a nation finds itself unable to increase revenue by lifting tax rates. Such a circumstance, if paired with mounting deficits, can lead to wholesale flight from a nation’s assets. The Chinese will only lend money if they think we will pay it back. If doubt about the latter deepens, all bets are off.

Why might the U.S. be in a tax trap? The problem is that the U.S. income tax, a primary source of federal revenue, is very progressive, and has high rates. When rates are already high, it becomes harder and harder to raise money by lifting them more. This is, of course, the observation that made economist Arthur Laffer famous, and for the U.S. it is a real concern.

Corporate Taxes
First, our corporate tax rate is the world’s second highest, and a number of recent studies have found that such rates don’t lead to more revenue. This version of the Laffer curve is now fairly widely acknowledged.

But what is less commonly understood is that our graduated income tax also probably has reached the point where higher rates raise little new revenue, at least given the political landscape. President Barack Obama has pledged to only increase taxes on those with incomes higher than $250,000. But lifting only that top marginal rate can have perverse revenue effects.

Here is why. When tax rates go up, wealthy individuals have many options to reduce their tax bill. They can work a little less, they can purchase municipal bonds that pay tax-free interest, and they can take a vast number of other similar steps.

More of Less
If we start with a tax rate of 35 percent, then for every dollar of income reduction, the government loses 35 cents. After the adjustment occurs, the government collects revenue via the higher rate applied to what is left. If you lift the marginal rate from 35 percent to 45 percent -- assuming taxpayers adjust their incomes lower -- then you lose 35 cents for every dollar of income reduction, while getting back 10 cents on every dollar that is left in the top bracket. The revenue effect depends on how much income adjusts, and how much income is left in the top bracket after that adjustment.

If you only change the top rate, then it gets surprisingly hard to generate revenue, even when income adjustments are small.

Let’s take the tax changes the Democrats have planned for next year. They want to let the top marginal rate go from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, and to reduce the value of itemized deductions in a way that adds a little more than a percent to the marginal tax rate, making the total 40.8 percent.

Making Adjustments
The top income tax rate kicks in for a married couple at $372,951. Everyone with an income above that will face the higher rate, and some adjust their taxable income down accordingly.

How big will that adjustment be? A study by Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley, suggests that these taxpayers would reduce their income by about 5.2 percent.

If incomes do decline in that amount, then the tax increases will raise very little revenue. Indeed, the breakeven point for the government is surprisingly high. For every individual who has income below about $613,000, the government will actually lose money because of the tax hike. The 35 cents lost for every dollar of income reduction isn’t offset by the roughly 6 cents gained on the income that remains.

The numbers are even worse if we analyze the 5.4 percent millionaire surtax that just passed the House as part of the health-care bill. Within the top tax bracket, the lower the income, the more people there are with that income. You have to collect a lot more money from the richest taxpayers in the bracket to offset the revenue losses from those at the bottom of the bracket as they make moves to avoid the tax by lowering their income. As a result the net revenue raised by these tax changes is likely to be tiny.

A Wash
That means that the tax increases that the Democrats plan to pay for their expensive programs are unlikely to raise much revenue.

The government deficit already looks like it will approach $1 trillion a year over the next decade. But in fact, the higher tax rates, especially those that are, as in the health-care bill, paired with higher spending, are going to make it worse.

When foreign investors see that higher taxes deliver little new revenue while spending soars, they will head for the exits.

The dollar will be dead, and the tax trap will have killed it.

 

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Nice animation image of a triple expansion engine:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Triple_expansion_engine_animation.gif

 

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The Leonid Meteor Shower:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/images/leonids2009/skymap_north.gif

 

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Revenge of the Climate Laymen
Global warming's most dangerous apostate speaks out about the state of climate change science
By ANNE JOLIS

Barack Obama conceded over the weekend that no successor to the Kyoto Protocol would be signed in Copenhagen next month. With that out of the way, it may be too much to hope that the climate change movement take a moment to reflect on the state of the science that is supposedly driving us toward a carbon-neutral future.

But should a moment for self-reflection arise, campaigners against climate change could do worse than take a look at the work of Stephen McIntyre, who has emerged as one of the climate change gang's Most Dangerous Apostates. The reason for this distinction? He checked the facts.

The retired Canadian businessman, whose self-described "auditing" a few years ago prompted a Congressional review of climate science, has once again thrown EnviroLand into a tailspin. In September, he revealed that a famous graph using tree rings to show unprecedented 20th century warming relies on thin data. Since its publication in 2000, University of East Anglia professor Keith Briffa's much-celebrated image has made star appearances everywhere from U.N. policy papers to activists' posters. Like other so-called "hockey stick" temperature graphs, it's an easy sell—one look and it seems Gadzooks! We're burning ourselves up!

"It was the belle of the ball," Mr. McIntyre told me on a recent phone call from Ontario. "Its dance card was full."

At least until Mr. McIntyre reported that the modern portion of that graph, which shows temperatures appearing to skyrocket in the last 100 years, relies on just 12 tree cores in Russia's Yamal region. When Mr. McIntyre presented a second graph, adding data from 34 tree cores from a nearby site, the temperature spike disappears.

Mr. Briffa denounces Mr. McIntyre's work as "demonstrably biased" because it uses "a narrower area and range of sample sites." He says he and his colleagues have now built a new chronology using still more data. Here, as in similar graphs by other researchers, the spike soars once again. Mr. McIntyre's "work has little implication for our published work or any other work that uses it," Mr. Briffa concludes.

He and his colleagues may well ignore Mr. McIntyre, but the rest of us shouldn't. While Mr. McIntyre's image may use data from fewer sites, it still has nearly three times as many tree cores representing the modern era as Mr. Briffa's original.

Yet Mr. McIntyre is first to admit his work is no bullet aimed at the heart of the theory of man-made climate change. Rather, his work—chronicled in papers co-written with environmental economist Ross McKitrick and more than 7,000 posts on his Climateaudit.org Weblog—does something much more important: It illustrates the uncertainty of a science presented as so infallible as to justify huge new taxes on rich countries along with bribes to poor ones in order to halt their fossil-fueled climbs to prosperity. Mr. McIntyre offers what many in the field do not: rigor.

It all started in 2002 when—as many might given the time and Mr. McIntyre's mathematics background—he decided to verify for himself the case for action on climate change.

"It was like a big crossword puzzle," he told me. "Business was a bit slow at the time, so I started reading up."

Prior to the Briffa graph revelation, he had also caught a statistical error that undercut another exalted "hockey stick" graph prominently featured by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC, this one by Michael Mann, head of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center. Alerts about review boards' seemingly lax standards litter his blog, highlighting in particular the IPCC, which has used both the Mann and Briffa graphs in its reports. In 2007, Mr. McIntyre found a technical gaffe that forced NASA to correct itself and admit that 1934, not 1998, was the warmest year recorded in the continental U.S.

"At the beginning I innocently assumed there would be due diligence for all this stuff. … So often my mouth would drop, when I realized no one had really looked into it."

Even more innocently, he assumed the billion-dollar climate change industry would welcome his untrained but painstaking work. Instead, Mr. McIntyre is subjected to every kind of venom—that he must be funded by Big Oil, by Big Business, by Some Texan Somewhere. For the record, the 62-year-old declares himself "past my best-by date, operating on my own nickel."

James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute, has dismissed him as a "court jester." Mr. Mann replied to an emailed query about Mr. McIntyre by decrying "every specious contrarian claim and innuendo against me, my colleagues, and the science of climate change itself."

Others are more thick-skinned: "You mention his name in my community, people just smile. It's a one-liner to get a laugh out of a group of climate scientists," affirms Stanford University's Stephen Schneider.

One wonders what is so funny, when it is not only the Canadian hobbyist fueling skepticism, but also figures from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center that now show thickening Arctic ice; from the U.K. Met (Meteorological) Office showing falling temperatures that contradict modeling predictions; and other studies that suggest natural factors in climate change are being dramatically underestimated.

Climatologists say they will only take Mr. McIntyre seriously if he creates his own temperature reconstructions and submits them for peer review. But the best science should stand up even to outside scrutiny. And if Mr. McIntyre has a credibility problem with climatologists, climatologists' predictions are increasingly viewed skeptically by the public.

A Pew report last month revealed that the number of Americans who believe humans are causing climate change has dropped 11 percentage points in the last 18 months to 36%; that the number who feel there is solid evidence that the earth is warming has fallen by 14 points to 57%; and that those who think the issue is "very serious" has sunk nine points to 35%.

Mr. McIntyre declares no interest in debunking The Theory in toto, nor in discouraging efficient energy use. His blog will disappoint those seeking anything more political than technical analyses.

In fairness, researchers are far from the loudest voices telling "skeptics" like Mr. McIntyre to sit down, shut up and surrender their lightbulbs without further question—that megaphone belongs to the politicians and activists pushing centrally-planned economies in the name of saving the Earth. Here, we see that contempt for laymen is not universal: Al Gore's ignorance is happily overlooked given his power to push billions in research funding. The same goes for Barack Obama, Leonardo DiCaprio, and everyone else declaring "the debate is over."

I asked 10 climatologists what they thought was the most reliable method of predicting climate, and got nearly as many answers. People in the field compare climate studies to health studies—another complex mechanism with uncontrollable factors, where best practices will always be debated.

Climate researchers know their prescriptions don't carry the certainty laymen assume from that which is labeled "science," yet most shy from a straightforward account of this uncertainty.

"Methods certainly need to be continually refined and improved. I doubt that anyone in the paleoclimate community would disagree with that," says Rob Wilson of the University of St. Andrews's School of Geography and Geosciences. "However, can the nuances of methodological developments be communicated to the laymen—and would they want to know? I do not think this would help."

Maybe not, but letting people feel duped by hyperbole is proving even more harmful to the warmers' cause.

"I never said I was proving or disproving anything…. I just don't think we should be thanking the people who make it harder to find out what's true," Mr. McIntyre says.

The climate establishment will probably never thank Mr. McIntyre, much less follow his example. The rest of us should do both.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100...2.html?mod=googlenews_wsj#articleTabs=article

 

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An independent Federal Reserve is the only thing that has kept the goddamned POLITICIANS ( be they "D" or "R" ) from turning the U.S. into a full blown banana republic. Arthur Burns and Alan Greenspan both took this country down the garden path by pandering to the politicians.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
( Fair Use Excerpt )
Full article:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ayDTHN41F4fQ&pos=7

Fed Presidents, Lawmakers Step Up Clash on Appointment Process
By Scott Lanman

Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve regional bank presidents and U.S. lawmakers intensified a clash over giving Congress a greater say in appointing the central bank officials, who are now named in part by private-sector banks.

