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Ephemera

http://droyer.web.wesleyan.edu/climate_sensitivity_PNAS_commentary.pdf

Fossil soils constrain ancient climate sensitivity
Dana L. Royer 1

Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 06459

Global temperatures have covaried with atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) over the last 450 million years of Earth’s history (1). Critically, ancient greenhouse periods provide some of the most pertinent information for anticipating how the Earth will respond to the current anthropogenic loading of greenhouse gases. Paleo-CO2 can be inferred either by proxy or by the modeling of the long-term carbon cycle.

Fig. 1. Constraints on climate sensitivity for the globally warm Cretaceous and early Paleogene (125–40 Mya). (A) Tropical sea surface temperature (SST) records (15–29). Boxes represent studies with high sampling density. The red band corresponds to estimated tropical SST under an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 1,000 ppm and a climate sensitivity (ΔT2×) of 3°C per CO2 doubling. Temperatures above this band probably represent times when climate sensitivity exceeded 3°C (see text). (B) Atmospheric CO2 records (compilation from ref. 2). Dashed lines correspond to present-day CO2 (387 ppm; A.D. 2009) and 1,000 ppm CO2. Records from the boron proxy are excluded because they are likely unreliable (30); records from the goethite and nahcolite proxies are excluded because they are not yet widely applied.​

For much of the geologic past, estimates of CO2 are consistent across methods (1). One exception is the paleosol carbonate proxy, whose CO2 estimates are often more than twice as high as coeval estimates from other methods (1). This discrepancy has led some to question the validity of the other methods and has hindered attempts to understand the linkages between paleo-CO2 and other parts of the Earth system. In this issue of PNAS, Breecker and colleagues (2) break important new ground for resolving this conflict.

The paleosol carbonate proxy for atmospheric CO2 is based on the analysis of carbonate nodules that precipitate in soils in seasonally dry to dry climates. These nodules incorporate carbon from two sources: atmospheric CO2 that diffuses directly into the soil and in situ CO2 from biological respiration. Because the stable carbon isotopic composition of these two sources is distinct, the concentration of atmospheric CO2 can be inferred if the concentration of soil CO2 and the isotopic compositions of the two sources are known (3). Atmospheric CO2 estimates scale directly with soil CO2 concentration: If the soil term is wrong by a factor of two, the inferred atmospheric CO2 will be off by a factor of two.

Estimates of soil CO2 concentration for fossil soils have been based on measurements taken during the growing season in equivalent living soils. However, Breecker et al. (2, 4) demonstrate convincingly that the window of active carbonate formation is restricted to the warmer and dryer parts of the growing season. Carbonate formation is simply not thermodynamically favorable during cooler and wetter seasons. Critically, biological productivity and respiration are low during these dry periods. As a result, soil CO2 concentration during the critical window of active carbonate formation has been overestimated in most soils by a factor of two or more (2).

What does this mean? CO2 estimates from the paleosol carbonate proxy can be cut in half (or more). Doing so snaps the paleosol-based estimates in line with most other approaches (2) (Fig. 1B) and produces the most precise view to date of Earth’s CO2 history. We are now better equipped to answer some important, basic questions. For example, what is the quantitative relationship between CO2 and temperature? That is, for every doubling of CO2, what is the long-term (103–104 years) equilibrium response of global temperature (termed here climate sensitivity)?

Most assessments of climate sensitivity for the present day hover around 3°C per CO2 doubling (5), although if the longterm waxing and waning of continental ice sheets are considered it is probably closer to 6°C (6). Less is known about climate sensitivity during ancient greenhouse periods, simply because having poles draped in forest instead of ice represents a profound rearrangement of climate feedbacks.

Records of CO2 and temperature are now sufficiently robust for placing firm minimum constraints on climate sensitivity during parts of the Cretaceous and early Paleogene (125–40 Mya), a well-known globally warm interval. Indeed, owing to the logarithmic relationship between CO2 and temperature, the geologic record is ideally suited for establishing minimum thresholds. This is because, to accommodate a declining sensitivity, other boundary conditions of the Earth system need to shift exponentially, for example, unreasonable oscillations in atmospheric CO2. Policywise, establishing a basement value for climate sensitivity is a critical step for addressing our current climate crisis (5).

With few exceptions, CO2 during the Cretaceous and early Paleogene was<1,000 ppm (2) (Fig. 1B). Global mean surface temperature is very difficult to establish for these ancient periods. However, temperature change in the tropics today scales at roughly two-thirds the global change (5, 6).

If we assume a similar relationship in the past and a climate sensitivity of 3°C perCO2 doubling, a rise in atmospheric CO2 to 1,000 ppm results in a 3.6°C warming in the tropics (relative to a 280-ppm baseline).

Given that tropical sea surface temperatures range from 27° to 29°C today, tropical temperatures exceeding 30.6°–32.6°C (red band in Fig. 1A) during the Cretaceous and early Paleogene likely correspond to a climate sensitivity >3°C. This threshold was commonly surpassed during the Cretaceous and early Paleogene (Fig. 1A). For times when CO2 was <1,000 ppm, the tropical temperature threshold for a 3°C climate sensitivity would shift to correspondingly cooler values.

Further, there is abundant evidence for flatter latitudinal temperature gradients during greenhouse periods (7, 8), meaning, again, that the tropical temperature threshold used here is probably a maximum. Together, it is clear that during the Cretaceous and Paleogene climate sensitivity commonly exceeded 3°C per CO2 doubling.

Although further work is needed, the geologic evidence (2) (Fig. 1) is most consistent with long-term, future climate change being more severe than presently anticipated (5). Also, global climate models tuned to ancient greenhouse periods commonly have emergent climate sensitivities of <3°C and they fail to simulate the shallow latitudinal temperature gradients (9). Thus even for times with little ice, there are important positive feedbacks that are presently not captured adequately in climate models. Processes for warming the high latitudes without a change in CO2 include more vigorous heat transport (10, 11), more widespread stratospheric clouds in the high latitudes (12), and climate feedbacks from polar forests (13). and their study highlights the value of a clearly resolved paleo-CO2 record. However, a limitation is that they uniformly apply a “best guess” value of 2,500 ppm for soil CO2 concentration.

They recognize this as an oversimplification and is an area for future work. Better modeling of the term, perhaps through independent proxy (14), may result in a further tightening of the paleo-CO2 record.

1. Royer DL (2006) CO2-forced climate thresholds during the Phanerozoic. Geochim Cosmochim Acta 70:5665– 5675.

2. Breecker DO, Sharp ZD, McFadden LD (2010) Atmospheric CO2 concentrations during ancient greenhouse climates were similar to those predicted for 2100 A.D. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 107:576–580.

3. Cerling TE (1991) Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: Evidence from Cenozoic and Mesozoic paleosols. Am J Sci 291:377–400.

4. Breecker DO, Sharp ZD, McFadden LD (2009) Seasonal bias in the formation and stable isotopic composition of pedogenic carbonate in modern soils from central New Mexico, USA. Geol Soc Am Bull 121:630–640.

5. IPCC (2007) Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis, Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge Univ Press, Cambridge, UK).

6. Hansen J, et al. (2008) Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim? Open Atmospheric Sci J 2: 217–231.

7. Bice KL, Huber BT, Norris RD (2003) Extreme polar warmth during the Cretaceous greenhouse? Paradox of the late Turonian δ18O record at Deep Sea Drilling Project Site 511. Paleoceanography 18:1031.

8. Bijl PK, et al. (2009) Early Palaeogene temperature evolution of the southwest Pacific Ocean. Nature 461: 776–779.

9. Shellito CJ, Sloan LC, Huber M (2003) Climate model sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 levels in the Early-Middle Paleogene. Palaeogeogr Palaeoclimatol Palaeoecol 193: 113–123.

10. Korty RL, Emanuel KA, Scott JR (2008) Tropical cycloneinduced upper-ocean mixing and climate: Application to equable climates. J Clim 21:638–654.

11. Ufnar DF, González LA, Ludvigson GA, Brenner RL, Witzke BJ (2004) Evidence for increased latent heat transport during the Cretaceous (Albian) greenhouse warming. Geology 32:1049–1052.

12. Abbot DS, Tziperman E (2008) Sea ice, high-latitude convection, and equable climates. Geophys Res Lett 35:L03702.

13. Beerling DJ, Nicholas Hewitt C, Pyle JA, Raven JA (2007) Critical issues in trace gas biogeochemistry and global change. Philos Trans R Soc Lond A 365:1629–1642.

14. Retallack GJ (2009) Refining a pedogenic-carbonate CO2 paleobarometer to quantify a middle Miocene greenhouse spike. Palaeogeogr Palaeoclimatol Palaeoecol 281:57–65.

15. Bice KL, et al. (2006) A multiple proxy and model study of Cretaceous upper ocean temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentration. Paleoceanography 21: PA2002.

16. Bornemann A, et al. (2008) Isotopic evidence for glaciation during the Cretaceous supergreenhouse. Science 319:189–192.

17. Forster A, Schouten S, Baas M, Sinninghe Damsté JS (2007) Mid-Cretaceous (Albian Santonian) sea surface temperature record of the tropical Atlantic Ocean. Geology 35:919–922.

18. Forster A, Schouten S, Moriya K, Wilson PA, Sinninghe Damsté JS (2007) Tropical warming and intermittent cooling during the Cenomanian/Turonian oceanic anoxic event 2: Sea surface temperature records from the equatorial Atlantic. Paleoceanography 22:pA1219.

19. Moriya K, Wilson PA, Friedrich O, Erbacher J, Kawahata H (2007) Testing for ice sheets during the mid-Cretaceous greenhouse using glassy foraminiferal calcite from the mid-Cenomanian tropics on Demerara Rise. Geology 35:615–618.

20. Norris RD, Bice KL, Magno EA, Wilson PA (2002) Jiggling the tropical thermostat in the Cretaceous hothouse. Geology 30:299–302.

21. Pearson PN, et al. (2001) Warm tropical sea surface temperatures in the Late Cretaceous and Eocene epochs. Nature 413:481–487.

22. Pearson PN, et al. (2007) Stable warm tropical climate through the Eocene Epoch. Geology 35:211–214.

23. Schouten S, et al. (2003) Extremely high sea-surface temperatures at low latitudes during the middle Cretaceous as revealed by archaeal membrane lipids. Geology 31:1069–1072.

24. Tripati A, et al. (2003) Tropical sea-surface temperature reconstruction for the early Paleogene using Mg/Ca ratios of planktonic foraminifera. Paleoceanography 18:1101.

25. Wagner T, et al. (2008) Rapid warming and salinity changes of Cretaceous surface waters in the subtropical North Atlantic. Geology 36:203–206.

26. Wilson PA, Norris RD (2001) Warm tropical ocean surface and global anoxia during the mid-Cretaceous period. Nature 412:425–429.

27. Wilson PA, Norris RD, Cooper MJ (2002) Testing the Cretaceous greenhouse hypothesis using glassy foraminiferal calcite from the core of the Turonian tropics on Demerara Rise. Geology 30:607–610.

28. Wilson PA, Opdyke BN (1996) Equatorial sea-surface temperatures for the Maastrichtian revealed through remarkable preservation of metastable carbonate. Geology 24:555–558.

