Category: Climate Science

Auto Added by WPeMatico

5 for 5

 

My subject is the astonishing level of incomprehension of and contempt for Trump by the American elites.

A perfect illustration is available from Real Clear Politics’ Monday edition of the state of incomprehension of Trump by the American elite. It is called “the End of Intelligence”, and appeared first in the Sunday New York Times. It is written by Michael Hayden, who was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009 and the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005.

His concern is with ‘post truth’ America, and what follows is Hayden’s line of argument.

He illustrates his case with some whoppers (outright lies), exaggerations and nonsense that Trump told during the election. [No discussion is made of anything from Hillary].

Hayden writes:

We in the intelligence world have dealt with obstinate and argumentative presidents through the years. But we have never served a president for whom ground truth really doesn’t matter.

The case in point is the ill-conceived Presidential directive that has come to be called ‘the Muslim-ban’. Hayden detects a pattern: something starts with a Presidential tweet, then the legions of  experts are called in to dampen, palliate, or moderate the instincts of the President.

“Sometimes, almost magically, he gets it right”, as when Trump agreed with the establishment to keep troops in Afghanistan.

But most of the time, Trump does not agree with the establishment, as on sanctions against Russia. In fact Trump disagrees with large sections of official opinion.

In this post-truth world, intelligence agencies are in the bunker with some unlikely mates: journalism, academia, the courts, law enforcement and science — all of which, like intelligence gathering, are evidence-based. Intelligence shares a broader duty with these other truth-tellers to preserve the commitment and ability of our society to base important decisions on our best judgment of what constitutes objective reality.

On how many issues is the American establishment wrong? They consist of journalists, academia, the courts, law enforcement and science.  And on how many issues are the the general consensus of the establishments in North America and Europe absolutely, completely wrong?

  1. Global warming/climate change: a concatenation of errors in false analysis, false conclusions, and wrong-headed solutions that will impoverish us, all driven by an anti-development ideology masquerading as “science”
  2. Iran deceiving us about their nuclear plans, and we being willing to be deceived
  3. Russia, seen as if it were still the Soviet Union, a confusing the thuggish Putin with the mass-muderer Stalin
  4. Islamic terrorism – you cannot be allowed to see or speak to the link between Islam the religion and Islam the political idea
  5. Korea – seen as insoluble

I would say it is five for five, on the most important issues confronting the West today. And I am not talking about the ideological mess of our universities.

Of course Hayden and his ilk believe that Trump is irrational in opposing Establishment views, because it is impossible that they could be wrong. We have all read their 60-page memoranda; we have all taken our lessons from the professors; we have all bowed our heads to the liberals in robes on the courts; and the police are busy policing thoughts and attitudes, as they ought. How can we all be wrong?

How can the establishments in law, policing, science, foreign intelligence and academia be wrong? The answer is quite simple, really. They have been animated by wrong ideas for fifty or a hundred years, and the results are now being seen.

I was once subjected to spiteful derision from a man who thought my views on global warming were utterly wrong. Without his ever having researched the subject, he found most offensive the fact that I dared to have an opinion that was not the consensus of scientists, as he saw it. How could I be so bold? [As a Protestant I am culturally accustomed to taking on Establishments and declaring them without authority, is the answer.]

The heresy or sin is in having a view that is not an establishment view. And Trump is five for five. And that, my friends, is why the Establishment thinks that Trump is irrational. Because they cannot be wrong.

Professor Pangloss, meet Dr. Doom

 

 

The most important thing about prediction is the time scale over which you are measuring. The probability of the extremely rare event rises to certainty with the passage of time. For example, the history of the earth for the last two million years shows that the next ice age cannot be further away than two to five thousand years. If we extend the time scale to several tens of millions of years, it is likely that the earth will pass through epochs considerably warmer than we are in now.

So it is with historical timespans, which are far shorter . The human race has been undergoing a massive population expansion since 1800 because of science, increasing energy resources, and a feedback loop between increasing wealth and increasing resources to deal with disease.

Yet the very forces that have created the population explosion are everywhere reducing human birthrates. Why? Because as women become certain of the survival of their babies, they have fewer of them. Just as the burden of humans on the planet reaches a peak, the human species declines in numbers. These are demographic certainties: the dearth of children since the 1970s has been felt in every part of the world, including especially the Islamic parts. Within three generations human fertility has crashed from 6-8 live births to about 2 live births per woman. Read David Goldman’s It’s not the End of the World, it’s just the End of You: the Great Extinction of Nations.