St. Louis Fed President James Bullard said yesterday proposed legislation to subject some officials to Senate confirmation is a “blatant politicization” of the Fed. Separately, seven House Democrats called for an “exploration of possible changes” in how the Fed is governed, saying there’s an “inherent conflict” in the way presidents are named.

Proposed legislation in the Senate risks higher inflation if there’s too much political pressure on the Fed to keep interest rates low while the economy rebounds, some former Fed officials say. Lawmakers say private-sector banks have too much influence at the Fed, and that the regional Fed bank presidents focus too much on inflation at the expense of job growth.

“This is going to be a big battle,” said former Fed Governor Lyle Gramley, now a senior economic adviser to New York-based Soleil Securities Corp. “The danger is the new arrangement will politicize the Fed to the point that they don’t do what’s necessary” when the central bank needs to raise interest rates, he said.

The powers and autonomy of the 12 regional Fed presidents are under threat on several fronts in Congress.

Under a draft bill released Nov. 10 by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, directors at each regional bank would be chosen by the Fed’s Senate-confirmed governors, and each board chairman would be subject to White House appointment and Senate approval. Currently, two-thirds of directors are chosen by private-sector banks and one-third by the Fed’s Washington-based governors.

Vote on Policy
The boards of directors of each Fed bank select the president, who votes on monetary policy and is approved by Fed governors in Washington.

Dodd, who will begin debate on his financial-overhaul legislation today, also proposed stripping bank-supervision authority from the Fed and its regional banks and called the Fed’s regulation an “abysmal failure.”

The House Financial Services Committee voted on Nov. 17 to amend legislation to limit powers of the regional Fed presidents, so they wouldn’t share the decision-making power awarded the Fed board to oversee financial stability.

“I doubt very much that by a year from now Fed presidents are going to have as big a role as they now have,” Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank told reporters after the vote. Frank said the presidents are “private citizens” who shouldn’t have “governmental powers.” He has said the presidents too often vote in favor of higher interest rates.

Political Appointees
Bullard, 48, the St. Louis Fed’s president since April 2008, said after a speech yesterday that the Fed is ultimately controlled by political appointees as it stands and that the private sector’s input is “invaluable.” Congress has “backed off these kinds of ideas” before and decided to “protect Fed independence,” Bullard said.

“We don’t want to put all the power into Washington and New York,” Bullard said. “That’s just the opposite of what this crisis is teaching us. So you want the input from around the country, and I think it’s really important for informing monetary policy.”

Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker said Nov. 17 that the mix of private and public influence has “helped us keep focused on long-run objectives.”

“I wouldn’t want to see the reserve bank governance mechanism politicized in any way,” Lacker, 54, told reporters after a speech in Richmond, Virginia. Asked if Dodd’s plan would politicize the process, Lacker said: “I think it could.”

******​

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Alisna_and_Summers_Central_Bank_Independence_vs_Inflation.gif

 

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The Near-Earth Environment 2007-8
This animation hitches a ride on the earth and observes its near-space environment for a period of one year at daily intervals starting in July 2007. No objects are displayed that are more than 20 million km from the earth. Objects within one-third of this distance are colored red, objects within two-thirds are colored orange, other objects are green. Objects below the ecliptic plane are shown as outline circles, objects above as filled circles. Objects may appear and disappear in seemingly odd locations, depending on how their orbits intersect the sphere enclosing the volume of space within 20 million km of the earth. Notable close approaches during the period occur on 2007 Sept. 5 (2007 RS1), Oct. 12 (2007 TX22), Oct. 17 (2007 UN12), Oct. 18 (2007 UD6), Oct. 30 (2007 US51), Nov. 14 (2007 VF189), Dec. 13 (2007 XB23), Dec. 27 (2007 YP56), 2008 Jan. 31 (2008 BC15), Feb. 7 (2008 CT1), Mar. 9 (2008 EZ7), Mar. 10 (2008 EM68), Mar. 29 (2008 FP), Apr. 3 (2008 GM2), Apr. 7 (2008 GF1) and May 10 (2008 JL24). Most of the objects depicted in this animation are recent discoveries.

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/iau/Animations/EarthRide2008Small.gif

 

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There's a surprising amount of skepticism about the reliability of GCMs even amongst the "true believers."

Top climate scientists share their outlook
By Tom de Castella

Climate scientists are like an exotic tribe – fascinating, sometimes hard to understand and rarely visited. The editor of a science journal warned me that I would find little to interest mainstream readers – the boffins would agree on pretty much everything. The debate, she implied, was over. She was wrong.

While climate scientists agree the world is warming due to man’s activities, there are still large areas of conflict, notably over how certain we can be about the predictions.

How did we choose?

Assembling any top 10 is fraught with difficulties. Assemble one for climate scientists and the problem is exacerbated by the complexity of their research and the range of specialist fields that make up a broad science.

Here, we focused on those people who specialise in climate prediction rather than climate change’s impact on the environment. The criteria for inclusion was original research, influence on peers and sound judgment.

So, while we were willing to consider talking to climate change naysayers – “denier” seems a rather Stalinist term – we found that even their initially compelling arguments were rarely backed up by peer-reviewed research. None made it into the top 10, although since he is a contrarian whose earlier work remains relatively respected, we chose to profile Richard Lindzen, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well.

Who’s missing?

One regret is the absence of Chinese experts. Three were approached but either refused to be interviewed outright or failed to make themselves available after seeing a list of questions.

What can we learn?

The fact that experts in the hard sciences disagree about climate change spells trouble for the politicians and policymakers at Copenhagen.

A majority of scientists claim to be limiting their carbon footprint – but measured against the scale of the problem is such individual action meaningful?

“If we believe in free will we can at least make some difference,” says Tim Lenton. Referring to the hundreds of thousands of air miles travelled by climate scientists going to and from professional meetings, however, he adds that “we all have to ’fess up to the fact that we’re deeply hypocritical and contradictory beings.”

Others argue that the focus on personal behaviour is damaging: “Heart-warming stories of volunteers insulating the primary school roof have become a distraction,” says Myles Allen, who believes the future lies in carbon capture and storage.

“We currently enjoy a free lunch, because energy, food and cement prices do not include the costs of decarbonisation. The sooner politicians are upfront with people about this, the better.”

..............................................

Name: Stefan Rahmstorf
Age: 49
Nationality: German
Position: Head of Earth System Analysis, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Expertise: Oceans

Mr Sea Level Rise fixes me with a steely gaze. We are sitting in a coffee shop close to the Oxford college where he is addressing a climate conference with his boss, John Schellnhuber. The two men are popular with the media, but some colleagues complain that they are too close to the policymakers and activists.

Rahmstorf, who is visiting from Potsdam, a university town strong in the sciences, projects a sense of both order and impatience. He argues that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has massively underestimated the rise in sea levels. Having tracked data for the past 120 years, he found that, above a certain equilibrium, a rise in temperature caused a proportionate increase in sea level. And when he compared the observations against the models for the years 1961 to 2003, the sea level had risen 50 per cent faster (1.8mm per year) than the models had predicted it would (1.2mm).

American oceanographer Carl Wunsch (see below) dismisses Rahmstorf’s findings, saying adequate measurement of the oceans only goes back 20 years: “People who claim to know what the ocean was doing 100 years ago are telling you fairy tales.” But Rahmstorf insists his curve fits recent figures. Since satellite measurements began in 1993, sea level has risen by 3.4mm a year. The IPCC notes the models’ inaccuracy in its full report, he says, yet makes no attempt to alter its projections. Neither will it include estimates for the melting icecaps. “A normal person would conclude ‘maybe we can’t trust the models’. But the models are simply taken as gospel for the future.” Rahmstorf believes the oceans will rise three times faster than the IPCC’s highest projections. Assuming a 4°C temperature rise by 2100, that would also mean a rise in sea level of 1.2 metres.

Rahmstorf believes that unless emissions are under control by 2020, there will be no time to prevent warming going above 2°C. A member of the German government’s Advisory Council on Global Change, he has issued a plan for how we can avoid such a rise. It gives every nation in the world a carbon allowance for the years up to 2050.

At current consumption levels, the US would exhaust its allowance by 2016. To give them time to adjust, rich countries can pay developing nations to share their allowance. Rahmstorf believes the payments will enable developing economies to “leapfrog the dirty model” practised by industrialised nations in the last century.

Personal stance: No air travel for holidays. Doesn’t own a car and cycles to work. His house is insulated, cutting energy use by 60 per cent. His “sins” are buying bananas and having a long shower every morning.

..............................................

Name: John Mitchell
Age: 61
Nationality: British
Position: Director of Climate Science, Met Office
Expertise: Climate modelling

After 36 years at the Met Office, including a spell writing the shipping forecast, John Mitchell has a weather-beaten mind. In person, there is no smug air of foreknowledge. Yet this softly spoken rugby fan from County Down in Northern Ireland is one of the most experienced climate modellers in the world.

Modelling is a contentious area. There’s so much we don’t fully understand about the climate – clouds, hurricanes, ice melting, aerosols – that questions remain over the ability of super-computers to model future climate. One experiment – Climateprediction.net, which generated thousands of versions of the Met Office’s climate model and got people to run them on their home PCs – showed that models will produce radically different results if you make minor adjustments to their parameters. The week before I met Mitchell, the Met Office was forced to defend its “barbecue summer” press release – proving the difficulty of making even seasonal predictions.

Mitchell takes such criticism calmly. “Essentially, a model is based on Newton’s Laws of Motion. All we’re trying to do with the models is quantify [the warming] better and say what the regional changes are.”

In practice, that means taking balloon and satellite measurements for temperature, winds and humidity in the atmosphere and using equations to give you a rate of change. It is always going to be an approximate picture but he insists there is a “strong resemblance” with what happens in reality.

Big obstacles remain. “There’s so much variation out there,” he says, pointing through the window. “How do you model that? Clouds are the ‘Achilles’ heel’ of modelling.”

But modelling power is increasing all the time. This summer, the government gave people access to detailed regional climate projections for the coming decades. The modelling was done by the Met Office – and though many scientists are uncomfortable with such “postcode predictions”, saying they send out an overconfident message about our understanding of the future, Mitchell is proud that the US is now considering following suit.

Personal stance: Takes small steps – turning down the thermostat and unplugging his mobile phone charger.

..............................................