29. Sexton PF, Wilson PA, Pearson PN (2006) Microstructural and geochemical perspectives on planktic foraminiferal preservation: “glassy” versus “frosty”. Geochem Geophys Geosyst 7:Q12P19.

30. Pagani M, Lemarchand D, Spivack A, Gaillardet J (2005) A critical evaluation of the boron isotope-pH proxy: The accuracy of ancient ocean pH estimates. Geochim Cosmochim Acta 69:953–961.
 

NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Global Climate Model "E"

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


PROGRAM GISS_modelE,160
!@sum MAIN GISS modelE main time-stepping routine
!@auth Original Development Team
!@ver 1.0 (Based originally on B399)
USE FILEMANAGER, only : openunit,closeunit
USE TIMINGS, only : ntimemax,ntimeacc,timing,timestr
USE PARAM
USE MODEL_COM
USE DOMAIN_DECOMP, ONLY : init_decomp,grid,finish_decomp
USE DYNAMICS
USE RADNCB, only : dimrad_sv
USE RANDOM

USE DAGCOM, only : oa,monacc,koa
USE SOIL_DRV, only: daily_earth, ground_e
USE SUBDAILY, only : nsubdd,init_subdd,get_subdd,reset_subdd
IMPLICIT NONE

INTEGER K,M,MSTART,MNOW,MODD5D,months,ioerr,Ldate,istart
INTEGER iu_VFLXO,iu_ACC,iu_RSF,iu_ODA
INTEGER :: MDUM = 0
REAL*8, DIMENSION(NTIMEMAX) :: PERCENT
REAL*8 DTIME,TOTALT

CHARACTER aDATE*14
CHARACTER*8 :: flg_go='___GO___' ! green light
external sig_stop_model
C**** Command line options
LOGICAL :: qcrestart=.false.
CHARACTER*32 :: ifile


call init_decomp(grid,im,jm)
call alloc_drv()
C****
C**** Processing command line options
C****
call read_options( qcrestart, ifile )
if ( qcrestart ) then
call print_restart_info
call stop_model("Terminated normally: printed restart info",13)
endif
C****
C**** INITIALIZATIONS
C****
CALL TIMER (MNOW,MDUM)

CALL INPUT (istart,ifile)
C****
C**** If run is already done, just produce diagnostic printout
C****
IF (Itime.GE.ItimeE.and.Kradia.le.0) then ! includes ISTART<1 case
call print_diags(1)
CALL stop_model ('The run has already completed',13)
! no output files are affected
END IF

open(3,file='flagGoStop',form='FORMATTED',status='REPLACE')
write (3,'(A8)') flg_go
close (3)
call sys_signal( 15, sig_stop_model ) ! works only on single CPU
MSTART=MNOW
DO M=1,NTIMEACC
MSTART= MSTART-TIMING(M)
END DO
C**** INITIALIZE TIME PARAMETERS
NSTEP=(Itime-ItimeI)*NIdyn
MODD5K=1000
CALL DAILY(.false.) ! not end_of_day
if (istart.le.9) call reset_diag(0)
if (Kradia.le.0) then
CALL daily_EARTH(.false.) ! not end_of_day
CALL daily_OCEAN(.false.) ! not end_of_day
CALL CALC_AMPK(LS1-1)

if (kradia.le.0) CALL CHECKT ('INPUT ')
end if
CALL UPDTYPE

WRITE (6,'(A,11X,A4,I5,A5,I3,A4,I3,6X,A,I4,I10)')
* '0NASA/GISS Climate Model (re)started',
* 'Year',JYEAR,aMON,JDATE,', Hr',JHOUR,
* 'Internal clock: DTsrc-steps since 1/1/',Iyear1,ITIME
CALL TIMER (MNOW,MELSE)
C****
C**** Open and position output history files if needed
C****
C**** Monthly files
if (Kradia.ne.0) then
write(aDATE(1:7),'(a3,I4.4)') aMON(1:3),Jyear
if (Kradia.gt.0) aDATE(4:7)=' '
call openunit(trim('RAD'//aDATE(1:7)),iu_RAD,.true.,.false.)
if (Kradia.lt.0) call io_POS(iu_RAD,Itime-1,2*dimrad_sv,Nrad)
end if
C**** Files for an accumulation period (1-12 months)
write(aDATE(1:7),'(a3,I4.4)') aMON0(1:3),Jyear0
if (Kvflxo.ne.0) then
call openunit('VFLXO'//aDATE(1:7),iu_VFLXO,.true.,.false.)
call io_POS(iu_VFLXO,Itime,2*im*jm*koa,Nday) ! real*8-dim -> 2*
end if
C**** Initiallise file for sub-daily diagnostics, controlled by
C**** space-seperated string segments in SUBDD & SUBDD1 in the rundeck
call init_subdd(aDATE)

C****
C**** MAIN LOOP
C****
DO WHILE (Itime.lt.ItimeE)

C**** Every Ndisk Time Steps (DTsrc), starting with the first one,
C**** write restart information alternatingly onto 2 disk files
IF (MOD(Itime-ItimeI,Ndisk).eq.0) THEN
CALL RFINAL (IRAND)
call set_param( "IRAND", IRAND, 'o' )
call openunit(rsf_file_name(KDISK),iu_RSF,.true.,.false.)
call io_rsf(iu_RSF,Itime,iowrite,ioerr)
call closeunit(iu_RSF)
WRITE (6,'(A,I1,45X,A4,I5,A5,I3,A4,I3,A,I8)')
* '0Restart file written on fort.',KDISK,'Year',
* JYEAR,aMON,JDATE,', Hr',JHOUR,' Internal clock time:',ITIME
KDISK=3-KDISK
CALL TIMER (MNOW,MELSE)
END IF
C**** THINGS THAT GET DONE AT THE BEGINNING OF EVERY DAY
IF (MOD(Itime,NDAY).eq.0) THEN
C**** INITIALIZE SOME DIAG. ARRAYS AT THE BEGINNING OF SPECIFIED DAYS
if (kradia.le.0) call daily_DIAG
C**** THINGS THAT GET DONE AT THE BEGINNING OF EVERY MONTH
IF ( JDAY.eq.1+JDendOfM(Jmon-1) ) then
write(aDATE(1:7),'(a3,I4.4)') aMON(1:3),Jyear
if (Kradia.ne.0) then
if (Kradia.gt.0) aDATE(4:7)=' '
call closeunit( iu_RAD )
call openunit(trim('RAD'//aDATE(1:7)),iu_RAD,.true.,.false.)
end if
*****​
 return
end subroutine print_restart_info
 
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601072&sid=ax4VkJuccVRQ

Areva Says U.S. Loan Plan to Create ‘Enormous’ Nuclear Market
By Katarzyna Klimasinska

Feb. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Areva SA, the world’s biggest reactor builder, said the successful execution of the U.S. nuclear-loan guarantee program and the ability of companies to deliver on time and on cost will lead to an “enormous” market.

Southern Co. and its partners received $8.33 billion of federal conditional loan guarantees earlier this week to build the first nuclear reactors in the U.S. in three decades. Jacques Besnainou, chief executive officer of Areva’s U.S. unit, is in the process of licensing its EPR nuclear-generator design, which is also a candidate for U.S. financial support.

“For me, they are not competitors, we are competi-mates,” Besnainou said about nuclear-plant builders in an interview in Bethesda, Maryland, yesterday. “What Wall Street needs to see, and Main Street as well, is that we are able to build on time, on budget.”

Areva, based in Paris, plans to invest more than $3 billion in its U.S. nuclear business in the five years ending in 2014. This includes spending on EPR design certification, which will likely be completed in 2012, the Eagle Rock uranium-enrichment facility in Idaho and the heavy nuclear-components manufacturing plant in Newport News, Virginia.

Southern, based in Atlanta, plans to add reactors in 2016 and 2017 using Toshiba Corp.’s Westinghouse AP1000 design. Baltimore-based Constellation Energy Group Inc. has also asked for federal loan guarantees for a new power plant using Areva’s design. Besnainou expects a decision on this request to be made in the next few weeks or months.

“The nuclear industry got a big boost by President Obama,” he said. “It’s no longer a taboo” to build new plants in the country...

*****​
 
* Ocean temperatures can be measured adequately only by the Argo buoy network. Argo buoys dive down to 700m, recording temperatures, then come up and radio back the results. There are 3,000 of them floating around all the world’s oceans.

* The Argo buoys have been operational only since the end of 2003. Before that, ocean temperatures were gathered by various methods - usually collected by ships in popular commercial shipping lanes - that lacked uniformity, sufficient geographical coverage, and the ability to measure temperature much beneath the surface. The Argo buoy system has added uniformity and greater reliability to ocean temperature measurements.

* According to Argo temperature measurements, the world’s oceans have shown a slight cooling since Argo became operational in 2003. In sharp contrast to model predicted heat build-up

* The Argo data contradict claims humans are causing rapid global warming, because ocean temperatures are not rising as fast as predicted by global warming alarmists.

... NOAA chose to remove satellite input into their global ocean estimation and not make any attempt to use Argo data in the process. This resulted in a jump of 0.2C or more and ‘a new ocean warmth record’ in July.
Click to expand...

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/argodata.jpg



=====================================================
Follow the Money

Enough is enough.

It’s about time that someone once and for all puts the lie to the recurrent charges that the AGW skeptical community is supported by “Big Oil”, or is populated by “flat-earthers”, or by those who in the past have been complicit with “the tobacco lobby”. These transparently pejorative statements are frequent inclusions in postings and commentary by AGW proponents , sometimes by less committed followers of the AGW controversy and even by some posters who are intellectually inclined to side with the skeptics. There are rarely any substantiating statements to support these allegations which in the absence of any formal repudiation by those so categorized, take on a life of their own like so many urban myths that populate the blogosphere.

The facts are that quite the opposite is the case. For example, let’s take “Big Oil”. BP has contributed over $500 Million to UC Berkeley, one of the Bay Area’s centers of AGW support, for its Energy Biosciences Institute.

Stanford University has received $225 Million from ExxonMobil, Toyota and Schlumberger for its Global Climate and Energy Project. That money will be combined with a $50 Million donation from alumnus Jay Precourt whose career as an oil engineer included such companies as Hamilton Oil and Tejas Gas Corp. The new entity will be named the Precourt Center for Energy Efficiency. See here.

Compare these numbers with a total of ~$6.4 Million over a 4-year period between 2002-2005 provided to non-academic and presumably more conservative think tanks by ExxonMobile according to data acquired by EDF (hardly an unbiased source). See here.

As for individuals active in the promotion of AGW, Susan Solomon, a Phd from Stanford and a lead author of the 2007 IPC Report was a recipient of the 2004 Blue Planet Prize, a 50 Million Yen (~$460,000) cash award from the Asahi Glass Foundation , see here. Other high profile figures such as James Hansen and Michael Mann have received six-figure amounts from organizations such as the Theresa Heinz Foundation and the Dan David Foundation. It seems as though being a staunch proponent of AGW is a very rewarding position to have.