It was with interest and pleasure that I have been absorbing Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome. Harper is the first historian of whom I am aware to have taken seriously the impacts of disease and climate change on the fate of the Roman Empire. He addresses the reader’s attention to the startling scale of death in the three waves of pestilence that not just decimated, but halved, Roman populations in the period 200AD to 550 AD. There were three near-global epidemics that swept through the Empire, each assisted by the ubiquity of trade links and safety of travel that imperial security allowed. One was probably the first exposure of humans to what we later called smallpox. The second was an Ebola-like hemorrhagic fever. 

The third, which swept through the Empire when the Emperor Justinian was trying to restore civil order and prosperity in the mid-500s, was bubonic plague, which broke out in AD 542. The population of the eastern (Byzantine) Roman Empire fell by half in one year, from 30 to 15 million, and kept on falling for several decades after as plague returned. Imagine the stink of corpses when everyone is dying and not enough people are available to bury them.

Coupled with volcanic outbursts that clouded the sun, and variations in the rainfall in central Asia, which sent the Huns westward in search pasturage, causing them to crash into the Goths who crashed into the Roman Empire, these waves of disease, worsening climate, and barbarian invasions had utterly wrecked the western Roman Empire by AD 400. Brian Fagan records in his book, The Long Summer, that the cultivation of the grape and the olive used to take place as far north in Gaul as the current French-Belgian border, but that, after the Roman Climate Optimum suddenly collapsed around 400 AD, the olive tree grows no further north than its current line in France’s Massif Central. Can you imagine what it would do to US agriculture if the climate of Saskatchewan moved south 400 miles? In the space of ten years?

Compared to scientifically literate histories like The Fate of Rome, Edward Gibbon’s attempt to blame the fall of Rome on the rise of Christianity, the personalities of Emperors, and barbarian invasions, seems more like an exercise in oratory and Latinate English than anything accurate.

Which brings me to the genial, clever Professor Steven Pinker and his Enlightenment Now. Pinker presents the best case possible that progress in the past several centuries has been real, and that catastrophists are wrong. I have every reason to believe this story; I am a rational optimist myself. Pinker and his teammate, Matt Ridley, both make the irrebuttable case that the world has been getting massively better for all. I wish there were more people who were aware of how much and how rapidly human life has improved since 1800, since 1900, since 2000. In that sense it is important to point out how much I agree with Pinker.

And yet, the pace of evolution is accelerating as population becomes denser. The pathogens that struck down the Roman Empire in repeated waves are entirely recent mutations.

As Harper explains:

The last few thousand years have been the platform for a new age of roiling evolutionary  ferment among pathogenic microbes. The Roman Empire was caught in the the turbulence of this great acceleration….

The primacy of the natural environment in the fate of this civilization draws us closer to the Romans, huddled together to cheer the ancient spectacles and unsuspecting of the next chapter, in ways we might not have imagined.

We are as grass, and while the arguments for impending catastrophe are much weaker than supposed, it is unwise to think that all will be well. The influenza epidemic of 1918 killed 3 to 5% of the world’s population, 50 to 100 million people, more than the World War that preceded it.

Civilizations and empires can end because of diseases and climate change. They have already done so several times. There is no reason to suppose we are immune, notwithstanding the cheerful and truthful news from the likes of Steve Pinker and Matt Ridley.

Professor Pangloss, meet Doctor Doom.

 

The y-axis indicates deaths per thousand

File:1918 spanish flu waves.gif

University of Alberta defends bad decision on Suzuki

The University of Alberta, and more  particularly its President, David Turpin, is under attack from some of  its professors for choosing to honour that senile gasbag, David Suzuki, who attacks the economics profession and the future prosperity of Canada on the ground of eco-catastrophism. Turpin defended his decision with the usual virtue-signalling twaddle:

“Turpin argued that the promise of an honorary degree to Suzuki cannot be reversed without major negative consequences for the institution’s reputation, which is obviously true. He defended the choice of the award to Suzuki on the grounds that a university cannot avoid controversy. “Instead, we must be its champion. Stifle controversy and you also stifle the pursuit of knowledge, the generation of ideas, and the discovery of new truths.” –Colby Cosh, National Post  

So let us see what stirling defence of freedom and controversy is mounted when Ross McKittrick is honoured with a doctorate for his work in debunking global warming hysteria. There are no honorary doctorates for the likes of McKittrick.

The President of the University of Alberta earned a whopping $824,000 last year. By contrast, the head of the broadcasting and telecommunications regulatory agency for all of Canada might earn about half of that. Salaries that large indicate that university administrators now get economic rents, rather than earn economic value.

The people of Alberta should demand his resignation.

Why are the equinoxes not statutory holidays?