Name: Rajendra Pachauri
Age: 69
Nationality: Indian
Position: Chair, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Expertise: Energy efficiency

Two years ago Dr RK Pachauri shared with Al Gore the Nobel Peace Prize for their work on climate change. If Gore was the populist showman, Pachauri was the diligent committee man, accepting the prize on behalf of the IPCC (which he has chaired since 2002).

The IPCC is in effect a huge machine for reaching scientific consensus on global warming. From its creation in 1988, it has brought together thousands of the world’s climate experts to draft reports on the latest authoritative data and predictions. At the time of Pachauri’s nomination for the post, Gore called him the “let’s drag our feet candidate”. Yet while he is not strictly a “climate scientist”, he plays a crucial role in creating consensus, particularly among the world’s developing nations.

Pachauri rejects the view that population is as big an issue as reducing per capita emissions. “In North America,” he argues, “they have emissions of over 20 tonnes per capita per year, while in Bangladesh it’s half a tonne.”

But surely the point is that South Asia’s per capita emissions will catch up? “That’s precisely why a country like India should not allow its emissions to reach anywhere near [those of] the developed world.” He argues that India will have a very different pattern of development to the west with “large-scale mass transport systems” instead of cars, and energy-efficient buildings.

Meanwhile, industrialised nations will have to cut back fast. “My big concern,” he says, “are the people living in several regions of the world where there is no infrastructure, no capability or financial strength to deal with the impact of climate change.”

Personal stance: Has given up meat, and only uses air-con on a moderate setting.

..............................................

Name: Myles Allen
Age: 44
Nationality: British
Position: Head of Climate Dynamics, Department of Physics, University of Oxford
Expertise: Statistics and modelling

Myles Allen’s young son John, who has been patiently reading in the corner, gets up and writes on the office whiteboard: “Myles is a penguin.” His father thanks him wryly, before launching back into his discourse on carbon sequestration. But there is something of the penguin about this freethinking statistician, who combines upper-crust vowels with the awkward charm of Griff Rhys-Jones.

Allen believes the current approach to tackling climate change is ill-conceived. His latest paper, published earlier this year in Nature, argues we should be looking at the total amount of carbon that humankind emits, not the rate at which we do so – the measure the negotiators in Copenhagen will be focusing on.

He shows me a graph with three different curves representing the same amount of carbon being emitted over different timescales. “Temperature response is identical,” he says. “It’s much easier to frame the problem if you say ‘what’s the total amount of carbon we can afford to inject into the atmosphere’ rather than what concentration should we be aiming for.” Yet because of the way the Rio Earth summit and Kyoto Protocol configured the problem, negotiations at Copenhagen are heading in the wrong direction.

Journalists are always asking Allen to say that unless emissions peak by 2015 we will pass a tipping point. He won’t, because he says such claims are nonsense. Worse, to pretend such arbitrary targets have a scientific basis will only disillusion the public once they find out the targets are going to be missed.

But isn’t it necessary to tell white lies in order to get what you want? “There’s just no point”, he says, looking over at his son before adding: “They’ll find you out!”

Personal stance: Cycles to work but loves Top Gear – “fossil fuels are fun”. Believes focus on personal behaviour is a distraction.

..............................................

Name: Tim Lenton
Age: 36
Nationality: British
Position: Professor of Earth Systems Science, University of East Anglia
Expertise: Earth systems science

Tim Lenton is James Lovelock’s anointed successor. As an undergraduate he read Lovelock’s The Ages of Gaia (a book which argues that the earth and its biosphere function as one complex system), and subsequently wrote to the author saying he wanted to do research in his field. It led to an “amazing” meeting – and the two have stayed in touch.

Today the protégé takes a different line to the mentor on climate change. Both are worried about positive feedbacks from the climate system – a domino effect of warming – but Lenton does not share Lovelock’s apocalyptic vision. “We’ve agreed to disagree about the level of hope we should have for the future,” he says.

We are talking in the front room of his house in a quiet residential street in Norwich. Hardly the climate change frontline. And yet, in 2007, the freshwater Norfolk Broads were nearly flooded after storm surge conditions at sea. “At some point – maybe in the next 50 years – we’ll see the Broads revert towards a salt marsh ecosystem,” he says.

While others work in decades or centuries, Lenton thinks in millions of years. The book he’s working on chronicles Gaia’s instability, focusing on abrupt changes such as a leap in the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere 2.5 billion years ago. “My question is: ‘are we at the start of another revolution?’” He guesses that by the time his son James is 80, we will either be recycling energy and materials, or be on the way to a world of “unpleasantries”.

Personal stance: Keen cyclist but also drives a Renault Clio. Holidays in the UK, but his wife is from New Zealand so they are using up a hefty dose of “love miles” this Christmas to see family.

..............................................

Name: Kevin Trenberth
Age: 65
Nationality: Dual New Zealand and US citizenship
Position: Head of climate analysis, National Centre for Atmospheric Research, Colorado
Expertise: Hurricanes

There is a big debate about whether climate change is causing more devastating storms. Some say the increase in hurricanes could simply be the result of natural variability.

New Zealander Kevin Trenberth, on the other hand, is sure of the impact that climate change is having on hurricanes: he says it is causing more devastating storms. But he’s less sure what effect hurricanes have on global warming.

Hurricanes tend to cool things down. They leave a cold wake in oceans, and the extra rainfall they bring helps keep the land a bit cooler, too. Climate models do not currently have a good grip on this cooling effect – so the projections for tropical sea temperatures in them may well be higher than they should be. Therefore, argues Trenberth, the number of projected future hurricanes is probably being overestimated.

That said, when the storms do occur, he is certain they’ll be of greater intensity. Water vapour in the atmosphere helps fuel storms – and according to Trenberth it has increased by 4 per cent over the ocean since 1970. He traces that rise to the 0.6°C rise in global temperatures in that same period; as temperatures rise, the atmosphere is able to hold more water vapour.

Many scientists argue that his native New Zealand will be largely protected from climate change’s most severe effects – thanks to its maritime climate. But Trenberth points out that energy price hikes will drive up shipping costs – and if as a result other countries start growing their own food, exports will be hit hard.

Personal action: He has fitted solar panels, a new heat pump and water heater in his home.

..............................................

Name: Chris Rapley
Age: 62
Nationality: British
Position: Director of the Science Museum
Expertise: Earth systems science

As a man who has moved between the different branches of climate science, Chris Rapley is well placed to judge his colleagues: “There’s a whole spectrum of views out there,” he says. “Some of the science is clear-cut,” but there are some big uncertainties. Will all the methane in the permafrost be released? What will be the rate of warming? Nobody knows what the world will look like in 50 years, but Rapley is confident it will be a warmer place facing a thousand years of rising oceans.

In 2005, he contributed to the Exeter conference on “avoiding climate change” commissioned by Tony Blair. His paper warned that the vast ice sheet on the western side of Antarctica might be starting to break up. As a result, he said, the IPCC would have to revise its prediction that the ice sheet was safe for 1,000 years. The following year he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science: “Only five years ago, Antarctica was characterised as a slumbering giant in terms of climate change. I would argue that it is now an awakened giant, and we should take notice.”

Recently he’s become more pessimistic about our ability to prevent serious warming. While there is no shortage of human ingenuity, rhetoric or Nobel Prizes, the emissions trajectory has not turned downwards. “Unless Copenhagen leads to deceleration in the emissions curve then I think we’re going to have to be very pessimistic about the future,” he says.

He is not a deep green eco-warrior. He’s a Formula 1 fan and describes Jeremy Clarkson as a “really intelligent guy and great supporter of the museum”. But he wishes the Top Gear presenter would tone down his views on climate change, which he fears encourage people to cock a snoop at “that global warming shit”. The stakes are too high for such pantomime acts.

Hundreds of years from now Rapley believes London, New York and Amsterdam will be under water. But it is the short-term, rapid deadlines of the modern world that scare him most. “We saw with the economic crash it takes hours for things to go wrong. And when [in 2000] the petrol tankers went on blockade, there was a very frightening timescale – about a week for the supermarkets to run out of food, fear of food riots and civil disorder.”

He “hates being apocalyptic” but says his grandchildren will have to choose how to minimise their exposure to the risks. “You’ll find serious people talking about buying an AK47 and a small farm in northern Canada or Scandinavia, forming a commune to grow food and protect themselves in case the wheels come off society.”

Personal stance: Wanders around the museum switching off lights. But believes corporations hold the key to cutting emissions.

..............................................

Name: Susan Solomon
Age: 53
Nationality: American
Position: Senior scientist, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Colorado
Expertise: Atmospheric chemistry

Susan Solomon was one of the first scientists to explain why the ozone hole was forming over Antarctica, and in 2007 she oversaw the historic Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report which said it was 90 per cent certain that the bulk of global warming that has occurred since 1950 had been man-made. Still, she believes in keeping the science “pure” and rejects the idea that her profession has a duty to speak out on global warming.

This conservative approach frustrates activists and some fellow scientists. In the report’s sea level projections, she excluded estimates for the impact of melting ice caps because modelling such a process is fraught with uncertainty. Neither would she discuss the policy response or make emotional appeals.

Almost three years on, Solomon believes she’s been vindicated: “There’s an enormous amount of emotion on this subject, influenced by both the left and right.” The job of the IPCC is to present the science with the minimum of speculation, she says.

She is convinced that unless emissions are seriously reduced, the world in 2060 will be between 2°C and 3°C hotter. A deal will be tough she says, contrasting her own tribe with the political animal. “If you sit 20 politicians in a room you won’t get them to agree on anything,” she says. “But bring scientists together, and at the end of a sensible discussion of the data you’ll all agree.”

But Solomon is hopeful that public pressure will bring about an eleventh-hour breakthrough at Copenhagen. “Whenever I hear a person say this or that is impossible, I think back to the ozone layer days when people said it would be impossible to phase out CFCs from deodorant.”

Asked about the life her step-son’s generation can be expected to live, she flares up briefly, arguing that such emoting is unhelpful: “I don’t know which way we’re going to come out. But I want the scientific historians to be clear: scientists had primitive tools and limited information, but they played this one right.”

Personal stance: Tries to eat vegetarian twice a week, cycles, drives a Prius.

..............................................

Name: Carl Wunsch
Age: 68
Nationality: American
Position: Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Expertise: Oceanography

To many scientists, Carl Wunsch is the world’s top oceanographer. Yet to the layman he is best known as the professor duped into appearing in Channel 4’s 2007 programme The Great Global Warming Swindle. Wunsch was horrified to see his nuanced statements taken out of context to back the programme’s dodgy premise. The broadcasting regulator Ofcom subsequently upheld his complaint and Channel 4 was obliged to broadcast a summary of its findings.