These are just a fractional example of the money that has flowed from the private sector to individuals and academic institutions friendly to the notion of anthropogenic influences on the environment. Over the past 10 years Government funding to such organizations has been conservatively estimated at well over $50 Billion.

Compare these enormous sums of money with the amounts that are received by prominent and well qualified members of the skeptical community. I know from personal association that external funding for such sites as WUWT and icecap is in the low five figures and comes almost exclusively from individual donations from those who access these sites. It would seem that the thinly veiled assertions from those expressing an alarmist position that people who adopt a more skeptical attitude are somehow insincere and must be doing it for the money. Since this is patently untrue, I submit that such accusations are more likely to be evidence of projection than of fiscal reality and they are more designed to obfuscate than enlighten the debate.

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/possibleblogpost030710.pdf
 
Last edited:

Government loan guarantees of nuclear plant construction:
http://www.masterresource.org/2010/02/radioactive-corporate-welfare/#more-7515

Federal energy subsidies:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/subsidy2/pdf/subsidy08.pdf

Corporate credit risk- nuclear construction:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/18057014/Moodys-New-Nuclear-Generation-June-2009



sr71plt said:
But it's worth that sexual overcompensating big, bold green font and all of that impotent ranting through the use of copyright violation repostings on this board that have nothing to do with this Web site, I take it? :D (Talk about slapping graffetti all over the board.)

Your options really are pretty clear--try living within your means and attending anger management classes.

And as far as posting your crap this board, Trysail, you have one story posted here four years ago. What are you even doing posting to this board? That's lame. Take it to the GB, man, that's where you and your schtick belong.
Click to expand...

Goddamn, what a colossal hoot!

I've spent the last two days laughing so hard at the above I damn near split my sides. There is an important concept that you really ought to discover ( not to mention correct spelling— yours continues haphazard and occasionally atrocious ): it can be found here.

You have no clue how amusing it is to watch you repeatedly go ballistic over the petty and the stupid. It's a hallmark of a personality that's all too familiar— one that practically defines people who spend too much time in the mother of all mediocrities. One of its unmistakable signs are repeated veiled suggestions of knowledge of really important people and secrets. I'll tell you a secret: it's not impressive and it's a dead giveaway of an insecurity-based narcissim. It is, in fact, hilarious.

When you made your initial appearance here in July, 2006, I pegged you as a braggadocio and a phony— a judgment that's been repeatedly reinforced and confirmed.


 
Last edited:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/21/fudged-fevers-in-the-frozen-north/

Fudged Fevers in the Frozen North
by Willis Eschenbach


I got to thinking about the (non) adjustment of the GISS temperature data for the Urban Heat Island effect, and it reminded me that I had once looked briefly at Anchorage, Alaska in that regard. So I thought I’d take a fresh look. I used the GISS (NASA) temperature data available here. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/

Given my experience with the Darwin, Australia records, I looked at the “homogenization adjustment”. According to GISS:

The goal of the homogenization effort is to avoid any impact (warming or cooling) of the changing environment that some stations experienced by changing the long term trend of any non-rural station to match the long term trend of their rural neighbors, while retaining the short term monthly and annual variations.

Here’s how the Anchorage data has been homogenized. Figure 1 shows the difference between the Anchorage data before and after homogenization:

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/anchorage_adjustments.jpg
Figure 1. Homogenization adjustments made by GISS to the Anchorage, Alaska urban temperature record (red stepped line, left scale) and Anchorage population (orange curve, right scale)

Now, I suppose that this is vaguely reasonable. At least it is in the right direction, reducing the apparent warming. I say “vaguely reasonable” because this adjustment is supposed to take care of “UHI”, the Urban Heat Island effect. As most everyone has experienced driving into any city, the city is usually warmer than the surrounding countryside. UHI is the result of increasing population, with the accompanying changes around the temperature station. More buildings, more roads, more cars, more parking lots, all of these raise the temperature, forming a heat “island” around the city. The larger the population of the city, the greater the UHI.

But here’s the problem. As Fig. 1 shows, until World War II, Anchorage was a very sleepy village of a few thousand. Since then the population has skyrocketed. But the homogeneity adjustment does not match this in any sense. The homogeneity adjustment is a straight line (albeit one with steps …why steps? … but I digress). The adjustment starts way back in 1926 … why would the 1926 Anchorage temperature need any adjustment at all? And how does this adjust for UHI?

Intrigued by this oddity, I looked at the nearest rural station, which is Matanuska. It is only about 35 miles (60 km) from Anchorage, as shown in Figure 2.

http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/anchorage_matanuska.jpg
Figure 2. Anchorage (urban) and Matanuska (rural) temperature stations.

Matanuska is clearly in the same climatological zone as Anchorage. This is verified by the correlation between the two records, which is about 0.9. So it would be one of the nearby rural stations used to homogenize Anchorage.

Now, according to GISS the homogeneity adjustments are designed to adjust the urban stations like Anchorage so that they more closely match the rural stations like Matanuska. Imagine my surprise when I calculated the homogeneity adjustment to Matanuska, shown in Figure 3.

http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/matanuska_adjustments.jpg
Figure 3. Homogenization adjustments made by GISS to the Matanuska, Alaska rural temperature record.

Say what? What could possibly justify that kind of adjustment, seven tenths of a degree? The early part of the record is adjusted to show less warming. Then from 1973 to 1989, Matanuska is adjusted to warm at a feverish rate of 4.4 degrees per century … but Matanuska is a RURAL station. Since GISS says that the homogenization effort is designed to change the ”long term trend of any non-rural station to match the long term trend of their rural neighbors”, why is Matanuska being adjusted at all?

Not sure what I can say about that, except that I don’t understand it in the slightest. My guess is that what has happened is that a faulty computer program has been applied to fudge the record of every temperature station on the planet. The results have then been used without the slightest attempt at quality control.

Yes, I know it’s a big job to look at thousands of stations to see what the computer program has done to each and every one of them … but if you are not willing to make sure that your hotrod whizbang computer program actually works for each and every station, you should not be in charge of homogenizing milk, much less temperatures.

The justification that is always given for these adjustments is that they must be right because the global average of the GISS adjusted dataset (roughly) matches the GHCN adjusted dataset, which (roughly) matches the CRU adjusted dataset.

Sorry, I don’t find that convincing in the slightest. All three have been shown to have errors. All that shows is that their errors roughly match, which is meaningless. We need to throw all of these “adjusted datasets” in the trash can and start over.

As the Romans used to say “falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus”, which means “false in one thing, false in everything”. Do we know that everything is false? Absolutely not … but given egregious oddities like this one, we have absolutely no reason to believe that they are true either.

Since people are asking us to bet billions on this dataset, we need more than a “well, it’s kinda like the other datasets that contain known errors” to justify their calculations. NASA is not doing the job we are paying them to do. Why should citizen scientists like myself have to dig out these oddities? The adjustments for each station should be published and graphed. Every single change in the data should be explained and justified. The computer code should be published and verified.

Until they get off their dead … … armchairs and do the work they are paid to do, we can place no credence in their claims of temperature changes. They may be right … but given their egregious errors, we have no reason to believe that, and certainly no reason to spend billions of dollars based on their claims.
 
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Confidence In Climate Science Eroding Over Errors

All Things Considered

February 22, 2010 -

ROBERT SIEGEL, host: From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.

The world's top climate science institution has conceded that it published errors in its reports. That follows a separate controversy over hacked emails from prominent climate scientists that cast doubt on their objectivity. Most scientists say the evidence for a warming world is still as strong as ever.

But as NPR's Christopher Joyce reports, some now acknowledge they may need to do some housecleaning and improve their public relations skills.

CHRISTOPHER JOYCE: Scientists don't like to make mistakes, so it was with much embarrassment that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted that it published a real laugher in its latest report on climate science.

The IPCC quoted a study that said Himalayan glaciers could completely melt by 2035. Two numbers were transposed. It should have said by the year 2350.

As climate skeptics pounced on the mistake, other errors in IPCC report surfaced. Climate scientists insist that these are minor and that climate change is still a fact, so did the top climate negotiator at the State Department, Todd Stern.

Mr. TODD STERN (Special Envoy for Climate Change, Department of State): What should not happen is that any individual mistakes, typos, whatever they might be, taken to undermine the very fundamental record from scientists all over the world, that this is a serious and growing problem.

JOYCE: But Robert Watson, who ran the IPCC for six years, worries that public confidence in climate science has been shaken.

Professor ROBERT WATSON: Only four or five sentences in 3,000 pages is a very small number of mistakes. However, I think, given the importance of IPCC, given the importance of the climate change issue, one always has to find the way now not to allow any mistakes to be propagated.

JOYCE: Watson says that means running every bit of research the IPCC collects -that's thousands of studies from around the world - through even more reviews. Now, reports by the IPCC already go through two rounds of outside review.

Steven Hamburg is an ecologist with the Environmental Defense Fund, who has worked within IPCC. He says mistakes are just part of doing science.

Dr. STEVEN HAMBURG (Chief Scientist, Environmental Defense Fund): We have to be careful that we don't hold the consensus on climate change that the IPCC represents to a significantly higher standard than we hold all of science that we herald as the basis of modern society.

JOYCE: But most new science goes through journals before the public sees it, that journals have a way to correct mistakes quickly.

Dr. HAMBURG: Every journal has a place in the back for corrections. Note, when you make mistake, you correct it. If it's not of significance affecting the fundamental conclusions, we move on.

JOYCE: The IPCC does not have a place for public corrections. Its reports come out every six years or so, too slow for corrections, as well as new research.

Watson and Hamburg say the organization could fix that by publishing corrections and updates on its Web site.

But then there's the politicking. The United Nations set up the IPCC and member nations must sign off on every word in the reports.

Former IPCC head Robert Watson recalls one nightmarish attempt to get bureaucrats to agree on a shorter, more public-friendly version of one report.

Prof. WATSON: Oh, I mean, after a day of argument, they gave up on the idea, because some countries took out 10 sentences or 20 sentences and some would say, ah, no. I wouldn't have any of those sentences. I'd pick the following 20 sentences.

JOYCE: That's the kind of squabbling that derailed the big U.N. Climate Conference in Copenhagen last December. Those deliberations failed and now the U.N.'s top climate diplomat Yvo de Boer is resigning.

Some climate scientists say all of this has put them on a defensive. EDF's Steven Hamburg says it also shows that they need to communicate a lot better about how climate scientists reach their conclusions.

Dr. HAMBURG: We've done a poor job of explaining how these things are done. So, how do we make predictions about the future? How do we understand impacts? How much of it is empirical, so it's direct measurement? How much of it is modeled, how much of it is theoretical?

JOYCE: And what it does and doesn't mean when scientists make mistakes.

Christopher Joyce, NPR News.

SIEGEL: Tomorrow, we'll hear about research that suggests, right or wrong, more facts may not be enough to convince people about the validity of climate science.



http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=123973664


Was this piece a joke? I'm ROTFLMFAO.

Christopher Joyce interviews an Environmental Defense Fund scientist on climate? What did you expect— equivocation? Balance? Criticism? Only NPR and Christopher Joyce could pull this nonsense off with a straight face.