As we come from a country where seasons forcibly affect our beings, where we suffer from winter, rejoice in spring, relax in summer and get to work in the fall, why do we not have appropriate holidays to mark the seasons?

Yes I acknowledge that Christmas (25th December) is laid over the winter solstice (December 21st) in the northern hemisphere, by religious and social fiat. That is one out of four.

Easter varies by 28 days (a lunar month) + 7 days. It is celebrated  on first Sunday after the first new moon after the spring equinox. As a movable feast, it is useless as an equinoctial celebration. As the observance of the death and resurrection of Jesus, Easter is too explicitly Christian. It has never taken off the way Christmas has, largely because the pagan origins of Yule coincide with the solstice, whereas Easter was made a movable feast by a decision of the Church in the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. The summer solstice is overlaid with  St Jean Baptiste Day in Quebec and a week later English Canadians get July 1st, but neither is explicitly about the summer solstice.

We are too busy working on September 21st to pay much attention to the autumnal equinox, but we ought to mark the passing of the year more formally.

My plea is for a set of holidays that acknowledge we are on a planet that revolves around a sun, and which tilts and wobbles. We do not mark sufficiently our place in the universe.  Having holidays like this would allow parents and educators to instruct the ignorant. If you think I exaggerate, I can relate my experience of a nice 50-year old taxi driver I had in Washington, D.C. last year, for whom the relationship among the solstices, the tilt of the earth, and  the relationship of the seasons to these facts, was a revelation. I am not kidding, and he was not kidding me.

So yes, folks, for this and many other reasons, I favour statutory holidays on the summer solstice, and the spring and autumn equinoxes. Christmas is well covered, thank you.

We are governed by children’s television stars

Bill Nye shows off a Canadian $5 bill, which features an astronaut and the Canadarm as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau looks on during an armchair discussion highlighting Budget 2018’s investments in Canadian innovation at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa on Tuesday, March 6, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang ORG XMIT: JDT103

Mr. Dress-up is seen with his Chief Science Advisor, Bill Nye, Science Guy, in conversation.

Nye seized the opportunity to challenge Trudeau on his support for the controversial Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion project in Alberta and British Columbia. He said research suggests that Canada could be powered entirely by renewable energy right now, “if you just decided to do it.”

Oh sure, Bill. We could get this kind of policy by people who do not know that solar panels do not work at night, that wind rotors do not turn in the calm of minus 40 temperatures, and who object moreover to the smoke from woodstoves. But sure, yes, we can be powered entirely by renewable energy if we just decided to live at the level of poverty enforced upon North Koreans.

I notice with some satisfaction that Mr. Dress-up’s poll ratings are sinking under the influence of Canadians finally realizing the embarrassment of being governed by children’s drama teacher. In the meantime Mr. Dress-up congratulated his science Minister, Kirsty Duncan, as a Nobel Prize winner because she contributed to the IPCC, the climate change fabulists, which in my view is grounds for being dismissed from any serious position in relation to science.

Science consists of the effort to prove a hypothesis wrong, so as to eliminate error, not the effort to maintain an ideology against all challenges. See articles on climate ‘science’ as groupthink.

 

A deeply unserious government

A think tank buried in the Privy Council Office called Policy Horizons Canada has suggested that Santa is moving to the south pole.

Please note the globalist fantasies: “international community” agrees to a “common legal definition of climate change” that “includes refugees as corporations” leading to the deployment of a “global climate change refugee visa system”. In the meantime the real world is beset with problems, many of them created or exacerbated by the type of policies favoured by the wankers in Policy Horizons Canada.

 

We now turn our attention to the world we live in, which has escaped poverty since 1800 by means of burning fossil fuels.

  • Canadian oil is selling for less on the international market because lack of pipelines keep the supply bottled up in Canada

Says the Globe and Mail:

Western Canadian oil companies have seen the price of their crude drop as a result of the lack of pipeline outlets from landlocked U.S. markets, coupled with growing U.S. production and unplanned refinery shutdowns.

“In a decision cheered by environmentalists but considered a setback by the oil industry, Canada’s national energy regulator says it will allow wider discussion of greenhouse gas emission issues in upcoming hearings for the Energy East Pipeline. The National Energy Board said [on August 23] it will for the first time consider the public interest impact of upstream and downstream GHG emissions from potential increased production and consumption of oil resulting from the project.”

As you see and as the Canadian government itself proclaims, the attacks on the oil industry are predicated on global warming hysteria, and the fatuous idea that CO2 alone is responsible for such little global warming as we are experiencing, and that humans alone are responsible for rises in the minuscule concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere (now at 400 parts per million).