In reality, Wunsch accepts the evidence for climate change, though he worries about what he considers overconfident predictions – and he may be unique amongst senior colleagues in having turned down the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s invitation to participate. He accepts the organisation’s usefulness but believes it moves too fast for the available data and has played down some of the uncertainties to catch the eyes of politicians.

On the other hand, Stefan Rahmstorf (see above) says Wunsch’s comments on the show were not only irresponsible but wrong. “They feed the message that the [film] makers wanted to portray.” Perhaps understandably, Wunsch and Rahmstorf have little time for each other. Early in our conversation, Wunsch bemoans the fact that some of his colleagues are guilty of “overstating” what we know to fit the media’s demand for simple answers.

“Often the right answer is ‘we don’t really know but we’re worried about the possibilities’.” The ocean has a long memory, he says, yet our observations of it are “grossly inadequate”. Unless you understand what is happening in the south Atlantic or northern Pacific, you are flying blind, he argues.

Accordingly, Wunsch takes a small-picture view. “Why has Arctic sea ice recovered partially in the last two years?” he asks. “What does this mean for the ‘tipping point’ that people talk of?”

In essence, he wishes people would stop making projections that read like strong probabilities and instead see climate change as “an insurance problem” – where we don’t know what will happen but acknowledge there is the potential for something serious to occur, and take precautions.

Like many scientists, he is less inhibited when straying from his patch. Stabilising world population should be the number-one priority and yet the politicians are “too spineless” to talk about such a thorny issue. “If the world goes to 9 and then 12 billion it won’t matter what the climate does,” he sighs. “It’ll be catastrophic.”

Personal stance: Travels mainly by public transport but also drives a Prius. He has insulated his home.

..............................................

Name: Isaac Held
Age: 61
Nationality: American
Position: Senior research scientist at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Professor at Princeton
Expertise: Climate dynamics

Isaac Held was born in a German refugee camp three years after the end of the second world war, to a mother who had survived Auschwitz. Several years later, the family secured their passage to the US and began a new life in Minnesota.

Held did a PhD in physics at New York State University (Stony Brook) but was lacking inspiration until he read a paper on carbon dioxide and climate by Syukuro Manabe, today regarded as one of the pioneers of climate modelling. Held moved to Princeton where he has remained for the past four decades. Today, he is one of the world’s foremost experts on predicting regional climate change. As the German oceanographer Mojib Latif says: “He’s not as visible to politicians as others, but he’s one of the best scientists – someone who really understands how the whole climate machine works.”

He believes that changes in rainfall patterns will have the most direct impact on people’s lives. In simple terms, he says, “the wet places will get wetter and the dry drier”. In the Mediterranean – one of the easiest regions to model – a 3°C temperature rise would cut rainfall by 20 per cent. The real uncertainties lie in the tropics, although Held suspects that the region will be one of the biggest losers from climate change. His research on drought shows how interconnected the climate system is. The dramatic decline in rainfall over the Sahel – a horizontal sub-Saharan strip that stretches from Senegal to Eritrea – during the 1970s and 1980s has been commonly ascribed to overgrazing.

Held’s research suggests the real cause has been the warming of the South Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans during the latter half of the 20th century. Together with the hole in the ozone layer, the warmer oceans have had a similar impact on Australia’s rainfall. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to know which is the dominant factor for Australia, he says. If it’s the ozone layer, then the situation should gradually improve. Otherwise, the land will get drier still.

Held follows the maxim of the medieval philosopher William of Ockham – forget complicated hypotheses if the simple explanation fits. “The case has not been made for any specific tipping point,” he says. “We haven’t seen that irreversibility. The climate system has so far behaved much as one would expect it to. Climate change means a steady warming with the impacts of warming growing bigger over time.”

Others, such as Latif, argue that we’re in for a decade of cooling before the warming trend reasserts itself. Quite plausible, Held replies, saying that natural variability may have been underestimated in the rapid warming of the last 30 years. But in the long term, global warming will continue.

Personal stance: His wife has set up a farmers’ market, they eat locally produced food and drive a hybrid car. Says he could join a car pool but prizes his freedom.

..............................................

The sceptic

Name: Richard Lindzen
Age: 69
Nationality: American
Position: Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Expertise: Atmospheric dynamics

Richard Lindzen is by turns charming and cantankerous. “That is the stupidest question I’ve ever heard!” he yells when I ask whether global warming is occurring. Later, as I outline the layman’s notion of what warming means, he barks: “Stop this bullshit!” When I cite a spokesman for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change saying the world warmed by 0.6°C over the 20th century, he puts it down to the natural variability of the climate.

Raised in the Bronx and educated at Harvard, Lindzen is the most respected of the climate change naysayers among other scientists. Arguing that CO2’s impact on climate has been overstated, he says that emissions can keep growing with no consequences. The pre-industrial level of CO2 was 280 parts per million, we are now at 380ppm and the negotiators at Copenhagen want to stabilise it at about 450ppm. But Lindzen says we can safely climb past 10,00ppm. Even if for some reason there is an impact, we will have ample time to see it coming, he claims.

Contrary to what the models say, he argues that the world has not warmed over the past decade. We’ve underestimated natural variability, he says. And in the context of “only” 0.6°C of warming, the argument that man has caused most of it is not tenable. His critics say his emphasis on the past 10 years is a red herring. Assertions of climate change were not based on a 10-year trend but on a 30- to 50-year period.

Lindzen is convinced that global warming will one day be exposed as a con. “I hope,” he says, “it’s in my lifetime.”

Personal stance: Drives a small car, uses energy-saving lightbulbs and says he probably uses less energy than “the climate change activists in Washington with their Mercedes”.

 

[trysail]

Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published skeptic papers.(1047388489)

http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=295&filename=1047388489.txt
__________________________________________


From: "Michael E. Mann" <mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>,rbradley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxxxxxxx.xxx,srutherford@xxxxxxxxx.xxx,tcrowley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Re: Fwd: Soon & Baliunas
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 08:14:49 -0500
Cc: k.briffa@xxxxxxxxx.xxx,jto@u.arizona.edu,drdendro@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, keith.alverson@xxxxxxxxx.xxx,mmaccrac@xxxxxxxxx.xxx,jto@u.arizona.edu, mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx

Thanks Phil,
(Tom: Congrats again!)
The Soon & Baliunas paper couldn't have cleared a 'legitimate' peer review process
anywhere. That leaves only one possibility--that the peer-review process at Climate
Research has been hijacked by a few skeptics on the editorial board. And it isn't just De
Frietas, unfortunately I think this group also includes a member of my own department...
The skeptics appear to have staged a 'coup' at "Climate Research" (it was a mediocre
journal to begin with, but now its a mediocre journal with a definite 'purpose').
Folks might want to check out the editors and review editors:
[1]http://www.int-res.com/journals/cr/crEditors.html
In fact, Mike McCracken first pointed out this article to me, and he and I have discussed
this a bit. I've cc'd Mike in on this as well, and I've included Peck too. I told Mike that
I believed our only choice was to ignore this paper. They've already achieved what they
wanted--the claim of a peer-reviewed paper. There is nothing we can do about that now, but
the last thing we want to do is bring attention to this paper, which will be ignored by the
community on the whole...
It is pretty clear that thee skeptics here have staged a bit of a coup, even in the
presence of a number of reasonable folks on the editorial board (Whetton, Goodess, ...). My
guess is that Von Storch is actually with them (frankly, he's an odd individual, and I'm
not sure he isn't himself somewhat of a skeptic himself), and without Von Storch on their
side, they would have a very forceful personality promoting their new vision.
There have been several papers by Pat Michaels, as well as the Soon & Baliunas paper, that
couldn't get published in a reputable journal.
This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the
"peer-reviewed literature". Obviously, they found a solution to that--take over a journal!
So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a
legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate
research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also
need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently
sit on the editorial board...
What do others think?
mike
At 08:49 AM 3/11/2003 +0000, Phil Jones wrote:

Dear All,
Apologies for sending this again. I was expecting a stack of emails this morning
in
response, but I inadvertently left Mike off (mistake in pasting) and picked up Tom's
old
address. Tom is busy though with another offspring !
I looked briefly at the paper last night and it is appalling - worst word I can
think of today
without the mood pepper appearing on the email ! I'll have time to read more at the
weekend
as I'm coming to the US for the DoE CCPP meeting at Charleston. Added Ed, Peck and
Keith A.
onto this list as well. I would like to have time to rise to the bait, but I have so
much else on at
the moment. As a few of us will be at the EGS/AGU meet in Nice, we should consider what
to do there.
The phrasing of the questions at the start of the paper determine the answer they
get. They
have no idea what multiproxy averaging does. By their logic, I could argue 1998 wasn't
the
warmest year globally, because it wasn't the warmest everywhere. With their LIA being
1300-
1900 and their MWP 800-1300, there appears (at my quick first reading) no discussion of
synchroneity of the cool/warm periods. Even with the instrumental record, the early and
late
20th century warming periods are only significant locally at between 10-20% of grid
boxes.
Writing this I am becoming more convinced we should do something - even if this is
just
to state once and for all what we mean by the LIA and MWP. I think the skeptics will
use
this paper to their own ends and it will set paleo back a number of years if it goes
unchallenged.
I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it
until they
rid themselves of this troublesome editor. A CRU person is on the editorial board, but
papers
get dealt with by the editor assigned by Hans von Storch.
Cheers
Phil
Dear all,
Tim Osborn has just come across this. Best to ignore probably, so don't let it
spoil your
day. I've not looked at it yet. It results from this journal having a number of
editors. The
responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers
through by
Michaels and Gray in the past. I've had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got
nowhere.
Another thing to discuss in Nice !
Cheers
Phil

X-Sender: f055@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 14:32:14 +0000
To: p.jones@uea
From: Tim Osborn <t.osborn@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: Soon & Baliunas
Dr Timothy J Osborn | phone: +44 1603 592089
Senior Research Associate | fax: +44 1603 507784
Climatic Research Unit | e-mail: t.osborn@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
School of Environmental Sciences | web-site:
University of East Anglia __________| [2]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/
Norwich NR4 7TJ | sunclock:
UK | [3]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/sunclock.htm

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

______________________________________________________________
Professor Michael E. Mann
Department of Environmental Sciences, Clark Hall
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22903
_______________________________________________________________________
e-mail: mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx Phone: (434) 924-7770 FAX: (434) 982-2137
[4]http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.shtml