What the IPCC ( and NPR and Christopher Joyce ) need is ACTUAL SCIENCE to support the totally unproved HYPOTHESIS of anthropogenic global warming. Thus far, there hasn't been any and that's a big, big problem for the evangelicals to overcome.

How about an interview with McIntyre and McKitrick on Hansen's hockey stick or Briffa's Yamal trees? How about an interview with Anthony Watts on the accuracy of the historic temperature record. How about an interview with Phil Jones on the Medieval Warming Period. Hell, you could even ask Phil Jones if there's been any statistically significant warming at all.

God, you people [NPR] are bent.

 
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http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/02/too-hot-to-handle/

Too hot to handle
Roddy Campbell

Before we embark on drastic plans to combat climate change, we must be sure of the facts

The belief that man is warming the Earth’s climate via greenhouse gas emissions is supported by evidence showing a modest increase in global temperatures over recent decades. But what is the scale of these increases, and are they in any way abnormal? To find out, we need an accurate record over a long period. This is where the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) comes in, and why the “climategate” scandal over its leaked emails matters so much.


The CRU is one of the world’s leading climatic research bodies. Its scientists, along with the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, build and maintain the world’s temperature record. This may sound easy, especially as the figures they produce always seem precise: in 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put warming over the past 100 years at exactly 0.74°C. But tracking such tiny temperature changes is tricky—even over the last century when we have had decent thermometer coverage. Do you measure highs, lows or averages? Should readings come from Siberia, Antarctica or Australia—and, if all of them, how do you weight the results for a global average? By land area? What about seas?


To get round this the CRU divides the world into geographical grids. It gathers data from meteorological offices all over the world, makes adjustments and obtains a temperature for each grid. Researchers then compare this result against a baseline of historical temperatures for that grid. The average of the differences across every grid reveals how much global temperatures today differ from historical temperatures.


But there are problems, even if you do this carefully. The first is urbanisation. Ideally, thermometers would be in the same place for long periods and unaffected by people. Yet they are often placed near airports, for example, where they are susceptible to an “urban heat island” (UHI) effect, as traffic increases or runways expand. This UHI effect has happened most in places where the record should be most trustworthy, like Britain and the US, where economic development has been strongest, so the surface temperature record has a manmade upward bias which needs to be adjusted for. The CRU’s adjustment methodology is not disclosed.


Even in the countryside, a thermometer on a farm could be exposed to more machinery today than a century ago. Comparisons of rural and urban thermometers have shown heat island effects of a few degrees celsius. Some studies claim that apparently rising temperatures are correlated with local economic activity rather than global warming. Other problems come when a thermometer is replaced, creating discontinuous data, so the series needs blending. This blending and averaging is far from perfect in places like Britain. But in Siberia and China the CRU has to take data without even observing the weather stations. (For 30 years there has been satellite data too, but this measures only at higher altitudes and has shown less warming than at ground level.)


This is why “sceptics” have, not unreasonably, asked to see the raw data. A scientist cannot say “I have discovered X” if he refuses to share the data to test his discovery. A 2005 email from CRU director Phil Jones to Australian sceptic Warwick Hughes highlighted this: “We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?” In another email he wrote that he had deleted “loads of emails” after receiving freedom of information requests, and had asked other scientists to do the same.


The good news is that now, post-climategate, the CRU and the Met Office have released data they had claimed was protected by copyright, or subject to confidentiality agreements. So the scandal has encouraged greater openness. But it has done less to solve a second problem, which arises when you try to deduce temperatures going back thousands of years. Palaeoclimatology (climate study of the history of the Earth) is harder than short term measurements, as there are no records. Temperature changes must be inferred through tree rings or ice cores. Yet some tree cores, for instance, suggest different histories from one side of the tree to the other, while their growth is changed by rainfall and CO2 as well as temperature. Another problem comes with the infamous “hockey stick” graph, devised by US climatologist Michael Mann and featured prominently in Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. This used tree ring data from Russia and the US to show temperatures gently falling for most of the last 1,000 years, then shooting up from the middle of the 20th century, like the end of a hockey stick. Yet the graph seemed to miss two crucial periods: the “medieval warm period” from the turn of the last millennium to the 15th century, and the “little ice age” at the start of the 17th century, when the Thames regularly froze. Mann claimed these periods were local in nature; sceptics, meanwhile, suspected that the techniques used to create graphs like the hockey stick had been designed to favour the idea that warming in the second half of the 20th century was unprecedented.


There is no conspiracy here. But the scientists involved in climate research for the past 30 years may have enjoyed their golden age too much. Research grants have flowed freely, although not, of course, as freely to scientists with contrary views. I am far from being a climate change denier. It seems perfectly likely that we are having, or will have, an effect on warming through the higher concentrations of greenhouse gases. But the evidence is not yet clear; there were, for example, periods of warming in the 19th century almost identical to the modest warming we seem to have experienced since 1975. We cannot rely on highly imperfect climate models as a basis for policy initiatives that cost billions and change how we live. An accurate and unbiased temperature record is critical.
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Suing Wall Street Banks Never Looked So Shady
Jonathan Weill

Feb. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Next time you see some company complain its “mark-to-market” losses aren’t real, remember this name: the Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle. It used to claim that, too. And it couldn’t have been more wrong.

About a year ago, the government-chartered lender blamed accounting rules after it wrote down its portfolio of mortgage- backed securities by $304.2 million to reflect how much their fair-market values had fallen. While those declines counted against its earnings and regulatory capital, the bank said they were “well beyond any expected economic loss.”

The bank’s executives said they expected to lose a mere $12 million of principal over the life of the securities. That estimate proved far too hopeful, though.

The bank, one of 12 regional Federal Home Loan Banks that supply low-cost loans to about 8,000 member banks and finance companies, now says it expects about $311.2 million of credit losses on its portfolio. And in December, it filed lawsuits against 11 Wall Street underwriters, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, seeking more than $3.9 billion of refunds on the securities, plus interest. You know the losses are real when the bank is suing to get its money back.

Yet there’s a far greater outrage here than this one bank’s unpleasant surprise. That would be what transpired in Congress and at the FASB last year after the Seattle bank disclosed its rosy $12 million estimate, which soon took on a life of its own.

‘Disturbing’ Example
The bank became a poster child for everything supposedly wrong with mark-to-market accounting. At a March 12, 2009, congressional hearing, U.S. Representative Ed Perlmutter of Colorado cited the disparity between the bank’s writedown and its much smaller anticipated loss as “an example that really was disturbing.”

The congressman leading the hearing, Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, pointed to a similar instance at the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta. The bank reported an $87.3 million writedown on its mortgage-backed securities for the 2008 third quarter; however, it said it expected its actual losses would be only $44,000.

While that’s roughly equivalent to the losses from a modest studio condo foreclosure, Kanjorski didn’t question the tiny number, saying: “I find that accounting result to be absurd.”

“It fails to reflect the economic reality,” he said. “We must correct the rules to prevent such gross distortions.” Kanjorski, Perlmutter and other lawmakers told Bob Herz, the chairman of the FASB, that it needed to change its rules immediately so banks could show stronger earnings. The board, which fancies itself as an independent standard setter, complied a few weeks later.

Changing the Rules
The rest of the story: Last year when the Atlanta bank released its financial results for the third quarter, it said it had raised the credit-loss estimate to $263.1 million. (Here’s the math in case you missed it: $263.1 million > $44,000.)

The FASB rule change gave companies a new way to avoid counting paper losses from toxic debt securities in their earnings. Before 2009, whenever companies recorded writedowns on impaired securities that they labeled as held-to-maturity or available-for-sale, they had to run the full amounts through net income for any losses deemed to be “other than temporary.”

Now they get to separate the impairments into two parts: estimated future credit losses and everything else. The first kind reduces earnings and regulatory capital. The other doesn’t.

What Regulators Count
Here’s how it works in practice. When the Atlanta bank reported its results for the first nine months of 2009, it showed net income of $201.3 million. That included the $263.1 million of credit-related charges. However, it excluded $943.4 million of other mark-to-market writedowns on its securities portfolio. Those got dumped into a line item on the equity statement that banking regulators don’t count.

Of course, it’s impossible for anyone to know how much of a given security’s decline in market value is due to perceived future credit losses as opposed to other factors, such as liquidity risk. The obvious incentive for companies is to estimate as few credit losses as possible.

That’s how the rules work now, though. The banking lobby got most of the accounting forbearance it was looking for at a critical point in the financial crisis. It didn’t seem to matter if the new standard made sense.

For their part, when I asked officials at the Atlanta and Seattle banks why their credit-loss estimates last year were so low, they said the new FASB rules introduced a more stringent test for determining if a security is impaired. Additionally, they said the increases in their credit-loss estimates reflected changes in market conditions, including the performance of loans underlying their securities.

‘Material Weaknesses’
“Over time, assumptions changed as the input variables, based on market data, deteriorated,” said Chris McEntee, a spokesman for the Atlanta bank. The Seattle bank had a unique circumstance, too. It disclosed last year that it had “material weaknesses” in its internal accounting systems, although a spokeswoman, Connie Waks, tried to assure me this was “not a contributing factor.”

Those explanations aside, what happened here is that a few members of Congress bum-rushed the FASB into action based on a premise that was false, in a misguided effort to boost public confidence in the financial system through smoke and mirrors. It’s an open question if the board’s standard-setting process can regain its credibility someday. Undoing this disaster of a rule change would be a good start.


http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=a7ZeWzn42KX4
 


This abso-fucking-lutely cracks me up. Clearly, it's the second coming of J.P.Morgan:
Feb. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Bernard L. Madoff’s daughter-in law Stephanie, the second wife of his son Mark, filed a formal request to have her surname legally changed to [ are you ready for this? ] Morgan, as well as those of her two children...
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Fannie Mae Taps Treasury for $15.3 Billion More After a 10th Loss
By Dawn Kopecki

Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Fannie Mae will seek $15.3 billion in U.S. aid, bringing the total owed under a government lifeline to $76.2 billion, after its 10th consecutive quarterly loss.

The mortgage-finance company posted a fourth-quarter net loss of $16.3 billion, or $2.87 a share, Washington-based Fannie Mae said in a filing yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Fannie Mae, which owns or guarantees about 28 percent of the $11.8 trillion U.S. home-loan market, has been hobbled by a three-year housing slump that wiped 28 percent from home values nationwide and led to record foreclosures. The company, which posted $120.5 billion in losses over the previous nine quarters, and rival Freddie Mac were seized by regulators in September 2008.

“Our financial results for 2009 reflected the continued adverse impact of the weak economy and housing market, which has resulted in record mortgage delinquencies and contributed to our recording significant credit-related expenses and net losses during each quarter of the year,” Fannie Mae said in the filing.

For the full year, Fannie Mae’s loss widened to $74.4 billion from $59.8 billion in 2008.

The company’s shares, which peaked at $87.81 in December 2000, closed at 99 cents yesterday in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The Treasury owns 79.9 percent of the company’s outstanding common stock.

Avoiding Receiver
After the next government payout, Fannie Mae’s borrowings will carry an annual dividend cost of $7.6 billion, which the company said it will repay by borrowing more money from the Treasury. “This amount exceeds our reported annual net income for all but one of the last eight years, in most cases by a significant margin,” the company said.