Meantime, freely available to anyone who can peruse a science/climate blog, other ideas about climate variation are available, and off limits within the Trudeau policy bubble. This one is about the role of cosmic rays in cloud formation. Climate variation under natural conditions is enormous.

My point is this: what should be a debate, and the occasion for very cautious measures in the face of huge ignorance, is reduced to a religious dogma that the petroleum industry needs to be destroyed to save us all from global warming, as in destroying the village in order to save it.

In the meantime, there is good news from Trumpheim. Scores of officials are resigning from the Environmental Protection Agency. 700 hundred have left, which is only one quarter of the reductions that the Trump Administration is imposing on the EPA.

The tax cuts the Congress has approved will make the American economy much more competitive. Anti-carbon energy regulations are being dismantled.

The progress in eliminating the baneful legacy of Obama will take another couple of years, but already is so marked that never-Trumpers are starting to come around. The National Review, of all places, is beginning its long-overdue repentance, noting not merely his economic successes in increasing investment and reducing regulation, but in standing up for the right values, such as his speech in Warsaw defending the idea of political liberty.

While there are many months of events yet between now and the next US Presidential election, I am beginning to think that Trump will win it again. To express myself more clearly, I observe that there are now plausible reasons and not mere instinct that he will win a second term.

Back to Policy Horizons inside the PCO, here is the staff.  In a Trump or a Harper government, they would face a shake-up of ideas and personnel, not for their winsome contribution to Santology, but for not thinking hard enough about our future, where global warming continues until it doesn’t. In the meantime, I wish all the naifs and drones of Policy Horizons Canada a…

 

 

The global cooling scare of the 1970s

An article by Bernie Lewin in Watts Up That is worth reading. I cite the particular paragraph below because it lays out the fact that the recent (last 700,000 years ) of earth’s history has been a continuous ice age interrupted by brief interglacials, such as the last 10,000 years. This is called the Quaternary ice age, and we are still in it. My inference from this fact is that humans have much less control over the planet’s climate than the global warming catastrophists would have us believe. And as others have demonstrated, there has been a continuous leaching of CO2 out of the atmosphere for the last 33 million years.

Atmosphere CO2 levels from 600 million years ago to present

source: http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/07_1.shtml

Combine these two facts. The earth has experienced increasingly severe ice ages in the last 700,000 years. CO2 has been depleted from the atmosphere for a long time. Some have reasoned that this has accelerated from the time the Indian plate collided with the Asian tectonic plate between 50 and 25 million years ago and pushed up the Himalayas. The action of monsoon rains falling on exposed limestone has had the effect of leaching CO2 from atmosphere, and dissolving it in the oceans. [It is important to note that regardless of the cause of the CO2 depletion, it has been occurring over a vast stretch of time.]  Quaternary CO2 levels reached a low of 180 parts per million (PPM). Partly because of human activities, CO2 is back up to over 400 ppm, the highest in the last 800,000 years. This is not the catastrophe that some would have us believe, but a recovery from a low point associated with ice ages.

Accordingly, if this association of depleted CO2 and ice ages is correct, then the threat to the planet is cold not heat. So far we are dealing with inferences from observed facts in the geological records.

And now to the conjectures.

Since humans are adding to the planet’s atmospheric CO2, then perhaps humanity’s function is to keep a recurrence of the next ice age from happening. Rubbish? Teleology? Maybe James Lovelock is right, and that our job as a species is to keep Gaia happy. In either case, we are heading into another ice age, unless the heat that humans are adding to the environment prevent one. And I rather doubt our power to prevent the next big advance of ice, but that is mere conjecture on my part.

So back to the global cooling scare of the 1970s (the one I think is better founded, because it rests on the demonstrable facts of glaciology). As Mr. Lewin writes:

The one great scientific advance that contributed to the 1970s cooling scare was a revolution in Quaternary geology. Until the late 1960s, it was generally agreed that there had been four recent glaciations, however their timing was largely unknown due to inadequate dating techniques. As the new dating technology was brought into play, it revealed that since the last geometric reversal, around 700,000 years ago, there had been no less than 8 cool/warm cycles. It also showed that cool was the norm. Indeed, the whole Quaternary period (i.e., the last 2.5 million years) is best described as an ice age punctuated by brief ‘interglacial’ warm ‘epochs’. These interglacials appeared like clockwork on a 100,000 cycle, and the record clearly showed that this cycle was about to switch phases. That is to say, the current epoch—the ‘Holocene’, the 10,000 years of warm stable climatic upon which agriculture-based civilization had been built—was about to end.