References

1. http://www.int-res.com/journals/cr/crEditors.html
2. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/
3. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/sunclock.htm
4. http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.shtml

 

[trysail]

Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere near balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.(1255523796)

http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=1052&filename=1255523796.txt

________________________________________________

From: Kevin Trenberth <trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: Michael Mann <mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:36:36 -0600
Cc: Tom Wigley <wigley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Stephen H Schneider <shs@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Myles Allen <allen@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, peter stott <peter.stott@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, "Philip D. Jones" <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Benjamin Santer <santer1@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Thomas R Karl <Thomas.R.Karl@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Gavin Schmidt <gschmidt@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, James Hansen <jhansen@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Michael Oppenheimer <omichael@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>

Mike
Here are some of the issues as I see them:
Saying it is natural variability is not an explanation. What are the physical processes?
Where did the heat go? We know there is a build up of ocean heat prior to El Nino, and a
discharge (and sfc T warming) during late stages of El Nino, but is the observing system
sufficient to track it? Quite aside from the changes in the ocean, we know there are major
changes in the storm tracks and teleconnections with ENSO, and there is a LOT more rain on
land during La Nina (more drought in El Nino), so how does the albedo change overall
(changes in cloud)? At the very least the extra rain on land means a lot more heat goes
into evaporation rather than raising temperatures, and so that keeps land temps down: and
should generate cloud. But the resulting evaporative cooling means the heat goes into
atmosphere and should be radiated to space: so we should be able to track it with CERES
data. The CERES data are unfortunately wonting and so too are the cloud data. The ocean
data are also lacking although some of that may be related to the ocean current changes and
burying heat at depth where it is not picked up. If it is sequestered at depth then it
comes back to haunt us later and so we should know about it.
Kevin
Michael Mann wrote:

Kevin, that's an interesting point. As the plot from Gavin I sent shows, we can easily
account for the observed surface cooling in terms of the natural variability seen in
the CMIP3 ensemble (i.e. the observed cold dip falls well within it). So in that sense,
we can "explain" it. But this raises the interesting question, is there something going
on here w/ the energy & radiation budget which is inconsistent with the modes of
internal variability that leads to similar temporary cooling periods within the models.
I'm not sure that this has been addressed--has it?

m

On Oct 14, 2009, at 10:17 AM, Kevin Trenberth wrote:

Hi Tom
How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where
energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not
close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is
happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as
we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!
Kevin
Tom Wigley wrote:

Dear all,

At the risk of overload, here are some notes of mine on the recent

lack of warming. I look at this in two ways. The first is to look at

the difference between the observed and expected anthropogenic trend relative to the pdf
for unforced variability. The second is to remove ENSO, volcanoes and TSI variations
from the observed data.

Both methods show that what we are seeing is not unusual. The second

method leaves a significant warming over the past decade.

These sums complement Kevin's energy work.

Kevin says ... "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment
and it is a travesty that we can't". I do not

agree with this.

Tom.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

Kevin Trenberth wrote:

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here
in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on
record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal
is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about
18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather
(see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last
night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth's
global energy. /Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability/, *1*, 19-27,
doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [PDF]
<[1]http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/EnergyDiagnostics09final.pdf>
(A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a
travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on
2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our
observing system is inadequate.

That said there is a LOT of nonsense about the PDO. People like CPC are tracking PDO on
a monthly basis but it is highly correlated with ENSO. Most of what they are seeing is
the change in ENSO not real PDO. It surely isn't decadal. The PDO is already reversing
with the switch to El Nino. The PDO index became positive in September for first time
since Sept 2007. see
[2]http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/GODAS/ocean_briefing_gif/global_ocean_monitorin
g_current.ppt

Kevin

Michael Mann wrote:

extremely disappointing to see something like this appear on BBC. its particularly odd,
since climate is usually Richard Black's beat at BBC (and he does a great job). from
what I can tell, this guy was formerly a weather person at the Met Office.

We may do something about this on RealClimate, but meanwhile it might be appropriate for
the Met Office to have a say about this, I might ask Richard Black what's up here?

mike

On Oct 12, 2009, at 2:32 AM, Stephen H Schneider wrote:

Hi all. Any of you want to explain decadal natural variability and signal to noise and
sampling errors to this new "IPCC Lead Author" from the BBC? As we enter an El Nino
year and as soon, as the sunspots get over their temporary--presumed--vacation worth a
few tenths of a Watt per meter squared reduced forcing, there will likely be another
dramatic upward spike like 1992-2000. I heard someone--Mike Schlesinger maybe??--was
willing to bet alot of money on it happening in next 5 years?? Meanwhile the past 10
years of global mean temperature trend stasis still saw what, 9 of the warmest in
reconstructed 1000 year record and Greenland and the sea ice of the North in big
retreat?? Some of you observational folks probably do need to straighten this out as my
student suggests below. Such "fun", Cheers, Steve

Stephen H. Schneider

Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies,

Professor, Department of Biology and

Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment

Mailing address:

Yang & Yamazaki Environment & Energy Building - MC 4205

473 Via Ortega

Ph: 650 725 9978

F: 650 725 4387

Websites: climatechange.net

patientfromhell.org

----- Forwarded Message -----

From: "Narasimha D. Rao" <[3]ndrao@xxxxxxxxx.xxx <[4]mailto:ndrao@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>

To: "Stephen H Schneider" <[5]shs@xxxxxxxxx.xxx <[6]mailto:shs@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>

Sent: Sunday, October 11, 2009 10:25:53 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific

Subject: BBC U-turn on climate

Steve,

You may be aware of this already. Paul Hudson, BBC's reporter on climate change, on
Friday wrote that there's been no warming since 1998, and that pacific oscillations will
force cooling for the next 20-30 years. It is not outrageously biased in presentation as
are other skeptics' views.

[7]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm

[8]http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100013173/the-bbcs-amazing-u-turn-on
-climate-change/

BBC has significant influence on public opinion outside the US.

Do you think this merits an op-ed response in the BBC from a scientist?

Narasimha

-------------------------------

PhD Candidate,

Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER)

Stanford University

Tel: 415-812-7560

--

Michael E. Mann

Professor

Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC)

Department of Meteorology Phone: (814) 863-4075

503 Walker Building FAX: (814) 865-3663

The Pennsylvania State University email: [9]mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx <[10]mailto:mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>

University Park, PA 16802-5013

website: [11]http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/index.html
<[12]http://www.meteo.psu.edu/%7Emann/Mann/index.html>

"Dire Predictions" book site:
[13]http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/news/DirePredictions/index.html

--

****************

Kevin E. Trenberth e-mail: [14]trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx

Climate Analysis Section, [15]www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html

NCAR

P. O. Box 3000, (303) 497 1318

Boulder, CO 80307 (303) 497 1333 (fax)

Street address: 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80305

--
****************
Kevin E. Trenberth e-mail: [16]trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Climate Analysis Section, [17]www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html
NCAR
P. O. Box 3000, (303) 497 1318
Boulder, CO 80307 (303) 497 1333 (fax)
Street address: 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80305

--
Michael E. Mann
Professor
Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC)
Department of Meteorology Phone: (814) 863-4075
503 Walker Building FAX: (814) 865-3663
The Pennsylvania State University email: [18]mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
University Park, PA 16802-5013
website: [19]http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/index.html
"Dire Predictions" book site:
[20]http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/news/DirePredictions/index.html

--
****************
Kevin E. Trenberth e-mail: [21]trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Climate Analysis Section, [22]www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html
NCAR
P. O. Box 3000, (303) 497 1318
Boulder, CO 80307 (303) 497 1333 (fax)

Street address: 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80305

References

1. http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/EnergyDiagnostics09final.pdf
2. http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/GODAS/ocean_briefing_gif/global_ocean_monitoring_current.ppt
3. mailto:ndrao@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
4. mailto:ndrao@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
5. mailto:shs@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
6. mailto:shs@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
7. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm
8. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/d...73/the-bbcs-amazing-u-turn-on-climate-change/
9. mailto:mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
10. mailto:mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
11. http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/index.html
12. http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/index.html
13. http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/news/DirePredictions/index.html
14. mailto:trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
15. http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html
16. mailto:trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
17. http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html
18. mailto:mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
19. http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/index.html
20. http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/news/DirePredictions/index.html
21. mailto:trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
22. http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html

 

[trysail]

Jeff Severinghaus
Professor of Geosciences
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
University of California, San Diego

The coolings appear to be caused primarily and initially by increase in the Earth-Sun distance during northern hemisphere summer, due to changes in the Earth’s orbit. As the orbit is not round, but elliptical, sunshine is weaker during some parts of the year than others. This is the so-called Milankovitch hypothesis [this really should say "theory" -- eric], which you may have heard about. Just as in the warmings, CO2 lags the coolings by a thousand years or so, in some cases as much as three thousand years.

But do not make the mistake of assuming that these warmings and coolings must have a single cause. It is well known that multiple factors are involved, including the change in planetary albedo, change in nitrous oxide concentration, change in methane concentration, and change in CO2 concentration. I know it is intellectually satisfying to identify a single cause for some observed phenomenon, but that unfortunately is not the way Nature works much of the time.

Nor is there any requirement that a single cause operate throughout the entire 5000 – year long warming trends, and the 70,000 year cooling trends.

Thus it is not logical to argue that, because CO2 does not cause the first thousand years or so of warming, nor the first thousand years of cooling, it cannot have caused part of the many thousands of years of warming in between.

Think of heart disease – one might be tempted to argue that a given heart patient’s condition was caused solely by the fact that he ate french fries for lunch every day for 30 years. But in fact his 10-year period of no exercise because of a desk job, in the middle of this interval, may have been a decisive influence. Just because a sedentary lifestyle did not cause the beginning of the plaque buildup, nor the end of the buildup, would you rule out a contributing causal role for sedentary lifestyle?

There is a rich literature on this topic. If you are truly interested, I urge you to read up.

The contribution of CO2 to the glacial-interglacial coolings and warmings amounts to about one-third of the full amplitude, about one-half if you include methane and nitrous oxide.

So one should not claim that greenhouse gases are the major cause of the ice ages. No credible scientist has argued that position (even though Al Gore implied as much in his movie). The fundamental driver has long been thought, and continues to be thought, to be the distribution of sunshine over the Earth’s surface as it is modified by orbital variations. This hypothesis was proposed by James Croll in the 19th century, mathematically refined by Milankovitch in the 1940s, and continues to pass numerous critical tests even today.