The company said the ability to tap continuing cash infusions from the Treasury this year “is critical to keeping us solvent and avoiding the appointment of a receiver.”

The loss in the fourth quarter was driven in part by a $5 billion writedown on low-income housing tax credits that the Treasury Department barred the company from selling. Rival Freddie Mac took a $3.4 billion charge for the same reason.

Losses at Fannie Mae are likely to grow with rising unemployment and costs to implement President Barack Obama’s plans to reduce foreclosures, the company said.

Housing Slump
Fannie Mae and McLean, Virginia-based Freddie Mac survived last year on investments the government made in the companies. The Treasury on Christmas Eve removed a $200 billion aid limit on each company, extending unlimited backing through 2012.

The two companies own or guarantee more than $5 trillion in U.S. residential debt, and were responsible for as much as 75 percent of the new mortgages made last year.

A record 3 million U.S. homes will be repossessed by lenders this year as unemployment and depressed home values leave borrowers unable to sell or make their house payments, according to a RealtyTrac Inc. forecast last month. Last year there were 2.82 million foreclosures, the most since the Irvine, California-based company began compiling data in 2005.

Fannie Mae and smaller rival Freddie Mac were chartered by the government primarily to lower the cost of homeownership by buying mortgages from lenders, freeing up cash at banks to make more loans. The companies make money by financing mortgage-asset purchases with lower-cost debt and by charging fees to guarantee securities they create out of home loans from lenders.

Treasury Borrowings
Fannie Mae’s net worth, or the difference between assets and liabilities, was negative $15.3 billion as of Dec. 31, compared with negative $15 billion on Sept. 30 and negative $10.6 billion on June 30, according to company statements.

For the fourth quarter, Fannie Mae decreased reserves for future credit losses to $64.9 billion from $65.9 billion in the previous quarter.

The amount of nonperforming loans that Fannie Mae guarantees for other investors rose to $174.6 billion from $163.9 billion in the third quarter, according to the filing. Fannie Mae also owned $41.9 billion in non-performing loans as of Dec. 31, up from $34.2 billion in the third quarter.

The fair value of Fannie Mae’s assets was negative $98.8 billion last quarter, compared with negative $90.4 billion at the end of September.

Future of Companies
The Obama administration will wait until next year to seek legislation that addresses the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the House Budget Committee on Feb. 24.

“We are going to propose reforms to the Congress next year to try to make sure we bring about fundamental change in the housing market and get ourselves in a position where the government is playing a less risky, but more constructive role in supporting housing markets,” Geithner said. “That’s going to be a difficult set of reforms.”

The Treasury and the companies’ regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, blocked Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae from selling their low-income housing tax credits, which can only be recognized if the companies expect to be profitable.

The Treasury found that an agreement Fannie Mae had to sell about half of its credits would have cost taxpayers more than the company would gain from the deal, according to a November letter to that company.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aZ7Vw70CckxU

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Citigroup Adviser Rubin Said to Face Queries From Crisis Panel
By Ian Katz and Jesse Westbrook

Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Robert Rubin, the former U.S. Treasury secretary who later advised Citigroup Inc. as the bank piled up subprime-mortgage losses, may soon face his first public grilling on the 2008 financial crisis.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, investigating the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, plans to ask Rubin to testify in April, said two people with knowledge of the commission’s decisions. The panel may summon former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and former Citigroup Chief Executive Officer Charles O. Prince in its review of companies and regulatory lapses that fueled excessive speculation in the real-estate market, said the people, who declined to be identified before the hearings are announced.

Rubin, 71, has been perceived as “bullet-proof” because his Citigroup job was “framed as if he was only there to give advice,” said Charles Geisst, author of “Wall Street: A History” and a finance professor at Manhattan College in Riverdale, New York. “Unless they’ve actually got some stuff where he advised on some surreptitious deal that went bad or his advice was purposely misleading, they’re going to have a very difficult time with him.”

Rubin’s reputation dimmed after the U.S. bailed out New York-based Citigroup with $45 billion and American International Group Inc. had to be propped up because of losses on derivatives. When Rubin was President Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, he fought efforts to regulate derivatives.

FCIC Chairman Phil Angelides and Vice Chairman Bill Thomas, in an interview Feb. 25, wouldn’t confirm whether Rubin will be asked to appear. The commission, created by Congress, plans to seek testimony from those who’ve been “major leaders” in government and on Wall Street, Angelides said.

‘Major Participants’
“It is striking the extent to which many major participants in this meltdown have not been called upon to answer questions either in public or private,” Angelides said.

Rubin, through an aide, declined to comment. Greenspan, 83, through his assistant, said he would be pleased to testify if asked. Prince, 60, declined to comment through a spokeswoman.

The request for Rubin and Prince to testify may show the FCIC is focused on Citigroup, which has lost $23.9 billion since 2008. Citigroup investors including Smith Asset Management’s William Smith criticize Rubin for collecting more than $110 million in pay over a decade while failing to steer management away from decisions that triggered losses.

Rubin, chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee from 1999 until 2008, became the bank’s chairman for five weeks after Prince resigned in November 2007. Rubin retired as senior counselor to the bank in January 2009.

Rubin, Obama
Barack Obama named Rubin to be an economic adviser during the 2008 presidential campaign, and two Treasury protégés, Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, are top officials in the White House. Summers, 55, is chief economic adviser and Geithner, 48, is Treasury secretary.

When Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein, JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon, Bank of America Corp. CEO Brian Moynihan and former Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack testified to the panel last month, no one from Citigroup appeared.

Former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Harvey Pitt said the hearing was a “parade of soundbites” that failed to shed light on why companies such as Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. failed, and U.S. taxpayers had to spend $700 billion rescuing the financial industry.

Thomas and Angelides said the first hearing was an introduction before the staff completed extensive probing and investigation. That will change as the panel examines additional companies and individuals, the two men said.

‘Hard Slog’
“We had our initial hearing and now we are in the hard slog of the research and investigation,” Angelides said. “The hearings will be stops along the investigatory trail.”

In the late 1990s, Rubin as Treasury chief and Greenspan as Fed chairman successfully blocked attempts by Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to study regulating over-the-counter derivatives. Born is an inquiry commissioner.

Congress passed a law in 2000 keeping over-the-counter derivatives unregulated. That allowed for rapid growth in products such as credit-default swaps, contributing to the $1.7 trillion in losses banks have suffered since 2007.

Greenspan in October 2008 told House lawmakers that the financial crisis revealed a “flaw” in his free-market ideology. Greenspan, who stepped down as Fed chairman in 2006, said he was “partially” wrong for opposing oversight of derivatives.

Prince testified to Congress in March 2008, taking responsibility for Citigroup’s reliance on “inadequate” models that proved “wrong” in assessing the risk of mortgage securities.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=awBxY8l.FeWE
 

Russia February Output Nears Post-Soviet Record on TNK-BP Gains
By Anna Shiryaevskaya

March 2 (Bloomberg) -- Russia crude production neared a post-Soviet record in February as TNK-BP, the venture owned by BP Plc and a group of billionaires, raised output at new fields in both western and eastern Siberia.

Crude production reached almost 10.08 million barrels a day, a gain of 3.3 percent from a year earlier and 0.2 percent from the previous month, according to preliminary data from the Energy Ministry’s CDU-TEK unit. Output, which has exceeded 10 million barrels a day for six months in a row, was slightly below November’s record.

Oil exports slumped to 5.21 million barrels a day, down 1.3 percent from January and 5.7 percent on the year, as the export tax climbed following the price of Urals, Russia’s benchmark blend.

TNK-BP boosted output to 1.42 million barrels day after ramping up new projects, such as the Uvat and Kamennoye fields in western Siberia and Verkhnechonsk in the east. Production advanced 4.5 percent from a year earlier and 0.5 percent from the previous month, not including its OAO Slavneft venture.

OAO Bashneft, controlled by Russian billionaire Vladimir Yevtushenkov’s AFK Sistema, raised output 18 percent from a year earlier to 276,600 barrels a day. That was a 3.3 percent increase from January.

State-run OAO Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil company, produced 2.22 million barrels a day, up 0.4 percent from January, while down 0.6 percent from a year earlier. Last month, gains at the east Siberian Vankor field, the country’s largest new oil project, were largely offset by a decline at its Yuganskneftegaz unit, which the government seized from Yukos Oil Co. and sold in 2004 to cover back tax claims.

Lukoil Declines
OAO Lukoil’s output fell to 1.84 million barrels a day, down 0.4 percent from January and 1.6 percent from a year earlier.

The Exxon Mobil Corp.-led Sakhalin-1 project produced 147,250 barrels of oil a day, down 23 percent from a year earlier, although 3.6 percent higher than in January, before new deposits come on line. Exxon’s partners are Rosneft, ONGC Videsh Ltd., and Japan’s Sakhalin Oil & Gas Development Co.

Exports via OAO Transneft’s pipeline network fell to 4.07 million barrels a day, a decline of 4.1 percent from the previous month and 5.9 percent from a year earlier. Russia raised its export tax to $270.70 a metric ton on Feb. 1, an increase of 1.4 percent from the previous month and more than double the $100.90 a ton charged in February last year.

The duty was reduced 6.3 percent on March 1, after oil prices declined from Jan. 15 to Feb. 14.

Russian natural gas output advanced to 2.07 billion cubic meters a day in February, up 0.4 percent from January, as oil producers pumped more of the fuel.

OAO Gazprom, Russia’s largest company, produced 1.63 billion cubic meters a day of the fuel, compared with 1.65 billion cubic meters in the previous month, the ministry’s unit said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601207&sid=ayk0k08Nruh8
 

Shell Aims for ‘New Nigeria’ as Qatari Plant Starts
By Stanley Reed and Robert Tuttle

March 4 (Bloomberg) -- Royal Dutch Shell Plc spent $19 billion to build the world’s largest gas-to-liquids project, triple the original estimate. Now, it’s pay-off time and the plant may generate $6 billion a year for the company and Qatar.

Shell needs the plant, known as Pearl, to bolster output, which fell for a seventh year in 2009 in part because rebel violence hampered oil ventures in Nigeria. Qatar, the arid Gulf state that’s become the biggest exporter of gas on ships, may account for 10 percent of the company’s production after Pearl and a liquefied natural gas project start deliveries next year.

Shell’s work in Qatar is “like creating a new Nigeria,” Andrew Brown, the company’s executive vice president for the country, said in an interview in the capital, Doha. Pearl will begin processing gas toward the end of this year and start delivering fuel in early 2011, he said.

Gas-to-liquids technology, a relatively expensive way to make diesel and jet fuel, makes more sense given today’s disparity between natural gas and oil prices. Converted into barrels of oil, gas is less than half the price of crude, which doubled to near $80 in the last year. At full capacity, Shell said Pearl will churn out 140,000 barrels a day of liquid fuel and 120,000 barrels equivalent of ethane gas and condensate, a by-product that’s like a light crude oil.

‘Fantastic’ Result
“GTL is a very expensive, energy-intensive process,” said Iain Anderson, an analyst at brokers Brewin Dolphin Holdings Plc in London. “But the result you get is fantastic.” Pearl could be paid off in five years, Anderson said.