Quaternary Geologists promote a cooling scare

The realization that we are at the end of a warm period was not itself alarming, as rapid climate change on a geological scale might be 1o C per millennia. Such a gradual trend would hardly be recognizable with all the local and global fluctuations known to occur across centuries and decades. If the decline out of past warm periods were associated with wider fluctuations on these time scales then this would remain unknown because the proxies indicators for temperature did not have the necessary resolution to pick them up. However, soon some geologists were claiming resolution down to a century or two which revealed evidence of climatic instability as previous interglacial epochs ‘broke down’. According to the Danish geologist, Willi Dansgaard, if the deep past is anything to go by, then ‘the conditions for a catastrophic event are present today’. This quote comes from the conclusion of a paperpresented to a conference at Brown University early in 1972 that was called in light of the new evidence to answer a question of singular pertinence:

The present interglacial, how and when will it end?

The article continues with a discussion of the politics and organization of world conferences on climate change, and concludes:

Thus it can be seen that the cooling scare—linked as it was with the food and energy crisis—provided the impetus behind the launch of the warming scare, and it also provided the institutional platforms upon which the launch of that scare would take place.

 

Why I do not need to believe in climate change, I know there is climate change

Here is an aerial view of the outskirts of Naples. Those are volcanic craters, with magma seeping upward close to the surface. They are called the Campi Flegrei, the fields of fire.

 

Why would anyone build over a volcanic caldera? Because the last time it seethed with magma was in 1538, and who remembers that, aside from a vulcanologist?

“It’s much more dangerous than Vesuvius because we don’t know where the eruption will be,” said Morra. Unlike Vesuvius, where the eruption is likely to come from the top or side of the cone, a caldera has the potential to erupt in many different locations simultaneously. “But people are more scared of Vesuvius because with Campi Flegrei you don’t see the cone, so there is not the same perception of danger,” he said.

So let us build a city on top of it, shall we?

Yet it is perfectly rational to do so, if your time horizon is short enough. And what I am going on about today is time horizons. We humans have the lifespan of grass, of mayflies, compared to the time spans that govern the earth. Consider this piece of short-sightedness, if you were a being that lived 50,000 years, of settling in northern North America.

So why would you ever build in Montreal, when it is periodically crushed by 10 thousand feet of ice? The height of ice was 10,725 feet, or 3300 meters.

By comparison, here is a map showing the thickness of ice over Greenland today.

https://barrelstrength.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/greenland-thick.gif

 

Or here is a map of the world covered by ice a mere 21,000 years ago, at the height of the last ice age.

 

https://barrelstrength.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/worldmap1.jpg

So, do I believe in climate change? No, I do not need to believe, as we would believe in God, or even believe in the idea that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 43 BC.

I let a pencil fall from my hand, I know it will hit the floor. Belief in the operation of gravity on this planet would be superfluous.

For this reason I do not believe in climate change, I know it. And by a similar process of reasoning, I know that humans have not caused the extent of climate change that keeps Toronto, Montreal, Chicago and Boston ice free (most of the year).

If some person asks you to believe in climate change, they are unaware. Belief is superfluous.

But to believe that we are causing it, now that takes belief.

 

 

 

 

Karl Popper and AGW

Karl Popper wrote: “In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.”

If there is no link between false predictions and the felt need to amend one’s theories, one is dealing with religions, or the equivalent of astrology, Freudian psychoanalysis, or anthropogenic global warming.

Such is the import of a good article on the subject by Milan Bhardawaj. 

He writes:

“it seems like any and all atmospheric occurrences are attributed to climate change — in part because its definition has become so broad. There is no combination of weather patterns that would cause climate change devotees to doubt their gospel. By contrast, even theories that are deeply ingrained in the fabric of our society, such as gravitation or evolution, are still capable of being disproven with counterexamples. It is for this reason that they are regarded as theories and not axioms. Climate change, on the other hand, has no counterexamples since every weather pattern is seen as a byproduct, therefore making it essentially pseudoscience”.

What is the refutation of AGW? It would be that something other than human agency is causing observed climate changes, or that climate is not changing relative to past patterns. The null hypothesis is that nothing unusual is occurring in global climate. “Unusual” in the climate science game would only be established by reference to climate change over tens of thousands of years, over many periods of glaciation and inter-glacial periods.

The merest glance at the history of the earth shows that, yes, the earth is warming slightly since 1850, and it is still colder today than it was in 1250AD. And so forth, through many cycles over tens of thousands and millions of years.

At the beginning of the Obama regime I heard a scientist dispute with John Holdren, Obama’s official science advisor, about the AGW hypothesis. The scientist said that AGW had become an axiom, not a testable hypothesis. The reception of this idea by Holdren was decidedly frosty. Of course it was, since in the politest possible terms Holdren was told he was not supporting science, but the equivalent of alchemy.