The greenhouse gases are best regarded as a biogeochemical feedback, initiated by the orbital variations, but then feeding back to amplify the warming once it is already underway. By the way, the lag of CO2 of about 1000 years corresponds rather closely to the expected time it takes to flush excess respiration-derived CO2 out of the deep ocean via natural ocean currents. So the lag is quite close to what would be expected, if CO2 were acting as a feedback.

The response time of methane and nitrous oxide to climate variations is measured in decades. So these feedbacks operate much faster.

The quantitative contribution of CO2 to the ice age cooling and warming is fully consistent with current understanding of CO2’s warming properties, as manifested in the IPCC’s projections of future warming of 3±1.5 C for a doubling of CO2 concentration. So there is no inconsistency between Milankovitch and current global warming.

Hope this is illuminating.


http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/the-lag-between-temp-and-co2/

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/co2-in-ice-cores/

 

[trysail]

Kevin Trenberth says they can't account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can't.

Michael Mann laments that Richard Black of the BBC is reporting the "lack of recent warming" and contemplates contacting Black.(1255352257)
( amazing stuff! )

http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=1051&filename=1255496484.txt

_______________________________________

From: Tom Wigley <wigley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: Kevin Trenberth <trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 01:01:xxx xxxx xxxx
Cc: Michael Mann <mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Stephen H Schneider <shs@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Myles Allen <allen@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, peter stott <peter.stott@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, "Philip D. Jones" <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Benjamin Santer <santer1@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Thomas R Karl <Thomas.R.Karl@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Gavin Schmidt <gschmidt@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, James Hansen <jhansen@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Michael Oppenheimer <omichael@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
X-MIME-Autoconverted: from 8bit to quoted-printable by ueamailgate01.uea.ac.uk id n9E71pl4015864

<x-flowed>
Dear all,

At the risk of overload, here are some notes of mine on the recent
lack of warming. I look at this in two ways. The first is to look at
the difference between the observed and expected anthropogenic trend
relative to the pdf for unforced variability. The second is to remove
ENSO, volcanoes and TSI variations from the observed data.

Both methods show that what we are seeing is not unusual. The second
method leaves a significant warming over the past decade.

These sums complement Kevin's energy work.

Kevin says ... "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of
warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't". I do not
agree with this.

Tom.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

Kevin Trenberth wrote:
> Hi all
> Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are
> asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two
> days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high
> the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the
> previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also
> a record low, well below the previous record low. This is January
> weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday
> and then played last night in below freezing weather).
>
> Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning:
> tracking Earth's global energy. /Current Opinion in Environmental
> Sustainability/, *1*, 19-27, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [PDF]
> <http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/EnergyDiagnostics09final.pdf>
> (A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)
>
> The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment
> and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the
> August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more
> warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
>
> That said there is a LOT of nonsense about the PDO. People like CPC are
> tracking PDO on a monthly basis but it is highly correlated with ENSO.
> Most of what they are seeing is the change in ENSO not real PDO. It
> surely isn't decadal. The PDO is already reversing with the switch to
> El Nino. The PDO index became positive in September for first time
> since Sept 2007. see
> http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/GODAS/ocean_briefing_gif/global_ocean_monitoring_current.ppt
>
> Kevin
>
> Michael Mann wrote:
>> extremely disappointing to see something like this appear on BBC. its
>> particularly odd, since climate is usually Richard Black's beat at BBC
>> (and he does a great job). from what I can tell, this guy was formerly
>> a weather person at the Met Office.
>>
>> We may do something about this on RealClimate, but meanwhile it might
>> be appropriate for the Met Office to have a say about this, I might
>> ask Richard Black what's up here?
>>
>> mike
>>
>> On Oct 12, 2009, at 2:32 AM, Stephen H Schneider wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all. Any of you want to explain decadal natural variability and
>>> signal to noise and sampling errors to this new "IPCC Lead Author"
>>> from the BBC? As we enter an El Nino year and as soon, as the
>>> sunspots get over their temporary--presumed--vacation worth a few
>>> tenths of a Watt per meter squared reduced forcing, there will likely
>>> be another dramatic upward spike like 1xxx xxxx xxxx. I heard
>>> someone--Mike Schlesinger maybe??--was willing to bet alot of money
>>> on it happening in next 5 years?? Meanwhile the past 10 years of
>>> global mean temperature trend stasis still saw what, 9 of the warmest
>>> in reconstructed 1000 year record and Greenland and the sea ice of
>>> the North in big retreat?? Some of you observational folks probably
>>> do need to straighten this out as my student suggests below. Such
>>> "fun", Cheers, Steve
>>>
>>>
>>> Stephen H. Schneider
>>> Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental
>>> Studies,
>>> Professor, Department of Biology and
>>> Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment
>>> Mailing address:
>>> Yang & Yamazaki Environment & Energy Building - MC 4205
>>> 473 Via Ortega
>>> Ph: xxx xxxx xxxx
>>> F: xxx xxxx xxxx
>>> Websites: climatechange.net
>>> patientfromhell.org
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- Forwarded Message -----
>>> From: "Narasimha D. Rao" <ndrao@xxxxxxxxx.xxx <mailto:ndrao@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>
>>> To: "Stephen H Schneider" <shs@xxxxxxxxx.xxx <mailto:shs@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>
>>> Sent: Sunday, October 11, 2009 10:25:53 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
>>> Subject: BBC U-turn on climate
>>>
>>> Steve,
>>> You may be aware of this already. Paul Hudson, BBC�s reporter on
>>> climate change, on Friday wrote that there�s been no warming since
>>> 1998, and that pacific oscillations will force cooling for the next
>>> xxx xxxx xxxxyears. It is not outrageously biased in presentation as are
>>> other skeptics� views.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm
>>> http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/d...73/the-bbcs-amazing-u-turn-on-climate-change/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> BBC has significant influence on public opinion outside the US.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Do you think this merits an op-ed response in the BBC from a scientist?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Narasimha
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -------------------------------
>>> PhD Candidate,
>>> Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER)
>>> Stanford University
>>> Tel: xxx xxxx xxxx
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> --
>> Michael E. Mann
>> Professor
>> Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC)
>>
>> Department of Meteorology Phone: (8xxx xxxx xxxx
>> 503 Walker Building FAX: (8xxx xxxx xxxx
>> The Pennsylvania State University email: mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
>> <mailto:mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
>> University Park, PA 16xxx xxxx xxxx
>>
>> website: http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/index.html
>> <http://www.meteo.psu.edu/%7Emann/Mann/index.html>
>> "Dire Predictions" book site:
>> http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/news/DirePredictions/index.html
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> ****************
> Kevin E. Trenberth e-mail: trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
> Climate Analysis Section, www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html
> NCAR
> P. O. Box 3000, (3xxx xxxx xxxx
> Boulder, CO 80xxx xxxx xxxx (3xxx xxxx xxxx(fax)
>
> Street address: 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80305
>


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Attachment Converted: "c:eudoraattachWigley-RecentTemps.doc"



Original Filename: 1255523796.txt | Return to the index page | Permalink | Earlier Emails | Later Emails

From: Kevin Trenberth <trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: Michael Mann <mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:36:xxx xxxx xxxx
Cc: Tom Wigley <wigley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Stephen H Schneider <shs@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Myles Allen <allen@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, peter stott <peter.stott@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, "Philip D. Jones" <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Benjamin Santer <santer1@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Thomas R Karl <Thomas.R.Karl@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Gavin Schmidt <gschmidt@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, James Hansen <jhansen@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Michael Oppenheimer <omichael@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>

Mike
Here are some of the issues as I see them:
Saying it is natural variability is not an explanation. What are the physical processes?
Where did the heat go? We know there is a build up of ocean heat prior to El Nino, and a
discharge (and sfc T warming) during late stages of El Nino, but is the observing system
sufficient to track it? Quite aside from the changes in the ocean, we know there are major
changes in the storm tracks and teleconnections with ENSO, and there is a LOT more rain on
land during La Nina (more drought in El Nino), so how does the albedo change overall
(changes in cloud)? At the very least the extra rain on land means a lot more heat goes
into evaporation rather than raising temperatures, and so that keeps land temps down: and
should generate cloud. But the resulting evaporative cooling means the heat goes into
atmosphere and should be radiated to space: so we should be able to track it with CERES
data. The CERES data are unfortunately wonting and so too are the cloud data. The ocean
data are also lacking although some of that may be related to the ocean current changes and
burying heat at depth where it is not picked up. If it is sequestered at depth then it
comes back to haunt us later and so we should know about it.
Kevin
Michael Mann wrote:

Kevin, that's an interesting point. As the plot from Gavin I sent shows, we can easily
account for the observed surface cooling in terms of the natural variability seen in
the CMIP3 ensemble (i.e. the observed cold dip falls well within it). So in that sense,
we can "explain" it. But this raises the interesting question, is there something going
on here w/ the energy & radiation budget which is inconsistent with the modes of
internal variability that leads to similar temporary cooling periods within the models.
I'm not sure that this has been addressed--has it?

m

On Oct 14, 2009, at 10:17 AM, Kevin Trenberth wrote:

Hi Tom
How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where
energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not
close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is
happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as
we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!
Kevin
Tom Wigley wrote:

Dear all,

At the risk of overload, here are some notes of mine on the recent

lack of warming. I look at this in two ways. The first is to look at

the difference between the observed and expected anthropogenic trend relative to the pdf
for unforced variability. The second is to remove ENSO, volcanoes and TSI variations
from the observed data.

Both methods show that what we are seeing is not unusual. The second

method leaves a significant warming over the past decade.

These sums complement Kevin's energy work.

Kevin says ... "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment
and it is a travesty that we can't". I do not

agree with this.

Tom.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

Kevin Trenberth wrote:

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here
in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on
record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal
is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about
18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather
(see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last
night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth's
global energy. /Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability/, *1*, 19-27,
doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [PDF]
<[1]http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/EnergyDiagnostics09final.pdf>
(A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a
travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on
2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our
observing system is inadequate.

That said there is a LOT of nonsense about the PDO. People like CPC are tracking PDO on
a monthly basis but it is highly correlated with ENSO. Most of what they are seeing is
the change in ENSO not real PDO. It surely isn't decadal. The PDO is already reversing
with the switch to El Nino. The PDO index became positive in September for first time
since Sept 2007. see
[2]http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/GODAS/ocean_briefing_gif/global_ocean_monitorin
g_current.ppt

Kevin

Michael Mann wrote:

extremely disappointing to see something like this appear on BBC. its particularly odd,
since climate is usually Richard Black's beat at BBC (and he does a great job). from
what I can tell, this guy was formerly a weather person at the Met Office.