Since the fuel Pearl will produce is purer than traditional crude-based products, Shell may be able to sell its output at a premium. Pollutants such as sulfur are stripped out of the gas, making it well-suited to green-minded airlines or clean diesel for cars.

Operating costs at Pearl will be about $6 a barrel, Brown said, and the company can reclaim the cost of building the plant through the production-sharing agreement it has with Qatar. With crude at $70 a barrel, Pearl would generate about $6 billion a year in profit for Shell and Qatar, he said.

“GTL starts to make sense when there is a spread between oil and gas prices,” said Ross Cassidy, an analyst at Edinburgh-based Wood Mackenzie Consultants Ltd.

Ras Laffan
Pearl’s webs of tanks and piping sprawl over a 4-square- kilometer (1.5-square-mile) area at Qatar’s Ras Laffan site. An estimated 51,000 workers, their necks draped in cloth to ward off the blazing Gulf sun, weld joints, dig ditches and direct traffic with red and green flags. The workers, mostly men, wear color-coded helmets indicating their roles. White hats are for managers, red for scaffolders, yellow for pipefitters.

Shell project engineer Wiliam Keij said the start-up will last for months as unit after unit is fired up. At the heart of Pearl will be twenty-four 1,200-metric-ton reactor vessels filled with pipes where gas will be converted into paraffin through interaction with catalysts. The paraffin then flows into refinery-like units where it will be broken down into kerosene for jet fuel, gasoil for diesel and base oils for lubricants.

The technology and energy required to make gas-to-liquids work mean it has rarely been used to bring natural-gas resources to consumers. The 34,000-barrel-a-day Oryx GTL, Qatar’s only operating gas-to-liquids plant, reached full power in 2009 after hitting snags following its 2006 start. Oryx is a venture of state-controlled Qatar Petroleum and South Africa’s Sasol Ltd.

Ironed Out Kinks
Shell said it has ironed out a lot of the kinks of gas-to- liquids at a smaller plant it has operated in Malaysia since 1993. Bintulu, which had early glitches, has been generating about $200 million a year in earnings. At 14,700 barrels a day, Bintulu is only about a 10th of the size of Pearl.

Alongside Pearl, Shell has a 30 percent stake in Qatargas 4, part of the world’s largest LNG complex, due to start exports in 2011. With oil prices at $70 a barrel, the two projects should generate more than $4 billion a year for Shell after revenue sharing with Qatar, Brown said.

Shell has advanced 28 percent in the past 12 months in London trading, and held steady today at 1,867.5 pence as of 12:24 p.m. local time. The company posted net income of $12.5 billion last year as New York crude futures averaged $62.09 a barrel. Oil and gas production averaged the equivalent of 3.15 million barrels a day, according to Shell filings on Bloomberg.

In Nigeria, Shell’s share of production for its onshore fields dropped to 150,000 barrels a day after an oil spill shut a pipeline, Chief Financial Officer Simon Henry said last month. At full capacity, output from the fields is more than 350,000 barrels a day.

When Pearl and Qatargas 4 are both up and running they will add 350,000 barrels a day to Shell’s total production.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601207&sid=aXnyAlpX1Ip8

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Canaport Plans to Double Winter LNG Shipments to New England
By Moming Zhou

March 4 (Bloomberg) -- Repsol YPF SA’s Canaport liquefied natural gas terminal in eastern Canada plans to double shipments into New England next winter as it takes advantage of rising demand and a pipeline bottleneck from the U.S. Gulf Coast.

The terminal, located in Saint John, New Brunswick, may ship an average of 800 million cubic feet a day of natural gas into the Northeast via pipeline compared with an average of 400 million shipped this winter, Phillip Ribbeck, president of Repsol Energy North America, said in a telephone interview.

Gas is preferred by power generators because it costs less than petroleum-based fuels and burns more efficiently and cleanly. About 25 percent of generators in New England can switch between gas and fuel oil based on price and availability, according to ISO New England, which manages the region’s power generation and distribution. Another 25 percent burn just gas.

“The amount of natural-gas fired generation is going to increase this year,” Ribbeck said in a telephone interview.

Limited access to New England will keep rising production at shale-gas deposits from Texas to Pennsylvania from competing for New England customers with Canaport, he said.

“New England is kind of insulated from that because of the pipeline infrastructure,” he said.

LNG represents about 20 percent of New England’s gas supply, according to Northeast Gas Association, a regional industry organization. Imports of the fuel account for about 3 percent of gas supplies nationwide.

Gas Prices
Natural gas in Boston was going for about $5.23 per million British thermal units yesterday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. No. 6 fuel oil traded at the equivalent of $11.44 per million Btu. The price of gas at the benchmark Henry Hub in Louisiana was $4.77 per million Btu.

“Canaport is very well positioned to be an important part in the New England market,” said Damien Gaul, an economist and gas specialist at the U.S. Energy Department. “They can meet swing demand by their close access to the New England market. We expect a significant increase of LNG imports at Canaport during the entire year.”

LNG is gas that’s been cooled to a liquid for transport by ship to markets not connected by pipelines. The fuel is received at import terminals and converted back to a gaseous form.

Canaport has received 20 tankers of LNG since it started operating in June, Ribbeck said. The ships have a capacity equal to about 65 billion cubic feet of gas. The port is connected to New England through the Maritimes & Northeast Pipeline.

Regional Terminals
The port has the capacity to put about 1 billion cubic feet of gas a day into pipelines, similar to the capacity of Boston- area terminals run by GDF Suez and Excelerate Energy. GDF Suez is planning to open another Massachusetts terminal this year.

“I don’t believe you need any more LNG terminals,” Ribbeck said. “There is no case that I can come up with at this point and over the next five years where you need additional terminals.”

U.S. LNG imports may rise 44 percent in 2010 to about 1.83 billion cubic feet a day, the Energy Department forecast on Feb. 10 in its monthly Short-Term Energy Outlook.

About 50 percent of Canaport’s LNG imports come from Trinidad and Tobago, where Repsol, Spain’s largest oil company, produces natural gas, Ribbeck said. Ships from Egypt, Norway and Qatar also supply the port. Supplies will start coming from Peru in the middle of the year, he said.

Repsol owns 75 percent of Canaport, and St. John-based Irving Oil Corp. owns 25 percent. Repsol has contracted for 100 percent of the capacity.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601082&sid=a9FhZegXelbw
 
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Smart Banks With Dumb Customers Don’t Exist
by Roger Lowenstein

March 8 (Bloomberg) -- Republicans and Democrats in Congress have been squabbling about whether the new financial consumer-protection agency should be housed within the Federal Reserve or as part of an independent body.

The new watchdog, wherever it goes, is the linchpin of the emerging financial-reform bill, and its premise is that greedy bankers exploiting dumb consumers essentially caused the credit crisis. Stop bankers from selling toxic mortgages and other harmful loans and we won’t have any more meltdowns.

Even though bankers were greedy, and many borrowers were naive, this is a simplistic way of viewing the financial crisis and one that misses its underlying cause. Since mortgage bankers make money from loans, it’s tempting to think of them as parasites that prey on customers. But there is no such thing as a smart bank with a dumb customer; if the loan turns sour, the banker was dumb, too. And in the mid-2000s, scads of them were.

Foreclosures by consumers heavily weighed on the economy, but what triggered the credit crunch was the failure (or near- failure) of the banks that issued (or acquired) the mortgages. In short, the root cause of the meltdown wasn’t that customers borrowed too much; it’s that banks lent too much.

This isn’t to deny that many subprime loans were exploitative, and that customers often didn’t understand repayment terms. Nor is it a bad idea to police banks, preventing them, for instance, from charging unreasonable fees.

Bank Self-Harm
Yet a sound economy needs healthy financial institutions. Rather than stop lenders from hurting consumers, the first priority should be to keep the banks from harming themselves. In the short run, solvency is often at odds with what consumers want (or with what they think they want). We should remember that for every mortgage customer that was hosed, others were willingly grabbing all the unsound mortgages they could get.

Before the bust, champions of the new consumer agency, such as Representative Barney Frank, were consistent advocates of more loans to subprime borrowers. That’s hardly surprising; it’s in the nature of folks to want more credit. As Warren Buffett once reminded a person in his employ, it’s the job of the banker to screen out loans with a low probability of repayment.

The aim of regulators should be to force banks to do what is in their own and society’s interests: to practice sound banking. No consumer watchdog can do this because systemic risk aggregates at the level of the lender. The surest solution is to limit the leverage of financial institutions. Regulators have already moved against dicey products such as no-documentation mortgages (“liar loans”), and ones in which borrowers get 100 percent financing. And well they should.

Next Bubble
Those abuses were in the last bubble. Count on it: There will be a new speculative mania, with its own distinctive products, and the banks that lend against it will suffer.

Rather than try to make banks perfect, the goal should be to minimize the damage when they prove imperfect. The way to do that is to limit financial leverage by restricting the banks’ use of debt. Leverage acts like an accelerator, magnifying and spreading losses, chain-reaction style, from one borrower to another. And in most meltdowns, this has played a leading role.

In 1929, the stock-market bubble was inflated by unprecedented amounts of margin debt. When stocks fell, indebted speculators had to keep selling to pay back their loans, fueling a downward cycle and, ultimately, a crash.

Silly Prices
In the late 1980s, firms paid silly prices for corporate acquisitions until, in 1990, the mania stopped. Since almost every deal had been financed with boatloads of junk bonds, the crash left corporate America saddled with debt, and banks were stuck with sinking assets. The country went into a recession.

By contrast, investment bubbles that aren’t associated with debt are far less lethal. The dot-com frenzy was easily the most flagrant episode of speculation in the last 75 years. Scores of companies with zero earnings sold stock; dozens of these initial public offerings soared in value on their first day of trading. The Nasdaq Composite Index rose 86 percent in 1999.

By contrast, the recent real-estate bull market was tame. Home prices doubled over five or six years -- impressive, but nothing like the IPOs that prompted stock values to double in a day. Yet when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, the impact was modest. The country had a mild, brief recession. Unemployment topped out at 6.3 percent. People lost money on stocks, but since the meltdown was in equities, no great harm ensued.

Brick by Brick
The mortgage bubble, on the other hand, was built brick by brick with debt. And it led to the worst recession since the Great Depression, with unemployment exceeding 10 percent. That is why the most urgent remedy is restricting bank borrowing.

U.S. regulators have been reluctant to raise capital requirements without an international agreement, lest American firms be put at a disadvantage. And the international Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland, has been vowing to raise capital standards. However, the process is slow. Congress should make clear that if the board doesn’t act, it will. There can be no going back to the days of 30-to-1 leverage on Wall Street.

Since much leverage today is kept off the balance sheet (via derivatives), any financial reform that doesn’t restrict the use of such instruments is sorely flawed. Congress should immediately raise the amount of margin capital required to place derivative bets -- the equivalent of reducing leverage.

Protecting consumers and breaking up large banks is fine. But neither will prevent banks from acting stupidly again. The surest safeguard is to ensure that, when they do, they aren’t up to their necks in debt.
 

It's the birthday of Pulitzer Prize-winning author John McPhee...

...born in Princeton, New Jersey (1931), who is known for his detailed, long-format novelistic nonfiction writing on eclectic topics — these include book-length works devoted to citrus fruits, deltoid pumpkin seeds, binding energy curves, farmers' markets, merchant marine ships, the currents of the Mississippi River, birchbark canoe construction, and shifting seismic plates. He's especially found a niche in geological history, and it was for his tetralogy on the geology of America, called Annals of the Former World (1998), that he won the Pulitzer Prize just over a decade ago (1999).

He's published more than two dozen books, but he almost never writes more than one single-spaced page a day, and he doesn't feel prolific. But he said, "You know, you put an ounce in a bucket each day, you get a quart."

He's written for The New Yorker magazine for more than 40 years, and he teaches journalism at Princeton. He wrote in his book Oranges (1967):

"An orange grown in Florida usually has a thin and tightly fitting skin, and it is also heavy with juice. Californians say that if you want to eat a Florida orange you have to get into a bathtub first. California oranges are light in weight and have thick skins that break easily and come off in hunks. The flesh inside is marvelously sweet, and the segments almost separate themselves. In Florida, it is said that you can run over a California orange with a ten-ton truck and not even wet the pavement."
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http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2010/03/08



U.S. Millionaires’ Ranks Increased 16% in 2009, Spectrem Says
By Alexis Leondis

March 9 (Bloomberg) -- The millionaires’ club in the U.S. grew 16 percent in 2009, following a 27 percent decline in 2008.

Families with a net worth of at least $1 million, excluding primary residences, rose to 7.8 million in 2009, an increase from 6.7 million a year earlier, according to a survey of high- net-worth U.S. households conducted by Spectrem Group.

Affluent households, which the survey defined as those with net assets of $500,000 or more, increased 12 percent to 12.7 million, the Chicago-based consulting firm said in a statement today. The number of households with a net worth of more than $5 million rose 17 percent to 980,000, Spectrem said.

The average age of a so-called affluent investor is 58, compared with 62 for a millionaire and 67 for an investor with more than $5 million...

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aqmrqS4E3H1Y
 
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A voice of sanity, knowledge and reason ( from 2007 !):

DrHappy said:
Count me as a vote that it’s overblown. The climate is always changing, and so I’m not surprised that we’ve noticed some change within the last 100 years. I’m sure that man has a finite influence, but I’m not convinced that man made CO2 emissions are causing a catastrophic increase in global temperatures.
As for the phenomenon listed above, there is plenty of evidence that the climate is quite variable between ice ages, including the existence the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age. Nothing above indicates that there is anything unprecedented about our current climate situation compared to the last 1000 years.

The paleo-reconstructions of the climate (using tree rings, etc…) which attempt to eliminate the MWP and LIA have been shown to have very serious statistical flaws. The famous “hockey stick” was eliminated from the IPCC’s executive summary for their latest report. The convoluted statistical method used to create the hockey stick would create hockey stick reconstructions even if random stock market data was used. The tree rings are not calibrated to local temperatures for these global studies. They are calibrated to global temperatures, so that individual trees may be highly weighted in their reconstructions, even if the aren’t good proxies for temperatures.

CO2 is a trace component of the atmosphere. The greenhouse effect is overwhelmingly dominated by water vapor. The atmosphere is already largely opaque in the regions of the spectrum that CO2 absorbs, and additional CO2 has a diminishing effect as the concentration increase further. Each 10 ppm increase in CO2 has smaller effect the 10 ppm before it.

The effects of CO2 alone won’t cause the catastrophic temperature changes of that the alarmists predict. The alarmist predictions require enormous positive feedbacks in which the temperature rise from feedback is much larger than original temperature rise from the CO2. The recently IPCC report includes 6C as a likely temperature rise resulting from a doubling of CO2. Without feedback of effects, a doubling of CO2 would only increase temperatures about 1C.

The actual temperature rise from CO2 will be dominated by how much actual feedback occurs from water vapor and especially clouds. The computer models are not able to predict cloud behavior and require assumptions. Studies which have looked at cloud cover and temperatures have actually shown a significant negative feedback due to clouds. If this is true, then there would be less than a 1C temperature change due to a doubling of CO2.
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As I look deeper into the specific methods used, I become more skeptical.

What specific scientific data do you find compelling?
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DrHappy said:
The term "alarmist" isn't intended to be derogatory, but I do feel the need to distinguish between those who feel that there is need for alarm due to man-made CO2 emissions and those who are skeptical about the state of crisis. "Alarmists" and "skeptics" seemed like acceptable terms to me, though I'm open to suggestions. I saw a documentary on PBS which referred to "scientists" vs "skeptics" which I thought was derogatory to the skeptics since it implied that skeptics were not scientists. I've also seen a variety of other derogatory terms for skeptics that I won't list here. I think that it is very likely that the climate has experienced a warming trend over the past 150 years or so as we have drifted out of the Little Ice Age (LIA). I am not surprised to see a reduction in ice over this period of time. I also think that it is likely that the planet experienced some cooling between 1940 and 1970, followed by some warming between 1970 and now. Between 1979 and now, satellite measurements have shown that the year-to-year variations in average temperature have been larger then the overall trend over this period of time. I haven't seen convincing data to suggest that the "fingerprint" of significant man made global warming has been detected and has proven that our current climate is unprecedented in the last 1000 years. I do see evidence of significant short and long term natural variations.

I find the question "is global warming going on" to be a little ambiguous. Has the average temperature of the planet increased over the past 100 years? Yes, probably, but the climate is always drifting, so I'd expect to always to detect either warming (50%) or cooling (50%) if you have a fine enough thermometer. I don't see credible evidence that our current climate to be particularly unusual. I don't think that drastic action is warranted. I don't see our current climate state as being one that will have a enormous and unprecedented effect on the current global world population. However, I think that it would be helpful to be able to predict trends in climate. We have always had droughts and they have generally been bad. However, the statistical basis for blaming an increase in hurricane intensity on global warming has been weak and somewhat contrived in my opinion. A better understanding of the oceanic oscillations and storm trends would be helpful regardless.

To be honest, I am more knowledgeable about the physics and methods, and less knowledgeable about the global economics. Bjorn Lomborg, who was written that "global warming is real and man-made" thinks that the consequences are often vastly exaggerated. He makes a point that global warming is only one of many issues, and there are other issues in which money could be better spent than trying to abate CO2. Do an internet search for "Perspective on climate Change," were he shows global priority list of other low hanging fruit as defined by a group of of economists (including 4 Nobel Laureates) in Copenhagen. I'm not an expert on this area, but I do find it worthy of discussion.
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DrHappy said:
For the record, I agree with the "Hockey Stick Hokum" article. I find the hockey stick debate interesting, though I disagree with the statement that the hockey stick is alive and well. Let me address some of the issues introduced in a recent comment

First, I'll point out that the dismissal of the Wegman report is simply an ad hominem attack, and does not address any specific scientific argument. I don't want to get too caught up in this game, but I will point out the following:

  • The 2006 NAS panel's report was never published in a peer reviewed journal either.
  • Wegman is not a climatologist, but that's not a bad thing given the topic of his report. He's a renowned statistician and he was asked to look at the statistical methods used to create the hockey stick graph. Since he isn't a climate scientist, he arguably would be less biased, since his career isn't affected by any particular outcome. Edward Wegman is the chair of the National Academy of Science' Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. For what it's worth, he also voted for Al Gore in 2000. His resume can be found here and is quite impressive.
For the sake of discussion, let me state the following definitions:

MBH = Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley, & Malcolm K. Hughes, the authors of the original hockey stick graph. MBH98 and MBH99 refer to their 1998 and 1999 papers.

MM = Steve McIntrye & Ross McKitrick, the authors of the papers pointing out problems with the MBH methodology. Their first such paper was published in 2003 (MM03).

Some findings of the Wegman report include:

  • In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling.
  • Mann et al., misused certain statistical methods in their studies, which inappropriately produce hockey stick shapes in the temperature history.
  • Our committee believes that the assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported by the MBH98/99 analysis. As mentioned earlier in our background section, tree ring proxies are typically calibrated to remove low frequency variations. The cycle of Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age that was widely recognized in 1990 has disappeared from the MBH98/99 analyses, thus making possible the hottest decade/hottest year claim. However, the methodology of MBH98/99 suppresses this low frequency information. The paucity of data in the more remote past makes the hottest-in-a-millennium claims essentially unverifiable.
  • It is clear that many of the proxies are re-used in most of the papers. It is not surprising that the papers would obtain similar results and so cannot really claim to be independent verifications.”
I have read several instances where someone has stated that “independent” studies confirm the original MBH study. However, as Wegman has stated, these studies tend to use extremely similar datasets and methodologies. There are other serious problems that the Wegman report did not address.

=================

Note that the article Report Affirms 'Hockey Stick' Climate Change Data was written by Raymond Bradley, one of the original hockey stick authors. That doesn’t necessarily make the article incorrect, but I would like to dissect some of the statements in the article and from the 2006 NAS report.

The 2006 NAS report has an interesting history. This report was commissioned by Congress to answer a very specific set of questions regarding the MBH hockey stick, and to determine whether the claims in the McIntyre-McKitrick studies were valid. A list of questions was sent to Ralph Cicerone at NAS, who then watered down the questions when he formed the NAS panel to investigate these claims and to write a report. By the time the panel was formed, the mission had changed to one that was much less focused on the specific claims against MBH. The panel members watered down their final report further by making it even their focus even more general and less specific, further avoiding direct confrontations with MBH. The makeup of the panel membership was hardly unbiased. Of the twelve panel members, only one, John Christy, has somewhat skeptical views of the negative climate forecasts. Many of the rest sound like activists when they make public statements regarding climate change. Given this situation, I found many statements from their report to be striking admissions on their part. Let's look at some of text in the actual report:

  • It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries.

They essentially said that it's warmer now than during the Little Ice Age. No one is really surprised by this. A key issue was whether the MWP was cool or warm. If it was cool, then we have a hockey stick. If the MWP was warm, then we don't have a hockey stick. The MWP corresponds to roughly the years 800 - 1300.

  • Less confidence can be placed in large-scale surface temperature reconstructions for the period from A.D. 900 to 1600
  • Very little confidence can be assigned to statements concerning the hemispheric mean or global mean surface temperature prior to about A.D. 900 because of sparse data coverage and because the uncertainties associated with proxy data and the methods used to analyze and combine them are larger than during more recent time periods.
  • Based on the analyses presented in the original papers by Mann et al. and this newer supporting evidence, the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium. The substantial uncertainties currently present in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about A.D. 1600 lower our confidence in this conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming. Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that “the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium” because the uncertainties inherent in temperature reconstructions for individual years and decades are larger than those for longer time periods, and because not all of the available proxies record temperature information on such short timescales.
The panel waffled the best the could. The word "plausible" is key. They state that the data doesn't rule out the possibility that the MWP wasn't warm, but the data certainly does not credibly support a conclusion that it was cool. The MM studies show that the MBH studies have serious problems, but they never claimed to produce an accurate reconstruction either. As a demonstration, MM used the MBH technique to create their "reconstructions" which show a much warmer Medieval Warm Period by making some arbitrary changes in the input parameters. The MM reconstructions are just as valid as the MBH reconstruction. However, MM claim that both sets of reconstructions are junk. MM actually don't even like to have their graphs referred to as a reconstruction since they don't endorse the methods used to create them.