We may do something about this on RealClimate, but meanwhile it might be appropriate for
the Met Office to have a say about this, I might ask Richard Black what's up here?

mike

On Oct 12, 2009, at 2:32 AM, Stephen H Schneider wrote:

Hi all. Any of you want to explain decadal natural variability and signal to noise and
sampling errors to this new "IPCC Lead Author" from the BBC? As we enter an El Nino
year and as soon, as the sunspots get over their temporary--presumed--vacation worth a
few tenths of a Watt per meter squared reduced forcing, there will likely be another
dramatic upward spike like 1xxx xxxx xxxx. I heard someone--Mike Schlesinger maybe??--was
willing to bet alot of money on it happening in next 5 years?? Meanwhile the past 10
years of global mean temperature trend stasis still saw what, 9 of the warmest in
reconstructed 1000 year record and Greenland and the sea ice of the North in big
retreat?? Some of you observational folks probably do need to straighten this out as my
student suggests below. Such "fun", Cheers, Steve

Stephen H. Schneider

Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies,

Professor, Department of Biology and

Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment

Mailing address:

Yang & Yamazaki Environment & Energy Building - MC 4205

473 Via Ortega

Ph: xxx xxxx xxxx

F: xxx xxxx xxxx

Websites: climatechange.net

patientfromhell.org

----- Forwarded Message -----

From: "Narasimha D. Rao" <[3]ndrao@xxxxxxxxx.xxx <[4]mailto:ndrao@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>

To: "Stephen H Schneider" <[5]shs@xxxxxxxxx.xxx <[6]mailto:shs@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>

Sent: Sunday, October 11, 2009 10:25:53 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific

Subject: BBC U-turn on climate

Steve,

You may be aware of this already. Paul Hudson, BBC's reporter on climate change, on
Friday wrote that there's been no warming since 1998, and that pacific oscillations will
force cooling for the next xxx xxxx xxxxyears. It is not outrageously biased in presentation as
are other skeptics' views.

[7]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm

[8]http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100013173/the-bbcs-amazing-u-turn-on
-climate-change/

BBC has significant influence on public opinion outside the US.

Do you think this merits an op-ed response in the BBC from a scientist?

Narasimha

-------------------------------

PhD Candidate,

Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER)

Stanford University

Tel: xxx xxxx xxxx

--

Michael E. Mann

Professor

Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC)

Department of Meteorology Phone: (8xxx xxxx xxxx

503 Walker Building FAX: (8xxx xxxx xxxx

The Pennsylvania State University email: [9]mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx <[10]mailto:mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>

University Park, PA 16xxx xxxx xxxx

website: [11]http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/index.html
<[12]http://www.meteo.psu.edu/%7Emann/Mann/index.html>

"Dire Predictions" book site:
[13]http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/news/DirePredictions/index.html

--

****************

Kevin E. Trenberth e-mail: [14]trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx

Climate Analysis Section, [15]www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html

NCAR

P. O. Box 3000, (3xxx xxxx xxxx

Boulder, CO 80xxx xxxx xxxx (3xxx xxxx xxxx(fax)

Street address: 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80305

--
****************
Kevin E. Trenberth e-mail: [16]trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Climate Analysis Section, [17]www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html
NCAR
P. O. Box 3000, (3xxx xxxx xxxx
Boulder, CO 80xxx xxxx xxxx (3xxx xxxx xxxx(fax)
Street address: 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80305

--
Michael E. Mann
Professor
Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC)
Department of Meteorology Phone: (8xxx xxxx xxxx
503 Walker Building FAX: (8xxx xxxx xxxx
The Pennsylvania State University email: [18]mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
University Park, PA 16xxx xxxx xxxx
website: [19]http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/index.html
"Dire Predictions" book site:
[20]http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/news/DirePredictions/index.html

--
****************
Kevin E. Trenberth e-mail: [21]trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Climate Analysis Section, [22]www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html
NCAR
P. O. Box 3000, (3xxx xxxx xxxx
Boulder, CO 80xxx xxxx xxxx (3xxx xxxx xxxx(fax)

Street address: 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80305

References

1. http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/EnergyDiagnostics09final.pdf
2. http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/GODAS/ocean_briefing_gif/global_ocean_monitoring_current.ppt
3. mailto:ndrao@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
4. mailto:ndrao@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
5. mailto:shs@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
6. mailto:shs@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
7. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm
8. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/d...73/the-bbcs-amazing-u-turn-on-climate-change/
9. mailto:mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
10. mailto:mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
11. http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/index.html
12. http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/index.html
13. http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/news/DirePredictions/index.html
14. mailto:trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
15. http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html
16. mailto:trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
17. http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html
18. mailto:mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
19. http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/index.html
20. http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/news/DirePredictions/index.html
21. mailto:trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
22. http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html

 

[trysail]

William Gray, Ph.D. debates Kevin Trenberth, Ph.D.:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/XchangeGray_FtCollinsFeb08.pdf



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

http://i45.tinypic.com/iwq8a1.jpg

 

[trysail]

"Once the government creates an insurance company or plan, the government or the taxpayers are liable for any deficit that government plan runs, really without limit. With our debt heading over $21 trillion within the next 10 years...we've got to start saying no to some things like this."

-Joseph Lieberman ( I- CT )
speaking about the "public option" portion of the Health Care debate.

 

[trysail]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/co...s/article6927598.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=2270657


November 23, 2009
Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too
Even if the science was reliable (which it isn’t), we should not force the world’s poorest countries to cut carbon emissions
By: Nigel Lawson

Exactly a fortnight from today, the United Nations climate change conference opens in Copenhagen. Its purpose is (or was) clear: to agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Under Kyoto, all those developed nations that ratified the treaty (all, in practice, except the US) agreed to cut their carbon emissions to 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. The successor treaty, to be agreed at Copenhagen, was intended to secure a cut in global emissions, from the developed and developing world alike (and China has now overtaken even the US), of 50 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050, leading to more or less total decarbonisation by the end of the century.

As Gordon Brown declared in his Guildhall speech only a week ago, Copenhagen must “forge a new international agreement ... [which] must contain the full range of commitments required: on emissions reductions by both developed and developing countries, on finance and on verification”.

This is a pretty tall order; and, needless to say, nothing of the sort will be agreed. Even if the Kyoto 5 per cent cut is achieved, it will be only because the developed world has effectively outsourced a large part of its emissions to countries, such as China and India, without Kyoto constraints. Not only is 50 per cent rather more severe than 5 per cent, but (except in the unlikely event of world industry migrating to Mars) a global target removes the escape route of outsourcing emissions.

Moreover there is a strong moral argument, too. The reason we use carbon-based energy is simply that it is far and away the cheapest source of energy, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

Switching to much more expensive energy may be acceptable for us in the developed world. But in the developing world, there are still tens of millions of people suffering from acute poverty, and from the consequences of such poverty, in the shape of preventable disease, malnutrition and premature death. So for the developing world, the overriding priority has to be the fastest feasible rate of economic development, which means, inter alia, using the cheapest available form of energy: carbon-based energy.

Mr Brown’s Copenhagen objective will, happily, not be achieved. But the meeting will still be declared a great success. Politicians do not like being associated with failure, so they will make sure that whatever emerges from Copenhagen is declared a success, and promise to meet again next year. This will at least give our political leaders the time to get themselves off the hook.

The greatest error in the current conventional wisdom is that, if you accept the (present) majority scientific view that most of the modest global warming in the last quarter of the last century — about half a degree centigrade — was caused by man-made carbon emissions, then you must also accept that we have to decarbonise our economies.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I have no idea whether the majority scientific view (and it is far from a consensus) is correct. Certainly, it is curious that, whereas their models predicted an acceleration in global warming this century as the growth in emissions accelerated, so far this century there has been no further warming at all. But the current majority view may still be right.

Even if it is, however, that cannot determine the right policy choice. For a warmer climate brings benefits as well as disadvantages. Even if there is a net disadvantage, which is uncertain, it is far less than the economic cost (let alone the human cost) of decarbonisation. Moreover, the greatest single attribute of mankind is our capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. By adapting to any warming that may occur over the next century, we can pocket the benefits and greatly reduce the disadvantages, at a cost that is far less than the cost of global decarbonisation — even if that could be achieved.

Moreover, the scientific basis for global warming projections is now under scrutiny as never before. The principal source of these projections is produced by a small group of scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), affiliated to the University of East Anglia.

Last week an apparent hacker obtained access to their computers and published in the blogosphere part of their internal e-mail traffic. And the CRU has conceded that the at least some of the published e-mails are genuine.

Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.

There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. But what is clear is that the integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British Government, but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay.

It is against all this background that I am announcing today the launch of a new high-powered all-party (and non-party) think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (www.thegwpf.org), which I hope may mark a turning-point in the political and public debate on the important issue of global warming policy. At the very least, open and reasoned debate on this issue cannot be anything but healthy. The absence of debate between political parties at the present time makes our contribution all the more necessary.

 

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Mixed-Sex Saudi University Hits Clerical Opposition
By Henry Meyer and Glen Carey

Nov. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world that forbids women from driving, isn’t ready to alter that, said Ali Suwaiyel, a 28-year-old Saudi banker.

“What’s the hurry?” he asked as he sipped a coffee in a Starbucks in Riyadh, wearing a traditional white Arabic robe and sunglasses. “What are the benefits?”

King Abdullah, 86, sees the need for speed in changing his country. He is creating secular universities, including a coeducational graduate school, and pushing for more science and technology in education. The king needs a well-trained workforce to diversify the world’s largest oil exporter from energy and create jobs for Saudi Arabia’s youth, more than 25 percent of whom are unemployed.

Failing to raise the fortunes of the almost 40 percent of the population under 15 would make the Islamic state even more susceptible to extremism, said Simon Henderson, an expert on the Gulf monarchies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Stability of world oil supplies depends on Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally.

A backlash by clerics, led in public by Sheikh Saad Bin Naser al-Shatri, is slowing those efforts, though the king dismissed al-Shatri from the country’s top religious body last month.

“We’re missing a lot of opportunities because of religious opposition,” said Jamal Khashoggi, editor of al-Watan newspaper in Jeddah. It is owned by Prince Khaled al-Faisal, governor of that province. “The conservatives are fighting back.”

No Film Festival
Al-Shatri publicly criticized the country’s first co- educational university in September. This followed the last- minute cancellation in July of a Jeddah film festival that had run annually since 2006. The Arab News said a cancellation order was issued by local authorities, citing festival organizers. Clerics in Saudi Arabia, where movie theatres are banned, maintain that musical and film performances are against Sharia, or Islamic law.

Under a pact between the ruling al-Saud family and the Sunni Muslim hierarchy dating back to 1744, Saudi Arabia maintains an austere brand of Islam in return for clerics’ acceptance of the crown, according to official history. The Wahhabi religious establishment controls the courts and dominates the education system.

Opposition
Prince Turki al-Faisal, whose father, King Faisal, introduced female education in the early 1960s and deployed soldiers to protect girls attending school, said there is similar opposition now.

“Any reform agenda will face resistance but that has not disrupted King Abdullah,” said Turki, 64, a former ambassador to the U.S. and U.K. and intelligence chief from 1977 to 2001.

To lure foreign academics and international students to his King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, known as KAUST, the Saudi monarch relaxed the rules.

Women don’t have to wear the abaya, a black robe that covers all but the face, and are allowed to drive in the fenced- off campus 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Jeddah.

“This is something I never expected to see in my lifetime in Saudi Arabia,” Hommood al Rowais, 23, a student in a black baseball cap, blue shorts and a T-shirt who is the son of a Saudi diplomat in Washington, said in an Oct. 14 interview on the newly built campus.

Four New Cities
Abdullah also is building four industrial cities, including the King Abdullah Economic City near KAUST. The government says they will create 1 million new jobs by 2020 in a country whose population is now 28 million. The aim is to build energy-related industries such as plastics, petrochemicals, aluminum and steel. Saudi Arabia depends on oil exports for 90 percent of its revenue.

Saudi Basic Industries Corp., the world’s largest petrochemicals maker and a leading pillar of the drive to reduce reliance on oil, is listed as a research collaborator with KAUST in the field of catalysis on the university’s Web site. The technology allows more efficient use of raw materials in the chemicals and petroleum industries.

Saudi Arabia could increase manufacturing’s share of the economy from 11 percent to 16 percent within the next decade, according to John Sfakianakis, chief economist at Banque Saudi Fransi in Riyadh, the capital.

Religious Education
Elementary schools devote 31 percent of their time to religion and 20 percent to math and science, according to a report last year by Booz Allen Hamilton, a McLean, Virginia- based consulting firm.

The king faces difficulties too as he tries to modernize the religious-run judiciary to create a favorable environment for business and foreign investment. In 2007, Abdullah said Saudi Arabia would reform the legal system by establishing a supreme court and commercial and labor courts.

The future judges who can bring the system more in line with international norms are “now studying in school,” Bandar bin Mohammed al-Aiban, president of the government-run Saudi Human Rights Commission, said in an interview in Riyadh. “This will take a long time.”

Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz became first deputy prime minister, the third most powerful position in the country, in March. He is more wary of provoking clerical opposition than Abdullah, said Khashoggi.

Religious Police
The head of the religious police, Abdelaziz al-Humayyin, ordered stepped-up patrols in July. The police enforce separation of unmarried males and females and a ban on alcohol, and require Muslims to respect prayer times.

Just days after the Saudi monarch presided over a Sept. 23 inauguration ceremony for KAUST in which he called it a “beacon of tolerance,” al-Shatri said in a television interview that mixed-gender classes were “evil.”

Suwaiyel, the banker, said he thinks women will drive someday in Saudi Arabia, though not for 10 or 15 years. Granting them the right earlier “would cause a lot of friction,” he said.

“I believe Saudi Arabia is going to change but at its own pace,” he said. “The conservatives are resistant to change and they don’t want it right now.”

 

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Natural Gas Glut Overwhelms Speculators, Defies Rally
By Ayesha Daya

Nov. 30 (Bloomberg) -- When Qatar’s biggest natural gas shipment to the U.S. arrived this month, it signaled to Barclays Capital Inc. and PFC Energy that this year’s worst performing commodity investment won’t recover in 2010.

Murwab, a Qatari liquefied natural gas tanker, carried the first shipment to the U.S. from the Persian Gulf nation since June 2008. Its cargo, enough to heat about 9 million homes for a day, added to the largest gas inventories for this time of year since at least 1994, Energy Department data show.

Rising supplies threaten to hurt the record-large $4.2 billion bet in the U.S. Natural Gas Fund LP, while traders hold 51 percent more options contracts to buy gas than they do to sell. The International Energy Agency warned of a glut that Qatar’s energy minister said may last until 2012. Wall Street’s consensus forecast for a 51 percent rise in U.S. gas futures to an average $6.09 per million British thermal units next year is too high, according to industry consultant Schork Group Inc.

“We have more gas than we know what to do with in the U.S., we have more waterborne gas floating around the world’s oceans that doesn’t have a home,” Stephen Schork said in an interview from Villanova, Pennsylvania. Prices this winter will “gravitate toward, and remain closer to $4, rather than $7” for each million Btu, he said.

U.S. imports of liquefied natural gas will rise 34 percent this year to about 470 billion cubic feet and another 40 percent in 2010, the Energy Department forecast on Nov. 10. Global LNG supply will exceed demand for a second year in 2010 as new projects from Qatar to Peru boost output, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. said in a Nov. 23 report.

Worst Performance
Natural gas for January delivery dropped as much as 4.1 percent to $4.98 per million Btu in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange today. The contract traded at $5.01 at 8:14 a.m. in New York. Gas has slumped 11 percent this year, the worst performance among the world’s biggest exchange-traded commodities. Gas peaked at $13.69 in July 2008 and declined to a low of $2.409 in September 2009.

Nikos Tsafos, a senior gas analyst at PFC Energy in Washington, predicts U.S. gas will average $5 next year because of rising domestic production and international supplies of LNG, gas cooled to liquid form for transport by ship. His projection is below the average $5.605 for 2010 monthly futures trading on the Nymex.

“It is hard to see how prices can be much better than the current strip,” Tsafos said, referring to the average of each futures contract for delivery next year.

Low prices will save money for the 57 million American households using gas for heat, who face bills of about $792 each this winter. Governments and energy companies such as London- based BP Plc are promoting gas, which emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal, to temper global warming.

Price Collapse
New production in Qatar, which has the world’s third- largest gas reserves, is a legacy of decisions made years ago. As gas tripled between 2002 and 2008 and Qatar increased investments, the nation avoided locking in prices for about half of its new LNG in anticipation of further gains, according to consultant Wood Mackenzie Ltd. Instead, the global recession caused prices to collapse 25 percent last year.

“Qatar has had to supply the U.S., even though the returns are absolutely awful, because it is the sink for cargoes that can’t go anywhere else,” said Tony Regan, a consultant with Singapore-based Tri-Zen International Ltd. and a former executive in Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s LNG business. “It’s the worst possible moment to increase production, because the world is in recession and prices are so low.”

U.S. gas production rose last year to its highest since 1974 as the industry exploited extracted gas from new areas.

‘Acute Glut’
Reserves in the U.S. may be 39 percent higher than estimated just two years ago, reflecting improved yields of gas stored in rocks such as shale, the Potential Gas Committee, a non-profit group linked to the Colorado School of Mines, said in a June 18 report.

An “acute glut” is looming during the next five years because of rising shale gas production in the U.S. and Canada, the Paris-based International Energy Agency said in its World Energy Outlook on Nov. 10.

“There is downward pressure on prices next year,” said Biliana Pehlivanova, a commodities analyst at Barclays Capital in New York, who forecasts gas at $5.05 for 2010. “We see a slow drift lower.”

A decline would be bad news for Oklahoma-based explorer Devon Energy Corp., which is betting on U.S. onshore gas production, as well as BP and Anadarko Petroleum Corp., the two biggest producers in the U.S., and countries that benefit from gas sales, such as Norway and Algeria.

Exporters Meet
Qatar will host a meeting of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum of 11 nations on Dec. 9 to discuss sagging world markets. Russia and Iran, which have the largest reserves, are competing to name the first secretary-general, a step in establishing a group that may one day match the price-setting clout that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has in oil markets.

As the world’s most efficient producer, Qatar can profit at lower prices. The nation can pump 1 million Btu for as little as 15 cents, compared with about $4 for Russia and Norway, according to the IEA. Most costs are covered by so-called condensate, an oil-like petroleum that’s pumped along with natural gas and refined as if it were crude. Qatar then spends another $2.83 to liquefy that gas ready for shipping.

Buyers Turned Away
The country plans to increase annual LNG production capacity 43 percent to 77 million tons by the end of 2010. As prices rose from $2 in 2002, Qatar resisted signing long-term contracts with Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and India, officials in the countries said at the time. Now, Qatar finds the spot market for excess supplies shrinking.

“By 2013, 2012, the world will see more demand” than supply, Qatar Energy Minister Abdullah al-Attiyah said at a conference in Doha Nov. 7, calling the drop in demand “short- term.” Qatar has the right to divert cargoes away from the U.S. if it finds better prices elsewhere, he said in an interview.

China may become the biggest market for Qatari gas, Fu Chengyu, president of China National Offshore Oil Corp., said in a Nov. 13 interview. Domestic gas companies were told to increase production and imports this month to ease shortages, China’s National Development and Reform Commission said in a Nov. 25 statement.

Asia ‘Key Market’
Shell, which sells more LNG than any other company, sees Asia as its “key market” for growth, Chief Executive Officer Peter Voser said in a Nov. 26 interview in Zurich.

“Any gas prices in Europe will actually have to compete with those prices in the Far East in order to get the gas to Europe,” Voser said.

JPMorgan Chase expects a colder-than-normal winter will revive U.S. prices even as market is now “drowning in bearish psychology,” Lawrence Eagles, head of commodities strategy, said in a Nov. 24 note. The bank kept its 2010 price forecast unchanged at $5.94 a million Btu.

Qatar is leasing import capacity at the Sabine Pass and Cameron terminals in Louisiana and Cove Point, Maryland, to sell excess cargoes to the U.S. Its $1 billion terminal under construction in Texas with ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil Corp., called Golden Pass, is unlikely to open before the middle of next year, after a one-year delay, Exxon Mobil spokeswoman Margaret Ross in Houston said by e-mail on Oct. 7.

The Murwab, carrying 216,000 cubic meters of LNG, arrived Nov. 4 at Sabine Pass, according to Qatar Gas Transport Co. and vessel tracking data compiled by Bloomberg. The last time Qatar sent a cargo there was in June 2008 when U.S. prices were more than double today’s level.

Countries that bet on the U.S. market “lost their shirt” this year, Chakib Khelil, energy minister of Algeria, Europe’s largest LNG supplier, said Oct. 7 in Buenos Aires.