What does this mean? If the climate of the last 1000 years was really a hockey stick, then this would show that today's climate is "unprecedented" and would be moderately strong circumstantial evidence man's influence on climate. If there was no hockey stick, then it would show that our climate situation is nothing special.
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The case against the hockey stick

A book review by Matt Ridley
( Author of Genome: The Biography Of A Species In 23 Chapters )
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/03/the-case-against-the-hockey-stick/
10th March 2010 — Issue 168


The "hockey stick" temperature graph is a mainstay of global warming science. A new book tells of one man's efforts to dismantle it—and deserves to win prizes.
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Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion is one of the best science books in years. It exposes in delicious detail, datum by datum, how a great scientific mistake of immense political weight was perpetrated, defended and camouflaged by a scientific establishment that should now be red with shame. It is a book about principal components, data mining and confidence intervals—subjects that have never before been made thrilling. It is the biography of a graph.


I can remember when I first paid attention to the “hockey stick” graph at a conference in Cambridge. The temperature line trundled along with little change for centuries, then shot through the roof in the 20th century, like the blade of an ice-hockey stick. I had become somewhat of a sceptic about the science of climate change, but here was emphatic proof that the world was much warmer today; and warming much faster than at any time in a thousand years. I resolved to shed my doubts. I assumed that since it had been published in Nature—the Canterbury Cathedral of scientific literature—it was true.


I was not the only one who was impressed. The graph appeared six times in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s third report in 2001. It was on display as a backdrop at the press conference to launch that report. James Lovelock pinned it to his wall. Al Gore used it in his film (though describing it as something else and with the Y axis upside down). Its author shot to scientific stardom. “It is hard to overestimate how influential this study has been,” said the BBC. The hockey stick is to global warming what St Paul was to Christianity.


Of course, there is other evidence for global warming, but none of it proves that the recent warming is unprecedented. Indeed, quite the reverse: surface temperatures, sea levels, tree lines, glacier retreats, summer sea ice extent in the Arctic, early spring flowers, bird migration, droughts, floods, storms—they all show change that is no different in speed or magnitude from other periods, like 1910-1940, at least as far as can be measured. There may be something unprecedented going on in temperature, but the only piece of empirical evidence that actually says so—yes, the only one—is the hockey stick.


And the hockey stick is wrong. The emails that were leaked from the University of East Anglia late last year are not proof of this; they are merely the icing on the lake, proof that some of the scientists closest to the hockey stick knew all along that it was problematic.


Andrew Montford’s book, despite its subtitle, is not about the emails, which are tagged on as a last chapter. It is instead built around the long, lonely struggle of one man— Stephen McIntyre—to understand how the hockey stick was made, with what data and what programs.


A retired mining entrepreneur with a mathematical bent, McIntyre asked the senior author of the hockey stick graph, Michael Mann, for the data and the programs in 2003, so he could check it himself. This was five years after the graph had been published, but Mann had never been asked for them before. McIntyre quickly found errors: mislocated series, infilled gaps, truncated records, old data extrapolated forwards where new was available, and so on.


Not all the data showed a 20th century uptick either. In fact just 20 series out of 159 did, and these were nearly all based on tree rings. In some cases, the same tree ring sets had been used in different series. In the end the entire graph got its shape from a few bristlecone and foxtail pines in the western United States; a messy tree-ring data set from the Gaspé Peninsula in Canada; another Canadian set that had been truncated 17 years too early called, splendidly, Twisted Tree Heartrot Hill; and a superseded series from Siberian larch trees. There were problems with all these series: for example, the bristlecone pines were probably growing faster in the 20th century because of more carbon dioxide in the air, or recovery after “strip bark” damage, not because of temperature change.


This was bad enough; worse was to come. Mann soon stopped cooperating, yet, after a long struggle, McIntyre found out enough about Mann’s programs to work out what he had done. The result was shocking. He had standardised the data by “short-centering” them—essentially subtracting them from a 20th century average rather than an average of the whole period. This meant that the principal component analysis “mined” the data for anything with a 20th century uptick, and gave it vastly more weight than data indicating, say, a medieval warm spell.


Well, it happens. People make mistakes in science. Corrections get made. That’s how it works, is it not? Few papers get such scrutiny as this had. But that is an even more worrying thought: how much dodgy science is being published without the benefit of an audit by Mcintyre’s ilk? As a long-time champion of science, I find the reaction of the scientific establishment more shocking than anything. The reaction was not even a shrug: it was shut-eyed denial.


If this had been a drug trial done by a pharmaceutical company, the scientific journals, the learned academies and the press would have soon have rushed to discredit it—and rightly so. Instead, they did not want to know. Nature magazine, which had published the original study, went out of its way to close its ears to McIntyre’s criticisms, even though they were upheld by the reviewers it appointed. So did the National Academy of Sciences in the US, even when two reports commissioned by Congress upheld McIntyre. So, of course, did the IPCC, which tied itself in knots changing its deadlines so it could include flawed references to refutations of McIntyre while ignoring complaints that it had misquoted him.


The IPCC has taken refuge in saying that other recent studies confirm the hockey stick but, if you take those studies apart, the same old bad data sets keep popping out: bristlecone pines and all. A new Siberian data series from a place called Yamal showed a lovely hockey stick but, after ten years of asking, McIntyre finally got hold of the data last autumn and found that it relied heavily on just one of just twelve trees, when far larger samples from the same area were available showing no uptick. Another series from Finnish lake sediments also showed a gorgeous hockey stick, but only if used upside down. McIntyre just keeps on exposing scandal after scandal in the way these data were analysed and presented.


Montford’s book is written with grace and flair. Like all the best science writers, he knows that the secret is not to leave out the details (because this just results in platitudes and leaps of faith), but rather to make the details delicious, even to the most unmathematical reader. I never thought I would find myself unable to put a book down because—sad, but true—I wanted to know what happened next in an r-squared calculation. This book deserves to win prizes.


Oh, and by the way, I have a financial interest in coal mining, though not as big as Al Gore has in carbon trading. Maybe you think it makes me biased. Read the book and judge for yourself.
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http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/03/the-case-against-the-hockey-stick/
 
http://talkingabouttheweather.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/goliaths-panic-begins/

Goliath’s Panic Begins
by Harold Ambler

A new editorial in Nature ( http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7286/full/464141a.html ) is startling for what it reveals, especially the fact Paul Ehrlich is a go-to figure about how hard scientists have it when it comes to media access. Ehrlich is an individual who became an international celebrity by spinning one frightening story after another (about the death of the oceans, for one thing) who maintains, with a straight face, that he and his fellow scientists have an unfair disadvantage in communicating their side of the climate debate. He is quoted by Nature as saying, regarding the aftermath of Climategate and the fact that skeptic scientists are finally getting a hearing, “Everyone is scared shitless, but they don’t know what to do.” People often forget: Goliath, right before the end, sensed that something was amiss.


For, ironically, among the most pervasive myths attending global warming is the one pitching David against Goliath, in which those touting the risks of damaging climate change are cast as David and Big Oil is Goliath. The story requires observers to ignore the facts: Media, most scientists, and governments the world over have spent and received so much money on their version of events that they have collectively become Goliath. Observers must ignore, too, the reality that skeptic scientists maintain their intellectual freedom at significant risk. Funding routinely dries up; tenure is denied them; ad hominem attacks of the most vicious variety are launched against them from the Ivory Tower of academia, from the studios of multi-billion dollar news organizations, and from the bully pulpit of government.


The myth that relatively simple, un-media-savvy scientists are being undone by oil-funded think-tanks is absurd on its face. Let’s first take the case of the U.K. For more than 25 years, all forms of the mainstream media in Britain (radio, television, film, and print), the AGW crowd veritably owned the means of production. People who bother to lookwill find tens of thousands of stories (many of them placed by slick p.r. machines, it turns out) trumpeting impending doom related to unprecedented warming. The U.K. became, during this time, one of the twin towers of warmist philosophy. (The other being the U.S.) And skeptics were simply not abided at all.


Only when Climategate broke, for the first time in a generation, could a skeptic scientist (or commentator) get an airing in the United Kingdom. By that point, though, the AGW scientists, members of the media, and politicians had been putting forth alarmist fantasies for decades, without cessation. They were not sad little children being bullied around the playground by clever think-tank bullies. They were the bullies. Again, it is all about the means of production, and the environmentalist movement piggybacked on AGW took over the means of production in the U.K. long ago.


In the United States, the same applies to a significant extent. There is a reason that people in the center and the right object to National Public Radio, with public funds, reliably touting leftist causes, notably AGW. When commentators go on NPR and complain about the slick campaign to control the media run by oil-funded think-tanks, there is more than enough irony to go around. This idea is quite simply Al Gore-generated boilerplate. Claims regarding the rightist conspiracy about climate have been read (more or less) to journalists by scientists, politicians, and celebrities for years now. Ask them to identify their adversary, and they clam up. Which oil-juiced skeptic scientist has grabbed the reins? They cannot, and will not, name names. The people at the top of the AGW movement, scientists and non-scientists alike, are highly sophisticated and extremely intelligent people, yet they will tell you how they’ve been out-foxed by a think-tank or two. Paul Ehrlich and company lacking in media savvy? Absolutely not.


Again, until November 2009, skeptic climate scientists couldn’t buy an interview in this country. Not with the New York Times, not with NPR, The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, not to mention thousands of local papers, not with CNN, Time magazine, Newsweek magazine, CBS News, NBC News, or ABC News. Even Fox, for all its vaunted right-wing values, very seldom put an actual skeptic scientist on the air prior to Climategate.


What if I, as a concerned citizen who had learned that when it came to the understanding of climate in my country up was down, black was white, and good was bad, and I wanted to go to Hollywood to get funding for a skeptical documentary about it? How do you think I would fare? Laughed out of town? If I was lucky!


Again, means of production: The left/pro-AGW has owned this issue, for decades. That is why there are tens of thousands of interviews in the press and other media outlets with Stephen Schneider, Michael Mann, James Hansen, Gavin Schmidt, Ben Santer, Al Gore, Ed Begley Jr., etc. One of the things that they say the most frequently during these free media opportunities is that a dark and dangerous cabal exists to sideline them. Ummm, no.


By the way, the BBC’s employee pension fund is heavily invested in climate-change related businesses, including carbon trading. Its monumental silence about skeptic science prior to Climategate (and to some extent since then, too) is arguably corrupt.


Finally, if the best that Nature can do to promote the idea of this dangerous oil-funded conspiracy is to quote Paul Ehrlich, who has a 40-year history of failed attempts to manipulate people with the most transparent fear-mongering, then that is not a good sign for the side of fear. One thing that you can believe believe Ehrlich about (unlike the idea that Malthus was really onto something): He and his ilk are running scared. That’s despite the fact that the skeptic side has now reached something like a 1 to 10 ratio of parity when it comes to media coverage. See, when you’re Goliath, that kind of trend seems disturbing.
 
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